Statement of Gratitude

This statement has been edited since its initial release. The version below is Shine’s final draft.

Revolutionary Greetings,

i take this opportunity to greet you all with a spirit of revolutionary love and rage. Foremost, i want to thank each of you who provided your time & energy to ensure my overseers knew that the way i was being treated would not be tolerated

To those of you who made calls and sent emails daily to prison officials, thank you. For those who utilized their platforms to shed light on my situation, i thank you. For those who attempted to send me letters of support, i thank you. And for those who showed up and showed out at the rally, i am beyond grateful.

Despite being held incommunicado for nearly 40 days i could tell that the support on the outside was growing and intensifying by the way my overseers were intensifying their reprisals.

It began with the Warden Ben Carver ordering his subordinates to confiscate my tablet, which is how i received my mail. Every time i would attempt to send mail out, the facility intelligence Lt. Nichols would write me up for an infraction. Then came the daily room searches wherein the pigs would destroy my cell, this was followed by the confiscation of my blankets and taking me to a strip-cell, where the toilet was cut off as was the drinking water and i was forced to sleep on a sheetless mattress for nearly 30 days.

The medical staff were complicit in the pigs plot to kill me by claiming that i was refusing daily medical assessments (blood pressure checks and sugar checks). It wasn’t until the facility’s doctor personally came to my cell and assessed me did i know the state i was in. i had an increased heart rate and my sugar had dropped significantly, resulting in me being sent out to the local ER.

While at the hospital one of the officers (Styles) who escorted me received a call from Warden Carver, i could immediately sense that something was being said that concerned my well being. After hanging up he informed the other transporting officer (Jones) that that was the Warden and he would tell him the details of the conversation later.

Normally i would’ve been transferred to Central Prison’s urgent care unit after being discharged from the hospital. However, the Grand Wizard, Warden Ben Carver had a different plan. He was unable to contain his hate and anger. They had tried everything to break me, but i continued to resist and defy.

Once back in the transport van, the officer who took the call typed out a message for his partner to read off his phone, which i was able to quickly read. It read, “the warden said bring his ass back, that they weren’t transferring him until he was about dead.”

i was returned to the same cell, where the toilet hadn’t been flushed in two weeks, and where the only time i could get a drink of water was when i was able to het them to briefly cut the water on while they were making rounds, usually once a day.

After 34 days, the facility’s doctor intervened and openly expressed to me in front of the unit manager and a couple guards that if they denied or delayed his recommendations to transfer me to Central’s urgent care unit he would report them to NCDAC’s Health and Wellness Director.

They waited until a Friday night to transfer me. i was placed in full restraints that had been put on so tight that i still have cuts on my wrist and ankles, i was then thrown in the back of a van where the officers transporting me blasted the AC for the entire 4-hour drive.

Upon my arrival here medical staff harshly criticized the officers who transferred me for having the restraints so tight, and ordered them to be removed immediately. Once removed, pictures were taken of my wounds and documented.

Subsequently i was assessed revealing an extremely high heart rate and a sugar level of 63, and i was dangerously dehydrated. They frantically rushed to get me hooked up to an IV drip and pleaded with me to drink water, which i complied. However, i remained on my hunger strike.

This is no attempt to be hyperbolic, i’m firmly convinced that they would’ve killed me if it wasn’t for you all. Albeit those sadistic dogs were relentless in their reprisals, the power of the people prevailed.

The whole experience revealed two things. 1) that those sadistic dogs are willing to take it to great extremes to break those who try to defy their omnipotence. 2) it’s obvious that they feel safe and secure in their attacks on prisoners. The cause of this is due to the lack of outside support for prisoners here in NC. They know no one is coming to the prisoner’s aid.

This is a dire issue that demands our immediate attention!

As a practical person i’m able to recognize that today’s dominant revolutionary paradigm offers selective justice, a fashionable outlet for personal biases of which struggle one deems most worthy of our time. Hence, there has been relatively little organized action and great disunity when it comes to organizing for and around the struggles of prisoners on the outside.

This is a serious issue, being that NC prisoners are subjected to some of the harshest living conditions in a prison setting.

Moreover, the prisoners who are engaged in the struggle to expose said conditions are under attack. We are being thrown in solitary confinement for years at a time. We are strategically being silenced and censored by the state in an attempt to cover up their crimes.

The state is stopping any newspapers or publications that speak out against modern day slavery and the economic exploitation of our families, they are now stopping any books that educate prisoners on these issues, they are attempting to cut us off from the outside world by restricting our incoming & outgoing mail and denying us access to the phone.

The seriousness of these conditions should impress itself on you all. This is happening right here in your back yard at a prison near you!

For instance, at Marion Correctional there is a kulture steeped in racism and racial violence. It’s located in the Western mountains region of NC. It has an all-white staff who come from race segregated communities wherein they have no interactions with New Afrikans or other Brown people. Marion’s predominantly New Afrikan prison population constantly find themselves under attack by said staff and there’s no one coming to the aid of these prisoners.

Huey P. Newton used to say you can’t talk about fighting racism without trying to destroy kapitalism and vice-versa. What i say is that you cannot talk about fighting ICE or fighting the colonization of the Palestinian people without tying the struggles of prisoners into the fight, for there is an undeniable link between the aforementioned struggles and the Prison Industrial Slave Complex—the U.S. imperialist empire is responsible for the deployment of ICE agents across the country, they provide bombs and other weapons to the zionists to keep Gaza occupied, and we know all about how the U.S. empire benefits from the Prison Industrial Slave Complex and the purpose it serves. And while prisons certainly operate as a tentacle of an apparatus emanating from what bell hooks would call a white supremacist imperialist patriarchal structure, it would be a fatal mistake to allow potentially passive minds to tacitly develop a mindset that dislodges prisons from their parent company of U.S. imperialism.

i find this particularly important as present day abolition rhetoric tends to be divorced from overall revolutionary internationalist ideation and as such cannot be an effective method by which to challenge what author of Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons, Brittany Friedman calls, “Carceral Apartheid.”1

To be blunt, a struggle that addresses one branch of suffering while ignoring the rest is a pseudo-struggle without foresight of conscience, which ultimately leads to repeated failures. Struggles of the past have proven this.

Moving forward our strategy must be to treat the Prison Industrial Slave Complex like a social cancer: we must fight to eradicate it while treating those affected by it.

Although i am bold and sweeping in my ambition, i am not a naive dreamer. i realize this demands a mass organized effort, for which is why it is of paramount importance that we bring NC prisoners and outside activists, groups, organizations, etc. together across barriers of nationality, ideology, geographical lines, gender, religion, etc., thereby enabling us to effectively FORCE prison officials to welcome our desired changes.

The failures and the dissolution of previous organizations have served as an excuse for anti-organizational tendencies: attacking and undermining all forms of organization. The ideal prevails that organization means giving up individual integrity, or is by definition oppressive. Like every other revolutionary movement on earth, we desperately need a good organization, strong and healthy, to embody the struggle of prisoners and direct our energies like a spear.

As i’ve said before, twos and threes is not good form for anything—it won’t put out a newsletter, organize campaigns, or prepare prisoners for their return to society.

What i am suggesting is that we move from the particular to the general—about moving from where we are right now, to actually doing Mobilizing, Organizing, Revolutionizing, & Educating in each prison, so as to build the foundation upon which will stand a NC prison movement. i’m talking about preparing prisoners to return to their communities where they will engage in transforming said communities into base areas of kulture, social, and political revolution. i’m talking about transforming these koncentration kamps into schools for liberation and to provide prisoners with the necessary resources needed that would ensure a successful reentry upon their release from prison.

To succeed in each of these objectives, we need organization. And here is the thing, we wouldn’t be building such organization from scratch. Thankfully all that is needed is to adopt the principles and ideology of Prison Lives Matter (PLM) and form a PLM chapter here in NC.

Prison Lives Matter is a United Front for Political Prisoners, Prisoners of War, Politicized individuals behind enemy lines and their organizations, as well as any outside formations in unison to abolish legalized slavery. Our goal is connect all the abolition networks together to create an organized body to be a force to be reckoned with. This requires much organization, communication, and education.

Something of importance to stress here. PLM is not solely about prisoners or the conditions within the walls of these razor wire plantations. It also serves as a vehicle for decolonization, a united front based on the blueprint of *FROLINAN* and the concept of We Are Our Own Liberators.2

We must get serious about building infrastructure to step up, reach out and establish a base here in NC.

If you are interested in learning more about PLM and how it is structured from the National Coordinating Committee (NCC) to the Regional Organizing Committees, i encourage you to read “Kwame ‘Beans’ Shakur: Call to Action for National Unification.”

Moreover, if you believe in our mission, due to me being in solitary confinement i encourage you to contact komrade Kwame Shakur, co-founder of PLM, via email: Kwame.Shakur@yahoo.com. Subject: Supporting Komrade Shine White In Building a PLM Chapter in NC.

The komrade will instruct you on how this is to be done.

In closing i want to thank you all for y’all’s support. i’m here, i’m alive, i’m struggling.

We Are Our Own Liberators

REBUILD TO WIN

Komrade Shine White