Next in our ongoing series featuring work from our upcoming Art against Incarceration show and fundraiser is this wonderful contribution by Audrey Carie. Special recognition goes out to Audrey who is the only artist to design a piece that specifically incorporates current information and facts about prisons!  Thank you Audrey.

Work by Audrey Carie

Between 1971, when Richard Nixon launched the war on drugs, and 2008, the latest year for which official figures are available, American law enforcement officials made more than 40 million drug arrests. That number roughly equals the population of California, or of the 33 biggest U.S. cities.

Source: Reuters 8-20-2010

Today has been a rough day for me and it is not even noon yet.  I have been moping around my office complaining to anyone within the sound of my voice about how tired I am and how much “work” I have to do.  I am sure many of you can relate to this feeling.

Anyway as I was about to begin my latest rant about how so and so wasn’t getting me what I needed “on time,” a friend and colleague sent me the picture below:

I was put to shame.  Look, I am definitely not a saint and I don’t expect that I will never or should never complain.  We all have our own problems and issues.  However, I took one look at this image and I thought about the fact that I could just walk out of my office, leave all of the annoyance and stress of the day behind, and go and grab some lunch.  I could take a walk along the lake which is not far from my office.  I could call a friend and take in a movie with her tonight.  I can stop by my partner’s office and talk his ear off about how my day sucked.  I am NOT confined in a jail cell unable to have contact with my family or friends.

This illustration is part of a project taking place at our local juvenile jail.  About a year ago, I came up with the idea of creating a graphic novel or zine about the history of juvenile justice and its contemporary manifestations.  My idea was that this could be a collaborative project between youth on the inside and youth on the outside.

Early this year, I pitched the idea to my friend Lisa Lee who is the director of the Jane Addams Hull House Museum.  Lisa, as is her custom, jumped right on the idea and suggested a partnership between my organization and the museum on this project.  Truth be told, without Hull House Museum, this would still only be an idea rather than a project in the process of being implemented.  So the image featured above comes from a comic/zine making workshop that we are sponsoring at our local juvenile jail.  An incredible teaching artist, Elgin Smith, is working with the youth at the jail.  So far, they have talked about the history of juvenile justice and learned about the fact that the first juvenile court was established right here in Chicago in 1898.  They are also working on illustrations about their own experiences of being incarcerated or anything else that they want to write about.

In September, another terrific teaching artist, Rachel Williams will work with youth on the outside to do the same thing.  These images and ideas will all be put together in a book which will be made available next Spring to educators and community organizations across the city.

Since my first conversation with Lisa about this idea, the partnership has grown to include my consulting on a new exhibit about juvenile justice that opens at the museum on September 8th.  I will have more to  say about the exhibit when it opens.

So if you are struggling today and having a day much like mine, I hope that this illustration helps put things in perspective for you as it has me.  I also hope that you will take a moment to think about what you can do with your own talents and ideas to support incarcerated youth in your town or city.

Regular readers of this blog know that I feature visual art because I believe so strongly in the power of art to help foster social change.  Over the past few weeks, I have been sharing visual art pieces that have been created or donated to our upcoming Art against Incarceration show.

Today, I want to feature new work by one of my favorite contemporary artists and printmakers: Favianna Rodriguez.  This work is not part of our Art against Incarceration show. I discovered Favianna through browsing through the Just Seeds Artists’ Cooperative website a few years ago.  I have been following her work ever since and in fact just purchased a set of her new poster series about food justice a couple of weeks ago.

Favianna just announced  on her blog some new art that she has completed for the Alameda County Juvenile Justice Center.

Here is one of the pieces called “Transition.”

Transition by Favianna Rodriguez

Beautiful and powerful work.  She offers a description of the art here:

The first piece above is titled, “Transition.” This piece centers around the themes of change, transition and goal-setting. The central protagonist is a young teenage woman who is imagining the many possibilities which her future offers her. Her hands are open in a manner that alludes to a yoga pose in which the person is opening themselves up to the universe, as an act of meditation. The open hands also symbolize the many practices that one can do with their hands, including music, art, dance, writing, exercise, typing, building, and reading. The shades on the woman reflect a spectrum of races – the young woman can be all of us. In the composition, the central figure is grounded and is imagining herself as a writer and as a singer. Behind her is a circle that represents the planet. The yellow and orange hues used in the piece represent a new beginning. The background textures were developed via a monoprint process in which I overlaid various shapes in multiple drops of etching ink. The primary objective of the piece is to empower young women to think about their futures as myriad of opportunities.

Continuing our series to feature art that has been created for or donated to our upcoming Art against Incarceration show, I am pleased to share the work of Justin Grey. Justin is the program director for an amazing group called Connect Force. Connect Force is a project of Alternatives, Inc. whose mission is to to facilitate personal development, strengthen family relationships and enhance the community well being.

Justin and some of his youth co-sponsored our Representing the Pipeline event on July 31st and created some art pieces that we will feature in multiple ways over the next year. All of the youth artists who created work at the event will be featured at Art against Incarceration. This piece was created as a response to the issue of youth being pushed out of school and into the prison pipeline.

Art Work by Justin Grey

I have written a ton about the criminalization of young black men.   Over the past few years,  I believe that a lion’s share of this criminalization has taken place in schools across the country.  Today, the Schott Foundation has released a report that should be absolutely galvanizing for those who care about prison abolition.  We are NEVER going to abolish prisons if we do not improve educational outcomes for all youth but for young men of color in particular.

Yes We Can: The 2010 Schott 50 State Report on Black Males in Public Education reveals that the overall 2007/8 graduation rate for Black males in the U.S. was only 47 percent.  Half of the states have graduation rates for Black male students below the national average.  The report highlights concerns that New York’s graduation rate for its Regents diploma is only 25 percent for Black male students.  New York City, the district with the nation’s highest enrollment of Black students, only graduates 28 percent of its Black male students with Regents diplomas on time. Overall, each year over 100,000 Black male students in New York City alone do not graduate from high school with their entering cohort. These statistics—and the other alarming data in this fourth biennial report— point to a national education and economic crisis.

Please take a minute out of your day to click on the following link to find out how young black men are doing in your state in terms of education outcomes and disciplinary actions.  I guarantee you that you will be infuriated by these numbers.  Please be angry and then take positive, affirmative action. Without addressing this issues, we have no chance of shutting off the school to prison pipeline.

The Schott Foundation 50 State Black Boys Report: Individual State Report Cards.

Alcohol Monitoring Systems doesn’t just advertise in print.  They created a helpful way for the public to find out if their jails and prisons are overcrowded.  AMS then bills itself as the perfect solution to this “problem.”  I’ll give them this — at least they are trying to be original.

I have  previously blogged about a number of hip hop artists who have had contact with the criminal legal system. It seems as though fame and riches do not insulate you from prison if you are a black or brown rapper.

I read a piece in Forbes Magazine a couple of days ago which suggests that, for Lil’ Wayne and some other hip hop artists, a prison experience enhances their bottom lines.

From the article:

Lil Wayne isn’t the only one of hip-hop’s cash kings to turn a jail sentence into marketing clout. 50 Cent parlayed a short stint in state custody into a gritty image and a lucrative recording career, and Senegalese crooner Akon used (and often exaggerated) his jail time to launch brands including Konvict Clothing and Konvict Muzik. Rapper Clifford “T.I.” Harris finished serving a one-year sentence earlier this summer and promptly scored a deal to become the global spokesperson for the French cognac Remy Martin.

I take it that the moral of the story according to Forbes is “Mo Time, Mo Money.”  There is something so deeply troubling about this type of reporting.  I understand that these facts may not be in dispute but what is the socially redeeming value of this article.  Perhaps its purpose is to encourage more young black and brown rappers to get in trouble with the law in order to sell more product???

The article continues by highlighting the efforts of Lil’ Wayne to capitalize off his incarceration by selling merchandise through his website:

Lil Wayne’s camp launched a website, weezythanxyou.com, in early April, that sells “Free Weezy” T-shirts and asks fans to write to the star in jail. He responds personally to some.

I just don’t even know how to react to this.  On the one hand, I don’t want to begrudge Wayne for getting rich off the very system that profits off his incarceration.  On the other hand, the commercialization of jail stints in hip hop culture has a certain perversity to it.  This relates to my ongoing concern that Lil’ Wayne is on a quest to glamorize incarceration.  It is incredibly problematic and even potentially destructive to the lives of countless of young black and brown youth who do not have Wayne’s fame or wealth to buffer their prison experience.  Youth on the Westside of Chicago who go to prison are not going to leave with endorsements and new products.   I am curious to know how many Forbes articles have been written about all of the businesses that profit off the prison industrial complex.  I am willing to bet that the number is a big, fat, ZERO.

As part of my continuing series of featuring artists who have been kind enough to donate their work to our upcoming show and fundraiser Art Against Incarceration, I am featuring this work from Tyrone Boucher called “No New Jails.”  Thank you Tyrone for sharing this with us, allowing us to show your work and to auction it off to support our programming!

Tyrone Boucher - No New Jails

I am not a lawyer nor do I play one on TV.  I have a lot of lawyer friends but I do not purport to understand the intricacies of jurisprudence.  I do however understand this:

Ever since New Jersey v. T.L.O., the dominant narrative, particularly in inner-city schools, has been that school children are dangerous and violent, drug dealing, gang affiliated, and out of control. Teachers and fellow students need protection from these menacing ambassadors of street thuggery. Therefore, under the rubric of school safety, we strip students of the full protection afforded by the 4th Amendment while simultaneously subjecting them to a model of school discipline that utilizes law enforcement officers to enforce school rules.

Yesterday, I read this in an interesting abstract for a paper written by Sarah Jane Forman of Washington University School of Law in St. Louis.  The title of the paper is “Countering Criminalization: Toward a Youth Development Approach of School Searches.”  I have not been able as of yet to read the full paper though I intend to do just that in the next couple of weeks.  I can’t imagine, however, that the constant harassment by School Security officers in many inner-city schools can be defused through a youth development approach.  The NYCLU has resorted to filing suit against the NYPD for their school “safety” policies and practice:

The lawsuit challenges the NYPD School Safety Division’s policy and practice of unlawful seizing and arresting schoolchildren, in violation of the Fourth Amendment and state law. NYPD personnel manifest this conduct in three ways:

• arresting students for minor violations of school rules that are not criminal activity.
• handcuffing students and locking them in seclusion rooms in school buildings, without parental or teacher consent, absent probable cause of criminal activity.
• removing schoolchildren who misbehave in school, without parental or teacher consent, and transporting them to hospitals for emergency psychiatric evaluations.

The lawsuit also challenges the NYPD School Safety Division’s policy and practice of using excessive force against students. SSOs push, shove and grab students. In many cases, this misconduct is not pursuant to making a lawful arrest. It is to compel a student to comply with an SSO’s orders or it occurs for no legitimate purpose whatsoever. These physical altercations often escalate and result in the child’s physical injury and, in some cases, hospitalization.

I really don’t know how we have come to this in so many urban schools.  Youth are treated like criminals and their education is lacking. Ms. Forman makes the case in her abstract that because they are treated as criminals, youth begin to live down to these expectations :

The sacrifice of students’ rights in the name of public safety comes at a cost. Such policies “construct a narrow range of meaning through which young people define themselves.” Forcing students to submit to pats, frisks, sniffs, and searches that would be illegal if performed on the average adult citizen transforms them into suspects. The constant suspicion with which they are regarded pushes students into a defensive posture that hinders their ability to become active and engaged citizens of their community and nation. This alienates them from mainstream society, increasing the lure of counter-culture ideas, decreasing the legitimacy of the rule of law, and, in some instances, feeding the school-to prison pipeline.

This conditioning is particularly detrimental to high school age youth because adolescents undergo significant psychological, intellectual and emotional development. During this time, youth are being “hardwired,” shaped, and programmed into patterns of thought and behavior that impact the way they interact with the world around them and determine what kind of adults they will become. As a result, they have very fragile identities which make them particularly vulnerable to outside pressures and influences. During the teenage years, children learn as much from interactions with peers and authority figures as they do from textbooks. Therefore, the draconian disciplinary policies of America’s public schools, where children are viewed with suspicion and treated like threats, create a self-fulfilling prophecy – when students are treated as threats to society, they become threats to society. [EMPHASIS MINE].

A number of school districts are recognizing the futility of these methods as a way to ensure “safety.”  They are beginning to focus on restorative justice practices as an alternative to their failed models of discipline.  I would recommend a terrific guide that has been published by Community Organizing for Family Issues educating Chicago parents about their rights and their students’ rights as they relate to school disciplinary policies.