FGWL #6: Critical Resistance
For decades, 2019-20 GIDEST faculty fellow Shana Agid and Critical Resistance colleagues Woods Ervin and Molly Porzig have been organizing to abolish the prison industrial complex. For FGWL #6, we invited them to reach into their archive and offer perspective gained from their work in the movement.
We suggest reading while listening to the Billy Taylor Trio's I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free.
Abolition is both a vision and a strategy. It requires, as Avery Gordon writes in The Hawthorn Archive, both “acute patience” and “urgency.” Abolitionist budget strategies pull at the columns and rows of allocations to ask bigger questions about what gets prioritized and why. Proposing people’s budgets is one tool for turning bolder demands into common sense. Current calls to defund the police have deep roots in decades of organizing—through coalition-building, humor, outrage, desire, practice, and simple proof that policing, imprisonment, surveillance, and borders do not make people safer, but that the many supports we build and sustain for well-being do.
The flyers and notices below are snapshots of twenty years of abolitionist organizing in Critical Resistance and in broad coalitions using radical budget strategies to chip away at, delegitimize, and dismantle prisons, jails, and policing in the US while developing and amplifying clear alternatives and long-term visions.
— Shana Agid, Woods Ervin, and Molly Porzig
2001-2002 - Stop Delano II
Joining Forces
Joining Forces: Environmental Justice and the Fight Against Prison Expansion (2001) brought together farmers and farm workers; activists from the civil rights and environmental movements met anti-prison organizers. Former prisoners and family members spoke with residents of prison towns. And urban residents from Los Angeles and the Bay Area met residents of the San Joaquin Valley's small towns.
Activists used the state’s decreasing prison population, multi-billion dollar budget shortfall, and the statewide opposition they had generated to try to kill Delano II.
2004 - Measure A, LA Jail Tax
"Critical Resistance Los Angeles (CRLA) chapter has fought jail expansion in Los Angeles County since 2004 through its No New Jails campaign, which evolved into the LA No More Jails Coalition in 2011. We are connected to jail fights across the state through our participation as an anchor member of Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB), a statewide coalition joining forces to reduce the number of people in California’s prisons and jails. Our demands to stop jail expansion in Los Angeles and invest in community wellbeing and life-affirming resources are rooted in demands for self-determination and health for poor and working class communities of color" (CRLA Rebel Archives, 2004-2017).
"Prison expansion is not prison reform. Moreover, advocating for gender responsive prisons fails to challenge the underlying assumption that prisons are a proper and effective institution to address women’s problems" (Rose Braz - Critical Resistance).
2007 - Plan for a Safer Oakland
"Plan for a Safer Oakland is a coalition of community members and organizations who care about the people of Oakland. We care about making our neighborhoods safer. But we know that policing, curfews, and prisons are NOT the answer to genuine safety. We believe that it is necessary to reverse Oakland’s priorities and re-invest in programs that help members of our communities succeed. To create safer neighborhoods, we have developed the following three-point plan. We ask you to join us in urging our city government to implement this plan. We know that only pressure from our community will make this plan a reality. Join us!"
"We demand: ... community centers, recreational centers, and gardens where kids and families can come together ... affordable housing and healthy jobs for people coming back from jail and prison, ... that funding go to better public hospitals and walk-in clinics, ... better mental health provision services that truly heal people in our communities and take care of people with psychiatric disabilities, ... better forms of preventing harm in our communities such as counseling, and safe spaces where people can find support. As members of the South Bronx who want to see our communities growing and coming together, we strongly oppose a new jail anywhere in New York City" (Community in Unity - statement from Critical Resistance members at La Casita, 2007).
"We oppose gang injunctions because they are ineffective, costly, and harmful to our communities.... Injunctions lead to increased police harassment and brutality, decreased community unity, increased alienation and racial profiling, and gentrification. They also divert a tremendous amount of resources from vital programs that could build strong, stable and healthy communities.... The[se] include after-school programs and youth centers, alternative ways of dealing with harm, job training and placement programs, drug and alcohol treatment, counseling services, affordable housing, and reentry support and services for people coming home from prison" (Betraying the Model City: How Gang Injunctions Fail Oakland, Critical Resistance Oakland, 2011).
"In June 2012, the LA Board of Supervisors voted to accept $100 million in AB-900 funding to help finance a women’s jail, what they are offensively calling a “Female Village.” This is the first piece of a much larger LA County Jail expansion plan…. The Revised Jails Facility Plan is projected to cost $1.5 billion.... The County plans to fund the project with $144 million in county money, $100 million in state lease revenue bond money, and $1.1 billion in debt service over 30 years. At a time of devastating budget cuts, LA County will be devastated by the cost of new jail projects.” (No More Jails in L.A. County! Stop the Women’s Jail at Pitchess Detention Center!, LA No More Jails, 2012).
"The reality is that San Francisco already has too much jail space. There are approximately 1,000 empty jail beds in county jails every single day in SF, and the jail population has been declining steadily, remaining at 62-65% of its total jail capacity for almost four years. The county has discussed “leasing” empty jail beds to other counties, states, or the federal government to fill excess cages. In essence, San Francisco not only wants to build County infrastructure that systematically disempowers, disenfranchises and kills Black, poor and homeless Californians, but is also willing to use it as a way to generate income" (The People’s Report: No New Jail in San Francisco, No New SF Jail Coalition and Critical Resistance, 2015).
2018 - Stop Urban Shield
"While the Bay Area has not experienced high level terrorist acts and has not been a target of a significant number of threats during the period in which UASI [Urban Areas Security Initiative] has been providing this funding, it has experienced significant harm from drought, wildfires, earthquakes, and similar natural disasters. ...Despite the County’s vulnerability to emergencies in which its most at risk residents would suffer greatly, Alameda County has persisted in squandering UASI resources on the Urban Shield war games and trade expo [instead of using them to shore up emergency shelter, food reserves, and health services]. Rather than take a cynical approach that prepares for disasters by instilling fear, racism, and xenophobia in local residents, the county could, even following UASI’s own logic, draw down resources from the same funding stream to address the real dangers residents face while increasing their abilities to build stronger networks to respond to whatever they may face" (Urban Shield: Abandoning Hope Not Building Hope, Stop Urban Shield Coalition, 2016).
To learn more about enacting current calls to defund police, check out the #DefundPolice toolkit produced by Interrupting Criminalization and the Movement for Black Lives.
Shana Agid is an artist/designer, teacher, writer, and activist whose work focuses on relationships of power and difference in visual and political cultures. His collaborative design practice explores possibilities for self-determined design through teaching and research. She is an Associate Professor of Arts, Media, and Communication at Parsons School of Design and a long-time member of Critical Resistance.
Woods Ervin is a black non-binary trans-femme organizer that has been organizing for over a decade in movements both for trans self-determination as well as prison industrial complex abolition. Woods has most recently worked with TGI Justice Project in the Bay Area. They currently are a member of Critical Resistance and engaged in research on the PIC at Interrupting Criminalization at Barnard. They are also an independent researcher on trans people in the labor market.
Molly Porzig is a born-and-raised Bay Area organizer and community educator. They became a member of Critical Resistance in 2006 as a transitional-aged youth and has been organizing and educating for prison industrial complex abolition ever since. Molly currently lives in San Francisco and organizes with No New SF Jail Coalition, fighting against jailing, criminalization and policing for a better, healthier, more sustainable and equitable San Francisco. Molly is also still a member of Critical Resistance, through CR's national membership network.