Step up fight to end barbaric solitary!

The following statement was issued Feb. 23 by Alyson Kennedy, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. president.

The Socialist Workers Party celebrates the release of Albert Woodfox, one of the Angola 3, after more than 40 years in solitary confinement, and calls on workers to use this victory to redouble our efforts to win freedom for Oscar López; Leonard Peltier; Mumia Abu-Jamal; Mondo we Langa and Ed Poindexter, known as the Omaha 2; Oregon cattle ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond; and others thrown behind bars by the U.S. ruling families. Woodfox walked out of prison Feb. 19 unbroken, vowing to step up his efforts “to ending this barbarous use of solitary confinement.” This is a victory for the working class.

Socialist Workers Party candidates across the U.S. will join in stepping up the fight against cop brutality, frame-ups and solitary confinement, to tell the truth about prison conditions and to win solidarity for all our brothers and sisters behind bars.

While Woodfox may have spent more time in solitary confinement than any other prisoner in the U.S., his case is not unique. There are an estimated 80,000 federal and state prisoners in solitary. And this doesn’t include those in local jails and immigration prisons.

Oscar López, a fighter for independence for Puerto Rico jailed in the U.S. for more than 34 years, spent his first 12 years in solitary confinement. The Cuban Five, revolutionaries framed up by the U.S. government, were put in isolation their first 17 months in prison. All of the Five — whose “crime” was working to stop violent attacks against the Cuban Revolution — are now back in Cuba.

“The jailers want to destroy you,” said René González, one of the Five. “They want to break your physical, moral, and mental integrity.” But they couldn’t break the Cuban Five, López or Woodfox.

This victory is a boost to the thousands of prisoners in California who through hunger strikes and protests have pushed back the torturous use of solitary confinement there.

The United States has 4.4 percent of the world population but 22 percent of the world’s prisoners. There are 2,984 people on death row and the vast majority of those behind bars are from the working class. Some 40 percent are Black.

The Socialist Workers Party candidates encourage everyone we meet to read and use the new Pathfinder book The Cuban Five Talk About Their Lives Within the US Working Class. In it they explain what is meant by Ramón Labañino’s conclusion, “It’s the poor who face the savagery of the US ‘justice’ system.”

Through the course of making their revolution, Cuba’s working people dismantled the police, courts and prisons of the U.S.-backed Fulgencio Batista dictatorship. In their place they began to put together a new society, becoming new men and women capable of running their country in their own interests and extending solidarity to workers and farmers worldwide.

As we join Albert Woodfox marching out of prison, we take this victory to step up our efforts to fight against the horrors and abuses of the capitalist “justice” system, and to emulate the example of Cuba’s workers and farmers to end the dictatorship of capital right here in the United States.

Related articles:
Woodfox is finally free after decades of solitary
Use victory to fight against prison barbarism!

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