This website includes a lot of distressing information that many of us are unaware of. These heinous realities of prisons are hidden from the public eye. The isolation of incarcerated people is not to help them in rehabilitation, rather it is an excuse prisons use to keep their violence hidden. We cannot let this information make us hopeless and complicit, we must use this information to fuel us to fight. As an ending page, I would like to propose things for us all to do. This project was an educational experience for me and I have learned about so many meaningful organizations in Alabama that I am excited to stay up to date with.
I think the two most important things I want to advocate for as next steps are: education and involvement.
Education is an essential part of unlearning the violent institutions and structures we have normalized. It helps us to learn from past struggles and to connect to a broader history of resistance to oppression. It is also helpful for social change when we feel confident enough to help educate others. This helps build community and bring people along the way.
Involvement can mean many things, but the one I think we can all do is to find the groups that organize with and in prisons. Many organizations focus on the injustice of prisons, but there is a difference between big organizations and grassroots ones. For involvement, it is more important to connect with local movements where you can make material change within your community. This also helps you know what legislation efforts incarcerated people in your area are pushing for and seeking support in.
“Who the hell set things up like this?”― June Jordan1
For Alabama this means supporting Free Alabama Movement’s Freedom Bill which proposes short-term and immediate reforms to provide life saving change to incarcerated people in Alabama.
Alabama and Southern Organizations to Keep Up with:
Alabama Bail Funds:
Education is a powerful tool and has been weaponized by oppressive powers to manipulate us. In an age of propaganda and fake news, we must do our work to listen to the voices of those who are silenced. This is at home and abroad. We have to be able to find narratives that are not coming from the white, colonial, ruling class, racist, and capitalist entities. It can be a hard journey to learn about abolition and radical politics generally when the resources are intentionally hidden. Because of this, I would like to share some helpful books and some alternative news sources. To end this website, I want to include resources to news sources that I trust for politically conscious domestic and international news.
– Assata Shakur from Assata: An Autobiography2
Abolition reading/film lists:
- To begin with here is a short and brief article explaining abolition versus reform from a abolitionst company.
- The group Free Alabama Movement has put together a reading list.
- For more resources about Abolition, check out Abolitionist Futures reading list.
- Reading can sometimes be hard and time consuming, so I would have linked like to also link the films resource list provided by Abolition Notes and For Everyone Collective.
New Sources I trust for broad news coverage:
Learn More About Indigenous Groups in Alabama:
- Alabama Indigenous Coalition
- It was extremely hard to find Indigenous organizations in Alabama to recommend for education because many of the top websites I found were governmental websites that are still beholden to colonial censorship. A website to learn where you currently are occupying is https://native-land.ca and from there you can do more indivualized research.
“To educate is a practice of freedom” (p. xiv).” 3
– bell hooks
PRISONS ARE A PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS: ALABAMA PAVES THE WAY 