#8: Prison Abolition and Community Accountability
:Abolishing prisons; Russell Maroon Shoatz review; Support NY interview
Summary
To conclude our series focusing on prisons and police, our eighth episode looks into strategies to dismantle the prison industrial complex and to hold each other accountable without the state. We interview members of Critical Resistance and Support New York, discuss a new collection of writings from political prisoner Russell Maroon Shoats, respond to listener feedback and anarchist perspectives on gun control, and share a letter from revolutionary Tom Manning about his transfer from solitary confinement--not to mention news, event announcements, Contradictionary terms, and more. {August 25, 2013}
Notes and Links
Creative Interventions - a resource center to create and promote community-based responses to interpersonal violence; includes the Story Telling and Organizing Project, collecting narratives of non-state anti-violence strategies, and a comprehensive toolkit.
Towards Transformative Justice by Generation Five - a theoretical framework for understanding community accountability
Critical Resistance - a nonprofit that seeks to build an international movement to end the Prison Industrial Complex
INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence - a national activist organization of radical feminists of color advancing a movement to end violence against women of color and our communities through direct action, critical dialogue and grassroots organizing. Check out their anthology The Color of Violence and the recent collection The Revolution Begins at Home.
Accounting For Ourselves: Breaking the Impasse Around Assault and Abuse in Anarchist Scenes - a CrimethInc feature critically assessing anarchist engagements with community accountability processes; includes a bibliography of readings and links on the subject
To write political prisoner Tom Manning, whose letter describing his release from solitary confinement we read on this episode:
Thomas Manning #10373–016
FMC Butner
P.O. Box 1600
Butner, NC 27509
(Note that the address from the support website linked to above is out of date; use the FMC Butner address above.)Also, issue number 3 of Rolling Thunder magazine includes an article on the history of the United Freedom Front.
Here’s the website for Russell Maroon Shoats and his new book, Maroon the Implacable: The Collected Writings of Russell Maroon Shoats.
Some of the essays from the book can be read online, including: “The Dragon and the Hydra”,“Autonomous Resistance to Slavery and Colonization” - includes the above essay and “The Real Resistance to Slavery in America”, “Liberation or Gangsterism: Freedom or Slavery” - explores the co-optation of radical youth culture, and the politics of gangs, hip hop, and the drug war , “Death by Regulation” and “Message From a Death Camp” - essays on control units and “clean torture” in US prisons
Support New York can be contacted at supportnewyork [at] gmail [dot] com.
Information about Sonja and Christian and the German Revolutionary Cells case, as well as the release of non-cooperating witness Sybille S.
“Politicians Love Gun Control: Reframing the Argument Around Gun Ownership” presents an anarchist perspective on firearms and state restriction.
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Political prisoners with upcoming birthdays:
Maliki Shakur Latine # 81-A–4469
Clinton Correctional Facility
Post Office Box 2000
Dannemora, New York 12929Russell Maroon Shoats #AF–3855
SCI Mahanoy
301 Morea Road
Frackville, Pennsylvania 17932Rafil A. Dhafir #11921–052
FCI Terre Haute - CMU
Post Office Box 33
Terre Haute, Indiana 47808Ronald Reed #2195311
Minnesota Correctional Facility-Oak Park Heights
5329 Osgood Avenue North
Stillwater, Minnesota 55082–1117 Music for the Ex-Worker provided by Underground Reverie