Prisons, Prose & Protest - #27

Rants, Musings and More

It’s been a busy start to the month of May for me. First, I am thrilled with the success of the Black Zine Fair (BZF) and need to thank my co-conspirator and friend Neta Bomani for putting in so much work to make it excellent. There were over 60 exhibitors and over 1200 attendees. Gratitude to all the volunteers, presenters, and partners who came together to create this special space. I think that everyone who came left feeling inspired to keep creating and to keep building community.

I shared five new publications at the BZF and Sojourners for Justice Press brought three new publications to the fair. I am proud of all of our independent publishing, especially at this current historical moment.

The day after the fair, I led a tour about Black abolitionists in NYC as part of Jane’s Walk. It rained but I appreciated meeting and walking with my fellow New Yorkers and talking about a part of this city’s history.

Giving Circle Update: In April, some of you donated $1841.44 [after fees] to the Giving Circle. I donated $1973.56 to 6 projects/people. Documentation of the groups that received funds is here. Thanks to everyone who has donated in lieu of a paid subscription for this newsletter. I don’t intend to monetize this newsletter on this site, so if you want to support it, please feel free to join the Giving Circle.

In this issue of Prisons, Prose & Protest, I offer a short history of carceral playgrounds. I recommend a new podcast by some of my wisest friends, several good recent articles, and more…

Art by Monica Trinidad (2025)

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Playground Jails and Copaganda

I am working on a long-term project about children and play. In that context, I’ve been thinking a lot about toys and games, and how these both shape and interact with carcerality.

Police can be a serious threat to children, and especially to Black youth. As just one example, Cleveland police officer Timothy Loehmann shot and killed Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old, in 2014. Zero-tolerance policies and a greater law enforcement presence in schools have contributed to a school-to-prison pipeline, pushing marginalized youth “out of classrooms and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems,” according to the ACLU.

Although police are a threat to young people—or because they are—schools, police and other authorities often encourage children to look up to, trust, and imitate cops.

Perhaps the most famous child-oriented copaganda effort was the Officer Friendly program, which ran from the 1970s through the 90s and reached some 1.5 million students between the ages of five and eight. Officer Friendly workbooks showed “helpful” cops locating missing kids and responding to 911 calls. Public service messages featuring the cute trench-coat wearing anthropomorphic canine McGruff the Crime Dog also functioned to make policing seem cuddly and fun. Children’s shows, books, and other entertainment often feature heroic and friendly police confronting criminal wrongdoers and throwing them in prison.

Playground design can also incorporate copaganda. Early 20th-century developers designed urban parks and play spaces generally for white children only. Police would harass Black children who tried to use them, or stand by while white mobs attacked them. Tamir Rice’s death was part of this history as well; Rice was in a Cleveland playground gazebo carrying a toy gun when Loehmann shot and killed him.

Despite Rice’s killing, the history of violent policing in parks is not much discussed or remembered. Today, jail- and police- themed equipment in playgrounds can encourage children to pretend to be police and can normalize the use of prisons, jails, and incarceration as punishment.

The most controversial example of a playground pretend jail, in Brooklyn, received national attention in 2010. But it is not an isolated case.

The Tompkins Houses jungle gym jail

In 2006, the City of New York commissioned a company called Landscape Structures to create a playground for the Tompkins Houses housing project in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. The playground included “an orange jungle gym adorned with the word ‘Jail,’ a cell door and prison bars,” according to reporting in the New York Times.

The Tompkins House community complained about the play jail for many years. In 2008, a mother reportedly sprayed over the word “Jail” with gold spray paint, though someone later restored the lettering.

People largely ignored these concerns until 2010, when the website Black and Brown News reported on them. The controversy was then picked up by the Times and other city outlets.

Lumumba Bandele, a veteran organizer and educator, denounced the play jail to Times reporters. “The fact is that this community along with six others in New York City makes up the majority of the prison population in New York State,” he said. “And to have this here under the auspices of [the New York City Housing Authority] is absolutely insulting.” One Tompkins House mother, Carmen Maldonado, told the Times that she tried to take her two children to other playgrounds, because she did not want her children to believe that they should want to go to jail.

After the controversy hit major newspapers, the city quickly painted over the word jail and scoured off the fake bars on the jungle gym. They also promised to replace the equipment.

Not the only play jail

The city was uncertain who had ordered the play jail or why. But the Times reporting suggested that play jails were rare. Four playground equipment companies said that they did not produce or sell play jails or jail-themed equipment. Darell Hammon, the founder of Kaboom, which builds playgrounds in poor neighborhoods, said, “In my 14 years’ experience on thousands of playgrounds, I actually have never seen [a jail-themed jungle gym.] So the good news is, I don’t think it’s a major problem.”

However, the Tompkins House play jail is not the only example of playground copaganda. In the 70s and 80s, McDonald’s added playgrounds to many restaurants to attract children and families to the restaurants. One regular feature of these playgrounds was an “Officer Big Mac”; kids could climb into the police officer’s hamburger head, which featured bars and functioned as a pretend jail.

Critics declared McDonald’s playgrounds unsafe. Original models featured metal play equipment that could become dangerously hot in summer; kids who fell on the equipment also experienced concussions and broken bones. But there was little pushback at the time against the playgrounds’ jail and policing themes.

There’s some evidence that jail-themed play equipment has been common outside of McDonald’s as well. The Candyland Adventure indoor playground in Pennsylvania features a play area with a “police station theme.” Police-themed and Western jail–themed playground equipment is also still available from private sellers. And of course toys for kids with police themes—Lego sets, Halloween costumes, Hot Wheels cars—are common.

An unsigned op-ed for Fox News published in 2010 in response to the Tompkins House play jail reporting claimed that “almost every big playground for young kids that I can remember going to as a child or taking my own kids to has had a ‘jail’ as part of the fantasy play.” It’s unclear how reliable this anecdote is. But given the lack of outcry in response to McDonald’s playground jails, and the ubiquity of copaganda, it seems likely that the Tompkins Houses playground jail was not the first or only one of its kind.

Playing with copaganda

Playground jails are not that common and have probably become less so as activists and marginalized communities have worked to raise awareness of police violence and police dangers to children and young people. However, as Tamir Rice’s death shows, actual policing in playgrounds remains a problem and a danger. At the same time, copaganda, including copaganda directed specifically at children, remains ubiquitous. In a society that celebrates police officers as heroic figures, and that accepts and normalizes mass incarceration, police and prisons are hard to escape, even for kids, and even on the playground.

Alec Karakatsanis has a new book about copaganda that I am looking forward to reading. My friend, Lewis Wallace, has been spearheading a copaganda series at Interrupting Criminalization.

Publishing

In the United States, tear gas is considered a standard police weapon used to disperse and repress crowds. It is generally discussed and marketed as a non-lethal and humane policing tool. However, the truth is that tear gas is both traumatizing and dangerous, and has been used by cops to intensify rather than prevent violence. In the 6th zine in my Archival Activations series, I share some historical background about the US police and their use of tear gas, along with archival photos and documents from my collection. I hope that more people will come to oppose its use and support efforts to ban it. Designed by Cindy Lau, I debuted this zine at Black Zine Fair. I’ll have some copies available at Printed Matter in the coming weeks.

Prose

For The Appeal, Meg O’Connor digs into some of the most extreme charges US states are levying against campus antigenocide protesters.

Hannah Riley and Micah Herskind offer up the lessons that Atlanta Stop Cop City organizers have learned about intense state repression of protest as a roadmap for “dissenters of all stripes” in this era. Pre-order this forthcoming anthology.

In an earlier newsletter, I shared a story about the neighborhood anti-ICE patrols in and around San Diego organized by Unión del Barrio. In April, Roberto Comacho checked in with organizers of the program for Bolts.

Silky Shah describes how “the changing infrastructure and scope of immigrant incarceration has become a clear testing ground for [the Trump] administration’s authoritarianism“ for Truthout.

In Prism, Kate Morrissey tells the story of oppressive Obama- and Trump-era border policies and successful litigation against them through the experiences of one asylum-seeker.

A terrifying, well-researched story about a woman in mental distress starving to death in an Arizona jail, and the corporations and structures responsible for her death, and for many more, through starvation, dehydration, and medical neglect. You can listen to the audio version of the story even without a subscription to the New Yorker.

Nylah Iqbal Muhammad writes in Hammer and Hope about how caloric restriction, inedible and unhealthy food, and other means of food sovereignty denial are woven into the everyday cruelties of carceral systems.

Orisanmi Burton writes about the New York state prison guards’ strike. As he writes, “I recount key aspects of this multifaceted crisis that has unfolded across the New York state prison system over the past three months and demonstrate that seemingly inscrutable aspects of the guards’ demands make sense when the prison is understood in its proper context as warfare.” Burton is the author of Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt.

I loved this reflection by Nataliya Braginsky on the practice and promise of teaching abolition and restorative justice to high school students.

Jackie Snow writes beautifully about how volunteering for a books-behind-bars organization changed her as a reader.

In the New Left Review, Aziz Rana walks us through what the collapse of the US constitutional order really means.

Podcast

My beloved friends and comrades have a wonderful new podcast!!!!! It grounds listeners in the histories of transformative justice and community accountability. You should definitely listen.

Poems

I love Lisel Mueller’s “In Passing” as a meditation on transience and wonder.

Potpourri

5/17 - NYC—Come to NYC Public Library Network’s People’s Assembly.

5/17 - Chicago—Come to an outdoor celebration and picnic to celebrate the launch of our children’s book, Prisons Must Fall.

5/21 - Chicago—The premiere of Invisible Giants, the short film based on the guidebook of Black women’s history on Chicago’s South and West Sides that I cowrote with my friend Essence McDowell, premieres this month at the Chicago History Museum. Essence has put her heart and soul into this project.

5/22 - Chicago—I’ll be talking about zine-making with Marc Fischer, K Reynolds, and Lewis Wallace: Why Make Zines in 2025? Marc was inspired to create a new zine!

5/25 - If you are seeking a space where you can reflect individually and with others on your ongoing activism and organizing, feel free to join me on the last Sunday of every month through December on Zoom from 4 to 6 pm ET. The next drop-in session is on Sunday, May 25. This is for people already engaged in some form of activism and organizing. Space is limited. Please only sign up if you are sure you want to drop in.

Just Detention has produced an excellent advocacy toolkit about protecting incarcerated trans people.

What is International Solidarity?, a recently released zine by James Kilgore, summarizes the findings and questions about the practice of international solidarity that emerged from 39 interviews with organizers who have participated in international solidarity movements.

I also really recommend WHY QUESTION? By Erica Overmeer. “Through a simple discourse of alternating questions, WHY QUESTION? explores themes of complicity, accountability, and agency. As these questions build upon and interrogate each other, they reflect on our capacity to hold complexity, difference, and multiple realities at once – asking fundamental questions about who speaks by, for, to, and through whom.”

Teaching for Change has a wonderful Organizing Booklist that introduces students of all ages to a range of social justice activists and strategies.

I love the post-incarceration and post-deportation reentry guides made by Illinois’s Education Justice Project.

Why am I being read?

Amy Wilson has made an incredible editioned art book called How to Survive This Moment.

An excellent zine of poetry by incarcerated women from the University of California Sentencing Project’s Creative Writing Workshop.

If you’re in Philadelphia, you should visit the Formerly Incarcerated Renaissance Museum (The F.I.R.M.), which opened last year to pay “homage to the talents of formerly incarcerated individuals, especially women, in America.” It’s profiled here.

Cool Library Thing

This is a great profile of the free grocery market at an Enoch Pratt Library branch in Baltimore, and of the larger free grocery store phenomenon.