#abolish prisons

[doomtribble73]

[isabellascarlett1]

Gender affirming care is suicide prevention.

Using folks’ correct name and pronouns is suicide prevention

Abortion care is suicide prevention.

Accessibility is suicide prevention.

Birth control is suicide prevention.

Mutual aid is suicide prevention.

Housing is suicide prevention.

Healthcare is suicide prevention.

Climate action is suicide prevention.

Food security is suicide prevention.

Ending imperialism is suicide prevention.

Land back is suicide prevention.

Abolishing borders is suicide prevention.

Police and prison abolition is suicide prevention.

[joy-haver]

Something I’ve noticed is that leftist movements tend to turn practical, thought out tactics that were part of a larger plan for liberation, and remove them from their context. Then we often use these tactics as symbolic ways to mark our distaste for empire and harken back to older movements. However, these tactics are often already accounted for by the system, and sometimes are actively encouraged as ways to harm our people and defang our processes.

Here is an example;

In the Civil Rights struggle, getting arrested en mass was seen as an important part of the process of freedom. The civil rights leaders realized that the areas they were in did not have large enough jails to confine them all, and that if they filled the jails up, the police simply could not confine everyone else in the movement. Getting arrested in coordinated ways was a noble and helpful sacrifice that kept your brothers and sisters from getting arrested. Due to less strict sentencing at the time, and the ability of the movement to scare the police into releasing people, getting arrested often wasn’t the utterly disabling and free-life ending process it is today. (That’s not to say getting arrested was easy on people; the police brutality of the time was incredibly intense.)

Those who spent time in jail were given almost a reverent status. That had gone through much suffering to keep others from the same fate. Often, their ability to taking confinement completely off the table for the rest of the activists is precisely what allowed for certain other actions to be successful. Paying for legal defense and moderate bail costs was something of a drain on the movements scant, resources but it could often be worth it due to the role arrests played.

However, the state responded to this, and turned it to their benefit. The next fifty years saw a prison boom. Now, economically deprived small towns were made to bid and beg for prisons to be built in there areas; not only to lock people up, but also because working at the prison was presented as one of the only jobs left in rural America. Additionally, thisdrove the labor minded population to be further in conflict with other movements in some areas.

As the capacity of the government to capture and confine increased, the capacity of the movement to fill up the jails and prevent further arrests did not. Now, the system was hungry for more and more bodies for its endless rooms. It further instilled and mechanized the capacity of prisons to force labor, undercutting labor movements. Sentences became longer, parole became stricter, fines and restitutions increased to exorbitant amounts. Those who went in for petty arrests often never came out.

But, the feeling that getting arrested was a noble and venerable goal did not leave the movement. Some transitioned tactics; instead of filling up the jails to allow others to act without recourse, they sought to get arrested in test cases, as they had seen work occasionally before. But this too became more and more difficult, as the legal system realized it did not have to play by its own rules. Slowly but surely, the legal mythology that because it is written and because it is fair, it will be ruled so, began to overtake the minds of activists; even as they failed time and time again to win this way, they still threw countless of their friends into the mouth of the enemy, and condemned them to life in prison.

Even this had become a shadow of itself by the 2000s and 2010s. Arrest became an aesthetic goal instead of a practical one. The most radical in the movements were culturally encouraged to throw their lives away for petty protests that none would see, and would have no material impact on the operations of the system of dominion. The reality that getting kettled at a non violent protest could land you with the same jail time as a political assassination did not dawn upon these activists until long after hey were already in jail, and already disconnected from the movement. Their friends would gather all their meager savings towards bail funds, oftentimes going into debt, or otherwise extracting money from the rest of the marginalized communities supportive of the activism. Those funds would then go to the government in the form of bail, and then right back towards operating the same policing systems that targeted them. In this way, the main economic output of the leftists movement of the time was to fund the very systems of policing that they sought to destroy; and to get themselves and each other locked in cages in the process. Instead of developing practical systems of change, radicals were taught to emulate key aspects of the tactics of prior generations that had specifically been recuperated into the goals of the state.

Those who saw the futility in this were readily pushed towards the defanged and self acknowledged pointless marches of the nonviolent liberal movement, which never had any goal other than to once again emulate the visual aesthetics and personal emotional fulfillment of past movements.

We see this pattern play out all the time. People insisting on the radical importance of a leftist print newspaper in a time when print journalism is dead. A fetishization of industrial unionism in a town where no factory has been for three generations. Arguments over whether to support long defunct governments and long dead leaders for some tactical benefit which will never arise from reality.

It is long past time for us to realize that the process of achieving human liberation does not come from symbolic actions, nor from following the playbook of past movements. We must learn our history, yes, but not to emulate it; instead we must learn it to understand its failures and its successes, and, most importantly, how our movement ancestors interacted with the material conditions of their time to create multifaceted plans that met the needs of their people and made successful guerrilla war upon dominion.

We need to imagine ways of making change that are suited to the times that we are living in, the problems we face, and the opportunities that we have. This utterly necessitates that we get deeply embedded into the places and communities around us, that we listen with open ears to the problems our people are facing, and that we fold those ever more towards opportunities of liberation and care for one another.

[closet-keys]

Hey y'all. I'm currently recovering from bottom surgery, and I'm lucky enough to do it safely in my apartment with support from my wife and friends.

Right now a trans woman named Gia Abigaill Valentina is recovering from vaginoplasty while being held in isolation in New Jersey State Prison (NJSP), a men's prison in the United States.

The Trans Feminist Revolutionary Liberation Front (TFRLF) last heard from Valentina in a phone call on January 20th. She said that she'd been bleeding through her dressings and denied access to clean gauze and medical care. Valentina has endured horrific transmisogyny in NJSP for years and founded TFRLF as a transfeminist prison abolitionist organization dedicated to freeing transfeminine prisoners.

TFRLF's demand is for Gia to be transferred to Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women immediately and given full access to appropriate medical care.

Check below the cut for details on how to support <3

Call Script:

"Hello, I'm calling on behalf of my friend Gia Abigaill Valentina, SBI #987301A. Gia recently received vaginoplasty surgery and is still being held in an all male facility. Gia reports that she is being denied proper access to medical care and supplies, including clean gauze. She needs to be transferred out of NJSP to Edna Mahan immediately and given full access to appropriate medical care."

Where to call:

NJSP

[phone]

New Jersey Department of Corrections (NJDOC)

Victoria L Kuhn, Commission of NJDOC: [phone]

Helena Tomé, Assistant Commission of NJDOC: [phone]

Write to Gia:

Isolation is so brutal for trans women, but for incarcerated trans women it's on another level. If any transfeminists following have the heart to, I'm sure Gia would really appreciate receiving letters of support.

If you write to her, here's how you address the envelope:

Gia Abigaill Valentina SBI #987301-A New Jersey State Prison - 1400 PO Box 96777 Las Vegas, NV 89193 United States

Here's a couple pages with tips about writing to incarcerated people if you've never done it before:

"How to Write a Letter to an Incarcerated Person"

"Guide to writing letters to incarcerated survivors"

[politijohn]

Source

This should never have been a thing

[queercodedangel]

"The prison has become a black hole into which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited. Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison. There are thus real and often quite complicated connections between the deindustrialization of the economy—a process that reached its peak during the 1980s—and the rise of mass imprisonment, which also began to spiral during the Reagan-Bush era. However, the demand for more prisons was represented to the public in simplistic terms. More prisons were needed because there was more crime. Yet many scholars have demonstrated that by the time the prison construction boom began, official crime statistics were already falling."

- Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?

[spaceshipsandpurpledrank]

[cyanide-rush]

"But the protests! We cant be violent, my optics!"

Shut the fuck up. These protests are actively keeping ICE agents in that area incapable of efficiently completely their job. Their job to kidnap people, torture them, and send them to a camp in another country with 0 due process.

Every time protesters stop ICE from advancing. Everytime they force the national guard, the police, whatever the state wants to throw from accompanying ICE, a family is saved. Every single time precincts are forced to stop a crowd instead of assist ICE, a family is saved.

This is direct action. This is showing up and building community. This is organizing.

Also don't give the "Oh but theyre looting!" Yeah and? Fuck those businesses. Looting is redistributing capital back to the working class and still helps stop ICE and Police from acting.