Prison Abolitionist Movement
Prison
abolition, as a movement, sounds provocative and absolute, but what it
is as a practice requires subtler understanding. For Gilmore, who has
been active in the movement for more than 30 years, it’s both a
long-term goal and a practical policy program, calling for government
investment in jobs, education, housing, health care — all the elements
that are required for a productive and violence-free life. Abolition
means not just the closing of prisons but the presence, instead, of
vital systems of support that many communities lack. Instead of asking
how, in a future without prisons, we will deal with so-called violent
people, abolitionists ask how we resolve inequalities and get people the
resources they need long before the hypothetical moment when, as
Gilmore puts it, they “mess up.”
“Every
age has had its hopes,” William Morris wrote in 1885, “hopes that look
to something beyond the life of the age itself, hopes that try to pierce
into the future.” Morris was a proto-abolitionist: In his utopian novel
“News From Nowhere,” there are no prisons, and this is treated as an
obvious, necessary condition for a happy society.
Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.
~Kahlil Gibran (1883 –1931), Lebanese American artist, poet, and writer.
sexism is the primal, or first, form of oppression in humanity
Sexism is a form of oppression and domination. As author Octavia Butler put it, "Simple peck-order bullying is only the beginning of the kind of hierarchical behavior that can lead to racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, classism, and all the other 'isms' that cause so much suffering in the world."
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Reparations?
02019 and beyond - this topic is coming up and we need more information.
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Blessed are the aged, for they can be forever young.
Blessed are the dead, for they are gone. We are on our own now.
—Kerry James Marshall
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Over one in ten households in the U.S. spends more than half their
income on housing costs – a financial burden that is associated with
increased food insecurity, child poverty and a greater proportion of
people in fair or poor health – according to new research conducted by
the
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the
University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute.
The annual collaboration,
County Health Rankings & Roadmaps,
analyzes the factors that influence health, such as structural factors,
access to and quality of health care, and personal health behaviors, as
well as health outcomes for almost every county in the nation. This
year’s analysis, which examines both location and race, has a particular
emphasis on housing.
The research reveals that in the most segregated
counties nearly one in four black households spends more than half their
income on housing, compared with one in 10 white households.
Here are some of the key findings:
On average, rates of “seve…
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