Vol. 80/No. 5      February 8, 2016

 
(feature article)

Prison labor is a window into workings of capitalism

Cuban 5: ‘In US prisons they aim to dehumanize you;
in Cuba a prisoner is another human being’

 
“It’s the Poor Who Face the Savagery of the US ‘Justice’ System’”: The Cuban Five Talk About Their Lives Within the US Working Class, a new book from Pathfinder Press, is now available. The Five were arrested in Florida and framed-up by the FBI in 1998 for their activity in defense of the Cuban Revolution. The last of them returned to Cuba in 2014. The book centers on a 2015 interview by Mary-Alice Waters and Róger Calero in which they talk about their time as part of the large section of the U.S. working class behind bars. Most of the excerpts below are from the section “In US Prisons They Aim to Dehumanize You; in Cuba a Prisoner Is Another Human Being.” Copyright © 2016 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

RAMÓN LABAÑINO: To understand the American system of justice, you have to begin from the fact that it’s a system used by the US government to enable a powerful minority to control a vast majority who are poor and dispossessed.

Almost 40 percent of the state and federal prison population in the US is African American, and more than 20 percent is Latino. In some states and some prisons the percentages are even higher. The whites in prison are poor, too. You may come across a rich person, a politician, here and there, people doing minimal time for white-collar crimes — and with all the protection in the world. A person who is poor — Black, Latino, Native American, white — faces the enormous savagery of what’s called American justice.

It serves above all to sustain a system that has no solution for the poor, present or future. It’s a way to separate them from society. It’s a way to hold off a revolution, to keep the conditions for a genuine revolutionary struggle from emerging.

In the United States, imprisonment is a way of dehumanizing a human being. It’s a way of isolating you from society, including from your family. To make you feel alone. To make you feel depressed. To make you feel as if you have no one to turn to. …

RÓGER CALERO: In the federal prison system, inmates are required to work, right?

RAMÓN LABAÑINO: That’s correct. You have to have a job of some kind. I did all sorts of things. I started out as an orderly, doing cleanup jobs. I taught Spanish to English speakers. I was a janitor in the laundry room. I worked for a while cleaning and straightening up the recreation area.

The better-paid jobs are with UNICOR. That’s the trade name for Federal Prison Industries, a government-owned corporation going all the way back to the 1930s. More than half of federal prisons have factories run by UNICOR. Inmates are paid from $0.23 to $1.15 an hour.

It’s a terrific deal for the government. A cheap workforce locked up in prison, with no right to organize, no health or safety protections. Nothing.

Inmates in these factories make uniforms, clothing, shoes, office furniture, even military items — and are paid a fraction of the federal minimum wage, which is $7.25 an hour right now. What a gold mine! It’s all part of the US justice system.

MARY-ALICE WATERS: And a window onto the workings of capitalism! You had experience with that kind of class exploitation before your arrests too. René [González] worked jobs in construction and on road repair crews. Antonio worked in a restaurant kitchen, then at a Days Inn, later digging ditches, and finally — through a temp agency — as a janitor at the Boca Chica Naval Air Station in Key West. We’ve read about that last job, since prosecutors used it as “evidence” in their espionage conspiracy frame-up.

RAMÓN LABAÑINO: In Tampa, when I first arrived in the US in 1992, I delivered newspapers door-to-door and sold shoes for a mail-order business. When I was assigned to move to Miami in 1996, I ended up driving a van delivering medicine and other merchandise to pharmacies. That was the most steady job I had. …

RÓGER CALERO: What about the jobs you and others had in prison. How many hours a day did you work?

RAMÓN LABAÑINO: You normally work from eight to five. But often there’s overtime. During the war against Iraq, for example, there were a lot of orders for clothing and boots. The factory at the Beaumont penitentiary in Texas worked practically around the clock.

FERNANDO GONZÁLEZ: At the federal prison in Oxford, Wisconsin, where I spent five and a half years, the factory assembled electronic components and systems for rockets, fighter jets, and tanks.

ANTONIO GUERRERO: You have to have a job, but sometimes it’s hard to find work and you have to wait for someone to leave. In prison you never take a job somebody else already has. And we never took the jobs that paid a little better, since they were a source of income for other inmates — and a source of conflict for that very reason. Like jobs in the kitchen, where people stole things.

In the penitentiary at Florence, Colorado, where I spent eight and a half years, they needed someone to give classes in math and in English as a second language, so I did that. Later, I worked as a teacher at Marianna, because some inmates asked me for help in passing the tests given in Spanish to get their GED [General Educational Development] certificates, the equivalent of a high school diploma. I wasn’t working for the prison then. I did it for those individuals, who together paid me $15 a month. More Latino students got their GEDs with the help of the course I taught than during practically the entire history of Marianna.

MARY-ALICE WATERS: US prisons are organized to exact retribution. To punish. They try to destroy a person’s dignity and sense of worth.

FERNANDO GONZÁLEZ: That’s exactly right.

GERARDO HERNÁNDEZ: The road to rehabilitation does not exist in the US prison system.

RAMÓN LABAÑINO: What happens when you enter the prison system? The first thing they do is to isolate you — from society, from your family.

I’d say most people in federal prison lose contact with their families within a few months. Most families don’t have the economic resources to support someone in prison. There are families that overcome these obstacles, of course, but many others can’t.

With no family support, no money beyond the pittance you make in prison, you become more and more isolated. You become “institutionalized,” as they say. You made a mistake in life, or at least that’s what they convicted you of, but now you’ve got no choice but to take on the rhythm of the prison. The prison becomes your world.
 
 
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