Russell ‘Maroon’ Shoatz is a revolutionary veteran of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army. Other than two daring escapes in 1977 and 1980, he has been incarcerated since 1970. While behind bars, Shoatz has studied and written on resistance against slavery, especially the organisational methods used by maroon communities of Amerindian and formerly-enslaved-African descent. In 2019 he was diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer and in November 2020 Shoatz tested positive for Covid-19, which is rife in the US prison system.
Russell Shoatz was imprisoned following the killing of Philadelphia police officer Frank Von Coln, in an attack which was launched in retaliation for the killing of black youth by the police and a crackdown on the Black Panther Party (for more on the brutal state racism in Philadelphia see Remember the MOVE massacre).
Shoatz has been subject to repeated abuse and human rights violations in the US prison system. From 1991 to 2014 he was held in solitary confinement – considered by the United Nations to be a form of torture. In 2016 the Pennsylvania department of corrections agreed to pay him $99,000 in an out-of-court settlement and never return him to solitary, after he lodged a legal case challenging his treatment as cruel and unusual.
The US prison system is rife with medical neglect on an industrial scale. According to The Lancet, more than 40 of the 50 largest clustered outbreaks of Covid-19 across the country have occurred in jails and prisons, and the rate of cases is 5.5 times higher among people who are incarcerated than among the general population. Shoatz tested positive for the virus following an operation for colorectal cancer. He was then transferred to a gymnasium holding 29 other elderly prisoners, all infected with coronavirus, in dark, cold conditions with just one toilet for them all.
In the words of Maroon’s son Russell Shoatz III: ‘It is 2020. My father was born in 1943. He’s 77 years old. He is a grandfather. He is an elder suffering from stage 4 colorectal cancer. He is a threat to no one. He is a prisoner of a war waged against Black people by the US government. The only threat that he serves is to anyone who believes that Black people are unworthy of defending themselves against state-sanctioned acts of terror. He is a human being who has been dehumanized, confined in a cage, alone, and tortured. My father deserves to be free. All political prisoners deserve to be free. Free. Them. All.’
Contact Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf at 717 787 2500 demanding the release of prisoner #AF-3855 and all prisoners at risk from the coronavirus pandemic.
You can support the Shoatz family at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-for-the-shoatz-family-fighting-injustice
Matt Glass
