Pictures of anarchist prisoners, "TFSR 06-05-2022: Anti-Repression, UprisingSupport.Org and June11.Org"
Anarchist, June 11, Political Prisoner, Prisons, Transcribed, zine

Anti-Repression, Supporting Uprising and Anarchist Prisoners

Anti-Repression, Supporting Uprising and Anarchist Prisoners

Pictures of anarchist prisoners, "TFSR 06-05-2022: Anti-Repression, UprisingSupport.Org and June11.Org"
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This week on the show, we’re featuring a few segments. First up, Chazz speaks about the website UprisingSupport.org which shares the names and cases of people criminalized in relation to the George Floyd Uprising of 2020 across the so-called USA, as well as the importance of growing a culture of anti-repression and resistance. Then, for this year’s June 11th Day of Solidarity with Marius Mason and All Long Term Anarchist Prisoners, you’ll hear supporters reading statements by Toby Shone in the so-called UK & Dan Baker in the so-called USA. You can find more on June 11th, announcements of celebrations, interviews with and about some of the featured prisoners and poster and sticker designs at June11.Org.

Prior June 11 interviews by TFSR:

  • 2021 episode with Jason and Jeremy Hammond, Atlanta anti-repression activist and Fergusson Uprising prisoner supporters
  • 2020 episode with Jeremy Hammond behind bars and a supporter of Marius Mason
  • 2016 episode on Marius Mason with his daughter
  • 2015 episode with an Eric McDavid supporter and updates on prisoners in Ohio & Missouri
  • 2013 episode about Marius plus support for Jerry Koch resisting a Grand Jury in NYC
  • 2012 episode on June 11, Cleveland 4, Pax and the Green Scare
  • 2011 episode with supporters of Marius and Eric, plus an organizer with June11.org
  • 2011 interview with Will Potter about his book, Green Is The New Red about the Green Scare

Some Former & Current Anarchist Prisoners Supported by June11:

Anarchist Prisoners and ABCs:

  • Russian anarchist and antifascist prisoners, November 2021
  • Evcan Osman as presented by Istanbul ABC
  • Mexico City ABC from 2016
  • NYC ABC from 2016
  • Iranian anarchist prisoner updates, 2022
  • Fire Ant Journal interview from 2019

Grand Juries, Tech, Uprising Support

Announcements

ABC Belarus Fundraiser

Our comrades in Belarus are out of the funds required to support prisoners resisting the Lukashenko regime. You can learn more including how to support ABC Belarus at abc-belarus.org and finding the post titled “No one will be left alone”

Fire Ant Journal

The June 2022 issue of Fire Ant Journal is now available! You can download for reading and reproduction at https://bloomingtonabc.noblogs.org

Get yourself a Fire Ant benefit t-shirt

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Featured Track:

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Transcription

TFSR: Could you please introduce yourself for the audience with any name, pronouns, location or affiliation that you’d like to share?

Chazz: Hi, yeah. My name is Chazz, and I work with this website that we’re going to talk about today called UprisingSupport.org. That’s probably the biggest affiliation that makes the most sense in this moment to talk about. I have a background in anti repression and prisoner support organizing inside the US.

TFSR: I understand the term anti repression and it seems kind of self explanatory, but can you talk a little bit about how that is as a framework to operate from? Because some people go into prisoner support because they’re into supporting specific prisoners or hate a specific facility, but can you talk about the idea of anti repression work?

Chazz: Yeah, so anti repression work… Honestly, inside of a US context is a little bit ill defined, a little bit poorly defined often. The way that I tend to use this term, and I think is the most applicable to the context that we’re in is that when we say repression, we’re talking about state repression. By talking about anti-repression work, as opposed to focusing on a specific prison, or a specific type or group of prisoners that we want to support, or a specific facility or even a specific mode of repression, we’re able to more accurately define and be in conflict with a larger system of repression. So anti-repression work is like a broad based method. Kind of a network of methodologies of responding to, and also preemptively stopping state repression.

In our context we’re talking mostly about anarchists and left radicals, but in the context of the website, we’re talking about it in a much broader way and not necessarily limited to talking about people who are taking action in the more classical sense of a political framework. So we’re talking about things that are not just focused on a specific aspect of state repression. We’re not just talking about jail support. We’re not just talking about prisoner support. Things like digital security, or security culture, or trauma care, all kinds of go into this broader idea of anti-repression work. Because if the State is going to use an ecology of methods to repress us, we need a similar kind of response to that State repression.

So that’s kind of the broad based idea behind anti repression work, as opposed to talking about singular anti prison or prisoner support or jail support, or even a bail fund. It’s this whole broad idea of that network.

TFSR: Cool. Thanks for letting me just launch that at you.

It seems like abolitionism has been a term that’s been used a lot more popularly and a lot more discussed over the last few years. It means a lot of things to a lot of different people. Then people sometimes have to specify police abolitionism as if those two organizations or those two platforms didn’t interact with each other and support each other. I want to talk about this a little more in a later question when when talking about building anti-repression culture, but it seems like it’s kind of approached from this direction of counter-counterinsurgency. Which I think is pretty useful because it puts a lot of things onto the table, including what appear to be violent repression, like police raids, ICE raids, the border regime as a whole, and then also it can also bleed over into addressing softer counterinsurgency stuff, like copaganda and the like.

Chazz: Yeah, I mean, at the risk of being overly broad, that’s kind of what we’re talking about here. Anti-repression is not only a thing that we’re striving to see in the world, but it’s also a tactic. Anti-repression as a tactic. And anti-repression organizing is a tactic that people use in an effort to maintain and further anti State struggles. It’s just a necessary aspect. If people are going to be taking direct actions against State and capital they’re going to need people who are organizing to help keep them safe.

TFSR: So can you tell us a little bit about UprisingSupport.org? Who runs it? How it got started? What it does and who it supports?

Chazz: Yeah, so UprisingSupport.org is run by a very small collection of people who came together because of the need and hadn’t necessarily worked together before. And everyone has a background in anti-repression organizing and work and prisoner support. But there’s been a lot of stuff that we’ve learned just by doing this website that we hadn’t encountered before even with a lot of years of experience. The website specifically is set up to give a space for people to find the information. It’s primarily for people who are being held on charges related to the 2020 Uprising across the US. And that’s a pretty big task. The primary people who are up on the site at the moment are almost all federal prisoners, because the federal system is a little bit easier to navigate in terms of finding people. State and county systems make the process much more difficult to track people from arrest to conviction and possible imprisonment.

The way in which the website works is that there are some people on the site who have organized outside support campaigns, and that’s where the information is drawn from. People in certain places that either had like an active organizing presence like earlier in the Uprisings who created support campaigns and support crews or leaned on already existing organizing in 2020 to create these groups of people who are doing long term prisoner support for people criminalized during the Uprising. That’s where some of our information comes from.

Then the people who don’t have those connections to prior organizing or don’t have connections to a support campaign, are on the site because we’ve reached out. We found their information through a variety of means. A lot of it’s media. We read an article, note down someone’s name, and then continue to try and follow their case. Then once they are reachable in a system, usually the federal system, we reach out, explain what the site is, and ask if they want to be added to it. Those come with certain caveats and we try and be clear about exactly who the site is geared towards. The site is obviously geared towards a left[ist] audience and we want people to be aware that when they put their information up on the site it’s gonna get reproduced in places that are primarily trafficked by anarchists, and radicals, and leftists. So, some basic information about the site, and we asked if people want to be listed. It sounds pretty straightforward, but prison doesn’t make it very easy to interact with people on the outside.

So there’s actually a lot of roadblocks to be able to do this. Just tracking someone through the system is fairly difficult. Then kind of the scope and scale of the amount of people that were criminalized during the 2020 Uprising and into 2021. The Uprising was ongoing in a lot of places, so we had to come up with a timeframe. So, we talk about the Uprising itself, in many ways going from from May 2020, until the election. That’s kind of our timeframe that we talked about in terms of Uprising prisoners in an effort to keep the site scalable, keep it within our means, and to give some kind of periodized context for what we mean by the Uprising. Even though clearly there was many actions in the Uprising continued past that point for many places.

TFSR: Yeah, and police killings haven’t stopped and people continue to go out for Breanna Taylor and other folks.

Chazz: Yeah, we’re not trying to necessarily call in every single person who’s been criminalized in the wake of a police shooting. That’s an incredible amount of people with a much longer history than the site could possibly cover.

TFSR: Yeah, that seems like a really good lesson of putting down a boundary and not expanding past capacity. I think that’s a hard thing for, especially newer activists to realize. Like, how do we do the good thing and then also recognize that we can only do so much and do that well.

Chazz: I think there’s also a certain amount of responsibility that goes into doing work with people who are currently imprisoned by the state. Holding yourself to boundaries and holding yourself to a certain level of accountability to doing what you said you were going to do. The stakes are much, much, much higher when you’re offering support and a service to people who are incarcerated. That’s not something that you can go back on, it’s not something that you can really take a break from, it’s not something that you can renege because you’ve overextended yourself. That’s a really important lesson for people who are moving into prisoner support: small increments, babies steps, moving at a pace that works well for yo, because the project itself is actually another person. It’s not the same as other kinds of projects that we do.

TFSR: So what I’m hearing you as offering is, is you’re providing a spot where people can come and find information about doing support for prisoners, and keeping up updates as you can, or pointing people to resources that would help them along this trail of supporting prisoners, and maybe post-release support if folks are asking for it. Is that right? You all aren’t actually doing, as this project – as UprisingSupport.org, you’re not actually coordinating the immediate support of folks?

Chazz: No, and we’re pretty clear with people when we write them the first time that we are not providing support. We’re not providing a resource beyond basically this public listing. Our hope is that the people who are publicly listed on the site that have support campaigns, this will be another place for those support campaigns to put information so that there’s just another way for people to find those campaigns. The other hope is that people who are in areas where there aren’t active support campaigns, but there are active defendants and people in prison from the Uprising, can find those people and possibly initiate relationships and possibly support campaigns for those defendants.

That’s all based on people’s capacity, and people’s working relationships, and building those working relationships. That’s kind of a hope of ours is that people, possibly in places that people didn’t focus on during the Uprising but had strong moments and demonstrations and all of these things during the Uprising, in those places that maybe, especially if there’s less resources or less capacity, folks who aren’t necessarily already plugged in, this could be an opportunity for them to reach out to those locked up and plug themselves in.

TFSR: Cool. That’s awesome. For all of us, for our understanding, can you give us a sense of the scope of how many prisoners faced heavy sentences that you that your project is aware of, at least, as a result of being targeted by the State for alleged participation in the George Floyd Uprising?

Chazz: Yeah, the heavier sentences definitely came down at the federal level. And that’s pretty consistent with the scale of incarceration in the US also, in a certain sense. It’s really hard to say exactly how many people were arrested or charged, but the number of charges that were initially set at the federal level was around 350 people. At the state level, the arrests themselves at the State and city level were in the 10,000’s. So, partially because of the pandemic, and some States really did limit the amount of people that they were actually sending to prison for a brief moment, a lot of those folks ended up on in these kind of like e-carceration situations, which is like a whole different topic.

The vast majority of the very serious charges, when we’re seeing convictions, mostly what we’re seeing is pleas. There’s an extraordinarily high percentage of people in general at the federal level, that plead their cases out. Those cases that we’re seeing being the most serious, we’re seeing a fair amount of five to ten year sentences stemming from the Uprising. They’ve slowed down in the last six months to a year, the convictions have slowed down a little bit, but out of those 350 people across the country, probably more… probably closer to 400, who picked up these federal charges, there’s a really high percentage of them who sat in prison for a really long time. We’re two years in now. So a number of people sat in prison, were not released initially, and then eventually pled to a charge that saw a lot of their time already done. So we’re seeing a fair amount of releases for people who took prison sentences for less than three years because they sat in prison for two years, awaiting sentencing, awaiting trial, and most of them eventually pled out.

But there are a number of people who are still actually going in right now two years on and starting five to ten years sentences. So that’s not an uncommon thing to see currently. In terms of exact numbers, it’s really hard to say partially because the whole process is so well obfuscated by the State. It’s so well hidden in a certain sense. To know exactly how many Uprising prisoners there are, and how many of them were taken at different levels, would require a team of people and probably more energy and people power than most of us have at the moment.

TFSR: That’s an important point. It’s important to note that federal prosecutions are a thing that can take a very long time, even besides the way that COVID messed up the way that the court systems operated in a lot of ways and extended out periods that people were being held in pretrial detention. But obviously, because the Uprising occurred primarily during the Trump administration, most of the prosecution’s and most of the arrests would have happened during that administration.

But I think it’s also important to note that where the administration, the current administration, under Biden, the Democrats, does have some leeway to give instruction to federal prosecutors as to how they should move forward with prosecutions and the prosecutions have continued, or people’s sentences haven’t been reduced. Despite the fact that Trump has been out of office, people are still people are still suffering.

Are people still being picked up on charges that relate back to then, like surveillance being presented publicly and then people snitching out folks and charges coming down, that you’re aware of?

Chazz: There have been a couple of late in the game ones recently. Not a ton in this last 2022 era. 2021…. it’s crazy that we’re still talking about this. We’ve got two years on this now. In the 2022 era we’re not seeing a ton of new charges coming up. We haven’t tracked every case, so let’s keep that in perspective, and keep that in mind in terms of our ability to know the bigger trends.

2021 was a really big year for prosecutions. It’s important to remember that who was in office in 2021. So 2021 saw a ton of prosecution’s. A lot of the cases that involved like snitch hotlines, which is unfortunately a ton of cases. This kind of goes back to when we talked about anti-repression, because a ton of cases came from people accidentally snitching themselves out through social media. That’s just a really commonplace thing and that’s a big topic for anti-repression, talking about how people keep themselves safe digitally.

Then there was a lot of police and federal investigations that involve tip lines, or “do you know who this is?” campaigns. Where they put up a bunch of grainy photographs of people inside a Starbucks or something and they’re like, “Do you know who these who these people are?” and someone stitches them out. That was a really big problem in a lot of these cases. You never know who exactly is doing this work of the state, but it certainly is an element to keep in mind and to think about in terms of countering state repression when it’s kind of foisted out on the community. Talking about “what is anti-repression work,” when a lot of the cases you’re seeing are people who are being being sent to prison by other civilians, basically.

I think it is also important to remember that there was a consistent tendency for cases in certain parts of the country to start off as State cases. So a case gets prosecuted at the State level and they’re going through this process, and then all of a sudden, the Federal Prosecutor step in and they say, “Actually, this is our case, now, we’re going to prosecute this at the federal level.” They did that under a handful of reasons. But a really big thing that happened in in that 2020 and 2021 era was the Fed stepping in, in certain parts of the country and saying, “Because the alleged damage to this building was done,” or “because it was a cop car, we’re going to prosecute this at the federal level, because the thing that was damaged was involved in interstate commerce.” It’s basically them being like, “Because an aspect of the thing that was attacked or the thing that was vandalized or yada, yada, moves in between physical states,” the Feds stepped in and prosecuted things that primarily, honestly, are State charges. Basic vandalism became this thing that was being prosecuted at the federal level, because of the nature of the of the vandalism, because it was politicized.

So, we saw that and then we saw an incredible use of this of this ‘civil disorder’ charge. Which, it’s not in common usage in terms of federal prosecutions. So those two elements, really heightened the idea, of heightened the ways in which this Uprising was prosecuted, and also why we saw so many federal arrests for things that in a different context would have been state charges. Not to say that state charges are better, but they’re easier for communities to rally around, they’re easier for people to fight legally, they’re easier for people to be released pretrial. There’s just all these aspects to it. A federal sentence is like a really big deal in a sense, if we’re talking about the scale of repression.

TFSR: Yeah, for sure. Just a point to an interview, if folks feel like listening to it, that we did in June of 2020 with Michael Loadenthal, who was tracking some of the federal prosecutions. That’s a point in this mapping the state’s strategy of repression against rebellion article, so that was on IGD at the same time. We’ll link that in the show notes. Maybe I’m incorrect in this, but also another way that they were approaching the federal charges was claiming that because a vehicle was purchased by the police department based from federal funds that were offered.

Chazz: I mean, yeah. There are just so many cases with things like that. Like, “these officers were trained in a facility across State lines, so this is federal, or this gun that was stolen during this riot was manufactured across the state line, or this business that was vandalized does interstate commerce, so this is a federal charge.” The law and the State are absurd, but this was just really, really them showing themselves in this in this way.

TFSR: You’ve kind of pointed to a couple times, different elements of this anti-repression culture or this anti-repression approach, and the different ways, whether it be digital security, as you said… One way of saying it is “snitching on yourself on social media,” another one is “posting boastful selfies that do not have context on social media.” But, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about just personally how you conceive of cultures of resistance, or cultures of anti repression, and some things that you feel could be useful in starting the conversation about how to think about it with the people that we care about, and the people in our community who we maybe don’t even know we are struggling alongside of?

Chazz: The best way that I can think to think about or to talk about anti-repression work is to think about it as as holistic. So thinking about State repression, and attacks on communities in resistance in a way where we can understand that those attacks coming from the State are going to be multifaceted, so our responses need to be multifaceted. It’s similar to the concept of security culture, and the thinking that security culture is not necessarily a list of things to do or not do, but it’s a methodology of making decisions for yourself and inside and with your community, and to create a broader culture of keeping each other safe.

So anti-repression work can can mean a lot of different things. But I think the ultimate goal and the ultimate understanding of anti-repression work and how to fit it into whatever it is that you’re doing inside your communities is to understand why you’re doing it. Especially in the fast paced world of 2020, where it seemed like nothing was going to slow down ever, it really felt like the moment a lot of people had been waiting for, in terms of upheaval had come and there was no reason to ever slow down. It is really easy to get into a kind of like rut of jumping into action in terms of responding to State repression without necessarily having a long term strategy or long term thought process around why it is you’re countering that specific repression or fulfilling a specific kind of service that goes into responding to that repression.

So this concept of anti repression, strategizing and organizing, making those decisions like, “are we going to start a bail fund? Are we going to be doing jail support? How do we do jail support?” Thinking about always going back to this idea of ‘why are we doing anti-repression work?’ And for me, this is the best way that I know how to describe it, is that we do anti-repression work so that the rebellion can continue. We don’t go and pick people up from jail when they’ve been arrested, because we want to feel good about ourselves. But we do that in the context of like our revolutionary organizing, because we understand that if we take care of each other, the rebellion that we’re seeing, and the revolutionary organizing, and potential, and activity that’s happening, can possibly continue. And the only way communities can stay in revolt is if they take care of themselves. And there’s this network of communities taking care of each other. So that’s a really big part of anti-repression [work].

That’s built into this, for us, in this talking about this website. What does it mean, if this incredibly large, incredibly broad rebellion took place across time, it took place across space, it took place in this huge way that generationally none of us can really touch in any other way. And then, what does it mean if the people who go to prison during that rebellion don’t have support? It means like a part of the Rebellion has ended. But what does it mean if those people do have support, and what kind of connections across community and across communities can be made by doing that kind of support.

I think an important aspect of this is that anti-repression is also the recognition that State repression isn’t always a thing that you can keep from happening and it’s up to us to create communities and create cultures, where when you are the subject of state repression, when you are being repressed, when you are imprisoned, you’re not cut off from the community that you came from, you’re not cut off from a community of rebellion. Prisoners have, as a group of people in a broad way I can say, they’re not out, they’re not done, it’s not over [for them], they are just in a really different place than those of us out here walking around in the so called ‘free world.’ So a part of anti-repression is going to be also maintaining those relationships, because it’s another methodology for us to show care to each other, to show care, but also because we want the rebellion to continue.

So I think these are really good questions that people should be asking themselves when they start doing anti repression organizing. There’s a lot of basic tools. There’s a lot of ‘Know Your Rights,’ there’s a lot of digital security stuff, there’s a lot of ‘how too’s,’ there’s a lot of tips and tricks and all of those that are a part of it. But ultimately, a big question is coming back to the center of your work and being like, “why are we doing this?” And figuring out what it is about creating strong communities in response to State repression that is that is the biggest for you and moving from that position. That will help create a better culture as opposed to a set of rules or things to do or not do that don’t help us build beyond that moment.

TFSR: Chazz, how can folks support your project? How can they get started or integrate their own ongoing work into something like UprisingSupport.org?

Chazz: Yeah, please come to the website and take a look around. There’s a resources page that has like a lot of information about how to do prisoner support and these very kind of bare-bones very basic ways about how to write letters, how to how to start, that kind of ‘Tips and Tricks’ stuff I was talking about. That’s all on the site. But look through the site and for one, remember that each name on a page is a person with their own story, background history, community, family, and try and find ways that you think that you have capacity to interact with those people. If that’s organizing a letter writing night and picking a handful of names, that that’s great, or if that’s picking one person and writing to them.

For people who are doing support for Uprising prisoners, I think that’s logistically very helpful for us, is for us to have information sent to us about people’s incarceration and updates about their cases. We try and keep the website updated, but there’s a lot of people that track and there’s a lot of people that we are tracking that aren’t on the site because they haven’t reached that point yet. A lot of back and forth. Us not having to keep an eye on everyone’s cases, really cuts down on our time, and allows us to take this small amount of time that we do have. This is this is one of many things that we’re working on. So if we have the information sent to us from people who are doing support campaigns that’s really helpful.

If you do make a relationship with somebody based off of the website, whether you’re in a state and you’re like, “Oh, crap, I didn’t realize that somebody from the Uprising was in prison for my state,” and you write them, think about creating a support campaign for people. It’s not a light responsibility, but it’s a really important one. I think that the more people that have this kind of inside/outside connection. A lot of folks are supported by their close friends and their families, but a lot of people aren’t also.

A lot of people on the site have been the subjects of State repression coming from their communities for a really long time. The defendants on the on the website are overwhelmingly Black men coming from hyper criminalized communities. So a lot of the folks that we talked to have dealt with state repression for a really long time, but I don’t know if they’ve ever had the support or the backing of other people from either their community or other communities that that see commonality and their struggle. So building those relationships is really important.

If you’re doing support for somebody, and they’re not on the site, and you think that they should be on the site, please reach out. We try and check the email fairly regularly. Let us know and we’ll start working with you or with other people that you’re in touch with, or prisoners directly, to get people listed.

TFSR: Awesome. Well, anything else that you want to touch on? This is going to air alongside of some recordings of anarchists prisoners who are supported by the June 11 project? So as another tendency within anti repression more widely, I don’t know if you had anything to add? No pressure.

Chazz: Yeah, thinking about the Uprising prisoners, as long term prisoners is really important and so putting that in this context is also really important. It’s important to remember that not everybody shares a theoretical political background. So just keep that in mind in terms of thinking about people as this large group of people who took action against whatever form of the state was in front of them that they were criminalized for, but also keeping in mind that a lot of folks really are entering into this realm of becoming long term prisoners, especially in the federal system. And that’s a big deal. And not forgetting that even many, many, many years on there still will be Uprising prisoners. Five years from now there, there will still be Uprising prisoners and keeping that in mind as we move forward as people who care about this.

TFSR: Thank you so much for taking the time to have this conversation for the work that you’re doing.

Chazz: Yeah, thank you so much for the opportunity to talk about the site.