Prisons, Prose & Protest - #34
Rants, Musings and More
We’re at the start of another year. 2025 was difficult for people across the world. There was terrible violence and also some beauty. Some people took courageous action and others capitulated. I suspect that 2026 will offer more of the same and also will surprise in some ways. Each of us will have to navigate the ups and downs in the best ways we can. My only piece of advice (I am not an advice giver) is to take opportunities to BE WITH OTHER PEOPLE this year.
I gave up on making New Year’s resolutions many years ago. I do end every year by assessing whether I met some personal goals and by setting small goals for the new year. For over 10 years, I have been using Yearcompass for this activity. I appreciate the simplicity of this free tool.
In 2026, I am teaching again. I look forward to it. My work continues at Interrupting Criminalization, where I will be co-organizing many projects with others. Survived and Punished will celebrate 10 years of work this year. I look forward to reflecting on accomplishments and thinking with others about what’s ahead. I will continue to organize with others around public libraries through For the People Leftist Library Project (FTP) and NYC Public Library Action Network (PLAN). I am excited to co-organize the Black Zine Fair (BZF) with Neta Bomani for the third year. Neta and I are also looking forward to another year of making short-form publications through Sojourners for Justice Press (SJP). I will of course continue to make my own zines and am also planning an exhibition for 2027. Finally, I plan to keep publishing this newsletter monthly. There’s a saying that man makes plans and God laughs. I have plans and am also sure that they will change. We’ll see how things go.
Speaking of the BZF, the application for exhibitors, workshop facilitators, and volunteers is open until February 9. We are fundraising to make the fair happen, and we welcome and need donations. It’s been fun to see a broader revival of zine culture.
In November, I emailed Giving Circle members a survey to ask whether people wanted the Circle to continue in 2026 and for ideas about the future. Thanks to everyone who responded. The responses were overwhelmingly positive and people wanted the Circle to continue this year. I will organize a virtual gathering for those Circle members who would like to connect this year. Finally, I will email a form to subscribers later this month to solicit suggestions of organizations that you think the Circle should support this year. Please feel free to join the Giving Circle. Here is the list of all of the groups and people who received funds in 2025. Together we donated nearly $40,000 to 116 groups, projects and people in 2025.
In November 2025, some of you donated $4716.85 [after fees] to the Giving Circle. I donated $4500 in November to 20 groups/orgs. Documentation of the groups that received funds is here.
In December 2025, as I mentioned in a previous newsletter, I used a lot of the Giving Circle funds to support a toy giveaway at Another World in Brooklyn. I also made a few donations to a handful of organizations.
In this edition of Prisons, Prose & Protest, I share an overview of a very good new book about policing and the Civil Rights Movement. I recommend a podcast about the legacy of Jen Angel, several good recent articles and essays, and more…
Prisons and Policing
How Cops Fought Civil Rights, and How the CRM Fought Back
Joshua Clark Davis’s Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back is a vital retelling of the history of the Civil Rights Movement. As the title says, Davis—a professor of history at the University of Baltimore—focuses not on desegregation or voting rights, but on police brutality as a, and even the, key civil rights struggle of the 60s and 70s. In doing so, he shatters a series of interrelated myths about the past and shows the freedom struggle’s continued relevance in the present.
The first crucial myth that Davis debunks is the belief that the most important and iconic acts of police brutality were violent assaults by Southern lawmen. The key figure here is the notorious Birmingham Commissioner Bull Connor, whose department’s use of fire hoses, dogs, and vicious beatings against the 1961 Freedom Riders shocked the world and gained the movement crucial liberal white support.
Other jurisdictions, however, learned from Connor’s mistakes. Police in places like Danville, Virginia, and Houston, Texas, turned over the next decades to what Davis refers to as “slow violence.” He defines slow violence as “unhurried acts of harm, the products of painstaking design that exact damage in such a subtle and drawn-out manner as to not appear violent at all, at least not to many observers.” Slow violence tactics included smearing protestors, publishing their personal information, sustained surveillance, infiltration of civil rights organizations, entrapment, planting evidence, and lawfare—including prosecutions for drug offenses and prosecutions for crimes committed by others at protests. These tactics drained activists of funds and energy and sometimes put them in prison for years. Davis recounts in ugly detail how slow violence devastated vital civil rights organizations like SNCC and CORE.
Most histories of the Civil Rights Movement focus on the FBI as the key perpetrator of slow violence, and especially of espionage. This is the second myth Davis challenges. The “red squads” of local police departments, he reveals, had more agents assigned to political surveillance than the FBI (4700 compared to 3000 by the end of the 60s). Despite being very segregated, local police departments employed far more Black officers than the almost entirely white FBI. This meant that local police were better positioned to infiltrate and surveil civil rights organizations.
Undercover operations by local police had devastating consequences for activists. In Houston in 1968, a court gave Lee Otis Johnson, a charismatic student SNCC organizer, a flagrantly unjust thirty-year sentence for sharing a joint with an undercover officer (he served four years). In New York in 1965, undercover officer Robert Wood convinced three civil rights activists to join him in a half-baked plan to dynamite the head of the Statue of Liberty; they were all arrested and served lengthy prison terms. In Philadelphia in 1966, a carful of white men beat young SNCC staffer Barry Dawson unconscious; he was convinced that they were police in part because he knew police had been surveilling him. He made a formal complaint—starting a wave of slow and less-slow police violence, including probable planted evidence, probable coerced confessions, the seizure of membership lists, and further beatings that terrorized Dawson and his SNCC chapter for two years.
The constant overt and covert surveillance of civil rights organizations for their politics with no evidence of crime effectively criminalized speech and assembly. Police used surveillance to intimidate activists and to mire them in the slow violence of lawfare—and not just, or even primarily, in states like Alabama or Mississippi.
In that vein, another crucial myth that Davis dispels is the entrenched narrative that Southern police were the movement’s most intransigent foes. In fact, the largest cities—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles—also had the largest police departments and the most resources to put into surveillance and slow violence. It was these departments that effectively kneecapped the movement as it pushed for broader gains outside the South.
This is not to say that activists and organizers simply allowed the police to steamroll them. It has become conventional wisdom that civil rights organizers did not seriously or consistently confront police brutality until the Black Lives Matter movement of the 2010s. But this is also a myth, and one that Davis thoroughly refutes. He points out that John Lewis’s famous speech to the 1963 March on Washington was a blistering denunciation of police violence. “We are tired of seeing our people locked up in jail over and over again, and then you holler, ‘Be patient.’ How long can we be patient? We want our freedom and we want it now.”
Lewis was far from alone; police violence of all kinds was an abiding concern of movement leaders from before Ella Baker to after the Black Panthers. Organizers also pioneered a range of important analyses of, and tactics for confronting, police violence. Los Angeles activists in the mid-60s, for example, launched “Community Alert Patrols”—volunteers in cars who followed the LAPD in Black neighborhoods to observe and take photographs. Just as ICE agents hate being filmed today, so the LAPD loathed the patrols and saw them as radical and dangerous precisely because they were effective in discouraging brutality and false charges.
In the mid-70s, activists in a range of cities, from Memphis to Chicago, sought to bring lawsuits to force police red squads to divulge their records. That prompted most departments to rush to shred or burn their files—the LAPD alone destroyed 1.9 million records. Davis argues that the lack of extant documentation is one reason the history of police surveillance has largely vanished from public consciousness.
Another reason is ongoing police propaganda; textbooks and museums devoted to law enforcement that present Bull Connor and J. Edgar Hoover as unfortunate, uncharacteristic white supremacist outliers, unrepresentative of policing as a whole. Police launder their past slow violence so that they can continue to perpetrate all kinds of violence in the present. Clark points out that many states, including Florida, North Carolina, and Oklahoma, have criminalized various forms of protest, while Cop City protestors in Atlanta have faced racketeering charges with a maximum penalty of twenty years in prison.
These abuses today, as in the past, prop up white supremacy and fascism. Police Against the Movement is a clarifying, necessary account of how long the police have fought the movement, and why equality and freedom are not possible until they are defeated.
Publishing
Sojourners for Justice Press will soon publish Black/Study: The Influence of David Walker’s Appeal. In 1829, David Walker published An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, a subversive pamphlet calling for enslaved Black people to revolt. His words inspired slave rebellions and shaped future abolitionist movements. Black/Study traces a history of the Appeal alongside archival photographs of Black people reading and learning across generations. You will be able to order a copy in the next couple of weeks.
Prose
Melissa Gira Grant has done great reporting on Chicago’s incredibly effective community-based ICE response. As Grant writes, in addition to the direct and immediate protection these groups are offering neighbors, “this is true movement-building, a project that may endure after this particular threat to immigrant communities, even after this regime.”
I also love this profile by Julia Carrie Wong of five people across the country finding different ways to plug into anti-ICE efforts.
Atarah Israel, a college student and In These Times intern, offers a beautiful and vulnerable review of Assata Shakur’s autobiography in the aftermath of Shakur’s transition. Israel writes, “Her words still retain a warrior-like strength that can only be described in terms of love.”
I loved reading about the community that women with partners incarcerated on Rikers Island have forged, both online and in person.
This is an interesting reading of Joan Didion’s 1968 essay On Becoming a Cop-Hater, as well as an investigation into why Didion never republished the essay in later collections of her work.
The excellent fall 2025 issue of the Barnard Center for Research on Women’s The Scholar and Feminist Online, which I discuss below, contains this vital work of scholarship by my friend & co-founder of Survived & Punished, Alisa Bierria: “Self-Defense Is a Practice of Freedom.”
As it is at most jails and prisons, food insecurity is a serious problem at Cook County Jail in Chicago, where incarcerated people have only two options: unappealing free meals that are usually low in nutritional value, and overpriced commissary items that many can’t afford.
A year ago, I shared an article about the $115-million settlement paid by the US Bureau of Prisons to survivors of systemic rape and sexual abuse by the staff of the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Dublin in California, which had been forced to close in December 2024. Now, community organizations and people formerly incarcerated at the notorious prison are fighting an effort by ICE to turn it into an immigration jail.
This exposé by incarcerated journalist Carla J. Simmons of the regular sexual violence incarcerated people are subjected to during “routine” strip searches is a difficult but vital read.
I recommend the history my comrade Jacqui Shine has written of Louisiana’s traveling electric chair, and the geographic significance it carried as executions moved from public spectacles to private operations.
Podcast
Snap Judgement made a beautiful episode about Jen Angel, her death, and the ways her loved ones have worked to honor Jen’s deeply felt politics by interrupting the normal course of retributive state punishment.
Poem
I am reflecting on this poem as a new year of work and journeying begins.
Potpourri
Sojourners for Justice Press is seeking a Creative Marketing Intern. See the internship description here. Applications are due on January 12.
February 1, 2026, from 3 to 5 p.m. ET—We re-opened registration for the virtual discussion about Open Admissions: The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Free College by Danica Savonick to include more people. Danica Savonick will be joining us. You can register here to participate.
Interrupting Criminalization is hosting a two-part virtual study group with our Abolition Journalism Fellow Lewis Raven Wallace about his excellent new book, Radical Unlearning: The Art and Science of Creating Change from Within. Thursdays January 29 and February 5, 6–7:30p.m. ET/ 5–6:30 p.m. CT/ 3-4:30 PT on Zoom, with special guests who are featured in the book.
Common Justice is holding a series of virtual community workshops beginning January 14. “We welcome both experienced practitioners and people newly drawn to this work to join us in conversation about how we approach restorative justice and violence, and to explore critical questions about safety, accountability, and racial equity in the context of addressing serious violence.”
I recommend the entire Fall 2025 issue of the Barnard Center for Research on Women’s The Scholar and Feminist Online. In partnership with Haymarket Books’s Books Not Bars program, the issue—“Abolition Feminism and the Politics of Reproduction”—was given a limited print run for free distribution to incarcerated readers “in an effort to facilitate intellectual exchange across prison walls.” Follow this link to request a copy for an incarcerated loved one.
New toolkit—invaluable for everyone, and of special interest for New Orleans and Twin Cities folks and other cities facing imminent federal surges: How We Dealt With Border Patrol from Siembra NC’s Defend & Recruit. The toolkit includes learnings and how-tos on crucial elements of rapid response including running ICE Watch and similar trainings, and planning patrol shifts and zones. So much experience and wisdom in one document.
This is a cool work of collaborative art.
The Queer Liberation Library is such a wonderful project—a digital library with free membership that connects “LGBTQ+ people with literature, information, and resources that celebrate the unique and empowering diversity of our community.”
Made this and it was actually delicious.
Cool Library Thing of the Month
This cracked me up. Anyone who happens to be near Darlington, WI, should patronize Johnson Public Library there.
Thank you for shouting out Queer Liberation Library! I'm a board member and we're all thrilled that you know about our work.