Today is National Occupy Day in Support of Prisoners. I am glad that folks around the country are coming together to bring needed attention to the plight of those we lock in cages. We should be in solidarity with prisoners every day.

A pen pal of mine who has been imprisoned for the past 10 years once told me that he saw himself as one of society’s “throw away” people. His words have stayed with me. They have pushed me to write letters to incarcerated people even when I have been at my most exhausted. It seems a small thing: a letter. I have learned however that isolation is one of the most difficult parts of being behind bars. The sense that you have been forgotten can sap you of all hope. We are only human in relation to other humans. Our need to be connected to one another is often overlooked but it is essential. Prisoners remind us of this on a daily basis.

So today, if you are not planning to take part in any of the actions that are being planned as part of the National Occupy Day in Solidarity with Prisoners, I make a humble request. Please consider becoming a pen pal for an incarcerated person. Organizations and projects like the Write to Win Collective (here in Chicago), Black and Pink, and Razor Wire Women provide you with an opportunity to connect with prisoners who would appreciate corresponding with you.

I haven’t been well over the past few days. My energy is low so it would be easy to just pull the covers over my head and stay in bed. Instead I’ll be spending my afternoon in a local arts center making cards and writing letters with young people who have incarcerated relatives. “Showing up” is the best way to express solidarity so that’s what I will be doing. As I am writing my letters today, I will keep Jimmy Santiago Baca’s poem in mind:

Letters Come to Prison
by Jimmy Santiago Baca

From the cold hands of guards
Flocks of white doves
Handed to us through the bars,
Our hands like nests hold them
As we unfold the wings
They crash upward through
Layers of ice around our hearts,
Cracking crisply
As we leave our shells
And fly over the waves of fresh words,
Gliding softly on top of the world
Flapping our wings for the lost horizon.

1976, Arizona State Prison-Florence, Florence, Arizona.

Update: A special thanks to my friends who came out this afternoon to help and participate in our card-making event at Rumble Arts Center. I was so moved by the beautiful sentiments expressed in the cards. We heard from a woman who told us that she had been incarcerated seven times and knew how important it was to receive mail while locked up. Here is a photo taken by the amazing Sarah Rhee of some of the terrific cards created by a couple of wonderful girls.

Take a look at the graph below. This is the result of many bad policy decisions but one stands out in particular…

Some months ago, I wrote about the cowardice of Illinois politicians and the corruption of the media in a post about the suspension of the state’s meritorious good time (MGT) program. Sure enough as many (including me) predicted, this disastrous political decision has had the effect of increasing the Illinois prison population by nearly 4,000 at an additional cost of nearly $100 million. I am of course not Nostrodamus. This was a completely foreseeable consequence of a dumb decision made by our Governor.

I attended a meeting about Illinois prison overcrowding on Monday and Malcolm Young once again spoke about the importance of reinstating MGT. He has written a new white paper (PDF) which is essential reading for anyone who is interested in the background on MGT, the political controversy and the consequences of the suspension of the program.

In the coming days, please look out for an opportunity to help push the Governor to instruct the Department of Corrections to reinstate MGT. I will be sharing the template of a letter that you can send to Governor Quinn as well as other ways that you can make your voice heard on this matter if you live in Illinois.

UPDATE: You can urge Governor Quinn to reinstate MGT by e-mailing, calling, sending a letter or signing a petition. Information is HERE.

I think that the re-entry industrial complex is a racket. Yet real people get out of prison and jail every single day and need to navigate hostile waters on the outside. One such person is Tracey Stevens who narrates her story. I think that her words are poignant and should compel us to REALLY focus on providing opportunities for formerly incarcerated people.

NEW YORK, Jan. 26, 2012 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — Other state agencies cover billions in corrections expenses

State taxpayers pay, on average, 14 percent more on prisons than corrections department budgets reflect, according to a report released today by the Vera Institute for Justice. The report, The Price of Prisons: What Incarceration Costs Taxpayers, found that among the 40 states that responded to a survey, the total fiscal year 2010 taxpayer cost of prisons was $38.8 billion, $5.4 billion more than in state corrections budgets for that year. When all costs are considered, the annual average taxpayer cost in these states was $31,166 per inmate.

While it is common knowledge that some prison costs are tracked outside their budgets, The Price of Prisons marks the first time these costs have been quantified for prisons across the states. To calculate the total price of prisons, Vera developed a survey tool that tallied costs outside corrections budgets. The most common of these costs were fringe benefits, underfunded contributions for corrections employees’ pension and retiree health care plans, inmate health care, capital projects, legal costs, and inmate education and training.

“This new tool changes the equation. It paints a far more accurate picture of the costs to taxpayers,” said Adam Gelb, director of the Public Safety Performance Project at the Pew Center on the States. “State leaders already have been questioning whether corrections spending passes the cost-benefit test, especially for nonviolent offenders.”

The scale of the expenditures outside of corrections departments ranged from less than 1 percent of the total cost of Arizona’s prison budget to as much as 34 percent in Connecticut. For example, the Connecticut Department of Corrections spent $613.3 million for prisons in fiscal year 2010; when all state costs are included, the total taxpayer cost was $929.4 million. The main outside costs were pension contributions ($147.1 million) and employee fringe benefits, including health insurance ($104.2 million). (For more information, see the fact sheets for states that completed the survey at www.vera.org/priceofprisons .)

The study found the following range of prison costs outside states’ corrections budgets in 2010:

20 to 34 percent in six states: Connecticut, Illinois, Missouri, New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas;

10 to 19.9 percent in nine states: Arkansas, California, Delaware, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, New Jersey, Washington, and West Virginia; and

5 to 9.9 percent in nine states and less than 5 percent in 16 states.

“As states continue to deal with serious budget constraints, it’s critical that policy makers, corrections officials, taxpayers, and legislators know exactly what their prisons cost,” says Vera director Michael Jacobson. “Many states are moving toward reserving incarceration for the most dangerous people and using proven strategies to improve public safety at a lower cost.”

To help policy makers manage prison costs, the report identifies a number of measures that states have taken to reduce spending while maintaining public safety. Options include modifying sentencing and release policies, strengthening strategies to reduce recidivism, and boosting operating efficiencies.

The publication is based on a survey conducted in August 2011 by Vera’s Center on Sentencing and Corrections and Cost-Benefit Analysis Unit, in partnership with the Pew Public Safety Performance Project. The report includes detailed methodology that state officials may use to calculate the full taxpayer price of prisons each year.

SOURCE Pew Center on the States
REPORT: http://www.vera.org/download?file=3407/the-price-of-prisons.pdf
Download the report and fact sheets for each participating state at www.vera.org/priceofprisons.

PARTICIPATING STATES: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho. Illinois
Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland Michigan, Minnesota ,Missouri ,Montana ,Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma , Pennsylvania Rhode Island Texas, Utah, Vermont ,Virginia, Washington, West Virginia , Wisconsin
Copyright (C) 2012 PR Newswire. All rights reserved

Last summer, I decided to curate a photographic exhibition to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Attica Prison Uprising. The exhibition which included photographs from John Shearer (who kindly sent them to me) and from my own collection of newspaper wire photos was incredibly well received. It culminated with a reading of original prose and poetry written by Attica prisoners and observers as well as a presentation by Michael Deutsch who shared his reflections about defending some of the Attica Brothers.

The experience that most impacted me though was the visit that I facilitated for a group of middle school boys from a local after-school program. As the young men walked around looking at the photographs, I watched their faces closely. Some seemed perplexed, others were clearly fascinated and a few were upset.

After they had seen the pictures, I asked how many of them had ever heard of the Attica Prison uprising. Out of the group of about 16 young men (all Black and Latino), not one hand went up. None had heard about the Attica rebellion. This was not at all surprising to me. Most people haven’t. But it was the response to my next question that really shook me. I asked how many of them knew a friend, relative, or neighbor who had been or was currently “locked up.” Every single hand in the room went up. Every single one. 16 out of 16.

This happened in September of last year and I haven’t written about it before today because I have been trying to process the experience since then. What does it mean when young men of color grow up not knowing the history of Attica but knowing so many people in their lives who were or are incarcerated? How do they make meaning of this experience? What lessons are they learning about how the world works for black and brown people?

After a few months of consideration, I have decided to take on an ambitious project. With the help of my friend Teresa Silva, who is a museum curator and scholar, I plan to organize some sort of an exhibition this year that will narrate a history of black imprisonment in the U.S.

I may have mentioned here in the past that I am a collector of prison-related artifacts. I have been for over 15 years now and have amassed a treasure trove of items relevant to the history of black people’s relationship to the criminal legal system in the U.S.

So with Teresa’s help, I am hoping to offer an opportunity for young black people in Chicago to interrogate themes related to the prison industrial complex: past, present, and future. My intention is to help young people to develop critical thinking about the experience of incarceration in the U.S., to identify its root cause, to consider resistance efforts, and to apply the experience to their own current circumstances.

I heard Rinku Sen recently say that: “Information is not power. Power is power and action makes information a conduit to power.” My challenge in co-curating this exhibition will be to make sure that young people don’t simply walk away with information but with a real desire to take ACTION today to address the epidemic of mass/hyper-incarceration which is ravaging black and brown communities across the U.S.

Stay tuned to hear about our progress in organizing the exhibition which I hope will open in October or November of this year. Much remains to be done, to start with, I need to find a venue for the exhibition. More details will be forthcoming and I welcome your ideas about what you might include in such an exhibition. How would you tell a history of black imprisonment in the U.S. in a way that would be empowering rather than dispiriting? I’d love to hear any thoughts about this.

I am dedicating this project to my young friend who committed suicide this past November.

In the meantime, I wanted to share one piece of my collection of stuff. Below are a set of vintage original mug shots from police records in Pennsylvania in the 1930s through the 1950s.

Also, here is Angela Davis making an important point about the failure of the educational system to teach about history and literature. This is why I have always worked to develop opportunities outside of the classroom to share historical knowledge with the broader public. It has been a motivating factor in my work since I was a teenager:

Yesterday, the Sentencing Project released a new report about private prisons titled “Too Good To Be True.”

The report details the history of private prisons in America, documents the increase in their use, and examines their supposed benefits. Among the report’s major findings:

1. From 1999 to 2010 the use of private prisons increased by 40 percent at the state level and by 784 percent in the federal prison system.

2. In 2010 seven states housed more than a quarter of their prison population in private facilities.

3. Claims of private prisons’ cost effectiveness are overstated and largely illusory.

4. The services provided by private prisons are generally inferior to those found in publicly operated facilities.

5. Private prison companies spend millions of dollars each year attempting to influence policy at the state and federal level.

The following table shows the dramatic increase in prisoners held in private prisons in the U.S. over the last decade:

Prisoners Held in Private Prisons in the United States

	1999	2010	Change 1999-2010
Total Prison Population	1,366,721	1,605,127	+17%
Total Private	71,208	128,195	+80%
Federal Private	3,828	33,830	+784%
State Private	67,380	94,365	+40%

 

 

Read an analysis of these charts by clicking here.

I occasionally get e-mails from people who ask me about how prison abolition looks in practice. I have decided to share some examples here today.

First, here is an introduction to the context within which we are operating.

Critical Resistance is one of the organizations that is actively operationalizing the concept of prison abolition:

Vikki Law does an excellent job of providing an overview of community-based alternatives for addressing harm. These models of intervening when harm occurs can and should form the basis of prison abolition.

Finally, the great Angela Davis brings it home as she asks us to re-imagine our ideas and understanding of “justice.”

I have been working for the past six months on a long essay about how policing and prisons figure into the modern black freedom movement. I often use this blog as a way to work out what I think about certain issues. This is one of those times so please forgive the disjointed nature of this post. I am thinking out loud…

Police, prisons, and jails (basically the apparatus of the carceral state) figure prominently across the history of the black freedom movement. Since slavery, black people in the U.S. have found themselves in conflict with the instruments of state power which have sought to control our bodies, our labor, our families, and our very freedom.

I have been reading quite a bit about the modern civil rights movement again (1945 to 1975) and am struck by how prominently police brutality and prison/jail figure in the narratives of that struggle. Police harassment consistently triggers riots in Harlem, Chicago, Rochester, Watts, & L.A just to name a few cities. People fed up with unrelenting police brutality find ways to lash out and/or to resist.

I have written about how the Black Panther Party centered the problem of police violence in their analysis and in their organizing. Their Ten Point Program titled “What We Want, What We Believe” advocated an end to police harassment and a reliance on self-defense to counter the brutality that people of color were subjected to on a daily basis.

Aside from the centrality of police violence in narratives of black protest, I am struck too by the prominent leaders in the movement who find themselves repeatedly jailed during this period: Martin, Malcolm, Bayard, Diane, Fannie, Rosa, Huey, Stokely, H. Rap, James Farmer, John Lewis… The list is so long as to seem interminable. In fact, Malcolm makes the point in a speech that:

“You can’t be a negro in America and not have a criminal record. Martin Luther King has been to jail. James Farmer has been to jail. Why you can’t name a black man in this country who is sick and tired of the hell that he’s catching who hasn’t been to jail.”

It’s important to say that Malcolm went to prison for criminal activities as a young man. He experienced his incarceration as oppressive and was radicalized by the experience. He was not, however, a political prisoner. While some of the Panthers were imprisoned for political reasons, others were incarcerated for criminal activities ranging from fraud, robbery to sexual violence. These experiences of incarceration were qualitatively different from the direct action and intentional strategy used by Dr. King and other black activists to dramatize the injustice that black people experienced daily.

Henry David Thoreau is credited with having said that: “In an unjust state the only place for a man is in jail.” Bayard Rustin reinterpreted that concept and wrote that “it is an honor to face jail for a just cause.” Dr. King embodied this idea in his repeated trips to jail from the mid-50s to the mid-60s. In his famous “Letter from A Birmingham Jail,” he wrote:

One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

This is not to say that Dr. King enjoyed the experience of being locked up. Quite the contrary. In fact, I have written previously about Dr. King’s fear of solitary confinement. For King, Parks, and the young people from SNCC and CORE, going to jail was about civil disobedience. It was a strategy for gaining public support for the cause. For King, it was critical that his direct action be nonviolent in nature even when he was met with violence. This enraged other black activists including Malcolm X who frustrated by the images of police violence against peaceful protestors in Birmingham uttered the following words in his famous speech titled “The Ballot or the Bullet:”

Whenever you demonstrate against segregation…the law is on your side, and anyone who stands in the way is not the law any longer. They are breaking the law, they are not the representatives of the law. Any time you demonstrate against segregation and a man has the audacity to put a police dog on you, kill that dog, kill him, I’m telling you, kill that dog. I say it, if they put me in jail tomorrow, kill—that—dog. Then you’ll put a stop to it. Now, if these white people in here don’t want to see that kind of action, get down and tell the mayor to tell the police department to pull the dogs in.

I am thinking more deeply about all of these cross-currents in the history of the modern black freedom movement. I am left with a couple of over-arching questions: 1. How did the centrality of the carceral experience impact our community during that period? 2. What is different today in the era of hyper/mass incarceration?

As I continue to read, think and learn more, I hope to develop some satisfactory answers to these questions. It is a work in progress…

Apparently the Washington Metropolitan Police has been overzealous (to say the least) about barring African American males from public housing properties. Before last week, I had never heard of the term “barring notice” which is defined as:

a tool that property owners and/or persons lawfully entitled to possession of property (and their agents whom they have approved to serve in such a capacity) may use to restrict an individual who is not lawfully present on their private property to ensure safety at the premises. If individuals violate a barring notice by appearing on the property after having received notice that they are not permitted on the property, they may face arrest and/or prosecution for unlawful entry on the premises.

These “barring notices” are an outgrowth of the War on Drugs. In an article on this topic titled “Kept Out: Responding to Public Housing No-Trespass Policies,” Elena Goldstein explains:

Typically, a PHA (public housing authority) that hopes to reduce drug sales or crime on housing development property will ask its local police department to warn nonresidents who enter the development that they are trespassing. Persons issued a warning are placed on a no-trespass list, maintained by the housing development manager or, in some cases, by the police themselves; if they return to the development, they are arrested.

The DC Metro Police have apparently taken the concept of a “barring notice” as a license to harass young African American males at will. A group of organizers and advocates are fed up with the practice:

Outrage and exasperation have emerged over the alleged treatment of young African-American men in our area.

Dozens have received “barring notices” from the DC Housing Authority Police and Metropolitan Police officers, forbidding them to visit local housing projects.

A spokeswoman for the DC Housing Authority says people are barred for engaging in any activity that threatens the health, safety or peaceful enjoyment of the premises by other residents. But some of the men insist they’re being barred simply for the way they look.

“I don’t even have a jaywalking ticket. They can’t even tell me why they slammed me on the ground, turning my pockets inside and out. Put their foot on my neck and laughing about it. Saying something to his partner about he’s going to jail tonight,” said Isaiah Green, a 21 year-old.

Green received one of the 67 “bar notices” issued so far this year at Woodland Terrace.

“Enough is enough. We are human beings. We’re not animals. We don’t deserve to go in cages. I have no record. I have never been convicted of any crime,” said Trayon White.

White was also arrested at Woodland Terrace. The Board of Education member was told he was not authorized to be on the property.

“And I was trying to figure out, ‘How can I be unauthorized to be on the property when I have an office and a contract with DC Housing Authority to serve on the property?’”

After a public outcry, the charges were dismissed, but White says his name is still in the DC court system.

“He’s branded for life and he did nothing. He has a Master’s degree. He’s a public servant. Duly elected. And they told him they can’t go certain places in the city,” said Johnny Barnes, a D.C. attorney.

Here’s the story of a 30 year man named Gary Lover who has been harassed while trying to visit his sick mother:

In 2008, he sat on the front porch of his mother’s home in the Lincoln Heights Housing when a jump out squad approached him asking for identification. When Lover questioned why he was being frisked, officers pushed him, charged him with disorderly conduct, arrested and took him to the Sixth District Police Station. He stayed overnight, went to court the following day and the case was dismissed.

“I never received any notification from the court, police or housing that I was barred from my mother’s place,” said Lover. For the next two years, Lover was arrested eight times for unlawful entry when he visited his mother. “Each time I was set free. The cases were not papered yet it still continues,” said Lover.

Wanda Lover, Gary’s mother, said she attributes her poor health to not being allowed to see her sons at her home of 25 years. “Both my sons are in the same predicament for no reason. It’s terrible. I’m angry because if I want to see either of my sons I have to meet them away from my home.”

“Sometimes police bang on my window shouting for my sons to come outside when they’re not even at my house. My sons haven’t committed any crimes. If something happens to me I can’t call my sons for help. It must be stopped,” said the ailing mother.

It appears that for some young men in D.C. “standing or visiting while black” qualifies as criminal activity. It seems to me that this is the equivalent of the Arizona “papers please” laws where people suspected of being undocumented immigrants can be stopped by law enforcement at will. It also reminds me of the slave patrols of old.