Today is Dr. Martin Luther King’s actual birthday. So Happy Birthday Dr. King!

In March 1960, supporters of Martin Luther King placed an advertisement in the New York Times, which was signed by 100 prominent Americans from all walks of life. Below is the advertisement and you can read the transcript here. Read the names of the signatories of the letter and see how many you recognize…

Advertisement, “Heed Their Rising Voices,”
New York Times, March 29, 1960
National Archives-Atlanta, Records of District Courts of the United States (National Archives Identifier 2641477)

Yesterday was a good day.

Cece McDonald was released from prison after being unjustly incarcerated for 19 months. Adding insult to injury, she was locked up in a men’s prison despite being a woman. Many people rejoiced including Cece herself who was obviously thrilled to be out of prison.

Cece with Laverne Cox leaving prison

I noticed a number of people on social media remarking that Cece was “free.” I thought of my friend Marcus who several years ago reprimanded me for applying this term to him. We were eating lunch about a month after he was released from serving five years in prison. I said, “So, how does it feel to be free?” He looked at me in his soul-searching way and replied: “I wasn’t free when I went in and I sure as shit ain’t free now.” I felt as though I had been punched in the gut because I of course knew this to be true. Since that conversation, I have tried to avoid using the term “free” when I talk about formerly incarcerated people.

Cece will suffer the collateral consequences of a criminal conviction and incarceration for years to come. This is what I call the ‘invisible shackles of the carceral state.’ Across the country, almost 6 million people are ineligible to vote in elections as a result of a criminal conviction. Cece who lives in Minnesota will be barred from voting until her “felony conviction record [is] discharged, expired, or completed.” This means that she will be disenfranchised for several years. She is one of the “lucky” ones who won’t be permanently barred from participating in a critical aspect of civic life.

Thankfully Cece has a supportive community of friends around her and has already found a place to live. However, most returning citizens find themselves scrambling to afford and rent apartments upon their release from prison. In many states, formerly incarcerated people are banned from public housing. Some find a place in halfway houses. Many more are made homeless.

In 2014, a criminal record is almost synonymous with permanent under and unemployment. In the current depressed economy, there are at least three applicants (usually more) for each open position. Employers have their pick of people to hire. Returning citizens are low on their list. Without a path to legal employment, many formerly incarcerated people turn to the informal economy to survive. This often leads them back to prison (PDF) within three years of their release.

In his searing memoir 7 Long Times, Piri Thomas writes poignantly about the psychological impact of his incarceration and his struggle to re-acclimate upon being released:

It took me a long time before I was able to get the prison cockroaches out of my head. I’d wake up at home from nightmares that I was back in prison hearing the horrors, the curses and screams, reliving the tensions, anger, and pain, my body drenched in cold sweat. It would take minutes for me to realize I was at home.

When I first came home, I couldn’t break the habit of waking up in the morning half-asleep, getting into my clothes and stumbling around my bedroom looking for the toilet bowl and wash bowl, then standing like a damn fool in front of my bedroom door waiting for the guard to spring the lock. While in prison, I had always fought against being institutionalized, but some of its habits had rubbed off on me a little too damn deep. Even now, twenty-four years later, I still have an occasional nightmare that I’m back in prison.

It’s not easy to “leave prison behind.” Many formerly incarcerated people battle depression and other mental health issues upon their release. Often without access to health insurance, many do not get counseling or any other support for their psychological struggles.

As a black transgender woman, Cece is at risk of violence every time she leaves the house as evidenced by the attack that led to her unjust imprisonment. In 2013, the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs documented at least 14 homicides of transgender women. The numbers are almost certainly much higher. The heightened risk of violence is another kind of cage, curtailing one’s movements and impinging on any sense of safety.

So while we rightly celebrate the fact that Cece has been released from prison and wish her well, let’s not forget the injustice that she was ever incarcerated in the first place. Let’s also remember that she is still dogged by the ‘invisible shackles of the carceral state’ so it behooves us to reframe the idea of ‘freedom.’ Finally, let’s make sure to commit ourselves to fighting for the release of the thousands of other trans people who are currently still locked up in our prison nation. In a letter from prison, Cece wrote:

“The real issues are the ones that affect all prisoners. People should get involved in changing policies that keep people in prisons, like exclusion from employment, housing, public assistance…These are just a few things that will keep people out of prisons and lead to the dismantling of these facilities.” (cited by Vikki Law)

Cece gets it. I hope others will too.

This spoken word piece by Javon Johnson is incredibly poignant.

My friend Carolyn has been in prison for over 10 years. We met through a mutual friend who told me that she was looking for a pen pal. We’ve been writing to each other for nearly eight years. I tell Carolyn about trivial, ridiculous, and important things. She shares her sorrows, challenges, and joys.

Carolyn never asks for anything. When I ask what she needs, she usually responds ‘nothing that you can give.’ Carolyn rarely writes about prison. She calls it a “tiny, lifeless place.” For her, prison life is mostly boring and always violent. She worries most for the young women who arrive daily. She wonders how quickly ‘the light will go out’ of them.

Carolyn says that her light dimmed on her 45th day in custody. It took me two years to ask what happened that day. She answered “nothing special, I opened my eyes and knew that it wasn’t actually a dream.”

Carolyn is one of my biggest cheerleaders. She is encouraging and always asks me to send her any articles where I am quoted and anything that I write. We don’t have arguments. I can only recall one time when she got angry at me. I was frustrated and tired so I threatened to stop speaking out about various injustices. She wrote me a scathing letter chastising me. I’ve kept the letter as motivation. It ended with these words:

“What you take for granted and what I hope you will never have to know is that we humans actually speak ourselves into being. You are your voice and your voice is you. You must speak to remind yourself to be.“

I tell Carolyn that she is a natural born writer. She ignores me. But she really is. When I think of her, as I do daily, in that “tiny, lifeless place,” I am overcome with anger which masks my fear and melancholy. I don’t like to be afraid so I sometimes trick myself into imagining that prison is not actually hell. I can’t stay fearful, sad, and angry every day. It would be debilitating so I pretend.

Yesterday, I saw an article in the Huffington Post about a photo shoot by stars of Orange is the New Black for Elle Magazine. The article mostly features photographs. Below is one of them.

I looked at the photographs and couldn’t help but think of Carolyn in her cage, in that “tiny, lifeless place.” Several years ago, I asked her if I could publish a letter that she wrote to me about being invisible. She declined. I was annoyed and had absolutely no right to be. Months later, she wrote again about her invisibility. I don’t have permission to share her letter but I don’t think she’ll begrudge me one sentence.

“I am ghost which means that only the most intuitive humans can actually see me.”

I am ghost… I have never forgotten her words. Not I am a ghost but I am ghost. Disembodied, not here/here, invisibly visible, dead/living, in between. Millions of prisoners are ghost. I look again at the glossy photos of the Orange is the New Black stars and I know that those images are about and for us on the outside, in the ‘free’ world, to assuage our fear, to hide our inhumanity, and to pretend that prison is not hell.

Carolyn is nowhere in those images. She is ghost…

I’m still on blogging hiatus but I came across this music video about private prisons called “Mississippi Lullaby” and thought that it was well done.

Some
Things
Do
Not
Make
You
Stronger…
They
Just
Make
You
DEAD.

– For Tyshawn Carter.

Imagination, at the Intersections
by nancy a heitzeg (h/t Kay Whitlock and Angela Y. Davis)

“This is what we need most in America — truly the entire world — today. Imagination. Religious scholar Walter Brueggemann has called it “Prophetic Imagination.” We need individuals who will not only occupy our streets, but also occupy our future. Brave soldiers of love who are crazy enough to dream of a world with no more war, no more violence, no more oppression based on the way people look, where they are from, or the way they were born.”

~ Charles Howard, Angela Davis: Power to the Imagination

It is 2014. Criminal InJustice is approaching the start of its fourth year of weekly publishing. Much remains unchanged. The US remains the world’s leader in incarceration. Racial disparities in school suspensions/expulsions, stop/frisk, arrest and imprisonment remain. Privatization and profiteering continues apace, with new alliances between old enemies and expansion opportunities in the field of “community corrections” growing. The courts failed us yet again with the gutting of the Voting Rights Act and the acquittal of George Zimmerman, just two examples among many. Perhaps the best overview is just here in the aptly titled 15 Things That We Re-Learned About the Prison Industrial Complex in 2013.

While the past year has brought some slim signs of progress in dismantling the prison industrial complex and its’ feeder – the school to prison pipeline, they are both small and slow. And not enough. As Nazgol Ghandnoosh and Marc Mauer, of The Sentencing Project ask this question:

We don’t have time to wait. Throughout our existence, we at CI have tried to illuminate the issue with data, statistics, the cold facts, and yes stories too, to illuminate, illustrate, increase the awareness needed as a foundation for change. This is no longer enough either. We know what the issues are. As co-editor Kay Whitlock has long argued, what we need to do is to imagine – dream a bolder vision.

And so we will. At the intersections.

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