I have been wanting to feature this art exhibit here for some time but had not gotten to it yet. Then I read a terrific piece by Alana Price over at Alternet about Evan Bissell's What Cannot Be Taken Away collaborative art project.

Bissell met with two groups — four youths whose parents are or were incarcerated and four fathers (not family relations) in the San Francisco jail — separately every week for five months. The artistic collaborators went through a process of free writing, artistic creation, and meditation in order to develop a vision for their portraits.

Below are some of the portraits that were created. They are incredible! Please visit Alana Price’s well written and moving blog post.

I am in NC today for a speech to a student group. I try very hard not to belittle people’s social concerns. But honestly, this is way too much for me.

A couple in North Carolina is launching a social movement against young people wearing sagging pants. This comes on the heels of a man who shot a teenager in the rear for wearing sagging pants.

Every article that discusses the issue of this youth fashion expression mentions that sagging pants are somehow linked to prison culture.

Sagging has its roots in prison culture; prisoners weren’t allowed to wear belts, so their pants sagged, according to Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of African and African-American Studies at Duke University. As hip-hop culture grew in the past 15 to 20 years, it absorbed elements of the prison culture, including sagging pants, Neal has said.

Quoting from the article about the march against sagging pants:

On Saturday, they’re hoping to make a more public statement, with a protest march — “The Walk to End Saggin’” at the East Winston Shopping Center.

“We’re just trying to get the message out that we want them to stop this sagging,” Gwen Rasheed said this week. “I think we have a responsibility to help these children.”

Rasheed said teens who wear sagging pants are not taken seriously by teachers or potential employers, and that can prevent young people from becoming productive adults.

Honestly, I just can’t take this seriously. If the biggest problem that we are facing with young people is that they are wearing sagging pants well then we have NO problems. We all know that young people are living with an inordinate amount of oppression and violence in their lives. Sagging pants are just not a major social problem. The article references the fact that several municipalities have considered ordinances against sagging pants attempting to further criminalize young people and their behaviors. Those efforts have proven largely to be failures. Thank God!

The Rasheeds say they don’t plan to ask the Winston-Salem City Council for a law banning sagging pants, as several eastern Winston-Salem activists did in 2008. An ordinance could lead to police records and fines, Gwen Rasheed said, and that wouldn’t help the offending kids.

In other cities around the country, ordinances barring sagging pants have met with resistance.

In September, a judge in Palm Beach Circuit Court ruled that such an ordinance in Riviera Beach, Fla., was unconstitutional, after a teenager was arrested and held in jail under the law.

Last week, the city council in Cocoa, Fla., considered a similar ordinance but decided not to vote on it.

The Winston-Salem ordinance proposed by citizens in 2008 received little support from the council; no council member ever proposed it for a vote, and the matter fizzled out by the end of the year.

Next week kicks off the “National Week of Action on School Pushout” sponsored by the Dignity in Schools Campaign.

The Dignity in Schools Campaign is organizing actions around the country during the week of October 11-17. The aim is to expose the pushout crisis in our nation’s schools and advocate for the human right of every student to a quality education and to be treated with dignity.

My organization, Project NIA, is proud to be contributing to the National Week of Action in a couple of ways. We are happy to join all of the other individuals and community organizations who are calling for an end to zero tolerance policies in our schools and an adoption instead of positive approaches to discipline like restorative justice.

We care deeply about the issue of school pushout because we know that education is the surest pathway for preventing future incarceration. Unfortunately, many of our schools are actually contributing to the school to prison pipeline by pushing youth of color out through harsh disciplinary policies and high stakes testing.

Project NIA has been working with the Rogers Park Young Women’s Action Team (YWAT) for over a year on a youth-led participatory action research project called “Suspension Stories.”

This project includes survey research, interviews, and art and will culminate in a new website. As part of the project, members of the YWAT came up with the idea of commissioning a comic about the school to prison pipeline. Project coordinator, Lillian Matanmi, approached artist and activist Billy Dee and asked Billy to create a comic that would illustrate the school to prison pipeline. Billy generously agreed and the result is Sent Down the Drain.

By Billy Dee for Suspension Stories Project (Project NIA & YWAT)

This comic is accompanied by a set of discussion questions that were developed by Project NIA and YWAT. The comic is meant to serve as a popular education tool that can be used with youth and adults to raise awareness and consciousness about zero tolerance and the school to prison pipeline.

When Project NIA was approached about contributing to the National Week of Action on School Pushout, we reached out to YWAT and asked if we could share Billy’s comic with the Dignity in Schools Campaign. The young women of YWAT agreed that this would be a great way to spread the word about an issue that they care very much about.

As such, anyone interested in using Sent Down the Drain as a popular education and organizing tool, could download the comic and discussion questions at the Dignity in Schools website during the National Week of Action on School Pushout.

After October 17th, the comic and questions will no longer be available at the Dignity in Schools website. So make sure to download the resource this week as it will only be available again in January 2011 on the Suspension Stories website.

In addition, you can view some of the interviews that we have done on our Suspension Stories Youtube Channel. Special thanks to Free Spirit Media for filming these interviews.

This PSA that was created last year by the Rethink Learning Now Campaign seems particularly relevant as we kick off the National Week of Action on School Pushout.

Gucci Mane has released a new album called “The Appeal: Georgia’s Most Wanted.” I knew very little about Gucci Mane before a couple of youth that I am currently working with suggested that I pay attention to some of his lyrics. I have to admit that anyone with the name “Gucci” was unlikely to garner any positive attention from me on his own. I immediately imagined him to be a materialistic, aspirational, and perhaps even misogynistic rapper who would have nothing of interest to share with me. Yes that’s my own prejudice shining through… I should know better.

So Gucci Mane who is 30 years old just finished a 6 month jail term stemming from a parole violation. One of the young men who I am working with, I’ll call him Jerell, e-mailed over an article about his new album with a note suggesting that I post it on my blog.

First I find it so endearing that a number of the youth that I work with are taking such an interest in the blog. I am getting regular suggestions about what to write about next. I keep insisting that I am open to “guest” posts from them but no one has taken me up on it yet…

Anyway, I e-mailed Jerell back to ask him why he thought I should post the article or write about it at all. His response:

“Because I think that he is telling the truth about how hard it is to escape the life.”

There is so much in Jerell’s short response. So much in the struggle that he is waging within himself right now. So much in his ambivalence about what choices he should make in his own life. I am pleased that he finds something important in Gucci Mane’s experience to relate to.

I read the article that Jerell forwarded and was most struck by the final sentence that quotes Gucci:

“(Prison) is a real problem in hip-hop — it’s a struggle to let that culture go. You can’t let the ideology of the street get you in trouble,” Davis said. “I just wish I didn’t have to go to jail to learn that. But sometimes we have to sacrifice and be responsible.”

It seems that these words particularly resonated with Jerell. But I honestly don’t know what to make of the words for myself. Prison is a real problem not just in hip hop but in American culture. A recent book that I read deconstructed the idea of the “Big House” in the American imagination and what I learned from that is that prison has been and is ubiquitous in the American psyche. So I disagree with Gucci that this is a hip hop culture specific phenomenon. I do, however, sympathize with his struggle to overcome the ideology of street culture and I agree that I wish that he didn’t have to go to jail to reflect on the impact that street culture has had on his life.

What do you think? Is Prison a particular problem in hip hop? Or in American culture more generally?

Three items that I saw this week underscore the connections between money and prisons. I wanted to take a moment to highlight them here.

[A] Fox 5 News investigation found the biggest cost in the New York State Department of Correctional Services isn’t prisoners, it is employees.

At Bedford Hills Correction Center in Westchester some employees will work double time, legally doubling or tripling their salaries.

In 2009, 28 corrections staffers and nurses made more than $100,000 because of overtime. Overtime at this one prison cost the state $1.7 million in 2009.

What I found interesting about this story was not the large amount of overtime pay that employees were accruing but rather the fact that prisons provide middle class jobs that have all but disappeared in this economy. This explains why the concept of abolishing prisons is even more of a uphill battle in the U.S. As Bill Clinton famously said: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Next I found this article to be profoundly troubling.

Cash-strapped states are increasingly imposing a number of fees on poor criminal defendants, including fees for a public defender, according to a report by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan policy and law institute affiliated with New York University’s Law School.

The report (PDF) found that of the 15 states with the largest prison populations, 13 allow low-income defendants to be charged fees for exercising their right to counsel. Some states even mandate these fees, meaning the court can’t waive the fee for even the poorest of defendants. In two states — Florida and Ohio —  individuals must pay defender fees even if they are acquitted or charges are dropped.

While these fees are used to boost revenue to the criminal justice system, their imposition raises “serious constitutional questions,” according to the report, which noted that the fees “often discourage individuals from exercising their constitutional right to an attorney — leading to wrongful convictions, over-incarceration, and significant burdens on the operation of courts.” These defender fees can come in several ways:

Defender fees can include charges to “apply” for representation before an attorney is appointed, charges during the course of a criminal proceeding to offset the costs of representation, and charges at the termination of a criminal proceeding to reimburse the state for all or a portion of the costs of representation.

But defender fees are just one of a number of the fees courts may impose on defendants throughout a criminal proceeding. Other fees states imposed included jail fees for incarceration prior to trial, prosecution reimbursement fees, prison fees, fees for court administrative costs, probation and parole fees, drug testing fees and mandatory treatment fees, in addition to fines dealt simply as punishment. Often, the fees continue to stack up when defendants are unable to pay off their criminal justice debts, or make their payments late.

“Every stage of the criminal justice process, it seems, has become ripe for a surcharge,” the report said. Many states deny ex-convicts voting or driving privileges if they miss payments or have not paid off such debt.

Not everyone thinks these fees are unfair. Jim Reams, president of the National District Attorneys Association, told USA Today that most criminal defendants don’t serve time and receive some form of probation, so “their job status and economics can and should change relatively quickly,” allowing them to pay off their debts.

 

Finally, the logical extension of all of this is that we are now incarcerating people in debtor’s prisons.  The ACLU has just released a report about this issue:

Incarcerating people simply because they cannot afford to pay their legal debts not only is unconstitutional but it has a devastating impact upon men and women, whose only crime is that they are poor. The sad truth is that debtors’ prisons are flourishing today, more than two decades after the Supreme Court prohibited imprisoning those who are too poor to pay their legal debts. This report seeks to document the realities of today’s debtors’ prisons and to provide state and local governments and courts with a more sensible path – one where they no longer will be compelled to fund their criminal justice systems on the backs of the poor, and one where the promise of equal protection under the law for the poor and affluent alike will finally be realized.

 

Here is the latest in my ongoing chronicles of Lil’ Wayne’s incarceration experience.

When we left Lil’ Wayne last, Forbes Magazine was proclaiming that prison was making him rich.

Well today, I read that Wayne has been sent to solitary confinement at Rikers Island (technically a jail).

From the article:

Lil’ Wayne will now have lots of alone time on his hands after getting banished to Rikers Island’s version of solitary confinement Monday, the Daily News has learned.

The rapper, jailed since March on a gun possession charge, was shipped to an isolation cell as punishment for previously getting nabbed with music-related contraband, Rikers Island sources said.

The platinum-selling star – who calls himself “Weezy” – will be confined to an isolation cell for up to 23 hours a day until his scheduled release on Nov. 4, the sources said.

Weezy won’t be going near other inmates during the rare moments when he is not locked down in a so-called “punitive segregation” cell – known as “The Bing” among Rikers Island jailbirds.

“He’s not in an area where he is mingling with other inmates – ever,” a Correction Department source said.

Lil’ Wayne, whose real name is Dwayne Carter, can blame his month-long loneliness on his love of music. Correction Department officers caught him with headphones and a charger for an MP3 player back in May.

Another inmate was found to be hiding the MP3 player itself.

Priority for punitive-segreation cells is given to inmates who commit violent infractions, so Rikers officials shipped Weezy off to The Bing when an opening became available yesterday.

Correction Department spokesman Stephen Morello confirmed Weezy’s transfer to punitive segregation Monday.

He will be confined in his isolation cell for 23 hours a day. In addition:

Even when he gets out of the isolation cell, he will still be segregated from all other inmates. He will continue to get a recreation hour, but it will be a solo workout. Even if he has to see a doctor, Rikers guards will make sure he won’t have contact with other jailbirds. He will get just one personal phone call a week.

It is my sincere hope that when he gets out of jail Wayne will actually speak to the realities of jail life instead of continuing to glamourize the experience as he has been. A girl can dream…

Members of YWAT Lead A Rally against Street Harassment (Chicago)

Reports of youth apathy and lack of engagement are greatly exaggerated.  For the past seven year,  I have been the primary adult ally for a group of extraordinary young women of color who call themselves the “Young Women’s Action Team (YWAT).”

We launched YWAT in 2003 and since that time the young women have used youth-led participatory action research as the basis for launching several organizing campaigns.  YWAT’s work focuses on challenging violence against girls and young women.

Their latest campaign is called “Suspension Stories.” Through the Suspension Stories project, YWAT is collecting stories of young people who have been been negatively impacted by harsh disciplinary policies like zero tolerance.  I share this here because as you all know I have a great interest in issues related to the School to Prison Pipeline.  I am currently working with YWAT members on this project and I can’t wait to share the final outcome of that collaboration with all of you next year.

After nearly a year of conversations and reflection, YWAT has decided that it will end its work as an organization next year after they complete their work on the  Suspension Stories project.   I felt that it was important for me to take a moment to tell each and every young woman who has been part of YWAT how proud I am of who they are and what they have accomplished.

YWAT will have existed as a youth-led social change project for 8 years when it shuts down in July 2011.  Members past and present continue to be activists in their communities.  That is what I believe the gift of YWAT was and is.  It has instilled a sense of life-long activism and organizing in young women’s lives. Already YWAT members are thinking about ways to support other young women with new projects and new organizing initiatives.  These projects will take different names but will have been born out of the legacy of YWAT.  I am so proud to be associated with such an amazing and inspirational group of people.  The past seven years have been some of the best times that I have had.

For those who are interested in learning more about the history of YWAT’s work and the young women’s many accomplishments, you can visit their new website here.

I have been admonished to mention that the website is a work in progress and will serve as an archive for all of YWAT’s work.  It will not be completed until next year but should provide a good sense of what the group and its members are all about.

P.S. Catch youth activists from YWAT, Blocks Together, the Chicago Freedom School, Gender Just, KRCC and MAGIC on Saturday October 16th from 9:30 to 2 p.m. for an event called YOUTH VOICES CHALLENGE THE SCHOOL TO PRISON PIPELINE. This morning panel followed by lunch and roundtable discussions will take place at Roosevelt University, 430 S. Michigan Ave.

The youth activists will share information about their campaigns to dismantle the school to prison pipeline. This event is part of the National Week of Action on School Pushout organized by the Dignity in Schools Campaign.

Interested people can register for the Youth Voices event HERE.

I found this short interview of Styles P to be layered and fascinating. He equates the prison system with slavery and suggests that the system does not rehabilitate anyone. I was struck by this quote:

“How can making you feel like an animal rehabilitate you?”

It has taken me a couple of weeks to gather my thoughts before writing this post.

I have gotten at least fifteen e-mails from young women who have a partner in prison since I posted this blog about how hip hop culture dictates that young women should stand by their men.

I want to be sure to say at the outset that I do not have a partner locked up and so I wrote about this issue from the perspective of an outsider. I was prompted to write about the subject because of what I saw as a confining set of expectations being promoted by a part of hip hop culture.  I believed and still do that hip hop culture was prescribing a restrictive set of expectations for young women who have a partner in prison.

I have been moved by so many of the stories that young women have shared with me since I wrote the blog post.  I have also received a couple of angry e-mails from young women who believe that I was judging their choice to stand by their partners while they were incarcerated.  As I have said in my responses to those e-mails, I was very careful to suggest in the post that I was NOT judging the choices that young women make.  Rather the main point of the post was to suggest that it was exceedingly important that young women be ALLOWED to make their choices without pressure from the culture suggesting that they stay or that they leave.

My initial foray into this topic was actually a response to my sense that many young women that I interact with actually feel that they have NO CHOICE but to stay or risk being labeled as disloyal or worse.  The young women that I have spoken to about this issue talk to me about the emotional and mental stress that they feel once their partners are locked up.  This has to be underscored.  They have spoken of the financial stress that they experience, yes.  However most of the conversations have revolved around their inner conflicts of whether they should stay in the relationship or move on.

I am going to share the response that I wrote to one of the young woman who wrote me the angriest e-mail.  We have now struck up an e-mail relationship and I asked her this weekend if I could share the response that I wrote to her initial e-mail here. I promised her that I would not share her initial e-mail which prompted the response that I will share. She feels that it no longer reflects her view of the initial blog that I posted on this topic.  I am also removing any identifying information including her name in my response.

Dear Lisa (pseudonym),

Thank you very much for sending me your e-mail in response to my post about “Hip Hop’s Stand By Your Man in Prison Problem.”  I have to apologize for not responding to you right away.  I needed to take a couple of days to think carefully about what I wanted to say to you.    First, I really do appreciate the fact that you took the time to reach out to me at all.   Many people take issue with something and do not go the extra step of engaging with the topic or in this case with the author of the piece that they took issue with.

Second, I want to say that I think that you are misunderstanding the main point of the post.  My point was actually that young women who have a partner in prison should be afforded the space to make an actual CHOICE about whether they want to stay or leave the relationship.  My point is that societal pressure, whether it comes from hip hop culture or somewhere else, should not constrain young women’s ability to decide for themselves what is right for them.

You suggested rather heatedly that I had no idea what it was like to have a boyfriend in prison.  You happen to be right about that.  Though you couldn’t have known that when you wrote your response to me.  So, you are correct that I do not have a boyfriend in prison.  You next suggested that because you were sure that I did not have a boyfriend in prison I should not write about the topic. I am paraphrasing because you used much more descriptive language.  Well I disagree with that.  Anyone can write about anything and should.  Experience gives one special purchase but not an exclusive claim on writing about particular issues.  What I mean is that I have supported and worked with many young women over the years who do have partners in prison and so I am writing about an observed experience rather than a lived one.  I hope that you too will find a public space to write about your lived experience if you haven’t already done that.  I would love to read about that.  There is room for both in the world.

I used to absolutely hate it when grown folks would do this to me when I was a teenager…  But I find that I am going to do it to you now.   I feel that I want to claim a role that I haven’t earned from you.  That of a big sister.  I am actually old enough to be your mother but I won’t go there.  I want to tell you that I do not think that all of the anger that you expressed in your e-mail is directed at me.  I am happy to be a container for your rage if that will help you to let go of  your anger.  But my point is that you cannot be this angry with a stranger who wrote something that you didn’t like.   I do know something about pain and about hardship.  I do know something about feeling alone and isolated.  I do know something about feeling disempowered and angry.  Your e-mail resonated with your pain and something more.  It echoed with your fear.  You wrote to me about how difficult it was for your boyfriend in prison and that you were his lifeline to the outside.  I know that this must be true and yet I also wondered out loud if you had any lifelines for yourself.  It seems like you are taking on a lot for someone so young.  It is likely that I am being super presumptuous and certainly that you may interpret this whole e-mail from me as being patronizing.  I want you to know that it actually comes from a place of empathy and a desire to make certain that I am not yet another person who you see as oppressive.

I would never tell you what to do in your life.  That was definitely not what the post was intended to do.  It has touched a chord though based on the responses that I have been receiving from young women across the country.  So Lisa, I want you to know that I am open to being a pen pal with you if you are interested.  I would be so happy to hear back from you if you are interested in continuing our exchange of ideas.

Take good care.

So that’s it for now.

Michael Vick is a prime candidate for attending some political education and consciousness-raising workshops.  This feels like a case of internalized oppression to me. From USA Today:

Incarceration was the only thing that was going to separate Michael Vick from the underachieving and destructive life he led prior to his conviction on a federal dogfighting charge, the Philadelphia Eagles QB said.

In an interview with the NFL Network‘s Jim Mora, who used to be Vick’s head coach with the Atlanta Falcons, Vick said he was so cocky that no one could rein him in.

“There was nothing you could do, Jim,” Vick told Mora, via PFT. “The best thing for me, that ever happened to me up to this point, as crazy as it may sound, was me being shipped off to (federal prison in Leavenworth) Kansas. Because other than that, I wasn’t going to change. I wasn’t going to get all the people away from me that was leeches and wanted to be around. I wasn’t going to stop fighting dogs.”

This is profoundly unhelpful.  As Angela Davis has said: “Prisons disappear people.”  Dear Michael, please stop being an apologist for the current system and more importantly choose to be an advocate for lessening the reach of the PIC rather than extending it.