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Three months ago, I wrote about Silja Talvi‘s excellent book Women Behind Bars.
It turns out the Texas Department of Criminal Justice also noticed it. They banned it – along with another book, Perpetual Prison Machine by Joel Dyer. Both books are distributed by Prison Legal News – a phenomenal non-profit based here in Seattle that educates America’s incarcerated class on its human and legal rights.
Prison Legal News has launched a lawsuit against staff and senior officials of the TDCJ. Money is not as issue here, principle is. “PLN is seeking compensatory, punitive and nominal damages plus declaratory and injunctive relief for violation of its rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments, as well as attorney fees and costs.”
WHAT TO DO
Visit Change.org and read my brief article.
Download the full PLN lawsuit (PDF).
Sign the petition to the TDCJ for reversal of their censorship policy.
Today, I read this wonderful article about community acting cooperatively to send a message to the highest authorities.
Ruth Hooke contributing in the Guardian’s Comment Is Free:
A step has been taken to right the injustices being done to the remaining detainees at the Guantánamo naval base. On 4 November the representative town meeting of Amherst, Massachusetts, overwhelmingly passed article 14 of its warrant, which urges Congress to repeal the ban on releasing cleared detainees into the US and welcomes such cleared detainees into our community as soon as the ban is lifted.
To Sarah Palin, I’d state that this is true America.
Philip Toledano‘s Days With My Father has got some coverage recently, and rightly so. There is a perfect balance and appropriate tone throughout the series which is inescapable. Aline Smithson included it in Photographing Family – her well reasoned Too Much Chocolate piece about the imperative of family to photographers.
It is even more remarkable because it is such a departure from his cynical but pointed political work America The Gift Shop.
In a Decemebr, 2008 interview with Joerg, Toledano explained that for the really complex stuff he had to turn to China:
“Only the inflatable Guantanamo Bay prison cell and the Abu Ghraib bobblehead were made in China. The rest was made in America. To find Chinese manufacturers, I Googled ‘bouncy castle manufacturers, China’ or ‘bobblehead manufacturers, China’ and then emailed a few companies. It was really simple. And then, for the bobblehead, for instance, I sent the manufacturer the actual photo from Abu Ghraib, and they’d email me photos of progress, with me commenting along the way. The whole project, from start to finish, probably took me about six to eight months, all told. That’s the amazing thing about the web – ANYTHING is possible now.”
Benjamin Drummond and Sara Joy Steele have been in the news recently for their Facing Climate Change initiative. They were featured by PDN as photographers who cared and secured a $10,000 Grant4Change.
I was super happy then, to see them diversify and change focus from massive global issues to the environmental issues of our region here in Washington State.
They teamed up with Dr. Nalini Nadkarni, Evergreen State College and The Sustainable Prisons Project (which I have talked about before) to produce a 7-minute multimedia piece with a gorgeous mix of inmate, staff, student and academic volunteer voices. They also deliver the goods for the stills gallery.
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The Sustainable Prison Project has proved that environmental justice, social justice and fiscal conservatism can be delivered all in the same package. I teach in a prison and the resolve to try new programs and learn new skills is not something left wanting.
Drummond and Joy Steele’s documents make it clear more than ever that prisons often are not – and really never should be – the intimidating “neverwheres” that media (often TV and film) depict them as.
Found at the amazing Center for the Study of Political Graphics
Why bother wasting words when an effective graphic says it all?
Women in Prison Scott Boylston, Silkscreen, 2005
The production of this poster was donated to promote the work of Action Committee for Women in Prison.
If I’ve ever heard an interview which encapsulates the pride-cum-naivety of the military rank and file, the necessarily difficult (but largely unprofitable) questions of the media and the legal blackhole the Cheney administration established with Guantanamo … it is this.
I was surprised to hear that detainees threw excrement and threatened to kill the guards. Perhaps this brash antagonism is a relatively recent development at Guantanamo, now it’s population is reduced to the most fanatical 200 or so prisoners.
Prison Photography 