I want to demand bigger, but I am not Trayvon’s family. But I am a big sister and cousin and teacher and neighbor. Hopefully I will never be the family of the next Trayvon.

But would this be justice? Is that all we mean when we demand justice? Of course that isn’t all, or shouldn’t be, but would a prison sentence be justice enough for us to settle for? Or can we keep demanding bigger, unattainably big conceptions of justice?

Saturday night thoughts / why I haven’t yet said much about Trayvon / what I’m wrapping my head around eventually

Solid op-ed about Gilad Shalit being released in exchange for over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, and the thousands more Palestinians still in prison without trial.

Yes, a number of studies show that it’s more expensive to execute an inmate than to house them for life.

Zuky’s right; there’s a huge discrepancy between what these people think it’s acceptable to spend on keeping someone alive and what it’s acceptable to spend on killing them (esp when this someone is Black, poor, etc).

that’s right; the death penalty costs much more than life imprisonment. deathpenalty.org/article… deathpenaltyinfo.org/co…

Thanks for the info, y’all!

I thought that with appeals, etc., it was more expensive to put someone on death row than life imprisonment?

Hmmm, that makes sense; I’m not sure. I just know I’ve heard that used over and over as a reason to keep the death penalty, that the state shouldn’t spend money on keeping them alive. I heard that a ton when Illinois put a moratorium on the death penalty while I still lived there.

Texas has a $2.7 billion annual budget for spending on prisons. The argument in favor of the death penalty is often that the condemned person doesn’t deserve tax money being spent on keeping them alive. But Texas can’t spare $100 on their last meal?

laborreguita:

My Life as a Feminista: We need to stop making our schools more like prisons and start making our prisons more like schools.

combat—wombat:

laborreguita:

mylifeasafeminista:

tmgmmathy:

I agree with the first part of this, but I’m struggling with the second part. Prisons should have schools in them but the idea of prisons should not be associated with schools in any way. Prisons should be associated with punishment. Schools should be associated with discovery.

I definitely understand what you’re saying about making a distinction between these spaces, but I don’t think that discovery should only be part of the education process in schools. The way prisons are currently structured and organized is not effective in meeting the alleged goals of rehabilitation and helping people in the future. The current state of American prisons works to create a cycle in which someone enters the prison system and is highly likely to continue interacting with said system for the rest of their life. Prisons need to be based on models of education and compassion if that is ever going to happen, not human rights violations and further oppression. The current association of prison to punishment is quite accurate, as that is exactly what happens in prison: someone does something that has been deemed socially wrong or inappropriate and receives a legal punishment from the government. Punishment, however, is not a one-size-fits-all issue, which I think is one of the biggest problems within the American “justice” system.

reblogging for mylifeasafeminista’s commentary - YOU ROCK. i just went to a PRI workshop the other day!

…except that prisons shouldn’t exist in the first place. Prisons aren’t effective, they’re a tool of racism and classism and patriarchy, they’re breeding grounds for rape and violence and exploitation. 

We shouldn’t be working for more comfortable cages, we should be smashing the fucking locks on the cages. Unless you’re also in favor of the total abolition of schools as well, this doesn’t make any sense.

andddd reblogging again for commentary. you learn something new every few minutes through tumblr. 

Funny because I am right now writing about penal abolition.

If there were solid reasons for why prisons should exist (and I would like to see those reasons), if you believe in prisons as something that will eventually end crime, then they should be more like what schools are supposed to be like. As it stands, neither one is really an instrument of education, but let’s pretend that overall schools are. If the goal is to make it so that people who have committed a crime don’t commit crimes anymore, then there needs to be something rehabilitative happening in prison to make them not commit that crime. That is, there needs to be some sort of education process there; otherwise they won’t have actually learned not to commit that crime, the lesson is only not to get caught.

All of that is based on several assumptions:

• that the goal of prison is deterring crime or ending it
• that the goal of the penal system is rehabilitation, or making sure that people who have been convicted of crimes once do not commit crimes again
• that the laws in place are just and should be followed
• that the laws in place are carried out fairly and everyone is monitored equally and punished equally for breaking those laws
• that the penal system has the right to put someone in prison and to determine a portion of someone’s life
• that prison is an environment where education and positive self-change could happen, and an environment where inmates are safe and looked out for
• that people will have opportunities for enacting that self-change when they get out of prison and will have opportunities to live their lives in ways that won’t get them arrested again

And I would argue (and am currently arguing in a separate project) that all these assumptions are false. If they were true, then prisons should look like schools, because their purpose should be education and rehabilitation. But because they are false, prisons should look like nothing; our goal should be abolishing prisons and the penal system, instead of just making them slightly friendlier.

(via laborreguitina)

latinosexuality:

i find it interesting that allllllll these people NOW want to worry about people who are incarcerated and their rights and safety. where are they when work and organization needs to get done? i hope i really do hope, that many folks who are reblogging and retweeting these stories of rikers island not being evacuated will volunteer their time/skill to help inmates post the storm in ANY way they can (i.e. teach a class, write a letter, send phone cards, donate ($, books, time), support alternatives to incarceration, etc. etc.)

True. Any day with prisons is a disaster, and it’s a manmade one. A bigger event like this that blatantly and unapologetically disregards people in prison (or even pre-trial holding, which is where many people are at Rikers) shows the nonincarcerated population how deeply society makes prisoners disposable. But every day, just the existence of prisons, the funneling of people into prisons, and the amount of money that passes hands within the prison industry, also shows that disposability if you pay attention.

It’s because of things like this that I’m interested in ways that radical communities can prepare for disasters without depending on the government to take care of us. Like I said earlier, I first started paying attention to that need a little bit after Hurricane Katrina, but more when we had immigration raids in New Haven in which 33 people were arrested. Some of our responses to the raids were instinctual—call everyone you know, get together at the center of the community that was targeted, keep checking in about what families need, protest the role of the New Haven police in the raids—and just came together naturally. I was already doing Food Not Bombs then, and we were figuring out helping families in that neighborhood with food after the raids, because families had lost a source of income; eventually people said they were set on food, but it made me think about how something like FNB could be more prepared to have nonperishable food on hand to distribute.

There’s a group in NYC called Aftershock Action Alliance that does disaster preparedness and puts out lit about it, and I’m interested in how this model could get expanded to more situations and places. Especially with these kinds of manmade disasters (i.e. a hurricane is a natural disaster [w/o taking climate change into account], abandoning a vulnerable population during a hurricane is not).

(via liquornspice)

firesandwords:

Take Action for Rikers’ Island Prisoners!  Demand the City Create an Emergency Evacuation Plan  

Mayor Bloomberg has announced that in the event of a hurricane, that he will not evacuate prisoners at Rikers’ Island, claiming instead to have a “contingency plan” in place. The experience of prisoners in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina shows that city authorities will abandon the basic rights of prisoners in the face of disaster.

We can’t let Bloomberg get away with this!

(1.) Demand the city create an emergency evacuation plan by 5pm today to evacuate prisoners at Rikers Island in the event that other areas in Zone B or C around Rikers Island are evacuated.

Call NYC Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs at (212) 788-2485

lgibbs@cityhall.nyc.gov

Twitter: @NYCMayorsOffice

(2.) Call on NY1 to investigate the status of the “contingency plan” for Rikers Island prisoners:

 http://www.ny1.com/content/contact_us/

Tel.:  212-691-6397

(3.) Submit evacuation plan demand to city’s website:

-Go to http://nycsevereweather.crowdmap.com/reports/submit/  –this is a website set up by the city for people to submit weather-related service problems.  Locate Rikers Island on the map and drag the red marker there.

-Copy and paste this text (or write your own!):

Title: Evacuation plan needed

The city has no evacuation plan for Rikers Island, despite its low elevation and its nearly 13,000 prisoners. Please do not let these individuals, or the ones at the nearby floating Vernon C. Bain Correction Center, suffer.

(4.) Please repost:

http://solitarywatch.com/2011/08/26/locked-up-and-left-behind-new-yorks-prisoners-and-hurricane-irene/\

Locked Up and Left Behind: New York’s Prisoners and Hurricane Irene

(via liquornspice)

zuky:

notemily:

“We are not evacuating Rikers Island,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a news conference this afternoon. Bloomberg annouced a host  of extreme measures being taken by New York City in preparation for the arrival of Hurricane Irene, including a shutdown of the public transit system and the unprecedented mandatory evacuation of some 250,000 people from low-lying areas. But in response to a reporter’s question, the mayor stated in no uncertain terms (and with more than a hint of annoyance) that one group of New Yorkers on vulnerable ground will be staying put.

New York City is surrounded by small islands and barrier beaches, and a glance at the city’s evacuation map reveals all of them to be in Zone A (already under a mandatory evacuation order) or Zone B–all, that is, save one. Rikers Island, which lies in the waters between Queens and the Bronx, is not highlighted at all, meaning it is not to be evacuated under any circumstances.

According to the New York City Department of Corrections’ own website, more than three-quarters of Rikers Island’s 400 acres are built on landfill–which is generally thought to be more vulnerable to natural disasters. Its ten jails have a capacity of close to 17,000 inmates, and normally house at least 12,000, including juveniles and large numbers of prisoners with mental illness–not to mention pre-trial detainees who have yet to be convicted of any crime.

#ugh i’m sure they and the homeless folks will be fine #worked so well in katrina

Incidentally one of the areas of activism I pursued while living in New York was evacuation plans for regional prisons, not only for weather events but also in the event of a catastrophic nuclear meltdown. If you’re familiar with the region, you may be familiar with the Indian Point nuclear power plant, an outdated cracking 50-year-old facility which has leaked radiation on several occasions in recent years. It sits on the Hudson River a short ride from Sing Sing, and in the event of a nuclear meltdown, evacuation plans call for Sing Sing to be locked and abandoned with all inmates still inside. The only sure solution is actually to shut down Indian Point — and we managed to get as far as county hearings on the question, but didn’t manage to cross the finish line and shut it down. In the meantime, the inhumanity of evacuation plans is a point for agitation and reform, and Irene provides an opportunity to engage that debate.

Now’s a good time (no actually, a couple weeks ago was a good time, really) to read up on disaster preparedness & relief outside of the government. Here’s a zine, Insurrectionary Mutual Aid, that we distro and that I really like, about organizing for disasters (natural/manmade/political, etc.) as communities and from an anarchist framework. What got me really paying attention to disaster relief was the immigration raids here a few years ago, and everyone sorting out what families needed in the aftermath of it, and seeing that as a disaster as well, just an intentional one.

(via so-treu)

YESSSS. So much on Google Books. Fuck a hurricane, I know what I’m doing this weekend til the trees come crashing through my house.

kameelahwrites:

(Reuters Health) - Black men are half as likely to die at any given time if they’re in prison than if they aren’t, suggests a new study of North Carolina inmates.

The black prisoners seemed to be especially protected against alcohol- and drug-related deaths, as well as lethal accidents and certain chronic diseases.

But that pattern didn’t hold for white men, who on the whole were slightly more likely to die in prison than outside, according to findings published in Annals of Epidemiology.

Researchers say it’s not the first time a study has found lower death rates among certain groups of inmates — particularly disadvantaged people, who might get protection against violent injuries and murder.

“Ironically, prisons are often the only provider of medical care accessible by these underserved and vulnerable Americans,” said Hung-En Sung of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

“Typically, prison-based care is more comprehensive than what inmates have received prior to their admission,” Sung, who wasn’t involved in the new study, told Reuters Health by email.

The new study involved about 100,000 men between age 20 and 79 who were held in North Carolina prisons at some point between 1995 and 2005. Sixty percent of those men were black.

Researchers linked prison and state health records to determine which of the inmates died, and of what causes, during their prison stay. Then they compared those figures with expected deaths in men of the same age and race in the general population.

curate:

California Admits 6,600 Prisoners Are on Hunger Strike

San Francisco Bayview, News Report, Isaac Ontiveros

OAKLAND, Calif. — The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation reports that as of Friday, July 8, at least 6,600 prisoners in at least 13 of the state’s prisons have joined the hunger strike initiated at Pelican Bay on July 1.
With prisoners striking at Corcoran State Prison Secure Housing Unit (SHU) and Folsom, Tehachapi, Centinela, Calpatria and San Quentin state prisons, as well as prisoners in Perth, Australia, advocates and lawyers working to support the strike claim these numbers are much higher and are pushing the CDCR to enter into negotiations with prisoners at Pelican Bay and immediately implement their demands.

The demands outlined by hunger strike leaders in the Security Housing Unit at Pelican Bay Prison include an end to long term confinement and collective punishment; access to food and programs; and an end to the practice of “debriefing,” or requiring prisoners to divulge information about themselves and other prisoners around gang affiliation in order to be released back into general population….

via bespangled