A3N: What does the case of the Angola 3 say about the current state of US politics, particularly regarding human rights and racism?
NAH: Tragically, the case of the Angola 3 is not an anomaly. The US has a long history of using local, state, and federal legal authority to suppress political dissent on the left. The state has been willing to use both constitutional subversions and violence to attain this end. This is certainly the case throughout the 20th century in cases ranging from Sacco and Vanzetti to Eugene V. Debs to Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and multiple injustices against The Black Panther Party, including the Angola3. There is a particular willingness and often extraordinary effort to silence leftist dissent from communities of color--perhaps the aforementioned organizations/individuals do represent a real threat to the hegemony of what bell hooks calls "the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" (1992). But that is challenge, a struggle that should be welcomed and embraced not silenced and suppressed.
The US government's commitment to human rights remains a selective one that is contingent upon race, class and political persuasion. Some choose to ignore the US' political prisoners and prisoners of conscience because they feel that they are safe from a similar miscarriage of justice. That position is in error, for the denial of constitutional rights to some is surely a threat to us all. Ultimately those who turn away, may someday, as Niemà ¶ller (1946) warned, be left with no one to speak for them.
A3N: Anything else to add?
NAH: I stand with the abolitionists. Our experiment in mass incarceration is a legal and ethical failure. We must try to imagine a nation, perhaps a world, without prisons. As important as reforms may be, frameworks that rely exclusively on reforms help to produce the stultifying idea that nothing lies beyond the prison. We must give serious consideration to "abolitionist strategies to dismantle the prison system"which preserves existing structures of racism as well as creates new ones"this is no more outlandish than the fact that race and economic status play more prominent roles in shaping the practices of social punishment than does crime." (Davis 1998 105).
Growing concerns about the rising costs of prisons and executions makes this an opportune moment to push for an end to the use of both. Local state federal governments spend nearly $150 billion per year on "corrections"--an average of $ 25,000 per inmate per year and $2 million dollars per execution. Comparatively, community correctional options have one-third of the costs and twice the success rate. A starting place might be The National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009. Please urge your representatives to support passage at once.
--This interview was originally published by Truthout. Permission is granted to reprint as long as Truthout.org is cited as the original source.--Angola 3 News is a new project of the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Our website is www.angola3news.com where we provide the latest news about the Angola 3. We are also creating our own media projects, which spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and more.
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