Juan Carlos Rico, from Valdemoro (Madrid III) Prison Slaughterhouse

13 07 2010 thisisourjob.wordpress.com

From Tokata (July 4, 2010):

What can be said about jail/prison that hasn’t already been said, written, or done about these “tomb-like spaces” where absolute power over the individual effectively determines the “right” of those who suffer imprisonment—in other words, prisoners—to life or death. Talking about prison as a totalized system only expresses one of its features, which is the regulation of the prisoner’s life inside the prison. Prison is that, and also much more. Prison is a closed, almost completely opaque institution through which the state (or, at the international level, states), coexisting with the dominant parasitic hierarchies, purposefully exercises not just torture and the deprivation of the most fundamental “rights,” but also the commercialized industrial slaughter of those sectors of the global population that do not fit into the capitalist model of production/consumption. It is these sectors that certain authorities (judicial, police) have previously labeled “criminal.”

Another known feature of prison is that, by its very existence, it acts as a constant reminder to the “normalized” population (in other words, those who exist/operate within the current social system) of where they might end up if they do not adapt to conventional forms of behavior. Of course, the ruling classes are exempt from this. One must never forget that the functions of prison are exclusively directed toward the people at the base of the pyramid of social architecture—in other words, the most disadvantaged and dispossessed.

Therefore, I assert that all conscientious human beings who are aware of this barbaric plague of wholesale extermination have an unavoidable obligation to DESTROY the ideological and material foundations of prison. And when I say “destroy,” I am referring to the DEMOLITION of the very architectural structures that lock away and annihilate human life, and the liberation of our brothers and sisters from those structures. Prison is incompatible with the evolution of a new way of understanding the world and the people who live in it—in short, of understanding life.

This is simply my point of view, and by expressing it my only desire is to contribute—humbly, but specifically—to the clarification of some of the ancillary functions of imprisonment.

If you are incapable of effectively opposing this globally institutionalized crime, then we will suffer another holocaust, and it may be the last. That said, our brothers and sisters should begin to organize in order to lash out at this murderous institution, this tool of terrorizing social control in the hands of the dominant castes, who use it to impose their aberrant plans and their twisted vision of how life should work.

REMEMBER that we are talking about hundreds of dead human beings, people who are being MURDERED with total impunity before your very eyes, all in the name of democracy. Reflect on that. Thank you for listening to me/us. In Haiti, the UN is investigating the “alleged” slaughter of inmates at Les Cayes prison after the earthquake. And so it goes.

On my end, I won’t stop showing my support for and solidarity with Honorio “Pope” Gómez Alfaro, in accordance with what I think and carry out in practice. Thoughts that have no effect on one’s surroundings are mere abstractions lacking practical results. That said: FIRE TO THE SYSTEM.

—Juan Carlos Rico Rodriguez
Valdemoro Prison Slaughterhouse
Isolation Wing 4
Madrid III