Articles
Critical Resistance Round Table
On January 21 and 22, 2010, Critical Resistance (CR), organized two events around the question of prisons and their relationship to the current educational cut backs. Organized under the theme of FEE HIKES, BUDGET CUTS: PRISON EXPANSION AND US, the events were part of a two-day program held at UC San Diego at the Cross Cultural Center (Communidad Room).
Ernesto Bustillos, founder of Unión del Barrio and member of the Chicano Mexicano Prison Project raised several points:
• Youth, especially Mexicans and Africans, are key targets of the police and this why we find more Raza are in prisons than at the university.
• Prisons are political weapons of the capitalist-colonial system and are used to control and lock-up anyone who struggles or has the “potential” to rebel against racism, poverty, and other forms of oppression.
• The Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) has become increasingly important to the capitalist-colonial system, because economically, the prisoners have become a profitable “commodity”/venture. Literally hundreds of thousands, mostly white and upper class people are making money out of the prison industry.
• It is in the interest of students and social activists to struggle for prisoners’ rights, as the odds are that they too will end up doing some prison time, especially if they are effective at challenging the root cause of injustice (Capitalism).
• As almost everyone is guilty of breaking some law, the only difference between most people in the outside and those inside prisons, is that those inside got caught.
The participation of the CMPP event was important as it enabled the project to bring awareness to the question of prison to the university community.
If the CMPP were not present at the Round Table, those present would have left without having heard a perspective fundamental to understanding the Capitalist-Colonial Prison Industrial Complex.
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2008 CMPP Pinto Art Show
Past Articles:
The Question of Political Prisoners
As Long As Capitalism And Colonialism Exist Police Killings of Raza will Continues
Building The Culture Of Resistance That Is Necessary To Winning Our Liberation
Supports The Hunger Strikers At Pelican Bay State Prison
Organized To Win Over Prisoners To The Struggle For The National
Liberation Of All Mexicanos
CMPP Continues Its Work in Defense of Raza Prisoners
The Question of Raza Prisoners
CMPP Moves Forward the Struggle in Defense of All Raza
Summing Up the Work of the CMPP
Laws, Incarceration, & Imperialism: Police and Prisons are Tools of Colonialism