Just because I can, I have decided to end the night with a musical interlude. I am not Christian but even I can appreciate this performance by the Mississippi Children’s Choir and the incomparable Bryan Wilson. This is a testament to the talent that our young black boys have and can exhibit if nurtured and cultivated. Have a good night.

Melanie Cervantes for Alto Arizona

I just blogged earlier today about the natural alliance between anti-prison activists and immigration activists. A friend just sent me a story by CBS News that highlights the unfortunate intersection between immigration and the prison industrial complex.

Quoting from the CBS News story:

New data from the Arizona Department of Corrections shows that undocumented immigrants are increasingly over-represented in the state’s prison population.

In June 2010, undocumented immigrants represented 14.8 percent of Arizona state prisoners, but accounted for only 7 percent of the state’s overall population according to the Department of Homeland Security.

The new data also revealed for the first time a breakdown of crimes for which undocumented immigrants were incarcerated.

The premise of the CBS story is to figure out whether undocumented immigrants “cause” more crime which is of course DEBUNKED from the FBI data cited in their own story.  What is NOT addressed in their piece is the fact that Arizona is actually CRIMINALIZING immigration status thus “filling up prisons” in that way.

I believe that we have to show more solidarity with the activists who are fighting against the unjust S.B. 1070.  We must do this immediately.  One way to start is to join next week’s National Week against Criminalization Campaign. Colorlines offers many other ways to support activists fighting against S.B. 1070.

When Derrion Albert, age 16, was killed by a group of his peers here in Chicago in late September 2009, I was appalled by the sensational coverage surrounding the incident. I also worried that this young man’s life would not be appropriately commemorated (except by his family and friends, of course). I felt that the lessons surrounding his death about the root causes of violence would also be missed.

I decided to spearhead a project to solicit curriculum units about the root causes of violence from people who work with young people. I contributed a number of my own units that I have developed over the years and we published a guide called “Something is Wrong” that is available for free downloading. Since we released the curriculum guide in February, it has been downloaded over 1,500 times by people as far away as Australia. It is my humble hope that many people across the world are thinking about Derrion’s life and also the root causes of violence that led to his untimely death.

I recently came upon information about the Oscar Grant Memorial Art Project. Oscar Grant was most recently in the news again when the police officer who killed him got an involuntary manslaughter verdict from a jury of his peers. I have already blogged about this issue a couple of times. However today, I want to focus on the innovative way that artists have come together to commemorate the life of Oscar Grant and to speak to the violence of his murder. I want to advocate that more such projects take place across the country channeling our frustration, hurt, and grief into constructive community education, engagement, and accountability projects.

Justice for Oscar Grant by Chris Stain

I personally purchased a copy of this print by Chris Stain of Justseeds Artists' Cooperative. While I also made a donation to a local organizing group that addresses the issue of police violence, purchasing this piece of art gave me another way to participate in the movement to commemorate Oscar Grant’s life and death. It is yet another example of the way that art can influence our affect by eliciting strong emotions that can be directed towards social transformation.

As we in Chicago continue to deal with senseless interpersonal violence and seemingly intractable systemic violence, it seems perhaps to be an opportune time to create our own “Memorial Arts Projects” dedicated to understanding and ultimately transforming violence in our city. We need our own iconic images to help catalyze our social change efforts. Urban Habitat offers a perspective on the role of protest art here.

As you contemplate these ideas, some terrific organizations in the Bay Area have made examples of the “art of Oscar Grant” available to all of us for free.

Poster
A poster about how to react after the verdict.

Update: I was just sent the link to a wonderful zine created by Youthradio called Grant Station: A Killing & the Aftermath (in images). It is a wonderful resource and I highly encourage you to take a look at it.

The number of persons on probation and parole has been growing dramatically along with institutional populations. There are now more than 7.3 million Americans incarcerated or on probation or parole, an increase of more than 290 percent since 1980.

Source: Facts about Prisons by the Sentencing Project.

There is always a lot of talk about the need for movement-building in order to make social change. This truism is even more relevant as it relates to anti-prison activism. I believe that those of us who care about abolishing or even just reforming prisons have to take our ideas to other movements. We cannot wait for others to approach us or to just join in our work.

To that end, I believe that anti-prison activists and immigration activists are natural allies. I recently watched a film called The Least of These. The film addressed the issue of family detention at the Hutto Detention Center which was run by CCA.

The fundamental question that the film raises is: “Should Children Ever Be Detained?” Ask yourself what you think about this question? What is your response to this question? The film chronicles the plight of asylum seekers who were “detained” at T. Don Hutto Prison under the pretext that it was more humane to keep families together in detention. The film is a searing portrait and ultimately provides a blueprint for how to launch successful organizing campaigns to dismantle the prison industrial complex and also to engender more just immigration policies.

You can watch the entire film here:

Watch more free documentaries

I encourage everyone to spread the word about this important film.

Seriously people this is apparently a true story. I can’t do the story more justice than Te-Ping Chen did over at change.org. I am linking to her story here.

Just another notch on the school to prison pipeline…

Earlier this week, I blogged about my dismay at the way that the mainstream media and Lil’ Wayne himself were characterizing his incarceration at Rikers Island.

In the new issue of Complex Magazine, T.I. is interviewed about his career in music and also speaks about the effects of his incarceration.   Here are some key parts of his interview:

At the end of “Yeah You Know,” you said, “Prison ain’t changed me, it made me worse.” In what sense did you mean that?

T.I.: When I was goin’ through it, I really felt like it added insult to injury. The lesson had already been learned. I already understood the errors in my ways and made the adjustments necessary. It did make me worse in a sense that, before I went in, I was already on a path of positivity. Putting me in prison took me off that path a little bit, and now I’m working to get back on that path—or at least back on the path to the extent that I was before I went in. I’m still not as bad as I was before this incident, but I lost a little bit of my positive focus during that period of incarceration. Being in that environment and having those daily surroundings, it’s going to affect you.

Was there an album that helped you get through your incarceration?

T.I.: I didn’t listen much to records when I was in there. Music is what I do every day. That made me more homesick than anything. I didn’t watch videos. I watched series like Sons of Anarchy. I’m a fan. It’s another form of The Sopranos to me. I watched football and ESPN. Another thing we watched was Hung. It had a good idea, but it depends on where they go from here. They watched a lot of that True Blood. I couldn’t really do that. They got into that shit heavy. The whole prison damn near shut down. Everybody left off the yard, like, “True Blood coming on!” They went crazy for it—there’s a bunch of sex in it, so they were tuning in for that.

What I appreciate here is that T.I. attempts to explain the emotional effects that incarceration has had on his life.  This is far different from the somewhat more “glamorous” portrayal of Lil’ Wayne’s current circumstances at Rikers.

The Justice Policy Institute just published a new brief called Healing Invisible Wounds: Why Investing in Trauma-Informed Care for Children Makes Sense.

As many as 9 in 10 youth in justice system have experienced a traumatic event, yet few such youth are identified as traumatized, and fewer receive appropriate treatment or placement

Currently the justice system does not meet the needs of traumatized youth and may increase trauma through its use of incarceration. Thousands of youth are incarcerated each year, and few are screened for trauma-related symptoms or provided trauma-informed care. In one study, 84 percent of agencies reported either no or extremely limited information provided on the youth’s trauma history, and 33 percent of the agencies reported not training staff to assess for trauma at all. Although 60 percent of states surveyed report using universal or selective trauma screenings, the scope is often limited, and fewer than 20 percent of states provide evidence-based or otherwise standardized assessment tools.

The premise of Prison Valley, which took 16 months to complete, is about a town in Colorado called Canon City. 36,000 residents, 13 prisons. The crew spent time in the town, interviewing the people who live and work there, and documenting what the voiceover calls “the clean version of hell.” The town has grown up around the prisons. “If the prisons weren’t here, there would be nothing and nobody, because there is nothing else to offer.”

After a four-minute introduction, the $300,000 project gets interactive. Viewers register via Facebook or Twitter, and watch the documentary, pausing every couple of minutes to check out additional footage and information. There’s a forum for the community to share opinions of the show and a blog. Thanks to the member profiles, the Web site remembers the last bit you watched, so there’s no need to go back to the beginning and search for where you left off.

If you are interested in addressing mass incarceration, the film is well-worth your time and is a unique interactive experience.

The mainstream media never misses an opportunity to capitalize on personal tragedy.  On the occasion of Lindsay Lohan going to jail, Time Magazine offers us a list of the top ten women in prison films.  Here’s what it has to say about the movie Chicago.

Chicago, 2002
The only WIP movie to receive the Academy Award for Best Picture (not to mention a Supporting Actress win for Catherine Zeta-Jones), Chicago was based on Maurine Watkins’ 1926 Broadway play and its 1975 musical version directed by Bob Fosse. Set in the 1920s and mining the same rich loam as The Front Page — corrupt lawmen, predatory newsmen and winsome cons — the story throws two murderesses, faux-naïve Roxie Hart (Renée Zellweger) and world-hardened Velma Kelly (Zeta-Jones), into a prison run by Mama (Queen Latifah), the typical tough lesbian warden. But this one spells out her demands in song in “When You’re Good to Mama.” (“Let’s all stroke together/ Like the Princeton crew./ When you’re strokin’ Mama,/ Mama’s strokin’ you.”) The movie’s message: when all life is show business, notoriety is celebrity. That’s a truism Lindsay Lohan can take to heart, and we don’t mean Roxie.