Prison Town Virginia I

My Thurs. Sept 3

Leaving DC, I’m supposed to head to Richmond to meet with Lillie Branch-Kennedy, otherwise known as Ms. K. She’s mending a busted ankle, so we talk over the phone. Lillie is the indefatigable and tireless voice of Resource Information Help for the Disadvantaged (RIHD), a grassroots organization dedicated to reforming Virginia’s criminal justice system through mobilizing imprisoned people, their family members and communities.

Since the 1995 repeal of parole and tough-on-crime craze, the prison population in Virginia has skyrocketed from approximately 15,000 to some 40,000. As in so many other states, the construction of new prisons has been in rural areas far from where most people who are imprisoned come. For example, western Virginia, a longstanding coal-mining region, now hosts Wallens Ridge (shown in the image), Red Onion, Pocahontas state prisons.

Wallens Ridge and Red Onion are 8 hours drive from Richmond. When she began visiting her son @ Wallens Ridge, there were few visitors there, but soon informal carpools turned into a more formally organized transport system connecting family members with their loved ones. RIHD is also working on reforming the parole system; increasing access to education, rehabilitative, and reentry services for prisoners; and on racial sentencing disparities. “Learn, share, build” is the model Ms. K emphasizes for the power that can be built through self-help. Prisoners and their family members’ own advocacy is imperative in pushing on legislators to reform the system and curb its abuses. For example, for the petition for “earned second chance” rehabilitative & education services (Virginia SB 105), each person imprisoned was asked to collect a small number of signatures through their family and friends. This continues to be a long haul project, but the number of signatures they collected surprised legislators. RIHD tabulated the signatures by state congressional district so each legislator they spoke with would know that some of their constituents don’t want a criminal justice system that warehouses people.

As Ms. K emphasizes, places that are setting their economic stakes on prisons do so “by any means necessary.” These prisons operate in a contradictory context of incentives for maintaining themselves on the one hand (jobs and repayment of bonds for construction, e.g.) and declining crime rates and excess capacity due to speculation on the other; but then there are longer sentences and reduced parole, and now the rapid expansion of civil immigration detention. This translates to a 21st century version of convict leasing (whether as the industry of last resort or on doing their party for safety and security) to maintain a steady number of prisoners and the contract dollars they represent. This means contracting from other government agencies that have closed, shrunk, filled, or otherwise contracted out their own prison capacities. These include New Mexico, the District of Columbia, the US Marshals office, and even the island of St. Thomas, and the latest is the Department of Homeland Security, which rapidly ramped up the numbers of people locked down under George Bush II.

All of this amounts to a perfect political brew for prisoner abuse because officials can pass the buck to some other agency, and to an organizing barrier for folks to shrink their local prison/jail systems. If places that don’t want to maintain the expense of prisons ship them to lower cost locales what does this mean for organizing? And how do loved ones hold prison officials accountable when their loved ones are thousands of miles away and in entirely different political jurisdictions? [spoiler alert: Thousand Kites project has been part of some successful campaigns that intervene in prison “bed” leasing] Because family mobilization, it seems to me, has been and will continue to be so important in making prisoner abuse unacceptable and shrinking the prison systems, how does this model look when it comes to immigrant detention when families are transnational and family members may also fear detention/deportation? To what extent has transnational mobilizing been important/successful? If anyone has stories/literature on these lines, drop me a line.

Time for Asheville music.