Art that fights back

For over two years now, I’ve been writing with anarchist prisoner Harold H. Thompson. He’s not just an anarchist - really though, who’s just an anarchist??-  but also a writer, a jailhouse lawyer, and a painter.

A few months back, his friend and supporter Josh put on an art auction of his work at the Dry River Collective space in Tucson, AZ. The benefits of the auction went to help pay Harold’s legal fees as he sues the Tennessee Department of Corrections for medical neglect (stemming from incidents you can read about here).

Of his paintings, here are a few of my favorites. Visit the Dry River site for more.

The last two are entitled “Bill” and “Hillary.”

Angela Davis 4.16.07

This Monday, April 16th, Professor Angela Davis addressed Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA on the topic of the Prison Industrial Complex (P.I.C.). Like always, Davis was most adept at drawing connections: she began the night by recognizing the Virginia Tech tragedy, whilst noting the fear-based demands for increased insecurity that are already being made. Following from the definition outlined in her excellent primer Are Prisons Obsolete?, she defined the P.I.C. as the proposition that the proliferation of prisons in the United States is not linked to crime, but rather social and economic factors. In turn, she touched on everything from the numbers of blacks and latinos in prison, to the workings of the global economy, to how the treatment of transgender prisoners reveals prisons as gendering processes.

I really do hope to touch on this topic in a future post, particularly since the Washington State legislature will likely pass a prison reform bill soon. In the meantime, I’ll post the syllabus for the class I taught last year that is based around the above-mentioned book by Professor Davis. Let me know what you think!

The Prison Industrial Complex & Beyond
(Fairhaven College, Fall 2006)

To Be (Effective), Or Not To Be…

This summer I spent a few great weeks with my pal Matt in Bloomington, Indiana. Since I left, he’s been a busy guy. He spent a few months volunteering with the Midwest Pages to Prisoners project, then began working with Community for Effective Justice. CEJ began three years ago after an inmate was tasered to death by a guard, and operates a non-profit, New Life-New Leaf, a group that works directly with inmates in Bloomington’s local jail to help them navigate the system and exercise their rights as inmates.

Matt first got involved by facilitating a class for male inmates on how to be better fathers. In late February, he began working on a campaign to repeal a federal ban that denyies those convicted of drug offenses government assistance of any kind - that’s financial aid, food stamps, help with housing, anything. This lack of resources makes it really, really hard - near impossible - for ex-felons to get back on their feet after being released from prison. I don’t know what the prospects for success are for the campaign, but its first event, a community forum, (the flyer for which is above) garnered some great coverage in the Indiana University daily paper, followed by an editorial by the paper calling for a lift on the public assistance ban.

Matt’s been doing really inspiring work - and at the same time, he’s wrestling with a dilemma a lot of radicals wrestle with, myself included. As an anarchist, he doesn’t just want a better prison system, he wants a society that has no need for prisons at all - and so he’d very much like to be around people who share the same radical analysis of society. In Bloomington, most of those folks are to be found at the Pages to Prisoners project, which is hosted by the local anarchist bookstore, Boxcar Books.

But after months with that program, Matt became frustrated with the insular nature of the project - not that sending free books to prisoners isn’t absolutely essential work, work the Midwest P to P peeps are masters at, but that the project had very little connection with inmates, face to face, in a local setting, not simply through reading letters and filling book requests. So Matt has had to compromise his radical perspective to be involved in practical work with a real constituency - local inmates - while Community for Effective Justice does not connect its work to a larger analysis of society.

How to be effective and radical at the same time? I only have time for the moment to tell Matt’s story, a story still in the making with no conclusion, but there’s hope. Critical Resistance seems the best example of an organization doing practical work tied to a larger analysis, and two books recently released by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence hint they’ve got an idea of what they are doing as well. I’m sure there’s a huge list of other organizations and projects worth noting… Hopefully I’ll list more in the future. If you can link of any, name drop ‘em in the comments section!

Jobs with Injustice

As of today, the United States incarcerates about 2, 250, 000 people - the most in the history of the world! - and Washington State’s trying its darnedest to pitch in. Two new state prisons are planned, and expansions of many existing prisons are in the works. In Whatcom County, a new jail will be completed by 2008.

Fortunately, the state is having a bit of trouble filling all the new jobs the prison boom is creating (thanks to my comrade Matt for the link!). Unfortunately, a $150,000 campaign is in swing to get new recruits. Billboards are everywhere. My partner, riding with her parents, pulled up to a stop light next to a bus; as her out-of-work father turned his head, a pang of fear ran through her mind as she saw what he was looking at: a giant “Join the exciting career of Corrections” billboard on the side of the bus! There’s even a huge billboard just a block away from my apartment, across the street from Bellingham’s Community Food Co-op.

I don’t know if a huge billboard will be enough for Bellingham’s liberals to take note of the Prison Industrial Complex and do something about it, but folks elsewhere have their own campaign in the works that aims to put a stop to the prison boom and pull things in a better direction. Called Justice Works!, they’ve been hard at work on issues surrounding the criminal (in)justice system in Washington State for several years, and their new campaign, “No More Prisons,” looks really exciting. They’re based in Seattle, and one of the first organizations I’ll be looking into once I move my ass down there come September.

Note: The Justice Works! website appears to be down at the moment, but you can see a cached outline of their campaign here.