Life in Massachusetts Prisons
Special Issue on Prisoners' Rights

(October 2004)

Urszula Masny-Latos, issue editor, writes:

This month’s Mass Dissent focuses on issues related to prisoners and their lives. As is the tradition with this annual issue, most of the articles are written by Massachusetts prisoners. This year, as every year, we have received an overwhelming number of articles and poems from incarcerated members of our society. Again, we were faced with a difficult decision to select, due to space limitations, only a handful of pieces for this issue.
We start with an article from an MCI-Norfolk prisoner Brian Polley in which he tracks the drastic increase in the United States prison population and explains how capitalists have turned this human tragedy into a commodity.
We follow with the anti-racist political prisoner Jann Karl Laaman’s statement to a group of activists who marched from the Democratic National Convention in Boston to the Republican National Convention in New York. Laaman explains how the line in the U.S. between inside and outside prisons has been blurred and calls on all of us to fight back against Bush’s wars and his police state. Timothy J. Muise, a prisoner at Souza-Baranowski and frequent Mass Dissent contributor, explains why the sadistic grin on the face of one of the guards at the core of the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal looked very familiar to him and his fellow prisoners.
In the next article, members of the newly-formed Boston chapter of the Jericho Movement call on all of us to support the many progressive and radical political prisoners in U.S. prisons.
Wayne B. Alexander, an MCI-Norfolk prisoner, asks why Massachusetts politicians continue to cut programs for prisoners and make prison conditions as harsh as possible, knowing that the overwhelming majority of prisoners will re-enter society unprepared for life on the outside after the treatment they received in prison.
In the final article, Howard Brown describes the draconian and fundamentally unfair nature of prison disciplinary procedures in Massachusetts.
We would like to thank all prisoners who submitted their eloquent and thoughtful pieces, especially those whose work could not be printed.

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