If you’ve read this blog even once, you know that I am against prisons. I am particularly against incarcerating children. Today kicks off the National Week of Action Against Incarcerating Youth.

I write a lot about the prison industrial complex (including the juvenile punishment system) and last year I published a paper with my friend Dr. Michelle VanNatta about alternatives to youth incarceration in Chicago. In the paper, we provided a brief literature review about juvenile detention and incarceration. I am republishing that part here to buttress the case against incarcerating young people.

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This is a video worth watching. It underscores how destructive the so-called “war on drugs” has been…

Next, TAKE ACTION.

Marie Smith doesn’t want her eight-year old son, Scott, to miss a particular exhibit that has dropped into the Colonial Park Plaza shopping center. She lets him gaze at it a moment, then delivers her message. “See,” she whispers, “it doesn’t pay to be bad.” (Source: Machalaba, Daniel, Wall Street Journal, 11/27/78)

Marie and her son Scott had just seen an electric chair that was part of a traveling exhibit called “Jail on Wheels.” In the late 1930s, a local sheriff named J. Edward Slavin came up with an idea. He wanted to create a mobile exhibit that would prevent juvenile delinquency. Thus “Jail on Wheels” was born in 1947. The specially-designed bus included ‘crime prevention’ equipment such as handcuffs, fingerprinting kits, weapons, tear gas, grenades, bulletproof vests, a resuscitator, and a “drunkometer.” The “Jail on Wheels” also featured a jail cell and a replica of an electric chair and gas chamber. Sponsored by the J. Edward Slavin Foundation, “Jail on Wheels” was popular through the 1970s. Millions of people toured the mobile exhibits over the years across the United States.

1940s Jail on Wheels Bus

“Jail on Wheels” was the precursor to the modern “Scared Straight” prison programs. Over the past couple of weeks, I seen some articles about the enduring popularity of Scared Straight programs despite empirical evidence that they are in fact harmful.

Critics have long pointed out that these programs are detrimental likening them to “horror shows.” Yet parents across the country have been undeterred. I guess it just “feels” like it should “work.” Aaron MacGruder famously satirized Scared Straight in his animated series ‘The Boondocks’.

I’ve previously written about my aversion to taking black & brown children on prison field trips. I’ve also underscored the cruelty of subjecting black and brown children to gruesome emergency room field trips too. These strategies DO NOT WORK. They only serve to traumatize children while dehumanizing prisoners.

The programs need to die.

I’ve hinted that I was working on an exciting project (one of a few). Well last week, the final draft went to the printer, today I officially approved the proof and in a couple of weeks a limited edition of 150 copies of “No Selves to Defend: A Legacy of Criminalizing Women of Color for Self Defense” will be available for purchase. All proceeds will go to support Marissa Alexander’s Legal Defense.

writer, Mychal Denzel Smith; artist, Molly Crabapple

Over a hundred years ago, in 1913, Mary Wilson was charged with murder. She was arrested in February in San Antonio, Texas for killing a trooper named Olaf Olson. The authorities say that she confessed. Mary was held without bail. She said that the soldier threatened her. She tried to flee to a friend’s home but Olson followed her and he grabbed her. Mary was scared. She thought that “he intended to do her bodily injury.” Mary “drew a revolver and shot him.” It was self-defense. But she was caged because she was black and a woman living in Texas at the turn of the 20th century. For a black woman, mere flesh is not a self. And for centuries, black women have had no selves to defend.

writer, Victoria Law; artist, Rachel Galindo

The Mary Wilson incident is documented by Rev. Elijah Clarence Branch in a book titled “Judge Lynch’s Court in America.” History is replete with stories of women (particularly of color) who were precluded from invoking self-defense in the face of violence. In fact, too many have been and are criminalized for protecting themselves. Marissa Alexander’s story is part of this unfortunate and unjust legacy.

writer, William C. Anderson; artist, Micah Bazant

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Learn more about how you can TAKE ACTION.

Note from Dustin: I am sending you an essay for your blog. Maybe someone will find themselves in this story and speak up.

Note from Prison Culture: I met Dustin in a class that I taught at Stateville Prison a couple of weeks ago. I received a letter from him a few days ago that included his essay “Either/Or.” I am happy to publish it here. If anyone would like to write to Dustin about his story. He can be reached at:
Dustin Sherwood Clay
R23623
Stateville Prison
P.O. Box 112
Joliet, IL 60434

You can also leave your comments below and I will make sure that they get to Dustin.

EITHER/OR by Dustin Sherwood Clay

There was a creek on my block in Bellwood that snaked under the street and exposed itself where lots for homes should have been. It is full two stories down to water level. It’s gated but gates are little hindrance to the thought of adventure. In the daytime the creek held mystery. Both slopes were steep and filled with brush, like most scenes in Jason movies. The thought of white water rafting under streets on the gentle currents of a slow moving creek seemed more exciting than being tall enough for the big boy roller coasters at Six Flags.

David got his hands on a blue hard plastic raft with two yellow hard plastic ores. The mission (and we chose to accept it) was to make sure no parent could see us sneak the raft up and over the gate and ease it down the slope to navigate the great unknown. We were pretty sure the raft was made for one but me, David and my brother was kids. Surely together we couldn’t exceed the weight of an adult. David hid the raft in his garage. My brother and I put ourselves in charge of the ores. We hid them in our living room behind our Dad’s chair. Hiding it in plain sight was not the plan, we actually thought they were hidden.

It was still a few days until the weekend. We agreed we needed a full day to explore the water. Christopher Columbus on the deck of the Santa Maria had to feel like a man with vision. There’s nothing like it, vision makes you find a way out of no way. I can’t even swim but dreams of the water felt like a great escape.

Me and my brother slept upstairs in a split level house next to our baby sister’s room. Our parents took over the guest room downstairs. Sometimes they would fight. Once the police were called. In ’83 domestic violence calls were the shortest investigation ever. If the woman pressed charges the man would be home in an hour minus 50 bucks with that being cause for another ass whoppin. If threat of arrest was realized, but all together avoided, it had a calming effect on the situation. Most times my brother and I didn’t leave our room. But the tones of hostility captured our attention like lassos in Dad’s old westerns. When that hostility flows out of the mouths that speak love to us, my heart drops.

One night we heard the boom of our Mother being knocked up against a wall. This fight was different. The tussling sounded desperate. I followed my brother’s lead. He flew out the bed, down the stairs with me and our baby sister in tow. My father was hunched over our Mother who was crouched down up against the dresser by the door of their bedroom. Dad’s eyes were intense and bloodshot, nose flaring, jaw clenched. His arms seemed even more massive, up in the air ready to strike again with the yellow hard plastic ore in his hands. I froze. I heard my brother screaming for my Dad to stop, my little sister screamed. I said NOTHING.

I can count on one hand how many times I heard my Mother use bad words in my whole life, this day being the first. At that moment she told my father, “You was out getting pussy.” That threw me. My Dad was slapped with rage, swinging the ore as if trying to erase those words from her lips. Mom used her full strength to block each blow while sobbing. A heavy humming sob that seemed to come more through her, than from her, from another dimension. My memory shuts off here like broken film in a projector. Write, missing reel here.

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Brave New Film’s newest release follows a young woman named Vanessa whose mother’s incarceration had a destructive impact on her life. From the Huffington Post:

When they took her mom away, Vanessa stopped caring. She acted out in school, got in trouble with the law, and ended up in a group home. By the time we met her, her mom only had a year left in her sentence, but Vanessa was one small mistake away from violating her probation and ending up in juvenile hall. Imagine the mother walking out of the walls of prison, only to see her child step in.

Note: It’s Mother’s Day. For several years now, I’ve been considering the idea of un-mothering. I share my inchoate thoughts here today. They are part & parcel of my ongoing consideration of how blackness functions across categories, social locations, and histories. In other words, these are jumbled ideas and you probably shouldn’t bother to read them. I’m trying to work through some ideas and writing them down helps that process…

The title of this post was originally “Punishing Black Motherhood.” In the U.S., black mothers have been and continue to be punished and controlled in various ways. Dr. Dorothy Roberts writes brilliantly about this phenomenon in two books and several articles. For example, “Prison, Foster Care, and the Systemic Punishment of Black Mothers” in the UCLA Law Review provides a good analysis of how the criminal legal and child welfare systems work together to police and control black women’s bodies and families. She writes that the systems “function together to discipline and control poor and low-income black women by keeping them under intense state supervision and blaming them for the hardships their families face as a result of societal inequities (p. 1491).” She also points out that stereotypes about black women as ‘welfare queens’ and ‘matriarchs’ subject them to and reinforce punitive policies.

Anecdotal and empirical evidence support Dr. Roberts’s claims. Over the past few years, however, I’ve been considering the idea of “un-mothering” as it relates specifically to black American women. Connie Chung has used the term (un)mothering to discuss “the politics of representation in documenting the homeless female ‘other’.” The concept of un-mothering that I advance focuses on the ways that the state and society actively & violently threaten, remove, disappear, and kill black women’s children. Through this process, black women become un-mothers having (sometimes) given birth and then had their children disappeared. For those women whose children are still in their care, the threat of un-mothering looms. It’s unclear what impact this might have since the concept of un-mothering isn’t explicitly articulated within the culture.

At least a couple of times on this blog, I’ve quoted a passage in Solomon Northrup’s “12 Years A Slave” where he describes the closing scene of an 1841 New Orleans auction:

“…The bargain was agreed upon, and Randall [a Negro child] must go alone. Then Eliza [his mother] ran to him; embraced him passionately; kissed him again and again; told him to remember her — all the while her tears falling in the boy’s face like rain.

“Freeman [the dealer] damned her, calling her a blabbering, bawling wench, and ordered her to go to her place and behave herself, and be somebody. He would soon give her something to cry about, if she was not mighty careful, and that she might depend upon.

“The planter from Baton Rouge, with his new purchase, was ready to depart.

“‘Don’t cry, mama. I will be a good boy. Don’t cry,’ said Randall, looking back, as they passed out of the door.

“What has become of the lad, God knows. It was a mournful scene, indeed. I would have cried if I had dared.”

The 1853 edition of “12 Years A Slave” included the following illustration depicting the violent process of Eliza’s un-mothering.

Separation of Eliza and her last child. (1853) Source: Twelve years a slave.

I’m wondering if the demand that black women not be seen publicly grieving their dead and/or disappeared children can also be seen as an important dynamic in the process of un-mothering. White mothers are given license to show public emotion in a way that is not reciprocated for black women with children. Eliza cried as her child was ripped from her embrace. She was admonished by the slave master, Freeman, to stop bawling. A few weeks ago, I wrote about Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis’s mothers: “In our historical moment, Sybrina and Lucia stand before the cameras stoic, pained, and tearless. One wonders if Freeman’s threat to Eliza not to cry has carried over somehow to 2014.” Murdering black women’s children un-mothers and denying them the right to be seen grieving seems key to the process.

The following images of enslaved women being forcibly separated from their children also provide representations of un-mothering.

Mother being separated from her baby. (1862) Source: Slavery in South Carolina and the ex-slaves; or, The Port Royal Mission. By Austa Malinda

[Woman pleading for the return of her two small children.] (1862) Source: Slavery in South Carolina and the ex-slaves; or, The Port Royal Mission. by Austa Malinda

I recently learned that “Louisiana was the only slave state that passed legislation mandating the auction of children born to enslaved women inmates (Derbes, 2013, p.278).” This process of un-mothering was enabled by an 1848 Louisiana law titled: “An Act Providing for the disposal of such slaves as are or may be born in the Penitentiary, the issue of convicts.” Brett Josef Derbes (2013) documents that:

“Eleven children were torn away from their mothers in the Louisiana state prison at approximately the age of ten years old and sold into slavery, with the proceeds going to the ‘free school fund.’ Four of those children were sent to plantations owned by the lessees of the penitentiary. Records of the transactions were difficult to locate, and the children are documented in only a handful of official penitentiary records. The 1850 slave schedule revealed that the children were kept in the penitentiary as property of the state, but only the 1860 population census identified their place of birth as ‘born in the penitentiary’ (p.288).”

[To be continued…]