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CHICAGO FOR ABOLITION: A SUMMIT ON ORGANIZING AND STRATEGY, NOV. 8-12, 2017
Critical Resistance and Chicago For Abolition have organised a weekend of events to strengthen the movement against the Prison Industrial Complex. If your are in, or near Chicago, go!
“In this period of astonishing energy and public discussion about abolition,” says Critical Resistance, “we are excited to build with organizations and communities in Chicago that are fighting to address and eliminate the harms of the interlocking systems of policing, imprisonment, and surveillance—what we call the prison industrial complex.”
Through a weekend of events, workshops, and political dialogue, Critical Resistance and dozens of communities in Chicago are building stronger organizational relationships shared understanding of PIC abolition and the advancement of local and national efforts.
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Chicago for Abolition Summit: November 8-12th, 2017
ALL EVENTS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Wednesday, November 8
No Easy Victories: Fighting For Abolition
A conversation with Angela Y. Davis and Ruthie Wilson Gilmore, moderated by Beth Richie. (Registration closed and all seats are currently full. CR will make an announcement by email if more seats become available.)
Thursday, November 9
Abolition and Rethinking Education
Organizing to get police out of your school? Working on responses to harm in the classroom and staffroom that do not involve criminalization? Want a curriculum that creates possibilities to imagine and build a world without prisons and borders? Building to protect students and families from immigration enforcement (ICE)? Come to this panel discussion with K-12 educators, youth advocates and abolitionist organizers that will deepen learning between and across these constituencies and identify needed tools and resources.
Featuring:
Ayanna Banks Harris – Chicago Math Teacher and Dean of Instruction, Love & Protect
Beatriz Beckford – MomsRising
Cyriac Mathew – Uplift Community High School
Muhammad Sankari – Arab American Action Network
Moderator: Charity Tolliver, Black on Both Sides/BYP 100
Location: First Defense Legal Aid, 601 S. California Ave, Chicago, IL 61612
Date: Thursday Nov. 9
Time: 6:30-8:30 PM
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Friday, November 10
Beyond One Chicago: Resisting the Divisions of the Prison Industrial Complex
An event on resisting criminalization, gang databases, and policing. We will feature the launch of a critical new report on the use of gang databases in Chicago. Community organizers will discuss past efforts to fight policing and criminalization. Together we will build abolitionist visions of expansive sanctuary in Chicago.
Featuring: BYP 100, CR, OCAD, and Mijente.
Location: University of Illinois at Chicago. Student Services Building (1200 W Harrison St., Chicago, IL 60607) Conference Rooms B & C
Date: Friday Nov. 10
Time: Doors open at 6pm, start at 6:30
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Saturday, November 11
Fight To Win: Shrinking Prisons and Jails / Strengthening Communities
An event on organizing against imprisonment and strategies to strengthen our fight for a world without cages. We will explore and discuss successful campaigns around stopping jail construction, ending money bail, advocating for prison closure, and for supporting prisoner-led struggles.
This event is hosted by Chicago Community Bond Fund, Critical Resistance, Free Write Arts & Literacy, Nehemiah Trinity Rising, The Next Movement.
Facebook event page.
Location: Trinity United Church of Christ (400 95th St, Chicago, IL 60628)
Date: Saturday Nov. 11
Time: 12pm-2pm
Chicago for Abolition Summit: November 8-12th, 2017
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Poster design by Monica Trinidad
LET’S AGREE TO AGREE
There’s nothing new here that advocates for prison reform don’t already know, but it’s worth a listen just to hear Obama declare that Omar was his favourite character in The Wire.
The conversation starts off pretty left of progressive with Simon asserting that “What the drugs didn’t destroy, the war on them did.” It’s a line he uses often but it’s a good one, and an accurate summary.
Obama makes pains a few minutes in to stress sympathy for police forces. To be expected from a leader who is taking the effort to first and foremost express sympathy for people who may have antagonist views toward an arrogant and broken record of policy as regards crime and punishment in American cities.
The political turn turns us toward the children. If we can’t all rally around a love of the children then what have we? The depiction of struggling Baltimore schools in The Wire was particularly hard for Obama, he says.
These 12 minutes weren’t a total waste of time. Simon got to register his dismay at the failings of government to help poor and addicted people. Obama got to express optimism for the more sensible debates we’re having about crime and transgression and where that might take us. He was very excited about bipartisan buy in, without any criticism that’s its come decades later than it should. Oh, that’s right people’s lives impacted by tough-on-crime-rhetoric were political footballs for the past 40 years.
The most sensible and realistic thing in the conversation is the closing remark of Obama when he says if we keep being honest about putting our policing, policy and sentencing failures right, we may see an improvement in about 20 years.
This was good PR for everyone involved. I doubt Obama would have sat down with Simon for this same conversation in 2009, but now it’s safer to be sensible — government budgets have told us so.
It’s not really significant what Obama and Simon said when they sat down together. Of most significance is the fact they sat down together, for the cameras, at all.
There’s a brouhaha brewing in San Francisco. The Armory — home to legendary controversial fetish porn empire Kink.com — is to host an event to coincide with San Francisco Pride. The WE Party Prison Of Love is being billed as THE BIGGEST PRIDE PARTY … EVER.
The predictable format for the prison-themed discoteque includes chains, shackles, a dungeon, and likely a whole lot of improv domination roll play. The majority of the 3,000-strong crowd is expected to be gay men.
As a cisgender straight male, I tend not to have any opinions on gay culture worthy of public proclamation. But, a prison-themed rave does seem a little tacky, though. For San Francisco’s trans-community, the Prison Of Love Party is far worse than tacky; it is an affront and a politically-clueless venture.
The Transgender Gender Variant, Intersex Justice Project in San Francisco, in an open letter to San Francisco Pride at the Armory, points out that the prison industrial complex abuses transgendered people strategically and disproportionally.
The primary signatory is Miss Major, one of this years SF Pride Grand Marshals.
It reads:
This year at least three SF Pride grand marshals are trans women who have been directly affected by the Prison Industrial Complex. Chelsea Manning is currently incarcerated, Miss Major is previously incarcerated and was politicized at Attica just after the 1971 uprising, and Jewlyes Gutierrez was arrested for defending herself from bullies in her high school.
The prison industrial complex and the incarceration of generations of people of color, gender variant, trans people, and queer people is not a sexy trope to throw a play party around. It’s not that we don’t love sex, sex parties, sex workers, and kink. It’s that we love it as much as we love justice, and are appalled by the casual use of the Prison Industrial Complex, which destroys the lives of millions of people and kills thousands every year, as a party theme.
The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. In our own LGBTQI communities, incarceration and significant abuses perpetrated by the Prison Industrial Complex constitutes no less than a crisis. According to the National Center for Transgender Equality, nearly 1 in 6 transgender people have been incarcerated at some point in their lives. Among Black transgender people, 47% have been incarcerated at some point in their lives. These rates overwhelmingly reflect the experiences of transgender women and especially trans women of color, who are housed in men’s prisons and face catastrophic rates of physical abuse, psychological terror, rape and sexual assault, and death. According to Just Detention International, 67% of LGBT prisoners reported being assaulted while in prison.
Not only is our queer community being harmed, the War on Drugs and the increasing privatization of prisons has created a phenomenon of mass incarceration of young Black and Latino men, and increasingly women too, which has economically, socially, and politically devastated these communities.
We are not interested in yucking anyone’s yum or shaming anyone who has fantasies or fetishes about ideas of this real-life violence. We are not interested in censorship or policing anyone’s sex life. We are interested in public space and party themes that get us closer to liberation from systemic and administrative violence and do not recreate a culture that normalizes or continues our oppression. Our push back is about navigating the legal and extra-legal targeting and criminalization of our communities.
At a time when public discussion and media finally has an eye toward the daily systemic violence against trans and queer people, your party theme and promotions are especially harmful and trivializing.
As individuals and organizations committed to justice and equality for LGBTQI peoples, we are working to end violence in our communities, and particularly at the hands of law enforcement, jails, detention centers and prisons. We’ve been doing this for years, and we’ll be supporting our brothers, sisters and siblings behind prison walls while you’re hosting a sex and dance event on Pride weekend that trivializes themes of incarceration and abuse as a good time.
We’re calling on you to understand how important these issues are to every member of our community, even if you’ve had the good fortune to not be hyper-visible and profiled by police, locked up, and then trapped in a cycle of institutional violence perpetrated by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, ICE, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
We’re calling on you to immediately change the theme of your party, and not use themes of arrest and incarceration, correctional officers beating inmates, solitary confinement, prison yards, or suggestions of prison rape in promoting your event.
As a step towards accountability and redress we’re also calling on you to donate a portion of the proceeds of your party to the Transgender Gender Variant Intersex Justice Project, El/La Para TransLatinas, and Communities United Against Violence, all organizations that are dedicated to ending police, prison, and systemic violence against trans and queer people in the Bay Area and beyond.
Signed,
Miss Major, SF Pride Grand Marshal/Director of Transgender Gender Variant, Intersex Justice Project
San Francisco Trans March, SF Pride Community Grand Marshal
Janet Mock, SF Pride Celebrity Grand Marshal/Author of “Redefining Realness”
Transgender Gender Varian Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP)
Community United Against Violence (CUAV)
El/La Para TransLatinas
Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB)
Justice Now
California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP)
Community Justice Network for Youth
Sex Workers Outreach Project – Bay Area (SWOP)
All of Us or None
Dr. Annalise Ophelian, Filmmaker, Director/Producer – MAJOR! documentary
StormMiguel Florez, Musician & artist, Co-Producer – MAJOR! documentary
Courtney Trouble, Host of Queerly Beloved Pride Party, owner TROUBLEfilms
Well said.
Unfortunately, I don’t think the protests nor the #NotProud Boycott SF Pride movement will stand in the way of this Pride At The Armory shindig. Half the tickets have already sold. It’s large event long in the planning and those types of entertainment-ships don’t turn.
That’s a shame because facts are facts and the issue is undeniable.
- LGBT teens comprise as much as 15% of the general population in juvenile justice facilities; among girls alone, 27% are lesbian or bisexual.
- LGBT young people and adults face harsher penalties from the justice system. LGBT people face higher rates of abuse and assault in prison.
- The two 2 leading risk factors for prisoner rape are previous sexual abuse and being LGBT.
- Incarcerated homosexual and bisexual men are sexually assaulted at rates 10 times higher than their heterosexual counterparts.
- The federal definition of “rape” didn’t even include men or non-vaginal penetration until 2010. Men assaulted in prison were not considered rape victims by the U.S. Department of Justice until 2010.
- Incarcerated trans women in men’s prisons report rates of sexual assault nearly 13 times greater than that among groups of other people.
More depressing facts here.
Bad call. PR fail SF Pride.
As Jezebel puts it, “Call it Dungeons & Dragons themed, call it Party in Westeros, do something else that involves bars and chains and implements of “torture.” But this? Taking one of the biggest issues facing the LGBT+ community and turning it into a party?”
Prison Photography 