My friend, the supremely talented, Rachel Marie-Crane Williams has created a new comic (PDF) titled “Women and the Prison Industrial Complex.” As always, she figures a simple and moving way to present horrible facts about the experiences of incarcerated women.

by Rachel Marie-Crane Williams (2012)

Photo by Sarah Jane Rhee

First, I have pneumonia. This happens to me without fail. I work my ass off and then at the end I get sick. I am trying to figure out how to mitigate this. As a result, I spent most of the past week holed up in my apartment and wasting time on Twitter catching up on election related news.

Yesterday was the first time in 5 days that I set foot outside. I organized a screening of the excellent documentary Slavery by Another Name at the Jane Addams Hull House Museum. The film describes an 80 year period of convict leasing in the United States. I highly recommend it. We had a good group of about 35 people in attendance and the screening was followed by a short discussion. I then took about 20 people on a tour of the exhibition.

It has been amazing to me that we’ve already had several hundred people visit Black/Inside. People of all ages, races, and orientations have come through. The response has exceeded all of my expectations. I am so grateful that the exhibition seems to be impacting those who see it.

We have been collecting evaluations about the exhibit from those who are willing to share them. My favorite question on the evaluation is: “If you were to talk to someone about this exhibit, what three words would you use to describe Black/Inside?” Below is a sample of the responses (special thanks to my friend Eva for compiling these):

dismantling, insightful, grounding
knowledge, inspiring, touching
prison, unjust, racism
interesting, informative, enlightening
insightful, sad, interesting
informative, shocking, important
intriguing, enraging, informative
powerful, insightful, critical
enlightening, intriguing, mind-blowing
powerful, jarring, enlightening
powerful, energizing, saddening
historical, enlightening, powerful
powerful, heartbreaking, necessary
jarring, motivating, maddening

Thanks to everyone who has supported this exhibition by visiting, letting others know about it, and sharing your thoughts about it. If you are in the Chicago area, I invite you to visit the exhibition before it closes. OK, now back to Twitter and the election. November 7th can’t come soon enough…

Young people in Chicago continue to organize against their criminalization. From the Lawndale News:

On the eve of Halloween, former detained youth, parents, ministers, and members of Blocks Together, BUILD Inc., and Community Justice Institute for Youth, among others, dressed in prison jumpsuits as part of their ‘Trick or Treat’ campaign to demand reinvestments in alternatives to detention during a budget hearing inside the Cook County Building.

Youth and community advocates pushed for Cook County Commissioners during the County budget hearing to allocate funds away from the Juvenile Temporary Detention Center (JTDC) and invest those funds in ‘high-quality’ community-based education and social services, such as athletics and arts programs, as well as mental health care and safe shelter.

Below is some video from the youth action:

Join the youth at an upcoming community forum with Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle on 11/19/12.

SAVE THE DATE: November 19th at 6 pm
Lafollette Park Field House
1333 N. Laramie

FORUM: Community Justice – alternatives to juvenile detention
with confirmed guest Cook County President Toni Preckwinkle

Youth directly impacted by juvenile detention will present their vision for community based alternatives to detention to Cook County President Toni Preckwinckle. Their vision calls for reinvestment of money spent on the Juvenile Detention Center into the communities where youth are getting locked up.

for more information contact the audy home campaign at: [email protected] – www.facebook.com/audyhomecampaign

You should read the concept paper that some of these young people helped to write.

So I have been working non-stop for days now. I have been juggling running an organization, completing a major project with the opening of the Black/Inside exhibition, and trying to live a life in between. It turns out that all of this activity can take a toll. I am going to take a few days off from blogging to recouperate. I should be back to regular posting next week.

I’ll leave you with a great video that my friend Jake Klippenstein filmed to preview the Black/Inside exhibition. If you haven’t yet had a chance to stop by to visit the exhibition, I hope that you will before November 21st.

The Masai warriors usually greet each other with “Kasserian Ingera” or “How are the children?” The traditional answer is “All the children are well.” I really like this greeting because it clearly underscores the priority that this culture puts on the well-being of its most vulnerable members.

I was thinking about this when I read the recent Human Rights Watch report “Growing Up Locked Down: Youth in Solitary Confinement in Jails and Prisons Across the United States.” The Huffington Post published an article describing the findings of the report:

The report is based on interviews and correspondence with more than 125 young people in 19 states who spent time in solitary confinement while under age 18, as well as with jail and/or prison officials in 10 states.

Human Rights Watch and the ACLU estimate that in 2011, more than 95,000 young people under age 18 were held in prisons and jails. A significant number of these facilities use solitary confinement – for days, weeks, months, or even years – to punish, protect, house, or treat some of the young people held there.

Because young people are still developing, traumatic experiences like solitary confinement may have a profound effect on their chance to rehabilitate and grow, the groups found. Solitary confinement can exacerbate short- and long-term mental health problems or make it more likely that such problems will develop. Young people in solitary confinement are routinely denied access to treatment, services, and programming required to meet their medical, psychological, developmental, social, and rehabilitative needs.

Below is a video with interviews of youth who experienced solitary confinement:

It would serve us all well in the U.S. if we began to greet each other with “Kasserian Ingera.” Perhaps this would be a reminder to us not to torture our children…

Today, I am going to try something different. I want to share audio of the poem “Chicago (Keef)” by the terrific Kevin Coval. This is a poem from his new book “More Shit Chief Keef Don't Like.” You can watch Kevin speak about his book, Chief Keef and violence in Chicago here.

A friend reached out to me yesterday.

A young man who she works with was standing in front of a judge and was offered a plea deal. He was told that he had to decide on the spot whether he would accept it. She needed to know if the deal was a “good” one. She called me.

I am not a lawyer but I have had a lot of experience being inside courtrooms. The young man was facing several felony battery charges against three police officers. He claims that he was harassed and then beaten by the cops. The officers were apparently looking for a robbery suspect, came across him, and promptly began to get rough with him. It was a case of mistaken identity and he fought back. The court case has dragged on for almost a year.

The prosecutors are now offering to decrease the charges to one misdemeanor count of battery of a law enforcement officer. If he agrees to the plea, he would not be able to expunge or seal this conviction. He currently has no criminal record and is in his early 20s.

I called some lawyer friends of mine immediately. They suggested that the deal sounded like a “good” one for the young man. One lawyer friend suggested that the state likely did not have a strong case which was why it was offering this deal. This of course gives one pause.

The judge continued the case to early November so the young man now has some time to consider the offer. He wants to take his case to trial rather than to take the plea because he is innocent.

All of us are worried. We don’t want him to plead to something that he did not do. However, those of us with experience in the criminal legal system know that a he said/he said between a young black man and three cops is unlikely to end well for the young person.

If he goes to trial and is found guilty of just one of the felony battery counts then he will get prison time. If he takes the plea deal, then it is likely probation. The stakes are high.

For months, I have had Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America” on a bookshelf. I was looking forward to reading it but have been distracted by other books. I finally finished the book over this weekend.

In the introduction, Gibran (2010) explains that the book is a “biography of the idea of black criminality in the making of modern urban America (p.1).” A central premise of the book is that white reformers used crime statistics to explain and humanize white immigrants in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In contrast, crime statistics were used to reinforce and “condemn” the idea of black criminality. This data was offered as proof of black inferiority and therefore to justify further criminalization. This was in stark contrast to how white progressives in the early 20th century used crime data related to white immigrants. That information was marshaled to call for more resources to help better assimilate these newcomers into American society. Muhammad (2010) writes:

“For these reformers, immigrants’ humanity trumped the scale of their crimes and the cultural expressions of their social resistance.By contrast, African American crime to many white race-relations experts stood as an almost singular reflection of black culture and humanity (p.274).”

Gibran traces the publication of the 1890 census as a key moment when “prison statistics for the first time became the basis of a national discussion about blacks as a distinct and dangerous criminal population (p.3).”

In light of the fact that I have been immersed in examining the social construction of black criminality over the past few months, this book is timely and extremely relevant. Part of what I wanted to do with the Black/Inside exhibition was to make this process of the social construction of black criminality more visible. I think that we were partly successful in achieving that goal.

Here’s Gibran talking about himself and his book with Bill Moyers:

Khalil Muhammad on Facing Our Racial Past from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.