Prisons, Prose & Protest - #18

Rants, Musings & More

I’m not ready for it to be August. Please stop time. 

I’m looking forward to seeing friends and comrades in Chicago at the end of this month at Socialism 2024. I haven’t been back to Chicago in two years and I miss the city and my friends. 

Also, registration is open for another exciting upcoming conference, “Through the Portal: Growing the World We Want,” in Chicago from September 20 to 22. I will be participating, along with over 80 other scholars, organizers, and artists who will gather together to share research and organizing experiences around three core themes: abolition, economic justice, and ecology.

There’s continued devastation in Gaza and people really need help now even as we do what we can to end the genocide and the occupation. I know that many crowdfunding links are circulating on social media and that the need is great. I have been trying to do my part to donate regularly and I know that it never feels like enough, but we can each contribute what we can. Will some of you please join me in supporting these two crowdfunding requests here and here? If you have the means to donate, please be as generous as you can.

In this month’s edition of Prisons, Prose & Protest, I share some thoughts about a project about art and censorship. I recommend a podcast about somatics, transformative justice, and safety; several good recent articles; and more…

Prisons/Policing

Prisons and jails are extremely dehumanizing institutions to enter and exit. Within these torture chambers, incarcerated people make art. This has been true as long as prisons and jails have existed. In recent years, more people on the outside have sought to collaborate with incarcerated people to both create art and also to platform the art they have made. 

A persistent moral and ethical question undergirds sharing work created by incarcerated and criminalized people: What should publications, galleries, and other curators do with art made by incarcerated people who have caused grievous harm? Does sharing it cause additional harm to those who were victimized by the artist, or to those who experienced similar harms? 

In 2021, Poetry magazine published a special issue that included the poems of Kirk Nesset, a former professor who had served time in prison for possessing child sexual abuse images. The special issue had invited submissions from “people who are or were incarcerated, their families, and those who work in ‘carceral spaces’.” Survivors of sexual violence expressed their opposition to the inclusion of his poems, and a couple of survivors shared that Nesset had sexually abused them as children.

This incident raised several questions for prison industrial complex (PIC) abolitionists, including the editors of the special issue. However, there didn’t seem to be space to engage those questions in real time. When the controversy online died down, I wondered what lessons were learned. The Return to Sender exhibition that I curated last year featured writing and visual art by incarcerated and criminalized artists and raised questions around prison censorship including: What do we do with the intellectual and cultural production of criminalized people? Should we censor these works? How do we decide?

As I reflected on these questions, I believed it was a good time to gather some abolitionist comrades (artists, survivors of violence, formerly incarcerated/criminalized people, organizers, advocates, educators, and more) to contemplate art and censorship deeply, specifically our principles regarding publishing and promoting the work of individuals who have caused significant harm and have been criminalized for it. I called on Jess Sylvia Phoenix and Cheryl Rivera to co-organize and co-facilitate some brainstorming sessions with me in May and July. We used the poetry magazine incident as a jumping-off point for our conversations. We were fortunate to have some individuals who were involved in editing and publishing the special issue in these sessions. 

Before each brainstorming session, we asked invited attendees to answer a few questions about how their organizations currently approach publishing or platforming the work of people who have committed grievous harm and have been criminalized for it. Based on these presession surveys, we surfaced questions to guide the discussions. These included:

This April, many of us met in person to dig even deeper into these and other questions together. In the end, dozens of people from across the country came together over the course of a year to develop a set of principles to take back to our communities for further conversation. The principles are not prescriptive or definitive, but they hopefully provide some clarity around some abolitionist values and commitments. 

I take heart in being part of communities of co-strugglers that constantly test our values while working diligently to shrink the gap between these values and our actions. I am immensely grateful to all those who played a part in this project, with a special appreciation for the currently and formerly incarcerated individuals who shared their perspectives. In particular, I was so moved by the participation of the members of the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project (PNAP) Think Tank at Stateville Prison. 

Because it’s not intended for the general public, we have decided not to share what we created together publicly. Instead, we’ve committed to bringing the work back to our communities and using it to sharpen and strengthen our practice. Once again, I am deeply grateful to everyone for their ideas, labor, and commitment to building a different world. 

War on Censorship by Hector “Bori” Rodriguez (2023)

Prose

This is a podcast episode that felt like prose and left me clutching my chest…

 “How to Survive Jail” is a moving personal account of incarceration in Atlanta-area jails by Stop Cop City forest defender Priscilla Grim. I encourage everyone to read the entire new issue of Hammer & Hope. It’s excellent. I learned a lot from this article about what’s happening in the Sudan too.

Bonnie Tenneriello examines the power of carceral systems to circumvent reform efforts, even those with wide public support, in this Boston Review essay about solitary confinement policy. Tenneriello asks, “Can meaningful solitary reform be achieved in a system where surveillance and control are the lodestar and deprivation is pervasive?”

I really enjoyed this Modern Farmer article about the rising popularity of free fridges, part of a fantastic series on the logistics and ethos of free fridges. One Million Experiments also has a great podcast episode featuring the organizers of a free fridge in the Bronx.  

I’ve shared resources in past newsletters about the powerful ongoing organizing against efforts to build a federal prison in Letcher County, Kentucky. In Prism, Ray Levy Uyeda describes where things stand now and does a particularly good job of articulating the damaging racial dynamics of prison construction in the region. 

For Inquest, Michelle Brown wrote a wonderful review of “Beyond Walls,” a collection of five short abolitionist documentary films. (I co-produced & co-wrote one of the films—you can watch it here.) 

An interesting look at efforts by social scientists to quantify the effectiveness of public protests…

This report asks trenchant questions about whether Baltimore’s “focused deterrence” gun violence reduction strategy is effectively reproducing the mass incarceration strategies that it was billed as replacing.  

In this insightful essay, Amna A. Akbar shines a light on the role municipal, state, and lower federal courts play in carceral violence, and looks at the growing power of creative organizing to resist and refuse those dynamics.

Podcast

This was a nourishing conversation between Kai Cheng Thom and Prentis Hemphill.

Poem

I appreciate this selection of poems about living and finding beauty in a broken world. Like Katie Farris, I want “to train myself, in the midst of a burning world/ to offer poems of love to a burning world.”  

Potpourri

The No More Police audiobook is on sale for $10 at Audiobooks.com.

If you’re in NYC on August 3, join me and writer, healer, and book artist tash nikol for an afternoon of zines, art books, and artmaking. We will use art to present a story of the Anguilla Prison Camp Massacre, an act of racist murder in response to a group of prisoners’ refusal to work in snake-infested waters. The program will include a talk followed by an art activity to remember and honor victims of the massacre, with provided materials. The art book that tash and I recently co-authored will be available for sale, with all proceeds benefiting Survived and Punished NY’s mutual aid fund. Register here.  

In Hope is a discipline—which is showing at The Arts Center at Governors Island from July 27 to September 29—Meghana Karnik has initiated and co-organized a showing of an ensemble of artists who explore ideas of memory and political inheritance. The show borrows inspiration from the aphorism that means so much to me, “hope is a discipline.”

The next session of the Life Stories of Anti-Slavery Abolitionists book discussion group is August 25, and we’ll be discussing Harriet Jacobs and her book Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl. Join us.

If you’re in NYC, don’t miss this conversation between Jack Norton and Ruth Wilson Gilmore on August 13. They’ll discuss the book Norton cowrote with Lydia Pelot-Hobbs and Judah Schept, The Jail is Everywhere: Fighting the New Geography of Mass Incarceration. 

New participatory research about criminalized survivors led by zara raven and Tracy McCarter. The research asks questions such as “how do criminalized survivors heal from state and interpersonal violence?”

I’m excited about a recently released resource by Free Hearts, Milwaukee Freedom Fund, Montgomery Bail Out, Tucson Bail Fund, and Community Justice Exchange. Dismantling Carceral Debt: A Manifesto on Building Debtor Power “covers six critical interventions that organizations can take to meaningfully challenge debt that accrues as a result of people being criminalized, prosecuted, imprisoned, or deported, including strategies for building debtor power and rejecting techno-solutionist reforms.” A Spanish language version is forthcoming.

Some of my zines are available for purchase at Printed Matter and can be ordered online. 

Abolitionist Tarot Cards from Southerners on New Ground to accompany their Strategic Almanac. 

Another delicious sorrel-based discovery for non–alcohol drinkers like me.

I’ve preordered this book and am so excited about it: Blk Mkt Vintage: Reclaiming Objects and Curiosities That Tell Black Stories.

I’ve been listening to this on repeat! Tasha is so talented. 

Cool Library Thing of the Month

In last month’s newsletter, I mentioned The Warehouse: A Visual Primer on Mass Incarceration, an innovative new art book by James Kilgore and Vic Liu. Through October 4, the Parkway Central Library in Philadelphia is exhibiting an installation of nine giant banners displaying Liu’s artwork from the book.