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Written by Stephen Vittoria
(New York)

Up to this point, every visit with Mumia has been extraordinarily memorable even though he was encaged in a sterile concrete box and presented behind a giant sheet of Plexiglas that stands between inmate and visitor… as Mumia has written: “the state-made blockade raised under the rubric of security.” But this time in the waning days of summer, 2012, my visit with Mumia was sans the blockade. No shackles. No Plexiglas. No muffled sound. Contact. Flesh against flesh.

I left Manhattan and cut my way across the Garden State in a rented car with my beloved New York football Giants on the radio. I was chasing the sun into Pennsylvania, planning to spend the night in Frackville – an old railroad town dating back to the area’s coal mining days… a sleepy settlement about fifty miles northeast of Harrisburg.

I was looking forward to visiting Mumia. I wanted to bring him up-to-date on “Long Distance Revolutionary” (although we correspond via mail all the time and less frequently by phone) but more importantly, we had to discuss the book we’re writing together entitled “Murder Incorporated: Empire, Genocide, and Manifest Destiny.” It’s a project we’re both stoked about.

Once in the prison, getting to the visiting area was identical here at State Correctional Institution Mahanoy as it was at SCI Greene, one of the super max crown jewels in America’s prison gulag and Mumia’s last “home” before being transferred here to Frackville in the middle of the night in shackles and leg irons, and of course at gunpoint, in fact numerous guns along with psychological threats. Remember, Charles Graner of Abu Ghraib fame cut his teeth at SCI Greene.

The visiting room is like a large hospital waiting room with tables and chairs, lounging chairs, and a children’s playroom for fathers to spend time with their kids. The guard that ran the admission of visitors announced out loud that I won the award for traveling the farthest today, seeming to spit out the words “Los Angeles” and “Abu-Jamal” with a subtext that was obvious. He asked me if I wanted my prize now or later. I said later. He never mentioned what the prize was but I could guess what he wanted to give me.

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As I walked into the large hall with all the mothers, fathers, wives, children, and friends of the thirty or so waiting inmates (all dressed in burgundy jump suits), I spotted Mumia walking toward me, gently touching his fist to his heart, his wide and warm smile piercing across the room. We shook hands… and that quickly turned into a long hug.

Contact.

The last time I visited Mumia, his dreadlocks were incredibly long and incredibly cool. They just about touched the floor. He cut them to shoulder length as part of a deal with the Department of Corrections, who were holding him in solitary confinement here at SCI Mahanoy for no apparent reason, even though his death sentence was set aside months before. Mumia was scheduled to join the prison’s general population. So, after thirty years in solitary on Death Row, he decided to cut his dreads for a little taste of freedom. And why not… I would have cut them after thirty seconds in solitary.

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Mumia and I sat down and talked about everything we could pack into almost six hours: the film, the book (which we were blazing on), the old Negro League baseball days, life for him in general population, handball (which he loves), working out, the pieces we each wrote about Gore Vidal, the Newark riots in 1967, Angela Davis, the jingoistic and robotic passion play that goes on at major league baseball games as well as Dave Zirin’s great take on this patriotic folly, Obama’s predator drone murder spree, the laughable and sad state of American constitutional law especially with regard to the dangerous National Defense Authorization Act, the clown which is Clarence Thomas, how a Kindle and an iPad work – especially when downloading books, using Amazon, using a computer to do research… then we ate lunch – sandwiches from the vending machines and dessert from vending machines… Tastycake cupcakes – that good old Philadelphia tradition… and that brought up a long list of Philly bullshit including Bozo the Clown, also known as Buzz Bissinger as well as his patron Ed Rendell, which then led to a discussion regarding the raping of the Barnes Foundation’s art collection in Philly, the book “Priceless” about an FBI agent’s historic fight to solve major art crime the world over… and this just scratches the surface of our ongoing conversation.

Then the PA System blares: “Pritchart, Wannamaker, Abu-Jamal – fifteen minutes.”

We have a rule, Mumia and I – we never let the fifteen minutes run out so our exit, our departure is on our terms, our decision to end it, not the prison’s… it’s a small victory, maybe really small, but it’s a victory nonetheless. “Love you, man.” “Love you, too, be good.” Our second hug is over. Mumia heads back to hell and I head back to freedom, a rented car, and Interstate 78 stretching east toward Jersey.

Mike Francesa on the FAN ushers me all the way back to Manhattan (love Francesa). During commercials on my iPhone I record my recollections for the book since I can’t take in a pad and a pen to write. I think I got all the major points or close enough.

Next thing I know I’m sitting in the East Village drinking wine, eating a great Italian meal, laughing with friends, enjoying a perfect New York City night… and my mind drifts back to Frackville and Mumia’s simple joy of eating something different than prison food – a sandwich from a vending machine and how much that meant to him… and on the heels of that thought more thoughts: his isolation, his hell, his horrific thirty-year plus existence, and suddenly the wine doesn’t sip as well, the food doesn’t taste as good, and my bourgeois life is on shaky ground… and I find myself hating my freedom because when one of us is wrongly imprisoned, we’re all wrongly imprisoned. When one of us suffers at the hand of state repression, we all suffer. Ultimately, it’s a failure of our collective will.