Tortured prisoner fights back

Prison officials in Rhode Island are worried. The tip of the iceberg of their crimes is being exposed.

Michael Walsh, a 30-year-old construction laborer from East Providence, is being held in minimum security at the Adult “Correctional” Institution (ACI). He is serving a short sentence for a non-violent violation of probation he had received for a shoplifting charge. He is due to be released in March.

Walsh reports that on Feb. 14, prison guards performed an anal cavity search on him. They accused him of smuggling contraband. In an act of torture reminiscent of those being carried out by U.S. captors at Abu Ghraib, Walsh said prison guards forced him to eat his own feces. He adds that guards then denied him the use of the sink and a toothbrush all day. Walsh also states that ACI officers beat him on the face with a telephone book.

Michael Walsh’s lawyer, Kenneth A. Schreiber, said at a news conference that he was conducting an investigation in order to prepare a civil rights lawsuit against all responsible parties.

Rhode Island Director of Corrections A.T. Wall has “disciplined” nine ACI staff: one has already returned to work and the other eight are on paid leave. Wall promises an investigation, and will undoubtedly blame individual officers for “going too far.” But there is nothing unusual about prison torture, which routinely occurs with impunity in prisons, jails and juvenile detention facilities across the country.

The ACI and all prisons in the U.S. are little more than workhouses and concentration camps for the working class, particularly the nationally oppressed minorities. U.S. Bureau of Justice statistics report that 60 percent of state and federal prisoners are Black and Latin@—although they each make up only about 12 percent of the U.S. population.

Most prisoners—nationally oppressed and white—have been sentenced for crimes of survival. Walsh was convicted of shoplifting, a small theft of property.

The owners of the retail industry, Rhode Island’s biggest private employer, profit from the labor of tens of thousands of cashiers and clerks who make a median wage of $9.05 per hour. The bosses, who are stealing the surplus value created by the labor of these workers, rarely provide them with health insurance. These retail chains are responsible for the poverty of thousands of Rhode Islanders. But as of today, none of these mega-buck bosses has been prosecuted for grand theft.

Walsh and thousands of other working-class prisoners across the United States are victims of the “war at home,” which is not just an anti-war slogan, but a social and political reality of imperialism. The intense competition for ever-greater profits drives the imperialists to slash domestic wages, benefits and social programs for workers.

The imperialists’ regime of police and prison repression must become ever harsher to defend a social order that promises the average worker nothing but a life of toil and sacrifice in the midst of extravagant opulence that he or she can never hope to attain. The working class, not a foreign government, is the enemy that the imperialists fear most.

The instant the working class becomes conscious that the capitalists’ laws and police state—no matter how brutal—cannot contain it, the parasitic class of millionaires and billionaires that has oppressed it for so long is doomed.