Photo credit: Chisa Hughes
Curated by the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP)
This political education resource was first circulated online on March 20, 2020. It was last updated on April 19, 2020.
CCWP is a grassroots social justice organization, with members inside and outside prison, that challenges the institutional violence imposed on women, transgender people, and communities of color by the prison industrial complex (PIC). We see the struggle for racial and gender justice as central to dismantling the PIC and we prioritize the leadership of the people, families, and communities most impacted in building this movement.
Founded in 1995, CCWP grew out of the fight for the health of incarcerated people in California’s women’s prisons. A documentary about CCWP co-founder, Charisse Shumate, is available to watch free online. Charisse was a life term prisoner incarcerated for 16 years at the Central California Women’s Facility. She became a lead plaintiff and spokesperson in a class action lawsuit challenging the medical neglect and abuse of women prisoners (Shumate v. Wilson). She died of complications from sickle cell anemia, cancer, and hepatitis C.
All of the following recommended readings are available online and free to access. In addition, you can find more than twenty years of writing across prison walls on issues of medical neglect, abuse, and violence in the online archive of CCWP’s inside/outside newsletter, The Fire Inside.
COVID-19 Inside Jails and Prisons
The coronavirus pandemic poses particular dangers to incarcerated people:
- Victoria Law, “As Coronavirus Spreads Through Prisons, States Are Failing Incarcerated People” (Truthout)
- Keri Blakinger, “What Happens When More Than 300,000 Prisoners Are Locked Down?” (The Marshall Project)
- “‘Leaving Us in Here to Die’: Prisoners Plea for Release, Protection Amid Skyrocketing Infections” (Democracy Now)
- Madison Pauly, “‘The Officers Were Taking Our Toilet Paper’: One Woman’s Life in Prison Right Now” (Mother Jones)
- Martha Hurley, “Why Prisoners Are At Higher Risk for Coronavirus: 5 Questions Answered” (The Conversation)
Strategies for Fighting COVID-19 Behind the Walls
One of the most effective ways to protect incarcerated people during this crisis is to reduce the size of prison and jail populations. Some states have already taken steps to, for example, move up release dates and limit the number of jail bookings. Organizers, policymakers, and researchers are advocating a wide range of decarceration strategies and other measures to protect incarcerated people who are especially vulnerable:
- Letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom about COVID-19 in California Prisons and Followup Letter
- Critical Resistance, “Abolitionist Steps to Combat COVID-19 Behind Bars” (Portside)
- Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic (Prison Policy Initiative)
- COVID-19 (Coronavirus) Response & Resources (The Justice Collaborative)
- #FlattenICE COVID-19 Call-In Action Guide (Asian Prisoner Support Committee)
Aging in Prison
Incarcerated people aged 50 years and older are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19. Roughly 30% of people incarcerated in California are serving life sentences, and approximately 5,200 people are serving Life Without the Possibility of Parole (LWOP). Organizers, inside and outside, have illuminated the public health crisis of extreme sentencing and have advocated for elder parole, compassionate release, and the end of the LWOP sentence:
- Victoria Law, “Aging, Sick, and Incarcerated: The Need for Compassionate Release” (Truthout)
- Vaidya Gullapalli, The Costs of Not Releasing People from Prison (The Appeal)
- Amber Rose Howard, “Gov. Newsom’s Executive Order Halts Death Penalty. Now Let’s Drop LWOP!” (San Francisco Bayview)
- Jean Trounstine, “Fighting to End the Other Death Sentence” (Truthout)
- Cassie Chew, “Aging in Prison: The Forgotten Plight of Women Behind Bars” (Crime Report)
The Everyday Crisis of Prison Healthcare
The danger of this pandemic to incarcerated people is exacerbated by long standing failures of prisons, jails, and ICE detention to provide adequate healthcare to those incarcerated:
- Corizon: A Curated Collection of Links (The Marshall Project)
- Hillel Aron, “Why Are So Many Inmates Attempting Suicide at the California Institution for Women?” (LA Weekly)
- Victoria Law, “Behind Bars, Co-Pays Are a Barrier to Basic Healthcare” (Truthout)
- Julia Conley, “’Unconscionable’: Asylum-Seekers In Texas Detention Center Report Being Denied Cancer and Mental Health Treatment” (Common Dreams)
- Lisa Hoffman-Kuroda, “Prison Abolition is a Key Component of Reproductive Freedom” (Wear Your Voice)
And incarcerated people and their allies have long made medical neglect, abuse, and violence a focus of their organizing efforts:
- “How Trans Inmates Are Getting Each Other Access to Treatment Inside” (Vice)
- California Coalition for Women Prisoners, “Suicide Crisis in California Women’s Prison” (San Francisco Bayview)
- Esther Kaplan, “Organizing Inside” (POZ)
- Nuala Sawyer Bishari, “California Prisoners Freed from Medical, Dental Copays By Bill” (SF Weekly)
- “It’s Past Time to Compensate Survivors of Eugenic Sterilization” (Center for Genetics and Society)
Post-Incarceration
It’s vital that people released from prison are supported in their homecoming process:
- Karina Piser, “Out of Prison With Nowhere Safe to Go” (New Republic)
- “Melenie Eleneke Grassroots Re-Entry Program” (TGI Justice Project)
- Marisa Endicot, “A Radical Approach to Helping Former Prisoners Start Over: Let Them Into Your Home” (Mother Jones)
- “Amika Mota Fought Fires as a Prisoner for 53 Cents Per Hour. Now Free, She Can’t Work as a Firefighter” (Democracy Now!)
- Linda Evans, Ban the Box in Employment: A Grassroots History (All of Us or None)
Prison Industrial Complex Abolition
Our work toward decarceration is based on a framework of prison industrial complex abolition: “a political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment” (Critical Resistance).
- Ruth Wilson Gilmore and James Kilgore, The Case for Abolition (The Marshall Project)
- Towards the Horizon of Abolition: A Conversation with Mariame Kaba (Next Step Project)
- Dan Berger, Mariame Kaba, and David Stein, What Abolitionists Do (Jacobin)
- Kim Kelly, What the Prison-Abolition Movement Wants (Teen Vogue)
- Rachel Herzing, “Big Dreams and Bold Steps Toward a Police-Free Future” (Truthout)
Looking for even more reading recommendations?
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