Eric Brown / TRU.ENation: On the Coronavirus, Angola, and C-Murder

This interview was conducted by Shawn Grant and published at The Source on April 16, 2020. It is being re-posted with the permission of Eric Brown.

Eric Brown, aka TRU.ENation, grew up in a prison. Sentenced to life without parole, Brown began his sentence at age 16, before studying law and working toward his release at age 41. During his 25-year prison stint, Brown experienced inhumane conditions. 

“I’ve seen overflowed sinks that have flooded whole cell blocks; bobcats, alligators and other rodents walking around units and the prison telling the inmates to remove it,” Brown shared. “The showers have holes in the tile where rodents come through, holes in the floor of the shower tiles. Cells only sanitized at the inmates' financial expense.”

Those conditions have only intensified during the coronavirus outbreak as those inside do not have proper protection for their own health and the lack of care paid to the scene is alarming.

In addition, Mr. Brown pointed out the wrongful conviction of many inmates due to corrupt officials, which he has experienced along with his close friend C-Murder.

“We need a major overhaul with the criminal justice system in the United States. We need to free the innocent. The criminal justice system was not designed to protect African Americans,” Mr. Brown says. “It was designed to enslave us. If you are black and get caught up in a system, you are not guilty until proven innocent. You will most likely be found guilty because of corrupt cops, DAs, and judges. They will do everything in their power to convict you, too.”

In a conversation with The Source, Mr. Brown details the conditions and reports coming from Angola, along with other facilities, how the justice system wrongfully convicted him and C-Murder and more.

Update From Angola: "Today Was Stranger Than Most"

Received early this morning from inside the walls:

"Today was stranger than most. There's something weird going on and no one is talking directly to us about it. The daily briefings we were having with the officials here have ceased and dorms are being placed on quarantine one after the other. Today, it was the dorm next door. Tomorrow, it will probably extend to our dorm as well. No one from any unit is allowed to come in contact with anyone from another unit; we have to do everything separately -- eat, shop at the canteen, have yard, etc.

"We are basically being kept in the dark about the scope of the outbreak here, but some information about new cases inside Angola is slowly reaching us from outside sources. I did find out today that the reason the dorm next door went on quarantine is because a guy tested positive for the virus after displaying flu-like symptoms. Here's the really weird part: another guy who was living in that dorm was moved into our dorm a few days ago. Then, when the guy from his former dorm tested positive, security suddenly came got the guy who had moved into our dorm and locked him up. So we are left wondering whether or not he was exposed to the virus before being moved into our dorm. The incompetence of some of the people in charge of our safety is astounding to say the least, which leads me to believe that things are far worse than we realize at the moment.

"Tempers are beginning to flare and the tension is getting so thick you could almost cut it with knife. The TV stays on CNN nearly all day everyday now and as more and more people succumb to the virus, the more anxious and nervous everyone in here seems to get. I'm curious to see what new revelations tomorrow will bring. I tend to think that I am prepared for anything, but these are uncertain times and I don't know if anyone is truly prepared for what comes next."

NOTE: A different source reported that five men were taken out of Ash-1 yesterday. No names are available at this time, but one of the men was reported to have left the institution. What that means has been left to conjecture. But if you have a friend or loved one in Ash-1, you should call Angola and ask for a wellness check.

Louisiana's Coronavirus Plan For Prisons Could Create Death Camps

This hearse was built by prisoners at Angola to carry men to the burial ground on the property. With the current onslaught of COVID-19, it is unlikely there will be time for pomp and circumstance.

________________________________________


This article was written by Alice Speri and Akela Lacy and originally published by The Intercept.

As the Coronavirus rips through jails and prisons across the country and pressure mounts on corrections departments to stave off disaster, federal, state, and local officials have begun to release some incarcerated people in an effort to reduce prison density and slow the spread of the virus. But in Louisiana, which has both the highest incarceration rate in the country and one of the worst virus outbreaks, officials are bucking the trend. Rather than release people, they plan to isolate those who test positive for the virus in two maximum-security state facilities — a plan that critics said amounts to creating death camps.

“The DOC plan to transfer people from across the state to Camp J — where there is no medical care, no hospitals, no access to lawyers — will be the moral stain on our country,” said Ben Cohen, of counsel at the Promise of Justice Initiative. He’s been doing capital defense and civil rights work in New Orleans for 23 years, including several cases following Hurricane Katrina. “It is like the Japanese internment camps, but with body bags. We are literally watching the S.S. St. Louis being sent back to Germany.”

A Prisoner Writes the Governor of Louisiana

This is the cemetery at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. There has been quiet talk -- inside and outside the walls in America -- of the possibility of mass graves. Will that happen at Angola? The prisoner who wrote this hopes not. 

It appears that America is finally starting to take this virus more seriously. Inside the walls, here at Angola, we are even more concerned. Earlier this week, an officer was sent into our unit with a high temperature. Two of our [jailhouse lawyers] had to be quarantined. But that doesn't help all of the men that went to court that day. Further, those who were quarantined are being held where other non-infected prisoners are quarantined for the ordinary flu.

These types of decisions have caused us to call for the immediate release of all prisoners currently serving time under the re-entry program and prisoners with 10 years or less to serve. We call for a review of the prisoners – violent or otherwise – who have spent 20 plus years in prison. Their records will identify those who can be released and have a place to go. This is a start for reducing the prison population, which was already in motion prior to the virus and is crucial in this crisis. It further serves the interest of the public because many of us have been trained in skills that can aid society in practical ways during this difficult time. But these releases need to begin now, as they have already begun – and are numbering in the thousands – in other states.

Decarcerate Louisiana and Supporters Call for Change

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

DATE:           May 1, 2019

CONTACT:  Email: decarceratelouisiana@gmail.com

                       Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100015779203681

                       Website: https://decarceratelouisiana.com

                       Mike Lukash, Outside Member, Decarcerate Louisiana / Phone: 330-714-3464

ANGOLA PRISONERS AND SUPPORTERS CALL FOR CHANGE

            On May 8, 2019, incarcerated citizens at Louisiana State Prison at Angola, their families, and other supporters will mark the anniversary of a nationally-reported* prison strike and work stoppage on that date in 2018, calling the commemoration “Mayday” to highlight the sense that it is a distress call to everyone that believes all people have human rights. Members of Decarcerate Louisiana admit that prison administrators have made limited efforts to address some of the prisoners’ grievances, but little has actually occurred to meet the demands put forward a year ago.

            As a result, the members of Decarcerate Louisiana are now renewing their demands as outlined below, while also connecting their struggle to a larger movement for social justice by standing in solidarity with Louisiana state teachers who have been waiting for more than a decade to see their pay reach comparable levels with the rest of the country. While the Louisiana Governor’s office reports that the state spent roughly $12,000 per public school student in 2018, the Vera Institute of Justice reported that the Louisiana Department of Corrections spent more than twice that (at $25,310) per prisoner.

            Decarcerate Louisiana, a movement that focuses on the rights of prisoners and their families, originated in Angola, but has since spread to other institutions in the state. Members are pledged to continue to make public their concerns related to, among other things, the use of incarcerated citizens as slaves, which is currently sanctioned by the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Decarcerate Louisiana supporters point out that forcing prisoners to work for as little as four cents per hour under the threat of severe punishment, including solitary confinement, is slavery pure and simple and should be abolished completely.

            Movements calling for the abandonment of this practice have risen in recent years across the nation, supporting each other and organizing across state borders in an effort to increase public awareness of the issues raised by the wording of the 13th Amendment, which was ratified in 1865: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

            Many believe that this wording was drafted the way it was in order to provide a process to develop a system so a nation that had been widely dependent on the use of literally millions of slaves could continue to access free labor. After the 13th Amendment became law, convict leasing systems quickly developed and then turned into state-run prisons. But more recently, correctional systems in America have added privately-owned for-profit prisons, as well as the widely used practice of making sweetheart deals between prisons and corporations that regularly use incarcerated citizens as workers for a tiny fraction of the cost of workers outside the walls. As if in support of this suggestion, Louisiana Department of Corrections statistics report that seven out of ten prisoners in Louisiana are Black.

            Aside from the underfunding of public education which has exacerbated the nationally researched School-to-Prison Pipeline, Decarcerate Louisiana is also concerned and expects to make future statements about the use of excessive force by prison guards, the excessive and inappropriate use of chemical agents, the housing of mentally ill prisoners in situations that routinely become violent and sometimes fatal, the lack of adequate mental health services in general, the overuse of solitary confinement for punitive reasons or no reason at all, the exorbitant cost of the current phone system available for prisoners to remain connected to their loved ones (which is ranked 43rd in the nation in affordability), the more than 7,000 geriatric prisoners that pose no safety problem to the public, and the many prisoners who remain incarcerated despite their being convicted by non-unanimous juries, a practice that is no longer legal.

            As a result of these concerns, the members of the Decarcerate Louisiana movement are reiterating their original demands made public on May 8, 2018:

            (1)  We believe that all living human beings are created equal and have inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, regardless of the social status.

            (2)  We believe in human rights and human dignity and that government has a fundamental obligation to protect all its citizens from slavery and human degradation.

            (3)  We are demanding a national conversation inquiring how state prison farms across the country came to hold hundreds of thousands of people of African descent against their will.

            (4)  We are urging that local, state, and federal governments who currently hold hundreds of thousands of African Americans on prison farms across the country be investigated for antebellum criminality, involuntary servitude, and slavery.

            (5)  We are demanding an end to the systematic oppression and exploitation of prisoners and their outside family and supporters for profit.

            (6)  We are demanding classrooms for our education and rehabilitation, not slavery.

_____________________________________________________________________

NOTE: The graphic above is the work of Heshima Denham .

* “Louisiana Prisoners Demand An End To ‘Modern Day Slavery,’” Bryce Covert, The Appeal, 6/8/18

* “Angola Inmates Halt Farm Work, Demand ‘Slavery’ Investigations of U.S. Prisons,” Benjamin Fearnow, Newsweek, 5/9/18

Angola (the Prison, not the Country)

It appears that I'm gearing up to do some more posts on the criminal justice system here in Louisiana and some of the cases that highlight it's...shall we say...peculiarity? I realize that it's not just Louisiana. I recently watched "Conviction", for example, the movie released just last fall about Kenny Waters, who did eighteen years on a life sentence for a robbery/murder he didn't commit. The payoff of $3.4 million came, of course, but eight years after Waters died of head injuries sustained in a 15-foot fall that occurred when he was taking a short cut on the way to his brother's house for dinner six months after his release. He had earlier said he was suffering from anxiety attacks, but the fall was considered an accident. Still, we'll never know.

This weekend, I'll be viewing "American Violet", the fictionalized account of the real life case of Regina Kelly, a single mother who took on and beat the District Attorneys in Hearne, Texas, after 28 innocent African-Americans were arrested for dealing drugs there. This was only a year after the infamous Tulia, Texas, case, by the way, wherein 15% of the local Black population was arrested for drug dealing, subsequently sharing a six million dollar settlement because, yet again, it was all a big, orchestrated lie.

Hi Ho, Hi Ho, To Angola We Go!

Yesterday, Boxer and I motored up to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola for the spring Arts and Crafts Fair. Most folks also attend the prisoner Rodeo which is always held the same week-end, but I can't support a gladiator-style competition where untrained prisoners bleed and are sometimes permanently disabled in events (such as bull riding) for which they are completely unprepared. All to make money for the prison.

I always have mixed feelings about hanging out with prisoners. And Angola -- with its 5000 prisoners (many of whom are Black and doing ridiculously long sentences) and 1800 "staff members" (some of whom are second and third generation guards and most of whom live on the prison grounds just like the prisoners) -- is larger than many towns in this state. A former(?) plantation, its 18,000 acres are meticulously kept (by its "inmates," of course) and resplendent with flowers. Riding through Angola, with its mile after mile of manicured lawns, always creeps me out, frankly, when you consider the unmitigated, continual anguish of those who are as surely held in bondage as their ancestors ever were.

As we prepared for our first hejira together to the Mecca of this desolate place, where Boxer spent twenty years of his life, he regaled me with stories. One told about a prisoner that just dropped his hoe one day and said, "I'm tired. I'm sittin' down."

"A guard, looking at him, shocked, said, "Whachu mean, you're tired? You better get back to work!"

The prisoner just shook his head and matter-of-factly replied, "I been workin' five hundred years and I'm tired..."

At which point the guard paused a moment, nodded, and said, "Yeah...you right. I 'magine you are tired. Go sit down."

Another story Boxer told was about the first time he was sent to the fields with the others shortly after he arrived at Angola.

It was mid-winter, cold, with a sharp wind blowing and they were sent out to the far north part of the plantation...er...prison to pick spinach. They were given no jackets, no gloves, no boots or caps to ward off the bitter weather, despite, needless to say, the guards on horseback who sported all of the above.

Boxer, new to the drill and unbroken, looked down the football field long row of plants he had just been assigned and said, "I'm not doin' it. It's cold out here. You sent us out here to work like slaves with no warm clothes and I'm not doin' it. Call me a cab!"

Why they didn't just march him off instantly to be given a proper "attitude adjustment" in a darkened cell somewhere off to itself, I don't know. It's fairly standard practice. But they didn't. And the others quickly picked up the refrain. In a bit, the bus rolled up and the men were re-loaded and returned to the dorms, with Boxer going to the infamous Camp J (also called "the dungeons"), where he was locked in a one-man cell.

Every week or so, they would appear at the bars of his cell with a "Ready to go to work?" Solitary lockdown isn't for everybody.

"Is it spring yet?" Boxer would ask.

And when told no, he would politely decline the offer of "freedom" from the cell. Again.

I met some of his long-time friends yesterday. A couple of them didn't know what had happened to him or where he went. He's been gone from Angola since 2000 and from the prison system since early 2008. But when a prisoner is moved, it's typically done rapidly and without notice, so maintaining contacts can be tricky. One learns to roll with the punches, as it were, to have the fewest possible expectations of life, to maximize patience, to let go of frustration -- in order to survive with one's physical, mental and emotional health intact to whatever degree possible.

I was reminded of the sociological concept of "master status." Your master status is the principle role you see yourself filling. For example, I spend a LOT of time teaching and mentoring and relating to students; I'm an activist on my campus and in my community; but I think of "writer" as my master status. I revel in not teaching for a while. I engage in activism on the basis of whatever is happening to which I must respond. But when I don't write for two weeks, I get edgy. I'm a writer.

In prison, the role of prisoner (with all that entails) becomes like a creeping rot on the soul of the individual. The man or woman who spends any time at all locked up -- let alone a long period so treated -- is modified in some very characteristic ways. But if a prisoner can embrace a master status other than prisoner while incarcerated, they are, while unquestionably shut down in a thousand other ways, still able to hang on to a greater portion of their humanity. Boxer, of course, was a winning boxer and later a trainer of other winning boxers. And in a system where wardens spend real cash on their boxing teams, pitting them in competition state-wide, this was a very cool master status indeed.

One of the men I met yesterday is Jeffrey Lewis (far left in the photo above), who's been down a long time for a double manslaughter conviction and was refused parole for having a juvenile record (which he does not, in fact, have). Apparently, the latest addition to the "how-we-gonna-keep-'em-down-on-The-Farm" repetoire is having a juvenile record. Consequently, for example, a 76-year-old man who went up for parole the last time the Board met was refused release because he had a juvenile record. Which means exactly what at this late date? It's stuff like this that makes me incapable of walking away from the prisons once and for all, no matter how much of a bummer they are. What kind of society allows such a system to brutalize people in such cruel and arbitrary ways and doesn't feel in any way responsible for its actions?

In any case, Lewis has been involved with the hospice program at Angola for seven or eight years now, a program that has been ruled the number one such program in the country for five of the past eight years, from what I understand. Nationally-recognized photographer Lori Waselchuk has put together a traveling exhibit on the program entitled "Grace Before Dying", which I'd like to see brought to my university, if possible. And Lewis' master status, it occurs to me, is that of "hospice worker," which has enabled him to avoid having "prisoner" be his primary personna, in spite of his being at Angola now for a very long time.

I also met Michael Johnson and Daniel ("Phantom") Washington, two really extraordinary artists that reminded me of an idea I once had and have now rebirthed: a brokerage to handle prison art from a catalog or online website. Prisoner artists are always hamstrung by their inability to access basic art supplies, training, and exposure to other art and artists to stimulate their muse. Because of this, much prisoner art is constituted of drawings and has a particular (however accomplished) tone to it. But some artists -- inside or outside of prison walls -- just have that "x factor," that inexplicable quality that stops the viewer in his or her tracks. And Johnson and Washington are two such artists.

Johnson's painting of an arrogant Black man walking away from a dejected Black woman sitting on the side of a bed has all the earmarks of an artist with an extraordinary internal eye for the human condition embodied in and expressed by the human form. Unfortunately (and this is not peculiar to prisoner artists), Johnson has had to pander to the tastes of the folks who attend the Angola Arts and Crafts Fair -- running in the direction of children in straw hats looking at a sunset -- to the detriment of the development of his edgier and far more interesting capabilities.

Washington's nod to the hoi polloi manifests more as nicely done oil or acrylic (I never figured out the difference) studies of famous and beautiful women (why am I not surprised?). But the one I was compelled to charge (shit! I'm trying so hard not to do that these days!) and bring home where it's hanging now on our bedroom wall is a butt-kicking 24 by 30-inch painting of three women. The two in the back, under a large umbrella, are so shadowed as to look almost gone, like apparitions hovering in the background, though just behind the principle figure, which is a disgusted-looking Black woman staring aggressively into the eyes of the viewer with such potency as to leave one fixated. The strength of the piece, as well as the use of color, line and shadow, is so highly developed as to suggest the artistic breakthrough of a real talent in my mind, though what little understanding I have of what makes art "good" has come largely as a function of just hanging out with artists and loving art.

Regardless, the work of these two men is pushing me to encourage them and to create an online window to the world for them in the way of a website that would offer their work (and that of others). Obviously, I don't need something else to do, but what the heck, right? I'll sleep when I'm dead. I'd be honored to have a role in introducing interesting and extraordinary artists from inside the walls, so I wouldn't be doing them any favors.

In the meantime, meeting and talking to these and other men at Angola reminded me also of a quote I found decades ago. I came across it again last week and now I feel urged to reproduce it here:

"There will come a dreadful time in the shame-ridden history of Mankind when The Kings of the East will meet The Kings of the West on the Vast Plains. A battle for Ultimate Justice shall be waged, as all Life trembles in the Confusion between Good and Evil; while the blind existence of Mankind violently struggles and desperately searches in deep ignorance for the Final Truth. That Truth SHALL BE FOUND, but the knowledge of it will only exist in the Sinful Soul of Mankind, as the Spirit of Life rapidly descends to the Netherworld, vanishing from all memory. Nothing shall remain of Mankind's cruel glory and false pride in their greatly mistaken theories toward Civilization and in Scientific Advancement. For even as the Seed Of A Fruit creates a Tree that independently GROWS;...in Full Bloom, the same Tree will shed its Fruit and discard it down to Earth...and so also will Mankind's technology come to outgrow its need for Mankind. But at this End, the Harvest will turn rotten; and when the Last City erupts in its Final Blaze, it will THEN be revealed that only those who have risen ABOVE the Qualities of Mankind shall survive..." -- A.U.P.S. (circa 7000 B.C.), Thudamen*

_______________________________________________________

*The Thudamen is the sacred book of the ancestors of the ancient Egyptians. This quote comes from the chapter called "The Fruits."