class-struggle-anarchism:

From  An account of the Hull prison riot, 1976  by Jake Prescott, (former Angry Brigade member)

“Most of the Tuesday night, and all Wednesday and night was spent then in smashing the place up, the files, trying to get the other files, gathering food together, gathering information, building barricades, watching and guarding vital spots, stopping fires and other counter productive incidents (it would have looked nice all having to run out into the path of squads of screws because of our own fires) setting up a small field hospital (three guys were injured earlier, one fell off a low roof and broke his leg, one got caught early by a loose gang of screws, got his head beat up, had concussion, the other I don’t know what was the matter with him, I think he was loopy temporarily). After a while, because of lack of sleep, having to stay on the alert Tuesday and Wednesday nights and all through the morning, and because of the murderous state some were in over the files, and others who had been on tranquillisers, sleepers etc. and now didn’t have them, and because of the influx of the guys who had been let out of their cells (all these guys, didn’t go on the original demonstration, so you can see they were not too enthusiastic - they helped to fan rumours about the screws charging en masse, the army coming in etc., etc.) things got a bit raggedy so we decided to stage a mass demo on the roof, get everyone out and showing solidarity and cheering - that happened Wednesday at 10 am and Thursday at 10 am and Friday at 8.30 am.

They were great times and were good for everyone. The prisoners couldn’t believe the number and the joyous noise of the kids! Very early on some of us began making banners. And what we did was shout out to everybody around asking them what we ought to put on them, and after much ribaldry and some crazy suggestions like “What’s happening?”, “Send largactil urgent”, “We demand transfers to Holloway” etc. etc., the ones which appeared were the agreed upon ones in the end. “Four screws beat up one prisoner”, etc. Someone was pushed to the front of the roof to talk to the media, that was one of the best things - just to stand there, all of us with our arms around each other’s shoulders and to shout out our anger and our contempt and our hopes and our strength and for everyone to endorse by whispered “Yeahs” and “Go ons” and raised fists and people saying “say this, say that” and to stop, ignore the T.V., radio etc., and have a quick round of everyone to see that everything was fair. We said we were here because of brutality, that they could read some of the details on the banners, that this was just the tip of the iceberg, that the brutality was in every aspect of the system, in the control units, both the ones which were well known and the ones which operate in every prison under the names of segregation units and rule 43. (Like the fact that 90% of the men in Wakefield control unit had been sent from Hull prison). That right below our feet there was the control unit of Hull where a prisoner was beaten up by 4 screws, where they had just installed 8 cells which had the glass brick windows and the blank walls which are a feature of control units. We went on about the finding of the files, the language of them, the rampant lies, the hysterical paranoia, the completely inhuman marking down of every prisoner’s past, present and future in terms of ABSOLUTE HOPELESS EXISTENCE FOR LIFE, that they clearly showed what we all knew - that the prison system was an industry trading in our lives, that we were here to tell people we would never be relegated to being passive ‘products’ on the conveyor belt in order to let screws, police, judges, politicians, bureaucrats get fat off us, that we would protest and demonstrate and take action again and again and until the last prison in Britain is shut forever. Also we mentioned about the work we were forced to do for a few pence a week, making furniture for prisons in Iran, and asked the media and people standing there, is this what we’ve come to?, supplying everything to kill, torture and imprison people all over the world. We all screamed for a while :

“FUCK THE SHAH OF IRAN, FUCK THE SHAH OF IRAN.”