'No new prisons'

Los Angeles--A wide coalition of anti-prison activists, organizations and concerned individuals met in East Los Angeles in November to discuss how to stop the growing prison industry. The town hall meeting titled "No New Prisons--Educate, Rehabilitate--Don't Incarcerate" was sponsored by Californians United For a Responsible Budget (CURB), Critical Resistance (CRLA) and the L.A. Prison Times and gave presentations to a small audience that included women from the League of Women Voters.

A woman from Labor Community Strategy Center (LCSC) stated that the school to prison pipeline must be severed. Students late to school are given truancy tickets (with fines of $250) and youths are put into a gang database for very minor infractions.

A spokeswoman from Families Against The Three Strike Law (FACTS) stated that the public has become tolerant of repressive laws against youths. We need a coalition to come up with a solution.

A Black woman ex-prisoner from A New Way of Life-Reentry Project (NWOL) described her organization's program to provide education, drug treatment, housing and jobs as a way to avoid recidivism.

All of Us or None (AON) is a national, civil rights movement founded by formerly incarcerated people to challenge discrimination faced after release, and work to restore human rights of formerly incarcerated and the still incarcerated.

There are hardly any funds for people leaving prison to reenter society, and widespread discrimination against parolees in job opportunities, funding for education, subsidized housing, health care, and other social benefits. Barriers to expungement of records after they have served their time are another issue ex-prisoners face.

Gang violence has given the police an excuse to impose a gang injunction (putting mostly nonviolent Black and Brown youths into a gang database). The police also use heavy-handed suppression tactics, which too often lead to police brutality and killing of innocent, unarmed youths. Those police are rarely punished.

Project Cry No More, an organization of Black women whose family members were victims of gang violence, and Cease-Fire Committee (a grassroots community intervention coalition of many anti-gang violence organizations), confront gang members nonviolently to stop killing each other. They advise youth to resist the pull in their neighborhoods of gang warfare and violence.

At the same time, they oppose gang injunctions and the heavy-handed suppression-only policy of the police. They hold educational meetings, peace breakfasts and summer Cool Down picnics to bring rival youths together and are on call to intervene to stop a potential killing. Black on Black killing is their primary concern, and they work in concert with the Brown and immigrant communities, and anyone else who opposes the enslaving prison industry and gang warfare, in a humane and nonviolent way.

--Basho

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