Prisons, Prose & Protest - #3
Rants, Musings & More
Welcome to Prisons, Prose & Protest, my personal newsletter. In this month’s edition, I reflect on incarcerated people’s contributions and influence on the theory and practice of prison abolition. I am excited to unveil a brand new zine that I worked on with Dr. Liat Ben Moshe and Sarah Warmker. Newsletter readers get all of the exclusives 🙂. I also share a preorder link for my forthcoming guidebook with Essence McDowell, among other items. Happy reading!
In solidarity,
Mariame
Prisons/Policing
Prison abolition finds some of its roots in the theorizing and organizing practices of incarcerated and formerly criminalized people. Compelling evidence of this can be found in various manifestos written by prisoners and in revolutionary actions they have taken. Many years ago, as part of a project where I co-created youth-friendly materials about the Attica Uprising, I came across a 1972 interview with two “recently released” Attica rebels. The interview was reprinted in a pamphlet called We Are Attica: Interviews with Prisoners from Attica. Speaking to the interviewer, a recently released organizer referred to as “Joe” responds to a question:
“Like I said, I’m not in favor of penitentiary reform. I’m in favor of abolishing the whole penitentiary. I don’t desire that you make the penitentiary like the Holiday Inn.”
I was reminded of this interview again in 2020 when listening to Dr. Orisanmi Burton reference Joe’s words as part of a virtual abolition teach-in.
With a little research, I was able to learn that Joe was Joseph "Joe" Little, who was politicized while incarcerated at Attica Prison and continued to organize against prisons and capitalism until he died in 2010.
After the Attica uprising, Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York, convened more commissions and task forces to *study* the issues and *make recommendations.* What else is new? For example, the state of New York impaneled a "Select Committee on Correctional Institutions and Programs" to issue a report.
Joe and his comrades decided to crash a hearing of the (useless) Select Committee. In an article published in the New York Daily News on February 12, 1972, we read that "a group of ex-convicts all but took over a public hearing on prisons yesterday to tell of being shot and gassed as inmates and to demand the ‘abolition of all prisons.’"
A couple of years ago, I reached out to Dr. Burton to ask if he had any more information about this incident and he kindly sent me a copy of part of the transcript of the hearing. Joe’s impromptu testimony begins on p. 100.
If you read the transcript, you will better understand that the threat of legal repression prevented the survivors of Attica from explicitly discussing the revolutionary dimensions of their uprising. However, Dr. Burton has a new book coming this fall that will help to reclaim this history. Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt is now available for preorder and I have already purchased my copy. You should too!
In my book We Do This Til We Free Us, I mention that one of the first people I heard talking about divesting from the prison industrial complex and investing in life-affirming institutions was a formerly incarcerated Black Panther Party member and intellectual named Eddie Ellis. I was happy to read Eddie referenced in an article in Slate by Seema Saifee last month about the Green Haven Think Tank. I had never heard of the Think Tank before and am glad that Saifee has recovered this history. It underscores, as she writes, “how people behind bars have created concepts and strategies that have opened up new possibilities to reduce incarceration and reduce crime.”
When PIC abolitionists who work outside of prisons/jails credit incarcerated people with co developing abolitionist theory and organizing strategies over the course of the movement’s history, it’s because there are countless examples that support this truth. I wanted to share a couple with you today.
Publishing
Lifting As They Climbed - A New Guidebook
The guidebook of Black women’s history on Chicago’s South and West Sides that I cowrote with my friend Essence McDowell will be released by Haymarket Books in July and is available for preorder. We originally self-published the book in 2018, and have expanded it for this new edition to tell the stories of more amazing, trailblazing Black women and the sites connected with them, and to offer a new tour specifically dedicated to Black women’s history on Chicago’s West Side. Preorders make a big difference to authors, and you can preorder a copy here or contact your local library asking them to preorder a copy.
New zine alert: “Jail and Bail” Campaigns, Disability, Medicalization, and Abolition
I don’t remember when I started to collect vintage press photos depicting “jail-a-thons,” but it’s been many years. Jail-a-thons are community fundraisers that are popular with nonprofit organizations like the American Cancer Society, American Heart Association, Muscular Dystrophy Association, United Way, YMCA, local schools, colleges, and more. Government entities such as sheriff’s offices have also organized jail-a-thons. These events seem to have originated with the March of Dimes in the 1950s and appear to be most popular with health- and disability-focused organizations.
As the years have gone by, my collection of photographs has grown. I’ve been challenged by them in multiple ways. I find the dramatization of the pain and violence of incarceration for funds and for laughs to be repellant. These events speak to the normalization of punishment in the United States. Participants get dressed up in costumes that are replicas of prison and police uniforms, and judges’ robes. They then “perform” punishment. The photos often show people laughing or putting on exaggerated sad looks. There are handcuffs and fake guns. What does all of this mean? What can we learn from these events about how our society views incarceration and punishment? I think a lot.
I am grateful to Liat Ben Moshe for offering her reflections about the intersections between disability and the carceral state in this zine. Thank you to Sarah Warmker for her wonderful graphic design. You can read the zine and download a copy here. The screenreader friendly version is forthcoming.
New publication: A tea practice zine
People who know me well know I love tea. I wax poetic about tea. I have dozens of different kinds of tea in my home. So, of course I decided that our new book Let This Radicalize You deserved its own tea guide. I partnered with my friend, the talented Rachael Zafer, and we’ve produced this small tea practice zine. I think it’s fun and I hope that you all enjoy it! Happy tea drinking!
Podcast
Connecting back to the theme of the importance of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people in abolitionist theory and organizing, I really enjoyed this special episode of the radio program REALTalk with Susan McCabe. McCabe talks to three formerly incarcerated organizers—Grady Mitchell, Willie Nobles, and Cyril Walrond—about the amazing community and movement-building work they did while in Washington State prisons and have done since their releases. I was moved by their descriptions of the work and history of the Black Prisoners Caucus and Taking Education and Changing History (TEACH).
Prose
I want to share this essay by Ali Rachel Pearl from the Making a Neighborhood newsletter. Pearl incorporates some of my thoughts about hope as a discipline into a beautiful reflection on safety, care, hope, and what drives community-building in her East Hollywood neighborhood.
I also recommend the free e-book that is the product of this very cool project: Prison Break: Imagining Alternatives to Prison in the UK. The project “uses creative writing workshops to support UK-based people involved in prison abolition and transformative justice to create speculative fiction (i.e. work in the genres of science fiction, fantasy, horror), that can help imagine and enact a more just future.” The book includes the resulting stories as well as excerpts from the workshops around the stories and creative writing/thinking prompts for the reader.
Poem
This month, I’m sharing Adrienne Rich’s “What Kind of Times Are These.”
Rich’s 1991 poem places itself in dialogue with a poem written by Bertolt Brecht fifty years earlier in which he asks, “What kind of times are these, when / To talk about trees is almost a crime / Because it implies silence about so many horrors?" Rich considers the processes through which we face the “truth and dread” of our own political realities, and concludes that “to have you listen at all, it's necessary / to talk about trees.” In the link above, “What Kind of Times Are These” is read by Rich herself; the text of the poem is here.
Potpourri
If you missed our virtual book launch for Let This Radicalize You, it was recorded so you can still watch it here. You can find all of the resources we created for the book here. You can buy a copy of our new book here.
Join me and co facilitator Geoff Johnson on May 28 at 4:00 PM EDT for the third 2023 session of our Intergenerational Reading Group focused on the life stories of anti slavery abolitionists. This month, we’ll be reading about and discussing Harriet Tubman. This virtual, bimonthly reading group is open to anyone 15 years old and up. Register here.
I highly recommend the short film Video Visit by Malika Zouhali-Worrall. It tells the story of a Brooklyn Public Library program—now expanded across other NYC libraries—that facilitates free video visits between families and their loved ones incarcerated by the NYC Department of Corrections. Predictably, the DOC agitated to make the service less accessible and more punitive, and equally predictably, the library staff worked tirelessly and righteously to protect families and their opportunities to connect. The film communicates the stakes of this struggle by cutting between library planning meetings and a series of video visits between a mother and her incarcerated son.
Musical shout out: I was honored to learn that We Do This ‘Til We Free Us was an inspiration for—and became a refrain in—an inside/outside musical collaboration between singer Lyndsey Scott and Anthony Rhodd (A-Rhodd), a musician incarcerated in Iowa. You can listen to and buy the beautiful track, and read more about how it came into being, here.
Censoring No More Police: In a disturbing illustration of the assaults on public libraries that For the People: A Leftist Library Project is pushing back against, county commissioners in southern Oregon are trying to ban a public library from hosting a social justice book club because the club discussed my book with Andrea J Ritchie, No More Police, for its April meeting. I’m heartened that the censorship attempt spurred a strong public backlash, with community members making their voices heard in support of free expression.
Support the cause by buying a Library Defender t-shirt in one of two designs by Noah Jodice. Proceeds go to For the People.
Cool library thing of the month:
The only video footage of the first Black librarian in the New York Public Library system, Catherine Latimer.