Now, I’m all for workers getting unionized. (Big fan of the Employee Free Choice Act – EFCA – which, when it passes, will make it a heck of a lot easier to start a union).

And, as much as my anarchist (and formerly incarcerated) soul rankles with the idea of cops and prison guards, they are workers, too. While they are, along with soldiers, the main perpetrators of direct state violence … well, they also deserve unions. I guess. Maybe their learnings about solidarity and collective struggle will inform a self-critique about their roles within oppressive institutions. One can hope.

But seriously? Seriously. The California Correctional Peace Officers Association, (“peace officers.” yeah. I love that. in English? prison guards union) has given up on whatever small hope they had of recalling Governor Schwarzenegger (a noble cause, I’m sure, although somehow I suspect their concerns might not exactly be my concerns) so that they can focus on defeating Proposition 5, the Nonviolent Offender Rehabilitation Act. CCPOA leadership has just handed the opposition to Prop. 5 $2 million, hoping to defeat it in next week’s vote.

Prop. 5 is one of California’s upcoming ballot initiatives – handy tools for the people to speak their mind when the legislature won’t listen. While there are other significant propositions being voted on, Prop. 5 is huge – the most sweeping sentencing reform in U.S. history, and the most important drug policy reform since the repeal of alcohol prohibition was ratified in 1933. By providing drug treatment to young people and diverting resources to treatment instead of incarceration for nonviolent drug law offenders, this initiative would save the state $2.5 billion in what would have been prison costs.

California has a huge budget crisis, and an even bigger prison crisis – overcrowding at 170 percent capacity of the facilities already built (which, to my mind, should all be abolished). Prison abolition aside, many, many, many folks agree that the answer to this overcrowding is not to build more jails. Those who don’t agree? Well … (and here’s a shocker!) those whose livelihoods depend on the prison industrial complex. Drug Czar John Walters is speaking out against it, and the prison guards have joined him in condemning the proposition.

Workers though they may be, I don’t think the prison guards – or at the very least, CCPOA leadership – really get the concept of solidarity. And I’m making sure everyone I know in California knows about and votes Yes on Prop. 5. I don’t know about you, but that new world we bring forth from the ashes of the old? I’d like fewer prisons, not more.

Posted by Vera Leone

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 31st, 2008 at 3:35 pm and is filed under Weed Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.