Editors’ note: After sending this correspondence to revcom.us, the revcom supporter followed up with a news alert from Palmdale, California, about a police body-camera video of an incident last year that was just released. The horrific video shows the pigs punching a Black woman in the face while she holds her three-week-old baby in her arms, begging them not to take her child. The revcom supporter wrote:
“The rape of the women in prison I wrote about yesterday and the brutality by the police outside the prison we read about today. What other horrors must our sisters and all of humanity endure?
“The women in FCI Dublin and the women in the auto that midnight with their children in Palmdale, they don't know each other. Some of them are locked up, can't go get a Starbucks, take a swim in the pool, or go get some hot Cheetos or a taco from a store. The others have that ‘freedom’ and because of an alleged motor vehicle violation, which is how most people get stopped by the cops, they're brutally assaulted, while holding their children. The people in the prison can't hold their children, but either way the pigs are going to beat you down worse than they beat a dog.”
Bodycam video shows LA sheriff's deputy punch mother holding baby. Credit: LAPD body cam video
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- Dublin, California, is the location of the Federal Correctional Institution, Dublin, a women’s prison with a population of about 600 women (according to the Bureau of Prisons), most of whom are reportedly incarcerated for convictions of drug crimes. There are two prisons at FCI Dublin, one is minimum security (the camp) and the other is low security (the prison).
- Over the last three years, news reports (mostly from the Associated Press) have outlined women prisoners’ horrific complaints about prison officials, a prison religious official, and prison employees raping them and sexually molesting them, in such a persistent manner that the prison was known to be a “rape club.” When the women complained, they faced retaliation, including being placed in solitary confinement and relocated to different prisons in the federal prison system.
- As many as eight officials, chaplain, and employees of the prison have been indicted, are awaiting trial, or have been convicted of various rape and sexual assault offenses against women prisoners. The rapes and sexual exploitation occurred within various locations within the prison. Other employees of the prison have been subjected to internal investigations.
As many as eight officials, chaplain, and employees of the prison have been indicted, are awaiting trial, or have been convicted of various rape and sexual assault offenses against women prisoners. Here, Ray Garcia, former warden of a federal women's prison, leaves the Federal Courthouse in Oakland, California, November 28, 2022. Photo: AP
- The Bureau of Prisons (BOP) of the United States consists of 122 Federal institutions, 29 imprison women, and only three are women only. Over the last decade, scores of BOP employees, including administrators, have been indicted and convicted of many offenses against prisoners, including corruption, smuggling, and bribery. Now, there are charges of rape and abuse of women at the hands of prison officials and prison employees.
- The Dublin rape and sexual abuse against women cases are part of the day-to-day oppression women suffer under capitalist imperialism in the United States. The fact that these horrific incidents occur in prisons indicates the focal point that prisons play in the capitalist-imperialist state oppression of women and the lack of human rights and dignity that women prisoners face and suffer.
- While there have been and are currently investigations underway about the Dublin prison rape and sex abuse, there have been many investigations about many abuses and crimes against humanity carried out by the U.S. capitalist-imperialist state. No investigation has ended the capitalist-imperialist system, nor will it ever.
- Since the prison system in the United States is universal in its brutality and oppression of women, the conditions that women are confronting in Dublin FCI undoubtedly are present in other prisons, be they state or federal. The 1980s campaigns against the rape of Black women Joan Little and Dessie Woods, southern Black women who were sexually assaulted are cases in point.
- The oppression of women is an integral part of the capitalist-imperialist system worldwide.
- In all aspects of economic, legal, and social life, women are the victims of horrific crimes against humanity. This is most certainly true of working class, poor, peasant, precariously employed women and women in prison.
- These crimes against humanity are carried out as a part of the system’s intrinsic nature. These are not aberrations nor rogue events.
- The goals of the Revolution Club spell out its fundamental opposition to the oppression of women and earmark the eradication of the oppression of women through a successful revolution to overturn capitalism-imperialism and establish the New Socialist Republic in North America under which the oppression of women will be eliminated because the capitalist-imperialist system will no longer exist and the socialist state will be committed to the extinction of the oppression of women in its deeds, laws, and actions.
- Two initiatives of the Revolution Club stand out in the struggle against the oppression of women and to build a revolutionary movement.
- The first is one of the “5 Stops,” characteristics of the system that cannot be reformed away. It reads, “STOP the Patriarchal Degradation, Dehumanization, and Subjugation of All Women Everywhere, and All Oppression Based on Gender or Sexual Orientation!”
- The second is the second Point of Attention to which members of the Revolution Club commit themselves: “We fight for a world where ALL the chains are broken. Women, men, and differently gendered people are equals and comrades. We do not tolerate physically or verbally abusing women or treating them as sexual objects, nor do we tolerate insults or ‘jokes’ about people’s gender or sexual orientation.”
- The Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, in Article 3, Section 3, shares the historical basis of the oppression of women and validates the Constitution’s vision that the revolutionary masses and society will establish after the revolution “basic rights and liberties that are essential for the emancipation of women.” As such, the revolutionary masses in society today oppose the oppression of women and take up the fight for revolution when they struggle against the oppression of women in the day-to-day work to make revolution.
- Much support must be organized to support the women in Dublin FCI and in all prisons and jails against “rape club” oppression. This is an urgent task towards building a revolutionary movement. Without the leadership and integral participation of women, there cannot be a successful revolution anywhere.