It’s January’s full moon, the Wolf Moon. As I approach three months incarcerated, a quarter of my sentence should I serve it in full, I thought I’d write you all. I exist, although surely there are those who wish the world forget me.
Yazoo isn’t as bad as I expected – Miami-Dade jail is certainly far worse. At least we aren’t fed bricks (bologna or pb+j on bread wrapped in plastic). However, the isolation is awful by design. My spouse is my greatest comrade, the strongest person I know, 15 hours by car, they’ve visited 11 days and hope to return this month. Just seeing them, tension instantly melts away. My face soon hurts from smiling so much. Prison is war waged upon the soul, but love and solidarity are our greatest weapons in this fight. The holidays are over, the trips from South Florida will be shorter, but every moment together is a blessing for us both.
An imperious desire to do evil hold 1,100 souls hostage here. No one deserves prison except those who choose to spend their careers keeping human in cages, torturing, starving, and cracking the whip in the attached sewing factory. They deserve this place. One day in prison is horrible, 366 are 366 times as bad. But five years? Ten? Thirty? A friend and his wife were locked up 37 years ago. She just got off probation and was finally approved to visit. Soon they will see each other for the first time in nearly four decades. They can briefly hold each other twice: at the beginning and end of the visit. May all find love so strong, may no love ever again be torn apart for so long. I know that I’ve found that eternal love.
“NONE ARE FREE UNTIL ALL ARE FREE!!!”
I think often of the tens of thousands of Palestinian hostages held by the settler-colonial state of Israel, an appendage of the U.S. Empire. Today, it was announced that 1,000 will soon be released. Sinwar, rest in power, leader of the Palestinian Resistance, called his 22 years in prison “the academy”, for he learned the way of his enemy. The violations for which those gulags are famous are less universal here in the imperial core… unless you’re trans. Unless you’re at FCI Dublin or San Francisco. Unless your name is Darren Rainey, rest in power, boiled to death in Florida State Prison, or any of the other countless names of the lynched, known and unknown. Another handful were released from Guantanamo, where extraterritorial ambiguity means endless torture. Many here in the U.S. awaiting execution were resentenced to death by prison. “We who all have life without parole sentences are the security deposit to keep prisons open and running from generation to generation,” -Angela M. Garza.
Each reprieve is a sad miracle yet together they are but a drop in the ocean. Generations spent their lives on plantation and generations still live in concentration camps rebranded “reservations” and “immigration detention”, often located on or near the ancestral lands of the indigenous internees. Even those who walk the streets have so little freedom: COVID relief aid built the largest and best armed police state in history with cameras on every street corner and cyberweapons to hack every device.
“ALL EMPIRES SHALL FALL!!! ALL EMPIRES MUST BE TORN DOWN!!!”
“Every(one) in prison has a baby-mama,” declares my friend Joker. He is Black. His words carry the generational trauma of chattel slavery when Black men were used as studs then carted away for their labor. Now this country criminalizes abortion and mass incarcerates whole communities. A Policy of forced birth becomes one of forced labor, to provide for the little ones. Some find legitimate work – often a McDonald’s uniform or a military uniform, a Walmart badge or a police badge. In other words, in order to raise a child with legitimate pay, most must become a wage slave or a class traitor, hands soaked in blood. Yet those jobs are so limited or pay so little; many parents end up here instead. Most prisoners in Amerikkka are imprisoned for being poor – selling drugs, fraud, organized “crime”, theft – for putting food on the table. Criminalizing abortion fills the prisons directly with patients and doctors and indirectly with parents trying to make ends meet. Prisoners are both the product (to transfer taxpayer money to private profit) and the labor (to keep the prisons running and manufacture goods with enslaved hands). “Slavery shall henceforth be abolished, except as punishment for a crime.” – the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The maximum pay here for an Adult In Custody is about $100 per month, but most are paid just $22 per month, barely enough to buy a month’s supply of phone calls to loved ones.
“Like flowers pushing up through the pavement, these gentle crimes keep me alive” – (unknown to me, spotted on a sticker in South Florida)
Mississippi really is beautiful. The crab grass planted at the prison’s construction is losing a protracted war to clover, wild lettuce, dandelion, and these gnarly purple flowers unknown to me. There are ancient trees in the distance, painted skies in the mornings and evenings; birds and skunks defy the barbed wire as voles excavate their burrows below. Yazoo City once burned to the ground thanks to the ghost of a witch burned at the stake seeking revenge. The rebuilt downtown was ravaged again by Walmart and now stands abandoned. Humans have not fared well here since Europeans brought genocide to the land. Yet that evil has only soaked as deep as the roots of the alien grass being routed by wild flowers yearning to be free.
I read. I write. I pretend heating instant noodles is cooking. I work out. I sift through the lies on CNN and Fox. I dream. I speak of the world as it could be. But mostly I learn. Here in the rotting carcass of this empire, there is such creativity, resilience, faith; we practice mutual aid and solidarity every day. We know who the enemy is. “Nothing in prison is free” was the first and biggest lie from a guard. Our bodies may not be free, but most of our possessions were gifts from one another, paid for in gratitude and reciprocity. The only things for sale are restricted or banned. Artificial scarcity is key to capitalism. Everyone is worse off for having come here, yet there are valuable lesson in the extraordinary nature of our humanity. These lessons are simply disdained by a society which worships domination and greed.
“I am truly free only when all human beings… are equally free.” -Mikhail Bakunin
The First Step Act and Good Time Credit will qualify me for release on April 10, 2025 as long as I am not written up. But they will hold me months past this date. The Second Chance Act already qualified me for a halfway house the day after I arrived. However, they keep making up excuses to delay the paperwork. The BOP has no discretion – these Acts are law. In practice, the BOP holds folx as long as they can. Overincarceration lawsuits will not win enough to cover lawyers’ fees unless one has been illegally held for over a year too long. So I remain in the belly of the beast at Yazoo City, Low 1, separated from my spouse and my community along with 1,100 others who deserve dignity and liberation as well. Meanwhile, states are criminalizing abortion and “fake clinics” continue to trick and manipulate folx from seeking actual medical care.
Please consider writing me, recommending books, sharing the details of our case, speaking up for bodily autonomy and the abolition of prison, distributing copies of this essay, and supporting my spouse and I:
chuffed.org/project/visitcalebf
Cashapp – $JadeF64
Instagram – @FTLauderdaleFoodNotBombs, @SolidarityFTL
In solidarity against all oppression,
Caleb Freestone
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My name is Caleb Freestone. I am a community organizer, a peace activist, a husband, a gardener, a sailor, a cook, an artist, a writer, an abolitionist, an anarchist, a revolutionary in South Florida. I am a political prisoner serving 366 days at FCI Yazoo City for pro-choice graffiti in the style of Jane’s Revenge on three “fake clinics” in Florida during the Summer of Rage in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, allowing unrestrained criminalization of abortion healthcare.
“Liberation in our lifetimes and no mercy until then!”
Jan 14, 2025
Source: Mongoose Distro