This August, it will be 18 years since I moved to Chicago from my hometown of New York City. I can hardly believe that I’ve been here this long. I moved here for graduate school and never expected to stay. But Chicago is a city that grows on you. I’ve come to love this place. Not as much as I love New York where I was born and where much of my family still lives. But it’s a close second in my heart now.

When Rahm Emanuel announced that he would run for Mayor of Chicago. I had a viscerally negative reaction. I ranted to anyone and everyone that he was a corporatist who would seek to further privatize the commons. I supported his opponent Miguel Del Valle in the primary. I believe that the city would be in much better shape had Del Valle won but the truth is that I would have voted for almost anyone besides Emanuel.

Now we find ourselves under constant and coordinated assault by Emanuel and his allies in the business community. He closed down six mental health clinics last year with a promise to target more. The Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) decided to increase its fares and Emanuel responded that riders who were unhappy should consider driving instead. In just a few weeks, the CTA will close all red line stops from Cermak to 95th street for 5 months effectively cutting off much of the Southside from the rest of the city. Emanuel is pushing a new mandatory minimum gun bill (HB2265/SB1003) designed to spike the prison population by nearly 4,000 in the next decade and costing us nearly $1 billion more in state prison funding. And the coup de grace is his recently announced decision to close 54 Chicago Public schools on the West and South sides of the city. He has been called the “Murder Mayor.” The title is earned and well-deserved.

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Frosting
by Langston Hughes

Freedom
Is just frosting
On somebody else’s
Cake —
And so must be
Till we
Learn how to
Bake

In most cases, it is already a FELONY to illegally possess a gun in Illinois. Illinois has among the strictest gun laws in the nation.

In the next few days, however, the Illinois House will vote on HB2265, a bill that would increase the mandatory minimum sentence for weapons-related offenses from one year to three. There is corresponding bill in the Senate (SB1003).

This bill originated on the recommendation of Mayor Rahm Emanuel and is being enthusiastically advocated for by Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez.

When Illinois imposed a mandatory minimum in 2011, there was no deterrent effect. In fact, the murder rate increased by 16 percent. Rahm Emanuel wants to increase the prison population while closing schools. This “anti-gun” legislation will spike the prison population by nearly 4000 in the next decade, for no public safety gain. TWO NEW PRISONS WOULD BE NEEDED. This alone will require $974 million more in prison funding (source).

Rather than address gun violence in Illinois, HB2655/SB1003 is likely to add to our problems as a state by burdening an already over-taxed prison system and increasing our fiscal woes.

Tell your legislators No to HB2265/SB1003.

HB2265/SB1003 would increase the mandatory minimum prison sentence for unlawful use of a weapon. This bill allows legislators to look like they are being “tough on crime” while doing NOTHING to address the root causes of gun violence.

Your legislators are likely supporting this bill. Do not let legislators pretend to address the problem of gun violence by sweeping more young people in prison. Tell them to invest in proven methods of violence prevention. Please take 30 seconds to contact your reps with this LINK.

Ask them to Vote “NO” on HB2665/SB1003 because:

1) HB2265 will cost Illinois taxpayers nearly $1 Billion over 10 years and will increase the state’s prison population by nearly 4,000 inmates, requiring the opening of two prisons to house them.

2) There is no conclusive evidence that increased prison sentences decrease the number of gun assaults. In fact, there is growing national consensus that mandatory minimums simply don’t work!

Demand that our lawmakers to invest in the things that we know create safe, sustainable communities – good schools, decent jobs, and social services – not building more prison cells and passing laws like HB2665/SB1003 to fill them.

The same neighborhoods most impacted by gun violence are also devastated by mass incarceration. The proposed law will make things worse for communities already decimated by poverty, foreclosures, poor schools and drug addiction.

The fact is, we can’t incarcerate ourselves into safety. We can only make our communities safer by investing in jobs, drug treatment, schools, physical and mental health, and providing wrap-around programs and support both for victims of crime, and people returning for prisons.

Note: Feel free to share the following Fact Sheet (PDF) created by the John Howard Association about HB2265/SB1003.

From Sociological Cinema:

“This short news documentary examines the relationships between race, poverty, incarceration, crime, and the war on drugs. It focuses on Baltimore, and its very high crime rates, showing how poor residents get attracted to crime and the drug business as a means of economic survival…

Read the accompanying story here.

Below is a shorter news clip from 2008:

On my bad days, I like to remember that we have a generation of young people who are as committed to social justice as any who have come before. In Chicago, young people are mobilizing against Rahm Emanuel’s announced school closures; the largest in this nation’s history.

Sara Johnson, a senior at Roosevelt High School and a student leader with Chicago Students Organizing to Save Our Schools, explained the coalition’s demands:

As usual, my friend, the intrepid & gifted Sarah Jane Rhee was on the scene of the student protest documenting the action. We, in Chicago, are blessed that Sarah lives here and that she is so generous with her photography skills. You can see all of Sarah’s photographs from yesterday’s student protest here. Her caption for the photos reads:

“On Monday, March 25, 2013, the first day of spring break for many CPS schools, Chicago Students Organizing to Save Our Schools held a press conference at CPS Headquarters calling on the mayor and CPS to abandon its plan to shutter 50+ schools. They made three specific demands, which were detailed in an oversized letter to Mayor Rahm Emanuel: 1) an immediate moratorium on ALL school closings; 2) TIF funding to be reformed and the funds to be used for CPS schools; and 3) an elected school board. From the press conference, the students and allies marched two blocks north to City Hall and crowded into the mayor’s 5th floor office, where they demanded to meet with Rahm. The mayor’s office sent out a representative who received the oversized letter with demands to take to the mayor. The students employed the people’s mic (i.e. “mic check!”) to relay their message to the press that was present and chanted “We’ll be back!” as an indication that this, their first action, would not be their last.”

Below are a few wonderful photographs documenting yesterday’s student protest:

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My friend Billy Dee, who volunteers with my organization and often collaborates with me on art-related projects wrote the following reflections about ze’s visit with Bowen High School students as part of the Black and Blue: Art on Policing, Violence and Resistance exhibit.

This past week I had an opportunity to meet students from Bowen High School who shared amazing artworks with Project NIA for an exhibit entitled Black & Blue: Art on Policing, Violence, and Resistance. The students made linocut prints in response to the topic of the exhibit with art-teacher Bert Stabler. They generously shared over a hundred colorful and thought provoking pieces that we were able to display in both the gallery and the storefront windows, where they caught the eye of many passers-by at the U.I.C. SJI (Social Justice Initiative) Pop-Up art Gallery.

I was impressed by the students artworks as they addressed issues ranging from the systemic racist violence in the C.P.D., to personal experiences of police violence, to the police harassment faced by trans people. One artwork that caught my eye as we installed the exhibit was a piece in which the artist had engraved an image of a C.P.D. badge accompanied by the phrase “we dirty up the black, but keep the white clean”. I was able to meet the young woman who made this piece during the visit, and told her that I thought her piece made a strong statement. What she said in response was interesting to me- she said something to the effect of: “I didn’t want to offend anybody, but that is what I was thinking, so that is the phrase I used in my piece.” I made sure to explain that making a strong statement in one’s art is something I respect very much, and that I found the piece both beautiful and also impactful.

I had a chance to talk to several students, and almost everyone I talked to mentioned some type of negative experience with the CPD. As we talked, we reviewed the stated purpose of the police (“to serve and protect”). A few students noted that the police can (and sometimes do) “serve and protect” but too-often this takes place on their own terms.

One young woman talked about the way that the police target her home neighborhood of Roseland. She talked about the fact that she sees cops all over the place, but does not let them intimidate her as she knows her rights when they approach on the street (yeah!). During the visit, a young man who was not able to finish his linocut for the exhibit shared a drawing to add to the artworks. Below a simple portrait, he wrote the phrase “Inmate of Society welcome to the end of You life of Police Brutality”. In addition to the artwork, the exhibit included a map on which visitors could use pins to mark locations in the city of Chicago where they had witnessed or experienced a negative interaction with police. During the visit, someone pinned an index card onto the map with the words “my sister was shot and killed”.

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I love radio. In fact, I prefer listening to the radio than watching television. Over the years some of the best reporting about the prison industrial complex has taken place in radio. Below is a list of some excellent radio stories about prisons that I wanted to share:

Jailing the Mentally Ill
Produced by American RadioWorks.

According to the 1880 United States Census, 99% of the nation’s “insane persons” lived at home or in asylums. Only a few hundred were in jail. That was the practice in the U.S. for the next century: Mentally ill people who couldn’t cope on their own were confined in institutions. Most never had the chance to live freely in society—or to get in trouble there.

That has changed. Last year the U.S. Justice Department said 280,000 people with serious mental illnesses were in jail or prison—more than four times the number in state mental hospitals. American RadioWorks explores why.

Prison Diaries

Prison Diaries takes place inside two correctional facilities: Polk Youth Institution in Butner, NC and the Rhode Island Training School (for juveniles) in Cranston, RI. More than 245 hours of raw tape have been edited into five half-hour documentaries, produced by Joe Richman and Wendy Dorr of Radio Diaries.

Tossing Away the Keys
Recorded in Angola, Louisianna.
Premiered April 29, 1990, on Weekend All Things Considered.

The Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola Prison, is a sprawling old plantation on the Mississippi River. It was named, long ago, for the birthplace of the slaves who were brought here to work the land.

Now, Angola holds more than five-thousand prisoners, mostly African Americans. It still has the look of another time: long straight lines of black men march to work along the levees with shovels over their shoulders. They are trailed by guards on horseback, shotguns resting in their laps.

It used to be that a life sentence in Louisiana meant a maximum of ten years and six months behind bars. But, in the 1970s, the state’s politicians changed the definition. A life sentence in Louisiana now means just that. Unless they’re pardoned by the Governor, inmates today know they will never again see the outside world — that they will die inside Angola prison. Tossing Away the Keys is their story.

Witness to an Execution
Producer: David Isay with Wilbert Rideau and Ron Wikberg / Mix engineer: Anna Maria deFrietas / Photograph by Harvey Wang.
Premiered October 20, 2000, on All Things Considered.

Witness to an Execution tells the stories of the men and women involved with the execution of deathrow inmates at the Walls Unit in Huntsville, Texas. Narrated by Warden Jim Willett, who oversees all Texas executions, Witness to an Execution documents, in minute-by-minute detail, the process of carrying out an execution by lethal injection. Most of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice employees interviewed have witnessed over one hundred inmates be put to death. One-third of all executions in the US have taken place in Texas, since the death penalty was reinstated in 1977.

The voices in Witness to an Execution tell a rare story. Major Kenneth Dean, a member of the “tie-down” team, describes the act of walking an inmate from his cell to the death chamber. Jim Brazzil, a death house chaplain who has witnessed 114 executions, remembers inmates’ last words to him. Former corrections officer Fred Allen discusses his own mental breakdown, caused, he says, by participating in one too many executions.

Witness to an Execution won a Peabody Award in 2000.

Producers: Stacy Abramson and David Isay / Production Assistant: David Miller / Narrator: Jim Willett / Editor: Gary Covino / Supervising engineer: Caryl Wheeler / Music: Bob Mellman / Music Coordinator: Henry Sapoznik / Executive Producer for All Things Considered: Ellen Weiss / Special thanks to: Larry Fitzgerald, and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice / Photography: Andrew Lichtenstein/Open Society Institute. / Funding provided by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Open Society Institute.

There are days, I admit, when work and life threaten to overwhelm…

It’s difficult to live in Chicago during this historical moment without succumbing to perpetual rage. Some days are defined by an internal battle between righteous anger and impotent rage.

Our mayor was away on a ski trip when the city announced its decision to close 54 schools. This is the largest mass closing of schools in the country’s history. It comes on the heels of Mayor Emanuel closing several mental health clinics in mostly black & brown communities. All of this is happening in a larger context where poverty has been steadily increasing in Chicago, affordable housing is scarce, communities are demanding access to trauma care and we have had a spate of lethal violence. We seem to have entered an era of disaster capitalism in Chicago where the elites manufacture crises as an excuse to privatize the commons.

In light of what feels like an onslaught of negativity, exploitation and oppression, it would be understandable to throw up one’s hands and decide to give up the fight for social justice. However, for me, this is impossible because I am privileged to engage with people (young and old) who believe passionately in our capacity to change our circumstances. These individuals refuse to abandon a generation of young people to the vagaries of capitalism and the punishing state. I am lucky. They give me hope.

Last week, a journalism student named Leah Varjacques who works with the Chicago Bureau interviewed me, Ethan Ucker (co-founder of Circles & Ciphers) and some young men from the Circles & Ciphers program about restorative justice. She just sent me the video and I was reminded again about why the work that I am blessed to participate in is such an important antidote to the current orchestrated assault that we are experiencing in this city. We are not a city of marauding, murderous black and brown people who need the National Guard to impose order on our “lawless” neighborhoods. We are not lazy, pathetic moochers who are bankrupting the coffers of the city. There is resilience, love, and hope in Chicago.

I hope that you will take 5 minutes to watch the video and be reminded that resistance exists and that it will continue.

restoring hope from Leah Varjacques on Vimeo.

[Special note: Those who know me will recognize that I appear on camera in this video. This is not something that I like to do and I avoid this at all costs. However, I feel so strongly that the good work that we are doing in Chicago needs to have a broader platform that I sucked it up this time.]

Continuing with the theme of the week, this is a great photo by Anderson Chaves, a young person who is a member of LuchArte. The photo titled “This is Not Where I Want My Education” is included in the Black and Blue exhibit. Chaves also has the following artwork in the show.

Stop by this Saturday to see the art and to participate in a reading about policing, violence and resistance.