 Logo of the Prisoners Rights Union | |
| Formation | November 17, 1970; 54 years ago (1970-11-17) |
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The Prisoners' Rights Union (PRU) was a prisoners' rights advocacy group, modelled after labor unions, founded in California in 1970. Its members paid dues and its lawyers sued courts for better conditions. The organization still exists, but became effectively defunct as a mass member-run organization in the 1990s.
History
On November 17, 1970, the idea for a prisoners union was born at a press conference held by former prisoners in support of the 1970 Folsom Prison strike. Its constitution argued that prisoners were an enslaved social class with the right to collective struggle for better conditions:
We the convicts and our people imprisoned or at large throughout the state of California are being subjected to a continuous cycle of poverty, prison, parole and more poverty; the same cycle that prisoners the world over have endured since the first man was enslaved. It is more than a game of Crime and Punishment; it is a social condition of inequality and degradation that denies us the opportunity to rise up and pursue a dignified way of life as guaranteed by the UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION. Once convicted, forever doomed has been the practice of society. We are the first to be accused and the last to be recognized. We are branded the lowest of all people: We the CONVICTED CLASS.
The right to organize for protection and survival is an inalienable right which is guaranteed to all people regardless of their social, racial, religious, economic, or political condition. Therefore, we the CONVICTED CLASS have banded together to form a cooperative Union to be hereafter called the UNITED PRISONERS UNION. We believe the creation of this Union will enable us to put an end to injustice, protect the lives and interests of our people, gain our constitutional rights and free us of our bondage.
In February 1971, the organization was created as the California Prisoners Union. By December 1971, the organization had 50 members, including both former prisoners and prison reform activists. The organization was soon renamed the United Prisoners Union.
In 1971, UPU published a "Bill of Rights", which declared that "We have been historically stereotyped as less than human, while in reality we possess the same needs, frailties, ambitions and dignity indigenous to all humans". The Bill of Rights demanded the abolishment of capital punishment; the prosecution of all prison, jail, parole, and military personnel for crimes inflicted upon prisoners; due process of law; the right to counsel of the prisoner's own choosing; a minimum wage and other labor rights; and many other prisoners' rights.
Although UPU's constitution used the language of class, and opposed capitalism, it largely eschewed the Marxist-Leninist and Maoist language of other radical California organizations, which would later fracture the organization.
In 1971, the organization claimed 3,000 members, 1/3 of which were current prisoners.
1973 split
Over time, the UPU shifted away from work stoppages (strikes) in prisons and toward publicizing abuse, lobbying, and winning court cases. In 1972, as a result of one such case, UPU won the right to publish its Outlaw newspaper in San Quentin.
In 1973, the UPU accused Popeye Jackson of stealing money from the organization. In response, he went to the union office with a gun and chased staff members around and denounced the UPU as a white supremacist organization. As a result, the UPU split in two: The radical minority into the United Prisoners Union led by Popeye Jackson and the moderate majority into the Prisoners' Union (PU) headed by Willie Holder.
In the mid-1970's, this shift toward revolutionary rhetoric and political violence by Bay Area groups resulted in a rapid decrease in outside support for prison support groups.
In 1974, the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped Patty Hearst and demanded that the Hearst family distribute $400 million in food aid. The Hearsts funded a Seattle organization, People in Need (PIN), which worked with UPU, the American Indian Movement, and other organizations to distribute food.
On June 2, 1975, Popeye Jackson was shot dead by a member of the radical underground Tribal Thumb organization. After Popeye's death, the UPU splinter quickly disintegrated, leaving only the PU, which would later be renamed the Prisoners Rights Union (PRU).
Subsequent history
In 1976, in Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners' Labor Union, the Supreme Court ruled that prisoners do not have the right under the 1st Amendment to form a union, claiming that prisoner unions might increase the likelihood of prison riots. In fact, empirical evidence suggested that prisoner unions like PRU often worked to stop riots and to stop intra-prisoner violence.
In 1978, the Supreme Court ruled against PU's lawsuit to establish local PU union offices in prisons where they had a large membership.
UPU published Anvil from 1971 to 76 and The Outlaw from 1974 to 77. PRU published The California Prisoner from 1989 to 96. In 1991, The California Prisoner had a readership of 30,000.
PRU became defunct in the early 1990s, when its key lawyer Paul Comiskey moved to private practice as a criminal defense attorney.
See also
- 1970 Folsom Prison strike
- Walpole prison strike and the National Prisoner Reform Association
- Symbionese Liberation Army
- Political prisoners in the United States
- Anarchist Black Cross
References
- ^ Price, Jimmy (June 1991). "Union gives second chance" (PDF). The California Prisoner.
- ^ Cummins, Eric (1994). The Rise and Fall of California's Radical Prison Movement. Stanford University Press. ISBN 9780804722322.
- Burton-Rose, Daniel (2011). Guerrilla USA: The George Jackson Brigade and the anti-capitalist underground of the 1970s. University of California Press.
- Irwin, John (June 1991). "Prisoners Rights Union - A 20 Year Struggle" (PDF). The California Prisoner.
So, in the winter of 1971, a group of 50 or so ex-prisoners and activists who had been working on prison issues organized the "California Prisoners Union."
- ^ "Prisoners' Rights Union (Calif.)". Johns Hopkins University Libraries.
- "United Prisoners Union Bill of Rights" (PDF). Freedom Archives. United Prisoners Union. 1971.
- Holles, Everett (September 26, 1971). "Convicts Seek to Form a National Union". New York Times.
The group, called the United Prisoners Union, says it has a membership cadre of some 3,000 California convicts, former inmates and members of their, families. It has drawn up a bill of rights for prison reform as an alternative to what it calls "the certainty of more riots and bloodshed, more Atticas and San Ouentins." Less than one‐third of the union's 3,000 charter members are actually in prison. Their identities are kept secret.
- Singleton, Sarah (Spring 1973). "Unionizing America's Prisons - Arbitration and State-Use". Indiana Law Journal.
Attempts to organize prisoners are becoming increasingly commonplace. Organizing is presently occurring in at least six states. In California, the United Prisoners Union claims a membership of over three thousand. 2 California is also the headquarters of the Prisoners' Union of San Francisco 3 and the Prisoners Legal Union at the Men's Colony at San Luis Obispo." In New York, more than half of the inmates at Greenhaven Correctional Facility are said to belong to the Prisoners' Labor Union.5 " The State Prison of Southern Michigan is presently being organized by another Prisoners Labor Union."8 A request for an election has been made to the Delaware Department of Labor to determine if the Imprisoned Citizens' Union ought to be accorded representative status
- Toobin, Jeffrey (2016). American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. p. 11. ISBN 978-0385536714.
- Easton, Susan (2018). The Politics of the Prison and the Prisoner: Zoon Politikon. Routledge. ISBN 9781317368915.
The right of prisoners to form a union was also considered by the United States Supreme Court in 1976, in Jones v North Carolina Prisoners Labor 433 US 119 (1977). Union meetings were prohibited by the Department of Corrections and union members were not allowed to solicit others to join. When prisoners challenged this, the Court ruled that prisoners did not have a right under the First Amendment to join the union. One reason the court took this view was that it thought that doing so would make prison riots more likely. Yet this has not been validated by subsequent experience. In none of the major riots in the US in the 1970s and 1980s studied by Useem and Kimball (1991) were prisoners' unions or rights groups' actions a contributor to or catalyst for the riot. On the contrary, in one case, they tried to stop the riot and at Attica and Michigan, the prisoners most willing to engage in negotiations were those least likely to harm hostages. Associations or unions may also be beneficial in building mutual trust between prisoners as conflict between prisoners is a major source of violence within prisons. Prisoners' unions may therefore contribute to the stability of prisons rather than undermine it.
- Comiskey, Paul (June 1991). "Union Needs You" (PDF). The California Prisoner.
- Schlanger, Margo (2013). "Plata v. Brown and realignment: Jails, prisons, courts, and politics". Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. 48.
But in most of the cases, the prisoners were represented by the Prisoners' Rights Union, which subsequently became, as one of its own members admits, "defunctish."
- Santos, Kari (March 2, 2015). "Quixote's Last Trial (Maybe)". California Lawyer.
External links
- United Prisoners Union collection in the Freedom Archives
- Prisoners Union collection in the Freedom Archives
- Civil rights cases filed by PRU; petered out in the early 1990s