ABOLITION NOW! TEN YEARS OF STRATEGY AND STRUGGLE AGAINST THE PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX , • OF STRATEGY AND TEN YEARS STRUGGLE AGAINST THE CR10 PUBLICATIONS COLLECTIVE Abolition Now!: Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle Against the Prison Industrial Complex by TheCRI0 Publications Collective ISBN 978-1-904859-96-3 Library of Congress Number: 2008935483 ©2008 Critical Resistance This edition ©2008 AK Press AK Press 674-A 23rd Street Oakland, CA 94612 www.akpress.org [email protected] 510.208.1700 AK Press u.K. PO Box 12766 Edinburgh EH8 9YE www.akuk.com [email protected] 0131.555.5 165 Printed in the United States on 100% recycled, acid-free paper. Design by Albert Ignacio and Marcelo Viana The CR10 Publications Collective is: Ben Goldstein Beth Richie Craig Gilmore David Stein Dylan Rodriguez Isaac Ontiveros Jodie Lawston Julia Sudbury Michele Welsing Rachel Herzing Rickie Solinger Yusef Omowale CONTENTS 01 Introduction xi SECTION 1: DISMANTLE 02 Perspectives on Critical Resistance Edited by Liz Samuels and David Stein 1 03 TheCritical Resistance INCITE! Statement on Gender Violence and The Prison Industrial Complex INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence and Critical Resistance 15 04 A System within the System: The Prison Industrial Complex and Imperialism David Gilbert 31 05 COPS and the Visual Economy of Punishment Ofelia Ortiz Cuevas 41 06 Autobiography @ 33 EddyZheng 49 07 Black Burden limi Marshall 53 SECTION 2: CHANGE 08 No One Is Criminal Martha Escobar 57 09 Safer Cities Unplugged Pete White of the Los Angeles Community Action Network 71 10 A Canadian Journey into Abolition Kim Pate 77 11 Surviving Warfare, Practicing Resistance Pilar Masch;, interviewed by David Stein 87 lL Wartare and the Terms of Engagement Dylan Rodriguez 91 13 Toxic Connections: Coalition Strategies against Jail Expansion Damien Domenack and Rachael Leiner 103 14 Prickly Coalitions: Moving Prison Abolitionism Forward Alexander Lee 109 15 Can You Understand? Souligma Phothong 113 SECTION 3: BUILD 16 Carceral Landscape in Hawai'i: The Politics of Empire, the Commodification of Bodies, and a Way Home RaeDeen Keahiolalo-Karasuda 121 17 Prison Abolition in Practice: The LEAD Project, The Politics of Healing, and "A New Way of Life" Setsu Shigematsu, Gwen D'Arcangelis, and Melissa Burch 137 18 Freedom Seeds: Growing Abolition in Durham, North Carolina Alexis Pauline Gumbs 145 19 Can You Hear Anonymous 157 INTRODUCTION From September 25-27, 1998, a conference, Critical Resistance: Beyond the Pris­ on Industrial Complex, was held in Berkeley, California. The conference brought together nearly 3,500 people from around the world to examine a newly framed concept-the prison industrial complex (PIC)-and to explore the practical poten­ tials of abolishing it. The convening not only provided a forum in which to foster conversations across organizations, locations, and sectors, but also re-ignited the fading spark of the anti-prison movement in the United States. What no one knew during that weekend was what the lasting impacts of that conference would be. As rarely happens as a result of conferences, Critical Resis­ tance (CR) jump-started pockets of organizing and strategizing around the US that would eventually merge and transform into the only national organization dedi­ cated to the elimination of the PIC in the United States. Since that founding confer­ ence, CR has fostered chapters across the US and engaged in a wide range of proj­ ects and campaigns. Our work includes educational and leadership development projects with transitional housing for women and their kids, coalitional efforts to make choosing sites for and constructing new jails and prisons impossible, local campaigns to support people being released from imprisonment, and a generation of new materials and tools to help make PIC abolition more accessible. Since 1998, some things have changed dramatically, while the steady drum­ beats of caging and control remain consistently applied by those in power in the US as responses to everything from homelessness to immigration to gender non-con­ formity. The number of people serving time in US jails and prisons, for example, xi ABOLITION NOW! is substantially higher today than it was ten years ago. In 1998, about 1.8 million people were behind bars in US jails and prisons. Today, over 2.3 million people are imprisoned in US jails and prisons. And, while many were outraged by this year's Pew Charitable Trusts report announcing that more that 1 in 100 adults are impris­ oned in the US, this number does not include the thousands caged in immigration detention centers, nor the thousands of young people locked in juvenile detention. Nor does it include more than five million people being fo rmally surveilled through parole and probation. While the statistics highlight the enormity and the urgency of the situation, they can't tell the only story of the PIC's violence. As we approach the tenth anniversary of the historic convening from which Critical Resistance was born, we are engaged in CRlO, an anniversary organizing project through which we are assessing the past ten years of the movement against the PIC, the shifting context in which we work, and thinking strategically about how to be most effective in the years to come. Thisboo k is part of a list of media projects developed by CR members and allies. Other media projects such as the films,A Prison in the Fields: False Promise in the Central Valley and I Won't Drown on That Levee and You Ain't Gonna Break My Back, and videos documenting the organizing from prior CR conferences, were created to fo ster political and intellectual engagement with the PIC. Abolition Now! is also situated within the lineage of other CR publications such as the re-print of Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists, a special issue of the journal So­ cial Justice entitled "Critical Resistance to the Prison-Industrial Complex," and the quarterly newspaper The Abolitionist-a project of CR-Oakland. One of the many reasons publications are important is that they facilitate political dialogs between people who are locked up and those of us "on the outside." Such dialogs are central to our organizing strategy and our ultimate goals. We hope this set of dialogs will contribute to collapsing the separation between the "us" on the inside and the "us" on the outside. Thisprocess of abolition will make us all safer and healthier. Thispublication also represents one method of assessment CRlO has prOVided us the occasion to use. One of the many fo cal points of CRlO is making PIC abo­ lition central as both a strategy and the goal. We hope this book will contribute to that conversation. Its call, Abolition Now!, reminds us that there was abolition, there is abolition, and there will be more abolition. Likewise, as many organizers have demonstrated, we are not only struggling to tear down the cages of the PIC, but also to abolish the actions of policing, surveillance, and imprisonment that give the PIC its power. We are also reminded that abolition is the creation of possibilities for our dreams and demands for health and happiness-for what we want, not what we think we can get. xii INTRODUCTION In this collection, we have compiled just a sampling of pieces to reflect the vio­ lent nexus of the PIC, and what abolition can look like. The collection is not meant to be exhaustive, but like CRlO, to instigate a conversation and formulate strategy. We have compiled some suggestive pieces to reflect the many ways that PIC aboli­ tion presents itself. The book is guided by three sections that each reflectabolition­ ist practice: dismantle, change, build. The first section, "Dismantle," is meant to assess the successes and challenges of the movement to abolish the PIC. "Perspectives on Critical Resistance" brings to­ gether the voices of sixteen CR members and allies to discuss struggles against the PIC. Theseare some of the many people who have, and continue to, breathe life into CR. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence has also reflectedon the important collaboration between INCITE! and CR, addressing the demand to link prison in­ dustrial complex abolition and the end of gender violence. Linking struggles, David Gilbert shows us the intimacies of imperialist statecraft, and how the US PIC is an articulation of warfare, while war is articulated in other forms throughout the world as well, be it in Iraq or Afghanistan, or the violence of neoliberal capitalism. Ofelia Cuevas demonstrates how the legacy of bearing witness to white supremacist violence is manifested both in the practice of lynching, as well as TV shows like COPS. Cuevas challenges us to question the ways that our vision is caught up in the "economy of punishment." Eddy Zheng's poem displays how part of the violence of the PIC forces us to live in different temporalities and consign certain people to premature death, while Jimi Marhsall's piece, "Black Burden," reflects on the pain created through a crucial piece of the PIC-anti-Black racism. Each of these writ­ ings reveals components of the brutal regime of the PIC; this process of identifying the PIC's articulations is central to our goals because, if we can't name what is kill­ ing us, we can't stop it. Section two of the book, "Change," is intended to reflect some of the ways the PIC has adjusted and changed over the past ten years. As prisons are not the sole feature of the PIC, this section confronts the many tentacles of policing, surveil­ lance, and caging-the raw materials for the PIC machine. Thewritings in this sec­ tion relate dangerous trends in both expansion and mobilization of the PIC, and recount how some of those trends have been countered.