Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Jaan Laaman on the life and death of Hugo Pinell -The Last Of The San Quentin Six Brothers

Sunday, 13 September 2015

Jaan Laaman on the life and death of Hugo Pinell

It was with true sadness that , on August 13th, I received the news
that legendary California prison activist Hugo Pinell, was killed in
a California prison.  This is Jaan Laaman, your political prisoner
voice and let me share a few thoughts about the life and death of
this extraordinary man.

I never personally knew Hugo Pinell.  The simple reason for that is
because Hugo Pinell was locked up in California state prisons for 50
years!  That is insane.  It is hard to wrap you mind around the
reality of someone being held captive for 50 years.  Even more
insane, for most of those years he was held in isolation-segregation
cells.

Hugo was just released from segregation and it is being reported that
he was killed by two white prisoners.  There was a serious uprising
or riot that also took place at this time.

Hugo Pinell spent decades teaching, advocating and struggling for
Human Rights, justice and dignity for prisoners.  He taught and
fought for racial and revolutionary unity among all prisoners.
Locked up in 1965, like many other prisoners at that time, Hugo
became politicized inside the California prison system.  In addition
to exploring his Nicaraguan heritage, Hugo was influenced by
activists like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, as well as his comrades
inside, including George Jackson.  His leadership in combating the
racism and brutality of prison officials made him a prime target for
retribution and Hugo soon found himself in the notorious San Quentin
Adjustment Center.

While in San Quentin, Hugo and five other politically conscious
prisoners were charged with participating in the August 21, 1971
rebellion, which resulted in the assassination of George Jackson by
prison guards on that day.  Hugo Pinell, Willie Tate, Johnny Spain,
David Johnson, Fleeta Drumgo and Luis Talamantez became known as the
San Quentin Six.  They had a very public 16 month trial.  The San
Quentin Six became a global symbol of unyielding resistance against
the prison system and its violent, racist design.  Hugo spent decades
in segregation, but continued to work for racial unity and human
rights for prisoners.

Personally, I am of course upset that a brother like Hugo was killed,
by what I have to assume were some reactionary fascist minded
prisoners.  But truly what I mainly feel is sadness, profound sadness
at this news.

Hugo Pinell is gone.  His bid, his sentence is now ended.  After 50
years of captivity, that is not a bad thing.  Even as an elderly
person, in his 70's, Hugo Pinell died in the struggle. The hands that
struck him down, it is reported, were prisoners, but the actual force
that killed him was the capitalist police state prison system that
holds 2.2 million men, women and children in captivity.

Hugo Pinell, we will remember you brother and your strong life long
example of resistance.  We will continue this resistance and this
struggle for Freedom.

This is Jaan Laaman.

4struggle | August 24, 2015

Tuesday, 25 August 2015

Some more quotes from Yogi, by Charlie Hinton:

Some more quotes from Yogi, by Charlie Hinton:
It’s been a long journey, one that will last for a lifetime and, altho it’s been really hard and trying, I’ve kept growing and growing. No matter how hard the times and experiences, I always remember that it is 10 or 20 times harder for billions out there. Heck, it’s much harder for the poor, the workers and the average person (citizen or not) in this country. It doesn’t minimize my situation or make it easier for me, but it keeps me grounded to not be complaining, bothering, or burdening anyone for much of anything. Living within my self reliant principles and constantly building the New Man has allowed me to stay humble, considerate, and I’ve found a personal freedom which cannot be deterred or taken away. I hope you can understand me, but we can always keep conversating, exchanging and being good company, providing you want to stay around.

I know what you mean about what it would take for so many people to change for the purpose of building a great beautiful world, but we have to encourage people to do so. That, no matter what else they are doing, they must be working internally, growing and evolving. You know as well as I do that beautiful people will make the beautiful world society we all want to live in. It will take time, generations, but we have to be transforming from within ourselves or else these terrible imbalances will continue to prevail in which a few million have the most while bilions suffer and die without a chance to live.

Of course, you might not be able to get others to really self change, but you can keep on growing, right along with me, and you can be creating your own personal freedom and peaceful place. Dying is too easy. We are all gonna die, sooner or later, one way or another, so it’s all about living and how well we live the living ways we’ve chosen, control and are accountable for.

From a statement sent by Hugo Pinell to the California Coalition for Women Prisoners in 2013:

"In 1967 when I joined the liberation movement in San Quentin, one of the goals was to build a new man, the way Brother Malcolm X showed we could. We don't know how long it will take to create that new, beautiful world. It might take generations. But if we continually work at it and try to create the new man in ourselves, we can achieve a personal freedom. I go through different changes to stay human for I will never get used to isolation and deprivation."

Hugo L. A. Pinell (Yogi Bear) tribute from Political Prisoner Veronza Bowers (Georgia)

Hugo L. A. Pinell (Yogi Bear) tribute from Political Prisoner Veronza Bowers (Georgia)

I received a phone call from Veronza last night (his dime) who expressed his warm condolences to me and gave me permission to spread this message with his name. Veronza has done 40 years in prison now, repeatedly denied parole despite being a “model prisoner” and “mentor” to other young prisoners.

Hi...This is what a Comrade had to say to Hugo:

Hugo...although we never met in the flesh, for over four decades i've known who YOU are:The fearless and tireless Warrior... one who dedicated and gave his ALL in the struggle for a better life for our People---a better world. i've always envisioned you as an unmovable Mountain.

Sooo, the State, in its impotent arrogance, *gave* you two life sentences...and an ignorant and depraved assassin *took* your life. But, what neither wicked and doomed force can never ever understand is that YOU were the Captain of your own ship...YOU had already given YOUR LIFE to the People.

Rest in Peace, my Comrade, knowing that the trick is on them. YOU can never die...for in death you have gained true immortality. YOU will always be remembered wherever people gather who love and fight for Freedom.

Hugh Pinell, Hugo Pinell, Hugo Pinell, Hugo Pinell...i will always remember to whisper your name upon the WIND.

YOU fought the good fight ! We thank YOU ! Comrade

Monday, 17 August 2015

Statement by the San Quentin Six

Statement by the San Quentin 6:
Also published in the SF Bay View.
Hugo Pinell was assassinated at new Folsom State Prison, August 12, 2015. This is another example of the racism people of color inside those prisons are confronted with on a daily basis.  Like Comrade George, Hugo has been in the cross hairs of the system for years. His assassination exemplifies how racists working in conjunction with prison authorities commit murderous acts like this. We saw it on the yard at Soledad in 1970 and we see it again on the yard at Folsom in 2015.       

Hugo's life was a living hell. We witness the brutality inflicted on him by prison guards as they made every effort to break him.  He endured more than fifty years of sensory deprivation; for decades,  he was denied being able to touch his family or another human being,  as well as attempts on his life. This is cruel and unusual punishment! Hugo is not the monster that is being portrayed in social media / news media. The CDC is the real monster. 

During the SQ Six trial we really got to know Hugo. He was as we all were under a lot of stress. His stress was heavier than mine because he had the additional load of being beaten on regular occasions. We saw the strength of his spirit, and through it all he managed to smile.

We mourn the loss of our comrade brother, Yogi. We have been hit with a crushing blow that will take some time to recover from. We must expose those who under the cover of law orchestrated and allowed this murderous act to take place. The prisoners who did it acted as agents of the state. It comes at a time when prisoners  are collectively trying to end decades of internal strife. Those who took his life  have done a disservice to our movement, their actions served the cause of the same oppressor we fought against!  

No longer do you have to endure the hatred of people who didn’t even know you and never dared to love you. You have represented George & Che well, and we  salute you!

SQ SIX
David General Giap Johnson
Luis Bato Talamantez 
Willie Sundiata

Hugo Lyon Antonio Pinell, "Yogi Bear"
This is the most recent picture of Yogi taken in the visiting room shortly after he was released to general population at Folsom State Prison.  If there is one word that could describe Yogi Bear, it would be LOVE.
"I hold that it is bad as far as we’re concerned if a person, a political party, an army or a school is not attacked by the enemy, for in that case it would definitely mean that we have sunk to the level of the enemy. 
It is good if we are attacked by the enemy, since it proves that we have drawn a lear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves.  It is still better if the enemy attacks us wildly and paints us as utterly evil and without a single virtue; it demonstrates that we have not only drawn a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves but achieved a great deal in our work." Mao TseTung - the Red Book

Friday, 14 August 2015

Tributes to Hugo L.A. Pinell

From SF Bay View

by Dr. Willie and Mary Ratcliff

Black August adds another hero and martyr to the roll

Beloved political prisoner Hugo ‘Yogi Bear’ Pinell, feared and hated by guards, assassinated in Black August after 46 years in solitary


by Dr. Willie and Mary Ratcliff
Black August adds another hero and martyr to the roll.
From December 1970 to 2014, when he finally had a contact visit with his mother, Yogi was allowed to come out from behind the thick glass in the visiting room and touch a loved one only once: When he married Shirley, they were given 15 minutes together. She later died.
By some accounts, it was his first day on the yard after 46 years in solitary confinement when Hugo Pinell, affectionately known as Yogi Bear, was assassinated Aug. 12. The news sparked a victory celebration by  prison guards on social media: “May he rot in hell” and “Good riddens” (sic), they typed. Yogi was the only member of the San Quentin 6 still in prison, and his role in the events of Aug. 21, 1971, the day George Jackson was assassinated, has earned the guards’ incessant enmity ever since.
“This is revenge,” declared his close friend, fellow Black Panther veteran Kiilu Nyasha, on Hard Knock Radio Aug. 13. “They hated him as much as George Jackson. They beat him constantly, kept him totally isolated for 46 years – no window, no sunlight – but they could never break him, and that’s why they hated him.
“The only way he survived was that this man was full of love.”
Isolated in the Pelican Bay SHU from 1990 to 2014, Yogi supported his SHU comrades’ campaign to end solitary confinement. He participated in the hunger strikes and applauded the Agreement to End Hostilities, authored by 16 of his comrades, Black, Brown and White, and dated Aug. 12, 2012, three years to the day before he was killed. It has nearly erased racial violence from California prisons.
The comrades who conceived and wrote the agreement were following Yogi’s lead.
“There was a time in the prison sys­tems throughout the United States,” according to a story headlined “The Black Panther Party and Hugo Pinell” in The Black Panther newspaper of Nov. 29, 1971, “when the prisoners themselves were divided, not only white against Black, but Latinos against Blacks. This – the result of racism in every area of U.S. society – was particularly apparent in Cali­fornia prisons.
This is the story from the Nov. 29, 1971, edition of The Black Panther. – Courtesy Billy X Jennings, ItsAboutTimeBPP.com
This is the story from the Nov. 29, 1971, edition of The Black Panther. – Courtesy Billy X Jennings, ItsAboutTimeBPP.com (Click to enlarge)
“Blacks and Latinos fought, stabbed and killed each other in the yards, cell blocks and dining halls of every prison camp from Tehachapi to Tracy. This is always the case when the racist white prison guard, under administration orders, pits one man struggling to survive against another.
“It is the easiest way for the prison to assure almost absolute control over its inmate population. After all, only an idiot would believe he could control 100 men with one man, unless the 100 were divided. Quite often men were paid to start fights between two men. …
“(B)rothers and sisters across the country inside the maximum prisons began to awaken to the fact of their oppression. They began to realize, as Comrade George Jackson would say, that they were all a part of the prisoner class.
'The Black Panther Party and Hugo Pinell' by The Black Panther 112971-2, web
“They be­gan to realize that there was no way to survive that special brand of fas­cism particular to California prison camps except by beginning to work and struggle together. … The prisoner class, especially in California, began to understand the age-old fascist principle: If you can divide, you can conquer.
“There are two men who were chiefly responsible for bringing this idea to the forefront. They helped other com­rade inmates to transform the ideas of self-hatred and division into unity and love common to all people fighting to survive and retain dignity. These two brothers not only set this example in words, but in practice.
“Comrade George Jackson and Comrade Hugo Pinell, one Black and one Latino, were the living examples of the unity that can and must exist among the prisoner class. These two men were well known to other inmates as strong de­fenders of their people.
“Everyone knew of their love for the people, a love that astounded especially the prison officials of the state. It astounded them so thoroughly that these pigs had to try and portray them as animals, perverts, madmen and criminals in order to justify their plans to eventually get rid of such men.
“For when Com­rades George and Hugo walked and talked together, the prisoners began to get the message too well.
“In a well-planned move, the state of California and the U.S. government carried out the vicious assassination of Comrade George Jackson, field marshal of the Black Panther Party, on Aug. 21, 1971. Their plans to slaughter Hugo Pinell are now in full swing.”

What happened on New Folsom Prison’s B yard on Aug. 12, 2015?

In California, the prisons are abundantly funded, but the billions of taxpayer dollars are spent in secret, as the media are prohibited from covering prisons. So the stories coming from the mainstream media about Yogi so far are based on press releases from CDCr, the Corrections Department, not from reporters who go inside to hear from prisoners.
Highly paid prison guards and their CCPOA (California Correctional Peace Officers Association) are called the most powerful lobby in the state. Guards at New Folsom, located in a suburb of Sacramento, the state capital, likely exert much of that influence. Is that why Yogi was sent there after more than 23 years at Pelican Bay?
“Once a man declares that he will retain his dignity, that he will not forfeit his manhood, then he has in essence declared war against the prison,” The Black Panther reported on Nov. 29, 1971. “He has declared war upon the guards, who operate on the smallest amount of intelligence and human un­derstanding, and upon the prison and state officials, whose every move is planned and calculated to help in this government’s last feeble attempts to quell the desire of the people to see power returned into the hands of the people. Hugo, from the very beginning of his imprisonment, made that declaration.”
Yogi’s enemies were not his comrades in the prisoner class – though he reportedly died at the hand of one or two prisoners, said to be white, though their race is unconfirmed. He was no threat to other prisoners. It was the guards who loathed him and loath the Agreement to End Hostilities, which he exemplified and set in motion over 40 years ago.
Sitting in the sunshine on the San Quentin yard in 1976 are Khatari Gaulden and Hugo Pinell. – Photo courtesy Kiilu Nyasha
Sitting in the sunshine on the San Quentin yard in 1976 are Khatari Gaulden and Hugo Pinell. – Photo courtesy Kiilu Nyasha
Did they have him killed to demolish the agreement, to rekindle all-out race riots? Riots are job insurance for guards.
Several of the authors of the agreement have also been transferred to New Folsom, where they have been educating other prisoners to understand and wield its power. A prisoner on the C yard, Hakim Akbar-Jones, P-85158, wrote this to the Bay View in July:
“Let this be understood: At CSP Sacramento on the C yard, the End to Hostilities Agreement is in full effect. Even though the summertime is here, there is rhythm and harmony amongst respective class members. There are diligent efforts made on all fronts to work hand to hand in solidarity to build a better future amongst the prison class. With this said, we stand fast and salute all conscious guerrilla revolutionaries whose concepts have been brought forth and come to fruition, those in solidarity who support the movement, thus bringing on and creating positive change for the oppressed.”
Does this sound like a place where Hugo Pinell, the legend, the giant amongst conscious guerrilla revolutionaries, would not be protected? Did the other prisoners even know that Yogi would be joining them on the yard on Aug. 12?

What else are the guards afraid of?

Three initiatives are underway that could empty the SHUs and empower the remaining prisoners, and the guards, fearing for their jobs, are fighting them. A reasonable assumption is that the guards expect that the assassination of Hugo Pinell will see a return of the bad old days of racial violence to “justify” filling the SHUs and guaranteeing job security and top pay for guards:
Black Guerrilla Family – According to family members of prisoners who have been negotiating the hunger strikers’ demands with CDCr administrators since the hunger strikes began in 2011, CDCr has decided to remove the Black Guerrilla Family from the list of eight prison gangs because it’s a political not a criminal organization, but reportedly the guards and their CCPOA are furiously opposed. If BGF is not a prison gang, then all the Black prisoners “validated” as BGF “gangsters” would have to be released from SHU.
George Jackson University – Abdul Olugbala Shakur (s/n James Harvey) recently settled a suit to legitimize George Jackson University, which 25,000 prisoners signed up for when he and other prisoners and outside supporters founded it years ago. Guards are adamantly opposed to the distribution and study of books that prisoners might find mentally and spiritually liberating and have prevented the prisoner-led institution from taking root. Though the settlement terms have not yet been revealed, guards are undoubtedly fearful.
Hugo Pinell in 1982
Hugo Pinell in 1982
Class action lawsuit to end solitary confinement in California – Currently in settlement talks with CDCr are the attorneys for the plaintiff class of prisoners who have been held in the Pelican Bay SHU for 10 years or more. The attorneys are led by Jules Lobel, president of the very prestigious New York based Center for Constitutional Rights, the public interest law firm that also represents many of the hunger-striking prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. The New York Times is giving the case multi-media coverage, including a recent video showing some of the plaintiffs describing how they survive the torture of long term solitary confinement. If the case doesn’t settle, trial is set for December.
These initiatives, bolstered by the awakening in the court of public opinion to the evils of mass incarceration and solitary confinement, are driving efforts by California prison guards and their “union,” CCPOA, to demolish the carefully constructed Agreement to End Hostilities and revert to racial warfare that divides and conquers prisoners of all colors so that the guards can rule over them as cruelly as they want without getting their hands dirty.

We call for a full independent investigation immediately

The Bay View, joining a consensus of prisoner family members and advocates, calls for investigations into Yogi’s death at both the state and federal level. We challenge California Attorney General Kamala Harris, now a candidate for U.S. Senate, and U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch to demonstrate they believe this Black life – the life of Hugo Pinell – matters. Harris, whose office acts as the attorney representing CDCr, needs to counsel her client to reign in the guards, especially the gang investigators.
We also call for the full and fair investigation of all deaths in jails and prisons, where incarcerated people are routinely abused and tortured and even killed. Begin with Sandra Bland and Hugo Pinell.
Yogi’s attorney, Keith Wattley, says his family is planning a wrongful death lawsuit.

Honor our fallen comrade

Long live Hugo Pinell, who showed us the power of the human spirit, that love can survive and overpower hell on earth.
Hugo Pinell in 2001
To anyone tempted to avenge Yogi’s death against another race, remember the wisdom of the Panthers: “If you can divide, you can conquer.” Ever wonder why the Bay View calls our prison section Behind Enemy Lines? The prison system, not another prisoner, is the enemy that hopes you won’t get out alive.
Embrace Yogi’s spirit and read the words that follow from current and former prisoners who loved him back.
Dr. Willie Ratcliff is publisher and Mary Ratcliff is editor of theSan Francisco Bay View. They can be reached ateditor@sfbayview.comor 415-671-0789.

Yogi’s time

by Mumia Abu-Jamal
Written July 30, 2006 – Few of us know the name Hugo Pinell.
That’s because the last time it was in the newspapers was probably in 1971, or 1976, when he was tried as a member of the famous San Quentin 6, six young Black prisoners facing assault charges stemming from battles with prison guards at the notoriously repressive California prison.
Yet that wasn’t the beginning nor the end of things.
Hugo Pinell (known as Yogi by his friends) came to the U.S. as a 12-year-old from a small town on Nicaragua’s East Coast. If he knew then the hell he would face in America, would he have left the land of his birth? We’ll never know.
He came. And he spent the last 42 years in prison – 34 of them in solitary! He hasn’t had a write-up in 24 years.
Now, his family and lawyer are seeking his parole after a lifetime in some of the most repressive joints in America.
Why so long? Why so many years? The answer, not surprisingly, is politics. Hugo was a student and comrade of the legendary Black Panther Field Marshal, the late George Jackson, with whom he worked to organize other Black prisoners against the racist violence and prison conditions of the ‘60s and ‘70s.
Consider this: When Hugo was sent to prison, Lyndon Baines Johnson was president, bombing in the Vietnam War was intensifying and Martin Luther King Jr. was still alive!
Of his introduction to the prison system, Yogi would later write:
Of these three political prisoners, Hugo Pinell, Mumia Abu Jamal and Nuh Washington, only Mumia is now alive, and his health has been precarious lately due to the prison system’s medical neglect and abuse. – Art: Kiilu Nyasha
Of these three political prisoners, Hugo Pinell, Mumia Abu Jamal and Nuh Washington, only Mumia is now alive, and his health has been precarious lately due to the prison system’s medical neglect and abuse. – Art: Kiilu Nyasha
“I was 19 years old when I turned myself in. I pled guilty to the charge of rape with the understanding that I would be eligible for parole after six months. When I arrived at the California Department of Corrections, I was informed that I had been sentenced to three years to life.”
California’s notoriously unjust indeterminate sentencing has led in part to the present prison overcrowding that now threatens to bankrupt the system. California’s prisons are roughly 172 percent over capacity, and parole is a broken, nonfunctional agency.
That’s not just my opinion, but California State Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, has called the present regime a “failure,” particularly the parole system.
Despite California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 2004 promises of major reforms of the parole system, which would lead to significant prisoner population reductions, the incarceration rate has soared. Today, there are a record 168,000 people in 33 state prisons, nearly double the rated capacity.
As Hugo Pinell seeks parole, California is spending $7.9 billion – yeah, with a “b”! – in the next fiscal year, an increase of $600 million a year for a prison system that has one of the worst recidivism rates in the nation, 60 percent!
Clearly, the so-called “Correctional and Rehabilitation” Department has failed in its mission to do both.
Support parole for Hugo Pinell; 42 years is more than enough.
© Copyright 2006 Mumia Abu-Jamal. Keep updated at www.freemumia.com. His new book is “Writing on the Wall,” edited by Joanna Hernandez. For Mumia’s commentaries, visit www.prisonradio.org. Encourage the media to publish and broadcast Mumia’s commentaries and interviews. Send our brotha some love and light: Mumia Abu-Jamal, AM 8335, SCI-Mahanoy, 301 Morea Road, Frackville, PA 17932.

Hugo Pinell – Rest in Power!

by Claude Marks
Graphic courtesy Freedom Archives
Graphic courtesy Freedom Archives
We are saddened by the news of Hugo Pinell’s death. Hugo Pinell always expressed a strong spirit of resistance. He worked tirelessly as an educator and activist to build racial solidarity inside of California’s prison system.
Incarcerated in 1965, like so many others, Hugo became politicized inside the California prison system.
In addition to exploring his Nicaraguan heritage, Hugo was influenced by civil rights activists and thinkers such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King as well as his comrades inside including George Jackson. His leadership in combating the virulent racism of the prison guards and officials made him a prime target for retribution and Hugo soon found himself confined in the San Quentin Adjustment Center.
While at San Quentin, Hugo and five other politically conscious prisoners were charged with participating in an Aug. 21, 1971, rebellion and alleged escape attempt, which resulted in the assassination of George Jackson by prison guards. Hugo Pinell, Willie Tate, Johnny Larry Spain, David Johnson, Fleeta Drumgo and Luis Talamantez became known as the San Quentin 6.
Their subsequent 16-month trial was the longest in the state’s history at the time. The San Quentin 6 became a global symbol of unyielding resistance against the prison system and its violent, racist design.
As the California prisons began to lock people up in long-term isolation and control unit facilities, Hugo was placed inside of the SHU (Security Housing Unit) in prisons including Tehachapi, Corcoran and Pelican Bay. There, despite being locked in a cell for 23 hours a day, he continued to work for racial unity and an end to the torturous conditions and racially and politically motivated placement of people into the SHU. This work included his participation in the California Prison Hunger Strikes as well as supporting the Agreement to End Racial Hostilities in 2011.
At the time of his death, Hugo had been locked behind bars for 50 years, yet his spirit was unbroken.
Claude Marks, director of Freedom Archives, 522 Valencia St., San Francisco, CA 94110, (415) 863-9977,www.Freedomarchives.org, can be reached at claude@freedomarchives.org.

Hasta Siempre Hugo (Forever Hugo)

Solidarity forever
And we are saddened
Solidarity left
You when (it) should have
Counted for something and
What your long imprisoned
Life stood for
Now all your struggles
To be free have failed
And only death
Inglorious and violent
Death has
Claimed you
At the hands of the
Cruel prison system
La Luta Continua

Thursday, 13 August 2015

Hugo Pinell ¡Presente!

Rest in Power Yogi!

Tributes to Hugo L.A. Pinell:

Please listen to: Hard Knock Radio, with Kiilu Nyasha talking about Hugo Pinell (Aug. 13, 2015)

SF Bay View

A Tribute to Hugo Pinell, on Hard Knock Radion (KPFA), August 20th 2015 (listen here)

Interview with Sundiata Tate about Hugo Pinell (August 16, 2015)

Interview with Shujaa Graham of the California Prison Movement about Hugo Pinell (August 18th 2015)

Interview with David Johnson of the San Quentin Six (August 18th 2015)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 

We just learned that our beloved Hugo Yogi Pinell was killed yesterday, August 12th 2015. We are saddened and shocked, and we are still gathering information. We will write more once we know more.
[Updated 8/14/15]

Rest in Power Yogi!

Wednesday, 7 May 2014

Hugo Pinell's Parole turned down again for 5 years

Greetings All:
It's with great sadness, but renewed hope, that we announce the results of of our brother Yogi's May 2nd Board hearing.

His attorney, Keith Wattley, reported the Board gave Hugo a five-year hit, but with the following caveat:  If he participates in the prison's Step-Down program, he will get another hearing in about a year to a year and a half.

This is certainly better than the worst possibility, a 15-year denial, but I'm quite sure it doesn't make Hugo's mother very happy.  She's well into her 80s and has been waiting nearly 50 years to have her son released and back home.

We are all disappointed, but still very committed to Yogi's ultimate release.  So please keep up your support, and send Yogi some love.  He'll need it to get through this disappointing period, as well as encouragement to endure this next phase of incarceration.  As far as we know, he is still in lockup, albeit with less tortuous conditions than at Pelican Bay.

Unbroken and Unbowed Fighter for the Oppressed-Hugo Pinell Assassinated

Workers Vanguard No. 1073
4 September 2015
 
 


Unbroken and Unbowed Fighter for the Oppressed-Hugo Pinell Assassinated
 
Class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell was a marked man. Since the late 1960s when he emerged as a leader of the prisoners’ rights movement together with his mentor and comrade, George Jackson, Pinell was on the hit list of the state and its sadistic prison guards. Brutalized and tortured, the target of repeated assassination attempts, Pinell was held in solitary confinement for more than 40 years. But he would not be broken. Despite being locked in a tiny cell for 23 hours a day, Pinell continued to struggle against the horrors of America’s prisons. In 2011 and 2013 he joined thousands of other inmates in hunger strikes against the dehumanizing torture of solitary confinement. The hunger strikes were initiated by prisoners in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) at California’s notorious Pelican Bay “supermax” prison where Pinell had been locked up since 1990.
In late July, Pinell, aged 71, was released into the general prison population at California State Prison-Sacramento (aka New Folsom). Two weeks later, on August 12, he was killed in the prison yard, allegedly stabbed to death by two inmates. Whoever wielded the knife it was his jailers who wanted him dead. Prison guards gloated on social media over Pinell’s murder while the capitalist rulers’ hired pens and media mouthpieces slandered him as a “notorious killer.”
Pinell was the last member of the San Quentin 6 still in prison. The six were framed up on charges stemming from the prison upheaval sparked by the assassination of Black Panther Party member George Jackson by guards in August 1971. In a statement honoring their fallen comrade Pinell, three members of the San Quentin 6—Willie Tate, Luis Talamantez and David Johnson—wrote: “We must expose those who under the cover of law orchestrated and allowed this murderous act to take place.” We stand with them in protesting Pinell’s murder, seeking to expose the state forces that stand behind it and honoring his unbreakable courage and commitment to the struggle against the barbarism of the American prison system. We also share the sorrow and tremendous sense of loss felt by Pinell’s mother Marina whose love preserved him, his daughter Allegra and the rest of his family.
Since 1986, Pinell, affectionately known as “Yogi Bear,” was a recipient of the Partisan Defense Committee’s monthly stipends to those imprisoned for fighting against the brutal class exploitation and racial oppression that define capitalist rule. Not an act of charity but of solidarity, the purpose of the PDC stipend program is to keep the cause of these prisoners alive outside the prison walls. In his greetings to the 2009 annual PDC Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners, Pinell wrote:
“In February 2010 it will be 45 years in the California Department of Corrections (CDC) on an original sentence of 18 months! My S.Q. 6 assault conviction has become a ‘buried alive sentence’ and, as unjust and brutal their actions, let me remain positive and reassuring over the great lessons and experiences in my journey. I came in a juvenile delinquent, a common criminal. Thanks to Beautiful People, i awakened, i have grown and transformed into a humble freedom Servant.... Your care and solidarity has provided me with extra strength and drive to keep on pushing and evolving and i hope that my company has served you well.”
The killing of Hugo Pinell is a blow to all fighters against racial injustice and oppression. At the same time, his story has many lessons to carry that battle forward.
A Fighter Forged in a Prison Inferno
Born in Nicaragua, Pinell moved to the U.S. when he was 12 years old. In 1964, at just 19, he was accused of raping a white woman, a charge he always adamantly denied. Despite his innocence, Pinell’s mother was pressured into believing that if he didn’t plead guilty he would be sentenced to death. Promised eligibility for parole after six months of a three-year sentence, Pinell copped a plea. When he got to prison, however, he learned that his sentence was three years to life.
Amid the degradation of prison life, Pinell was introduced to the politics of the radical struggles for black rights by militant black prisoner W.L. Nolen in 1967. As Pinell wrote in a letter to a friend: “Most of us were very young, doing short sentences (supposedly), had been through the gladiator stations, Tracy and Soledad, and the time and place was right for self-change...to join the liberation movement we had to understand the meaning of liberate and, to embark, on a commitment to freedom, we had to do away with old ways, old habits, f----d up mentality, the club, homeboy set mentality and attitude.”
When prison guards inflamed racial hostility between prisoners at Soledad in the summer of 1969, Nolen launched civil rights lawsuits against the warden, the California Department of Corrections and several of the guards. In January 1970, the guards orchestrated a melee between black and white prisoners in the yard. A prison guard sharpshooter in the tower gunned down Nolen and two of his comrades. Pinell was among the first to file a legal protest against the Department of Corrections for this bloodbath.
After the guard who killed Nolen and the two others was exonerated on the grounds of “justifiable homicide,” prisoners erupted in outrage. A white guard was killed and George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo and John Cluchette were framed up on murder charges. Their case, which exposed the sadistic brutality directed against black prisoners, including a series of murders of militants, became widely known with the publication of George Jackson’s prison letters in the book Soledad Brother (1970). Pinell refused an offer of early parole promised if he gave false testimony against George Jackson.
In their struggle against the racist hell of “life” inside prison, Pinell, Jackson and others reflected the mass social struggles that were taking place outside, from the Black Power movement to the protests against the Vietnam War. At the same time, their institutional concentration and extreme oppression provided a material basis for coming to understand such racial injustice from a social rather than individual viewpoint.
Black Panthers, war resisters and other militants provided a transmission belt for radical politics, often an eclectic mixture of Marx and Mao, Lenin and Franz Fanon, into the prisons. Young black and Latino lumpen criminals were inspired to become avowed humanitarians, freedom fighters and revolutionaries with all the contradictions that entailed. As Jackson wrote in Soledad Brother: “I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels and Mao when I entered prison and they redeemed me.” Together with a deepening political awareness, their lives developed discipline and focus. Jackson and Pinell especially stood out for struggling to overcome the murderous racial hostilities between black and Latino prisoners fomented by the guards to maintain control. The prospect of interracial solidarity evoked particular fear and hatred from the prison masters, who struck back with a vengeance.
Amid the tumultuous social struggles of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the prison guards and their masters did not want George Jackson to get his “day in court,” fearing it could serve as a potential platform for exposing the racist depravity of their prisons. On 21 August 1971, two days before the opening of the Soledad Brothers’ trial, Jackson was gunned down by guards who claimed he was trying to escape. Prisoners were enraged by Jackson’s killing and a melee erupted, in which three guards and two inmate trusties were killed and three other guards wounded.
As a result, Hugo Pinell and five other inmates—the San Quentin 6—were framed up on charges of murder and conspiracy. It was the longest trial in California history, costing millions of dollars. The shackled prisoners were led into court leashed like animals and handcuffed to special chairs bolted to the floor. When the trial ended on 12 August 1976, Pinell and David Johnson were convicted of assault; Johnny Spain was convicted of two counts of murder.
Pinell was killed 39 years to the day after his conviction and three years to the day after the California prisoners’ Agreement to End Hostilities that was coauthored by black, Latino and white inmates, a cause for which Pinell’s decades of struggle were an inspiration.
Prison Guards: The “Worst of the Worst”
Revolts by prisoners against the conditions of their incarceration challenge a key institution of capitalist state repression. Thus, the multiracial 1971 Attica, New York, prison rebellion that was sparked by Jackson’s murder, combined with the prospect of interracial unity exemplified by Jackson and Pinell, drove the state authorities into a murderous rage. Declaring the Attica revolt “a serious threat to the ability of a free government to preserve order,” New York governor Nelson Rockefeller massacred the prisoners as mercilessly as forces hired by his grandfather had murdered striking coal miners in Ludlow, Colorado in 1914.
The same year as the Attica revolt, in the aftermath of the ghetto upheavals of the 1960s, President Richard Nixon launched a “war against crime” that was aimed at black militants and the inner city poor. Two years later, Governor Rockefeller enacted draconian drug laws which became the model for the “war on drugs” that went into high gear in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan, alongside increasing deindustrialization.
Having created the conditions in which more and more black and Latino youth were condemned to joblessness and poverty, the rulers branded them criminal outlaws. By 2010, the prison population in the U.S. was 2.3 million, the majority black and Latino. America came to lead the world in the percentage of its population that is behind bars, with California leading the nation.
Among the biggest beneficiaries were the prison guards. In the past 30 years, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA) has grown by a factor of six and their pay more than tripled. The most powerful lobbying force in the state, the CCPOA has poured millions into backing harsher sentencing laws and into measures to defeat attempts to alleviate prison conditions.
The murder of Hugo Pinell came while prisoners have been pursuing a class action suit against California’s notorious solitary confinement torture chambers. The attention drawn to the unspeakable conditions in the SHUs by the courageous prison hunger strikers has already led to some minimal, face-saving measures. Recently some 1,000 prisoners have been released from SHUs into the general prison population. Yet two days after Pinell was assassinated, an Associated Press article proclaimed: “California’s efforts to ease its famously harsh use of solitary confinement are clashing with a bloody reality after an inmate who spent decades alone in a tiny cell was sent back to the general population and killed by fellow inmates within days.”
It’s a win-win for the prison guards: a man they have wanted dead for decades was assassinated and his murder has the additional benefit of potentially preserving their jobs as the SHU overseers. As the San Francisco BayView (14 August) noted in commemorating Pinell:
“He was no threat to other prisoners. It was the guards who loathed him and loath the Agreement to End Hostilities, which he exemplified and set in motion over 40 years ago.
“Did they have him killed to demolish the agreement, to rekindle all-out race riots? Riots are job insurance for guards.”
Abolish the Prisons! For a Socialist America!
The prisons are the concentrated expression of the depravity of American capitalist society. They are a key instrument to coerce, torture and brutalize those whose lives have been deemed worthless by a system rooted in exploitation and racial oppression (or who have fought against that system). It will take nothing short of proletarian socialist revolution to destroy the prisons and sweep away all the barbaric institutions of the capitalist state.
The violence and savagery of the prisons, alongside the social ferment of the time, propelled Hugo Pinell, George Jackson, W.L. Nolen and others to see their oppression as a product of the capitalist system. Even so, as prisoners, they were cut off from the one class that has the social power to eradicate this system, the multiracial working class. However heroic, the prison revolts were a desperate response to desperate conditions. Unlike the New Left and others at the time, we did not enthuse over black and Latino prisoners as the “vanguard” of revolutionary struggle.
In memory of Hugo Pinell, we reiterate what we wrote in “Massacre at Attica,” on the front page of the first issue of Workers Vanguard (October 1971):
“We support the most militant struggle against the state. We only seek to give that struggle the strategic perspectives that will lead to the workers conquering political power....
“The heroic Attica martyrs and George Jackson will long be remembered for their courageous stand against overwhelming odds. It is not the crimes (real or alleged) for which the prisoners were jailed, but the stand they took—rising far above capitalist-imposed ignorance, poverty, brutality and frame-up—for justice and against oppression, that the world’s working people will remember.”
The black, Latino and white cadre of a future revolutionary workers party will learn from and honor Pinell’s legacy. Under the leadership of such a party, the social power of the multiracial working class will be mobilized in the fight for the liberation of all the oppressed and for a workers America, putting the tremendous wealth now held by the tiny class of capitalist exploiters at the service of the many. When the workers rule here and internationally they will begin to lay the material basis for an egalitarian communist society where there will be no need for an apparatus of state repression. The modern instruments of incarceration, torture and death will be placed alongside their medieval complements as relics of a decaying social order that deserved to perish.


Sunday, 13 September 2015

Jaan Laaman on the life and death of Hugo Pinell

It was with true sadness that , on August 13th, I received the news
that legendary California prison activist Hugo Pinell, was killed in
a California prison.  This is Jaan Laaman, your political prisoner
voice and let me share a few thoughts about the life and death of
this extraordinary man.

I never personally knew Hugo Pinell.  The simple reason for that is
because Hugo Pinell was locked up in California state prisons for 50
years!  That is insane.  It is hard to wrap you mind around the
reality of someone being held captive for 50 years.  Even more
insane, for most of those years he was held in isolation-segregation
cells.

Hugo was just released from segregation and it is being reported that
he was killed by two white prisoners.  There was a serious uprising
or riot that also took place at this time.

Hugo Pinell spent decades teaching, advocating and struggling for
Human Rights, justice and dignity for prisoners.  He taught and
fought for racial and revolutionary unity among all prisoners.
Locked up in 1965, like many other prisoners at that time, Hugo
became politicized inside the California prison system.  In addition
to exploring his Nicaraguan heritage, Hugo was influenced by
activists like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, as well as his comrades
inside, including George Jackson.  His leadership in combating the
racism and brutality of prison officials made him a prime target for
retribution and Hugo soon found himself in the notorious San Quentin
Adjustment Center.

While in San Quentin, Hugo and five other politically conscious
prisoners were charged with participating in the August 21, 1971
rebellion, which resulted in the assassination of George Jackson by
prison guards on that day.  Hugo Pinell, Willie Tate, Johnny Spain,
David Johnson, Fleeta Drumgo and Luis Talamantez became known as the
San Quentin Six.  They had a very public 16 month trial.  The San
Quentin Six became a global symbol of unyielding resistance against
the prison system and its violent, racist design.  Hugo spent decades
in segregation, but continued to work for racial unity and human
rights for prisoners.

Personally, I am of course upset that a brother like Hugo was killed,
by what I have to assume were some reactionary fascist minded
prisoners.  But truly what I mainly feel is sadness, profound sadness
at this news.

Hugo Pinell is gone.  His bid, his sentence is now ended.  After 50
years of captivity, that is not a bad thing.  Even as an elderly
person, in his 70's, Hugo Pinell died in the struggle. The hands that
struck him down, it is reported, were prisoners, but the actual force
that killed him was the capitalist police state prison system that
holds 2.2 million men, women and children in captivity.

Hugo Pinell, we will remember you brother and your strong life long
example of resistance.  We will continue this resistance and this
struggle for Freedom.

This is Jaan Laaman.

For Hugo- On The Anniversary Of The Death Of Black Panther George Jackson-From San Quentin To Attica To Pelican Bay- Never Forget!

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the black liberation fighter and Black Panther Party leader, George Jackson.

Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated August 23, 2011, for February Is Black History Month.
Bob Dylan- George Jackson Lyrics
I woke up this morning
There were tears in my bed
They killed a man I really loved
Shot him through the head

Lord, Lord, they cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord, they laid him in the ground

Sent him off to prison
For a seventy dollar robbery
Closed the door behind him
And they threw away the key

Lord, Lord, they cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord, they laid him in the ground
[ Lyrics from: http://www.lyricsfreak.com/b/bob+dylan/george+jackson_20207841.html ]
He wouldn't take shit from no one
He wouldn't bow down or kneel
Authorities, they hated him
Because he was just too real

Lord, Lord, they cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord, they laid him in the ground

Prison guards, they cursed him
As they watched him from above
But they were frightened of his power
They were scared of his love

Lord, Lord, so they cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord, they laid him in the ground

Sometimes I think this whole world
Is one big prison yard
Some of us are prisoners
The rest of us are guards

Lord, Lord, they cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord, they laid him in the ground

Workers Vanguard No. 1073
4 September 2015
 
Unbroken and Unbowed Fighter for the Oppressed
Hugo Pinell Assassinated
Class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell was a marked man. Since the late 1960s when he emerged as a leader of the prisoners’ rights movement together with his mentor and comrade, George Jackson, Pinell was on the hit list of the state and its sadistic prison guards. Brutalized and tortured, the target of repeated assassination attempts, Pinell was held in solitary confinement for more than 40 years. But he would not be broken. Despite being locked in a tiny cell for 23 hours a day, Pinell continued to struggle against the horrors of America’s prisons. In 2011 and 2013 he joined thousands of other inmates in hunger strikes against the dehumanizing torture of solitary confinement. The hunger strikes were initiated by prisoners in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) at California’s notorious Pelican Bay “supermax” prison where Pinell had been locked up since 1990.
In late July, Pinell, aged 71, was released into the general prison population at California State Prison-Sacramento (aka New Folsom). Two weeks later, on August 12, he was killed in the prison yard, allegedly stabbed to death by two inmates. Whoever wielded the knife it was his jailers who wanted him dead. Prison guards gloated on social media over Pinell’s murder while the capitalist rulers’ hired pens and media mouthpieces slandered him as a “notorious killer.”
Pinell was the last member of the San Quentin 6 still in prison. The six were framed up on charges stemming from the prison upheaval sparked by the assassination of Black Panther Party member George Jackson by guards in August 1971. In a statement honoring their fallen comrade Pinell, three members of the San Quentin 6—Willie Tate, Luis Talamantez and David Johnson—wrote: “We must expose those who under the cover of law orchestrated and allowed this murderous act to take place.” We stand with them in protesting Pinell’s murder, seeking to expose the state forces that stand behind it and honoring his unbreakable courage and commitment to the struggle against the barbarism of the American prison system. We also share the sorrow and tremendous sense of loss felt by Pinell’s mother Marina whose love preserved him, his daughter Allegra and the rest of his family.
Since 1986, Pinell, affectionately known as “Yogi Bear,” was a recipient of the Partisan Defense Committee’s monthly stipends to those imprisoned for fighting against the brutal class exploitation and racial oppression that define capitalist rule. Not an act of charity but of solidarity, the purpose of the PDC stipend program is to keep the cause of these prisoners alive outside the prison walls. In his greetings to the 2009 annual PDC Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners, Pinell wrote:
“In February 2010 it will be 45 years in the California Department of Corrections (CDC) on an original sentence of 18 months! My S.Q. 6 assault conviction has become a ‘buried alive sentence’ and, as unjust and brutal their actions, let me remain positive and reassuring over the great lessons and experiences in my journey. I came in a juvenile delinquent, a common criminal. Thanks to Beautiful People, i awakened, i have grown and transformed into a humble freedom Servant.... Your care and solidarity has provided me with extra strength and drive to keep on pushing and evolving and i hope that my company has served you well.”
The killing of Hugo Pinell is a blow to all fighters against racial injustice and oppression. At the same time, his story has many lessons to carry that battle forward.
A Fighter Forged in a Prison Inferno
Born in Nicaragua, Pinell moved to the U.S. when he was 12 years old. In 1964, at just 19, he was accused of raping a white woman, a charge he always adamantly denied. Despite his innocence, Pinell’s mother was pressured into believing that if he didn’t plead guilty he would be sentenced to death. Promised eligibility for parole after six months of a three-year sentence, Pinell copped a plea. When he got to prison, however, he learned that his sentence was three years to life.
Amid the degradation of prison life, Pinell was introduced to the politics of the radical struggles for black rights by militant black prisoner W.L. Nolen in 1967. As Pinell wrote in a letter to a friend: “Most of us were very young, doing short sentences (supposedly), had been through the gladiator stations, Tracy and Soledad, and the time and place was right for self-change...to join the liberation movement we had to understand the meaning of liberate and, to embark, on a commitment to freedom, we had to do away with old ways, old habits, f----d up mentality, the club, homeboy set mentality and attitude.”
When prison guards inflamed racial hostility between prisoners at Soledad in the summer of 1969, Nolen launched civil rights lawsuits against the warden, the California Department of Corrections and several of the guards. In January 1970, the guards orchestrated a melee between black and white prisoners in the yard. A prison guard sharpshooter in the tower gunned down Nolen and two of his comrades. Pinell was among the first to file a legal protest against the Department of Corrections for this bloodbath.
After the guard who killed Nolen and the two others was exonerated on the grounds of “justifiable homicide,” prisoners erupted in outrage. A white guard was killed and George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo and John Cluchette were framed up on murder charges. Their case, which exposed the sadistic brutality directed against black prisoners, including a series of murders of militants, became widely known with the publication of George Jackson’s prison letters in the book Soledad Brother (1970). Pinell refused an offer of early parole promised if he gave false testimony against George Jackson.
In their struggle against the racist hell of “life” inside prison, Pinell, Jackson and others reflected the mass social struggles that were taking place outside, from the Black Power movement to the protests against the Vietnam War. At the same time, their institutional concentration and extreme oppression provided a material basis for coming to understand such racial injustice from a social rather than individual viewpoint.
Black Panthers, war resisters and other militants provided a transmission belt for radical politics, often an eclectic mixture of Marx and Mao, Lenin and Franz Fanon, into the prisons. Young black and Latino lumpen criminals were inspired to become avowed humanitarians, freedom fighters and revolutionaries with all the contradictions that entailed. As Jackson wrote in Soledad Brother: “I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels and Mao when I entered prison and they redeemed me.” Together with a deepening political awareness, their lives developed discipline and focus. Jackson and Pinell especially stood out for struggling to overcome the murderous racial hostilities between black and Latino prisoners fomented by the guards to maintain control. The prospect of interracial solidarity evoked particular fear and hatred from the prison masters, who struck back with a vengeance.
Amid the tumultuous social struggles of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the prison guards and their masters did not want George Jackson to get his “day in court,” fearing it could serve as a potential platform for exposing the racist depravity of their prisons. On 21 August 1971, two days before the opening of the Soledad Brothers’ trial, Jackson was gunned down by guards who claimed he was trying to escape. Prisoners were enraged by Jackson’s killing and a melee erupted, in which three guards and two inmate trusties were killed and three other guards wounded.
As a result, Hugo Pinell and five other inmates—the San Quentin 6—were framed up on charges of murder and conspiracy. It was the longest trial in California history, costing millions of dollars. The shackled prisoners were led into court leashed like animals and handcuffed to special chairs bolted to the floor. When the trial ended on 12 August 1976, Pinell and David Johnson were convicted of assault; Johnny Spain was convicted of two counts of murder.
Pinell was killed 39 years to the day after his conviction and three years to the day after the California prisoners’ Agreement to End Hostilities that was coauthored by black, Latino and white inmates, a cause for which Pinell’s decades of struggle were an inspiration.
Prison Guards: The “Worst of the Worst”
Revolts by prisoners against the conditions of their incarceration challenge a key institution of capitalist state repression. Thus, the multiracial 1971 Attica, New York, prison rebellion that was sparked by Jackson’s murder, combined with the prospect of interracial unity exemplified by Jackson and Pinell, drove the state authorities into a murderous rage. Declaring the Attica revolt “a serious threat to the ability of a free government to preserve order,” New York governor Nelson Rockefeller massacred the prisoners as mercilessly as forces hired by his grandfather had murdered striking coal miners in Ludlow, Colorado in 1914.
The same year as the Attica revolt, in the aftermath of the ghetto upheavals of the 1960s, President Richard Nixon launched a “war against crime” that was aimed at black militants and the inner city poor. Two years later, Governor Rockefeller enacted draconian drug laws which became the model for the “war on drugs” that went into high gear in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan, alongside increasing deindustrialization.
Having created the conditions in which more and more black and Latino youth were condemned to joblessness and poverty, the rulers branded them criminal outlaws. By 2010, the prison population in the U.S. was 2.3 million, the majority black and Latino. America came to lead the world in the percentage of its population that is behind bars, with California leading the nation.
Among the biggest beneficiaries were the prison guards. In the past 30 years, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA) has grown by a factor of six and their pay more than tripled. The most powerful lobbying force in the state, the CCPOA has poured millions into backing harsher sentencing laws and into measures to defeat attempts to alleviate prison conditions.
The murder of Hugo Pinell came while prisoners have been pursuing a class action suit against California’s notorious solitary confinement torture chambers. The attention drawn to the unspeakable conditions in the SHUs by the courageous prison hunger strikers has already led to some minimal, face-saving measures. Recently some 1,000 prisoners have been released from SHUs into the general prison population. Yet two days after Pinell was assassinated, an Associated Press article proclaimed: “California’s efforts to ease its famously harsh use of solitary confinement are clashing with a bloody reality after an inmate who spent decades alone in a tiny cell was sent back to the general population and killed by fellow inmates within days.”
It’s a win-win for the prison guards: a man they have wanted dead for decades was assassinated and his murder has the additional benefit of potentially preserving their jobs as the SHU overseers. As the San Francisco BayView (14 August) noted in commemorating Pinell:
“He was no threat to other prisoners. It was the guards who loathed him and loath the Agreement to End Hostilities, which he exemplified and set in motion over 40 years ago.
“Did they have him killed to demolish the agreement, to rekindle all-out race riots? Riots are job insurance for guards.”
Abolish the Prisons! For a Socialist America!
The prisons are the concentrated expression of the depravity of American capitalist society. They are a key instrument to coerce, torture and brutalize those whose lives have been deemed worthless by a system rooted in exploitation and racial oppression (or who have fought against that system). It will take nothing short of proletarian socialist revolution to destroy the prisons and sweep away all the barbaric institutions of the capitalist state.
The violence and savagery of the prisons, alongside the social ferment of the time, propelled Hugo Pinell, George Jackson, W.L. Nolen and others to see their oppression as a product of the capitalist system. Even so, as prisoners, they were cut off from the one class that has the social power to eradicate this system, the multiracial working class. However heroic, the prison revolts were a desperate response to desperate conditions. Unlike the New Left and others at the time, we did not enthuse over black and Latino prisoners as the “vanguard” of revolutionary struggle.
In memory of Hugo Pinell, we reiterate what we wrote in “Massacre at Attica,” on the front page of the first issue of Workers Vanguard (October 1971):
“We support the most militant struggle against the state. We only seek to give that struggle the strategic perspectives that will lead to the workers conquering political power....
“The heroic Attica martyrs and George Jackson will long be remembered for their courageous stand against overwhelming odds. It is not the crimes (real or alleged) for which the prisoners were jailed, but the stand they took—rising far above capitalist-imposed ignorance, poverty, brutality and frame-up—for justice and against oppression, that the world’s working people will remember.”
The black, Latino and white cadre of a future revolutionary workers party will learn from and honor Pinell’s legacy. Under the leadership of such a party, the social power of the multiracial working class will be mobilized in the fight for the liberation of all the oppressed and for a workers America, putting the tremendous wealth now held by the tiny class of capitalist exploiters at the service of the many. When the workers rule here and internationally they will begin to lay the material basis for an egalitarian communist society where there will be no need for an apparatus of state repression. The modern instruments of incarceration, torture and death will be placed alongside their medieval complements as relics of a decaying social order that deserved to perish.