I occasionally get e-mails from people who ask me about how prison abolition looks in practice. I have decided to share some examples here today.

First, here is an introduction to the context within which we are operating.

Critical Resistance is one of the organizations that is actively operationalizing the concept of prison abolition:

Vikki Law does an excellent job of providing an overview of community-based alternatives for addressing harm. These models of intervening when harm occurs can and should form the basis of prison abolition.

Finally, the great Angela Davis brings it home as she asks us to re-imagine our ideas and understanding of “justice.”

It was the hat that did it…

As regular readers of this blog know, I collect prison artifacts. I mostly focus on pre-1960s items (with a particular interest in the early 20th century). A couple of weeks ago, I decided to add to my collection of original vintage mug shots; I have dozens ranging from the early 20th century through the 1970s. I won’t go into why I started collecting these photographs — that will be a story for another day.

So I came across this Bertillon criminal card for sale online. These mug shot cards were known as Bertillon cards after the French law enforcement officer, Alphonse Bertillon, who pioneered criminal identification techniques such as anthropometry (measurement).

I knew instantly that I had to have this one. The card provides some basic details (though I won’t list them all).

Criminal Name: Laura Scott
Reg No: 23187
Age: 40
Birthplace: Alabama
Height: 67.8 inches
Weight: 150
Hair: Black
Eyes: Brown
Complexion: Black
Race: Negress
Occupation: Dressmaker
Crime: Pt. Larceny & Prior
Sentence: 5 years
Measurements taken: August 8, 1905

Laura Scott’s face is mesmerizing. There is a look of defiance in her eyes. This is the look of a woman who has been through this before. And then that incredible hat…

Aren’t you curious to know Laura Scott’s story? Well I certainly was and since I am a complete nerd, I set out to learn everything that I could about this black woman who was incarcerated at the infamous San Quentin Prison in 1905.

How did Laura Scott end up on that Bertillon card? Well, an item that appeared in the August 5, 1905 edition of the Los Angeles Herald offers some initial clues:

“Laura Scott, negress, pleaded guilty yesterday to a charge of grand larceny and was sentenced to one year in San Quentin prison. The woman was accused of stealing (85?) and a gold watch and chain from Carson. ”

Over the next few weeks, I will share a story of Laura Scott with you. It’s a story that has led me to the California Archives and to Census Records from the 1800s. It’s a story cobbled together from disparate sources and is based on my original research. Laura Scott’s story has its roots in Reconstruction era Alabama, in the Black Belt and takes us all the way to California at the turn of the 20th century. Through Ms. Scott’s story, I hope to provide a portrait of what life was like for female prisoners in the late 1800s-early 1900s in the U.S. I hope that you’ll continue with me on this journey.

P.S. Reading about the history of San Quentin Prison makes me appreciate this song by Johnny Cash even more…

The more things stay the same…

“This piggish, criminal system. The system that is the enemy of people. This very system that we live in and function in every day. This system that we are in and under at this very moment. Our system! Each and every one of your systems. If you happen to be from another country, it’s still your system, because the system in your country is part of this. This system is evil. It is criminal; it is murderous. And it is in control. It is in power. It is arrogant. It is crazy. And it looks upon the people as its property. So much so that cops, who are public servants, feel justified in going on a campus, a college campus or high school campus, and spraying mace in the faces of the people. They beat people with those clubs, and even shoot people, if it takes that to enforce the will of the likes of Ronald Reagan, Jesse Unruh, or Mussolini Alioto.” — Eldridge Cleaver (who incidentally became a Conservative Republican later in life). “An Address on Prisons” delivered at a rally in his honor a few days before he was scheduled to return to jail in 1968.

UC Davis Police Lt. John Pike uses a can of pepper stray on protesting students

The U.S.A. Court of No Appeal
by George Edward Tait

A magazine jury of twelve rounds
A prosecuting trigger

& forefinger judge

A witness box casket on a tombstone stand

The accused found guilty of melanin

In the first degree

A death verdict in a graveyard court —

Injustice sustained;

Objection overruled.

In light of another tragic shooting of a young black man in Atlanta:

I would like to implore our community members to reinforce the message to our youth that they should NOT run from police under any circumstances. Here are five things for young people (everyone actually) to know to minimize the impact of a police encounter. One of these things is NOT TO RUN. I know that this is difficult given the reality expressed below:

“Young black men don’t trust the police,” said former Atlanta City Councilman Derrick Boazman, representing Waiters’ family. “It’s a normal reaction for them to run when they see the cops.”

Songs like “Run” by Ghostface Killah do not help matters either:

It’s important to educate our youth about street law. It may save their life.

I am grateful to a young man who sent this over to me last month. I have been listening to it often. Below is the video from Akala titled “Fire in the Booth.” It is 8 minutes long but you really should listen to the entire thing. You can thank me later.

Here is the song again but this time with the lyrics on screen:

I have been working for the past six months on a long essay about how policing and prisons figure into the modern black freedom movement. I often use this blog as a way to work out what I think about certain issues. This is one of those times so please forgive the disjointed nature of this post. I am thinking out loud…

Police, prisons, and jails (basically the apparatus of the carceral state) figure prominently across the history of the black freedom movement. Since slavery, black people in the U.S. have found themselves in conflict with the instruments of state power which have sought to control our bodies, our labor, our families, and our very freedom.

I have been reading quite a bit about the modern civil rights movement again (1945 to 1975) and am struck by how prominently police brutality and prison/jail figure in the narratives of that struggle. Police harassment consistently triggers riots in Harlem, Chicago, Rochester, Watts, & L.A just to name a few cities. People fed up with unrelenting police brutality find ways to lash out and/or to resist.

I have written about how the Black Panther Party centered the problem of police violence in their analysis and in their organizing. Their Ten Point Program titled “What We Want, What We Believe” advocated an end to police harassment and a reliance on self-defense to counter the brutality that people of color were subjected to on a daily basis.

Aside from the centrality of police violence in narratives of black protest, I am struck too by the prominent leaders in the movement who find themselves repeatedly jailed during this period: Martin, Malcolm, Bayard, Diane, Fannie, Rosa, Huey, Stokely, H. Rap, James Farmer, John Lewis… The list is so long as to seem interminable. In fact, Malcolm makes the point in a speech that:

“You can’t be a negro in America and not have a criminal record. Martin Luther King has been to jail. James Farmer has been to jail. Why you can’t name a black man in this country who is sick and tired of the hell that he’s catching who hasn’t been to jail.”

It’s important to say that Malcolm went to prison for criminal activities as a young man. He experienced his incarceration as oppressive and was radicalized by the experience. He was not, however, a political prisoner. While some of the Panthers were imprisoned for political reasons, others were incarcerated for criminal activities ranging from fraud, robbery to sexual violence. These experiences of incarceration were qualitatively different from the direct action and intentional strategy used by Dr. King and other black activists to dramatize the injustice that black people experienced daily.

Henry David Thoreau is credited with having said that: “In an unjust state the only place for a man is in jail.” Bayard Rustin reinterpreted that concept and wrote that “it is an honor to face jail for a just cause.” Dr. King embodied this idea in his repeated trips to jail from the mid-50s to the mid-60s. In his famous “Letter from A Birmingham Jail,” he wrote:

One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

This is not to say that Dr. King enjoyed the experience of being locked up. Quite the contrary. In fact, I have written previously about Dr. King’s fear of solitary confinement. For King, Parks, and the young people from SNCC and CORE, going to jail was about civil disobedience. It was a strategy for gaining public support for the cause. For King, it was critical that his direct action be nonviolent in nature even when he was met with violence. This enraged other black activists including Malcolm X who frustrated by the images of police violence against peaceful protestors in Birmingham uttered the following words in his famous speech titled “The Ballot or the Bullet:”

Whenever you demonstrate against segregation…the law is on your side, and anyone who stands in the way is not the law any longer. They are breaking the law, they are not the representatives of the law. Any time you demonstrate against segregation and a man has the audacity to put a police dog on you, kill that dog, kill him, I’m telling you, kill that dog. I say it, if they put me in jail tomorrow, kill—that—dog. Then you’ll put a stop to it. Now, if these white people in here don’t want to see that kind of action, get down and tell the mayor to tell the police department to pull the dogs in.

I am thinking more deeply about all of these cross-currents in the history of the modern black freedom movement. I am left with a couple of over-arching questions: 1. How did the centrality of the carceral experience impact our community during that period? 2. What is different today in the era of hyper/mass incarceration?

As I continue to read, think and learn more, I hope to develop some satisfactory answers to these questions. It is a work in progress…

“They got the judges
They got the lawyers
They got the jury-rolls
They got the law
They don’t come by ones
They got the sheriffs
They got the deputies
They don’t come by twos
They got the shotguns
They got the rope
We git the justice
In the end
And they come by tens.
– From Old Lem by Sterling Brown

Back in the day, African American elders used to offer life lessons to young people through storytelling. Folktales provided a vehicle to impart truths in a fun and non-threatening way. I wish that we did more of this today in our communities.

When I was younger, I went through a period when I read every African and African American folktale that I could get my hands on. I even took a job at the New York Public Library for a year as an information specialist. I worked at the Countee Cullen branch library which is adjacent to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. There I could read all day to my heart’s content and I took full advantage of the opportunity. It was then that I discovered Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown. I became a particular fan of poet and folklorist Sterling Brown. He would often retell the story of Old Sis Goose. He told the story in different ways depending on the audience but the gist of the folktale is this:

While swimming across a pond, Sis Goose was caught by Brer Fox (who in some versions of the tale is described as a sheriff). Sis gets pissed off because she believes that she has a perfect right to swim in the pond. She decides to sue Brer Fox. But when the case gets to court, Sis Goose looks around and sees that besides the sheriff who is a fox, the judge is a fox, the prosecuting and defense attorneys are ones too and even the jury is comprised entirely of foxes. Sis Goose doesn’t like her chances. Sure enough at the end of the trial, Sis Goose is convicted and summarily executed. Soon the jury, judge, sheriff, and the attorneys are picking on her bones. The moral: “When all the folks in the courthouse are foxes and you are just a common goose there ain’t gonna be much justice for you.”

Folktales like Old Sis Goose were shared to impart lessons to young black people about understanding their place in the world and taking care not to step out of line in the white world lest they end up like Old Sis Goose. Some may find these types of folktales detrimental because they would seem to dissuade young people from resisting their circumstances. After all, Old Sis Goose ends up dead for feeling that she had a right to swim in the pond.

However, understood in their historical context, these stories were imbued with love and a desire to protect young people from the real dangers that they faced on a daily basis from a hostile and racist dominant culture. These stories about the rampant injustice in the system were meant to be cautionary tales.

In the Fire Next Time, James Baldwin beautifully expresses the fear that black parents, like his, had for their children:

“The fear that I heard in my father’s voice, for example, when he realized that I really believed I could do anything a white boy could do, and had every intention of proving it, was not at all like the fear I heard when one of us was ill or had fallen down the stairs or strayed too far from the house. It was another fear, a fear that the child, in challenging the white world’s assumptions, was putting himself in the path of destruction. A child cannot, thank Heaven, know how vast and how merciless is the nature of power, with what unbelievable cruelty people treat each other (p.26-27).

In his poem “Old Lem” (which I cite at the beginning of this post), Sterling Brown references the tale of Old Sis to make a statement about mob violence and the injustice of the criminal legal system for black people. Black parents like Baldwin’s knew that they and their children could suffer violence and even death at any turn. They looked for ways to cushion that reality by relaying stories that contained within them important lessons for living.

In the 21st century, we need a modern-day folktale admonishing our young people about how to interact with the police and the criminal legal system. We need our own updated version of Old Sis Goose. This time though, let’s make sure that Sis lives to fight another day..

Apparently the Washington Metropolitan Police has been overzealous (to say the least) about barring African American males from public housing properties. Before last week, I had never heard of the term “barring notice” which is defined as:

a tool that property owners and/or persons lawfully entitled to possession of property (and their agents whom they have approved to serve in such a capacity) may use to restrict an individual who is not lawfully present on their private property to ensure safety at the premises. If individuals violate a barring notice by appearing on the property after having received notice that they are not permitted on the property, they may face arrest and/or prosecution for unlawful entry on the premises.

These “barring notices” are an outgrowth of the War on Drugs. In an article on this topic titled “Kept Out: Responding to Public Housing No-Trespass Policies,” Elena Goldstein explains:

Typically, a PHA (public housing authority) that hopes to reduce drug sales or crime on housing development property will ask its local police department to warn nonresidents who enter the development that they are trespassing. Persons issued a warning are placed on a no-trespass list, maintained by the housing development manager or, in some cases, by the police themselves; if they return to the development, they are arrested.

The DC Metro Police have apparently taken the concept of a “barring notice” as a license to harass young African American males at will. A group of organizers and advocates are fed up with the practice:

Outrage and exasperation have emerged over the alleged treatment of young African-American men in our area.

Dozens have received “barring notices” from the DC Housing Authority Police and Metropolitan Police officers, forbidding them to visit local housing projects.

A spokeswoman for the DC Housing Authority says people are barred for engaging in any activity that threatens the health, safety or peaceful enjoyment of the premises by other residents. But some of the men insist they’re being barred simply for the way they look.

“I don’t even have a jaywalking ticket. They can’t even tell me why they slammed me on the ground, turning my pockets inside and out. Put their foot on my neck and laughing about it. Saying something to his partner about he’s going to jail tonight,” said Isaiah Green, a 21 year-old.

Green received one of the 67 “bar notices” issued so far this year at Woodland Terrace.

“Enough is enough. We are human beings. We’re not animals. We don’t deserve to go in cages. I have no record. I have never been convicted of any crime,” said Trayon White.

White was also arrested at Woodland Terrace. The Board of Education member was told he was not authorized to be on the property.

“And I was trying to figure out, ‘How can I be unauthorized to be on the property when I have an office and a contract with DC Housing Authority to serve on the property?'”

After a public outcry, the charges were dismissed, but White says his name is still in the DC court system.

“He’s branded for life and he did nothing. He has a Master’s degree. He’s a public servant. Duly elected. And they told him they can’t go certain places in the city,” said Johnny Barnes, a D.C. attorney.

Here’s the story of a 30 year man named Gary Lover who has been harassed while trying to visit his sick mother:

In 2008, he sat on the front porch of his mother’s home in the Lincoln Heights Housing when a jump out squad approached him asking for identification. When Lover questioned why he was being frisked, officers pushed him, charged him with disorderly conduct, arrested and took him to the Sixth District Police Station. He stayed overnight, went to court the following day and the case was dismissed.

“I never received any notification from the court, police or housing that I was barred from my mother’s place,” said Lover. For the next two years, Lover was arrested eight times for unlawful entry when he visited his mother. “Each time I was set free. The cases were not papered yet it still continues,” said Lover.

Wanda Lover, Gary’s mother, said she attributes her poor health to not being allowed to see her sons at her home of 25 years. “Both my sons are in the same predicament for no reason. It’s terrible. I’m angry because if I want to see either of my sons I have to meet them away from my home.”

“Sometimes police bang on my window shouting for my sons to come outside when they’re not even at my house. My sons haven’t committed any crimes. If something happens to me I can’t call my sons for help. It must be stopped,” said the ailing mother.

It appears that for some young men in D.C. “standing or visiting while black” qualifies as criminal activity. It seems to me that this is the equivalent of the Arizona “papers please” laws where people suspected of being undocumented immigrants can be stopped by law enforcement at will. It also reminds me of the slave patrols of old.

Art created by a participant in a comic arts project at our local youth jail (2010)

Happy New Year! When I started this blog 18 months ago, I wanted to find a place where I could write about my work and about the issues that I care about. It has turned into more than that. I really appreciate hearing from the readers of this blog. Your ideas, suggestions, and encouragement keep me writing. I am incredibly grateful.

The beginning of a new year is a great time to set intentions. Here are a few of mine for this blog:

1. I will continue to rant against various injustices. After all, what good is it to have a blog if you can’t rant and vent? It seems to me that this is the purpose of blogging: catharsis.

2. I hope to keep bringing the voices of currently and formerly incarcerated people to the fore. I’ll do that by sharing their writing and ideas.

3. I will continue to highlight the terrific prison abolitionist work that is taking place around the world (and particularly in the U.S.). This includes sharing resources and information about transformative justice.

4. I will continue to provide updates about my own work and share the product of that work when appropriate.

5. I hope to provide a platform for the writing and projects of friends and strangers who are doing inspiring and interesting work about the prison industrial complex. I hope to expand the space to include many more guest bloggers. The people who I have been gently nudging to write over the past 18 months will be getting more assertive pushes this year…

6. Finally, one of the most consistent themes that I hear from those of you who e-mail me is that you appreciate learning more about the history of prisons and criminal legal reform. I intend to continue to write about this here. In fact, I am planning a series that will focus on some of the “invisible” moments of resistance to the PIC over the past 400 years. More on this is forthcoming…

2012 is upon us. May each of us make the most of our opportunities this year and May we each contribute in some way to making the world more peaceful and just!