Grace Before Dying is a photo exhibit that looks at how, through hospice, inmates assert and affirm their humanity in an environment designed to isolate and punish. (h/t Just Seeds Blog).

From the introduction of the exhibit’s website:

A life sentence in Louisiana means life. More than 85% of the 5,100 inmates imprisoned at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola are expected to die there. Until the hospice program was created in 1998, prisoners died mostly alone in the prison hospital. Their bodies were buried in shoddy boxes in numbered graves at the prison cemetery. But the nationally recognized program, run by one staff nurse and a team of inmate volunteers, has changed that.

I don’t have anything to say except that I was profoundly moved by these two images. They show the humanity of those behind bars both the dying and those who are giving care while bearing witness.

You can view other photographs here.

“School are prisons. I’m happy to be in college.” I found this comment on youtube under the following news report about zero tolerance policies in American schools produced by ABC Nightly News in 2003. Very little has changed since that time. In fact in some jurisdictions things are considerably worse.

As many young people are headed back to school now, I think that it is important that we continue to wage the fight for RESTORATIVE spaces in our local schools. We have to advocate strongly and loudly against mindless zero tolerance policies while insisting that young people’s rights and dignity are upheld.

The ACLU has a great series called the “Freedom Files.” The following is a preview of an episode for season 2. This episode focuses on the school to prison pipeline. It’s well worth catching the full episode. It serves as a good primer for what many youth are facing in schools across the country.

For more information, click here.

This is the final work of art that I will be featuring this week from our upcoming Art against Incarceration show taking place on Saturday from 7:30 to 10:30 p.m. at Many People’s Church, 1505-07 West Morse Ave in Rogers Park. This print was made by artist Jesa Rae.  It is beautiful and really spoke to me when I saw it.  There are so many interpretations to it and I will leave you to your own.  Thank you Jesa for contributing this wonderful piece of art to the show and for your support of our work!

Artwork by Jesa Rae

This latest installment of “Adventures in Zero Tolerance Land” illustrates the ludicrousness of some school rules across the U.S.

Meet Kenneth Fails who got an in-school suspension on the first day of school because they say that his hair is too long. They want him to cut it.

From the article about this incident:

It’s only the first day of class at Itasca Middle School, and 12-year-old Kenneth Fails has already been issued an in-school suspension.

His offense: Long hair. Fails hasn’t cut it in at least two years.

“It’s in a room across from the principal’s office. Just me and the teacher, right now,” Fails said. “I just like having my hair long,” he said.

His school noticed in April, and slammed him with an in-school suspension for the rest of his fifth grade year.

“It was something like nine weeks,” he said.

His mom hoped the policy would change over the summer. It didn’t. “Hair Don’ts” include below the shoulder length hair for males.

“He’s my son and I want to teach him to stand up for what he believes in,” Marsha Wisnosky said.

Wisnosky says the policy is unfair because it allows girls to wear long hair.

“I’m mad about it because they’re taking his rights away from him,” Wisnosky said.

Wisnosky was so mad she started a petition drive and put up signs in her front yard. One sign reads, “Jesus had long hair.”

Wisnosky’s yard faces Main Street and a Methodist Church.

The school board says it won’t bend. Wisnosky says she may need an attorney.

This means that one bad hair day could turn into a year. Kenneth’s mom says his punishment means her son cannot attend physical education classes, eat lunch in the cafeteria or participate in after school activities.

(© MMX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)

Honestly, this is just another case of adults getting too far on the ledge and stubbornly refusing to retreat.  Besides the fact that it is fundamentally sexist not to allow this young man to have long hair, it also serves NO PURPOSE.  He certainly does not deserve to spend his entire school year in detention for this.  His mother also should not have to hire a lawyer to fight this which is bound to be expensive.   Ridiculous!  This young man’s schooling experience must be excrutiating and might contribute to creating another drop-out.  Administrators and educators really need to fight the bigger battles and leave this other stuff alone.

The following is a wonderful piece of art by Billy Dee. I feel that this work conveys the sense of loneliness and isolation of incarceration while providing a message of hope. Special thanks to Billy who has been a steadfast supporter of our work for this terrific contribution to our upcoming Art against Incarceration show and fundraiser taking place on August 28th in Rogers Park.

Artwork by Billy Dee

I found this fact to be astounding though sadly unsurprising:

Of African-American men born since the mid-1970s and who dropped out of school, 68 percent have prison records (Source: Social Inequality in Prisons).

People often ask me why our organization runs a “peace room” in our local elementary school. My answer is always that it is because we are interested in interrupting the school to prison pipeline. This pipeline is real and we see it in operation every day. Young black males at our local school are quick to be suspended or even expelled for the slightest misbehavior. Sometimes they are even arrested directly from school. This situation has been going on for years and just last September we decided that establishing a peace room that would serve as an alternative to suspension, expulsion, and arrest was a potential solution to the problem.

Part of our job in the peace room is to do what one of my staff calls “emotional triage.” Many urban schools are now akin to war zones and students and teachers are suffering from battle wounds (both visible and invisible). Sometimes our role is to take a couple of students out of class because the teacher is at her wits end. Sometimes we are an ear for a teacher who wants to quit that day. Sometimes we are there to calm a parent down who has been told that her child needs to be in special education. When we get around to it, we are able to run peacemaking circles. That comes last. Our first and most important role is to be present in the lives of everyone in that school community and to have compassion for all stakeholders. There need to be “peace rooms” in all 550 elementary schools in the Chicago Public Schools system. Community members need to step up and step back into the life of their neighborhood public schools.

When I write about the school to prison pipeline, it is not from a place that is unsympathetic to the administrators and teachers in local schools. It is precisely because I understand the challenges and am in my way trying to help address them that I am so passionate about the fact that we need to limit the numbers of suspensions and expulsions in schools. These serve as ways to “push out” the students who often most need to be in school.

Recently, the NAACP took on a campaign to address the disproportionate rate of suspensions among black students (particularly males) in Nashville schools. To watch a television report on their efforts, click here WZTV FOX 17 :: Newsroom – Top Stories – NAACP Sees Problems with School Suspensions in Metro Schools.

Columnist Dwight Lewis wrote about their efforts:

They were tired of see­ing black kids sus­pended at a higher rate than white kids. So black lead­ers came together last week in a call to action about high sus­pen­sion rates for African-American boys in Met­ro­pol­i­tan Nashville Pub­lic Schools.

“We have gath­ered today to bring atten­tion to an issue that we feel directly impacts the edu­ca­tion and the very lives of the African-American com­mu­nity, espe­cially the lives of young, African-American males,’’ rep­re­sen­ta­tives from about a dozen orga­ni­za­tions here said in a press release. “The issue that we want to bring atten­tion to is that of increased sus­pen­sions of black males in pub­lic schools.…

“The Depart­ment of Education’s Office of Civil Rights released a study stat­ing that black stu­dents are four times more likely to be sus­pended than other stu­dents. The report stated that nine mid­dle schools in Nashville have sus­pended more than half of their black stu­dents dur­ing the course of the school year. The report fur­ther stated that six ele­men­tary schools sus­pended only black students.’’

Wednesday’s meet­ing included rep­re­sen­ta­tives from the NAACP’s Nashville branch; the Inter­de­nom­i­na­tional Min­is­ters Fellowship’s Peniel pro­gram; Urban League of Mid­dle Ten­nessee; the Cen­ter for Com­mu­nity Change; Urban Epi­cen­ter; Ten­nessee Black Children’s Insti­tute; the Dis­pro­por­tion­ate Minor­ity Con­tact and Con­fine­ment; 100 Black Women; the Ten­nessee Immi­gra­tion and Refugee Rights Coali­tion; Gideon’s Grass­roots Army for Chil­dren; and Nashville city council’s Black Caucus.

The Nashiville story is being repeated in communities across the U.S. Just last week, I read an article highlighting instances of disproportionate minority school suspensions in Wake County, North Carolina.

We are going to need an entire community of people in order to address the issue of harsh disciplinary policies in schools and to interrupt the school to prison pipeline. I hope that efforts like the ones in Nashville and our small contribution in Chicago are replicated in cities and towns across the U.S.

Millions of Americans have a sense that all is not right in our culture. That nagging sense that “things need to change” propelled a majority of the country to elect a black man named Barack Hussein Obama as the President of the United States. Yet I get the sense that people now expect that this election was supposed to transform the entire country, indeed the world.

I said at the time of the election that the country would be in for a severe case of “post-traumatic stress syndrome.” I was not wrong. After years of abuse by the Reagan, first Bush, Clinton and Bush administrations, I think that people are only now coming to the realization that there are structural imbalances in the U.S. that adversely affect the majority of the country which is comprised of the poor, the black and brown, the young, the elderly, the gender non-conforming, the LGBTQ population, the disabled, women and now the entire middle class etc…

I believe that this in part explains the rise of the reactionary right wing: the Tea Party and the Fox News nation. Many of these people feel more insecure than ever and are lashing out at the black man in the White House and marginalized groups rather than at the culprits of their misery which is the corpocracy.

The constant refrain from these folks is that they want “their country back.” I guess that they now feel at the mercy of forces that we who have lived our lives as members of marginalized groups have never had the luxury of feeling immune from. Indeed, in 2010, marginalized communities are even more targeted by the violence of structural oppression than ever. Consider the following:

* Among developed nations, the USA has one of the greatest income disparities and highest levels of racial and economic neighborhood segregation. Among OECD member nations, only Turkey and Mexico have higher levels of income disparity.

• Although the majority of illegal drug users and dealers nationwide are white, three-fourths of all people imprisoned for drug offenses have been black or Latino. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. In Washington D.C., our nation’s capital, it is estimated that three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in poor neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison. Similar rates of incarceration can be found in black communities across the nation.

• More than 50 years after Brown vs. Board of Education, America’s public schools are more segregated now than they were in the 1960s.

• People of color and poor people live with more pollution than the rest of this nation. For example, African Americans are 79 percent more likely than whites to live in neighborhoods where industrial pollution is suspected of posing the greatest health danger.

• Communities of color continue to carry a disproportionate burden of racial disparities in infant mortality, childhood obesity, diabetes and adolescent deaths due to gun violence and homicide.

What do these facts suggest? To me, they show that racism is alive and well in the US. They also offer a reason for why we need to build a multi-racial, multi-class, and multi-gender movement for transformative justice. Transformative justice demands that we pay attention to repairing the frayed relationships between individuals living in communities across the country. It asks us to put at the center of our organizing concerns about race, class, gender, and sexual orientation because we cannot have justice without this. Transformative justice expects that we will name oppression and work to uproot it. It asks a lot and yet so little. There is something else too.

We will not abolish prisons, we will not make a dent in mass incarceration without uprooting structural oppression, without challenging the fact that certain groups of people are targeted by the PIC while others escape its clutches. The work continues…

Time and again, research suggests that youth incarceration does not in fact “lower” crime. In fact, researchers suggest that youth incarceration mainly insures that those young people who are impacted will end up in the adult criminal legal system.

I was reading the latest issue of Daedalus magazine this weekend. The issue is completely devoted to the issue of mass incarceration. Last week, I referenced some research by Robert Sampson about the spatial concentration of incarceration from the journal. Anyway, Professor Jeffrey Fagan has a good article in Daedalus about the contradictions between juvenile crime and punishment.

Fagan suggests that despite the “raw emotional politics” of violent crime, diverting minors from prison invariably becomes the better option, given that for many harsh punishment is neither a “socially productive nor a principled path.” He cites studies that find adolescents who are punished as adults are rearrested and imprisoned “more often, more quickly, and for more serious crimes. In addition, he argues lengthened sentences for juvenile offenders do nothing to lower crime rates.

“Incarceration at a young age not only increases the risk of future incarceration, it mortgages the long-term prospects of young males for marriage, employment, and social stability over a lifetime,” Fagan writes. “Even a short spell in detention adversely influences the outcomes of cases once they get to court, tipping the odds toward harsher punishment instead of diversion or probation.”

Moreover, Fagan writes, youths in prison are less likely to receive education and other essential services, and more likely to be victims of physical violence and have more psychological problems.

“While the law has moved toward increasing the incarceration of younger teens, social and biological evidence suggests moving in the other direction,” Fagan writes.

The case is open and shut. Youth who commit crimes need alternatives to incarceration in community settings. They should not be imprisoned. It costs us $78,000 a year to incarcerate a juvenile in Illinois. Can’t we think of something better and less destructive to do with this money? Of course we can!

From the most soulful city of Detroit…

I had to triple check this to make sure that it wasn’t a joke.  Indeed it is not.  Republican politicians have been accused of having no ideas with respect to how to support the poor and the middle class. Turns out that this is untrue…

Republican candidate for governor Carl Paladino has a plan for welfare reform: He wants to turn prisons into dormitories for welfare recipients so they can get state-sponsored jobs, employment training and lessons in “personal hygiene.”

Paladino is a wealthy Buffalo real estate developer popular with many Tea Party activists. He’s competing for the Republican nomination with former Rep. Rick Lazio; the primary is Sept. 14.

Paladino said the dormitory living would be voluntary, not mandatory, and would give welfare recipients an opportunity to take public state-sponsored jobs far from home.

He also defended his remarks about the hygiene of welfare recipients, saying he had trained troops from inner city communities during his years in the Army and was familiar with their needs.

(Copyright ©2010 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

One hardly knows where to begin in commenting on this.  He knows about welfare recipients because he trained troops from the inner city while he was in the Army????  The racism and sheer low-rentness of this statement are too much. I have no problem with the idea of creating subsidized employment for those who need it. In fact, I would love to see the federal government create a WPA for the 21st century. However why should people in need of employment be subjected to living in prisons and then also be forced to participate in classes about hygiene? This is preposterous and offensive.