Protesting prisons-for-profit that prey on the poor, powerless immigrant detainees

Occupy Wall Street groups march on Wells Fargo bank in Harlem

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Published: Wednesday, February 22, 2012, 4:00 AM

Updated: Wednesday, February 22, 2012, 4:00 AM

Handout

More than 200 members of Occupy Wall Street groups rally outside a Wells Fargo bank branch in Harlem to protest investments in prisons-for-profit.

Incarcerating poor, powerless people for profit is a despicable business, but it sure is profitable.


“Hello Harlem, we’re here to help” reads an unintentionally ironic sign in a Wells Fargo bank, a major investor in two private prison companies, the GEO Group and the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) that in 2010 made a whopping $2.9 billion in profits.


On Monday 200 people took to the streets to protest the scandalous connection between investment in private prisons and the mass jailing of prisoners and immigrant detainees for profit. The demonstration was organized by the Occupy Wall Street Immigrant Worker Justice working group and the OWS Prisoner Solidarity working group, "[For these corporations\] the more people in prison the better it is for business,” said Mariano Muñoz of the Occupy Wall Street Immigrant Worker Justice working group.


Not surprisingly, both GEO and the CCA spend a pretty penny lobbying at both the state and federal level for laws like the infamous Arizona and Alabama anti-immigrant legislations.
“[Those laws\] place greater numbers of non-U.S. citizens in the immigrant detention and deportation system,” Muñoz added. “And that’s good for business.”


Private prison corporations that profit from detention and deportation policies make tons of money by locking up poor, powerless immigrants for months and even years with little federal supervision. One of these jails is located in Springfield Gardens, Queens, and many voices have been raised in protest.


A spokesman for Wells Fargo denied the company owns shares of GEO or CCA or that it is invested in either company. "Wells Fargo Advantage Funds currently holds a small position in mutual funds that we administer as a trustee on behalf of fund shareholders. Wells Fargo is not the owner. Public filings and website listings can give the incorrect impression that Wells Fargo is an owner of a company’s stock – we are not. These shares are owned by various Wells Fargo mutual funds. Wells Fargo is not a beneficial owner of these mutual funds, but serves as an adviser,” he said.


The rally last week focused on the role those private prison companies have played in supporting anti-immigrant policies, leading to record detention and deportation rates.


The rally began in front of the Lincoln Correction Facility in Harlem, one of the city’s many African-American neighborhoods devastated by the explosive growth in prisons over the past few decades. From there, protesters marched to a Wells Fargo bank branch.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/protesting-prisons-for-profit-prey-poor-powerless-immigrant-detainees-article-1.1026328#ixzz1nLZXHy4B


Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/protesting-prisons-for-profit-prey-poor-powerless-immigrant-detainees-article-1.1026328#ixzz1nLZL5UJr

Occupy movement stages day of protests at US prisons

via: theguardian

Occupy demonstrators participated in a nationwide day of action to protest against the US prison system on Monday, with demonstrations carried out at over a dozen sites across the country, including prisons in California, Chicago, Denver and New York.

The call to protest was issued by activists with the Occupy Oakland movement and was co-ordinated to coincide with waves of prison hunger strikes that began at California's Pelican Bay prison in July. Demonstrators denounced the use of restrictive isolation units as infringement upon fundamental human rights. The hunger strikes followed a US supreme court ruling in May which stated that overcrowding in the California prison system had led to "needless suffering and death." The court ordered the state to reduce its overall prison population from 140,000 to 110,000, which still well-exceeds the state's maximum prison capacity.

Sarah Shourd, Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer – the American hikers who were held for over a year by Iranian authorities – took part in demonstrations outside San Quentin prison in Marin County, California. Addressing the crowd, Shourd described the psychological impact of solitary confinement, saying her 14 and a half months without human contact drove her to beat the walls of her cell until her knuckles bled. Shourd noted that Nelson Mandella described the two weeks he spent in solitary confinement as the most dehumanising experience he had ever been through.

"In Iran the first thing they do is put you in solitary," Fattal added.

Bauer said "a prisoner's greatest fear is being forgotten." He described how hunger strikes became the hikers' own "greatest weapon" in pushing their captors to heed their demands. According to Bauer, however, the most influential force for changing their quality of life while being held in Iran was the result of pressure applied by those outside the prison. It was for that fact, Bauer argued, that "this movement, this Cccupy movement, needs to permeate the prisons."

Occupy supporters are calling for a fundamental change in the US prison system, which today houses one quarter of the planet's prisoners; more than 2.4 million people. As of 2005, roughly one quarter of those held in US prisons or jails had been convicted on a drug charge. Activists point out that in the past three decades the nation's prison population has increased by more than 500%, with minorities comprising 60% of those incarcerated. The number of women locked up between 1997 and 2007 increased by 832%.

Demonstrators are broadly calling for the abolition of inhumane prison conditions, and the elimination of policies such as capital punishment, life sentences without the possibility of parole and so-called "three strikes, you're out" laws.

Some demonstrators were also demanding changes in their own specific states. Activists in Columbus, Ohio, for example, highlighted the fact that their state is second only to Texas in rates of capital punishment and planned to deliver letters to several elected officials, including governor John Kasich.

Ben Turk, an activist with Red Bird Prison abolition, noted that rising prices in prison commissaries have also been an issue with many Ohio prisoners. According to Turk, prices at the commissaries where prisoners purchase food and other amenities have risen, while the amount of money prisoners are able to make have largely remained the same.

"We work with prisoners and ask them what their grievances are," Turk said. "A lot of them talk about how commissary prices have been continually rising for the last couple of decades, while state pay remains the same."

At least 20 prisoners at Ohio State Penitentiary chose to fast for the day in solidarity with Monday's action.

In Washington DC, demonstrators protested new prisoner visitation policies that will include the installation teleconference TV screens in place of glass partition.

In New York City, Mercedes Smith, a Brooklyn mother, took the streets along with roughly 250 others who marched from the Lincoln Correctional Facility through Harlem. Smith said she and her 21 year-old son had both been personally impacted by the criminal justice system. Smith said her son had been stopped and searched by the police throughout his life and is now incarcerated.

Smith carried a sign that read "End the War On Drugs". She said that people who were addicted to drugs had a "sickness" that was "not a reason to put them in prison."

"This war is costing more money. All the money that they using to keep this war going on, they could open up more centers, more programmes to help people," Smith told the Guardian.

Michelle Alexander on The New Jim Crow and the school-to-prison pipeline

December 20, 2011 by rethinkingschoolsblog

by Jody Sokolower

Last spring I went to hear Michelle Alexander, the dynamic author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. She spoke to an overflow audience at a primarily African American church.

We were transfixed as she described how difficult it had been for her, as a civil rights attorney, to face the current realities of what is happening with prisons in this country and its impact on people of color. It was the stories of one formerly incarcerated person after another that finally broke through her long-held beliefs about the justice system. She went on to explain her thought-provoking and disturbing thesis: Mass incarceration, justified and organized around the war on drugs, has become the new face of racial discrimination in the United States.

At that point, we were in the midst of planning the winter issue of Rethinking Schools—available the first week in January—which focuses on the school-to-prison pipeline. I realized how important Michelle’s perspective is in understanding how the criminalization of youth fits into the larger social picture. So we asked her to provide a context for our readers by sharing her thoughts about the implications of her work when applied to education and the lives of children and youth. She agreed. Here is the interview:

RS: What is the impact of mass incarceration on African American children and youth?

MA: There is an extraordinary impact. For African American children, in particular, the odds are extremely high that they will have a parent or loved one, a relative, who has either spent time behind bars or who has acquired a criminal record and thus is part of the under-caste—the group of people who can be legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives. For many African American children, their fathers, and increasingly their mothers, are behind bars. It is very difficult for them to visit. Many people are held hundreds or even thousands of miles away from home. There is a tremendous amount of shame with having a parent or other family member incarcerated. There can be fear of having it revealed to others at school.

But also, for these children, their life chances are greatly diminished. They are more likely to be raised in severe poverty; their parents are unlikely to be able to find work or housing and are often ineligible even for food stamps.

For children, the era of mass incarceration has meant a tremendous amount of family separation, broken homes, poverty, and a far, far greater level of hopelessness as they see so many of their loved ones cycling in and out of prison. Children who have incarcerated parents are far more likely themselves to be incarcerated.

When young black men reach a certain age—whether or not there is incarceration in their families—they themselves are the target of police stops, interrogations, frisks, often for no reason other than their race. And, of course, this level of harassment sends a message to them, often at an early age: No matter who you are or what you do, you’re going to find yourself behind bars one way or the other. This reinforces the sense that prison is part of their destiny, rather than a choice one makes.

A Birdcage as a Metaphor

Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

RS: At one point in The New Jim Crow, you refer to the metaphor of a birdcage as a way to describe structural racism and apply that to mass incarceration. How does what is happening to African American youth in our schools fit into that picture?

MA: The idea of the metaphor is there can be many bars, wires that keep a person trapped. All of them don’t have to have been created for the purpose of harming or caging the bird, but they still serve that function. Certainly youth of color, particularly those in ghetto communities, find themselves born into the cage. They are born into a community in which the rules, laws, policies, structures of their lives virtually guarantee that they will remain trapped for life. It begins at a very early age when their parents themselves are either behind bars or locked in a permanent second-class status and cannot afford them the opportunities they otherwise could. For example, those with felony convictions are denied access to public housing, hundreds of professions that require certification, financial support for education, and often the right to vote. Thousands of people are unable even to get food stamps because they were once caught with drugs.

The cage itself is manifested by the ghetto, which is racially segregated, isolated, cut off from social and economic opportunities. The cage is the unequal educational opportunities these children are provided at a very early age coupled with the constant police surveillance they’re likely to encounter, making it very likely that they’re going to serve time and be caught for committing the various types of minor crimes—particularly drug crimes—that occur with roughly equal frequency in middle-class white communities but go largely ignored.

So, for many, whether they go to prison or not is far less about the choices they make and far more about what kind of cage they’re born into. Middle-class white children, children of privilege, are afforded the opportunity to make a lot of mistakes and still go on to college, still dream big dreams. But for kids who are born in the ghetto in the era of mass incarceration, the system is designed in such a way that it traps them, often for life.

RS: How do you define and analyze the school-to-prison pipeline?

MA: It’s really part of the large cage or caste that I was describing earlier. The school-to-prison pipeline is another metaphor—a good one for explaining how children are funneled directly from schools into prison. Instead of schools being a pipeline to opportunity, schools are feeding our prisons.

It’s important for us to understand how school discipline policies have been influenced by the war on drugs and the “get tough” movement. Many people imagine that zero tolerance rhetoric emerged within the school environment, but it’s not true. In fact, the Advancement Project published a report showing that one of the earliest examples of zero tolerance language in school discipline manuals was a cut-and-paste job from a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration manual. The wave of punitiveness that washed over the United States with the rise of the drug war and the get tough movement really flooded our schools. Schools, caught up in this maelstrom, began viewing children as criminals or suspects, rather than as young people with an enormous amount of potential struggling in their own ways and their own difficult context to make it and hopefully thrive. We began viewing the youth in schools as potential violators rather than as children needing our guidance.

The Mythology of Colorblindness

RS: In your book, you explain that the policies of mass incarceration are technically “colorblind” but lead to starkly racialized results. How do you see this specifically affecting children and young people of color?

MA: The mythology around colorblindness leads people to imagine that if poor kids of color are failing or getting locked up in large numbers, it must be something wrong with them. It leads young kids of color to look around and say: “There must be something wrong with me, there must be something wrong with us. Is there something inherent, something different about me, about us as a people, that leads us to fail so often, that leads us to live in these miserable conditions, that leads us to go in and out of prison?”

The mythology of colorblindness takes the race question off the table. It makes it difficult for people to even formulate the question: Could this be about something more than individual choices? Maybe there is something going on that’s linked to the history of race in our country and the way race is reproducing itself in modern times.

I think this mythology—that of course we’re all beyond race, of course our police officers aren’t racist, of course our politicians don’t mean any harm to people of color—this idea that we’re beyond all that (so it must be something else) makes it difficult for young people as well as the grown-ups to be able to see clearly and honestly the truth of what’s going on. It makes it difficult to see that the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement manifested itself in the form of mass incarceration, in the form of defunding and devaluing schools serving kids of color and all the rest. We have avoided in recent years talking openly and honestly about race out of fear that it will alienate and polarize. In my own view, it’s our refusal to deal openly and honestly with race that leads us to keep repeating these cycles of exclusion and division, and rebirthing a caste-like system that we claim we’ve left behind.

RS: We are in the midst of a huge attack on public education—privatization through charters and vouchers; increased standardization, regimentation, and testing; and the destruction of teachers’ unions. Much of it is justified by what appears to be anti-racist rhetoric: Schools aren’t meeting the needs of inner-city children, so their parents need choices. How do you see this?

MA: People who focus solely on what do we do given the current context are avoiding the big why. Why is it that these schools aren’t meeting these kids’ needs? Why is it that such a large percentage of the African American population today is trapped in these ghettos? What is the bigger picture?

The bigger picture is that over the last 30 years, we have spent $1 trillion waging a drug war that has failed in any meaningful way to reduce drug addiction or abuse, and yet has siphoned an enormous amount of resources away from other public services, especially education. We are in a social and political context in which the norm is to punish poor folks of color rather than to educate and empower them with economic opportunity. It is that political context that leads some people to ask: Don’t children need to be able to escape poorly performing schools? Of course, no one should be trapped in bad schools or bad neighborhoods. No one. But I think we need to be asking a larger question: How do we change the norm, the larger context that people seem to accept as a given? Are we so thoroughly resigned to what “is” that we cannot even begin a serious conversation about how to create what ought to be?

The education justice movement and the prison justice movement have been operating separately in many places as though they’re in silos. But the reality is we’re not going to provide meaningful education opportunities to poor kids, kids of color, until and unless we recognize that we’re wasting trillions of dollars on a failed criminal justice system. Kids are growing up in communities in which they see their loved ones cycling in and out of prison and in which they are sent the message in countless ways that they, too, are going to prison one way or another. We cannot build healthy, functioning schools within a context where there is no funding available because it’s going to building prisons and police forces.

RS: And fighting wars?

MA: Yes, and fighting wars. And where there is so much hopelessness because of the prevalence of mass incarceration.

At the same time, we’re foolish if we think we’re going to end mass incarceration unless we are willing to deal with the reality that huge percentages of poor people are going to remain jobless, locked out of the mainstream economy, unless and until they have a quality education that prepares them well for the new economy. There has got to be much more collaboration between the two movements and a greater appreciation for the work of the advocates in each community. It’s got to be a movement that’s about education, not incarceration—about jobs, not jails. A movement that integrates the work in these various camps from, in my view, a human rights perspective.
Fighting Back

RS: What is the role of teachers in responding to this crisis? What should we be doing in our classrooms? What should we be doing as education activists?

MA: That is a wonderful question and one I’m wrestling with myself now. I am in the process of working with others trying to develop curriculum and materials that will make it easier to talk to young people about these issues in ways that won’t lead to paralysis, fear, or resignation, but instead will enlighten and inspire action and critical thinking in the future. It’s very difficult but it must be done.

We have to be willing to take some risks. In my experience, there is a lot of hesitancy to approach these issues in the classroom out of fear that students will become emotional or angry, or that the information will reinforce their sense of futility about their own lives and experience. It’s important to teach them about the reality of the system, that it is in fact the case that they are being targeted unfairly, that the rules have been set up in a way that authorize unfair treatment of them, and how difficult it is to challenge these laws in the courts. We need to teach them how our politics have changed in recent years, how there has been, in fact, a backlash. But we need to couple that information with stories of how people in the past have challenged these kinds of injustices, and the role that youth have played historically in those struggles.

I think it’s important to encourage young people to tell their own stories and to speak openly about their own experiences with the criminal justice system and the experiences of their family. We need to ensure that the classroom environment is a supportive one so that the shame and stigma can be dispelled. Then teachers can use those stories of what students have witnessed and experienced as the opportunity to begin asking questions: How did we get here? Why is this happening? How are things different in other communities? How is this linked to what has gone on in prior periods of our nation’s history? And what, then, can we do about it?

Just providing information about how bad things are, or the statistics and data on incarceration by themselves, does lead to more depression and resignation and is not empowering. The information has to be presented in a way that’s linked to the piece about encouraging students to think critically and creatively about how they might respond to injustice, and how young people have responded to injustice in the past.

RS: What specifically?

MA: There’s a range of possibilities. I was inspired by what students have done in some schools organizing walkouts protesting the lack of funding and that sort of thing. There are opportunities for students to engage in those types of protests—taking to the streets—but there is also writing poetry, writing music, beginning to express themselves, holding forums, educating each other, the whole range. For example, for a period of time the Ella Baker Center in Oakland, Calif., was focused on youth engagement and advocacy to challenge mass incarceration. They launched a number of youth campaigns to close youth incarceration facilities in northern California. They demonstrated that it is really possible to blend hip-hop culture with very creative and specific advocacy and to develop young leaders. Young people today are very creative in using social media and there is a wide range of ways that they can get involved.

The most important thing at this stage is inspiring an awakening. There is a tremendous amount of confusion and denial that exists about mass incarceration today, and that is the biggest barrier to movement building. As long as we remain in denial about this system, movement building will be impossible. Exposing youth in classrooms to the truth about this system and developing their critical capacities will, I believe, open the door to meaningful engagement and collective, inspired action.
http://rethinkingschoolsblog.wordpress.com/2011/12/20/michelle-alexander-on-the-new-jim-crow-and-the-school-to-prison-pipeline/

Counties dilemma: how to use funds for inmates

Count dilemma: how to use funds for inmates

Marisa Lagos, Chronicle Staff Writer

Monday, December 5, 2011

In a nondescript classroom one block from the San Francisco Hall of
Justice, 10 men gathered on a recent night for a parenting class.

They went around the room, sharing the high and low points of their weeks.
One man said he was relieved that November - the anniversary of both his
brother's and father's deaths - was over. Another was excited and nervous
about an upcoming job interview. The group - many of them ex-convicts, all
of them there because of past involvement with the criminal justice system
- responded with encouragement and support.

The parenting class, run by the nonprofit Community Works and sponsored by
the San Francisco Sheriff's Department, is one of a host of programs
offered both in San Francisco's jails and in the community to help
offenders get their lives back in order. Supporters say that for someone
with a criminal history, a program can mean the difference between
rehabilitation and returning to jail.

And that's why many nonprofit community organizations around California
have been lobbying hard to be included in the pot of money counties are
receiving under the state's criminal justice realignment plan, which
includes keeping more felons at county lockups instead of shipping them to
state prisons.

But how that funding is spent varies by county. Some jurisdictions are
spending the bulk of the money on law enforcement, including the hiring of
police and probation officers, while others are choosing to invest in
nonprofits that offer substance abuse counseling, housing, job training and
other services to criminal offenders.

Experts say counties that choose to invest in services are more likely to
reduce recidivism - and thus the number of people in the state's crowded
jails and prisons.

Studies back that up. A recent report by the Pew Center on the States noted
that the "largest reductions in recidivism are realized when evidence-based
programs and practices are implemented in prisons and govern the
supervision of (offenders) in the community post-release."

One of the participants in the parenting class at the Hall of Justice, a
38-year-old former drug addict, said he is proof that these programs work.

A year ago, he was living in San Francisco County Jail after 10 years of
bouncing between sobriety, drug binges and run-ins with the law. Now, he is
working full time, getting straight
A's<http://www.sfgate.com/sports/athletics/>at City
College <http://www.sfgate.com/education-guide/> and preparing to move back
in with his girlfriend and 1-year-old son.

Last week, he graduated from the parenting class.

"I'm doing really well ... and I'm proud of myself for sticking with it,"
said Scott, who did not want his last name used because he is worried about
future employment opportunities. "A lot of people don't know about drug
addiction, the things we've been through. They think it doesn't work
because statistically, it doesn't always.

"If no one else believes in you, and you don't believe in you, one person,
saying, 'I do' - that's really all it takes."
Investing in solutions

Many Bay Area counties have embraced the idea of investing in services,
with San Francisco, Alameda and Santa Clara each allocating one-quarter to
one-third of their first year realignment budget to nonprofit providers.

"Our belief is that what's really going to help in terms of resolving
recidivism and having a higher success rate is getting folks jobs and
much-needed services," said Santa Clara Probation Chief Sheila Mitchell,
who put 25 percent of the county's $15.4 million into services. "Our
funding plan mirrors our philosophy."

Some of the state's largest counties, however, have put just a fraction of
their realignment budget into services.

One of those is San Bernardino County, which is second only to Los Angeles
County in the number of inmates it sends to state prison every year. County
leaders there chose to earmark about $300,000 of their $27.5 million budget
to faith- and community-based organizations this year, a move that angered
many advocates.

County probation Chief Michelle Scray said she believes community
organizations can make the difference between incarceration and a
productive, crime-free life for someone with a criminal history.

However, Scray noted that she must ensure the county probation department
can handle an additional 2,500 former prison inmates over the next four
years. That's in addition to the 19,000 probationers the agency already
supervises.

So when San Bernardino County came up with a plan for spending its money,
Scray and other county leaders decided to spend the lion's share on hiring
probation officers, sheriff's deputies and other law enforcement officials.

Scray said she is training probation officers to do things like teach
anger-management classes at one of the three reporting centers the county
plans to open. But she said the state needs to give additional money for
nongovernment services, which she believes are important.
Ill-equipped for influx

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and
expecting different results," she said. "California has a 67 percent
recidivism rate because we only do things from the law enforcement side and
there is no rehabilitation."

Those who run nonprofits and churches say that's exactly why counties
should be investing in their services instead of waiting for money that
will likely never materialize from the deficit-plagued state.

The Rev. Samuel Casey runs COPE, a network of African American
congregations in the Inland Empire. He said San Bernardino County is
ill-equipped to handle the thousands of men and women it will be charged
with supervising under realignment. County leaders, he said, need to
analyze where these offenders will be going, what they need and what
resources are available to them - and then, they should invest in those
services.

"Part of it is just cultural competency, being able to engage this
population. These are some of our brothers, sisters, mothers, grandfathers
and uncles coming home," he said. "Probation is not going to have the
engagement with these individuals the way everyone thinks. They will barely
see them. They barely see the ones that are on probation now."

Community leaders in Sacramento, Los Angeles and elsewhere are also angry
and frustrated by the tiny amount those jurisdictions have decided to
invest this year in community services.

Daniel Macallair, executive director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal
Justice in San Francisco, said the discrepancies between counties mirror
what was already happening in each jurisdiction prior to realignment. The
center conducts criminal justice research and provides direct services,
including a substance abuse program for adults who are released from
prison.
'Counties not prepared'

"Most counties are not prepared to meet the challenges of realignment, and
for many of them it's their own fault. They have engaged in bad practices
and policies for 30 years," he said. "The counties that will have the
hardest time are some of the Southern California and Central Valley
counties that have relied heavily on the state prison system."

Macallair said probation departments need to change the way they approach
their job and rely more on the community.

"What people don't realize is that even though we're the state of
California and we have one set of criminal laws, you have 58 counties
responsible for interpreting and applying those laws and essentially 58
different criminal justice systems," he said. "You're going to have well
functioning counties able to meet this challenge and a lot that are going
to lag behind. There's nothing uniform about this."

E-mail Marisa Lagos at mlagos@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/12/05/MNDF1M6CVP.DTL

This article appeared on page *A - 1* of the San Francisco Chronicle

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/12/05/MNDF1M6CVP.DTL&ao=2

Long Beach Community Peace and Justice Summit, October 26, 2011

LONG BEACH COMMUNITY PEACE AND JUSTICE SUMMIT

We shall address the devastating effects of the failed “War on Drugs” and the many barriers to re-entry that people confront when coming out of prison.  Speakers at the Summit will talk about the damage felt by whole communities as a result of imprisoning people at alarming rates, communities who were already underserved to begin with and in need of more services and resources.  Elected officials, policy makers, administrative leaders and government personnel will hear presentations and testimony from those directly affected by our criminal justice policies and practices.  We will share specific changes and policy reform needed for us to be treated fairly and as equals in society, including declaring the end to the broken “War on Drugs”. 

The US Supreme Court has ruled that California must release tens of thousands of non-serious, non-violent, non-sexual inmates back into their communities due to overcrowding. In so doing, AB-109 was en-acted by Governor Brown. Long Beach will experience a vast majority of these individuals coming back home, as it is a concentrated city that has incarcerated many under the “non-non-non.”

The failed “War on Drugs” and the “get tough on crime” policies created barriers for us in employment, housing, social services and family reunification.  Denying us access to basic needs such as food and shelter is inhumane and traps us at the bottom of society without the possibility to live decently, fulfill our potential and leaves us vulnerable to cycling back into prison.

In a nation that prides itself on democracy, freedom and justice for all, it is crucial that we ban together to ensure that all people are treated with respect and have the opportunity to make the most of one’s life because “nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”

We urge the public to come out and join us, as we address issues that will help curtail recidivism and create a safer community with specific results stemming from voices that speak to Peace & Justice.

Contact: Fanya Baruti @ 323-357-8431 Office 562-688-0472 Cell

Long Beach Councilman Dee Andrews 562-570-6816 Office ---Attn: Tonya Martin