[This article first appeared on the Infoshop website in February 2003]
The Missouri Prison Labor Union was organized by prisoners and supporters in the hope of bettering the living and working conditions in the state of Missouri prison system. One of our goals is to establish minimum wages for all prisoners in Missouri and to stop all prison abuse. We were lawfully given recognition by the Secretary of state in Missouri on August 3rd of 1998 and since our arrival on the scene, members have been subjected to all forms of abuse and harassment by the Missouri Department of Corrections and the prison officials of Potosi Correctional Center, Jefferson City Correctional Center and Crossroads correctional Center.
The MPLU is an organization that fights against oppression, repression, torture, brutality, rape, corruption and exploitation of prisoners both male and female. In this struggle we seek to regain our human dignity. We will seek to remove legislation which acts as a barrier to a prisoner’s right to vote. We’ll work to procure the minimum wage pay scale for all prisoners - to abolish all abuses of prisoners throughout the US and around the world.
The MPLU is an anarchist driven prison initiative that strikes at the lore of slave labor capitalism. Prisoners are openly considered slaves by the very constitutional amendment 13 that supposedly abolished slavery. Prisoners can be forced to labor, without pay, healthcare or safety protections.
Jerome White-Bey, Bruce Cummings, Sheik M. Moore, and others are horrifically oppressed, locked down in the hole, assaulted and otherwise abused for their uncommonly courageous work in an unabashed effort to break them. This is why I have chosen to not only support them but to establish the MPLU-Texas local chapters so that Texas prisoners may strive and accomplish those same goals.
When modern man looks at the problem of slavery with his 20th century background and in the light of the hideous crimes perpetrated during the slave trade and the abominable barbarous treatment that was meted out to slaves he discovers it as a most shocking and horrid crime. He is at loss and finds it extremely difficult to understand as to how such a thing can be approved of by a nation that considers its self to be based on equality and justice.
Slavery has been and still is a melee of treachery, surmise and violence of one nation or group of people to another due to its expansionist designs and the lust for exploitation in order to advance its own selfish ends. Such practices are and have been the outcome of personal ambition, pride, vanity or a wish for vengeance. It was because of these inclinations that their consciences never twinged them when murdering, punishing, raping, or making their slaves perform loathsome and burdening jobs.
