Rethinking an organization as complex and ingrained as the PIC requires removing all of our present notions of the state and its role at the community level. The current system sends many prisoners hundreds of miles from the place of commission of their crime, and thus eliminates any possibility of a healthy reconciliatory relationship between that individual, the community, and the people affected.
Prisons currently serve as mental health facilities for those incarcerated; this system is unsustainable and ineffective. Instead, areas with high rates of mental health issues should have quasi-hospitals and halfway homes located within walking distance. Member of the community affected would be close to loved ones, not in the state penitentiary hundreds of miles away.
Mike Davis' City of Quartz
observes the transformation of downtown Los Angeles into a "new Berlin," with a massive divide between the poor urban class of newly minted elites who operate in the downtown area. Frank Law Olmsted envisioned American parks as the answer to Europe's piazzas and squares: sites of uprising and disorder. In a bucolic setting, he figured citizens were less likely to demand upheaval violently and mope likely to congregate and communicate... The state of policing policy imperils this vision.
Along with Dylan Rodriguez, Rachel pushed the audience on April 10th in lecture to analyze the meaning behind their mission and movement. Future generations will critique the achievements of people our age as a collective whole. What we build and what we dismantle now will shape those critiques.
The Oakland Privacy Working Group works to prevent the creation of the $11,000,000 Domestic Awareness Center in Oakland. The DAC, funded by grants from the Department of Homeland Security, has been incepted, and was nearly implemented, apart from the public in private city meetings. It would aggregate data from public and private security cameras throughout Oakland in a massive surveillance network. More information can be found at:
http://oaklandwiki.org/Domain_Awareness_Center
Eddy Zheng has established himself as one of the premier products of interprison education programs. His willingness to create in an environment meant to suppress intellect and analysis of his past actions reveals a corrective model at the heart of a new punitive system.
Professor Robinson's lectures featured the distinction between radical reform
and reform reform.
The former is a means to deconstruct and reimagine a world without prisons as part of a broader solution to negative structures built into our society. The latter merely represents a bandage to those structures, disguised, when it accepts and perpetuates more of the same.
Jenna Loyd's The Fire Next Time,
an analysis of several instances of racial violence in America, provides a hopeful outlook of how another instance may be reacted to in the future. She also observes how crime statistics are self-proving; a community is violent if it's crime rate is high, but the presence of advanced policing tactics makes the crime rate high. This observation is essential to understanding current and future prison demographics and sentencing policy.
Long, hot summers provided the ideal metaphorical and physical conditions for protest, and eventually riot. In Philadelphia, Harlem, and other major urban centers of America, people took to the streets. These mass gatherings would coincide with a shift in punitive policy from a rehabilitative model to a barebones, inherently violent structure.
Dylan's introduction during the April 10th interval was filled with valuable insight not only into the abolition movement, but the nature of organizing and action movements in general. A main theme he impressed upon the audience centered around selflessness of purpose. The "embrace humility" message places all organizing endeavors in a setting of active awareness, current and historical.
