Past as Prologue: Storytelling about Resistance to the Brutality of Incarceration
Live transcription available at http://bit.ly/pastasprologue2020
Register here. This event will take place online from 4pm – 6pm ET on 5/8/20. Live captions will be provided. Contact bcrw@barnard.edu with any questions.
For centuries incarcerated people and others have painted a grim and gruesome picture of conditions inside prisons and jails. There have been countless reports, testimonies, exposes, and essays addressing the brutality and violence that incarcerated people are subjected to daily. Often these terrible conditions have led to uprisings and rebellions by prisoners. Attica is among the most well-known, however it is far from the only example. The reality is that incarcerated people have always and continue to resist daily and everywhere.
Too often accounts of this brutality are met by the general public with indifference or tacit support. This is to all of our shame. We need to be in solidarity with incarcerated people who deserve freedom and at least to be treated with care while locked up.
Join Survived and Punished NY and the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW) for a discussion of the current horrific conditions that incarcerated people are enduring under the COVID-19 pandemic and how they are resisting this violence. In addition, the conversation will focus on historical examples of prisoner resistance to the violent conditions of confinement.
We’ll be joined by formerly incarcerated organizers and leading thinkers about criminalization, Monica Cosby and Kathy Boudin, along with historians Toussaint Losier and Laura McTighe. Other participants to be confirmed.
How to Join
Register here to hear about how people are currently organizing to improve conditions of confinement and learn about how incarcerated people and others have done so in the past. You will receive an email with a link to the live conversation when the event starts at 4pm on Friday, 5/8.
About the Speakers
Kathy Boudin is Co-Director of the Center for Justice at Columbia University and an adjunct lecturer at the Columbia School of Social Work. She became an activist during the 1960’s and she spent 22 years in prison in New York State. She has written widely about issues related to prisons and is part of both RAPP (Release Aging People in Prison) the the National Council of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls.
Monica Cosby is a Mom and Grandma from Chicago. Monica is Co-Director of Organizing with Moms United Against Violence & Incarceration, and Community Organizer at Westside Justice Center. She is a survivor of 20 years of incarceration in Illinois prisons.
Toussaint Losier, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He is co-author of Rethinking the American Prison Movement (Routledge, 2017) with Dan Berger and preparing a book manuscript tentatively titled, War for the City: Black Liberation and the Consolidation of the Carceral State.
Laura McTighe is a long-time HIV prison activist, an Assistant Professor of Religion at Florida State University, and the Co-Founder and Associate Director of Front Porch Research Strategy in New Orleans. Through her research and teaching, she works in partnership with movement thinkers to study the enduring and often-hidden histories of struggle that fill our present. With these thinkers, she asks how we can use religion to imagine abolition and build the world otherwise. She is the co-founder of Prison Health News, TEACH Outside, and the Institute of Community Justice, and currently serves on the boards of Women With A Vision in New Orleans, Men & Women In Prison Ministries in Chicago, and Reconstruction Inc. in Philadelphia. Her writings have been published in Signs, Souls, Crosscurrents, Cultural Anthropology, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, The Revealer, and Truthout.
Image by Kate Deciccio.