Update and Thoughts from

Behind the Walls
January 2025

Caleb Freestone
Mongoose Distro, “Updte & Thoughts from behind the Wall,January.
2025 Caleh Frecstone

mongoosedisro.com/2024/02/s/update-and-thoughts from-behind.
the-walls anuary-2025-by-caleb-freestone/

with whatever weapons a hand

January 14,2025

1¢'s January’s full moon, the Wolf Moon. As I approach three months
incarcerated, a quarter of my sentence should I serve it in full, T thought
Td write you all T exist, although surely there are those who wish the
world forget me,

Yazoo isn't as bad as expected - Miami-Dade jail is certainly far worse. At
least we aren'tfed bricks (bologna or pbsj on bread wrapped in plastic)
However, the isolation is awful by design. My spouse is my greatest
comrade, the strongest person 1 know, 15 hours by car, they've visited 11
days and hope to return this month, Just secing them, tension instantly
‘melts away. My face soon hurts from smiling so much. Prison is war
wwaged upon the soul, but love and solidarity are our greatest weapons in
this fight. The holidays are over, the trips from South Hlorida will be
shorter, but every moment together i a blessing for us both.

Animperious desire to do evil hold 1,100 souls hostage here. No one
deserves prison except those who choose to spend their careers keeping
human in cages, torturing, starving, and cracking the whip in the attached
sewing factory. They deserve this place. One day in prison s horrible, 366
are 366 times as bad. But five years? Ten? Thirty? A friend and his wife
were locked up 57 years ago. She just got off probation and was finally
approved to visit. Soon they will see each other for the first time in nearly
four decades. They can briefly hold each other twice: at the beginning and
end of the visit. May all find love so strong, may no love ever again be torn
apart for so long. 1 know that I've found that eternal love.

“NONE ARE FREE UNTIL ALL ARE FREE!”

Ithink often of the tens of thousands of Palests

ian hostages held by the
settler-colonial state of Isracl, an appendage of the U.S. Empire. Today, it
was announced that 1,000 will soon be released. Sinwar, rest in power,
leader of the Palestinian Resistance, called his 22 years in prison “the
academy”, for he learned the way of his enemy. The violations for which
those gulags are famous are less universal here in the imperial core..
unless you're trans. Unless you're at FCI Dublin or San Francisco. Unless.
your name is Darren Rainey, rest in power, boiled to death in Florida State
Prison, or any of the other countless names of the lynched, known and
unknown. Another handful were released from Guantanamo, where

rrp—— f
ity means endless torture. Many here in the U.S.
awaiting execution were resentenced to death by prison. “We who all have
life without parole sentences are the security deposit to keep prisons open
and running from generation to generation,” -Angela M. Garza,

Each reprieve is a sad miracle yet together they are but a drop in the
ocean. Generations spent their lives on plantation and generations still
live in concentration camps rebranded “reservations” and “immigration
detention”, often located on or near the ancestral lands of the indigenous
internees. Even those who walk the streets have so lttle freedom: COVID.
reliefaid built the largest and best armed police state in history with

cameras on every street corner and eyberweapons to hack every der
“ALL EMPIRES SHALL FALL ALL EMPIRES MUST BE TORN DOWNLY"

“Every(one) in prison has a baby-mama,” declares my friend Joker. He is
Black. His words carry the generational trauma of chattel slavery when
Black men were used as studs then carted away for their labor. Now this
country criminalizes abortion and mass incarcerates whole communities.

APolicy of forced birth becomes one of forced labor, to provide for the
little ones. Some find legitimate work - often a MeDonald’s uniform or a
military uniform, a Walmart badge or a police badge. In other words, in

order to raise a ]

with legitimate pay, most must become a wage slave
ora class traitor, hands soaked in blood. Yet those jobs are so limited or
pay solittle; many parents end up here instead. Most prisoners in
Amerikkka are imprisoned for being poor - selling drugs, fraud, organized
“erime”, theft - for putting food on the table. Criminalizing abortion fills
the prisons directly with patients and doctors and indirectly with parents
trying to make ends meet. Prisoners are both the product (to transfer
taxpayer money to private profit) and the labor (to keep the prisons
running and manufacture goods with enslaved hands). “Slavery shall
henceforth be abolished, except as punishment for a crime.” - the 13th
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The maximum pay here for an Adult

In Custody is about $100 per month, but most are paid just $22 per month,
barely enough to buy a month’s supply of phone calls to loved ones.

“Like flowers pushing up through the pavement, these gentle crimes keep
‘me alive” ~ (unknown to me, spotted on a sticker in South Florida)

S apate s towins
Mississippi really is beautiful. The crab grass planted at the prison’s
construction is losing a protracted war to clover, wild lettuce, dandelion,
and these gnarly purple flowers unknown to me. There are ancient trees
in the distance, painted skies in the mornings and evenings; birds and
skunks defy the barbed wire as voles excavate their burrows below. Yazoo
City once burned to the ground thanks to the ghost of a witch burned at
the stake secking revenge. The rebuilt downtown was ravaged again by
Walmart and now stands abandoned. Humans have not fared well here
since Europeans brought genocide to the land. Yet that evil has only
soaked as deep as the roots of the alien grass being routed by wild flowers
yearning to be free.

Iread. Twrite. I pretend heating instant noodles is cooking I work out. 1
sift through the lies on CNN and Fox. I dream. I speak of the world as it
could be. But mostly I learn. Here in the rotting carcass of this empire,
there is such creativity, resilience, faith; we practice mutual aid and
solidarity every day. We know who the enemy
free” was the first and biggest lie from a guard. Our bodies may not be
free, but most of our possessions were gifts from one another, paid for in
gratitude and reciprocity. The only things for sale are restricted or
banned. Artificial scareity is key to capitalism. Everyone is worse off for
having come here, yet there are valuable lesson in the extraordinary
nature of our humanity. These lessons are simply disdained by a society
which worships domination and greed.

“Lam truly free only when all human beings...are equally free.” -
‘Bakunin

‘The First Step Act and Good Time Credit will qualify me for release on
April 10,2025 as long as 1 am not written up. But they will hold me months
past this date. The Second Chance Act already qualified me for a halfway
house the day after I arrived. However, they keep making up excuses to
delay the paperwork. The BOP has no discretion - these Acts are law. In
practice, the BOP holds folx as long as they can. Overincarceration
Iawsuits will not win enough to cover lawyers’fees unless one has been
illegally held for over a year too long. So I remain in the belly of the beast
at Yazoo City, Low 1, separated from my spouse and my community along
with 1,100 others who deserve dignity and liberation as well. Meanwhile,
states are criminalizing abortion and “fake clinics” continue to trick and
‘manipulate folx from seeking actual medical care.

rrp—— s
Please consider writing me, recommending books, shari
our case, speaking up for bodily autonomy and the aboli
distributing copies of this essay, and supporting my spouse and I

chuffed.org/project/visitcalebf
Cashapp: sJadeTes

1G: @FTLauderdaleFoodNotBombs
@SolidaritySFL

In solidarity against all oppression,

Caleb Freestone

. apdate 8 thovghts
Write to Caleb:

Caleb Freestone #07786-506
FCI Yazoo City Low 1 A1
Federal Correctional Institution
P.0. Box 5000
Yazoo City, MS 39194

rrp——
My name is Caleb Freestone. I am a community
organizer, a peace activist, a husband, a gardener, a
sailor, a cook, an artist, a writer, an abolitionist, an
anarchist, a revolutionary in South Florida. I am a
political prisoner serving 366 days at FCI Yazoo City
for pro-choice graffiti in the style of Jane’s Revenge
on three “fake clinics” in Florida during the Summer
of Rage in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court
overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, allowing
unrestrained criminalization of abortion healtheare.

“Liberation in our lifetimes and no mercy until
then!”