State and local governments across the U.S. are going broke. In 2011, budget deficits in state houses across the country will necessitate increased revenue and/or spending cuts. As Republicans have made significant gains in governorships and state houses, conventional wisdom expects that they will focus on “spending” cuts rather than on raising taxes. New governors like Chris Christie in New Jersey, John Kasich in Ohio, and Rick Scott in Florida are all promising to cut their public employees and cut various public services.

Therefore it is not surprising to me to read the following article about a proposal to increase the use prisoners to respond to natural disasters.

The Missouri National Guard plans to start training some of the state’s prison inmates to help it during natural disasters and other emergencies.

Missouri Guard Maj. Tammy Spicer said that under the proposal, the inmates would become a more formalized part of the Guard’s disaster response. She said it would give the Guard a larger and better trained pool of workers to respond to emergencies.

The training would focus on skills such as filling and stacking sandbags and removing debris.

“We’re trying to do something better for Missourians,” Spicer said.

Inmates have been used in the past to help local officials during floods and other emergencies. Over the past several years, they have worked to shore up levies and fill sandbags along flooding rivers from near St. Louis to northwestern Missouri.

Then there is also news that female prisoners in New York States will be running a DMV call center:

Female prisoners at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County are staffing a Department of Motor Vehicles call center. The facility employs 39 inmates, including 31 full-time and part-time customer service agents, six team leaders and two trainers.

The program has been going on for years at the Bayview Women’s Prison in Manhattan, but that has been converted to a re-entry facility for short-timers being released into the community and Bedford Hills has a larger inmate population with longer sentences.

The men’s Arthur Kill Correctional Facility on Staten Island also operates a DMV call center. Between the two, one million calls are expected yearly with a savings to taxpayers of $3.5 million annually.

In addition to saving money, it will provide job skills for participating inmates, said prisons spokesman Erik Kriss.

“They do earn a small stipend for doing this work and that helps them to afford items in the commissary and so forth and it gives them motivation,” he said. “Everyone needs motivation, whether you are outside prison or inside prison.”

The inmates who participate do not have access to DMV computers and are not able to access any customer data. Inmates convicted of a telephone related crime or credit card or computer fraud are not eligible to work at the center. Calls are monitored at random.

I expect that many other states will be starting similar programs if they haven’t already done so in the next few years. I expect that this is only the beginning of using prisoners to meet the needs of the public sector during our upcoming era of austerity.

Following up on my post about the invisibility of women prisoners' organizing efforts and on the occasion of news that Sara Kruzan has had her sentence commuted, I thought that folks might be interested in revisiting the “Free Joan Little” movement as an example of successful cross-issue organizing that could provide a useful template for the present. First, a short summary of the facts of the Joan (pronounced Jo Anne) Little case.

At 4:00 A.M. on August 27, 1974, officers at the Beaufort County Jail in Washington, North Carolina discovered the body of guard Clarence Alligood in a cell. Nude from the waist down, he had been stabbed 11 times. His trousers were bunched up in his right hand. The fingers of his left hand enclosed an ice pick. The cell’s occupant, Joan Little, age 20, had been serving a seven-year sentence for robbery; now she was gone. One week later she surrendered to authorities. The story she told made headlines. Little, a black woman, claimed that the 62-year-old white jailer had forced her into performing a sexual act, and that she had killed him in self-defense.
Source: Joan Little Trial: 1975 – Sexual Advance Prompts Killing, A Quick Acquittal

Joan Little at Women's Prison

Here’s how Time Magazine described the trial in 1975:

In the dark-paneled courtroom in Raleigh, N.C., the 21-year-old black defendant testified in a voice that was so low that jurors often had to cup their ears to catch her words. She clutched a tissue but broke down in tears only once. Otherwise, Joan Little remained remarkably self-possessed through two days of painful testimony and cross-examination, sticking stoutly to her story that she had been defending herself from rape when she stabbed white Jailer Clarence Alligood to death with an ice pick in the Beaufort County Jail in Washington, N.C., on Aug. 27,1974.

Her appearance on the witness stand was the climactic moment in the five-week-old trial, which had become a cause celebre among feminists and civil rights activists (TIME, July 28). Citing mostly circumstantial evidence, Prosecutor William Griffin contended that she lured the 62-year-old jailer into her cell with a promise of sex and then killed him in order to escape from the jail, where she had spent 81 days after being convicted of breaking and entering.

Eventually, Joan Little was acquitted by a jury after 78 minutes of deliberation and returned to jail to serve time for her original offense which was a break-in. Ms. Little escaped in October 1977, a month short of possible parole.

She was recaptured in Brooklyn that December after a high-speed car chase. North Carolina’s request for extradition touched off wide protests among civil-rights advocates and others who said it would be tantamount to a death sentence.

After long court battles, Ms. Little was sent back to Raleigh to serve out her sentence plus time for escaping. She was freed in June 1979 and returned to New York. Source: New York Times

These are the broad contours of Joan Little’s 1974 case.

What I want to talk about today is the movement that was mobilized to free Ms. Little from prison. Jerry Paul was the lead attorney on Joan Little’s case. He and some early supporters of Little traveled the country telling her story at rallies, in the media, etc…. Even People Magazine published a story about the case. They used an organizing strategy that involved seeking the support of feminist organizations, anti-rape organizations, civil rights groups, black power activists, and the like. In an earlier post, I shared that Rosa Parks was a founder of the Joan Little Defense Committee in Detroit.

Paul was joined by Karen Galloway, the first African-American woman to graduate from Duke Law School, who signed up to join the legal team on the same day that she passed her bar exam (McGuire 2010, 214).

In 1975, Angela Davis wrote an essay in Ms. Magazine that brought national attention and even more supporters to Joan Little’s cause. In her book At the Dark End of the Street, historian Danielle McGuire provides a sample list of some of the organizations, groups, and individuals who organized to support Joan Little’s cause. These included: the Southern Poverty Law Center (with Julian Bond at the helm), the Women’s Legal Defense Fund, the Feminist Alliance Against Rape, the Rape Crisis Center, the National Black Feminist Organization, the National Organization for Women, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, some local chapters of the NAACP (though not the national group), and Maulana Karenga, just to name a few.

Bernice Johnson Reagon, civil rights activist and founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock, penned a song called “Joanne Little” which became an anthem for the “Free Joan Little” movement. Here are the lyrics of that song:

Joanne Little, she’s my sister
Joanne Little, she’s our mama
Joanne Little, she’s your lover
Joanne the woman who’s gonna carry your child.

Verse 1
I’ve always been told since the day I was born
Leave those no good women alone
Child you better keep your nose clean
keep your butt off the street
You gonna be judged by the company you keep
Said I always walked by the golden rule
Steered clear of controversy I stayed real cool
Till along come this woman little over five feet tall
Charged and jailed with breaking the law
And the next thing I heard as it came over
the news
First degree murder she was on the loose

Verse 2
Now I ain’t talking bout the roaring west
This is 1975 at its most oppressive best
North Carolina state the pride of this land
Made her an outlaw hunted on everyhand
Tell me what she did to deserve this name
Killed a man who thought she was fair game
When I heard the news I screamed inside
Lost all my cool my anger I could not hide
Cause now Joanne is you and Joanne is me
Our prison is the whole society
Cause we live in a land that’ll bring all pressure
to bear on the head of a woman whose
position we share

Tell me who is this Girl –
and who is she to you?

When Little’s trial began on July 15th 1975, 500 supporters rallied outside the Wake County Courthouse. According to McGuire (2010):

“They hoisted placards demanding the court “Free Joan Little” and “Defend Black Womanhood,” and loud chants could be heard over the din of traffic and conversation. “One, two, three. Joan must be set free! the crowd sang. “Four, five, six. Power to the ice pick!”

The Joan Little case affirmed a woman’s right to self-defense. But to me one of the most important aspects of the “Free Joan Little” movement was that supporters insisted that incarcerated women had a right to their own bodies. It was not socially acceptable to rape women in custody. Obviously, we are still a long way from preventing sexual assault in prisons even today but the Joan Little story played an important role in the continuing struggle for social justice.

One has to wonder what it would take to build a similar coalition of groups and individuals in 2011 to take aim at dismantling the unjust prison industrial complex. The “Free Joan Little” movement is instructive because it underscores that it is possible to come together to address prisoner injustice and to WIN.

Josh MacPhee over at Just Seeds has an ongoing series called “Judging Books by Their Covers.” His most recent post in that series focuses on the covers of books about prisons. Here’s what he had to say about this:

For the next month of so I’m going to focus on the covers of books about U.S. prisons. Something uplifting for the new year! I first became involved in prison-related activism (including support for political prisoners, whose books will also be featured in the upcoming weeks) in the early 1990s, and slowly have amassed a large collection of books and publications on prison issues (in order to keep this manageable, I’ve pretty much stuck to books with spines, leaving out pamphlets, magazines, and chapbooks, as well as keeping it U.S focused). In addition, a couple friends have pretty large collections as well, so I’ve photographed some of theirs (thanks Dan Berger!), and pulled a select few off the web. This week we’ll start with prison riots. And the daddy of the modern U.S. prison riot, Attica. Although it had begun to be an issue before, the Attica rebellion in 1971 awoke the American public to the fact that their were serious problems in the prison system, and a slew of both scholarship and sensational writing followed, including a series of reports like the ones to the right and below.

You can check out the blog post here.

I participated in an online auction for a good cause last month and bid on a photograph that I really wanted. I am happy to report that I won the item and have decided to share it with all of you. This is a great photograph by Lynne Pidel of a mural in her neighborhood.

Shot by Lynne Pidel

I was drawn to this photograph for many reasons. What does it evoke for you?

Here’s one of the things that the photograph evokes for me…

Sometimes I get the funniest e-mails even if the author does not mean it to be so…

Right before the holidays, I received an e-mail from someone who was incensed that I would suggest that we need to abolish prisons. The e-mail ended with this sentence: “By the way your blog sucks!” I did not add the exclamation point…

I am not going to quote the e-mail here because I did not get permission to do that. I do however want to address myself to one of the points that the author raised. The author wrote that prison abolition is a “pipe dream.” This is not the first time that I have been accused of being naive or worse “delusional.”

I really do understand how threatening it must be in our American punishment culture to hear the words “prison abolition.” I have previously written about my response to the perennial question that I am asked about what we will do with all of the “bad people” in a previous post about transformative justice. I have also shared some resources about abolition here and here.

Today, I would like to offer more insights about what I mean when I speak of prison abolition. The first thing to know is that not all abolitionists think alike. This should not be surprising. It’s a big world and we are all shaped by our varying experiences. So I am speaking for myself here and not for all prison abolitionists.

I don’t feel defensive about my position. I am analytical by nature and after evaluating the evidence I have concluded that prisons are harmful, corrupting, and have not ended violence but instead perpetuate it. I think that anyone who honestly assesses the role and impact of prisons on our society would come to a similar conclusion as I have. Given that the PIC is detrimental, it is incumbent on all of us to re-imagine a viable and humane alternative to address our social problems.

In her excellent book Right to Be Hostile, my friend and colleague Erica Meiners persuasively makes the case that the current system is beyond reform:

“The system does not work. It does not provide rehabilitation. It targets poor people and people of color and lends itself to interlocking relationships with other institutions. It is directly connected to the histories of race and oppression in the United States and it is difficult to talk about our contemporary prison system in isolation of slavery. It forecloses other avenues of conceptualizing and addressing the trauma of violence, and, arguably, does little to improve the lives of communities and individuals who experience harm (p.167).”

I know that some of the individuals who are currently locked up have caused great harm to people and to communities. I do not minimize this at all. This is why I am so passionate about the need for us to create alternative community-based structures to address harm and to mediate conflicts. This is supremely important and will be integral if we are to achieve the long-term goal of abolishing prisons.

When I speak of abolition, I am therefore clearly not talking about closing prisons tomorrow. None of the abolitionists that I know imagine that we will not always need to find a way to ensure accountability for violent people who repeatedly cause harm. We believe in creating the conditions necessary to ensure the eventual possibility of a ‘world without prisons’. I turn once again to Erica who brilliantly encapsulates how I too conceptualize abolition:

“For myself, working toward abolition means creating structures that reduce the demand and need for prisons. It is ensuring that communities have viable, at least living-wage jobs that are not dehumanizing. It means establishing mechanisms for alternative dispute resolution and other processes that address conflict or harm with mediation. It means ensuring that our most vulnerable populations, for example, those who are mentally ill or undereducated, do not get warehoused in our prisons and jails because of the failure of other institutions such as healthcare and education. It means practicing how to communicate and to live across differences and to rely more on each other instead of the police. Working toward a horizon of abolition requires an acknowledgment that prisons have been used, as Davis, writes, as ‘a way of disappearing people in the false hope of disappearing the underlying social problems they represent’ (Davis, 2005, 41).”

So for me, abolition does not mean the immediate closing of all prisons. It means that we have to organize and mobilize to address the root causes of oppression and violence. It means that we have to be prepared to creatively re-imagine our current structures of policing and warehousing individuals. It means that we have to test the limits of our imagination of what’s possible in terms of addressing violence and harm. It means that we have to always expose the brutality and utter failure of the current system. It means that we have to be at the forefront of a revolutionary transformation of consciousness while demanding that our resources be radically reallocated towards social justice. Indeed it means refusing to accept that prison abolition is a “pipe dream.”

I follow a prisoner blog called Prison Proxy and read an excellent post there today. The post titled “Thoughts on Prison Culture” is written by a prisoner serving life in prison in the Texas State Penitentiary. It is offered here without comment because it speaks for itself.

Thoughts on Prison Culture…

Prison Culture dictates that inmates follow certain rules and policies, and break others. The prison staff expect and are okay with this, even though it involves rules being broken, because it reaffirms inmates into their accepted roles within Prison Culture. And, by extension, this reaffirms the officers’ roles for themselves. New inmates and officers are subsumed into this character casting without so much as a fight, and thus the tragedy continues.

Yesterday, I was again in one of those reveries where I like to hear myself talk. I rhetorically asked an acquaintance how I could claim that I’m not supposed to be here, while doing everything that I’m supposed to do in this backwards system. Put differently, a syllogism: This is a backwards system, and I’m a ‘forward’ person who’s not supposed to be here, therefore I won’t do the backwards things that I’m supposed to do.

I buy toilet paper from inmates who steal it solely for the purpose of selling it. Inmates are only provided with one roll of toilet paper per week, and if one runs out before that week is out, he’s – pardon my French – S.O.L. As a result of this punitive policy, a black market in stolen toilet paper thrives, and I for one buy them. Or, take the inmates that are dying of A.I.D.S. They get one extra sandwich at lunch (an extra sandwich!), ostensibly so as to boost their caloric intake. These inmates unfortunately tend to have no outside support, so they sell these sandwiches (two pieces of white bread and a slice of cheese) for a couple of mint sticks. They give up possible months of life for the comfort of an otherwise unattainable piece of candy. The rule prohibiting these activities (i.e. no trafficking and trading), and many other rules are to varying degrees unjust, so inmates are permitted – even duty-bound – to circumvent these rules. Even if by means of our own (what would generally be) injustices – e.g. sneaking, politicking, etc. , just so long as our (justified) injustice is to a lesser degree than that of the rule. Because there is no hard and fast ruler for degrees of injustice, my own means of rule breaking must be significantly less unjust than that of the rule.

Likewise, there are no rules on the books against investing in stocks or blogging, yet Prison Culture nonetheless prohibits these activities because they redefine what it means to be an inmate (i.e. in his relation to the free-world).

I break all of these rules and unspoken rules, not only for the purposes of the act – be it accumulating toilet paper reserves or penning this blog – in itself, but also for the purpose of breaking rules simply because they are unjust. And this particular modus operandi makes me a maverick – the essence of which is to reject being cast, by rules or norms, into pre-defined (i.e. regurgitated) character roles.

Prison Culture is all about preserving the slave/master relationship. In the plantations of the Antebellum South, there was no right or wrong. The masters did what they wanted to do, and the slaves did what they needed to do to survive. Here in prison, the guards do what they want to do (here in Texas, the backs of their caps are inscribed with “looking out for our own”), and the inmates do what they have to do to survive.

The inmates take this mentality to the free-world, which is neither the Antebellum South nor Prison Culture, and thus come right back to Prison.

In the New Year, I am committed to featuring many more voices from the inside on this blog. To kick off the year, here is a letter to the editor from a prisoner in Florida who is responding to this truly dumb and misinformed column.

Here is the letter by Jeffrey Ashten, Martin Correctional facility:

Letter: Life in prison in Florida is not Club Fed

I am a 48-year-old inmate at Martin Correctional, serving a life sentence for homicide, having been incarcerated since September 1988 and I would like to respond to Charles DeGarmo’s views on prisons versus senior care facilities (“Move seniors into prisons for better care”, Nov. 5) as his facts are a bit off the mark.

There are no free phones in prison, as all calls are collect. Computers are donated and used in limited/restricted access with no connection to any outside system. The televisions and computers, donated by church groups, are welcomed by the prison staff as they are utilized to control inmates.

I’ve yet to see in all my decades of incarceration an outdoor meditation garden. Perhaps Mr. DeGarmo means the times I zone out while repeatedly cutting the grass?

The only special meals here are for medical reasons. I am Jewish. I’ve yet to see a Kosher diet for long-term prisoners. (Short-term prisoners just received one this year for the first time. Federal law mandates it.)

As to food in prison, I invite Mr. DeGarmo to come dine with me on a diet that is 70 percent soy. (Not too good for health from what I see on my donated, collectively-shared TV.) He seems too willing to comment upon a situation of which he has no first-hand knowledge. Television and movies have glamorized “Club Fed.” I didn’t rate a federal sentence. In Florida, I assure you, there are no “Club Feds.”

It is ridiculous to compare senior care to that of prisoners. Seniors have rights that I don’t. They can vote for elected officials who could regulate better care for them. I can’t vote for a better jailer. If Mr. DeGarmo doesn’t like the system of warehousing prisoners, then he should put his efforts into finding a better way for criminal reform.