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>That's what I keep saying: the prisons are important, even key, to a
>left platform.
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>Joanna
You're not alone in thinking this. This is from an interview with Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Gilmore's bio blurb and a link to info about her book Golden Gulag Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California is at the bottom of this post:
http://www.yourblackeye.org/1Q05/Gilmore_YBE_Interview_1Q05.html
RWG:..... Since prison sits at the intersection of so many vulnerabilities to premature death, then in everyday activism it is possible to discern ways people who do not currently recognize each other's struggles as also their own can align their organizations into movement-building forces.
YBE: Which organizations and/or independent activities would you recommend for those who might share your initiative to be actively involved in prison issues?
RWG: There's plenty of work to be done. There are many organizations involved in local, regional, and national projects and campaigns & their contact information is in most cases available on the web. Critical Resistance has 10 chapters around the country, and three regional offices (Oakland, New Orleans, and New York); some folks in the Chicago area are looking for help to organize the next national gathering. California Prison Moratorium Project, and its autonomous sister organizations New York Prison Moratorium Project and Arizona Prison Moratorium Coalition, are working to stop new prison construction, and they have joined up with environmental justice, youth, and immigrant organizations in urban and rural places. The Western Prison Project organizes in the Pacific Northwest. All of Us or None is a growing national organization of people who have been in prison. SEIU Local 1000, that represents some prison free staff (teachers, nurses, clerks), and the SEIU California State Council have taken the position that the prison system must shrink. All labor unions that organize modestly educated men and women doubtless number among their members people who have been in prison. And educators! The National Education Association has endorsed the call for Education Not Incarceration. The NEA is developing workshops that locals can host that will help teachers, parents, and students analyze the situation and form strategies and alliances to change skewed budget and planning priorities. After all, in some jurisdictions, juvenile and adult jail and prison authorities are planning cages for kids whose parents have not been born yet! People who want to learn the basics should contact The Real Cost of Prisons Project. RCPP has developed a series of workshops that help people understand and teach the dollar and intangible costs to prison towns and prisoner communities; the devastation perpetrated by the War on Drugs; and the particular vulnerabilities of women prisoners and their children. RCPP also commissioned 3 fabulous comic books that lay things out with astonishing clarity. People who want to figure out alternatives to prison-based punishment, from the perspective of those most likely to experience both harm and criminalization might want to contact !Incite! Women of Color Against Violence. Those are a few organizations that people can either join or learn from; and there are plenty of others wherever a reader might live.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Associate Professor of Geography and Director of the Program in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is a member of the founding collective of Critical Resistance, one of the most important national anti-prison organizations in the United States.
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10234.html