According to a recent study titled Children on the Outside: Voicing the Pain and Human Costs of Parental Incarceration:

African American children are seven and Latino children two and half times more likely to have a parent in prison than white children. The estimated risk of parental imprisonment for white children by the age of 14 is one in 25, while for black children it is one in four by the same age.

The magnitude of this crisis often feels impossible to convey to the general public. Yet in order to create a successful mass movement to dismantle the prison industrial complex, we must engage thousands of people across all racial, class, gender, religious backgrounds. How do we do this?

Over the years, I have relied on popular education as an important component of organizing for social change. One of the main reasons that I create so many curricula is to find useful ways to disseminate knowledge that might lead to future action. I am privileged to be a member of the Chicago PIC Teaching Collective. The Teaching Collective is an all-volunteer group that organizes interactive workshops, film screenings, and trainings which aim to inspire action. We also produce educational materials and resources. We provide opportunities for youth and adults to explore issues related to mass incarceration/hyperincarceration. We focus on practical steps to inspire, inform, and enable action, and on how to develop workable alternatives.

The PIC Collective officially launched last fall and has 20 members. We’ve been working together on a couple of projects over the past few weeks. The first involves creating a 3 hour PIC 101 workshop that will be offered in our communities. The second is to create a zine that can be disseminated as we conduct our workshops.

We look forward to offering our first couple of PIC 101 workshops in April and June respectively. Below is a draft of an image that our friend, the talented Billy Dee has created for the zine.

By Billy Dee

The goal of the PIC collective is to make the invisible visible. I’ll keep you up to date about our progress as we launch our workshops this spring.