Critical Resistance: "Nourishing Abolition"

Here's the link to the flier for the Critical Resistance "Nourishing Abolition" Celebration to be held Thursday, November 19, in Oakland, California. Critical Resistance is a national resource and organizing center dedicated to the abolition of the prison industrial complex. Angela Davis - abolitionist,  professor, author, former political prisoner - is among the guests at the event. It is a cause worth supporting, if you're out in that neighborhood - and the Critical Resistance site is a great internet resource.

Torture of Women in Prisons

Hey All -

Found a good interview with Vikki law (who wrote Resistance Behind bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women) at this opednews site- it's an interview done by the Angloa 3 guys on the torture of women in prisons. Seemed relevant to Marcia's campaign.

Pittsburgh G-20 Resistance Project

Another take on the G20 resistance, via the Phoenix Anarchist Coalition:

Sept. 24: Mass March on the G-20 

Summit: The People’s Uprising!

Capitalism isn’t in crisis, capitalism IS the crisis…

For a present and future worth living we must act…

For a world based on dignity, love, compassion and sustainability we must work to build it…

Against all systems and relations of injustice, exploitation and oppression we endlessly and uncompromisingly rebel…

Meet: 2:30pm at Arsenal Park (40th Street & Penn Avenue in Lawrenceville)

We invite you to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on Sept. 24 for a global justice convergence coinciding with, and occurring alongside, resistance to the G-20 summit descending on our city that same week.

For four days, thousands of people from all walks of life will be active participants in actions and dialogues that go beyond the G-20 summit to the heart of what matters: why is the world the way it is and what can we do about it? The summit offers a strategic opportunity to answer these questions and demonstrate our ongoing resistance to the existing social order.

During this convergence there will be community gatherings, labor marches, climate justice actions, events to connect global injustice to local institutions, and dozens of other activities. This is a gathering of those disaffected who are far from demoralized. A coming together of those who refuse to be crushed by this system’s violence and exclusion, who desire something more than to live their lives and observe the world around them through a pane of glass.

On Thursday, September 24, the G-20 summit officially begins and we will hold a mass march to their walled off meeting site downtown. This march will not be state-sanctioned; it is unpermitted and intended to allow people the space and freedom to oppose the G- 20 how they see fit. The rest is up to you! There will be different contingents focusing on workers, students and climate issues, alongside other feeder marches, bands, and hundreds engaged in a collective effort to disrupt the summit. The summit is much more than a meeting; it is the creation of a spectacle, legitimizing the ability of the few to wield power in the minds of the population and that is far more important to contest than an event that could conceivably occur as a giant conference call.

This march is the main event on Thursday, something that has been acknowledged by other sectors mobilizing against the summit. Some of our comrades have had experiences with going to protests in which 150 or 300 people, mostly wearing black, attempt to disrupt an event and are attacked by police only to find themselves isolated and without support in the broader community. We can't stress enough that this is not what's going to go down in Pittsburgh. We believe it is time for our movements to once again realize our power and to start thinking and planning with that strength in mind. We’re not going to settle for ducking behind others’ events. We’ve got numbers and we don’t need that kind of cover. Not to mention, if you live in the Steel City, you’re familiar with the overlap, the same faces at both liberal and radical events. Planning a march at the same time would only serve to decrease our numbers on both fronts. And ultimately, we aim to show solidarity based on respect for a political diversity within this struggle. We’ll be living and working alongside other Pittsburgh communities of resistance long after the pepper spray has cleared the air and the out-of-towners have headed home. We want to respect the stated goals of our neighbors, to protest the destructive, undemocratic policies of the G-20 and demonstrate that a better world is possible. Diversity of tactics works best when the space is available for that diversity to actually occur.

At its heart, this mass march springs from an understanding that our miseries and the myriad of injustices we see and experience are all consequences of the way in which society is structured. Profit is extracted from others’ labor and to achieve a maximization of profit necessitates a division of people along socially constructed lines, that decision-making and privilege are hierarchically arranged, that competition and the desire for total control necessitate ever expanding apparatuses of oppression and fear.

This is therefore not simply an “appeal” to the political process for universal health care, for an end to attacks on workers’ rights to organize, for an end to occupations of others’ lands, for clean water, for accessible education for all, for sustainability to forestall ecological collapse, or for a break with corporate power. It rejects both a singular focus on single issue organizing and the false notion that our world vision is about bringing together a bunch of complaints about the way things are. This march is our statement that our solutions must be as systemic as the problems we face, that our future lies in a “movement of movements” that work synergistically with one another to produce victories based on the interconnected nature of solutions. And so we don’t come to ask, beg or negotiate, we come to find strength in one another to work towards a society in which the injustices and indignities with which we struggle every day can finally be addressed.

In solidarity,
Pittsburgh G-20 Resistance Project

Web: http://www.resistg20.org
Convergence Center: 4374 Murray Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15217 (at the corner of Murray and Hazelwood in Greenfield).

Abolish them all.

First, let me repeat: There needs to be an independent outside investigation of the death of Marcia Powell, and the appropriateness of certain policies as soon as possible - before evidence is corrupted. This is the latest on the story from Stephen Lemons at the Phoenix New Times. It is titled: "Marcia Powell did have next of kin." (She was removed from life support just hours after she was brought in from under the sun. Why could that not wait for a meaningful search for next of kin? How can Ryan investigate himself on this?)

Also announced today: It's been a little more than two weeks since Marcia Powell died, and the Perryville prison complex in Goodyear just can't get by without using outdoor cages, so they're back. It was previously reported that prisoners were supposed to be checked on every 30 minutes - that's the brilliant new policy they have in place now, with a log book where staff have to document when the prisoner was last seen alive.

That's going to keep people like Marcia from heatstroke and death again?

Here's the AZ Republic article announcing it.

Why don't we ever hear what prisoners and families have to say?

Also came across this article today about how creatively states are saving money on prisoner food budgets: they're just eliminating meals. Some prisoner advocates argue that making food a scarce commodity in prison is not only a denial of human rights, but it creates an opening for more violence.

That make sense, since it will also lead to more time and more reason to leave people locked down or in solitary. And I guess if people are busy fighting for food they won't be clamoring for luxuries like health care.

That's often an effective tactic used against poor people who are trying to organize: hunger is no small thing. Hunger is a brutal form of torture that can be dragged out for years; it wears down ones resistance and gnaws at our children; it brings entire armies to its knees. Hunger feeds our jails and prisons already with check-kiters and petty thieves - need we starve them there, now, too?

The new budget proposal calls for privatizing several prisons in AZ, including Perryville, where Marcia died and and Death Row lives. The only thing in the way of this legislation passing is the Governor. All attention should be focused on the governor's office. She could even write Marcia's law into this budget with oversight and prisoner rights protections, provisions for reducing the flow of people into prisons and overcrowding, and appropriations to make it meaningful. Marcia's Law could be a deal-maker, if she wanted it to be.

Enough of us have to let her know we want Marcia's Law first. And what we want in it.

For folks with questions about where the prison reform advocates are on this, contact Middle Ground Prison Reform in Tempe. Donna Hamm is the one who proposed Marcia's law, and probably has a clear agenda for what that might look like.

When you do contact your legislators and the governor's office, please just remember the following concerns that need to be raised:

1. do not privatize prisons - the DOC needs to be accountable - focusing instead on saving money through decarceration;

2. adequately fund re-entry assistance, long term affordable housing, and employment opportunities (and options for the disabled) to reduce recidivism;

3. reform sentencing laws to reduce incarceration rates, and

4. put teeth into prisoner rights protections - including funding more intensively for training of guards and prisoners alike about rights,

5. Citizen - community-level - oversight of facilities based on the overall jail/prison population, so both communities that operate prisons and those that lose their children to them are represented;

6. New policy immediately: no more cages (That makes a great freewayblogging sign, if you can find a fenced overpass);

7. Prioritize making recommended reforms to health and mental health care services for prisoners, and compassionate release for those who are elderly and seriously or terminally ill.

We need to take control of these institutions - just like our schools - and hold government accountable.

We don't need more commissions and studies, really. This can just be done. Just keep in mind the vision of a world with no need for prisons, and step by step we'll blaze a trail. It's already begun. Critical Resistance, in fact, produces the CR Abolition Organizing Tool Kit, which is worth the $15 I think they ask for it. Spend some time on the website - it's a great resource. There are a few other good books at that link too - I'd recommend all four selections for starting an abolition library.

I'd also recommend a subscription to The Abolitionist (same page): mine just came today and it's pretty good. It helps to see how others address the dilemmas and challenges inherent in building a world without bars.