Once upon a time, not so long ago, people who identified as feminists cared profoundly about prisoners and prisons. They were at the forefront of advocating prison abolition. Things changed…

I decided to share this great reminder from 1971 in the radical feminist publication “Off Our Backs (PDF)” when it was still a newsletter. Below are some excerpts from the publication that includes an essay about prison abolition.

Women Prisoners Revolt

In support of their brothers at Attica and the 28 demands they made, the women incarcerated at Alderson demonstrated peacefully on Tuesday, September 14. The demonstration developed into a total strike with the women refusing to return to their cottages. Later they met with representatives of the federal prison parole board and presented additional demands including fair wages for work performed in the jail (they presently receive 7 cents an hour); mail privileges; and treatment facilities for addicts. Frustrated by the out-of-hand rejection of their demands and the harsh and adamant attitude of the prison officials, the women rioted. Tear gas was used. They were all then locked into the cottages. Three sisters “escaped” from the rooms to tell the press what had happened.

Unprecedented actions have been taken against the women who presented the demands. Sixty-six of them have been transferred to to a male youth reformatory in Ashland, Ky. Additional male guards (there are usually * 60) now patrol Alderson to enforce “order.” Authorities will not release the names of women who have been transferred or say where they will be sent now.

How Many Lives?

How many years of people’s lives must be lost, hidden, and brutalized, before we see that prisons must be abolished?

How many Atticas, San Quentins and Aldersons will it take till we realize that our society has created these monstrous institutions out of fear — fear of human freedom, cultural differences, loss of capitalist property. The ethics of our society have been distorted by this fear, and are then imposed on non-white people, poor people, young people and women to make survival and experimentation crimes. Why should people in Amerika spend years in jail for such “immoral” acts as smoking grass, getting drunk and singing in the streets, making love or printing “obscenity”, much less for standing by moral decisions not to kill or work for an immoral government? If prisons were really to protect us from psychopaths, murderers and thieves, they would contain Nixon, Rockefeller, Mitchell, Reagan, Agnew, owners of motor industries and oil dynasties, slum land lords, church leaders, and Pentagon officials. Prisons are the extreme domestic example of the racism, sexism, militarism and imperialism that we have been watching for years in Vietnam.

Who needs “rehabilitation” in our society? Not the slaves of ghetto deprivation and drugs pushed by those who wish to dull possible insurgency. Not the men and women who have learned to hustle and survive despite all efforts to destroy them. Not revolutionaries like Angela Davis and George Jackson. The people who need to be “rehabilitated” (if that’s even a correct attitude to have toward any human beings) are those whose minds and bodies have been warped by false value systems that convince them that some people must die so they can live, many must starve so they can eat, all must slave so they can enjoy rest.

“Rehabilitation” is the pacification program of liberalism. Even if we did want to “rehabilitate” sick or deviant minds or bodies, prison would be the last place to achieve it. We need to rid our selves of prisons. They are a danger to society not only because they are schools for “crime” (70% of all “crimes” are committed by ex-convicts) but because they try to erase from our consciousness people who could possibly bring about exciting changes in our social order. We need women like Angela Davis, Erica Huggins and Madame Ngo Ba Thanh among us. We need the Puerto Rican revolutionaries locked inside Alderson.

To abolish prisons we may have to develop “reforms” that carry within them contradictions that will make it hard to achieve them without drastically changing prisons — black prisoners’ unions with collective bargaining power, ending detention before conviction, a national prisoner monitoring system, open door policies, viable alternatives to incarceration. But whatever approaches are used, the goal should be prison abolition. To have no alternative at all would be better than to continue the present reality. And we can’t wait for the ending of racism, sexism and poverty in this country before we begin tearing down the walls. It may be in our own self-interest.

The question on the table: which current feminist publication can you imagine would publish such words?

When the news first broke, I didn’t believe it. Frankly I still don’t. It’s taken me a few weeks to write this post. I am still in a bit of shock.

After years of organizing and struggle in Illinois, TAMMS Supermax is closed. As of last Friday, so too is Dwight Prison. These are tenuous victories to be sure because there are many who continue to believe that prisons must remain a permanent fixture.

There are still some who continue to call for Dwight to remain open citing prison overcrowding. But this is surely not the solution to address overcrowding. Instead the state should develop or expand the use of initiatives such as good time credits or diversion programs. More importantly, we should reduce our prison population while improving public safety by investing in communities to ensure that people do not end up behind bars in the first place.

In communities all across Illinois, women and men are caught in a vicious cycle of arrest, conviction, prison, surveillance and re-arrest, making it nearly impossible to maintain housing, health, jobs, and relationships. Rather than contribute to this tragedy, we must invest in prison alternatives and community-based services, while addressing the root causes of incarceration. We need to rebuild the social infrastructure rather than spend more on a failed prison system. Closing Dwight and other prisons in Illinois will help us to find new resources to invest in these better options.

The shuttering of Dwight follows the closing of two youth prisons: Murphysboro and Joliet. Last month, Vikki Law wrote about the activism that helped lead to the closure of the two youth prisons. Regular readers of this blog know that I have been working for years to close youth prisons in this state. You have read some of my rants over the past couple of years. We finally have our first victories and I have found it difficult to articulate my feelings. I am overcome.

So many people have had a hand in these victories but I want to specifically single out my friends and allies at TAMMS YEAR 10. For over a decade now, this dedicated group of organizers, educators, activists, family and community members has been calling for the closure of the torture chamber formerly known as TAMMS Supermax. They organized direct actions, lobbied legislators, hosted countless workshops, created art, wrote letters and so much more. Most importantly, they were a voice for those who didn’t have a public one: the men who were locked up at TAMMS.

Prison destroys lives. This is a fact. I am thinking today of James who spent time at IYC-Joliet and came out scarred and damaged seemingly beyond repair. I am thinking of another young man who told me that IYC-Joliet was a living hell for him.

There are still about 50,000 adults and nearly 1,000 youth locked up in prisons across Illinois. I know that closing four prisons is only one part of a long struggle to decarcerate Illinois. All of the people who are still locked up today in prisons need our advocacy. We must and will continue to press for their freedom. We have some encouragement in our work. We know that it is possible to close prisons in Illinois. We must build on these victories and remain in the fight for the long haul. One of my favorite poets, Gwendolyn Brooks, is someone I always turn to when words fail me. So today I rely once more on her wise words:

Say to them,
say to the down-keepers,
the sun-slappers,
the self-soilers,
the harmony-hushers,
“Even if you are not ready for day
it cannot always be night.”
You will be right.
For that is the hard home-run.
Live not for the battles won.
Live not for the end-of-the-song.
Live in the along.

“Speech to the Young, Speech to the Progress-Toward (Among Them Nora and Henry III)”
by Gwendolyn Brooks

La Lucha Continua! La Lucha Continua!

It’s Women’s History Month and my friends are pretty great… My friend, Katy, made this coloring page illustration of Audre Lorde and the PIC. Feel free to copy and share with the young/older people in your lives. You can download the PDF HERE.

My friends Lewis Wallace and Micah Bazant have updated their original Miklat, Miklat zine and I am happy to share the new version HERE (PDF). I am incredibly grateful to Lewis and Micah for creating this excellent resource. I am always asked by folks to “define” transformative justice. I mostly resist those efforts.

I have offered a page of some resources for those who want to explore the concept of transformative justice. I have also wrestled quite a bit on this blog with the question of how transformative and restorative justice look in practice. I will continue to do so here while still resisting the urge to offer an definitive answers (since I don’t think that there are any because TJ is so situational).

If you have been considering the concept of transformative justice in your own life and work and have developed your own resources (reading lists, zines, essays), please do share them with me. I would be happy to post them on the blog so that others can learn from your experiences.

Once again, you can download the updated zine HERE (PDF).

Last week, I got an e-mail from a friend that made me smile. She has given me permission to share it:

I saw a toddler running down Ashland barefooted and wearing very little clothing. No one was in sight. A month ago, I know that I would have immediately called the police. In light of recent events, I got out of the car and did my own detective work. I was nervous. The child was pre-verbal and I’m not good with small children, plus I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. I was painfully conscious, however, that calling the police might bring irreversibly negative consequences for someone — a family, the baby, me.

The good news is that I found another passerby. We wrapped the baby in my sweater and together we went door-to-door until we found the mom, who by that point was hysterical because she realized that her child was missing. Between the neighbors confirming the child’s identity and the woman’s expression when we walked up with the baby, we were pretty confident the child was hers.

When I returned to my car, your work with Circles came into my mind. So, I wanted to share this little story with you.

This anecdote made me smile for two main reasons. First, it reminds me that my friends are actually paying attention to my regular rants about needing alternatives to calling the police. Second, it illustrates that with only a subtle shift in thinking, we can creatively solve community problems without relying on law enforcement as the first resort.

My friend Mimi Kim launched an organization some years ago called Creative Interventions with the expressed mission “to create community-based options for interventions to interpersonal violence.” I am so excited about CI’s work over the years and even more excited that it will be releasing a new toolkit soon to help others develop models of intervening in interpersonal violence that do not involve relying on the criminal legal system. This will be an invaluable resource. In the meantime, below is a story from CI’s Storytelling and Organizing Project that illustrates why some people (particularly marginalized people) choose not to call the police to intervene in interpersonal violence. This story was first printed in the Abolitionist – A Publication of Critical Resistance:

CREATIVE INTERVENTIONS
Why did you not want to call the cops?

StoryTeller: It just wasn’t an option, on multiple levels. The police are, you know, the enemy. So it’s like you just don’t call the cops. Now, what’s inside of that, I don’t think it’s just a theoretical political thing. There’s the fact that the police had just shot this person in front of hundreds of people, you know, video tape rolling. They had just been incredibly violent out on the street. There was a police state downtown. On every level calling the cops was not an option, right? So there’s the political level in which you don’t call the oppressor to help you out. You just don’t.

Then there’s the level of our politics being like: we need to figure out ways to deal with this shit that aren’t about calling in the source of violence. So then there are all kind of layers that happen with that, so then there’s like well why don’t we, right? And in this situation why don’t we? Here is this person who is distraught, has a gun, and is a person of color. There’s no fucking way we could trust the cops to do anything but–I mean what, what were the cops going to do at best? The safest thing that they would possibly do would be to physically disarm this person which would involve, you know, violence, right? And lock him up. That is the best case scenario. So it addresses none of problems at all.

It was about this person’s safety, but in a way that was not just responding to a crisis around their safety but also like what can we do? You know, it’s not just what can we do by any means necessary to stop this self harm or harm to another person. It’s actually about: how is what we’re going to do right now going to reverberate to helping this person move through this period in their lives that is unfolding, in this very acute way right in this moment? I mean I guess that that’s actually kind of hopeful [laughs], that even in those moments of crisis you are actually thinking about why the moment is serious is also about the future.

You might be told in all these other ways in life about deescalating violent situations, like if you have beef with your neighbor that’s getting kind of heated, people say “well, just try to talk it out,” or “you could hire a mediator,” or “call a lawyer.” The discourse ends, I think, when there’s a gun involved. Or an act of violence. “Oh, well then you call the police.” And it’s almost like it’s a natural thing, right. It’s like an act of nature.

And so we don’t call the police, we call this community organization. I think that was cool—I mean it’s cool that it exists, it’s cool that we knew about it, it’s cool that we did— but I think also what’s cool is that that’s where our mind went very quickly in this crisis moment. And so, once again it engenders a little bit of hope, around our abilities to respond when the resources are so scarce.

We started talking about what we had done and we started talking about what could we do and where was the harm. What were the different levels of harm, right? Where are our efforts, where are our loyalties, where are we invested, where are we in relationship to all this stuff, what are our priorities?

And we talked about that and that was really good, and I think that that’s—what became the center was this thing that’s going to happen next week which is potentially traumatic to this person and he has acted out in this and this way previously. His mode of acting out has intensified. So the harm or the potential harm has intensified, the harm to himself and therefore, the potential harm to others has intensified. So, what can we do to reduce the harm? We started talking about everything that we can do. One of the major things we talked about is like: who else can we involve?

That’s when it came to mapping out who else can help. And the help being specific to what are the most like urgent things and what we’re trying to learn from these things, right? It’s like, where are people’s people in these situations? The analogy was: it’s a lot easier to lift something that’s really heavy if you have more than two people doing it, especially if it’s something heavy that you all care about. And you all carrying it is in relationship to you caring about it and it affects how you care about it down the road. I was like, true, where are these people’s people?

It’s been a long time coming but last Wednesday, Governor Quinn announced that he was recommending the closure of two adults prisons (TAMMS and Dwight) and two youth prisons (IYC-Murphysboro and Joliet). Closing the two youth prisons alone is expected to save the state over $17 million dollars in a year.

Last year, Gov. Quinn had already recommended that IYC-Murphysboro be closed. I wrote about the resistance that emerged to his recommendation here. Elected officials and unions successfully postponed the closure of Murphysboro. The unions in this state are well-organized and committed to keeping their members’ jobs. Anti-prison advocates are less organized and we were unsuccessful in countering the arguments advanced in favor of keeping the prison open. We have another chance now. Before I get further into my discussion about the youth prisons, I want to take a moment to say a few words about TAMMS-Supermax prison which is also on the closure list.

TAMMS is and has always been a bad idea. It is a torture chamber that keeps prisoners locked in cells 23 hours a day. My friend Laurie Jo Reynolds, the lead organizer of TAMMS YEAR TEN , put it best in a recent interview when she said that “Illinois fell for a “foolish national trend” in the 1980s and built a “vengeful and wasteful prison” the state didn’t need.” The seeds of TAMMS’s destruction were sown from its inception.

For just a glimpse of the horror that is TAMMS prison, I recommend that you read the Dart Society’s recent investigative report about solitary confinement. I defy you to read these words by Anthony Gay who is locked up at TAMMS and not be moved to action:

“I’ve been trapped for approximately nine years. The trap, like a fly on sticky paper, aggravates and agitates me,” he writes. “America, can you hear me? I love you America, but if you love me, please speak out and stand up against solitary confinement.”

In introducing their photo documentary of TAMMS, the Chicago Tribune described the prison as follows:

Conditions are harsh, and meant to be. For at least 23 hours a day, prisoners sit in solitary confinement in 7-by-12-foot cells. There is no mess hall. Meals are shoved through a chuckhole in cell doors. Contact with the outside world is sharply restricted. For a rare visit from relatives or friends, inmates are strip-searched, chained to a concrete stool and separated from visitors by a thick glass wall. There are no jobs and limited educational opportunities.

These words are tame. They do not capture the true horror of life at TAMMS. This article in the Tribune begins to get at some of it. So I am asking you to in the words of Anthony Gay, “please speak out and stand up against solitary confinement.” You can do that very easily by signing this petition thanking Governor Quinn for his recommendation to close TAMMS. For more background on TAMMS, read this essay by the terrific folks at Solitary Watch.

Finally, I want to say a few words about the experience of being locked in a cell when you are 15 years old. I am currently working with a young man who is now 19. He spent two years between the ages of 15 to 17 locked up at IYC-St. Charles (a youth prison in Illinois). He was traumatized by the experience. It will take years for him to heal. He cannot sleep because he is plagued by nightmares. He is not alone in this. I have worked with many many young people who are broken by the experience of being incarcerated. It is time for us to utilize community-based alternatives to incarceration as the FIRST resort. Prison is “no place for kids.” If you live in Illinois, please take a moment to sign this petition thanking Governor Quinn for his leadership and encouraging him to hold firm on his recommendation to close these facilities. It will only take a moment but you will be making a real difference.

From “An Address on Prisons” in Ramparts Magazine (1968):

“When you focus on the adult penitentiaries, you’re looking at the end of the line, trying to see where a process begins. But if you really want to understand and see what’s behind the prison system, you have to look at Juvenile Hall. You have to do down to Juvenile Hall. That’s where I started my career, at about the age of twelve, for some charge. I don’t know what it was, vandalism. I think I ripped off a bicycle, maybe two or three bicycles. Maybe I had a bicycle business. I don’t remember. But it related to bicycles. They took me to Juvenile Hall, and it took me about six months to get out again. While I was there I met a lot of people. I met a lot of real, nice, groovy cats who were very active, very healthy people, who had stolen bicycles and things like that. Then I moved up the ladder from Juvenile Hall to Whittier Reform School for youngsters. I graduated from that one and they jumped me up to the big leagues, to the adult penitentiary system.

I noticed that every time I went back to jail, the same guys who were in Juvenile Hall with me were also there again. They arrived there soon after I got there, or a little before I left. They always seemed to make the scene. In the California prison system, they carry you from Juvenile Hall to the old folks’ colony, down in San Luis Obispo, and wait for you to die. Then they bury you there, if you don’t have anyone outside to claim your body, and most people down there don’t. I noticed these waves, these generations. I had a chance to watch other generations that came behind me, and I talked with them. I’d ask them if they’d been in jail before. You will find graduating classes moving up from Juvenile Hall, all the way up. It occurred to me that this was a social failure, one that cannot be justified by any stretch of the imagination. Not by any stretch of the imagination can the children in the Juvenile Halls be condemned, because they’re innocent, and they’re processed by an environment that they have no control over.

If you look at the adult prisons, you can’t make head or tail out of them. By the time these men get there, they’re in for murder, rape, robbery and all the high crimes. But when you look into their pasts, you find Juvenile Hall. You have to ask yourself, why is there not in this country a program for young people that will interest them? That will actively involve them and will process them to be healthy individuals and lead a healthy life. Until someone answers that question for me, the only attitude I can have towards the prison system, including Juvenile Hall, is tear those walls down and let those people out of there. That’s the only question. How do we tear those walls down and let those people out of there?

People look at the point in the Black Panther Party program that calls for freedom for all black men and women held in federal, state, county, and municipal jails. They find it hard to accept that particular point. They can relate to running the police out of the community, but they say, “Those people in those prisons committed crimes. They’re convicted of crimes. How can you even talk about bringing them out? If you did get them out, would you, in the black community, take them and put them on trial and send them back again?” I don’t know how to deal with that. It’s just no. NO! Let them out and leave them alone! Let them out because they’re hip to all of us out here now. Let them out. Turn them over to the Black Panther Party. Give them to us. We will redeem them from the promises made by the Statue of Liberty that were never fulfilled. We have a program for them that will keep them active — 24 hours a day. And I don’t mean eight big strong men in a big conspicuous truck robbing a jive gas station for $75. When I sit down to conspire to commit a robbery, it’s going to be the Bank of America, or Chase Manhattan Bank, or Brinks.”

If you didn’t know that this was written in 1968, you would think that it was tailor made for the time that we are currently living in. No? The main thing that we are missing in 2012 is our own version of the Black Panther Party (with some improvements).

I have spent a big chunk of this week organizing two self-care events for incarcerated girls that will take place this weekend. I am doing this as part of a great program called Girl Talk.

One might wonder what it really means to “care for oneself” while locked in a cell. If you are a prison abolitionist, as I am, you might even bristle at the idea of organizing a “self-care” day for incarcerated girls. It seems like a contradiction. Our goal as abolitionists should not be to make prisons more livable; it should not be to make prison a more bearable place. As abolitionists, we know that prisons cannot be reformed; they must be abolished.

So why have I spent countless hours organizing these two days of pampering and self-care for incarcerated girls, you might ask. It is because as my friend Erica often points out: “there are real people and real bodies behind bars.” Abolishing prisons is a long-term project. It is likely not to happen in my lifetime. In the meantime, though, millions of people pass through prisons and jails across the country every year. These people need to know that those of us on the outside care about their well-being. They need to know that they are not forgotten.

So the best that I can do, as the holiday season approaches, is to call on my friends and some volunteers to come in from the outside to offer their many talents & skills in the service of incarcerated girls. I am blessed to know people who are healers, bodywork therapists, yoga instructors, and just genuinely caring. We are planning to offer manicures, pedicures, yoga and stretching classes, reiki, chair massages for a few hours this Saturday and Sunday. Is this contributing to dismantling the prison industrial complex? No, not in a structural way. However, I believe that it helps to create relationships between those of us on the outside and those who are locked up. This connection helps to reduce isolation and makes it harder for our politicians to demagogue issues of crime. However this is not the real reason to organize such events. We should offer self-care days for incarcerated girls because they deserve them. They deserve to be reminded of their humanity when everything on the inside offers the opposite. They deserve to be touched in ways that are not about abuse but instead focus on healing and love. We all need these things. We all deserve them.

So as I head out to a local discount store to buy some mixing bowls that will hold ingredients to make homemade lip gloss, I look forward to the weekend and to connecting with the girls.

I heard Angela Davis give a presentation at a conference in October. She made many salient points in her critique of mass incarceration but one point stood out in particular. She mentioned that “we talk about prisoners as though they were only the recipients of our charity as opposed to agents in their own rights.” I could not agree more with her characterization.

The histories that have been written about prisoners often treat them merely as “casualties of the system.” It is worthwhile, I believe, to reclaim some of the histories of resistance by prisoners. We just commemorated the 40th anniversary of the Attica prison rebellion in September. I spent a chunk of my summer re-reading a lot of books about Attica and produced (with contributions from some friends) a primer and zine about the uprising. It was my small way of trying to re-insert the idea of prisoner agency and resistance within the stories that we tell about the carceral state. As part of my research about Attica, I came across many incidents of prisoner resistance. One of these took place over the course of three months in 1973 “when prisoners ran walpole.”

In March of 1973, guards decided to walk off the job at Walpole State Prison in Massachusetts. For three months, Walpole was run by prisoners who moved “freely throughout the prison, establishing programs, and democratically determining policy and the structure of their day-to-day lives (p.12).” The prisoners at Walpole were able to successfully self-govern for over three months because they already had the experience of organizing. In 1971, prisoners had established a chapter of the National Prisoner Reform Association (NPRA) at Walpole.

This historical moment is recounted by Jamie Bissonette and her co-authors in their book “When The Prisoners Ran Walpole.” The authors describe the mission and goals of the NPRA:

“The NPRA defined prisoners as workers. Using a labor-organizing model, the NPRA intended to form chapters in prisons throughout the country. The goal of the association was to organize prisoners into labor unions or collective-bargaining units. Prisoners’ unions could then act as a counterbalance to the notoriously powerful guards’ unions in negotiations with prison authorities about how the prisons were run. Prisoners throughout the country began to look at prisoners’ unions as a catalyst for prison reform. But only at MCI Walpole did the NPRA become a recognized bargaining unit, democratically elected by prisoners — the workers — to lead their struggle for reform within the prison.

The NPRA at Walpole remained the recognized representative of the prisoners for two years, and sought State Labor Relations Commission certification along the way. Even after its petition for recognition as a labor union was denied, the NPRA continued to exercise its power as the prisoners’ elected representative for an additional two years (p.11-12).”

For those who are loathe to read books, the history at Walpole is also dramatized in a good documentary titled: “Three Thousand Years and Life.” A couple of clips from the film are below and the whole documentary can be watched on YouTube:

At this historical moment when the Occupy Movement is nascent, it is worth remembering that prisoners are still a marginalized part of the 99%. We need to incorporate the concerns and the needs of prisoners in our calls for economic justice and transformation. The history of prisoner resistance at Walpole points the way.

A big part of my mission on this blog is to feature examples of alternatives to incarceration. It is often difficult to find such stories reported in the news. The news prefers subscribe to the “if it bleeds, it leads” motto. Back in January of this year, I featured a story of restorative justice involving a mugging victim.

Now comes this story from the Cincinnati Enquirer:

Wearing his hard hat and a sheen of sweat, Danny Pabst stepped away from the locomotive and watched as Michael Morgan swung a sledgehammer like a baseball bat, smashing it into a metal rod held by his older brother, William Morgan.

Grunt, clang. Grunt, clang. Grunt, clang.

The Morgan brothers, Pabst and others were trying to dislodge a rusted, bent, 3-inch-thick metal pin. It was connecting a piece to the exterior of a 60-year-old locomotive being renovated in a Norwood rail yard.

After 30 minutes of sledge swinging and oath uttering, the pin finally was freed.

“I like the work that they do,” a panting Pabst said of William, 34, and Michael Morgan, 30.

He likes their work so much, he’s decided to hire them.

But Pabst wasn’t as enamored of them in April, when the brothers broke into the rail yard – where Pabst restores privately owned, historic passenger railway cars at his Cincinnati and Ohio Railway Services company – and stole $7,000 in copper cables.

The seven cables, so heavy that the brothers also stole a plastic 55-gallon garbage can to carry them in, are the electrical umbilical cords that connect rail cars.

Police were unaware of the theft when they saw the Morgan brothers at about 4 p.m. April 28 on railroad tracks burning rubber coatings off cables to get to the copper wire. But when Pabst reported the theft the next day, police immediately made the connection.

They went to a nearby scrap yard, where workers told police they had paid $454.50 for copper brought in by William Morgan, who signed the receipt and was on video scrapping the copper.

The copper cables were being hauled by William Morgan in a gray garbage can just like the one Pabst said had also been stolen, scrap yard workers told police.

Arrests weren’t new to the brothers. William Morgan, a former iron worker, had been to prison once. Michael Morgan, who did odd jobs, had been twice. All were theft-related convictions.

They stole from Pabst, William Morgan said, because their father is ill and receives hospice care.

“Our dad’s dying of cancer and we’re trying to keep the (family) house,” William Morgan said.

The brothers, who live just blocks away, know the rail yard well.

“They’ve been running us out of here since we were kids,” William Morgan said with a laugh.

When they came to court in August, Pabst asked if they had cash to repay him the $7,000.

Because they had no money, Pabst offered a suggestion.

As attorney Greg Nolan, who represented Michael Morgan in his receiving-stolen property case, put it: “The words out of Danny’s mouth were, ‘These jerks, if they just would have only come to me in the daylight hours, I would have hired them. I’m desperate for help.’

“Given the number of copper thefts and the amount here, there was a good chance both of these gentlemen were going to jail.”

Pabst, though, persuaded Hamilton County Common Pleas Judge Robert Ruehlman to place the brothers on probation so they could work off their debt to him.

“That’s amazing,” the judge said. “That’s a first. We don’t have that very often, where guys steal stuff and then actually come back and work for the victim, pay them back by working for them.”

The judge put the brothers on probation for a year so they could pay off the debt.

Read the rest of the story here.