A Kansas City Case Study in Revolutionary Prisoner Solidarity

KANSAS CITY, MO – A Kansas City man who asked to be identified as Carl Holmes, and a few of his friends, including his current partner who goes by the name Brianna Peril, made their way to Memphis in 2012. An encampment affiliated with the Occupy Wall Street movement was still standing there, after so many Occupy camps in different cities had been evicted by police.  

Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, a self-identified anarchist who while incarcerated authored the first edition of Anarchism and the Black Revolution, met with the car full of people from Kansas City after they arrived in Memphis. It was there and then that the folks from KC were introduced to the life and work of Martin Sostre, a celebrated champion of the rights of the incarcerated whose work inspired subsequent generations of prison abolitionists, including members of the Industrial Workers of the World who formed the IWW’s Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee.

Labor organizers established the IWW in 1905 to unite workers across industries with the aim of abolishing the wage system and with the intention of “forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.”

Prior to the formation of IWOC, Carl and Brianna and a handful of others became Wobblies, as IWW members have long been called. 

“Initially, the Kansas City prisoner support effort was part of the Kansas City IWW branch that we formed,” Brianna explained. 

Their IWW General Membership Branch held meetings, and someone showed up at one with a list of people on a hunger strike inside the Potosi Correctional Center in Missouri’s Washington County, Brianna said. Their branch started writing to the hunger strikers. 

Carl said the KC IWW crew started meeting every Sunday night near the University of Missouri-Kansas City to write letters to prisoners. He said they kept up the weekly letter writing for about six years, and he estimates six to eight people showed up each week. 

As IWOC, the first labor union in the US with membership available to the incarcerated section of the working class, got off the ground thanks to founding members like Brianna and Carl, so too did the official KC IWOC local. Those who were active from the jump helped make Kansas City the steady, beating heart of efforts to abet prisoner self-determination and to chip away at the carceral carapace that continues to arrest, mutilate and immure human beings. 

Carl said KC IWOC members corresponded with a number of individuals who had become or were becoming, “politicized” prisoners—Sostre’s term used to distinguish those whose political consciousness developed during their period incarcerated from the “political” prisoners who were incarcerated for socially aware activity criminalized by concentrated power. 

Kansas City is where mass mailing for all of IWOC is done, Brianna said. That being the case, her branch tends to blend with the entire IWOC network. Not surprisingly, boundaries between local activities and what’s done as part of the universal IWOC blurred in the buildup to the nationally coordinated prison strike in September 2016, which the union for incarcerated workers helped facilitate. 

Ben Turk, a Wisconsin-based organizer who previously served on the steering committee for all of IWOC, noted that from early on the KC IWOC chapter was one of the most committed of any branch and also one with some of closest ties to incarcerated people.

“As the 2016 strike organizing progressed, Brianna was always ready to build more connections with emerging inside organizers and formations, while holding steady on local letter writing and outside movement building work,” Ben recounted.

The KC crew penned as many as 60 letters to prisoners a night when they met leading up to the 2016 strike, per Carl’s recollection.

After receiving massive amounts of mail from people inside, much of it containing intricate personal narratives in which prisoners tried to extensively explain their struggles and garner support, members of KC IWOC also created a form for complaints and to obtain consent to assist so as to make the work more manageable, Brianna said. They asked prisoners what abuse they were suffering and who was responsible, who and what phone number they wanted them to call, and what message to pass along. 

They developed a “triage plan” of sorts, Brianna said, which treated the major mobilization effort to coordinate strikes to begin on September 9, the anniversary of the 1971 Attica prison uprising, as the top priority. 

“From there, okay, well multiple people in one state [are] organizing around a common demand; we’ll prioritize that,” she explained. “And then from there, are multiple people in one prison trying to organize around one demand?” 

The prioritization scaled down to the level of isolated prisoners subject to various kinds of cruelty, and the IWOC members made a concerted effort to support them too. 

“We collected lists of demands,” Brianna said with respect to solidarity efforts circa 2016. “We did phone zaps and call-ins.” 

To make the work they do less emotionally overwhelming for newcomers, Brianna started separating the less intense letters from the more heart wrenching ones. She developed that approach after KC IWOC lost members on the outside after they read mail from prisoners who described in graphic detail the torture they endured. Those sorts of letters exacted a psychological toll and left activists feeling despondent and powerless to adequately intervene. 

“When we lose people, I think they feel like they’re not being effective enough because the problem is so huge,” Brianna said.

Another KC IWOC member who asked to be identified as Chris called the prison system a “behemoth,” and he used the phrase popularized by political theorist Hannah Arendt—the “Banality of Evil”—to characterize its operations. 

Despite omnipresent dejection stemming from the yearning, yet inability, to do more, Chris is also aware that doing anything in solidarity with human beings who are locked up is tantamount to doing a lot, given the scope of the problem. 

In the same vein, Brianna is wont to emphasize the indisputable, if oft-overlooked, meaningful difference even the most modest seeming solidarity efforts, like phone calls and letters, make in the lives of those most affected by the system. 

Through the IWOC network, those efforts can compound. 

IWOC members writ large, especially those straddling the Missouri-Kansas state line, not only played a pivotal role in supporting those who participated in the then-largest prison work stoppage in US history back in 2016. Two years later, they also helped coordinate a prison strike that officially kicked off on August 21, the anniversary of the murder of George Jackson, an incarcerated anti-prison insurgent, and that formally concluded a little less than three weeks later, on the anniversary of the Attica uprising. 

“I hope that they’ve kind of put a dink in the armor,” Chris said about the strikes vis-à-vis the prison system. 

Brianna highlighted several other efforts initiated by IWOC members in the KC area that proved effective in mitigating at least some of the horrors prisoners routinely face. 

When time-clock machinery was failing to log ten minutes of prisoner labor time each day, thus docking the pay of incarcerated persons in Missouri making pennies an hour, phone calls from IWOC put pressure on authorities to address the problem, she said. And once unpaid incarcerated workers assigned to assist fellow prisoners confined to wheelchairs received at least a modicum of compensation for their labor following IWOC advocacy. 

What is more, Brianna shared a story about an incarcerated IWOC member who was receiving the wrong dose of medically necessary insulin at the wrong time of the day. Calls from members on the outside prompted prison staff to fix the life-threatening medication administration issue. Also, after KC IWOC agitation, women in the local county jail gained tampon access. 

The daunting and pressing challenge of prison abolition, along with the inevitable setbacks involved in actively seeking it, have yet to cage the spirit animating KC IWOC’s successes and ongoing efforts. 

KC IWOC has repeatedly supported Mama’s Day Bailouts, a project coordinated by the National Bail Out collective to get as many Black mothers and caregivers released on Mother’s Day as possible. Justice Gatson, founder of the KC-based Reale Justice Network, worked on the bailouts IWOC endorsed. 

Members of KC IWOC foregrounded the concerns of formerly incarcerated persons within KC Tenants, a local organization trying to build a citywide union of tenants to ensure everyone in the area has access to housing. 

At present, KC IWOC members are circulating a petition to demand that Missouri release 2,500 prisoners and then move another 2,500 into reentry programs to help end the practice of punitive segregation units being used to house human beings when there is a lack of bed space inside overcrowded facilities. They are also disseminating this FAQ sheet with information on the ways in which Missouri prisons violate human rights and run afoul of their own policies. 

Carl, Chris, Brianna and likeminded abolitionists in Kansas City have also been thinking about the upcoming Shut ‘Em Down demonstrations that the Jailhouse Lawyers Speak collective is encouraging people who are not incarcerated to participate in from December 6 through December 13.

Kansas City residents who want to get involved in planning demonstrations and related actions or who want to get plugged into other prisoner solidarity work can reach members of KC IWOC via email at kciwoc@gmail.com. In the meantime, near the confluence of the Missouri and Kansas rivers, seasoned veterans in the movement at the confluence of anti-capitalist and abolitionist struggle will maintain their support for fellow working class folks inside state captivity. 

“KC IWOC remains committed to the work, even as momentum and attention to prison rebels and mass incarceration in the US declined,” Ben, the onetime IWOC organizer, affirmed from afar, before adding: “They provide a strong example of what a few dedicated people who stubbornly persist in organizing can achieve.”

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