April 13-15, 2007
The Prison Activist Coalitions at Bard College and Cornell University are
groups of students committed to combating the incessant growth,
inequality, racism, and oppression of the United States prison system.
Join us in an effort to build a stronger movement against the rapid caging
and degredation of our communities.
At Bard, we grew from a few students who volunteered for the Bard Prison
Initiative by tutoring in New York State prisons. We believed that our
tutoring efforts were not sufficient to address the systems failures.
This is now the groups third year in existence. Our efforts began
educating our campus and the surrounding communities about many prison
issues. From there, the Prison Activist Coalition engaged in supporting
prisoners through fundraisers, book-drives, art shows, letter-writing
campaigns, and other projects; fighting the Rockefeller Drug Laws and
other draconian legislation; and speaking out against the injustices of
the Prison Industrial Complex.
At Cornell, our work has grown from a group of students who wanted to
develop organizational capacity after attending events with Fred Hampton
Jr. of the Prisoners of Conscience Committee and Ashanti Alston, former
Black Panther and current chair of the Jericho Movement. We have also
developed a strong relationship with the Southern Tier Advocacy and
Mitigation Project (S.T.A.M.P.) to develop peer-to-peer relationships with
juvenile prisoners at the MacCormick Secure Center and the Lansing
Residential Center. Further, weve developed a strong relationship with
Jalil Muntaqim, who is a political prisoner of the New York 3 residing at
Auburn Correctional Facility.
However, our geography and our numbers limit the scope of our work. We at
Bard and Cornell realize that in order to adequately fight for radical
changes, we need to immerse ourselves within a larger movement. But where
is this movement now? Many prison activist groups are working separately.
In this time of apathy, heightened political repression, and a rapidly
intensifying crisis in our prison system, it is our responsibility to
unite. With Eliot Spitzer as the new governor of New York and the recent
victory of the Telephone Campaign for Justice to reduce the egregious
phone call costs of prisoners and their families, we feel this is an
opportune moment to develop a more unified and strategic set of goals for
this movement. Many students and community organizers in and around New
York State are active in doing prison work; thus, in response to what we
consider a state of emergency, we are extending an invitation to all
prison activists and community organizers - especially but not at all
limited to youth - to join us for a two-day conference at Bard College
April 13-15th. We recognize that coming from these two schools we hold a
great deal of privilege and resources. However, we do not presume to speak
for all prisoners or the communities most affected by criminalization.
Instead, we want to connect youth who will inherit this system with each
other, organizers with more experience with these issues, and members of
all our communities.
The goals of this conference are:
1. To form a unified prison activist movement with a strong network of
communication among its individual organizations/members.
2. To produce a collective statement in response to urgent prison
issues
and our proposal on what needs to be done.
3. To map out ways we can continue to work together and support one
anothers efforts (i.e. planning a campaign).
This is not a conference to teach people about the prison system. On the
contrary, we are building a working conference as a forum where prison
activists can come together to talk about current issues, what each
organization does, the obstacles they face, what they desire to do, and
how we can all work collaboratively to effect real and lasting change. It
will be an opportunity for us to link up, learn from each other, and form
a broader base of action. Though this will take place at Bard College, we
want to join forces with other groups in developing the conference. Our
workshops and strategy sessions will focus on:
Education in prison
Juvenile incarceration
Parole and re-entry
Rockefeller Drug Laws
Political Prisoners
Jail/Prison expansion
What issues do you want to explore and what do you wish to accomplish from
such an event? Any feedback, outreach, and support you can offer will
greatly strengthen this endeavor. Join us to support prisoners and to
counter the criminalization of our communities!
To obtain more information on the conference and to RSVP, please contact:
Jennifer Quick, jlq4@cornell.edu
or
Max Forman-Mullin, mm893@bard.edu
]]>Speakers: Dylan Rodriguez, David Brotherton
Friday , April 13,6:30-8:30. ITC Bldg 2222 (Reception).
Session: ITC Bldg 2221
This session is targeted to bring into one discussion persons and groups working in different areas of prison abolition activity. This includes a community group (that includes ex-prisoners) which is moving towards creating a 501 (3c) center for ex-prisoners, especially around re-entry issues; faculty volunteer teaching in regional max security prisons; student groups working in local jails and juvenile detention centers; a student group doing prisoner support work; and faculty and graduate students engaged in prison scholarship. This is according a diverse group and attention needs to be paid to working across languages and locations—with however a clear prison abolition intent. Many of these groups are listed on a common web site: www.justiceprojects.org
6:30-7:10: Prof. Brotherton will frame the conversation. We have asked him to address the following questions, briefly and informally:
*What are the central ingredients of what Mike Davis has called the Prison Industrial Complex?
*Why rethink grassroots projects having to do with incarceration in terms of prison abolition?
*How is your own work with gangs/street organizations affected by thinking of it in terms of the prison industrial complex and prison abolition?
7:10; 7:40 Brief introduction by participants of projects they want to (re)think in terms of prison abolition and of the analysis of the prison industrial complex..
7:40- 8:10 Discussion: putting the talk and the projects together.
8:20 Forming the agenda collectively: summary of issues and questions to be carried into the next day of the conference.
Saturday April 14, 9:00-12:00 a.m. Mountain View 111
Breakfast: Mountain View G17. Please stop at G17, get your food and take it to 111 so we can start soon after 9:00
9:10-9:50 a.m. Prof. Rodriguez will frame the dialogue with his answer to the following questions:
*In the face of a right wing consensus (at the local, state, and national level), how do we participate in a radical politics without becoming politically marginalized and hence neutralized?
*Given your criticisms of non-profits, how does one engage in a radical politics that takes on the prison industrial complex? What projects or models do you find helpful? How would you describe their main features as both practical, effective, without becoming non-profits?
*How do both state and interpersonal gender oppression of women of color and poor white women connect with prison abolition? Is the present joint use of social services (crisis lines, shelters,etc.) and the legal system (the police, courts, prisons, court mandate men’s groups) part of the prison industrial complex or part of the solution?
* If the 'way we know' social change (our imagination of it) is limited, and maybe even part of the problem, then how does one cultivate a more radical imagination? What tools or techniques are useful?
*You have suggested that the management of fear keeps us in the situation we are in. How do reposition ourselves to face this fear effectively?
9:50-10:20 a.m. Joshua Price, David Brotherton, and Bill Martin will briefly engage Prof. Dylan Rodriguez's answers.
10:20- 11:20 a.m. Small group discussion. [We can use G17 also]
11:30-12:00 a.m. Each group will report to the whole. An agenda will be prepared for the afternoon discussion that includes the questions formulated Friday evening at closing
.
Saturday Afternoon: 2:00-4:00 p.m. (Refreshments, room G17)
Next steps
2:00-2:40 p.m. David Brotherton and Dylan Rodriguez hold a conversation on the agenda prepared by participants during the friday evening and saturday morning discussions.
2:40- 3:20 Group discussion with some focus on next steps.
3:20-4:00 Closing remarks pulling the threads together: Joshua Price
4:00-5:30 Framing the work theoretically.
Street organizations: discussion with David Brotherton [room 111]
Prison abolition: discussion with Dylan Rodriguez [room G17]
Note on language: We, at the Broome County Justice Project, have adopted the practice of not referring to incarcerated people as 'inmates, prisoners, felons,' or formerly incarcerated people as 'ex-felons, ex-offenders, former inmates' etc. To be incarcerated is not a quality of a person, it is a circumstance. A person's criminal history does not need to be the primary descriptive characteristic. Referring to people as 'inmates,' 'prisoners,' etc. is another way to dehumanize them. Similarly, we prefer 'people on parole' to 'parolees' etc.
Dylan E. Rodriguez
Associate Professor
HMNSS 3602
dylan.rodriguez@ucr.edu
(951) 827-4707
Dylan Rodriguez is an Associate Professor at UCR, where he began his teaching career in 2001. He received his Ph.D. and his M.A. degrees in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and earned two B.A. degrees from Cornell University in Africana Studies (Magna Cum Laude) and the College Scholar Program, as well as a Concentration Degree in Asian American Studies.
Dr. Rodriguez is an interdisciplinary scholar-activist whose interests traverse the fields of critical race studies and cultural studies, with focal attention to the intersections of race, state violence, and community/identity formation. His work attempts to engage with the field of radical and revolutionary praxis that has emerged in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, across the different sites and moments of struggle against global racism, white supremacy, and other forms of institutionalized dehumanization. His political, philosophical, and theoretical interests are especially devoted to visualizing notions of “freedom,” “liberation,” “community,” and “justice” that productively, creatively critique and disarticulate dominant definitions. Among other political-intellectual collectives, he has worked with and/or alongside such organizations as Critical Resistance (a leading force in the contemporary prison abolitionist movement, see criticalresistance.org), INCITE! (a progressive antiviolence movement led by radical women of color, see incite-national.org), the Critical Filipino and Filipina Studies Collective (cffsc.focusnow.org), and the editorial board of the internationally recognized journal Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict, and World Order.
Prof. Rodriguez’ first book, Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime was published in 2006 by the University of Minnesota Press. His essay-length writings have appeared in such scholarly journals as Radical History Review, Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation, and Culture, The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, Social Justice: a Journal of Crime, Conflict, & World Order, and Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture. Some of his other written work has been included in such anthologies as Warfare: Prison and the American Homeland (ed. Joy Ann James) (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), Positively No Filipinos Allowed: Building Communities and Discourse (eds. Tiongson, Gutierrez, and Gutierrez) (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), Pedagogies of the Global: Knowledge in the Human Interest (ed. Arif Dirlik), (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2006), and Radical Philosophy Today, Vol. 2: The Problems of Resistance, (Steve Martinot, ed.) (Amherst, NY: Humanity Press, 2001).
Professor David Brothertondcbjj@jjay.cuny.edu
Dr. Brotherton grew up in the East End of London, England where he worked in various blue-collar jobs while organizing labor and youth. He came to the United States in the early 1980's on an exchange fellowship with the University of California and later worked toward his Ph.D. degree at the University of California, Santa Barbara while teaching public high school in the Mission district of San Francisco. Dr. Brotherton gained his doctorate in Sociology in 1992 and began work on street gang subcultures for his post-doctoral fellowship at U.C. Berkeley in the same year. In 1994, Dr. Brotherton came to John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, where he continued his research on youth resistance and marginalization, co-founding the Street Organization Project in 1997.
He has received numerous grants from both private and public agencies and has published widely in journals, books, newspapers and magazines. In 1998 and 2001, he organized the first academic/practitioner/community conferences on street youth to be held in New York since the 1960’s and is actively preparing for a third conference on Globalization and Street Youth to be held in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil in 2005. During 2002-3, Dr. Brotherton was a Visiting Professor of Law and Sociology at the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) and co-organized the first ever conference on deportees from the United States. He has published two books by Columbia University Press entitled: The Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation: Street Politics and the Transformation of a New York City Gang (co-authored with Luis Barrios 2004) and Gangs and Society: Alternative Perspectives (co-edited with Louis Kontos and Luis Barrios 2003). A third book entitled Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Youth, Marginalization and Empowerment is being co-edited with Michael Flynn (Columbia University Press, forthcoming 2005).
Panelists:
Glenn Martin, Co-Director Legal Action Center, National HIRE Network
Yolanda Johnson-Peterkin, Director of Reentry, Services, Women's Prison Association
Vivian Nixon, Soros Justice Fellow and Director, of College and Community Fellowship
Rozann Greco, Southern Tier Social Justice Project
Saleem Diaz, Southern Tier Social Justice Project
Refreshments will be Served
About the Conference http://www.barnard.columbia.edu/crow/scholarandfeminist/index.htm
Friday, 7 April, 7:00 - 8:30 PM
Saturday, 8 April, 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Barnard Hall at West 117th Street and Broadway