#prison abolition for all

[itsbansheebitch]

How are there not riots in the streets?

Looking back on 2023:

We know our education system is bunk and that NASA was started with help from a literal 1940s Nazi. We know this country was built on genocide, bigotry, and the backs of immigrants & slaves.

We know we're colonizers, we know our first President's teeth were made of a combination of his slaves' teeth and wood. We know the last President ran his campaign off sexual assault jokes.

We know the first time the Confederate flag was ever in the US Capital was on January 6th, 2021. We know approximately 50% of white medical trainees think black people have higher pain tolerance (especially black women).

We know black people are more likely to get bitten by police dogs and are more likely to get death sentences instead of life in prison like their white counterparts committing the same crime. We know you can predict if you'll be a victims of police brutality based on where past lynchings have happened & the amount of money a you make in a year.

We know that America helped cover up Unit 731 and gave the "scientists" immunity. We know that America has been at war for more time than not and we know school shootings are so "old news" that the news doesn't even cover most of them anymore.

We know the United States has an unusually high homeless population and that 40% to 60% of homeless people in the United States have jobs. We know the United States isn't opposed to human experimentation and we know that slavery is illegal unless you're in prison.

We know prisoners are used to fight fires for free, we know some prisons have cotton farms for the prisoners to work on for free. We know 1 in 5 people on death row are innocent and that police are known to fake/plant evidence and to assault witnesses & suspects that don't give them what they want to hear.

We know judges are more likely to give death sentences than life in prison when they're hangry (I'm NOT joking) and police were originally militias paid for by rich people to get their runaway slaves black. We know we are one of the most, if not the most, dangerous "developed" countries in the world.

Why do we perform non consensual surgeries on (intersex) babies right out of the womb without the parents' permission, but we make consensual surgeries (gender affirming care) illegal? Why is gender affirming care (plastic surgery, masculine voice classes) only legal and normal for cis people?

Why do we let people who are one foot in the grave sign our death certificates? Why do we let people who clearly have dementia run one of the globe's superpowers? Why are we letting the oldest bigots in the country decide our future?

So why are there not riots in the streets? When did we become so complacent to our own demise? Why do we deny the ship is sinking when we are up to our knees in water? What is wrong with us? Are we pathetic or broken or wrong in a way that is incomprehensible to us? Why are we pretending everything is normal?

Why are there not riots in the streets?

[sayruq]

[egberts]

ALSO if prisoners could get educated then prisons could run themselves more reliably and function like communities which is conducive to a growing/healing/learning/absolving mindset

[blackpearlblast]

(U.S.) two people are being put to death this month

thomas creech in idaho and ivan cantu in taxes are both scheduled to be executed by the state on february 28, 2024. if you are so inclined, please sign these petitions asking for clemency for them.

[fenrichaita]

the mental health industry is an auxiliary of the police state. It is not a tool of healing in the same way that a prison is not a place of rehabilitation. In both cases, you are more profitable while demoralized, detained, and stripped of your rights, than autonomous and empowered.

[liberaljane]

🖤 Our current drug laws are unjust and nonsensical – and disproportionately harm Black and brown communities. 🕷️🕸️🖤

Digital illustration of a young witch with brown skin and pink hair wearing a green cape and hat. Next to her is an owl sitting on a book along with an open spell book. There is a variety of objects scattered on the table in front of her including a cauldron, a bag of soil and candles. Text reads, ‘to be blunt, drug criminalization is racist.’

[trans-axolotl]

reading writing from other people who have also survived solitary confinement (in so many different places, prisons + institutions + more) and sometimes the grief overwhelms me. i feel such a strong connection through the page--they put words to this swirling mess of emotions that lies under my skin when i think back to those weeks. they've found a way to talk about what it does to you and what you become and what it's like to try to come back to the world afterwards. i still can't speak about most of it. some days i wake up panicking because my door is shut; I'm glad my walls are thin and my roommate plays music slightly too loudly at night--it's easier to fall asleep when i know she's there.

this quote: "I am filled with the sensation of drowning each and every day."

and this one: "When he walked out of the SHU, he saw his first tree in 12 years."

and this one: "Solitary confinement is a living death. Death because it is the removal of nearly everything that characterizes humanness, living because within it you are still you. The lights don’t turn out as in real death. Time isn’t erased as in sleep…"

(from shane bauer reporting on solitary confinement in California: x)

i don't have words for the kind of rage i feel when i think about all the people being tortured in solitary right now and every single fucking day; loved ones + activist acquaintances + people i have never met. i want to start breaking things. i want to tear it all down. some days i feel so incredibly guilty that i saw the leaves fall outside today--how is it that i get that and she's still in there. there are no words.

[jonasgoonface]

June 11 is coming! go write a letter! Fuck prisons fuck the laws that put us in them and fuck the cops that uphold those laws. Hella dm me if ur looking for some folks to support. Or you can check out mongoose distro, abcportland, thefinalstrawradio they're always doing a good job of looking out for the locked up homies. Also a.b.o.comix is really cool! They get comics from queer prisoners and sellem for commissary bucks. And lgbtbookstoprisoners is cool! I sent them a buncha Godshaper comics! You should give them books too!

[melyzard]

It's not over! It's not hopeless! Progress is still happening and we have a chance to undo the damage or prevent any further! We are not doomed!

[sayruq]

[just-an-enby-lemon]

I think we need more stories about how even if you are genuinally a bad person or did something truly atrocious that does not justify the suffering of the mordern Prison Industrial Complex and how prison more than punishment should be about making sure if not all at least most people can go back to society and never do crimes again.

I mean it. Most stories about how bad prison is either follows a thief that did it out of necessity or an innocent man wrongfully arrested and we should think of those people ofc. But we should also think about how prison is not supposed to be karma is supposed to help society (plus we need more assistencial programs to suport victims of violence as well asap).

[drumlincountry]

So .... communities. Right. Once upon a time a guy was so personally offended by the concept of divorce that he hand-wrote my mother a letter to tell her not to divorce my father. Insane. 22 years after this, I had to teach this guy in a class. We had to co-occupy a space both in full awareness that he was the busy-body freak who tried to tell my mother not to get a divorce she absolutely needed to get (And did get! three cheers for divorce!🥳🥳🥳). And. We did co-occupy. The course went great. It was fine.

Life is long and life is weird and I still don't like that guy very much but living in a community means accepting that the guy who gets involved in other people's divorces still has something to offer the world. Or something.

[anarchotahdigism]

"

Haiti’s government declared a state of emergency and nighttime curfew late Sunday in an effort to regain control of the streets after a huge popular uprising over the weekend saw armed fighters storm the country’s two biggest prisons.

The 72-hour state of emergency took effect immediately. The government said it would set out to find the escapees from prison. “The police were ordered to use all legal means at their disposal to enforce the curfew and apprehend all offenders,” said a statement from Finance Minister Patrick Boivert, acting prime minister.

Prime Minister Ariel Henry traveled abroad last week to try to salvage international bourgeois support for bringing in a US-backed security force to pacify the country in its conflict with increasingly militant organizations countrywide." ... "But the siege Saturday night of the National Penitentiary came as a shock even to Haitians accustomed to living under the constant pressure due to colonial misrule. Almost all of the estimated 4,000 inmates fled in the jailbreak, leaving the usually criminally overcrowded facility empty Sunday with no prison guards in sight and plastic sandals, clothing and furniture strewn across the concrete patio. Three bodies with gunshot wounds lay at the prison entrance." ... "Among the few dozen who chose to stay in the prison are 18 former Colombian soldiers accused of working as mercenaries in the July 2021 assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse. Amid the clashes Saturday night, several of the Colombians shared a video pleading for their lives.

'Please, please help us,” one of the men, Francisco Uribe, said in the message widely shared on social media. “They are massacring people indiscriminately inside the cells.' " .... "A second Port-au-Prince prison containing about 1,400 inmates was also overrun. Gunmen also occupied the nation’s top soccer stadium in a highly symbolic display of defiance Internet service for many residents was down as Haiti’s top mobile network said a fiber-optic cable connection was slashed during the rebellion." .. "The rebellion is significant since the president, who is US-backed and unelected, has been organizing an international occupation force to impose its will on the country. There has been no notable progress on social issues, economic issues, or reparations for US and French destruction of the country.

The violence must be understood in this context."

[trans-axolotl]

honestly sometimes i start thinking about all the tumblr bloggers who like saved my life a little bit when i was on here as a teenager and it makes me so emotional in a good way :) tumblr was the place i first got introduced to harm reduction, disability justice, prison abolition, so many other things. i remember reading a comic about prison abolition on here when i was 11 and i was like oh shit this all is making so much sense for the first time in my life. genuinely changed the path of my life. it just gave me so much more room to understand like, my family members in prison and the bullshit cops did in my neighborhood and how those weren't just individual events, but connected to these larger patterns of power. i remember being 13 following SO Many disability justice bloggers who were like, linking to mia mingus access intimacy and talking about crip time and interdependence and at the time i didn't even think i was disabled i was just like "wow this is all so interesting and cool to me" and then once i started getting more and more disabled like. my foundation of disability was one based in community and care and protest and not just the medical model or disability-as-tragedy. i remember following so many harm reduction bloggers on here and learning about decrim and like. that was a fucking lifeline when i was too young to actually access harm reduction resources irl and i am ALWAYS going to be so fucking grateful for all the people who were just sharing about their lives and their thoughts because it really did so much for me

[mandy4ever69420]

i beg any shameless blogger to think a fucking second before being like "so-and-so should've called the cops in this situation" because you are almost certainly fucking wrong. this includes calling the cops on kash not because kash wasn't being horrible but because having him arrested would involve:

outing ian

forcing ian to be cross examined by lawyers in testimony

potentially leading to the security tape being played in front of 15 probably total strangers

leaving ian feeling like he's lost someone close to him traumatically. even if he shouldn't have trusted this person, and taking an even more aggressively protective stance towards this guy who regularly used ian's protective instincts to manipulate him

putting someone in prison doesn't stop them from hurting others it just means you can't see it

nor does imprisoning someone help their victims cope emotionally with the repercussions

and, if you're with it enough to understand that people who do horrible things still have basic human rights it's worth noting

people convicted of sex crimes especially against minors are frequently subjected to punitive rape by any fellow inmate who learns what they've done

prison is by its definition a system of abuse.

traumatizing someone doesn't make them stop being dangerous. probably makes them worse.

police brutality doesn't stop being a bad thing just because you dislike the victim

like holy fuck lol

also as a side note as much as kash's kids shouldn't be used as an excuse for why you cant do anything to stop them i feel like it's just healthier for them to not grow up knowing that their dad is a pedophile.

[the-penandpaper]

Live Stream: Prison Abolition Film Series--> Watching 'Manufacturing Guilt- A Short Film About Mumia Abu Jamal's Case

Link

In case you missed the livestream...no worries. Here's a link to watch on YouTube.