Dear TaSin Sabir and All of Us or None,
I hope this letter reaches you well and brings you my intended egalitarian love, respect, understanding, thanks, and appreciation.
I just received my first issue of All of Us or None, Vol. 6, No. 2 (February 2025), and your article on incarcerated firefighters was very informative. I first read about incarcerated firefighters in the San Francisco Bay View newspaper back in 2014 or 2017 and have been telling prisoners in Florida about them ever since. With all the news about wildfires in California, I’ve been telling prisoners here that California uses incarcerated firefighters, housing at least 4,000 of them—yet they can’t get a job as firefighters upon release.
However, there is one prisoner on the wing from California who had never heard about it and is skeptical. He basically says it isn’t true. We are often at odds—he is deeply metaphysical, and I am deeply secular; I am political, and he is apolitical. He allows our ideological differences to hinder his growth. However, he challenges me in a way that increases, rather than diminishes or stagnates, my development as a former street reactionary.
But your newspaper came at the perfect time. I let a few people read the articles for themselves. The California brother refused, claiming he only reads religious material and considers anything political, like convict leasing, sinful.
The poems in the paper are enlightening as well. I am also in complete agreement with the Carceral Con article. At the end of the day, we must view reform as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. Not all reform is bad. While good reform should be seen as a “small victory” that provides leverage for fundamental or structural change, we cannot truly end incarceration—or the issues that accompany it—until we end capitalism, which fuels incarceration for profit and all other societal ills. If we don’t dismantle it, it will eventually destroy us all.
I’ll end by thanking you for your wonderful, wise, and courageous work. You are truly making a difference by being different, and that counts for a lot. Stay wise and strong.
All of Us or None. All Power to the People.
— Keith Soanes, Suwannee Correctional Institution
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