Students Against Mass Incarceration (SAMI) is a student organization dedicated to exploring issues of political prisoners and promotes awareness on the controversial structure of the United States prison system.

Founded by students at Howard University in Washington, D.C., in 2011, with the western Massachusetts chapter being formed October 2011, the group has participated in protests, town hall-style meetings and more.  The western Massachusetts chapter includes student members from the University of Massachusetts, Mount Holyoke College and Hampshire College.

The local chapter was founded “to sustain the massive energy created after Troy Davis was murdered by the state of Georgia,” said Emahunn Raheem Ali Campbell, a leader in the western Massachusetts chapter who is working on a doctorate in the African-American studies department.

Currently, the chapter is working towards the release of Charles Wilhite, a 27-year-old Springfield man. According to Campbell, he is “facing life in prison without the possibility of parole for a murder he simply did not commit.”

Wilhite was arrested on the charge of murdering Alberto Rodriguez, a 28-year-old Springfield man, in October 2008. He was found guilty in December 2010.

According to Campbell, “There is not a shred of physical evidence linking Wilhite to the murder victim Rodriguez. Furthermore, the star witness has recanted his testimony citing police coercion.” SAMI is working with Justice for Jason and the Wilhite family to petition the presiding Judge to release Wilhite.

Their mission is to not only get Wilhite released from prison but the collapse of all prisons, finding them to be “illegitimate institutions that manifest themselves in various ways, from social and personal interactions to how schools operate,” said Campbell. In short they are “prison abolitionists” he said.

The first chapter was formed in last February at Howard University in Washington, D.C. “The mission of the organization is to raise awareness about the prison industrial complex, political prisoners, and recidivism,” according to the group’s website. Such issues are addressed “through radical and militant Black activism linked to previous social movements but revised for a 21st century context,” according to the group’s mission statement.

There are more than 2,266,800 adults in U.S. federal and state prisons, according to 2010 numbers released by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, accounting for 3 percent of the U.S. population. African-Americans, while accounting for 12.33 percent of the entire population, according to 2010 U.S. census numbers, account for 39.4 percent of the total jail and prison population. The likelihood of an African-American going to prison in his lifetime is 28.5 percent, according a 1997 report by the Department of Justice on disparities between racial groups. The likelihood of a Caucasian male being behind bars in his lifetime is 4 percent.

According to The Sentencing Project, a national nonprofit that works toward sentencing form, wrote in a publication titled, “Reducing Racial Disparity in the Criminal Justice System,” “people of color are imprisoned for drug offenses at rates that greatly exceed their proportion of the drug-using population.”

The group added, “This is due in part to  law enforcement practices, but is also related to drug  sentencing policies that have been enacted since the 1980s at both the federal and state level.”

Additionally, according to a recent study by Princeton University, socio-economic status plays a part in one’s likelihood of going to prison.

“Rising economic inequality increases crime at the bottom of the social hierarchy, generating more arrests, convictions, and prison admissions. Sociologists and economists commonly maintain that the disadvantaged are more involved in crime, so increased inequality can be expected to have aggregate effects on imprisonment,” according to the June 2003 study by three Princeton professors.

“This is no accident, for the disproportionate incarceration of black men and women have taken place since Reconstruction through convict leasing,” said Campbell.

Convict leasing was a practice from the Civil War and through the early 1900s, when counties and states leased prisoners to corporations to do labor, such as mining, according to Campbell. It is illegal, but, SAMI protests, a form of it is still legal, as prisons have inmates do forms of labor, including making chairs and tables, usually benefiting a private prison company.

Campbell said SAMI links “mass incarceration to both the attempt to socially control people of color and to accumulate profits for both private and public prison institutions.”

SAMI also argues that there are some prisoners are sentenced to prison for political reasons. Political prisoners are those arrested for beliefs and actions against the government. SAMI calls for “freedom for all people imprisoned for their political beliefs and actions,” according to the chapter’s Facebook page.

The group works to expose that political prisoners still exist and are persecuted, especially Marshall “Eddie” Conway, who has been in jail for murder since 1970. Numerous other organizations including the ACLU are trying to get his case reviewed, and regularly petition the governor of Maryland.

The group is also in communication with hip-hop duo Dead Prez and Rebel Diaz, to hold a local concert, where all of the proceeds will go to aid political prisoners.

Claire Anderson can be reached at [email protected].