Celebrating Prisons Must Fall!
Moving our visions toward reality with books, art and community celebrations.
Last month we celebrated the publication of Prisons Must Fall with friends and community at a beloved gathering space here in Chicago, the Haymarket House. This is the first children's book I have illustrated! (Stay tuned for another post about the illustration process.) Written by Mariame Kaba and Jane Ball, this inviting storyline invites our young audience to imagine what a world beyond prisons could look like. We knew we wanted to host an event to bring our community together to share this vision and the book itself.
It was a beautiful spring morning and a memory I will certainly carry with me for the long road ahead. Let me tell you about it!
While we were planning the event, we knew that we wanted the space to be relaxing, family oriented and celebratory. So many of us are operating with incredibly broken hearts, amid so much fear and uncertainty, and we know that creating spaces for us to come together, feel nourished and celebrate our abolitionist work + visions is the type of fuel that keeps us showing up.
The picnic gathering was full of hands on kids activities including; a coloring table with images from the book, a ribbon wand making station mimicking details from my illustrations, free seeds from my World We Want Seeds project, seed planting, food, chalk art, bubbles and tables for our co-sponsor organizations Love and Protect, No New Prisons IL and Chicago Torture Justice Memorial Foundation to talk about their work. Folks mingled, played with kids, ate food together, sent cards to loved ones on the inside and postcards to Illinois leadership demanding no more money for punishment.
For the book reading I asked my dear friend Jennifer Viets if she would feel comfortable leading. She did such a fantastic job and this was certainly my favorite part of the event! Jenny has a background in circle keeping, transformative justice AND youth arts programming (and happens to be one of my co-gardeners). She brought instruments, scarves and other small items for kids to hold and led us in an incredibly lively reading that included a slide whistle, sign language and chanting. At the end, I lead a march around the garden with our ribbons and instruments singing “1,2,3,4 Lets fling open every cell door! 5,6,7,8 Our people's freedom cannot wait!”
I know we are in fact far off from living in a world where prisons are obsolete, where we have the resources to care for each other and the tools to address harm without the carceral system, and if anything it has been feeling further and further away as the US moves deeper into fascist authoritarianism. But there was something about this morning that opened my heart back up to what is possible and why we are here. There is something transformative about imagining something, making art about it, and then living it, that makes the work of social change feel more tangible.
Marching with those kids and families alongside organizations that are reaching through the bars to connect with our incarcerated loved ones or organizing to ensure that our state's money is not directed toward building/enhancing more prisons had me feeling like this vision is, in many ways, is a reality. Certainly not in the mainstream or dominant culture but here in our beloved community of abolitionists demanding we turn towards each other, find new paths toward repair and tear prisons down. We will do this work while dancing, marching and celebrating together.
Marimame Kaba and Jane Ball live out of state. We were sad not to have them there!! But I want to thank Dana and the whole Haymarket team for their work pulling this event together. The Haymarket House is a wonderful community space. I’m so grateful it exists and you can support their work HERE!
Also huge gratitude to Sarah-Ji from Love and Struggle Photos for capturing so many great pictures from the event!
New to Prison Abolition?
If you are reading this and are new to Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) Abolition, HERE is a helpful short synopsis from Critical Resistance.
“Abolition isn’t just about getting rid of buildings full of cages. It’s also about undoing the society we live in because the PIC both feeds on and maintains oppression and inequalities through punishment, violence, and controls millions of people. Because the PIC is not an isolated system, abolition is a broad strategy. An abolitionist vision means that we must build models today that can represent how we want to live in the future.”
I also love this quote from abolitionist teacher Ruth Wilson Gilmore;
“Abolition is about presence, not absence. It’s about building life-affirming institutions."
For me, being a Prison Abolitionist means I believe in, and am committed to building a world where we do not throw each other away when we do something wrong. Where we do not see each other as disposable and our social infrastructure affirm that. (Yes, transitioning out of a capitalist economic system is imperative here.) This means that the core of our societies are built around taking care of each other by providing housing, healthcare, education and other resources that allow us to grow and live safely. Abolition is about addressing the root causes of harm instead of trying to solve complex social issues with control, punishment, family separation, armed force and sometimes death. We cannot solve harm by causing more harm. It does not help. It does not teach.
“Instead of trying to fix what we have, abolition invites us to ask; “What can we imagine for ourselves and the world?” If we do this, boundless possibilities of a more just world await us.” ~Mariame Kaba
Connecting PIC Abolition to the Movements for Palestinian Liberation, Immigration Justice and the Rise of Authoritarianism
As our community members get snatched off our streets by masked state agents, locked away from their families, or sent to prison camps in foreign countries, as brave students are punished, criminalized and locked up for protesting genocide, it is clear that the world building work of abolitionist movements only continues to grow in importance.
Here are a few good articles linking Prison Industrial Complex Abolition to Immigration Justice movement, the Movement to Free Palestine and growing authoritarianism.
The Growth of America's Carceral State by Scot Nakagawa
When Abolitionists Say “Free Them All,” We Mean Palestine Too by Nadine Naber
Trump’s First 100 Days Show Immigrant Jails Are Authoritarian Testing Grounds by Silky Shah
Did the US’s Descent Into Authoritarianism Start With Policing in Blue Cities? by By Stephen Janis & Taya Graham
Lastly!! Next week I will be in conversation with Maya Schenwar and Keisa Reynolds at Three Avenues Books about Abolition, Care Giving and how we as artists and writers are bringing our skills to this world building movement.
Rooting & Resisting,
Olly