What does social justice mean to me? Good question. No one has any control over the time, place, manner, or circumstances in which we enter this world. Once we arrive our views and opinions are formed and shaped by our surroundings and influences. As time progresses we gain more knowledge and different experiences change our views. 

I was born exactly ten years after John F. Kennedy was shot, in Portland, Oregon. I grew up in a middle-class suburb that was predominantly white. There was one Black family in the neighborhood. 

The year before Martin Luther King Day became a national holiday, I was in the seventh grade, my first year of junior high. That day, the majority of my classmates protested by refusing to go to class, storming the cafeteria, breaking tables, and causing minor destruction. The local TV station interviewed one of the students and asked, “Why are you guys protesting?” She replied, “Some guy died today.” 

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The prisons keep us divided and pacified, or more accurately, we allow them. It is a rule violation to gamble or possess gambling paraphernalia. But every institution and unit has a gambling table using state supplied cards. Only when prisoners begin physically fighting over the game does the prison enforce the rule for those specific individuals. They allow a certain amount of drugs and tobacco in. They keep us fighting each other through racial, gang or our crimes. A prisoner once said to me, “Sergeant Richardson’s cool. He told me which house was telling on us.” The person actually believed the sergeant was doing him a favor. More than likely the person had just pissed off the sergeant, probably by filing a grievance. That sergeant expected the one to fight the other, thereby both going to the hole and leaving the unit. 

From the moment I stepped on the chain bus from jail to prison, the guards told us we used to be able to smoke until a prisoner filed a lawsuit. At every orientation at each prison I have been at, there is always at least one staff member that tells us we lost some privilege because some prisoner grieved it. We can get away with a lot in prison, including murder, and the prison will look the other way. But as soon as you start speaking out about the inhumane treatment and violations of the limited rights you have, the full force of prison abuse is taken until it either crushes your spirit or convinces those around you to not follow your lead. 

What does social justice mean to me? It’s a feel-good term for an ugly problem. The same as changing prisoner to incarcerated individual, guard to correctional officer, Warden to Superintendent, and prison to Department of Corrections. It’s a feel-good name for the same ugly pig. Freedom is not free. It is a never-ending fight. Until prisoners realize they are slaves of the state, and their power lies in unity through peacefully withholding their slave labor and demanding basic human treatment, social justice is just another fancy name for an unchanged problem.