I picked up this photograph while antiquing last year. I didn’t recognize the young man’s name or know of his legal case. I was just struck by the photograph. Later, I did some research to educate myself about what happened to him. Predictably, it was another miscarriage of justice. You can read more about his story here and here

I try as much as possible to document activism & resistance by youth in Chicago on this blog. I do this because I am profoundly committed to the idea of youth leadership development and voice. I am co-founder of the Chicago Freedom School and these issues are central to our mission. I also see the activism of youth in this city as critical to prison abolition.

Anyway, today over 100 people gathered on the Southside of Chicago on 61st & Cottage Grove as part of an event organized by youth from FLY (who I’ve referenced several time on the blog) and members of Chicago Students Organizing to Save Our Schools (CSOSOS).

The Chicago Tribune reported on the event:

The protesters [sic] staged a “die-in” about 4:45 p.m. on South Cottage Grove Avenue at East 62st Street to make the case that school closures will force displaced students to cross gang lines. The protesters wore mock blood-stained shirts as they blocked traffic at the intersection before being arrested. Goldenberg said.

The protest was intended “to demonstrate to Mayor (Rahm) Emanuel the loss of life that he will be responsible for if he and his appointed school board go through with the proposed closures,” the group said in a press release.

DNAinfo Chicago offered more details:

Matt Ginsberg-Jaeckle, an organizer with Southside Together Organizing for Power, and others called the event — in which students blocked traffic in the intersection of 61st Street and Cottage Grove Avenue — a “die-in.”

Students wore mock-bloody clothes in an effort to show the effect they believe school closings will have: more violence and death for the young students forced to cross new gang territories.

“The message is that school closings are killing people,” Ginsberg-Jaeckle said. “Everyone knows what will happen when these kids start crossing these gang lines.”

The students laid down in the intersection, blocking traffic for several minutes before being taken away by police after refusing to leave, witnesses said.

Police could not confirm immediately confirm any arrests but said the protest was “peaceful.”

According to witnesses at the scene, the students were led away in handcuffs.

Kelly High School teacher William Lamme said two of his students were arrested in the protest.

“They wanted to do something to show how they feel,” said Lamme, a Kelly social studies teacher. “Mayor [Rahm] Emanuel is certainly creating a school for young activists.”

Nearly 100 activists, parents and students were at the event, initially arranged by parents from Fiske and Sexton elementary schools. Sexton is slated to close and merge its students into Fiske.

“We have to make our voices louder and our actions stronger,” said Lamme, who came to support his students. “This is civics 101.”

Here is a brief video of a student whose school is targeted for closure speaking the importance of keeping it open:

As per usual, the amazing and intrepid movement photographer, Sarah Jane Rhee was on the scene to document the student resistance. She posted her terrific photographs on Facebook. I share some of them below.

Read more »

I Have Seen You
by Lolita Lebron

I have seen you as I searched
in the shade
of this terrifying and cold silence.
Some furniture falls to pieces…
and I’m left with the cell,
bereft of warmth and humor.
Everything is so alone. So disquieting.
Love has gone so far away from my eyes…
And there is no chirping from the birds
to make me smile away my sorrow…
“I am trembling, companero,
with painful and exhausting uneasiness!”
My shoulders hurt…as if sinking under
the weight of tortured rock,
The hour is dark.
The day silent with a moan
hidden in its great burden.
Even prayer is wounding: in the depths of my entrails
pain tearlessly weeps.
I like forests and gardens.
The waterfalls and their tiny crabs,
their rocks,
their murmurs and bubbles,
their radiant streams,
the thought of their mysteries,
with flowers and plants surrounding them.
Their aromas.
And how I loved the washerwomen,
scrubbing upon the rocks
with a box of bluing at their side.
How they remind me of mama!
Here, jail is like a tempest,
heavy and hard-hearted…
A ruin that reeks of death
and unspeakable pain.
It is the white bear’s domain.
Keys and blows, headcounts,
injustices and schemes.
Undisclosed tortures
from an unwritable book.
The real story of death,
unwritten, without pages.

Thanks to the outrageously talented Ariel Springfield, the Assata Shakur Teach-Ins have a poster that can be used to advertise your event.

In today’s edition about the racist and failed “war on drugs,” I wanted to share this commentary and report by Melissa Harris-Perry who asks if this is the beginning of the end for this so-called war.

The word “war” is often utilized to push people into fighting for a collective goal or against a common enemy. There are classic military conflicts like the Civil War and World War II, and there are the ideological fights like the “War on Poverty” launched by Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

But what happens when a war is waged against a faceless and intangible enemy? Host Melissa Harris-Perry asked her Sunday panel whether it is time to re-focus and rename the “War on Drugs.” As Eugene Jarecki, director of the documentary The House I Live In, put it, “It hasn’t achieved anything. It’s achieved catastrophe.”

In the 42 years since President Nixon launched the “War on Drugs” in 1971, the consequences have outweighed the gains. According to the ACLU, of the 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States, 25% of them imprisoned for drug offenses. There’s a reason why these incarceration rates are so high, according to Kathleen Frydl, author of The Drug Wars in America, 1940-1973. “Our incarceration rates reflect the artifacts of our enforcement strategies,” said Frydl on the show.

There is an ethnic divide when it comes to drug arrests. Thirty-eight percent of those arrested for drug offenses are African-Americans, and they spend almost as much time in prison for those drug offenses as white criminals do for violent offenses.

Read more

Once upon a time, not so long ago, people who identified as feminists cared profoundly about prisoners and prisons. They were at the forefront of advocating prison abolition. Things changed…

I decided to share this great reminder from 1971 in the radical feminist publication “Off Our Backs (PDF)” when it was still a newsletter. Below are some excerpts from the publication that includes an essay about prison abolition.

Women Prisoners Revolt

In support of their brothers at Attica and the 28 demands they made, the women incarcerated at Alderson demonstrated peacefully on Tuesday, September 14. The demonstration developed into a total strike with the women refusing to return to their cottages. Later they met with representatives of the federal prison parole board and presented additional demands including fair wages for work performed in the jail (they presently receive 7 cents an hour); mail privileges; and treatment facilities for addicts. Frustrated by the out-of-hand rejection of their demands and the harsh and adamant attitude of the prison officials, the women rioted. Tear gas was used. They were all then locked into the cottages. Three sisters “escaped” from the rooms to tell the press what had happened.

Unprecedented actions have been taken against the women who presented the demands. Sixty-six of them have been transferred to to a male youth reformatory in Ashland, Ky. Additional male guards (there are usually * 60) now patrol Alderson to enforce “order.” Authorities will not release the names of women who have been transferred or say where they will be sent now.

How Many Lives?

How many years of people’s lives must be lost, hidden, and brutalized, before we see that prisons must be abolished?

How many Atticas, San Quentins and Aldersons will it take till we realize that our society has created these monstrous institutions out of fear — fear of human freedom, cultural differences, loss of capitalist property. The ethics of our society have been distorted by this fear, and are then imposed on non-white people, poor people, young people and women to make survival and experimentation crimes. Why should people in Amerika spend years in jail for such “immoral” acts as smoking grass, getting drunk and singing in the streets, making love or printing “obscenity”, much less for standing by moral decisions not to kill or work for an immoral government? If prisons were really to protect us from psychopaths, murderers and thieves, they would contain Nixon, Rockefeller, Mitchell, Reagan, Agnew, owners of motor industries and oil dynasties, slum land lords, church leaders, and Pentagon officials. Prisons are the extreme domestic example of the racism, sexism, militarism and imperialism that we have been watching for years in Vietnam.

Who needs “rehabilitation” in our society? Not the slaves of ghetto deprivation and drugs pushed by those who wish to dull possible insurgency. Not the men and women who have learned to hustle and survive despite all efforts to destroy them. Not revolutionaries like Angela Davis and George Jackson. The people who need to be “rehabilitated” (if that’s even a correct attitude to have toward any human beings) are those whose minds and bodies have been warped by false value systems that convince them that some people must die so they can live, many must starve so they can eat, all must slave so they can enjoy rest.

“Rehabilitation” is the pacification program of liberalism. Even if we did want to “rehabilitate” sick or deviant minds or bodies, prison would be the last place to achieve it. We need to rid our selves of prisons. They are a danger to society not only because they are schools for “crime” (70% of all “crimes” are committed by ex-convicts) but because they try to erase from our consciousness people who could possibly bring about exciting changes in our social order. We need women like Angela Davis, Erica Huggins and Madame Ngo Ba Thanh among us. We need the Puerto Rican revolutionaries locked inside Alderson.

To abolish prisons we may have to develop “reforms” that carry within them contradictions that will make it hard to achieve them without drastically changing prisons — black prisoners’ unions with collective bargaining power, ending detention before conviction, a national prisoner monitoring system, open door policies, viable alternatives to incarceration. But whatever approaches are used, the goal should be prison abolition. To have no alternative at all would be better than to continue the present reality. And we can’t wait for the ending of racism, sexism and poverty in this country before we begin tearing down the walls. It may be in our own self-interest.

The question on the table: which current feminist publication can you imagine would publish such words?

This month is Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month. I am certain that this is flying under many people’s radars. It shouldn’t. As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I am familiarizing myself a lot more this year with the history of Japanese Internment. The entire country should be well-versed about this unjust and immoral travesty.

Today, I have decided to highlight a copy of Executive Order 9066 from the National Archives:

Issued by President Franklin Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, this order authorized the evacuation of all persons deemed a threat to national security from the West Coast to relocation centers further inland. In the next 6 months, over 100,000 men, women, and children of Japanese ancestry were moved to assembly centers. They were then evacuated to and confined in isolated, fenced, and guarded relocation centers, known as internment camps.

Read more here

Read more »

“Emaciated and frail, more than 100 men lie on concrete floors of freezing, solitary cells in Guantánamo, silently starving themselves to death.

Stripped of all possessions, even basics such as a sleeping mat or soap, they lie listlessly as guards periodically bang on the steel doors and shout at them to move an arm or leg to prove they are still conscious.”

These are the opening words of an article that I read last weekend about Guantanamo prison hunger strikers. I felt sick to my stomach as I continued to read but made myself do it anyway.

Then I came across an article about Willie Manning’s impending execution in Mississippi:

“Mississippi is still scheduled to execute a convicted murderer Tuesday despite a lack of physical evidence tying him to the crime and a new admission from the Department of Justice that the forensic investigation was severely flawed.

Willie Jerome Manning, a 44-year-old African-American man, has been in prison for almost 20 years after being convicted for the 1992 kidnapping and murder of Jon Steckler and Tiffany Miller, two white college students in Mississippi.”

At the last minute, a court granted Mr. Manning a temporary stay of execution. I took a deep breath and exhaled conscious of the fact that his state-sanctioned murder was only postponed for the time being.

Read more »

This is a great photograph of Inez Garcia whose seminal legal case I wrote about here. I also shared a vintage flier created by her Defense Committee as the first item in this series.

The Sentencing Project released a report in February about the racial dynamics of women’s incarceration in the U.S. One of the main findings was that the gap between black women’s incarceration rates and white women’s shrank in the past decade. Specifically:

In 2000 black women were incarcerated in state and federal prisons at six times the rate of white women. By 2009 that ratio had declined by 53%, to 2.8:1. This shift was a result of both declining incarceration of African American women and rising incarceration of white women.

This news was greeted with some joy in certain quarters and it’s true that a declining rate of incarceration for black women is a good thing. However, it’s also true that most women who are currently locked up are black and that black women are still more likely to be incarcerated than white women. This is a cause for continued concern and renewed activism.

I thought about this report again when I heard the news of Lauryn Hill’s three-month prison sentence for tax evasion. It will come as a surprise to no one that I think imprisoning Ms. Hill is wrongheaded and actually destructive. Like most women who are incarcerated, Lauryn Hill has children. She will now have to be separated from them for several months. Some will suggest that she has the financial resources to make sure that her children are cared for in her absence. My response is that children need their primary caregiver’s presence as much as they do financial resources. Locking Lauryn Hill up will deter no one from cheating on their taxes. If we want her to be accountable for transgressing our social norms, then I can think of hundreds of other ways that don’t involve prison time. Does anyone doubt that had Miley Cyrus been convicted of tax evasion, she would have been sentenced to community service? The question is a rhetorical one.

I find it difficult to write about Lauryn Hill because I have a great deal of affection and admiration for her. I don’t know her personally but that doesn’t matter. She is familiar to me. Being born a brilliantly talented black girl in the U.S. is to be subjected to attack, abuse, and to develop a thick skin at an early age. Lauryn feels familiar to me because we are of the same generation though she is a few years younger than me. I’ve imagined what her life might have been if she had been born in a different era. Ironically, if she had been born a generation earlier, I can imagine her walking into a jail cell under completely circumstances.

Read more »