More stats and social media images at afsc.org/dententionreport
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According to AFSC’s research, the corporatization of prison reform is an outgrowth of a long-standing trend of prison privatization—corrections authorities contracting to outsource services such as food or long-distance calls home. Efforts to “decarcerate” may ostensibly reduce some business for private prison-industry companies. But carceral institutions and technology are being rebranded for the outside world, and profits from these emerging “security” sectors appear to be on the upswing: There is growth potential in halfway houses and treatment centers—perhaps minimally regulated and financed on a per diem basis. In the pre-trial stage, there’s demand for private probation(used in poor communities to coerce people owing fees and fines for petty infractions) and ankle-bracelet monitors (shackled to thousands of detained migrants who have been released on bond).
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Columbia University has become the first university in the United States to divest from private prison companies, following a student activist campaign.
(Source: CNN)
Part of our new travelling exhibit “All of us or none: responses and resistance to militarism.”
More info, images, and to bring it to your community: afsc.org/allofus
Building a nonviolent revolution against injustice: A conversation with Michelle Alexander
[Originally published here: http://afsc.org/friends/building-nonviolent-revolution-against-injustice-conversation-michelle-alexander]
“What does it mean, individually and collectively, to create a strategic, nonviolent revolution against injustice - not only against the prison system, but against America’s recurring forms of racialized social control?” Michelle Alexander
Daniel Hunter: Baltimore is on our minds, We are carrying our brothers and sisters in the streets and who are in jail in our hearts. One thing that seems important to figure out is how we support this movement to develop more strategic thinking, as well as expression of emotion. How do you see the expression of emotion, anger and rage in the streets of Baltimore, and how do you see strategy to move this massive system of mass incarceration? How do you see those two sitting hand-in-hand together?
Michelle Alexander: Like everybody in this room, I’ve been heartbroken over what I’ve seen happen to Freddie Gray and I’ve also been hugely inspired by the thousands of people who have taken to the streets and inspired by many of the young people who really were willing to speak and be honest about how they feel and their own rage and pain.
Last night there was a New York Times article called, “We are all Freddie Gray now.” I was surprised the NYT published it because it was written by a man who was basically arguing for violence. He had grown up in Baltimore and knew all too well the brutality of the police, he and his family were victims of police violence. He and many other young people are looking at the protests that have occurred around the country that were nonviolent, but yielded little in terms of results.
He was asking, “Why should we just keep holding hands with pastors and marching in the streets, when nothing ever seems to change?” We go home and weeks or days later, there is another killing, another tragedy. Isn’t time to say to elected leaders in Baltimore, “Do the right thing and deal with the police or we will burn this city down.”
I was grateful the Times ran the piece because it was such an honest expression of what so many people are feeling, being tired, feeling we’ve been through this before, being nonviolent, holding hands with the pastors only to watch it play out over and over again.
My feeling is that this sense so many people have that we’ve been trying nonviolence for a long time and it hasn’t worked rests on a false conception. The nonviolent strategies and activists that so many people were committed to, especially at the end of King’s life, is not what has been going on over the last four years. It’s time for us to have an honest conversation about what it means to build a truly strategic, nonviolent revolution against injustice. Rather than being in the streets again because we’re mad about the last thing that has happened. Those are two different things.
It’s necessary to take to the streets and protest when a tragedy occurs. We do need to find a way to transition from protest politics, reacting when bad things happen, to how do we build a truly strategic, nonviolent revolution not just to end mass incarceration, or to cut our prison population by half, but ultimately a revolution that will break this nation’s habit of creating these massive systems of racial and social control.
We are in a different place than we were five years ago. When my book was first released, no one wanted to talk about this stuff, Obama was just elected and we were awash in post racialism and all of that. But there have been a number of developments especially the uprising in Ferguson, which we really will need to look back at as a turning point for this movement as a whole.
Over the past five years, we’ve had politicians across the political spectrum saying maybe we need to reconsider this system of mass incarceration because we don’t want to raise taxes on the predominantly white middle class. Hilary Clinton is now portraying herself as a champion of the movement to end mass incarceration when the Clinton administration was a primary architect of the current system of racial and social control.
We are at a critically important moment when people are awake and they’re angry and there is a space politically for a meaningful conversation about what’s necessary. But we have got to move out of the space of just analyzing the problem, though that’s important too. We have to begin to have the hard conversation: if we are going to build a radical movement that has the hope and promise to dismantle the system and create something new, what do we need to do it? What needs to happen in our places of worship, what needs to happen in our communities, what needs to happen on our street corners, what needs to happen in our schools? What infrastructure needs to be created?
One of the frustrations I’ve had as I’ve gone around the country speaking - speaking in prisons, speaking in juvenile detention centers, speaking in churches, speaking at judicial conferences, speaking at all these different places and everywhere I go - people say, “I want to join the movement, what do I do?” Right now there is a not a single national organization, not one, with deep grassroots connections to local communities that is focused like a laser on ending mass incarceration in America.
So when people say they want to join a movement, they often have no idea what’s going on in their own communities. There is incredible work going on in communities all over, there is incredible work going on in Philadelphia, but people lack awareness of what’s happening. It often feels disconnected, and there is no infrastructure.
There are Membership-based organizations based on ending mass criminalization and disposal of generations of poor communities and communities of color, but people don’t know how to connect and join.
We don’t have to replicate what was done before, it’s a new era. How do we build a movement that has revolutionary potential?
Jondhi Harrell: President Obama recently called the protestors in Baltimore thugs and criminals. I was very disappointed in that language, I expected more of him. This is typical of the thinking not just of national leaders, but local leaders as well.
I was just invited to a community policing meeting with the mayor of Philadelphia and the commissioners and various organizations. When it came time to speak, I looked around and said, “You’ve got the wrong people in this room.” It was so many pastors and activists and community organizations that the young people do not listen to.
How do we connect the real voices in the community? I’ll give you an example: we had a meeting at the Friends Center where we had political forum for candidates to speak. Across the hallway in the other room we had the Black Lives Matter people and they would not cross the hall to talk with the politicians. How do we make those connections?
Michelle Alexander: First, I share your deep disappointment with the use of the word “thug” by President Obama, by the mayor of Baltimore, by so many folks who have gotten so accustomed to being able to dismiss entire populations just by a label: they’re “thugs,” they’re “felons,” they’re “criminals,” or “repeat offender,” or “gang banger.” These labels are meant to trigger a mental switch in our brain, so we stop caring, stop listening and allow law enforcement to do whatever they do and give them a wide berth to do it.
We have to be very conscious that we don’t use language ourselves that has the same effect. I used the word “ex-offender” in my book; that is not language I would use today. I think in so many ways formerly incarcerated people and their families have done such an enormous service to the movement by challenging those of us who think we are standing in solidarity about our language, about the way we talk, think and frame the issues we’re engaged in.
In terms of trying to get young people and political leaders in the same room and connected, I have very mixed feelings about it. I think young people are entitled to their distrust. I don’t necessarily think the answer is for young people and the prevailing political establishment to sit down and work their issues out and for everyone to feel heard.
I’m always for dialogue and for trying to get increased understanding, but I think there are often attempts by politicians and others to say, “Well, we want to talk to young people and hear from them,” but there is almost a co-optation that takes place of young people’s anger and resentment. Rather than giving young people a role or voice or some power, they feel, “As long as they feel heard I can go on with the work we are doing with business as usual.”
I look at what has been going on in Baltimore, as well as what the Democratic party has been doing for the last few decades and I say, “Why would I, as a young person, trust the current Democratic establishment to hear me, to take my concerns seriously?”
I’m for dialogue, but I also think the time has come for young people and others to think seriously about building alternatives to the current political parties and building power and strength outside of the current political machine that runs cities like Baltimore.
Jondhi Harrell: What would that look like?
Michelle Alexander: I certainly don’t have a blueprint for it. Many of the young people and others - pastors, old folks, veterans from previous movements and others - are tired of business as usual. They are willing to get serious about developing alternatives.
But I think we ought to explore more seriously than we have in the past building alternative parties. It seems too challenging or pie in the sky to run a presidential candidate who isn’t a Democrat or Republican. You need billions of dollars to do so. But on a local level, it’s possible for people in communities to begin to organize, to take over school boards and city councils, and begin to build power outside of the prevailing machine. I think it’s something that needs to be explored.
Too often we wag our fingers and shame people in poor communities of color or young people for not getting out to vote. We say, “You can’t complain if you don’t get out to vote.” And they look at who’s running and who’s running the local machine and they say, “Why, why should I support this?”
One thing we need to consider is building real alternatives, so we’re not asking people to meet with their legislature or sign a petition or to support another Democrat that is hooked into the larger machine.
Watch the whole interview to hear more analysis and advice for building a movement to end the New Jim Crow.
They are called detention centers, but let’s be clear: they are prisons.
(Source: youtube.com)
Seattle organizers pressure officials to downsize youth jail
Thanks to three years of intense pressure by anti-racist organizers, officials in Seattle have announcedsignificant changes to a proposed $212 million juvenile detention center. But organizers, who are working closely with AFSC’s Seattle Community Justice Program, have pledged to continue developing community-based anti-racist alternatives to detention.
In March, officials announced plans to:
• reduce the number of allotted beds at the King County juvenile detention center by 40 (which represents a third of the original number),
• stop incarcerating youth for status offenses like truancy, and
• cut incarceration for probation violations by 50 percent.
Officials also plan to devote more resources to efforts that would keep youth out of jail and begin to counter the disproportionate effect of detention on youth of color in King County.
“I think this is a great start, but often measures like these are used to pacify organizers and slow down our momentum,” says Khalil Lee Butler, who’s active with two AFSC-related projects organizing against the detention center: YUIR (Youth Undoing Institutional Racism) and EPIC (Ending the Prison Industrial Complex). “They’re cutting down the number of beds, but they’re still building the jail and they’re still locking up kids.”
Youth lead the way
Young people have been at the forefront of organizing efforts against the detention center. And they’ve built a multi-generational coalition with events such as the recent People’s Tribunal on the Juvenile Justice System.
Early on, organizers understood that they needed to educate the public. The ballot for the detention center passed in 2012, but the language was misleading.
“It said a lot about healing services. There was no mention of ‘cells’ or ‘jail’ or ‘detention’,” Khalil recalls. “Many people didn’t realize what they had voted for.”
Organizers also used statistics—and the stories behind those statistics—to make their case. For example, while black youth account for about 10 percent of the youth population in King County, they make up close to 50 percent of incarcerated youth. “But people hadn’t been connecting those numbers to actual people and families,” Khalil says. “We spent a lot of time bringing those people and voices to light.”
He adds: “Once the education happened, momentum against the detention center picked up quickly.”
Developing skills as organizers
Another key to their success so far has been the careful skill building that starts with the Tyree Scott Freedom School. Since 2001, this annual gathering has provided community leadership training and anti-racism organizing skills to more than 1,200 young people.
Youth then continue learning and using their skills through YUIR, and eventually “graduate” to more intensive organizing through EPIC.
Their organizing against the detention center has gotten significant media attention, with multiple stories appearing in The Seattle Times, The Stranger, the South Seattle Emerald, The Seattle Globalist, the Seattle Channel, and Seattle Voices, among others.
Up next is the summer Freedom School, where more youth will be introduced to the basics of anti-racist organizing and the ongoing work to stop the building of the youth detention center.
