Results matching “prison abolition”

*Note: There is no internet access on the conference site, so these live blogs will be posted with significant delay. Sorry everyone!

Getting Real about Alternatives to Cops

Critical Resistance 10 Conference, Rose City Copwatch

Founded in 2003 in Portland Oregon
Building community power in opposition to police violence
-observing police behavior (videotaping police)
-agitation, disruption
-reconciling police abolition with concerns about safety

Examples:
-bad date line for dangerous johns
-Community committees in apartheid SA where the police had abandoned the neighborhood
-Peace for the streets by kids from the streets, Seattle WA "donut dialogues"

Alternatives vs Auxiliaries? How do we reconcile programs to make policing better or safer with a larger goal of prison abolition?
-Hate crimes, violence against women and their usage to legitimize and escalate policing (the idea of "vulnerable populations" who need defense)
-Ubuntu, an organization run by survivors in Durham NC
-Trust building and community building as ways of creating our own networks for safety
-Emergency healthcare: police are always a part of first response
-Philly Stands Up: Sexual Assault Survivor Support
-Gang intervention in a community: mothers in the community would make lunch and go eat it on the corners where young men were hanging out. It was a way to reach out to them and make them uncomfortable.
-Grandmothers used as a security system, tough love policing
-What is crime? How do we look at that critically? Criminalization of drugs, stealing, what about morality, ethics, crime defined by harm?

Vanessa Huang is a queer Chinese-American organizer, writer, and artist born to immigrants from Taipei. Vanessa is the Campaign Director for Justice Now , and also organizes with Transforming Justice and the Bay Area chapter of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence .

Our movements are at a turning point.

10 years have passed since Critical Resistance ’s founding gathering in 1998, when thousands of people converged in Berkeley to develop strategies to abolish the prison industrial complex. Back then, I was 14 years old and just beginning high school, unaware of this historic gathering taking place just across town.

As a queer female- and able-bodied kid of immigrants who came to the U.S. with papers, I’ve grown to understand my experiences along a spectrum of migration, recognizing the histories of coerced migration to this land connected with colonialism and slavery, and their legacies in ongoing U.S. confinement practices spanning ICE and the prison industrial complex more broadly. I’ve also grown to accept my role as a bridgebuilder for movements for collective liberation, and to understand that role stemming from both my experiences of not ever quite fitting in because of where my family’s from, my relationship with my body, how I present myself, and my sexuality – and from my ability and class privileges.

Since 1998, I’ve joined the prison industrial complex abolition movement at the tail end of conversations bringing the experiences of people locked in women’s prisons into public consciousness. Most recently, I’ve been able to help bring this organizing into conversation with emerging work centering transgender and gender non-conforming people targeted by the prison industrial complex. In this back-and-forth, the movement challenging the imprisonment of people in women’s prisons has shared lessons we’ve learned, i.e. how we’ve contributed to the rise of dangerous policy trends (“gender responsive� prison expansion) , and the movement challenging the imprisonment of transgender and gender non-conforming communities has significantly deepened our broader movements’ understandings and embodiment of gender justice alliances – across gender identities, gender presentations, and experiences of gender oppression.

This past weekend, Justice Now convened 17 key leaders engaged in work at the intersections of the reproductive justice and anti-population control, gender self-determination, prison industrial complex abolition, and anti-violence movements. We spent the weekend building groundwork toward a cross-movement effort to challenge “gender responsive� imprisonment as a form of reproductive and gender oppression – and to strengthen existing strategies to proactively reduce imprisonment; support communities, not prisons; and foster non-harmful responses to violence.

Right now – as my comrades and I shift gears into the final few months before CR10 : Critical Resistance’s 10th Anniversary Celebration and Strategy Session this fall in Oakland – I’m particularly present with the feeling of struggle, hope, vulnerability, and excitement that comes when we embrace and nurture our movements’ growing edges. Join us September 26-28!

I am very very excited this week to present our Voices of series for May featuring the amazing organization Justice Now. Justice Now is located in Oakland CA and works at the intersection of violence against women and incarceration and prison expansion. They are one of the amazing organizations that fights for prison abolition.

In their own words,

Our mission is to end violence against women and stop their imprisonment. We believe that prisons and policing are not making our communities safe and whole but that, in fact, the current system severely damages the people it imprisons and the communities most affected by it. We promote alternatives to policing and prisons and challenge the prison industrial complex in all its forms.

This weeks posts will blow your minds both from women inside the prison system to advocates working alongside them.

Thank you Justice Now for joining us in our Voices of series! Give em some extra love feministing fam!

I am a little late to this, but since the media seems to be spending more time covering Paris Hilton's experience with the criminal justice system over anything else (only to be replaced by the murder of a pregnant woman--a seeming trend--which is a whole different post on how the media has to stop trying cases on TV) it seems that a conversation has failed us about the actual problems in the criminal justice system. And specifically in California, home to proposals that seek to expand prisons as opposed to schools, but also home to several prison abolitionist campaigns.

My colleague, Jeremy Bearer-Friend from Justice Now and Movement Strategy Center, pointed me to a piece he wrote about the fact that the actual problems with the criminal justice system and the populations targeted by it are being ignored for the fate of a famous woman (whether the coverage be unnecessarily cruel or not).

He writes,

“it’s imperative to bring in an abolitionist angle.�

The real scandal here is that women of color are the fastest growing population of incarcerated people in the US, yet this story is never told or reported on. The current media frenzy over Paris demonstrates only the apartheid state we currently live under, with a media that is absolutely uninterested in reporting on the mass incarceration of people of color.

“De-incarceration has been a central goal of prison reform and prison abolition work in California. That Paris has the opportunity to remain within her community and recover from her substance abuse amongst her family is an opportunity that all addicts should be able to enjoy. The reaction to this story is not to lock up everyone for longer and prevent addicts from accessing treatment. The solution is to shut down a broken system and replace it with public health money that can treat addiction and substance abuse in an effective and healing way.�

So, people only want to hear about celebrity gossip? I just want to add to this the media LOVES to highlight the incarceration of people of color, just not from an abolitionist perspective. Often MSM is more focused on recreating some mythical monster beast that must be put behind bars to keep our good white children safe.

Am I wrong?