Jose Lopez

After such a glowing introduction, and following these three great presentations, it is quite difficult for me to speak. I'm usually not lost for words, but I find myself in that kind of awkward situation. Perhaps it is because the people that have spoken to you tonight are people that I consider my very good friends and I hold in such high regard that my emotions run high. I feel it is a privilege to share the panel with Rev. Nozomi Ikuta and Dr. Alan Berkman.

Alan Berkman is one of those rare people whose many deeds will never be known. He is one of those people whose lives have touched many of us and who has done a great deal, but only those who have been very close, only those who have received benefits, would ever be able to attest to them. Alan Berkman is a doctor who has helped many, many people, including one of our great freedom fighters, Guillermo Morales, and I'm honored to present to you, and we should all be honored to have with us not only Alan Berkman, but Guillermo Morales' and Dylcia Pagan's son, Guillermo Morales. (Applause) Guillermo is now living in Cuba with many other revolutionaries, including the great Black Nationalist leader, Assata Shakur. Dylcia Pagan, as most of you know, is in prison. She is one of the Puerto Rican POWs in prison in FCI Dublin.

As I listened to Alan's presentation I thought about how each one of us experiences certain things that only that individual can attest to. I rarely speak about my personal problems or suffering or about my family, but I thought it was important to talk about a very personal experience. Some of you probably know that my mother is suffering from Alzheimer's and some of you also know that my brother Oscar has a grand daughter who is also the grand daughter of Carmen Valentin, one of those coincidences. An important coincidence. The last time that my mother was fully conscious after visiting Oscar in Marion, when she came home the first thing she told me was that she had not been able to touch my brother and how much she wanted to do it. Now she hasn't been able to do that in many years, but this last time was very significant to her, because she was aware that something really wrong was happening to her.

This summer, Lourdes, my niece, went to visit Oscar in Florence with Karina, my brother's grand daughter. And she said that in the visit Karina had put her hand against the glass, and Oscar had put his hands against the glass and Karina told him, "let's imagine that we're touching each other." Now this is a five year old kid. I share this with you for several reasons: One is the obvious, the problem of the dehumanization process control units create in a human being and in the human experience. I also share this with you because in Karina exists all the possibilities of imagining and in my mother there is no possibility of imagining. A few days ago, I visited her in Puerto Rico, and yet it's very interesting: of all the family, the only one that she remembers is my brother, Oscar. And so in one way, both my mother and my niece are real examples of the triumph of the human spirit - the almost unexplainable and yet very explainable possibilities of the human being of confronting tremendous odds and being able to come out of those odds with some deep, profound human senses and human emotions.

I just finished browsing through an article that appeared today in the Chicago Tribune magazine. The article is entitled "The FALN Dossier, How Local Bombers Became a Cause Celebre." It's an article about the Puerto Rican political prisoners and POWs. And one of the things that struck me was the ending, the last few words of the article. The author ends by saying,

"Will Clinton grant the FALN a pardon or not? Probably not. At a minimum the FALN will have to renounce armed violence and agree to pursue their goal of Puerto Rico independence peacefully. So Torres, Rodriguez and Rosa are likely to spend more years in prison, until the memory of their actions fades from public consciousness, until releasing them no longer carries a heavy domestic political cost, until society can be certain that the FALN's war is finally over. "

But there was another interesting revelation, made before by the author of this article Gary Marx: "No polls have been taken in Puerto Rico or the United States to gauge public support for a pardon, but many scholars say a majority of Puerto Ricans in the U.S. and on the island would support the release of the FALN." It's very interesting. It's interesting because the basic conclusion by the author of this article is that the Puerto Rican political prisoners have a long way to go before they can hope to come out. But it's also saying something - if they want to come out, they will come out on the conditions which the U.S. government wants to impose. Gary Marx does not really understand that the Puerto Rican political prisoners and prisoners of war are the representatives of a captive nation; the representatives of anti-colonial struggle; the representatives of an unresolved historical problem.

In 1979 we celebrated the release of the Puerto Rican nationalists here in Chicago. For many years, people had told the Nationalists to seek parole, to ask forgiveness. They didn't and today Lolita Lebron and Rafael Cancel Miranda walk the streets of Puerto Rico as free human beings, never having to have said they were sorry. They had nothing to feel sorry about. They were engaged in s struggle against a crime against humanity - colonialism. This past weekend I had the opportunity to be with Rafael Cancel Miranda, one of the Puerto Rican Nationalists who was released.

This issue about prisons in America, the issue that prisons in America reflect a very serious problem, and that is the problem that America is a colonial power; that America is an empire, and obviously what we see in its prisons is a reflection of that imperialism. If there are right now 1.5 million people in prison and jails in this country and nearly 70% of those people happen to be people of color, and there are 1.5 million people at the graduate level of higher education across the country, and if about 80% of those graduate students in this country happen to be white, there is a real bell curve in America. Without a doubt, America's prisons reflect America's reality. When you ask a people that they should renounce their right to be free, you can ask it of them, you can even impose it on them, but what happens is that you can never get the problem resolved that way, because, and I often tell this to my students: that while history does not repeat itself historical problems insist on being resolved because historical problems, like individual problems, insist on being resolved. Now if any one of us has a deep psychological problem that's bothering us, at some point we have to address that problem because it will keep on surfacing until we are able to resolve it. And the same thing happens with historical problems.

The issue of Bosnia and Herzogovina and the balkanization of Europe is not the repetition of history. There are some deep seated historical problems that Yugoslavia was not able to resolve, and while Tito may have been able to keep a lid on those problems, the fact is that those problems smolder and what is happening today is a reminder that they were not resolved, and that they need to be resolved. The same thing happened in what was the Soviet Union. The same thing is happening in Rwanda. The same thing happens across the world when historical problems are not addressed. We talk about 190 countries in the world, today. As a matter of fact, there are at least 3,000 nationalities in the world that insist on resolving their national questions. And there is no way to get around this. You have to address it.

One of the problems you have in America is precisely the problem of addressing, honestly and critically, historical problems. In 1903 DuBois wrote in his book, The Souls of Black Folk, "the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line." And we're entering the 21st century and the problem of the 21st century also seems to be the problem of the color line. And when you look at America's prisons you are obviously looking at the problem of the color line. And Du Bois made another very interesting observation. He said, "the nation is not yet at peace with its past sins." "The nation is not yet at peace with its past sins." What are the nation's past sins? Obviously it's colonialism and racism. Anyone who wants to talk about racism as an individual act is crazy. I don't care how you relate to any person of color or how that person relates to you. The problem of racism is not resolved. I don't care how many intermarriages there are, the problem of racism is not resolved. I don't care how many cocktail parties Black people and Latinos, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans and whites go to together, the problem of racism is not resolved.

Because the problem of racism is not an individual problem. It is not a problem that we can sit around and resolve. It is a problem that the society has to resolve. It is a problem that can only be resolved when those oppressed nationalities fully exercise the human right of self-determination. And, if those people cannot exercise the right of self-determination, we can go on ad infinitum talking about racism and trying to come up with some quick fix solutions as to how we address these issues of the gap between black and white America. There is no way to do it unless you are honestly and truthfully committed to analyzing the history of this country; the fact that this country's wealth was built on the seizure of Indian lands, on the appropriation of the labor of Black people, on the expropriation of 51% of Mexico's land, on the occupation of Puerto Rico, Samoa, Guam and Hawaii. Unless we're able to acknowledge that Reconstruction was carried out by Black people, Reconstruction was done primarily by Black people in prison after 1865. If you study the prison population between 1865 and 1900 in the South, you will see an incredible swelling of the prison population in the deep South. Black people came out of slavery and were literally transported to prisons. With the chain gangs, they rebuilt the mines and the cities, and the railroads and ports of the South. In the South, Reconstruction was not done by white people. It was done by slave labor from the prisons. That's why the 13th amendment to the Constitution doesn't really end slavery. It ends chattel slavery, for it clearly states, "Slavery and involuntary servitude shall forever be abolished from these United States, except when duly convicted." Today there are 5 million people in this country who have been duly convicted and are now under some aspect of the penal system. There are 1.5 million people in prisons and jails in this country right now who are literally civil slaves. So, if any one wants to talk about the Puerto Rican political prisoners having to say they are sorry they better think again. For it is the U.S. empire which has to ask for forgiveness in order to enter the process of reconciliation.

But, if we are going to talk about the possibilities of reconciliation, that can only happen (and I'm sure that Rev. Ikuta knows this very well and that most of the religious people know this well) that there can be no reconciliation unless there is a process of confession, penance, retribution and atonement. The first thing a sinner must do is confess his or her sins. Right? (Applause) So America has to confess its sins, and then America must do something else. Once you confess your sins, what do you do? You do penance! And after you do penance you do what else? Pay retribution! And then you can have atonement.

But atonement can not be done by Black people, and it can not be done by Puerto Ricans (or by the Puerto Rican freedom fighters), and it cannot be done by Mexicans. Atonement must first take place as a response by white America and the white power structure of this society acknowledging its historical sin - its past sins. And so if we are to deal with this issue of prisons and jails, and if we are to honestly look at the issue of control units (and I think you've gotten a pretty good idea about what control units are about and why they exist), then we have to really be able to study the history of this country, to see clearly that in order for this country to begin to resolve its problems it must, as Du Bois says, be at peace with itself. And the only way to be at peace with itself is to confess its sins. And we all know what those past sins are -colonialism and racism. It means we have to undo a lot of things in America because we cannot continue. What the O.J. Simpson trial proved, what the Million Man March to Washington proved, is the fact that American is extremely divided, and that Black people and white people are speaking in different languages, and they hear different drums- obviously Black people better, because they have a history of being able to understand the drum.

I think that when we look at where prisons are going and without a doubt America's prisons are becoming America's concentration camps. We have talked a great deal about the concentration camps, and people talk about the immorality of concentration camps, but the fact is that concentration camps in Nazi Germany were economic centers of production, and when we talk about the fact that the people of Florence really like the control unit because they benefit from it, and the people in Westville like the control unit because they benefit from it. We are talking about prison as economic enterprise; we are talking about a prison-industrial complex.

We have traveled across this country to demonstrate. We went to Alderson, West Virginia. Alderson, West Virginia has a population of 300 people and the day we marched there everybody locked their doors, except for the F.B.I., National Guard and every repressive agency, but not a single resident of Alderson because the people of Alderson live off the misery of the women's prison there. Alderson (Davis Hall, the control unit there) was one of the first control units for women, and we closed it down. And we went to Lexington, and we did the same thing. And in Lexington, the day we went, there were no people there because many of the people in Lexington make their livelihood from the prison. And we closed down the Lexington control unit. And in the process we prevented the Marianna control unit for women from being constructed.

Unfortunately we haven't been so successful with Florence. But I think we have registered a few successes this year, and Nozomi already pointed some of these out. Small but important. And I think we can have other examples that will ultimately insure that we can collectively make some changes. These are not definitive changes. But I think as Alan so well testified to, the fact is that sometimes small things like writing a letter, like making a phone call, the smallest things sometimes we cannot imagine, can have incredible consequences. And while it may appear to us that we are powerless, I think it's important for you to remember that in the case of Karina she could imagine playing with my brother and being able to touch him despite the glass that divided them. And if this little girl could imagine that, it means that we could collectively imagine a lot of things. We can even imagine ourselves realistically being free. And freedom is nothing more than this.

Freedom is nothing more than the possibility of human beings understanding the world about them, acting responsibly upon that world and, most importantly, transforming that world. That's what freedom is about. For freedom can only take place within a human context. When every human being can freely undertake that process. And today thousands, millions of people in this world are not able to do that because of the system that was created about 500 years ago based on greed and racism - the system of colonialism. Interestingly enough, if you look at the history of prisons and you look at the history of capitalism, they coincide. The first modern prison was built in Amsterdam, the Rasphaus in 1595, to imprison the thousands of people who were fleeing from the feudal small villages to the city because there was a saying at that time, "the air of the city makes a person free." But as they came to the city they didn't find freedom. What they found were prisons because the city's population was so great, there were no jobs, so the only option was population control. So from the beginning, prisons were centers for social control. And without a doubt, we are entering the 21st century and we're entering with prisons becoming America's concentration camps- just as they were in Germany - centers of production, centers of exploitation and super- exploitation. Without a doubt, prisons are becoming America's most incredible capitalist experiment, because you can guarantee a free labor force, you can guarantee the possibilities of not having strikes and all kinds of things- factories with fences which by the year 2000 will produce $8.9 billion in profits. Already prisoners make jeans for K-Mart, rocking ponies for Eddie Bauer, and uniforms for McDonalds. Control units are going to be used more arbitrarily for those who resist this movement .

Only when America is forced to face the reality of acknowledging its historical sins of colonialism, and only when oppressed nationalities within this prison house of nationalities - the U.S. federal system - freely exercise the right of self-determination "can the nation be at peace with its past sins." But, a small and significant step towards that end, is for the society to see the further incarceration of young people of color as a continuation of that colonial legacy and TO STOP IT; another small but significant step is to take on the prison industrial complex and TO STOP BUILDING MORE PRISONS (particularly control units); and still another, small but significant step, is to FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS AND PRISONERS OF WAR from its prisons.

In the meantime, the human spirit and the human virtue of resilience is such (as evidenced in Karina and even my mother) that in the last few days, you have seen some very interesting uprisings across the land in the prisons that they thought were the most secure, including here in Illinois. As I heard the news, I wondered whether we would be accused of conspiracy, as we were here tonight celebrating this activity on control units and the human spirit and the will to confront and resist them.

Thank you.