Ky Peterson – Survived and Punished from BCRW Videos on Vimeo.

Ky Peterson should be free, but right now he is in prison for defending his life.

In 2011, on a fall evening in Americus, Georgia, Ky Peterson, a young Black trans man, was walking home from a convenience store when he was attacked and knocked unconscious. When he came to from the blows, he was being raped. Fearing for his life, Ky fought back. In the midst of the struggle, Ky shot his attacker, killing him.

Though he survived, Ky feared for his life again, knowing too well the police and criminal legal system’s brutal record on anti-Black racism, transphobia, and criminalizing survivors of sexual and physical violence. He was right.

Neither police nor prosecutors believed Ky was a victim.

Instead, he was charged with involuntary manslaughter with a twenty year sentence, fifteen of those years to be served in prison. Abused by the courts and neglected by the public defenders assigned to his case, Ky was coerced into signing a plea deal.

Ky’s community mobilized. They appealed to the court to reduce Ky’s sentence, which exceeded Georgia’s limits for involuntary manslaughter. Five years later, in 2017, Ky was granted a re-sentencing hearing, but the judge denied his request for parole. Instead, his sentence was changed from involuntary to voluntary manslaughter, providing the state of Georgia legal justification for the twenty-year sentence. In prison, Ky faces an isolation known for magnifying psychological torture and physical and sexual violence at the hands of corrections officers.

Ky has now been in prison for over five years with fifteen years left on his sentence. His community continues mobilizing in his defense.

by Micah Bezant

Free Ky, Free Them All

Ky is not alone. Prisons are filled with survivors of physical and sexual violence, as well as survivors of state violence. Black and Brown people, immigrants, low-income and no-income people, women, queer and trans people, and people with disabilities are routinely criminalized for daily acts of survival.

Take Action: Community Self-Defense

We know from the successful campaigns to free Joan Little in the 1970s to the more recent campaign to free Marissa Alexander that grassroots mass mobilizations work. That’s why the Ky Peterson Defense Committee, including support from organizations Freedom Overground, Survived and Punished, Black and Pink, and Southerners on New Ground, are organizing to free Ky from prison.

NYC student activists are collaborating with Freedom Overground and Survived and Punished on a letter writing campaign to demand that Georgia Governor Nathan Deal pardon Ky and release him from prison.

If you live in New York City, you can join these activists at a letter writing party next Wednesday, August 16.

If you don’t live in NYC or you can’t make it next Wednesday, check out the Freeing Ky Support Guide from Freedom Overground to organize a letter writing party in your own community and learn about other ways to support Ky and others locked up in prison. You can also learn more by visiting the Freedom Overground website. Please use these resources and share them widely.

If you are on social media, you can help build momentum to support Ky’s freedom by posting a photo of yourself with a message of solidarity, using the hashtag #Justice4Ky and tagging @KyPeterson1 on Twitter and The Free Ky Project on Facebook.

Many people like Ky Peterson, Joan Little, and Marissa Alexander are in prison all over the United States, doing time for defending themselves and surviving.

Visit the Survived and Punished website to learn about ongoing campaigns for freedom and to support the work.

Download the Survived and Punished toolkit for resources on starting a defense campaign.

A few weeks ago, I was the keynote speaker at a national gathering of community bail funds. I spoke about a number of things. Here’s an excerpt from my talk:

The National United Committee to Free Angela Davis framed bail as a political weapon that was being used against Black and poor people as a way to unjustly and illegally detain them. They write:

“In NYC, however, money bail is set in 85% of all felony cases – and well over half of these alleged felons are held because they can’t afford bail. But of these people, more than 1/3 are later acquitted of all charges, and another large percentage are convicted but given suspended sentences. Who ae these people who spend months and years behind bars despite their right to bail and freedom? In NY, there are poor Blacks and Puerto Ricans, for the most part – and they number in the tens of thousands ever year, jamming and overflowing the city’s ancient and dilapidated jails.

Most people have no idea of the larger number of brothers and sisters who languish behind bars because they can’t make bail. It’s generally thought that everyone has access to bail bondsmen whose activities are carefully regulated by law.”

Doesn’t this sound eerily familiar?

What is our current coherent political argument against the coercive use of bail/bond? What is our consistent argument that is being articulated across our movements?

[…]

The National United Committee to Free Angela Davis was clear-eyed in linking its fight to free Davis with a broader fight to free all prisoners:

“A political attack on the bail system as a racist system of pre-trial detention has to be mounted in all prominent political cases. But the attack, to be successful, must not only result in the freeing of a particular captive. It must also bring massive, organized pressure to bear on the whole oppressive bail system itself. Political activists are captured and incarcerated because their struggles point towards the liberation of all oppressed peoples. Only when the burden of oppression has been lifted from the shoulders of all their brothers and sisters will political prisoners be truly free.”

Recently, Critical Resistance hosted a discussion for donors about abolishing cash bond and ending pre-trial detention. You can hear the discussion below.

CR also produced a set of guidelines for considering bail reforms from an abolitionist perspective. You can download those guidelines here. You can find more resources that were shared on the webinar/call here.

Ending Child Sexual Abuse: A Transformative Justice Handbook (PDF) is freely available online and features relevant information regarding child sexual abuse as well as an accessible introduction to transformative justice and concrete action steps for those seeking to prevent, heal, or transform the impact of child sexual abuse in their lives.

This handbook seeks to update and make more widely available the ideas first put forward ten years ago through generationFIVE’s document “Toward Transformative Justice.”

generationFIVE has spent the last decade, with allies across movements and across the country, developing Transformative Justice. Transformative Justice is an approach to respond to and prevent child sexual abuse and other forms of violence that puts transformation and liberation at the heart of the change. It is an approach the looks at the individual and community experiences as well as the social conditions, and looks to integrate both personal and social transformation.

Their aim was to develop intervention and prevention that aligned with:

• our analysis of child sexual abuse as both one of the symptoms and perpetuators of oppression and violence
• a politic committed to systemic change and liberation
• our commitment to healing, agency, and accountability
• the actual relationships and situations in which child sexual abuse happens
• the oppression and limitations of state responses

More here.

Since I’m currently on vacation for the next couple of people, I’ll try to post more regularly. I am excited to share a new book from my friend and comrade Andrea Ritchie that was just released last week. Invisible No More: Police Violence against Black Women and Women of Color explores how Black women, Indigenous women, and women of color experience racial profiling, police brutality, and immigration enforcement.

I am honored to have written a foreword for the book. Here are a few words from that:

“By centering the experiences of girls and young women of color Invisible No More extends and enlarges the carceral landscape, insisting that we consider the streets, schools and the home as sites of oppressive policing. Previously obscured, sexual and reproductive violence come into view. Invisible No More also argues that paying attention to these issues expands and transforms how we consider policing. As more people address the ever-expanding prison industrial complex (PIC), this book finds itself in dialogue with others addressing the history and impacts of mass incarceration on women of color (particularly Black women and girls). After all, the police are the gatekeepers of the PIC. But racialized gender violence doesn’t stop with police.

This book doesn’t just document police violence against women of color, nor does it simply offer policy prescriptions to reduce the harms of oppressive policing. Invisible No More is also an invitation to resistance to each of us, and will serve as a long overdue and invaluable resource to anchor and inform the efforts of young people organizing today against state violence in all its forms.”

I recommend reading this book. You should take care as you do read it because it is a lot to process. You can learn more about the book at its website.

You can listen to Andrea speaking about the book on the Lit Review podcast.