A Call to Arms from Starvin’ Naked Marvin: Now!

A Call to Arms from Starvin’ Naked Marvin: Now!

I’ve ranted against people who wait for the ‘right time’ to move against the forces of injustice. I’ve hammered away at them saying, waiting is the cowards way of putting off a necessary response to injustice. And now I find, I also have been waiting for the right time.

I’m shamed by that realization and act now to confront that shame. It seems I’ve been waiting to make a general call, a ‘call to arms’ for a mass hunger strike. I now end that wait by making the following call:

It’s time for us to realize that no one outside the wall is coming to our rescue, not a god, not a congress person, and not a lawyer. The rescue from years of interminable imprisonment lies within our very hands, our minds, our bodies.

This is a call for the strong, not the weak. By taking up this call you become, trite though it sounds, an army of one. No one can hunger strike with you. If you consider yourself to be weak or think that a hunger strike is a weapon of the weak then this is not a call to you. For it is only the strongest, only the most self sufficient who can continue in fear and loneliness, under threats of violence, violence, and isolation, to maintain their strike every day, every month, every year.

What must you do to become a hunger striker? First, read, understand, and accept the objectives and demands of this strike. Second, notify friends and family that you have joined this strike. Rid yourself of most of your possessions, you will not have access to them after your strike begins. Third, notify me and the prison (Warden & HSU) that you have joined this strike. Fourth, stop eating, stop wearing clothing, and non-violently refuse to follow any prison rules that do not serve your hunger strike.

You will of course be placed in the segregation unit and monitored. After you’ve refused to eat for three days a court order must be obtained to force feed you, the prison may wait longer.

Refuse to voluntarily submit to or walk to the forced feedings. Lay naked on your bed in the submission position: face down; on your stomach; hands crossed behind your back; legs crossed at the ankles; and your face turned toward the nearest wall, and DO NOT offer any physical resistance to the guards or the forced feeding procedure.

The forced feeding procedure is neither unbearable nor lengthy. In less than fifteen minutes you will be chained up, strapped into a restraint chair, intubated by passing a thin plastic tube through your nose into your stomach through which the food supplement will be poured, untubed, unstrapped from the chair, placed back on your bed and left in your cage. Stay wrapped in your sheets and blankets to maintain your warmth between feedings.

An admonishment: The objective of this strike is not your death, it is the destruction of the Wisconsin DOJ/DOC through the disruption of its daily activities, the exacerbation of its budgetary problems, and the embarrassment of the State of Wisconsin before the nation and the world, and the acceptance, by the State, of our demands. The strong understand that their death is a possibility, as it is in all wars for freedom and justice, but it is not the objective.

Our hunger strike is a necessary act of civil disobedience, it is an inherent right of Americans, who believe their government is acting in either a lawless or corrupt fashion, to protest those actions through civil disobedience. I assert that it is more than a right, it is a duty of Americans to stand in protest of government actions that abuse the laws and the lawmaking process for politically driven ends, and an affront to the humanity of its citizens, both of which are current maladies of the Wisconsin justice system.

This is a call for people who can maintain not ‘passive resistance’, but ‘passive aggression’ to confront and defeat an injustice that blemishes the very character of America and diminishes every person, be they prisoner, guard, or free person, that it touches.

The hunger strike in a prison environment must be passively pursued to present to the public a sympathetic face, countering its expectation of violence. Yet it must also be an aggressive attack on the budgets of each prison, the DOC, the DOJ, and ultimately the wallets of the Wisconsin taxpayer. each year the Wisconsin DOJ/DOC is forced to spend a minimum of $200,000 in staff overtime and administrative overhead to manage my hunger strike, it has no choice in the matter, hunger strikers must be force fed.

To reduce the burden of my strike upon any particular prison’s budget, I am moved every four to five months to another prison. To date I’ve been in eight separate prisons (RCI, DCI,RGCI,SCI,FLCI,JCI,NLCI,& WCI) and twice to two of them. No prison, after experiencing my strike, wants me back. Imagine the effect of numerous hunger strikers on the DOJ/DOC budget and the prison staffs. It is this picture of budgetary devastation and staffing nightmares that is the ‘aggressive’ in this passive aggressive hunger strike.

We must be honest with ourselves, public sympathy with our strike will not move the public to action, but the costs of such a massive strike will move the public and then the legislators to action. When we force that movement upon the public and the legislators we must be ready and unified to present our demands. And, as we will surely be kept separated we must go into this agreed upon those demands.

There are five demands I’ve been pushing since I began my strike four years ago, they are:

1. The release from prison of all Americans held for nonviolent social conflict, and the prohibition of the imprisonment of the nonviolent. It is both a moral and fiscal irresponsibility to imprison nonviolent Americans when community-based options would better serve the individual and the nation.

2. A constitutional limit on the number of Americans that can be held by any authority (federal, state, county, city) to 1 in 1250 per U.S. census count, and the planned quadrennially downward revision of this limit as a spur to improving the delivery of educational and social services.

3. A consolidation of state laws which govern imprisonment into national (non-federal) laws. We are a nation of people not a nation of states, the laws which govern our freedoms must be uniform in order to remove regional biases.

4. The prohibition of the practices of parole and probation. As imprisonment has a negligibly positive effect in changing the behavior of individuals even less is that behavior changed by parole and probation. They serve no purpose other than to extend imprisonment and to entrap those least likely to obey excessive restrictions on their freedoms.

5. The prohibition of the practice of disenfranchisement and the re-enfranchisement of all disenfranchised Americans. There must be an end to retribution, to perpetually punish an individual who has served time for a wrong done is a wrong in itself. The intrusion of government into an individual’s life should always be minimal and done to restore him to society not to permanently alienate him.

I now add a sixth demand to the list:

A base, a sea change in the philosophy of State and Federal government, a shift from politically centered to human centered laws by the adoption of the principles of Fiscally Responsible Humanism.

Fiscally Responsible Humanism

Fiscally Responsible Humanism is a philosophy of government that when applied to the creation of laws sets the enhancement of the values, capacities, and worth of its citizens as government’s primary law making goal, and requires that this goal be achieved in a fiscally responsible manner.

Laws created under this philosophy must pass through four filters:

1. It must make sense: The proposed law must be logically and morally sound, the reasoning supporting its implementation must be logically irrefutable, and its resulting effect morally consistent with the nation's ethical standards;

2. It must do no harm: No law passed must harm the individuals it will affect and especially it must do no harm to those indirectly affected who have no recourse, the focus of government must always be toward the enhancement of its citizens lives;

3. It must solve the problem: The law must do what it was designed to do, laws targeted to specific issues must effectively and narrowly address those issues and timely bring about a diminution of the problem, and;

4. It must be fiscally responsible: A cost versus benefit analysis must be part of every proposed law, that analysis must include: 1) the demographics of the affected population, 2) the cost to implement and enforce the law, 3) the cost of the projected custodial and/or rehabilitative services, and 4) a comparison of alternate, less expensive solutions.

I urge all hunger strikers to adopt, in their entirety, these six demands. It is through the adoption of these demands that even though we can not gather to fight this injustice yet we will be unified, as a powerful force, in our individual strikes.

Why do these demands select only the non violent for help? The answer is this, the public has less fear of the non violent and though public sympathy will never rise to a sufficient level to bring action in support of the non violent just for their sake, it will rise more readily, in support of releasing the non violent to remove the budgetary strain on the public wallet caused by a massive hunger strike for their release than it would if it feared the release of violent individuals.

Once we’ve successfully begun the process of prison population reduction, which consequentially reduces the power and influence of the prison industry, we can introduce the subject of the proper treatment of the violent, who now simply face lengthy confinement without adequate treatment for their release.

When I speak of releasing the non violent I do not mean that in every case, no supervision is warranted. I mean release from prison to be managed by community based programs which address the cause of the social conflict but keeps the individual in his/her community. Community based programs which provide continuing education, drug treatment, psychological services, out patient and in patient care, an/or public service have all proven more effective and less costly than imprisonment. Yet, Wisconsin, year after year, continues to waste tax dollars in this fruitless pursuit to punish citizens instead of increasing their value, capacity, and worth, in an effort to change their behavior. Wisconsin’s failure to correct its actions is based upon politically based nonsense taken to the ultimate harmful effect of the needless destruction of human lives.

Our army-of-one hunger strike will force Wisconsin to adopt community based programs for handling non violent social conflicts, and Fiscally Responsible Humanism in the production of its laws. Our success is inevitable as we, as strong individuals, are unstoppable by threats of force. For as we are passive, how can force be legally applied to stop us? And, as we are aggressively eating away at the DOJ/DOC budget, there, likewise is no response that can be applied to stop us. How then can we fail to succeed? The answer is that success is inevitable for the strong.

Large numbers of hunger strikers will not come forth nor does this campaign require large numbers to succeed. It requires you, as an individual, see the simplicity, the power, and the inevitability of the success of this method. I predict our numbers will be astounding but also predict that those who take up this call will see their sacrifice come to fruition.

One last prediction: This strike will spread past the borders of Wisconsin.

Warren Gamaliel Lilly, Jr. DOC # 447655, WCI is Starvin’ naked Marvin (SNM), and Chairman of the Campaign for Fiscally Responsible Humanism in Government