CR10 Photos by Scott Braley

CR10 Art Exhibit

Check out the CR10 Art Exhibit at the Lighthouse Community Charter School, 345 12th Street, at Webster in Oakland, just a few short blocks from Laney College. Take the CR10 shuttle over and see the paintings, drawings, video installations and more.

The Power of Prayer
Daniel Gwynn, SCI Greene, PA

CR10 Party Tonight!! Free 'em ALL!

Jury of Peers? (Mumia's message to CR10)

Check out Mumia's new radio-essay on the issue of the fair jury, including this special message to the CR10 conference:

http://prisonradio.org/JuryofPeersMumia.htm

And read Journalists for Mumia's interview with CR10's Rose Braz:
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/07/organizing-to-abolish-the-prison-industrial-complex/


For more information on Mumia's case:

International Concerned Family & Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal
P.O. Box 19709
Philadelphia, PA 19143
215-476-8812
icffmaj@aol.com
http://www.mumia.org/freedom.now/

And write to Mumia:

Mumia Abu-Jamal
AM 8335
SCI-Greene
175 Progress Drive
Waynesburg, PA 15370

Are you blogging from CR10? Let us know

We'll be getting some photos up from yesterdays sessions and events soon. In the meantime, check out the CR10 site for schedule information and updates.

And if you're blogging from CR10 (and we know some of you are), let us know so we can link up. So far, we've seen mentions from feministing, lambs knitting sweaters, enough enough.org/,
a book without a cover, o-scene, tomatoes from the vine.

Kenyon, you here? Bloggers from the south? Chicago?? And where's New York?

Let us hear from you!

I'm in town for CR10. How do I get around?

Wondering how to get around in Oakland?

CR10's website has info on getting around by foot, various kinds of wheels, including bikes and our own shuttle service, and Oakland's public transportation.

To learn more, check out the Local Transportation Information Page on the CR10 website.

Welcome to CR10!

When you arrive at CR10, be sure to register.

You can register for CR10 on-site during the conference all weekend long, at the registration station at the main entrance to Laney College. It's at 900 Fallon Street, in front of the Adminstration Building.

If you have pre-registered, be sure to check in and get your conference packet at the same site.

Opening Plenary: ABOLITION NOW!!

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 26
6.30­-8.30
Scottish Rite Center Auditorium

1547 Lakeside Dr. Oakland, CA
Doors open at 5.30pm, arrive early for seats.
Overflow will be seated in separate room.

ABOLITION NOW!!

What does it mean to live our vision of PIC abolition in our every day life, work and activism? How can we create the world we want to live in today, even as we work toward abolishing prisons, policing and punishment in the future? CR10 kicks off with a celebration of the PIC abolition movement incorporating spirituality, the arts, the power of personal experience, and groundbreaking political analysis. Come celebrate the energy and power of the movement!!


SPEAKERS AND PERFORMERS INCLUDE:

All Nations Drum is an Oakland based traditional Pow Wow singing group that brings together members from a variety of tribes to sing and drum in the Northern style. All Nations Drum was founded nearly 20 years ago, and performs at Pow Wows and social justice events, as well as training Native youth in traditional song and drumming.

Suheir Hammad is a Palestinian-American poet, author and political activist who was born in 1973 in Amman, Jordan to Palestinian refugee parents and immigrated with her family to Brooklyn, New York City when she was five years old. Her newest book, breaking poems, is out this October from Cypher Books. Her award winning work has appeared in anthologies, on stage, in her own books and on screen.

Lenny Foster (Ki'yaa'aanii) is a spiritual leader who has spent the last 28 years fighting to ensure that incarcerated Native Americans have the right to worship with access to their traditional ceremonies. Lenny is the Program Supervisor for the Corrections Project with the Navajo Nation in Window Rock, Arizona and is the spiritual advisor for approximately two thousand Navajo and Native American inmates in ninety-six state and federal prisons across the United States. He is also National Coordinator for the National Native American Prisoners Rights Advocates Coalition and a member of the American Friends Service Committee Native American Task Force. As a member of AIM, Lenny was involved in the occupation of Alcatraz and, in 1972, in the Trail of Broken Treaties Caravan and the Bureau of Indian Affairs take-over in Washington, D.C. He took part in the 71-day protest at Wounded Knee in 1973 and he participated in the Longest Walk, a seven-month journey from Alcatraz to Washington, D.C., in 1978.

Hank Jones is one of the SF8, a group of eight former Black community activists - Black Panthers and others - who were arrested January 23rd in California, New York and Florida on charges related to the 1971 killing of a San Francisco police officer. Similar charges were thrown out after it was revealed that police used torture to extract confessions when some of these same men were arrested in New Orleans in 1973. Hank Jones currently is out on bail, and along with his comrades, is awaiting a preliminary hearing scheduled to begin in San Francisco September 8. Soon after their arrest, the SF8 formed the Committee for Defense of Human Rights (CDHR), the mission of which is to oppose human rights abuses perpetrated by the government of the United States and law enforcement authorities.

Lisa Ortega is Co-Director of Rights for People with Psychiatric Disabilities, a grassroots, direct action organization that works to demand justice and social change for imprisoned people with disabilities. RIPPD's membership is made up of people with psychiatric disabilities that have been in jail or prison as well as family members and friends of people with psychiatric disabilities who are, or who have been imprisoned. Lisa has served time in jail and has been been a passionate organizer for over 15 years. She is a single mother of 4 and grandmother and has 17 years of recovery from addiction.

The Welfare Poets are a collective of activists, educators, and artists who have been together since 1990. Through teaching residencies and workshops, through activism around community struggles and through sharp-edged performances of music that incorporates Hip Hop, Bomba y Plena, Latin Jazz and other rhythms, the Welfare Poets bring information and inspiration to those facing oppression and those fighting for liberation. The Welfare Poets have produced three independent albums, "Project Blues," "Rhymes for Treason" and "Cruel and Unusual Punishment," a Hip Hop compilation against the death penalty, and are working on a CD compilation to raise funds and awareness about the Puerto Rican political prisoners. Over the collectives' 15-year existence, they have taken a direct stance in the struggle for social justice, most notably against police brutality, in defense of political prisoners, and in opposition to environmental injustice and the death penalty, the colonial status of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Naval occupation of the island.

Miss Major is an elder, black, formerly incarcerated transgendered Male-to-Female person. She has been involved in the trans community as an activist and advocate for over thirty-five (35) years. In NYC, she worked with fellow performers in local bars trying to establish an equal pay scale for their performances and also worked on the streets with other hookers keeping track of license plates of the cars they got into. In Sing Sing and other prisons, she helped the girls inside hold on to who they were and not cave in to the wishes and desires of fellow inmates and guards. At the onset of HIV/AIDS, the opportunity arose to work and get legitimate money to do prevention, education, counseling, and outreach to her community. She has received numerous awards and accolades for her activism in her community. Most recently, she spoke at the Committee to Eliminate Racial Discrimination (CERD) at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland on the abuses of transgender women of color. Currently, she's working as Community Organizing Director of TIP (Trans and gender variant in Prison Committee) and TGIJP (Transgender, Gender-variant, and Intersex Justice Project), where she instills hope and belief in the future and a sense of some kind of justice for the girls that are currently incarcerated and those coming home.

Andrea Smith (Cherokee) is a longtime anti-violence and Native American activist and scholar. She is co-founder of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, a national grassroots organization of radical feminists of color advancing a movement to end violence against women of color and their communities through direct action, critical dialogue, and grassroots organizing. She is also co-founder of the Boarding School Healing Project, a coalition that is documenting boarding school abuses so that Native communities can heal and demand justice. Andy is the author of Conquest, Sexual Violence, and American Indian Genocide (South End Press, 2005), Native Americans and the Christian Right: The Gendered Politics of Unlikely Alliances (Duke University Press, 2008), editor of The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Nonprofit Industrial Complex (South End Press, 2007) and co-editor of Color of Violence: The Incite! Anthology (South End Press, 2006).

Linda Evans is a former political prisoner who spent 16 years in federal prisons. Granted clemency in January 2001, she continues to work for the freedom of other political prisoners in the United States. The co-author of the groundbreaking essay, "The Prison Industrial Complex and the Global Economy," Evans draws links between economic globalization, state repression and the increasing use of incarceration throughout the world. Evans' own activism dates back to the late 60s, when as a regional organizer for Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) she led efforts against the Viet Nam war and in support of Black liberation struggles. She was also active in the lesbian and women's communities and in solidarity movements for struggles in South African, Palestine and Central America. Evans continued her activism behind bars, leading AIDS education and other prisoner support efforts. Linda is a co-founder of All of Us Or None, a national organizing initiative of prisoners, formerly-incarcerated people and our families, to combat the many forms of discrimination people face as the result of a felony conviction.

The Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company (DAYPC) is a multicultural group of teens who create original performance art pieces, in collaboration with professional artists, that combine hip-hop, modern, and aerial dance, theater, martial arts, song and rap. The productions are a dynamic, creative forum for the young people to express their fears, hopes and strategies for confronting challenging personal and social issues. The company has performed locally and nationally since 1993 for thousands and thousands of audience members. DAYPC comes out of Destiny Arts Center, an Oakland-based nonprofit violence-prevention and arts education organization that has been serving youth for over 20 years, through after-school, summer and weekend programs in dance, theater, martial arts, conflict resolution, self-defense, and youth leadership at their Oakland center and in over 25 East Bay public schools and other community centers. DAYPC Artistic Directors are Sarah Crowell & Simón Hanukai.

Angela Davis has been deeply involved in our nation's quest for social justice over the last decades. Her work as an educator - both at the university level and in the larger public sphere - has always emphasized the importance of building communities of struggle for economic, racial, and gender equality. Professor Davis' has spent the last fifteen years at the University of California Santa Cruz where she is Professor of History of Consciousness, an interdisciplinary Ph.D program, and Professor of Feminist Studies. She is the author of eight books and has lectured throughout the United States as well as in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. In recent years a persistent theme of her work has been the range of social problems associated with incarceration and the generalized criminalization of those communities that are most affected by poverty and racial discrimination. She draws upon her own experiences in the early seventies as a person who spent eighteen months in jail and on trial, after being placed on the FBI's "Ten Most Wanted List." She has also conducted extensive research on numerous issues related to race, gender and imprisonment. Her most recent books are Abolition Democracy and Are Prisons Obsolete? She is now completing a book on Prisons and American History.

The Freedom School Collective is a collective of young queer, transgender and gender non-conforming survivors of state violence, particularly of police, prison and jail violence. Based out of the the West Village in New York City, the Freedom School Collective organizes through political education workshops, coalition building and support for movement building spaces, to challenge the prison industrial complex and link PIC abolition with gender liberation and self determination. Speakers: Nai Fowler Timir, Tamika Johnson and Reg Gossett.

Music and graphics by: Black Arts Collective and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics.

TONITE! Incarceration, Resistance, Costs And Consequences:A Discussion with Authors, Activists And Former Political Prisoners

For info on more events planned locally during or around the CR10 weekend, check out the CR10 website.

Thursday, September 25
7:00 pm - Oakland

Discussion and Book Launch -
Incarceration, Resistance, Costs And Consequences:
A Discussion with Authors, Activists And Former Political Prisoners

Co-sponsored with KPFA. A benefit for the Angola 3 Defense Fund.

First Congregational Church, 2501 Harrison St, Oakland 510.444.8511

Panelists will be PM authors:

• Robert Hillary King, author of the new autobiography From The Bottom Of The Heap: The Autobiography Of Black Panther
  
  
• Lois Ahrens, editor of the Real Cost Of Prisons Comix
  
  
• Vikki Law, author of the forthcoming The Invisibility of Women’s Resistance
  
  
• Matt Meyer, editor of the documentary anthology Let Freedom Ring
  
  
• Bo Brown, former political prisoner (George Jackson Brigade) and one of the founders of Out of Control, a lesbian prisoners group
  
  
• Ashanti Alston, former Black Panther and Black Liberation political prisoner.

Bo Brown and Ashanti Alston are contributors to Let Freedom Ring.

C.S. Soong, host of “Against the Grain”, Moderator.

$10—no one turned away.

TONITE! Presentation and strategy discussion with Bobby Dellelo from "When the Prisoners Ran Walpole"

The National Institute of Corrections and the Prison Industrial Complex: Presentation and Strategy Discussion with Bobby Dellelo

TONITE!
September 24th, 2008, 7:30 PM
3411 E. 12th St., (near Fruitvale BART, Oakland) SEIU Local 24/7

light refreshments served, wheelchair accessible

• Do you know about the National Institute of Corrections?
• Do you know what they do and what their influence is?
• If not, Bobby Dellelo's workshop will be a major wake up call!

Bobby Dellelo spent 40 years of his life in prison. While in prison he earned a BA in sociology, founded the AIDS Education Program, ran the library, and was the president of the National Prisoners Rights Association, the subject of a recently released book, When the Prisoners Ran Walpole: A True Story In the Movement for Prison Abolition. Presently, Bobby is working with the American Friends Service Committee, Criminal Justice Program, and is the Editor of Outlook on Justice.

$5-$10 donation requested, no one turned away for lack of funds

Co-sponsored by the Center for Political Education and the Abolitionist
(a Critical Resistance, Oakland publication)

For more information call or e-mail center@politicaleducation.org, 415-431-1918

Share your Ideas at CR10!

We invite you to share presentation materials (workshop outlines, Power Point presentations, session notes, etc.), reactions, ideas, new plans or anything else that inspires you with us. During the conference, people will be available to help you post ideas via blogs, our website, and any other ways you can dream up. If you’re interested in posting any materials or ideas, please join us at the Lighthouse Community Charter School, in Green’s Classroom.

And don't forget: Thousand Kites Radio will broadcast live from CR10. Call them toll-free at 877.518.0606 to record your story for the broadcast! For more information on Thousand Kites, go to thousandkites.org

UPDATE: CR10 Registration

While you will be able to register for CR10 on-site during the conference all weekend long, we have closed pre-registration. You will be able to register for the conference by going to the registration station at the main entrance to Laney College (900 Fallon St. in front of the Adminstration Building). If you have pre-registered, you will be able to check in and get your conference packet at the same site.

See you next week!

Planning Profile: Outreach Workgroup

CR10 Outreach Committee

CR10 is a two-year organizing project designed to make and strengthen connections between abolitionist organizers throughout the country. Ten years later, which strategies are working? Which have been co-opted by the state? Which communities need to be centered in the work? How can we continue to act both locally and in tandem?

The Outreach Committee began by creating a list of the 50 groups they thought were most highly impacted by the prison industrial complex. As Nat Smith explains, they strategized about how to create “a conference that’s not just about a weekend, but about movement building, and about what people have already been building.”

With this in mind, long-time CR members and new volunteers started meeting with activists and community groups around the country. Kool Black and Rose Braz made a week-long trip in the South and met with The Ordinary People Society (T.O.P.S) in Dothan, Alabama, the local NAACP in McComb, Missississipi and Safe Streets/Strong Communities and Family and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children in New Orleans. While a few more formal trips like this were planned and funded, outreach largely happened at a grassroots level.

Anywhere CR members traveled, they took hundreds of brochures and applications with them. From the STOPMAX Conference in Philadelphia to The Border Action Network in Tucson, Arizona to the Community HIV-AIDS Mobilization Project (CHAMP) in New York City to The Partnership for Safety and Justice in Portland, Oregon, CR members went hear about local work being done to dismantle the PIC and to discuss visions for CR10 and future collaboration. People who have been working to establish Critical Resistance chapters around the country are also using the conference as an opportunity to gather momentum and get new people involved.

The Outreach Committee wanted to use CR10 as an opportunity to build stronger relationships with groups that have been on the margins of CR’s work and to get them meaningfully involved in the planning process, the weekend conference, and the continuing work afterwards.

First Nations members were one such priority. For three days before CR10, dozens of First Nations activists and other leaders will gather in Oakland to focus on strategizing against and healing from the devastating impacts of the PIC. This will be the first First Nations gathering of this magnitude with this purpose.

Since some aspects of the founding CR conference in Berkeley marginalized sex workers, the Outreach Committee also aimed to center the fight for decriminalization of sex work and sex workers’ rights. St. James Infirmary, the first occupational safety and health clinic run by and for sex workers, and Gay Shame, a radical queer direct action group, will both host strategy sessions at the conference.

Outreach to people who are currently imprisoned has occurred throughout the planning process. Imprisoned people have submitted art to the prisoner art show, recorded greetings and messages that will be broadcast at the conference, and served in an advisory capacity for many aspects of the planning. Transcripts and recordings from the conference will be sent into prisons, and currently imprisoned people will send notes from their own coinciding meetings to Critical Resistance.

The outreach process is far from over. As the conference approaches, CR10 organizers will focus on street outreach in Oakland. The Outreach Committee encourages people throughout the country to keep doing outreach locally. For materials, please contact Nat Smith at nat@criticalresistance.org

Planning Profile: Programming Workgroup

If you're a sucker for organizational structure, check this out: CR10 is being organized by four distinct workgroup: Programming, Media, Outreach and Logistics. We each have regular separate meetings and at strategic moments, the whole planning team converges for huge conference calls or face to face retreats.

Check out this profile of our Programming Workgroup:

CR10’s Program Committee

What work has been done in the past ten years to dismantle the prison industrial complex? What alternatives are being built? What comes next?

The Program Committee’s main priority in planning CR10 was to keep the focus, for the first time, on abolition. They partnered with the Outreach Committee to request proposals from organizers working on issues of homelessness, alternative healthcare, First Nations rights, policing, queer and trans justice, prisons, immigration and detention, harm prevention and reduction, alternatives to imprisonment, and ending discrimination against formerly imprisoned people. The goal: to continue to build connections and share strategies with communities who approach PIC abolition from as many angles as possible.

Incite! Women of Color against Violence will pair up with the Women of Color Resource Center in Oakland to discuss the gendered violence of the PIC and its relation to militarism.

Transforming Justice will lead a session on the criminalization and imprisonment of transgender communities and radical coalition building between queer and trans people of color.

The weekend will also include a prisoner art show, a performance series, a film festival, visual and sound installations and children’s programming for people ages 3-12.

To ensure that the challenges and changes to the PIC abolition movement over the past ten years are represented in the agenda, the Program Committee also aimed to center the strategic alternatives to policing and imprisonment that organizations/communities around the country have been building. This year, the question is not only, What are alternatives to prisons? , but also, How can our communities respond meaningfully to harm without relying on the police? What does community accountability look like and how can we achieve it? Many of the organizations coming together at CR10 will provide their localized responses to these questions.

In a multilingual project that aims to learn and teach more about the ways that communities already respond to harm without calling the cops, Creative Interventions and Generation 5 collaborated to collect successful stories of “community-based interventions to family, intimate partner, and other forms of interpersonal violence” from across the country. They’ll be presenting part of the ongoing project and discussing strategies to break cycles of interpersonal and state violence.

Incite! will host a number of discussions on alternative responses to state-based intervention when domestic and sexual violence occur in communities of color.

The Audre Lorde Project will present on Safe Outside the System, a project aimed at ending and responding to violence against and within queer communities of color without state intervention.

All programming during the CR10 conference and strategy session will be free. We hope that you will lend your voice to these important discussions. To see a schedule of the weekend’s events, please visit our website.

Thanks to Shana Agid for her work on the Program committee and his help with this post.

CR10 Film Festival

All films are screened in Room A273 at Laney College

For more information on these films,
check out the schedule on the CR10 website.


Download Film Festival Schedule here.

Download Film Festival Flyer here.

Thousand Kites radio will broadcast live from CR10!

Whether you can be at CR10 or not, check out the Thousand Kites radio webstream during the conference, September 26-28.

Listen to Thousand Kites radio here.

Add your voice to CR10! Call toll-free at 877.518.0006 to record your story on Thousand Kites radio!

For more information on Thousand Kites, go to thousandkites.org

Abolition and Mumia

Hans Bennett of Journalists for Mumia interviews Rose Braz:

Hans Bennett: What does “prison abolitionist” mean?

Rose Braz: CR seeks to abolish the prison industrial complex: the use of prisons, policing and the larger system of the prison industrial complex as an “answer” to what are social, political and economic problems, not just prisons.

Abolition defines both the goal we seek and the way we do our work today. Abolition means a world where we do not use prisons, policing and the larger system of the prison industrial complex as an “answer” to what are social, political and economic problems. Abolition means that instead we put in place the things that would reduce incidents of harm at the front end and address harm in a non-punitive manner when harm does occur. Abolition means that harm will occur far less often and, that when harm does occur, we address the causes of that harm rather than rely on the failed solutions of punishment. Thus, abolition is taking a harm reductionist approach to our society’s problems.

Abolition means creating sustainable, healthy communities empowered to create safety and rooted in accountability, instead of relying on policing, courts, and imprisonment which are not creating safe communities.

HB: How has prison changed in 10 years?

RB: One recent shift is that our denunciation of conditions inside has been twisted into justifications for expanding the system, particularly through what are sometimes called “boutique prisons”.

For example, there is fairly uniform agreement that California’s now $10 billion-per-year prison system holds too many people, provides horrendous health and mental health care, underfunds and cuts programming and services, and consistently fails to deliver on its promise of public safety. Nonetheless, California’s answer to this disaster has been to make it even bigger, building more prisons and in particular specialized prisons — for women, for elderly prisoners, for the sick, etc.

What’s new and more insidious about this expansion is that it has not been couched in ‘tough on crime’ rhetoric that politicians usually employ to justify expansion. Rather, in response to growing anti-prison public sentiment, these plans have been grounded on the rhetoric of “prison reform” and in regard to people in women’s prisons: “gender responsiveness.”

One current challenge is to continue to debunk the myth that bricks and mortar are an answer to these problems and to make common sense that the only real answer to California’s prison crisis is to reduce the number of people in prison and number of prisons toward the goal of abolition.

HB: How has the anti-prison movement evolved in the last 10 years?

RB: In the last decade, I think the movement has become more coordinated, is growing and has shifted the debate from one about reform to one that includes abolition.

In 1998, while there were numerous people and organizations working around conditions of confinement, the death penalty, etc., and in particular using litigation and research strategies; grassroots organizing challenging the PIC was at a low following the crackdown on the movement in the 1970’s and 80’s. We believe that a grassroots movement is a necessary prerequisite to change. CR is bringing people together through our conferences, campaigns, and projects toward the goal of helping to build that movement.

I also believe the debate has shifted and unlike a decade ago, abolition is on the table. A prerequisite to seeking any social change is the naming of it. In other words, even though the goal we seek may be far away, unless we name it and fight for it today, it will never come.

HB: What distinctions do you make between “political prisoners,” and others, including non-violent and violent offenders?

RB: CR focuses on how the PIC is used as a purported “answer” to social, economic and political challenges, and clearly a big part of the build up of the PIC followed directly on the political uprisings of the ’60s and ’70’s. CR seeks to abolish the PIC in its entirety, for us that means fundamentally challenging the PIC as an institution. This means that just as we fight for Mumia to not be locked in a cage, we also fight for people convicted of offenses classified as “violent” or “nonviolent” by the state to also not be locked in cages. While acknowledging that people are put in prison for different reasons, we do not make the distinction between people in for “violent” or “nonviolent” offenses because the PIC is not an answer to either.

HB: Anything else to add?

RB: One day, I believe those who fought for abolition will be seen as visionaries. Historian Adam Hochschild notes that there are numerous institutions in history that appeared unchangeable and moreover, small numbers of people have sparked extraordinary change.

Until the late 18th century, when the British slavery abolitionist movement began, the idea of eliminating one of the fundamental aspects of the British Empire’s economy was unimaginable. Yet, 12 individuals who first met in a London printing shop in 1787 managed to create enough social turbulence that 51 years later, the slave ships stopped sailing in Britain.

In the US, the first slavery abolitionists were represented as extremists and it took almost a century to abolish slavery. Similarly, many who lived under Jim Crow could not envision a legal system without segregation.

As Hochschild wrote, “The fact that the battle against slavery was won must give us pause when considering great modern injustices, such as the gap between rich and poor, nuclear proliferation and war” and I would add the Prison Industrial Complex. “None of these problems will be solved overnight, or perhaps even in the fifty years it took to end British slavery, but they will not be solved at all unless people see them as both outrageous and solvable.”

Hans Bennett is a Philadelphia-based photo-journalist who has been documenting the movement to free Mumia Abu-Jamal and all political prisoners for over five years.