As a resident of Forks, WA, I am encouraged to see that our community has been proactive in taking steps to minimize the impact of COVID-19 when it comes to our town. We closed parks, are staying at home, and made changes to our hospital and pharmacy protocols to limit contact.
But I am worried that we are not taking into account a large population that is within our community and currently incarcerated. As of May 5, 24 incarcerated people in Washington have tested positive for COVID-19, along with 36 prison staff members. Only twenty incarcerated people at Clallam Bay Corrections Center (CBCC), one of the local prisons on the West End of the Olympic Peninsula, have been tested.
May Day arose as a day to celebrate the working class and our life and death struggles for liberation. We honor that legacy of resistance and solidarity today.
We are facing an unprecedented situation in the history of workers’ struggles and the racial capitalist system of exploitation and expropriation. Amidst the chaos of COVID-19, the rich continue to prioritize profit, private property and control over our bodies and labor. The police and military surveil and criminalize our acts of resistance. They will gladly sacrifice human life to continue the relentless pursuit of profit.
At precisely noon last Thursday, under quiet blue skies, a line of cars pulled up to the Washington Corrections Center for Women in Purdy and jolted the day awake. “Free them all! Free them all!” yelled protestors, honking their horns while maintaining a safe distance from each other. Bewildered guards stood by the prison parking lot as protestors shouted through a bullhorn, held protest signs out of car windows, and even blew a trumpet. Simultaneously, protests were also taking place in Olympia, outside the Governor’s mansion, and outside the Monroe Correctional Complex.
Every day, Dave M. works in the Washington Corrections Center kitchen. He stands right next to fellow inmates, all of whom are currently without masks, to make meals for the rest of the prison’s population. He says nothing in the kitchens have been moved or changed to make it safer for himself and his fellow kitchen workers. All the measures the Department of Corrections has announced its prisons are taking? He says they’re just for show.
We live in a dangerous world. People leave the house in fear, in fear of the world outside. The crime, the robberies, the rape, the murder. In these grim streets with piss stained alleys, they see danger around every corner. Those fears are what make the world dangerous; in the name of protection many children have been slain. All in the name of the injustice system, all in the name of public safety, but is the public safe?
