In Sunset Park, Protesters Call for "Prisoner Liberation"

SUNSET PARK, BROOKLYN — Their silhouettes were visible behind thin windows. Their cell lights flashed on and off, and when the crowd was quiet, they could be heard tapping rhythmically against the thick glass.

This was how the inmates of MDC Brooklyn in Sunset Park communicated with the protesters gathered on the street outside the federal prison Friday night. The crowd, a mixture of organizations and messages — some printable, others not were there in solidarity with a nationwide strike of prison workers coordinated by the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee.

The gathering, though, was about far more than just the terms of prison work, which the Organizing Committee argues is a form of modern-day slavery. Instead, it was a call to end the prison system and the police system as they exist today.

"I believe in the struggle for prisoner liberation," said Joel Serrano, 23, a Harlem resident who attended the protest. "Crime is a condition of the society we live in. Criminal behavior is not natural to people."

Those behind bars "should be released," Serrano said, and allowed to help address "real causes of crime and poverty in our community."

Lucy Randall, 25, said she had recently moved to New York City from St. Louis.

"Keeping people in cages is not the way to address problems," she said, adding that prison labor is "such an exploitative system."

Prisons and traditional police forces should be phased out, she explained, replaced with new forms of communal justice that would provide "a more thorough and fair system of enforcement."

"We need to start over in order to build something that is good," Randall said.

Many of those on hand objected to the incarceration of dozens of alleged gang members arrested in the Bronx in April by the NYPD.

At press conferences, police leaders say such raids are a way to target the city's most dangerous residents, people responsible for a disproportionate share of shootings and other serious crime. The tactic, they say, is partly responsible for the fact that New York's crime rate continues to approach historic lows.

But Paula Clarke, the mother of one such inmate arrested in April and held at MDC, said at the rally that her son Mark was "kidnapped" by law enforcement, accused of participating in gang activity he had nothing to do with.

In a recently published interview with The Nation, Clarke described the police raid that took her son as a violent invasion of her privacy and security.

Clarke said her son's court-appointed lawyer has only met with him once, is difficult to reach, and isn't providing adequate defense. (She is raising money to hire a new one.) Clark said her son has "turned to religion now. That is the only way [he] can find hope."

Paula Clarke

Another protester who said she was from the Bronx tied Clarke's comments to the broader themes of the protest.

"A lot of our community is being targeted in a very Draconian, predatory way," she said. Poor community members, she said, are being arrested "under the banner of gang prevention."

Even if they have engaged in illegal activity, she continued, "they're the victims of systematic neglect," living in a society where police forces are over-funded while schools and other social institutions lack financial support.

Asked about the violence the NYPD says it's preventing through alleged gang raids, the protester said, "Violence is related to poverty. Poverty is a form of violence. If [the police] want to address violence, they need to address poverty."

MDC Brooklyn inmates at the windows of their cells

Pictured at top: A protester holding a sign at Friday's rally. Photos and video by John V. Santore