The following is from my pen pal, Randy, who is incarcerated at Indiana State Prison. Randy loves to write and has been using his words to reach out to young people for the past few months.

Our Children and Prison
by Randy Miller

One of the most difficult aspects of prison life is the knowledge that our children are doing time with us. Our children did not choose to do our time. They were forced into it by our poor decisions and actions. They were left on their own to wonder why they don’t have a daddy to care for them. Wondering what they did wrong to cause their daddy to go away, and often face severe hardships in trying to establish a positive relationship with their incarcerated father.

Prisons are not designed to promote an environment for healthy family interactions. Prisons are designed to warehouse some violent, dangerous men and keep us as isolated from society as they can, so society can continue existing as if we didn’t. “Out of sight, out of mind,” should be the motto for the Department of Corruption. Little do lawmakers and prison officials care that the main people being hurt by their policies and regulations are our children.

Prisoners do care! I have seen hardened, defiant men, reduced to tears over their children. I’ve seen men who had otherwise lost their will to fight their own case, still fight everyday to see their kids. I’ve seen some of the hardest and meanest men in here, smile like kids when they talk about their children. Children are the most precious and sacred part of any prisoners life, and unfortunately, it’s the most difficult part of our lives to get straightened out.

Prison officials don’t care who gets hurt outside these walls. The only thing they care about is controlling the population of the prison, in such a way that it goes as efficiently and smoothly as possible. The smoother it runs, the more beds they can open up and the more men they can lock-up. Prisons were designed to be not-for-profit institutions, to rehabilitate men and integrate them back into society as productive citizens. Prisons have become a business, and like any business, the more beds they fill, the more money they make, and they don’t care who gets hurt in the process.

Just like us, our children have become nothing more than statistics, to the home-wrecking machine known as the Department of Corruption. How much longer will our children have to pay the price for our mistakes? How much longer will society carry on acting like they don’t know about the problems that exist within our prisons? How much longer will we have to wait for those in power to realize they are crippling society by continuously releasing institutionalized, traumatized men back into society? Someone needs to take notice, before it’s too late.

I am seriously ready to stop thinking about the police for the foreseeable future.

Readers of this blog know that I have lived with the police (so to speak) for the past 16 months or so. Today I am proud and honestly more than a little relieved to share a set of resources that has been months in the making. My friends and family have no doubt grown weary of hearing me talk about policing, violence, and resistance over these past months. But their love for me seems to have overwhelmed any lasting annoyance.

Almost everything that I do is done in collaboration with others. I want to offer my deepest and most profound gratitude to some people who’ve come on this journey with me.

Earlier in the week, I thanked my friend Rachel Marie-Crane Williams for her generosity, passion, and incomparable talent. Thank you to my friend Lewis Wallace who just consistently steps up, dives in, and always produces. My friend Mauricio Pineda created an amazingly beautiful work of art as part of this project and I am grateful beyond measure to him for collaborating with me. Thanks to Billy for saying yes whenever I say “Come on, let’s put on a show.”

The list of people to thank is long because it takes a village (at least) to build and create anything worthwhile. I want to acknowledge everyone who has contributed to this project and say THANK YOU!

You will find the following resources here:

1. A set of pamphlets about historical moments of policing, violence and resistance.
2. A new guide with activities and resources for talking to youth about policing and violence.
3. A zine by Rachel Williams about the manifestations of police violence.

Finally, I want to say that everyone associated with this project volunteered their time and talents. This is significant because it underscores the commitment to social justice that they all have. It also shows that it is possible to do this work without the benefit of grants or funding. The truth is that I have and do rely on friends (old and new) to make projects like this happen. Local and national funders are not clamoring to support political education projects.

Please share these resources with others. Use them to foster discussions and to catalyze action in your own communities. I put this project together with the hope that it ultimately contributes to the making of a more just and less oppressive world. Please spread the word… You can find all of the resources here

The following is my list of everyone who I owe my undying appreciation to for their contributions to this project (in alphabetical order):

Madeleine Arenivar, Samuel Barnett, Micah Bazant, Martha Biondi, Antonia Clifford, Lisa Dadabo, Billy Dee, Lakeesha J. Harris, Julie Hilvers, Mariame Kaba, Eric Kerl, Megan Milks, Laura Mintz, Olivia Perlow, Emily Pineda, Mauricio Pineda, Caitlin Seidler, Gina Tarullo, Lewis Wallace, and Rachel Marie-Crane Williams.

Continuing with my roll out of the resources that we will share with supporters on Saturday and with the broader public on Monday, I have written a pamphlet about a history of resistance to police violence in Harlem. This is part of the historical moments in policing, violence, and resistance series. Thanks to Eric Kerl for designing and laying out the publication.

In February 2012, over thirty community-based organizations in New York City came together to form “Communities United for Police Reform .” The coalition has launched a campaign to address the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) “Stop and Frisk” policies which disproportionately target innocent black and brown community residents. Police violence especially against black people in New York City is endemic and historical. As early as the 1920s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was filing complaints about police violence against the NYPD.

From the early 20th century through the 1960s, police violence was one of the most visible symbols of racial oppression in the North. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, in a survey of attitudes held by residents in cities where riots broke out, reported that police practices were the major grievance, followed by unemployment and inadequate housing.

This pamphlet illustrates how police violence in fact engendered resistance from Blacks in cities like Harlem. Harlem became the epicenter of black New York and perhaps even black America at the turn of the 20th century. In Harlem, tensions with the police were a permanent part of life. In 1943, a riot was triggered by a police officer’s mistreatment of a young woman. In 1957, Malcolm X came to national prominence following an incident of police brutality. In 1964, Harlem once again went up in flames after another incident of police mistreatment of local residents.

This pamphlet focuses on these three episodes to provide some perspective about the history of police violence in New York City and particularly in Harlem in the mid-20th century. The topics are covered in an introductory manner and additional information is provided at the end for those who want to focus more in-depth.

You are the first to be able to download a copy of the pamphlet here. I’ll be talking about this publication and other resources on Saturday. Details about the event are here. If you are in Chicago, feel free to stop by.

I’ll be back to posting again on Monday. Hope you have a good weekend!

In honor of May Day, I wanted to share a pamphlet about the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre written by my friend Samuel Barnett and designed by Madeleine Arenivar. This is part of a set of new resources that will be released to supporters this Saturday and to the broader public on Monday. My goal in launching this series of pamphlets is to inject some historical memory into our current discussions and considerations of policing and violence.

Sam introduces the story of the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre below:

What we today call the Memorial Day Massacre of 1937 occurred when Chicago police officers opened fire on a group of 1000 protestors attempting to establish a picket line in front of Republic Steel, on the city’s southeast side. Similar to the Haymarket Tragedy fifty years earlier, no direct documentation exists from which to ascertain how the violence began that Sunday afternoon. A Paramount news cameraman filmed much of the march and the brutal beatings police laid on injured and fleeing protestors, but he was changing lenses at the moment shots rang out, leaving open questions of interpretation about what sparked the violence. In the days and months that followed two narratives emerged, strikingly different in the way they explained the cause of the massacre and the events that led up to it.

The story of how this became known as the Memorial Day Massacre is one of how the victims of police violence, with their allies in law and elected office, in the labor movement, in their communities, and in radical political organizations countered a hostile and wildly inaccurate report of details to reframe public perception and reveal a brutal display of class violence perpetrated against working people by state and capital through their agents, the police.

This much was certain: Around four o’clock in the afternoon at 117th Street the protestors encountered a line of Chicago police officers, 200 in number. By the end of the day four protestors were dead and nearly 100 hospitalized with serious injuries. Another six men would die before the week’s end. The police sustained no major injuries. Many of the 65 people they arrested were seriously wounded.

The Chicago Tribune immediately built a narrative which established the protestors as the provocateurs, justifying the police’s use of lethal violence to stop an enraged mob, led or inspired by communists, intending to invade the mill and forcibly halt production. Coroner Frank Walsh personally declared to “fix the blame” on “the mob.” His report ruled the death of the ten men as ‘justifiable homicide,’ despite the fact that the deceased’s wounds were on their backs or sides, indicating they were trying to flee, not attack, the police. Together with police testimony, forces loyal to the Republic Steel corporation engaged in Red-baiting as a means to shape public and legal perception of the incident.

Read more about the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre in the following new pamphlet (PDF) by Samuel Barnett. Readers of Prison Culture are the first to access the publication (lucky you!).

If you are in Chicago this weekend, join us on Saturday from 1:30 to 4:30 p.m. at UIC and listen to Sam talk a bit about this pamphlet. Details about the event are here.

Yesterday, I saw this article about the abuse of women prisoners in Oregon. Since I am currently immersed in reading about the history of women in prison, I thought that I would write something about the role that “reform” has played in the history of female prisoners.

In the mid 19th century, female reformers pushed the states to establish new facilities that would house women separately from male prisoners. These would be called “reformatories.” This proposal was in response to some of the scandals that were uncovered in the treatment of female prisoners who were housed with men in penitentiaries. I wrote about some of those scandals in a post last week. Additionally, female prisoners were subjected to brutal treatment in custodial facilities.

The new reformatories would particularly cater to young (white) first time offending women between the ages of 16 to 30 who were convicted of misdemeanors. Reformers believed that these wayward young women had the capacity to change. This was a shift from the previous societal view which held that female criminals were “fallen” women who were basically evil and irredeemable. For late 19th century prison reformers, certain female criminals could be rehabilitated into future wives and mothers. All these women needed was the proper training. Women of color, of course, were not afforded the benefit of being seen as redeemable. They were considered inherently immoral and basically beyond rehabilitation.

From the beginning, the Reformatory movement ran into trouble. States felt that these facilities were too expensive. Marie Gottschalk (2006) outlines several unintended consequences of these separate women’s prisons. Chiefly she makes this important point:

“Previously, women who committed transgressions like vagrancy, drunkenness, prostitution, and giving birth out of wedlock served short sentences in local jails, if they were incarcerated at all. Reformers successfully made the case that it was now acceptable to ignore the norm of proportionality because the aim was to treat offenders, not punish them (p.117).”

So what the reformatory movement actually succeeded in doing was to widen the net for incarcerating more women. Nicole Hahn Rafter (1985) suggests that “reformatories extended government control over working-class women not previously vulnerable to state punishment” and used the power of the state to “correct women for moral offenses for which adult men” were not incarcerated (p.158).

In reading about women prisoners in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, I came across an interesting essay by Cheryl D. Hicks (2009) about how the state regulated working-class black women’s sexuality in Harlem at the turn of the 20th century. Many young black women were hounded and falsely charged with prostitution in Harlem. Their sexual behavior was the subject of intense surveillance by their families but also by the police. Hicks reviews prison records of young black women who were incarcerated in the Bedford reformatory in the early 20th century to learn about how these women and prison administrators described their sexual behavior. It is a really interesting read and adds a great deal to our collective understanding of how gender and race discrimination became institutionalized as justice.

I return to Marie Gottschalk (2005) to summarize the limitations of the reformatory movement:

“The reformatory movement generally took an uncritical view of the state in penal policy. It did not question the fundamentals of the prison system nor whether many of these women ought to be considered criminals at all. It authorized the state to police new areas of behavior and to sanction tougher punishments for acts that previously had been overlooked or subject to mild rebukes. It contributed to the spread of indeterminate sentencing and to erosion of the norm of proportionality in punishment. It also legitimized the practice of using institutions like reformatories to “correct” deviations from traditional roles (p.118).”

This should give current criminal legal reformers pause. We should always be vigilant that our proposed reforms do not serve to widen the net of the prison industrial complex. This should be the test of any new proposal.