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Current IDOC efforts to restrict materials

We have already seen restrictions increasing on material access behind bars in Indiana and other states such as Pennsylvania. The Indiana Department of Corrections (IDOC) has implemented restrictions on books and other resources at facilities including Westville, Indiana State Prison, and Miami that require materials be new and directly from only two vendors, one of which is Amazon. All other reading materials must be purchased through the tablets.

In December, IDOC facilities will be switching over to Globel Tel Link (GTL), which will provide tablets with limited resources available at exorbtiant costs. Some example fees include that the podcasts available for inmates will cost $9/month, and GTL will charge $9.95 for video visitation services.GTL expects to generate $6.5 million annually with the tablets in Indiana prisons. IDOC will collect $750,000 annually and is remaining silent about how this revenue will be spent.

GTL plans to monopolize inmate communication and literature. If we don’t act now, IDOC will feel comfortable expanding this restrictive policy to all prisons in the state and effectively ending used and new book donations to inmates in favor of inaccessible, limited resources. This amounts to very clear form of state censorship and suppression of political education for individuals who are incarcerated in our state.

Education for Abolition!

We need your continued support for getting reading materials to folks on the inside that actually pertain to their needs and interests. With these funds, we will order and send books that focus on fighting against mass incarceration and the prison-industrial complex along with providing the theory and history of prison abolition and struggles against the carceral system, as well as ones that engage larger questions of race, gender, class, and capitalism, to our comrades on the inside who will form study circles and share these books with other inmates. Once we have the funds to order books again, we will be forming study groups on the outside to facilitate an exchange of ideas between people in the abolition movement inside and outside the prisons’ walls. We need around $500/month to send books to 20 people each month.

Please consider sustaining a monthly donation for this project. Check out our website for responses written and recorded by incarcerated IDOC Watch members for the Abolition Study Sessions we organized in 2018.

Books on our list include:

• The Accumulation of Capital by Rosa Luxemburg (1913)

• Black Awakening in Capitalist America: An Analytic History by Robert L. Allen (1990)

• Blood in My Eye by George Jackson (1990)

• Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy by Heather Ann Thompson (2016)

• Carceral Capitalism by Jackie Wang (2018)

• Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complexedited by Nat Smith, Eric A. Stanley (2011)

• Drug War Capitalism by Dawn Paley (2014)

• Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism by Greg Grandin (2007)

• Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination by Robin D. G. Kelley (2002)

• From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America by Elizabeth Hinton (2016)

• Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California by Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2018)

• Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror by Mahmood Mamdani (2004)

• Are Prisons Obsolete? Angela Davis (2003)

• The Invention of the White Race by Theodore W. Allen (1994)

• The Law Is a White Dog – How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Personsby Colin Dayan (2013)

• Layers of Injustice: Re-Examining the Lucasville Uprising by Staughton Lynd (2013)

• Night-Vision: Illuminating War and Class on the Neo-Colonial Terrain by Butch Lee, Red Rover (1998)

• Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour by Maria Mies (1998)

• Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire (1972)

• Resistance Behind Bars: The
  Struggles of Incarcerated Women by Victoria Law (2009)

• Decolonizing Dialectics, George Ciccariello-Maher (2013)

• Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (1984)

• This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color edited by Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa (2015)

• State and Revolution, V.I. Lenin (1917)

• The War Before: The True Life Story of Becoming a Black Panther, Keeping the Faith in Prison, and Fighting for Those Left Behind by Safiya Bukhari (2010)

• Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi, Kali Akuno & Ajamu Nangwaya (2017)

• We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity by bell hooks (2003)

• We Will Return in the Whirlwind: Black Radical Organizations 1960-1975by Muhammad Ahmad (2007)

• The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon (1961)

• Dispersing Power, Raúl Zibechi (2010)

• The Political Thought of Abdullah Öcalan: Kurdistan, Women’s Revolution and Democratic Confederalism, Abdullah Öcalan (2017)

• An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (2015)

• The Fire and the Word: A History of the Zapatista Movement, Gloria Muñoz Ramírez (2008)

• The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States, Dan Berger (2014)

• Adiós Niño: The Gangs of Guatemala City and the Politics of Death, Deborah T. Levenson-Estrada (2013)

• Space of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis between Los Angeles and San Salvador, Elana Zilberg (2011)