I discovered a new blog by Free Minds Book Club & Writing Workshop. Free Minds describes its mission and blog as follows:

Free Minds uses books and creative writing to empower young inmates to transform their lives. All poems posted here were written by young men in the DC jail or federal prisons. The goal of this blog is for readers to provide encouragement and feedback for our young writers, and also to build connections with incarcerated Free Minds members and the outside world. This is often their first attempt at creative writing. Behind bars, they sometimes feel as though the world has forgotten about them. Our writers look forward to hearing how others have been affected by their writing. Every week we print out the comments and pass them along to the poets. This positive feedback helps them find their voices as writers and inspires them to continue writing.

Below is an example of a poem written by one of the young prisoners. Please take a moment to visit their blog and leave feedback for the young poets.

A Dropped Call?

Never one to jump to conclusions

I’m always willing to give a person the benefit of the doubt

Maybe they accidentally hung up

Perhaps their finger accidentally brushed up against the wrong button…

Yeah, that’s probably what happened

I’ll try again

Ring…ring…ring

Answering machine

Well damn, I know I’m not lunchin’

I just heard them answer the phone a minute ago when I called

I’ll try one more time

Ring…answering machine

Doesn’t get any clearer than that, oh well.

Wonder what’s for chow tonight?

Only if it were actually that simple

That would be great

But in reality, the rest of my day is defined by a storm of confusion

All of my doubts, fears and anxieties whirling around in my head

Like tree branches and back yard garbage cans in a hurricane

That big, bluish-black monster named Depression

Begins to creep and stalk me like a vulture in the desert

I’m fully aware of his big ugly presence

He’s as cold as ice

And the closer he gets, the more depleted I feel

I try to fight him, but I’m totally disarmed

And he continues to consume me whole, slowly but surely

All of a sudden, I feel exhausted and I have to lay down to sleep

I awake in the calm of my storm

Rain letting up, clouds clearing out, and the sun shining through

I bounce back

Because I have to

Never will I lose sight of the primary objective

Make it home in one piece with a sound mind

I will soldier through any and every situation prison throws at me

And come out of here better than I came in

I just can’t help but wonder

Was it a dropped call?

Then again, I know better

We should be ashamed of ourselves in this state that this is happening… This is what happens when politicians pander during elections. Superintendent Randle did the right thing with the early release program and Governor Quinn was cowed by the odious Bill Brady to renounce a sensible early release program. Shameful. Particularly shameful that the public was so quick to buy this crap.

From an article in the Chicago Tribune:

Hard time has gotten even harder in Illinois prisons.

The state’s prison system is bursting at the seams with a record high of nearly 49,000 inmates, some 3,000 more than just a year ago. The surge, combined with the state’s multibillion-dollar budget crisis, has led to conditions that watchdog groups and veteran correctional officers say they haven’t seen since a population crisis in the 1980s prompted the state to build three new prisons.

Confronted with putting more offenders in the same amount of space, administrators are doubling up every available cell. As many as four inmates are bunked in slightly larger cells intended for two handicapped prisoners. At the intake facility at Stateville near Joliet, incoming inmates regularly sleep on cots in a gymnasium or prison hospital.

2.3 million Americans are behind bars, up from 500,000 in 1980: a 300% increase.

Home to less than 5% of the world’s population, the U.S. holds 25% of the world’s prisoners.

America incarcerates 754 persons per 100,000, Russia, the second leading nation, imprisons 627.

In 2008, more than 7.3 million people were under some form of correctional supervision.

1 in 11 African Americans are under correctional control, compared with 1 in 27 Latinos and 1 in 45 whites.

More than 2.7 million children had a parent behind bars, or 1 in even 28. For black children, the number was 1 in 9.

More than 2.4 million people are employed in the criminal legal system — in a wide variety of tasks beyond enforcement, including food service, health care, construction & maintenance, with significant portions outsourced to private companies.

States spend $50 billion on corrections and 5 states — Connecticut, Delaware, Michigan & Vermont — now spend more on prisons than they do on schools.

The Federal Department of Justice budget is $29.2 billion, with $6 billion given to the prison bureau.

Local governments spend more than either the states or feds at $115 billion.

By Audrie Carie for Project NIA

Last weekend, I received an e-mail from a woman who said that she felt that my blog posts were missing something very important. She wrote: “You cover a lot of the ‘facts’ about prison and inmates but you leave out the heart.”

This has been haunting me. A stranger had me pegged. I am much more comfortable living in my head. I am less trusting with my heart.

She went on to write: “I am the other side of ‘Prison Culture’. I am the one left behind.”

I wrote back to her. We have since exchanged a few e-mails. I asked if I could write about this here. She said that it was fine as long as I did not use her name or other identifying information. I promised that I would not. I will call her Tina.

I wanted to write about our correspondence because Tina is right that I do not focus enough on those left behind because of mass or hyper incarceration. In my defense, this is because I really can’t presume to truly understand their experiences and their emotions. I can sympathize certainly but I worry that it means that I cannot write convincingly about their plight. However I certainly can do a better job of featuring their stories when they come to me. And I will.

Tina’s first e-mail was poignant and poetic. I can’t quote substantially from it without violating her confidentiality so I will try to paraphrase some of what she shared with me. She wrote of love; the abiding love that she feels for her incarcerated husband. She wrote about loneliness. Loneliness that she says is worse than the kind she felt when her mother passed away a couple of years ago. “Knowing that my mother is no longer on earth actually means that she is beyond reach to me, my husband is not dead, he is still on this earth, but beyond reach to me.” She wrote that no one in her circle truly understands what she is going through and that they are not sympathetic to her situation. She feels isolated. She is tired. She wrote to me about the burdens of black womanhood in the 21st century.

She told me that she has been following my blog for a couple of months. She was prompted to write to me after she read a post where I wrote about feeling hopeful in spite of living in an unjust society. She thought maybe I would be receptive to her story.

I truly hope that our e-mail exchange over the past week has conveyed to Tina that I see her. That while I cannot empathize, that I can absolutely sympathize with her.

I’ve been re-reading a lot of June Jordan in the past three months. I love her writing and her conviction. She wrote about justice, pain, activism, and most of all love. Love for self, for family, for community, for the world.

I am thinking a lot about love this week. Love and how it relates to abolishing prisons. Because of Tina, I am thinking even more about those left behind (parents, children, spouses, siblings, friends) once someone has been incarcerated. I am still struggling to formulate my own words for all of this. I am still struggling to find the “heart” of it all. The following words from June Jordan feel very appropriate to how I am feeling right now. I will borrow them and share them with Tina and you.

And it is here — in this extreme coincidence of my status as someone twice stigmatized, my status as someone twice kind to the despised majority — it is here, in this extremity, that I stand in a struggle against demoralization and suicide and toward self-love and self-determination. And it is here, in this extremity, that as a Black feminist I ask my self and anyone who would call me sister, Where is the love?

And it seems to me that the strength that should come from Black feminism means that I can, without fear, love, and respect all men who are willing and able, without fear, to love and respect me…this means that as a Black feminist I cannot be expected to respect what somebody else calls self-love if that concept of self-love requires my self-destruction.

As a Black woman and feminist, I must look about me, with trembling and with shocked anger, at the endless waste, the endless suffocation of my sisters; the bitter sufferings of hundreds of thousands of women who are the sole parents of hundreds of thousands of children, the desolation of women trapped by futile, demeaning, low-paying occupations, the unemployed, the bullied, the beaten, the battered, the ridiculed, the slandered, the trivialized, the raped and the sterilized; the lost millions of beautiful, creative momentous lives turned to ashes on the pyre of gender identity.

It is against such sorrow, such spiritual death, such strangulation of the lives of women, my sisters, and of powerless peoples — men and women — everywhere, that I work and live, now, as a feminist, trusting that I learn to love myself well enough to love you [whoever you are], well enough so that you will love me well enough, so that we will know, exactly, where is the love” that it is here, between us, and growing stronger.

Source:
“Where is the love?” in Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color. Ed. Gloria Anzaldua, pp.174-176.

The following is a terrific infographic that was created by GOOD Magazine.

I love her. Have since I was a tiny child.

For a blast from the past…

I have posted about T.I. a few times over these past few weeks. The first time was back in July after T.I. gave an interview about his nearly year-long incarceration experience. I highlighted the fact that prison was not a country club in stark contrast to how Lil’ Wayne had portrayed his incarceration experience. Next I blogged about how uneasy I was about hip hop culture’s expectation that young women of color “stand by their men” while incarcerated no matter what. I underscored T.I. song “I Got Your Back” as making me feel a bit queasy. Finally in October, I wrote about the facts that prisons do not work and used T.I. return to prison as concrete proof of this fact.

Yesterday I read a searing letter that T.I. posted from prison. Here is the letter in its entirety:

This experience is truly a pain I have never felt before and that’s saying a lot for a nigga who’s been down locked up as many times as I have. I see this as a real ass whoopin’. The kind you don’t just go back outside to play afterwards. You take ya ass to bed and don’t come out of your room until it’s time to go to school. I don’ t know what effect this will have on my life moving forward but I’m certainly sick and mother f*cking tired of going to jail, juve, prison, the pen, correctional facilities or whatever else you want to call it.

I’d have been better off doing a 5-10 year bid one time than going in time and time again for days, weeks and months for the last 15 years of my life. Even though it’s been a long road, I’m still standing, barely but nevertheless still standing. At one time I thought my motivation for continuing was for my fans, my partna Philant, my pops, my grandmama, even for the haters or the people I let down. But nah… I got to do this shit for me!!!

I’ll be God damned if I’ve come all this way and made it through so much hell to let it go down like this! F*ck that! If an hour in the dark is worth a second in the sun then pass me my mother f*ckin’ shades cause I’m ready to cash my darkest hours in…ASAP!!!

A lot of folks had fathers or father figures in the house to raise them into manhood. I’m not trying to make any excuses for my situation but my father was a hustler that lived in New York. My uncle was a local big time dope boy turned 10 year federal inmate. My mother and grandparents did the best they could but I found my manhood in the trap and in prison systems. But I found it. And nan one of mine will ever have to feel the cold tight grip of a handcuff or grace the presence of a jail cell if I can help it. Over my dead body! So if you can’t respect that you ain’t rocking with my movement then Fuck you dog! I know a bunch of mother f*ckers who are…..

I haven’t even had a chance to review this report because it just came into my e-mail box. However I am adamantly opposed to the very existence of the TAMMS Supermax prison.

Attached is the newly released monitoring report by the John Howard Association (which incidentally does some of the most important work out there).

Summary: It need not be this harsh
On Nov. 9 a group of John Howard Association board members, staff and volunteers conducted a monitoring tour of Tamms Correctional Center, the state’s highest security prison often referred to as Tamms Supermax. Tamms is a male prison located approximately 360 miles south and west of Chicago.

Nearly all states operate a supermax prison reserved for gang leaders or inmates who are extraordinarily disruptive and dangerous. Typically they include inmates who have attempted to kill staff or other inmates, have organized gangs to challenge prison management, or who have proven to be exceptionally destructive.

Although conditions vary widely at the nation’s supermax prisons, they are often characterized by years of solitary confinement, sensory deprivation, extremely aggressive security measures and long-term physical and social isolation of inmates. This is the case at Tamms.

For another side of activism around TAMMS, check out an action station that has been set up at the Jane Addams Hull House Museum focused on overcoming the isolation of the prisons there.

TAMMS Action Station. Photo by Adam Mark

For example, the “Tamm Year Ten” station tells the story of Tamms super-maximum prison in southern Illinois that houses inmates under permanent isolation. The Tamms Year Ten group—an eclectic coalition of activists, artists, lawyers, prisoners, and ex-prisoners—is dedicated to ending the psychological torture of total confinement, which is counter-productive to rehabilitating inmates. As one Tamms prisoner stated: “I will ask you, ‘Lock yourself in your bathroom for the next 10 years and tell me how it will affect your mind.” Tamms Year Ten’s moniker reflects the prison’s tenth anniversary (currently in its eleventh year). Founded on the notion of short-term punishment, many prisoners at Tamms supermax have been there for a decade.

The Tamms Year Ten station is interactive, engaging visitors with a project to send poems to prisoners. (Why? Because prisoners asked for them.)

I have been remiss in promoting an upcoming event. Tomorrow from 7 to 9 p.m, Buzz Alexander of the Prison Creative Arts Project will be reading from his new book “Is William Martinez Not Our Brother?”

The reading will be followed by a panel discussion that includes luminaries such as Amanda Klonsky, Meade Palidofsky, and Jonathan Shailor. All of whom have years of experience working with prisoners using various artistic mediums. Also on the panel is me (which is truly embarrassing). I initially signed on to moderate the panel but alas I will now be speaking.

If you are in Chicago, come by because of all of the other amazing people who will be sharing their experiences. You can put your ipod on when it’s my turn to speak. I promise not to be offended.

You can download the flyer for this event here.

I spend a lot of time around organizers and activists in my life. These days I am often approached by younger people (I can’t believe that I am considered mature now) who want to talk to me about social justice. They ask me a lot of questions about how I ended up where I currently am; doing the work that I do. I never have good answers for them.

I read an article that summarized some remarks made by Dr. Boyce Watkins in Kentucky. What stood out to me was a parable that he told to his assembled audience about a bull and a butterfly. The parable sparked thoughts for me about the nature of power and social change.

The bull, named Billy, wanted to trash a china shop because he had heard the owner was abusing neighborhood children.

But Billy resisted the urge, for fear that he would get in trouble. The butterfly, named Buddy, said he could do as much or more damage, a claim Billy found unlikely because he was so much bigger and stronger.

Buddy replied: “If you have the power but don’t use it, we’re about equal.”

What do you take away from this story? For Watkins, it is a parable about “a lot of people with power who aren’t using it.” He shared the story in the context of remarks urging a renewal of civil disobedience to raise awareness and to resist racism and oppression. It was a call to action for people to use the power that they have to make change.

I interpret the parable differently. To me the butterfly is actually akin to a number of the armchair philosophers/revolutionaries that populate too many of our movements for social transformation. At this point in my life, I actually find myself identifying strongly with the bull in the parable. I think that the bull is misunderstood. Let me explain.

Since I was a very young person, I felt compelled to address injustice: whether this was in my family, among my friends, in my community or the world at large. Yet I worried about finding legitimate outlets for channeling my rage and for directing my social action. I wasn’t afraid to exercise whatever minimal power I had at the time. I was struggling to figure out how to use that very limited power in the most effective ways.

As I grew up in New York City, I was incredibly lucky to be surrounded by wonderful touchstones. These people were patient with me, hard on me, but most importantly they listened to me. They were great role models for the limits and possibilities of lifelong organizing and activism. Yet I must admit that I write these words with retrospective admiration. When I was 14, 15, 16 years old, I really didn’t appreciate these people. I derided them as being too cautious and as lacking revolutionary zeal. The truth is that I was being seduced by another group of people — I’ll call them the butterflies.

These were the people who always had a ready quote by Fanon, Malcolm, Che or Douglass. They carried around tattered books that I had not read. These would send me scurrying to the library to find those exact texts. These were the people in my life who spent their time preaching about revolution and struggle. In retrospect, I know that the reason I was so enthralled was because they were mostly about talk. They rarely ‘acted’ on anything. My ideas were always brilliant around them because I never had to put them to the test. They were fun because they rarely participated in the actual hard work of making change.

While the bulls were doing the painstaking work of going door to door in Harlem to educate community members about affordable housing, the butterflies were lamenting the fact that “the people” were not being sufficiently engaged in “our” struggles. None of them ever went door to door. We talked a lot about “new” models of engagement when the old ones would have served us just as well. The key was to actually get out there and to talk to people; to put ourselves on the line; to risk being told to F-off.

Early on, these people dazzled me. They were shiny, brilliant, and looked the part of a committed organizer for social change. I was seduced by them and I was a major brat to the bulls who I proudly proclaimed were sell-outs because they had to be accountable to funders and to the “man.” Those were the days… I had not yet read Barbara Ransby’s seminal work about Ella Baker. That book had yet to be birthed.

Then one afternoon I won’t soon forget, as I spouted off about someone or other being a sellout, one of my touchstones, a bull, asked me a question that changed my trajectory.

“What have you built?” he asked. I must have looked perplexed. So he asked me again, “What have you built?”

I don’t know what you mean I answered.

“Come back and talk to me when you’ve figured it out” he told me.

I was so pissed off by that exchange that I left the office where I was working as a volunteer in a huff. I didn’t have an answer for him for another two years. It turned out that I hadn’t “built” anything. He was asking me when I had put myself truly on the line for something that I believed in. He was asking me when I had been brave enough to actualize the ideas and theories that I was always so quick to offer to and about others. He had been passionate about the issue of affordable housing and had “built” a community-based organization (where I was incidentally volunteering) to implement his ideas; to test them against his theories. Once I could answer his question, he truly became one of my greatest teachers. The butterflies began to quickly lose their appeal.

I still run across too many butterflies today and unfortunately too few bulls.