“An injury to one is the concern of all.” The events of 1886 – powerful displays of solidarity and mass strikes for an eight-hour work day followed by absolute abuses of state power in executing innocent labor organizers – continue to inspire workers to demand fair, just workplaces & laws.
Plantations Were Prisons: Mobilizing for the Aug. 19 Prisoners Human Rights March (tags)
Law Professor Angela A. Allen-Bell confronts the history and legacy of slavery head-on, asserting: "When it comes to African Americans, we have been incarcerated from the time we arrived in this country. Plantations were prisons. The change from incarceration on a plantation, to incarceration in custodial institutions, to incarceration where there are no physical limitations, but where one exists in a state of civic and political oppression, in my view, is nothing more than semantics. Mass incarceration started when slavery started."
ALL OUT ON MAY 1st in LA, FIGHT FOR IMMIGRANT RIGHTS (tags)
Immigrants all of nationalities under attack, what should we do? Rise up, Fight Back! The Echo Park Community Coalition (EPCC) is calling all immigrants and their advocates in Los Angeles to mobilize and hit the streets of LA on May 1. For the EPCC --May 1, International Workers' Day, marks the fifth anniversary of the historic nationwide immigrant workers’ strike. On that day, millions upon millions of immigrant workers—documented and undocumented—flooded the streets of Los Angeles with millions of their supporters also in small towns and large cities demanding respect for all workers.
Abolishing the Prison Industrial Complex --An interview with Criminal Injustice Kos (tags)
Focusing on the prison abolitionist movement, we interview two co-editors of an exciting new series at Daily Kos, called Criminal InJustice Kos, a weekly series "devoted to exploring the myths of 'crime', 'criminals', and criminal justice and the intersection of race/ethnicity/class/gender/sexuality/age/disability in policing and punishment. Criminal Injustice Kos is committed to furthering action towards reducing inequity in the US criminal justice system." Look for Criminal InJustice Kos every Wednesday at 6 pm CST.
Visiting A Modern Day Slave Plantation --An Interview With Nancy A. Heitzeg (tags)
My interest in Angola is as both a paradigm of the Southern transformation of plantations into prisons and as a prototype for what we now call the prison industrial complex. Many old plantations in the South became prisons after the Civil War. Angela Y. Davis traces the initial rise of the penitentiary system to the abolition of slavery, writing: “in the immediate aftermath of slavery, the southern states hastened to develop a criminal justice system that could legally restrict the possibilities of freedom for the newly released slaves.”
The Roots of the PIC in American History (tags)
by Daniel Horowitz de Garcia, Walda Katz-Fishman, Clark McKnight, explores the roots of the Prison Industrial Complex back to slavery.