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| Campaign to End the New Jim Crow to be represented by King Downing at the Sean Bell Annual Summit
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The Sean Bell Annual summit - for minority men and the police
It will take place on 4/27/12 at 6:00 - 8:00 pm in York College, Jamaica, Queens, NY. The event will promote progressive and positive dialog between the police and minority men, it features a vast panel of legal, clergy, politicians, and high ranking African American police officials, along with political and social activist. Our Special Guest speaker will be Senator Malcolm A. Smith, (he will thoroughly explain the SEAN BELL bill).
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| Statement of Solidarity With Occupy Oakland and the Occupy Movement Everywhere
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The Campaign to End the New Jim Crow (New York) stands in solidarity with Occupy Oakland and denounces the brutal attack by the police on their encampment. Oakland is predominantly a city of people of color, and this recent assault — while not the first against the Occupy movement nationally — reached new levels of violence with stun grenades, tear gas, and rubber bullets. The attack by police in Oakland was aimed at those most victimized by the racial and economic violence in a city devastated by police brutality, foreclosures, and unemployment. Carried out in Oscar Grant Park — re-named for a 2009 victim of a police murder — the raid underscored the depths of repression meted out against the poor and people of color. We condemn this racist violence and pledge our solidarity and support with our brothers and sisters in Oakland both on the November 2 National Day of Action in solidarity with Occupy Oakland and beyond.
We further stand in support of the Occupy movement everywhere. The 1% has long prioritized building prisons, criminalizing people of color, and policing our neighborhoods over the kinds of investments that sustain our communities: jobs, housing, and social programs. Nearly $70 billion is spent each year to keep people in cages and in the grip of the prison and parole systems, institutions that only perpetuate economic injustice through the collateral consequences of a felony conviction and the new Jim Crow. A society where the majority of those behind bars, where the disproportionate number of those unemployed, hungry and without fundamental rights are people of color, speaks for itself: this is a world we are struggling to transform.
The 99% are the incarcerated and the formerly-incarcerated, the victims of racism and the police, the unemployed and the evicted. We ALL stand to win when these injustices are uprooted. The Campaign to End the New Jim Crow is in solidarity with the Occupy movement everywhere and joins the resistance to the 1% who aim to destroy our lives.
Contact: campaigntoendnewjimcrow@gmail.com
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| GET INVOLVED WITH THE CENJC!
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Please join us for upcoming meetings of our working committees to help build the movement in New York!
Contact Lewis Webb at the AFSC healing Justice Program office in Manhattan, or by email to LWebb@afsc.org to find out about ways to become active in the campaign.
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| The Recession and America's Prisons
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| In 2009, more than 7.2 million people in America were in prison, jail, on probation or parole. That's 500,000 more than the entire population of Washington state. Here, we break down America's prison demographics, look at President Obama's 2012 budget for prison spending, and show you which states saw a decline -- or an increase -- in prison population during the recession of 2008-09.
Click here to see this excellent graphic display!
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| Sep 26, 2011
(submitted by King Downing - AFSC)
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| Two Hunger Strikes: Palestinian prisoners and Pelican Bay / Calipatria round 2
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Click headlines for more information:
1. Palestinian Prisoners Begin Open-Ended Hunger Strike
Sunday, 26 September 2010 11:48 Ahmad Jaradat and Tania Kepler, AIC
Approximately 7,000 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel commenced an open-ended hunger strike yesterday (25 September) in protest of their deteriorating conditions and to raise the issue of Palestinian prisoners in the newly renewed Palestinian-Israeli negotiations.
2. CA: Gearing up for Round 2 of Hunger Strike, CDCR Threatens Strikers
Posted on September 23, 2011 by prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity
On Monday, September 26th, prisoners at both Pelican Bay & Calipatria will resume the hunger strike to stop the torturous conditions of Security Housing Units (SHUs).
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| Sep 9, 2011
(The Nation, Francis Reynolds and Liliana Segura)
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| The Attica Prison Uprising: Forty Years Later
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to watch the video, click here.
(from TheNation.com)
The prisoners filling the cells of New York's Attica prison in 1971 faced inhumane conditions. They earned 56 cents per day for manual labor in searing workshops, were only allowed one bar of soap a month and could only shower once every two weeks. They were not allowed to read what they wanted to read and there was no due process in parole hearings. The prison population was largely black and Hispanic, controlled by an all-white guard staff. After years of progress by civil rights activists and the black power movement, the authorities across America were beginning to push back.
When tempers at Attica reached a boiling point on September 9, the prisoners erupted in a full-fledged rebellion, taking over the prison and holding it for four days, along with several guards who had been taken hostage. But when the negotiations broke down over the point of amnesty for violence conducted during the take-over of the complex, the mood in and outside the prison soured. By the time state troopers and police forces had retaken Attica by force on the morning of September 13, ten hostages and twenty-nine inmates had died.
In this video produced by The Nation's Frank Reynolds and Liliana Segura, some of those involved in the uprising and its aftermath - lawyer Elizabeth Fink, former national guardsman Tad Crawford and former Attica prisoners Carlos Roche and Joseph "Jazz" Hayden - recount what happened during those days forty years ago, and examine some of the repercussions still being felt from the police attack. For more, read Segura's Attica at 40 in this week's issue of The Nation magazine and asha bandele's After the Attica Uprising.
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| Sep 12, 2011
(Democracy Now!)
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| Attica Is All of Us: Cornel West on 40th Anniversary of Attica Prison Rebellion
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Video from Democracy Now!
Attica Is All of Us: Cornel West on 40th Anniversary of Attica Prison Rebellion from Democracy Now! on Vimeo.
Democracy Now! airs an excerpt from a Sept. 9 commemoration at Riverside Church in New York City, "Attica Is All of Us," featuring Dr. Cornel West, professor of religion and African American studies at Princeton University and the author of numerous books on race. "Forty years later, we come back to commemorate this struggle against the historical backdrop of a people who happen so terrorized and traumatized and stigmatized that we have been taught to be scared, intimidated, always afraid, distrustful of one another, and disrespectful of one another," West says. "But the Attica rebellion was a counter move in that direction."
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| September 8, 2011
(AlterNet / By Anthony Papa)
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| 40 Years After the Attica Prison Uprising: Celebrating the Heroic Courage of Prisoners Who Risked Their Lives for Justice
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In September of 1971, one of the bloodiest prison riots in the history of the United States took place at Attica Correctional Facility in Attica, New York. The uprising was brought on by prisoners living in terrible conditions who wanted to fix a broken system of justice.
The prisoners negotiated with state officials and called for improving their living conditions and the implementation of educational programs. But in seeking positive changes for those that lived in the darkness of Attica, they were met with cruel and unusual resistance by their keepers. Soon after their negotiations failed, National Guard troops and state police stormed Attica on orders by then-Governor Nelson Rockefeller. On September 13, when the five-day prison rebellion was over, 39 individuals were dead (29 prisoners and 10 civilians).
To many, the uprising at Attica was the start of an American movement that sought to bring to light the horrible conditions of imprisonment and to confront the growing prison-industrial complex. Surprisingly many of the horrid conditions that existed back then still plague the present prison system today as seen by the recent hunger strikes in Georgia and California protesting dehumanizing conditions.
Read more on Alternet
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(Brennan Center for Justice - NYU School of Law)
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| Voting After Criminal Conviction
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Voting is both a fundamental right and a civic duty. However there remains one significant blanket barrier to the franchise: 5.3 million American citizens are not allowed to vote because of a criminal conviction. As many as 4 million of these people live, work, and raise families in our communities, but because of a conviction in their past they are still denied the right to vote.
To read more, click here.
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| June 22, 2011
(Ellen Brown, Global Research)
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| The Military as a Jobs Program: There are More Efficient Ways to Stimulate the Economy
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"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. . . . We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people."
Dwight David Eisenhower, "The Chance for Peace," speech given to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Apr. 16, 1953
In a Wall Street Journal editorial on June 8 bemoaning the failure of the Obama stimulus package, Martin Feldstein wrote:
"Experience shows that the most cost-effective form of temporary fiscal stimulus is direct government spending. The most obvious way to achieve that in 2009 was to repair and replace the military equipment used in Iraq and Afghanistan that would otherwise have to be done in the future.But the Obama stimulus had nothing for the Defense Department."
You cant make this stuff up. The most obvious way to stimulate the economy is to replace military equipment? And the Obama stimulus had nothing for the Defense Department? When veterans benefits and other past military costs are factored in, the military now devours half the U.S. budget. If military spending is such a cost-effective stimulus, why have the trillions poured into it in the last decade left the economy reeling? To read more, click here.
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| June 2011
(Justice Policy Institute)
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| Gaming the System: How Political Strategies and Private Prison Companies Promote Ineffective Incarceration Policies
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At a time when many policy makers are looking at criminal and juvenile justice reforms that would safely shrink the size of our prison population, the existence of private prison companies creates a countervailing interest in preserving the current approach to criminal just ice and increasing the use of incarceration. To read more, click here.
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| Sep 08, 2011
(Jazz Hayden)
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| The Interactive 2010 U.S. Census Map
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This is fascinating and instructive.
Click here.
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