Locked Down, Locked Out (27 page)
Read Locked Down, Locked Out Online
Authors: Maya Schenwar
Chapter 10 A Wakeup
1
Davis, “Masked Racism.”
2
Lisa Marie Alatorre and Chanelle Gallant, “CKUT Interview with the Co-Editors of Everyday Abolition,”
Everyday Abolition/Abolition Every Day
, June 2013. Retrieved from
http://everydayabolition.com/2013/09/16/ckut-interview-with-the-co-editors-of-everyday-abolition-abolition-everyday/
.
3
Micha Cárdenas, “Finding the Movements That Keep Us Safe,”
Everyday Abolition/Abolition Every Day
, August 30, 2013. Retrieved from
http://everydayabolition.com/2013/08/30/finding-the-movements-that-keep-us-safe/
.
4
Benedict Carey, “Holding Loved One’s Hand Can Calm Jittery Neurons,”
New York Times
, January 31, 2006.
5
Dan Berger, “Social Movements and Mass Incarceration,”
Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society
15, nos. 1–2 (July 2013): 3–18.
6
Quinn Ford, “West Garfield Park Parents, Religious Leaders Protest School Closings,”
DNAInfo Chicago
, March 30, 2013.
7
Gaëlle Faure, “Why Doctors Are Giving Heroin to Drug Addicts,”
Time
, September 28, 2009.
8
Amy Goodman, “Angela Davis on the Prison Abolishment Movement,”
Democracy Now
, October 19, 2010.
Epilogue Not an Ending
1
Jewell Oates, “Second Chances: Life at the Women’s Treatment Center,”
Women’s Treatment Center Newsletter
, Fall 2011,
www.womenstreatmentcenter.org/_files/content/pdfs/twtcfall2011newsletter_201205211523485038.pdf
.
Resources
Books
Abolition Now! Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle Against the Prison-Industrial Complex
, by the CR-10 Publishing Collective (Oakland: AK Press, 2008)
This compilation honors the work of Critical Resistance, a collective that works toward PIC abolition. The book’s themes are “Dismantle,” “Change,” and “Build,” and its essays put forth courageous ideas and highlight movements for transformation.
Are Prisons Obsolete?
by Angela Y. Davis (New York: Seven Stories, 2003) In this pithy, powerful book, Angela Davis makes a clear-cut case that prisons should be abolished. She looks at how past movements made slavery, the convict-lease program, and overt racial segregation “obsolete” practices and suggests the time has come for prisons to go that route as well.
Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation
, by Beth Richie (New York: New York University Press, 2012) This book documents the suffering of black women at the hands of male violence—at both the intimate and state levels—and how the white feminist antiviolence movement has failed them. Richie demonstrates how state responses to gender violence often criminalize and punish survivors themselves.
Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders and Global Crisis
, edited by Jenna M. Loyd, Matt Mitchelson, and Andrew Burridge (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012)
Linking the prison-industrial complex and the violent policies and practices that govern migration, this collection advocates an approach to activism that connects the prison abolition and immigrant justice movements.
Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex
, edited Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith (Oakland: AK Press, 2011)
This collection focuses on how the practices of the prison-industrial complex impact trans, gender-nonconforming, and queer people. It calls for a recognition that the struggles for prison abolition and trans and queer liberation are inextricably linked.
Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California
, by Ruth Gilmore (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007)
In this detailed account of the rise of mass incarceration in California, Gilmore looks at its roots in financial shifts, racism, and the repression of social movements.
High Price: A Neuroscientist’s Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know about Drugs and Society
, by Carl Hart (New York: Harper, 2013)
This book combines neuroscience and memoir to take down antidrug propaganda. It shows how pointing to drug abuse as the root of societal ills serves as a decoy that simply fuels incarceration and distracts from real social problems.
Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse
, by Todd Clear (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)
This intensively researched text spells out the implications of large-scale imprisonment for poor neighborhoods, primarily neighborhoods of color.
A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of the Juvenile Court
, by Bill Ayers (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998)
Ayers chronicles his experiences teaching and observing in Chicago’s juvenile detention center, telling the stories of the individual kids he came to know and revealing the necessity of systemic change.
Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis
, 2nd edn., by Christian Parenti (London: Verso, 2008)
Mass incarceration’s economic underpinnings are the emphasis of this sweeping work. Parenti argues that the rise of the “police state” is closely tied to the “managing” of surplus populations created by hyper-capitalism.
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color-Blindness
, by Michelle Alexander (New York: New Press, 2010)
This groundbreaking book demonstrates how mass incarceration—like slavery and the Jim Crow laws—serves to maintain a racial “caste system.” Alexander focuses on the impact of the drug war on black men, and the far-reaching impacts of that targeting.
Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women
, by Victoria Law (Oakland: PM Press, 2009)
Focusing on activism initiated by women in prison, this book provides a much-needed look at individual and collective struggles that are rarely made visible beyond the walls of prison.
Action Resources
All of Us or None
1540 Market Street, Suite 490
San Francisco, CA 94102
This organization advocates for the rights of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people and their families, organizing around such issues as record expungement, voting rights, and opposing employment discrimination and jail expansion.
Audre Lorde Project
147 West 24th Street, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10011
The Audre Lorde Project is a lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and gender-nonconforming people of color community organizing center. The Project includes Safe OUTside the System, an antiviolence program that utilizes community justice strategies.
Black and Pink
614 Columbia Road
Dorchester, MA 02125
Black & Pink works to advocate for LGBTQ prisoners and to act against the system as a whole, through the lens of LGBTQ justice. It distributes a free monthly newspaper to prisoners and also leads a pen-pal project.
California Families to Abolish Solitary Confinement
c/o FACTS Education Fund
1137 E. Redondo Blvd.
Inglewood, CA 90302
Born during the 2011 Pelican Bay hunger strike, CFASC aims to end the use of solitary confinement. In the short term, the group pushes to reduce the practice and advocates for the demands of prisoners held in isolation.
Campaign to End the New Jim Crow
The Riverside Church
490 Riverside Drive
New York, NY 10027
A joint project of the American Friends Service Committee and the Riverside Church Prison Ministry, this organization works to end mass incarceration through education, direct action, and coalition-building.
Creative Interventions
www.creative-interventions.org
4390 Telegraph Avenue, #A
Oakland, CA 94609
This site is filled with resources and strategies for preventing and responding to interpersonal violence, outside of policing and prison. It offers an in-depth, practical toolkit on violence prevention.
Critical Resistance
1904 Franklin Street, Suite 504
Oakland, CA 94612
CR, a national grassroots movement, works to end the prison-industrial complex and build stable, healthy communities. The group approaches the goal of abolition through three frames: dismantle, change, and build.
CURB Prisons
P.O. Box 73688
Los Angeles, CA 90003
Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB) is a coalition of more than forty organizations aiming to decrease the number of people in prison and the number of prisons in the state of California.
Decarcerate IL
www.nationinside.org/campaign/decarcerate-illinois
This group, which grew out of the recent series of Illinois prison closures, works to reduce incarceration in the state and to urge investment in prison alternatives.
Decarcerate PA
P.O. Box 40764
Philadelphia, PA 19107
This campaign works to end mass incarceration in Pennsylvania, pushing for the state to stop building prisons; reduce the prison population; and reinvest in community priorities like education, housing, and health care.
Everyday Abolition
This international political art collaboration features a blog based on the ways people are “living abolition” in their everyday lives.
Ex-Prisoners and Prisoners Organizing for Community Advancement
This Massachusetts group organizes against policies that harm people with criminal records, pushes for sentencing reform, and runs the Jobs NOT Jails campaign aimed at redirecting money from incarceration to addressing unemployment.
INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence
INCITE! is a national organization of radical feminists of color advancing a movement to end violence through direct action, critical dialogue, and grassroots organizing.
Nation Inside:
www.nationinside.org
This online platform hosts campaigns that challenge mass incarceration. You can join a campaign in your area, read stories of people who’ve been impacted by the prison-industrial complex, and share your own story or perspective.
Prison Culture:
www.usprisonculture.com
This blog tracks the workings of the prison-industrial complex, providing news, analysis, and action items in the anti-PIC struggle.
Prison Legal News
and
Human Rights Defense Center
www.prisonlegalnews.organdwww.humanrightsdefensecenter.org
P.O. Box 1151 Lake Worth, FL 33460
Prison Legal News
prints news and analysis of issues relating to prisoners, and it’s widely read in prisons. It is sponsored by Human Rights Defense Center, a nonprofit that advocates for incarcerated people’s rights.
Project NIA:
This Chicago-based project combines organizing, education, research, and advocacy, working toward the goal of ending youth incarceration and building community-based models of addressing youth crime.
Release Aging People in Prison:
The Correctional Association of New York
2090 Adam Clayton Powell Blvd., 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10027
RAPP advocates for the establishment of a fair parole process in New York, and for other decarceration-focused policy changes. The group aims to increase the number of incarcerated elders who are released from prison.
Sylvia Rivera Law Project
147 West 24th Street, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10011
SRLP provides access to legal services for low-income transgender, inter-sex, and gender nonconforming people, and engages in action directed at ending institutional violence and discrimination based on gender identity and expression.
Get a Pen Pal!
Black and Pink
614 Columbia Road
Dorchester, MA 02125
November Coalition
www.november.org
; write to Nora, at nora[AT]November.org
282 West Astor Avenue
Colville, WA 99114
Prisoner Correspondence Project
www.prisonercorrespondenceproject.com/
QPIRG Concordia c/o Concordia University
1455 de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC H3G 1M8 Canada
Women’s Prison Book Project
c/o Boneshaker Books
2002 23rd Avenue S.
Minneapolis, MN 55404
Write a Prisoner
www.writeaprisoner.com/inmate-profiles
P.O. Box 10
Edgewater, FL 32132
Write to Win Collective
http://writetowin.wordpress.com/
2040 N. Milwaukee Avenue
Chicago, IL 60647
Acknowledgments
I couldn’t have written a word of this book without the wisdom and generosity of the following people. Their insights and stories, gleaned through interviews, correspondence, guidance, long conversations, and friendships, are what brought this book into existence. Thank you to my sister, my parents, Hakim Ali, April Anderson, Bill Ayers, Sue Barrow, Dan Berger, Kate Berry, Reginald Akkeem Berry, Katie Boyd, Lillie Branch-Kennedy, Nora Callahan, Beth Derenne, Jake Donaghy, Diane Dwyer, Bill and Kimberly Emerson, Barbara Fair, Eugene Fischer, Jimmy Flores, Chanelle Gallant, Marcos Gray, Sarah Grey, Lacino Hamilton, Carl Hart, Jazz Hayden, Joe Jackson, Dahr Jamail, Deborah Jiang-Stein, Tiffany Johnson, Mariame Kaba, Fr. David Kelly, Kathy Kelly, Alice Kim, Sable Sade Kolstee, Victoria Law, Rev. Jason Lydon, Abraham Macías Jr., Glenn E. Martin, Donna McNeil, Layne Mullett, Peter Newman, Nick Nyman, Isaac Ontiveros, Jenna Peters-Golden, Laurie Jo Reynolds, Beth Richie, Kenny
Riley, Carlos Rodriguez, Mauricio Rueben, Miguel Segarra, Andrea Smith, Gabrielle Stout, Lawson Strickland, Audrey Stuart, Nick Szuberla, Susan Garcia Treischmann, Alok Vaid-Menon, Johnnie Walton, Claudia Whitman, Tasha Wilkerson, Steven Michael Woods, Ilana Zafran, and Diana Zuñiga.