On the 2nd of April, prisoners destroyed the new isolation unit in the prison of Brugge (Belgium). This new isolation unit was opened almost ten months ago and apparently didn’t reach it’s objective to break the spirit of rebellion amongst certain prisoners. The riot and destructions obliged the prison directories to close the new unit down.
Nothing is over, everything continues.
The prison is nothing more than a reflection of the society in which we live. A society that resembles a great prison in which the majority of the population are locked up because of the necessity to find money, because of the lack of perspective in life, because of roles of submission and servitude that are being imposed by the ruling values. Just like in the street there are people in the prisons, psychiatric institutions, detention centres who do not come to peace with this, that do not burry a certain taste for freedom, for a better life, because the judge imposes that. People that refuse the humiliation every day to obey the guards and chiefs. For whom the walls and the barbwire of the prisons are not yet marked in their brains, and rather observe them as obstacles that have to be overcome. Because the punishment society gave them, through its judges, only is a consequence of a world that is based on the exploitation and obedience.
Since three years a small storm of revolt blows through the tens of Belgian prisons and detention centres. By rising up, by burning the prisons infrastructure, by attacking guards, by escaping, some prisoners found back what the system tried to take from them period : courage, a desire for freedom, a rebellion that dreams of finishing with at least a part of the mess this society brings.
Answering to this, the State opened two new isolation units in Brugge and Lantin, real prisons inside the prison, to be able to better isolate and break the ‘unruly’. But even in these cages, some haven’t lost the taste of combat. On the 2nd of April 2009, prisoners in Brugge have flooded the cells of this unit after which they smashed the unit almost completely. On the moment that the government is announcing its plans to construct seven new prisons, they are obliged to close down their showpiece, the isolation unit in Brugge. The prison machine isn’t that well oiled as it seems.
Strength and courage for all those who fight for freedom, inside and outside!
Let us, we as well, attack everything which is locking us up, exploiting us and oppressing us!