The Sulha Peace Project

A little hope in times of terror?

Hello friends and supporters,

We are mourning the loss of lives and are praying for the safety of our friends who are in danger in both Gaza and southern Israel. We pray that both peoples come to true compassion and forgiveness toward the other.

With the only news coming from the from the Holy Land being about the war, we send some news of another picture from the Holy Land. Though we Palestinians and Israelis who work together for peace are being tested more than ever, the relationships we have built stay strong. The Sulha Peace Project continues to aspire to create a new reality and prepare the people in the region for a life of mutual respect and trust.

Not long ago, over three days last August 26-28, thousands of Israelis and Palestinians met for the seventh annual 'On the Way to Sulha' gathering on the grounds of the Latrun monastery between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The Sulha Peace Project worked in full partnership with the Palestinian organization, Al-Tariq, to plan the event. Israelis and Palestinans came from all over the Holy Land, and including 200 Palestinians from the West Bank cities of Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah and Hebron. Our partners in Gaza who have been with us at previous events sent messages of blessing and support from the people of Gaza.

Daily activities included:
- listening circles that brought Israelis and Palestinians together to share with and listen to each others stories.
- the Bereaved Families Forum, with bereaved Israelis and Palestinians sharing their stories and leading discussions
- a children's tent for Israeli and Palestinian children to play and make art together
- workshops in culture and music
- special events each day, such as the men's and women's dialogue circles
- a traditional Bedouin tent, set us to be a space where Arab and Jewish musicians could jam and make music together
- the inter-religious prayer tent with religious Jews praying dialy prayers, followed by religious Muslims praying in same tent
- the Sulhita program, Sulha youth movement worked together where Israeli and Palestinian teenagerson the final evening performance.

The Kitchen, made fully kosher brought Israeli and Palestinian volunteers together to chop vegetables and cook side by side to feed hundreds of peace each meal.

Our special guest was Rabbi Marc Gopin, director of the Center for World's Religions, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University. Rabbi Gopin spoke about his work in Syria for building bridges of dialogue. We had a special corner set up at the Sulha gathering for children and adults to write messages of peace that were then delivered by Gopin to the people of Syria. As Marc Gopin is now in the Holy Land, visit his website for his insightful commentary and postcast about the present war in Gaza and south Israel:

http://www.marcgopin.com/

In the prayer tent, we held inter-religious study sessions, with panels on the themes of 'Forgiveness' and 'Religion and Ecology'.

In addition to Christian, Muslim and Jewish religious leaders and scholars from the Holy Land, joining us were Geshe-la Thebten Phelgye a Tibetan lama and member of the Tibetan Parliament, Sheikha Khadija, teacher of Sufism from New York and Rabbi Marc Gopin. On the main stage the final day religious leaders spoke about Sulha, reconciiation, in our religious texts and traditions.

Each evening there were highlights. Sheikh Abu Falastin from Sakhnin led hundreds of us in a Sufi 'zikr' ceremony together, after which Rabbi Menachem Froman led us to chant in unison, calling out Allahu Akbar in Arabic and HaShalom Yinatzeach (Peace will Prevail) in Hebrew.
Later, there was a magical performance by "Acharit Hayamim"- an Israeli religious Jewish reggae band, who performed with an ensemble of refugees from the Darfur region in Sudan. On the final evening, Sheikh Abdul Qarim al-Zorba, Imam of the Dome of the Rock chanted songs from the Islamic tradition.

The 'Sulha Family', Israelis and Palestinians continue to meet, planning events events to heal the wounds and re-build trust between our peoples. After the riots in Acco between Arabs and Jews last Yom Kippur, we organized a peace tent there, with two days of bridge building activities. The 'Sulha Family' met recently, gathering for Shabbat in Jerusalem to support each other during this time. Israeli 'Sulha Family' members are meeting with friends from Palestinian partner organization Al-Tariq. The Sulha Peace Project is joining Middle Way for a peace walk in Jaffa January 9th and setting up a dialogue tent in Jaffa.

Please send a prayer of healing for the children of a Gazan peacemaker who has brought his family to several of our Sulhita youth gatherings. His son and daughter have been seriously wounded in the violence in Gaza.

View this link to see great pictures from the 'On the Way to Sulha' gathering last August, and from the Acco peace tent:

http://flickr.com/photos/jerusalem_peacemakers/sets/72157611868341584/

The Sulha Peace Project is in a deep financial crisis. With the global recession, donations have stopped almost completely. We need your support to continue this important work. Please make a donation small or large to the Sulha Peace Project.

For details about how you can offer a donation, please visit this link:

http://sites.google.com/site/sulhapeaceproject/

Shalom, Salaam,
Eliyahu McLean,
Sulha Peace Project, interfaith coordinator

Jerusalem Peacemakers, co-director

with
Gabriel Meyer, co-founding director, and Ihab Balha, Muslim co-director of the Sulha Peace Project

Some wisdom from the Boyarin brothers

"The solution of Zionism-that is, Jewish state hegemony, except insofar as it represented an emergency and temporary rescue operation- seems to us the subversion of Jewish culture and not its culmination. It represents the substitution of a European, Western cultural-political formation for a traditional Jewish one that has been based on a sharing, at best, of political power with others and that takes on entirely other meanings when combined with political hegemony.
"Let us begin with two concrete examples. Jewish resistance to assimilation and annihilation within conditions of Diaspora, to which we will return below, generated such practices as communal charity in the areas of education, feeding, providing for the sick, and the caring for Jewish prisoners, to the virtual exclusion of others. While this meant at least that those others were not subjected to attempts to Judaize them-that is, they were tolerated, and not only by default of lack of Jewish power-it also meant that Jewish resources were not devoted to the welfare of humanity at large but only to one family. Within Israel, where power is concentrated almost exclusively in Jewish hands, this discursive practice has become a monstrosity whereby an egregiously disproportionate measure of the resources of the state is devoted to the welfare of only one segment of the population. A further and somewhat more subtle and symbolic example is the following. That very practice mentioned above, the symbolic expression of contempt for places of worship of others, becomes darkly ominous when it is combined with temporal power and domination-that is, when Jews have power over places of worship belonging to others. It is this factor that has allowed the Israelis to turn the central Mosque of Beersheba into a museum of the Negev and to let the Muslim cemetery of that city to fall into ruins.33 Insistence on ethnic speciality, when it is extended over a particular piece of land, will inevitably produce a discourse not unlike the Inquisition in many of its effects."

"The inequities-and worse-in Israeli political, economic, and social practice are not aberrations but inevitable consequences of the inappropriate application of a form of discourse from one historical situation to another.
"For those of us who are equally committed to social justice and collective Jewish existence, some other formation must be constituted. We suggest that an Israel that reimports diasporic consciousness-a consciousness of a Jewish collective as one sharing space with others, devoid of exclusivist and dominating power-is the only Israel that could answer Paul's, Lyotard's, and Nancy's call for a species-wide care without eradicating cultural difference.35 Reversing A. B. Yehoshua's famous pronouncement that only in a condition of political hegemony is moral responsibility mobilized, we would argue that the only moral path would be the renunciation of Jewish hegemony qua Jewish hegemony.36 This would involve first of all complete separation of religion from state, but even more than that the revocation of the Law of Return and such cul- tural, discursive practices that code the state as a Jewish state and not a multinational and multicultural one. The dream of a place that is ours founders on the rock of realization that there are Others there just as there are Others in Poland, Morocco, and Ethiopia. Any notion, then, of redemption through Land must either be infinitely deferred (as the Neturei Karta understands so well) or become a moral monster. Either Israel must entirely divest itself of the language of race and become truly a state that is equally for all of its citizens and collectives or the Jews must divest themselves of their claim to space. Race and space together form a deadly discourse. Genealogy and territorialism have been the problematic and necessary (if not essential) terms around which Jewish identity has revolved. In Jewish history, however, these terms are more obviously at odds with each other than in synergy. This allows a formulation ofJewish identity not as a proud resting place (hence not as a form of integrism or nativism) but as a perpetual, creative, diasporic tension. In the final section of this paper, then, we would like to begin to articulate a notion of Jewish identity that recuperates its genealogical moment-family, history, memory, and practice-while it problematizes claims to autochthony and indigenousness as the material base of Jewish identity."

"We want to propose a privileging of Diaspora, a dissociation of ethnicities and political hegemonies as the only social structure that even begins to make possible a maintenance of cultural identity in a world grown thoroughly and inextricably interdependent. Indeed, we would suggest that Diaspora, and not monotheism, may be the most important contribution that Judaism has to make to the world, although we would not deny the positive role that monotheism has played in making Diaspora possible.50 Assimilating the lesson of Diaspora, namely that peoples and lands are not naturally and organically connected, could help prevent bloodshed such as that occurring in Eastern Europe today." - and elsewhere.

Senator Webb speaks about Prison Reform

January 1, 2009

Editorial

Sen. Webb’s Call for Prison Reform

This country puts too many people behind bars for too long. Most elected officials, afraid of being tarred as soft on crime, ignore these problems. Sen. Jim Webb, a Democrat of Virginia, is now courageously stepping into the void, calling for a national commission to re-assess criminal justice policy. Other members of Congress should show the same courage and rally to the cause.

The United States has the world’s highest reported incarceration rate. Although it has less than 5 percent of the world’s population, it has almost one-quarter of the world’s prisoners. And for the first time in history, more than 1 in 100 American adults are behind bars.

Many inmates are serving long sentences for nonviolent crimes, including minor drug offenses. It also is extraordinarily expensive. Billions of dollars now being spent on prisons each year could be used in far more socially productive ways.

Senator Webb — a former Marine and secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration — is in many ways an unlikely person to champion criminal justice reform. But his background makes him an especially effective advocate for a cause that has often been associated with liberals and academics.

In his two years in the Senate, Mr. Webb has held hearings on the cost of mass incarceration and on the criminal justice system’s response to the problems of illegal drugs. He also has called attention to the challenges of prisoner re-entry and of the need to provide released inmates, who have paid their debts to society, more help getting jobs and resuming productive lives.

Mr. Webb says he intends to introduce legislation to create a national commission to investigate these issues. With Barack Obama in the White House, and strong Democratic majorities in Congress, the political climate should be more favorable than it has been in years. And the economic downturn should make both federal and state lawmakers receptive to the idea of reforming a prison system that is as wasteful as it is inhumane.
Originally from the New York Times - here

On Gaza

By Richard Falk
United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian
Territories and Professor Emeritus of International Law, Princeton
University

For eighteen months the entire 1.5 million people of Gaza experienced a
punishing blockade imposed by Israel, and a variety of traumatizing
challenges to the normalcy of daily life. A flicker of hope emerged some
six months ago when an Egyptian arranged truce produced an effective
ceasefire that cut Israeli casualties to zero despite the cross-border
periodic firing of homemade rockets that fell harmlessly on nearby Israeli
territory, and undoubtedly caused anxiety in the border town of Sderot.
During the ceasefire the Hamas leadership in Gaza repeatedly offered to
extend the truce, even proposing a ten-year period and claimed a
receptivity to a political solution based on acceptance of Israel's 1967
borders. Israel ignored these diplomatic initiatives, and failed to carry
out its side of the ceasefire agreement that involved some easing of the
blockade that had been restricting the entry to Gaza of food, medicine,
and fuel to a trickle.

Israel also refused exit permits to students with foreign fellowship
awards and to Gazan journalists and respected NGO representatives. At the
same time, it made it increasingly difficult for journalists to enter, and
I was myself expelled from Israel a couple of weeks ago when I tried to
enter to carry out my UN job of monitoring respect for human rights in
occupied Palestine, that is, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well
as Gaza. Clearly, prior to the current crisis, Israel used its authority
to prevent credible observers from giving accurate and truthful accounts
of the dire humanitarian situation that had been already documented as
producing severe declines in the physical condition and mental health of
the Gazan population, especially noting malnutrition among children and
the absence of treatment facilities for those suffering from a variety of
diseases. The Israeli attacks were directed against a society already in
grave condition after a blockade maintained during the prior 18 months.

As always in relation to the underlying conflict, some facts bearing on
this latest crisis are murky and contested, although the American public
in particular gets 99% of its information filtered through an exceedingly
pro-Israeli media lens. Hamas is blamed for the breakdown of the truce by
its supposed unwillingness to renew it, and by the alleged increased
incidence of rocket attacks. But the reality is more clouded. There was no
substantial rocket fire from Gaza during the ceasefire until Israel
launched an attack last November 4th directed at what it claimed were
Palestinian militants in Gaza, killing several Palestinians. It was at
this point that rocket fire from Gaza intensified. Also, it was Hamas that
on numerous public occasions called for extending the truce, with its
calls never acknowledged, much less acted upon, by Israeli officialdom.
Beyond this, attributing all the rockets to Hamas is not convincing
either. A variety of independent militia groups operate in Gaza, some such
as the Fatah-backed al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade are anti-Hamas, and may even
be sending rockets to provoke or justify Israeli retaliation. It is well
confirmed that when US-supported Fatah controlled Gaza's governing
structure it was unable to stop rocket attacks despite a concerted effort
to do so.

What this background suggests strongly is that Israel launched its
devastating attacks, starting on December 27, not simply to stop the
rockets or in retaliation, but also for a series of unacknowledged
reasons. It was evident for several weeks prior to the Israeli attacks
that the Israeli military and political leaders were preparing the public
for large-scale military operations against the Hamas. The timing of the
attacks seemed prompted by a series of considerations: most of all, the
interest of political contenders, the Defense Minister Ehud Barak and the
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, in demonstrating their toughness prior to
national elections scheduled for February, but now possibly postponed
until military operations cease. Such Israeli shows of force have been a
feature of past Israeli election campaigns, and on this occasion
especially, the current government was being successfully challenged by
Israel's notoriously militarist politician, Benjamin Netanyahu, for its
supposed failures to uphold security. Reinforcing these electoral
motivations was the little concealed pressure from the Israeli military
commanders to seize the opportunity in Gaza to erase the memories of their
failure to destroy Hezbollah in the devastating Lebanon War of 2006 that
both tarnished Israel's reputation as a military power and led to
widespread international condemnation of Israel for the heavy bombardment
of undefended Lebanese villages, disproportionate force, and extensive use
of cluster bombs against heavily populated areas.

Respected and conservative Israeli commentators go further. For instance,
the prominent historian, Benny Morris writing in the New York Times a few
days ago, relates the campaign in Gaza to a deeper set of forebodings in
Israel that he compares to the dark mood of the public that preceded the
1967 War when Israelis felt deeply threatened by Arab mobilizations on
their borders. Morris insists that despite Israeli prosperity of recent
years, and relative security, several factors have led Israel to act
boldly in Gaza: the perceived continuing refusal of the Arab world to
accept the existence of Israel as an established reality; the inflammatory
threats voiced by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad together with Iran's supposed push
to acquire nuclear weapons, the fading memory of the Holocaust combined
with growing sympathy in the West with the Palestinian plight, and the
radicalization of political movements on Israel's borders in the form of
Hezbollah and Hamas. In effect, Morris argues that Israel is trying via
the crushing of Hamas in Gaza to send a wider message to the region that
it will stop at nothing to uphold its claims of sovereignty and security.

There are two conclusions that emerge: the people of Gaza are being
severely victimized for reasons remote from the rockets and border
security concerns, but seemingly to improve election prospects of current
leaders now facing defeat, and to warn others in the region that Israel
will use overwhelming force whenever its interests are at stake.

That such a human catastrophe can happen with minimal outside interference
also shows the weakness of international law and the United Nations, as
well as the geopolitical priorities of the important players. The passive
support of the United States government for whatever Israel does is again
the critical factor, as it was in 2006 when it launched its aggressive war
against Lebanon. What is less evident is that the main Arab neighbors,
Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, with their extreme hostility toward Hamas
that is viewed as backed by Iran, their main regional rival, were also
willing to stand aside while Gaza was being so brutally attacked, with
some Arab diplomats even blaming the attacks on Palestinian disunity or on
the refusal of Hamas to accept the leadership of Mamoud Abbas, President
of the Palestinian Authority.

The people of Gaza are victims of geopolitics at its inhumane worst:
producing what Israel itself calls a 'total war' against an essentially
defenseless society that lacks any defensive military capability
whatsoever and is completely vulnerable to Israeli attacks mounted by F-16
bombers and Apache helicopters. What this also means is that the flagrant
violation of international humanitarian law, as set forth in the Geneva
Conventions, is quietly set aside while the carnage continues and the
bodies pile up. It additionally means that the UN is once more revealed to
be impotent when its main members deprive it of the political will to
protect a people subject to unlawful uses of force on a large scale.
Finally, this means that the public can shriek and march all over the
world, but that the killing will go on as if nothing is happening. The
picture being painted day by day in Gaza is one that begs for renewed
commitment to international law and the authority of the UN Charter,
starting here in the United States, especially with a new leadership that
promised its citizens change, including a less militarist approach to
diplomatic leadership.

Mumia update

From Philly IMC

On Friday, Dec. 19, 2008, death-row journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal filed his appeal to the US Supreme Court, asking it to consider his case for a new guilt-phase trial. One month before, the Philadelphia DA filed its separate appeal to the court asking to have Abu-Jamal executed without a new sentencing-phase trial. Both are appealing the March 27, 2008 rulings by the US Third Circuit Court.

For more links, videos, photos, etc. go here or go to Abu-Jamal News

In this holiday season of thanks and light, let us remember everyone who is incarcerated and everyone whose loved ones are locked up.

Angela Davis ... oh Angela Davis

An interview with and biopic on Angela Davis by Avi Lewis on InsideUSA, a new program on AlJazeera English - it is really amazing. See part one here and part two here. In the interview, Davis talks about institutional memory, the mythology of post-racialism, the media's inability to talk about race, privatization trends across the country, and of course, abolition. As always, she speaks such truth.
Still can't believe I got to hear her speak in person...

Here is an old conversation between her and Dylan Rodriguez from History is a Weapon:

The Challenge of Prison Abolition: A Conversation

Dylan: Your emergence as a radical prison activist was deeply influenced by your experience as a prisoner. Could you talk a bit about how imprisonment affected your political formation, and the impact that it had on your eventual identification as prison abolitionists?

Angela: The time I spent in jail was both an outcome of my work on prison issues and a profound influence on my subsequent trajectory as a prison activist. When I was arrested in the summer of 1970 in connection with my involvement in the campaign to free George Jackson and the Soledad Brothers, I was one of many activists who had been previously active in defense movements. In editing the anthology, If They Come in the Morning (1971) while I was in jail, Bettina Aptheker and I attempted to draw upon the organizing and legal experiences associated with a vast number of contemporary campaigns to free political prisoners. The most important lessons emanating from those campaigns, we thought, demonstrated the need to examine the overall role of the prison system, especially its class and racial character. There was a relationship, as George Jackson had insisted, between the rising numbers of political prisoners and the imprisonment of increasing numbers of poor people of color. If prison was the state-sanctioned destination for activists such as myself, it was also used as a surrogate solution to social problems associated with poverty and racism. Although imprisonment was equated with rehabilitation in the dominant discourse at that time, it was obvious to us that its primary purpose was repression. Along with other radical activists of that era, we thus began to explore what it might mean to combine our call for the freedom of political prisoners with an embryonic call for the abolition of prisons. Of course we had not yet thought through all of the implications of such a position, but today it seems that what was viewed at that time as political naivete, the untheorized and utopian impulses of young people trying to be revolutionary, foreshadowed what was to become, at the turn of the century, the important project of critically examining the political economy of a prison system, whose unrestrained growth urgently needs to be reversed.

Dylan: What interests me is the manner in which your trial -- and the rather widespread social movement that enveloped it, along with other political trials -- enabled a wide variety of activists to articulate a radical critique of U.S. jurisprudence and imprisonment. The strategic framing of yours and others' individual political biographies within a broader set of social and historical forces -- state violence, racism, white supremacy, patriarchy, the growth and transformation of U.S. capitalism -- disrupted the logic of the criminal justice apparatus in a fundamental way. Turning attention away from conventional notions of "crime" as isolated, individual instances of misbehavior necessitated a basic questioning of the conditions that cast "criminality" as a convenient political rationale for the warehousing of large numbers of poor, disenfranchised, and displaced black people and other people of color. Many activists are now referring to imprisonment as a new form of slavery, refocusing attention on the historical function of the 13th Amendment in reconstructing enslavement as a punishment reserved for those "duly convicted." Yet, when we look more closely at the emergence of the prison-industrial complex, the language of enslavement fails to the extent that it relies on the category of forced labor as its basic premise. People frequently forget that the majority of imprisoned people are not workers, and that work is itself made available only as a "privilege" for the most favored prisoners. The logic of the prison-industrial complex is closer to what you, George Jackson, and others were forecasting back then as mass containment, the effective elimination of large numbers of (poor, black) people from the realm of civil society. Yet, the current social impact of the prison-industrial complex must have been virtually unfathomable 30 years ago. One could make the argument that the growth of this massive structure has met or exceeded the most ominous forecasts of people who, at that time, could barely have imagined that at the turn of the century two million people would be encased in a prison regime that is far more sophisticated and repressive than it was at the onset of Nixon's presidency, when about 150,000 people were imprisoned nationally in decrepit, overcrowded buildings. So in a sense, your response to the first question echoes the essential truth of what was being dismissed, in your words, as the paranoid "political naivete" of young radical activists in the early 1970s. I think we might even consider the formation of prison abolitionism as a logical response to this new human warehousing strategy. In this vein, could you give a basic summary of the fundamental principles underlying the contemporary prison abolitionist movement?

Angela: First of all, I must say that I would hesitate to characterize the contemporary prison abolition movement as a homogeneous and united international effort to displace the institution of the prison. For example, the International Conference on Penal Abolition (ICOPA), which periodically brings scholars and activists together from Europe, South America, Australia, Africa, and North America, reveals the varied nature of this movement. Dorsey Nunn, former prisoner and longtime activist, has a longer history of involvement with ICOPA than I do since he attended the conference in New Zealand three years ago. My first direct contact with ICOPA was this past May, when I attended the Toronto gathering.

Dylan: Was there anything about ICOPA that particularly impressed you?

Angela: The ICOPA conference in Toronto revealed some of the major strengths and weaknesses of the abolitionist movement. First of all, despite the rather homogenous character of their circle, they have managed to keep the notion of abolitionism alive precisely at a time when developing radical alternatives to the prison-industrial complex is becoming a necessity. That is to say, abolitionism should not now be considered an unrealizable utopian dream, but rather the only possible way to halt the further transnational development of prison industries. That ICOPA claims supporters in Europe and Latin America is an indication of what is possible. However, the racial homogeneity of ICOPA, and the related failure to incorporate an analysis of race into the theoretical framework of their version of abolitionism, is a major weakness. The conference demonstrated that while faith-based approaches to the abolition of penal systems can be quite powerful, organizing strategies must go much further. We need to develop and popularize the kinds of analyses that explain why people of color predominate in prison populations throughout the world and how this structural racism is linked to the globalization of capital.

Dylan: Yes, I found that the political vision of ICOPA was extraordinarily limited, especially considering its professed commitment to a more radical abolitionist analysis and program. This undoubtedly had a lot to do with the underlying racism of the organization itself, which was reflected in the language of some of the conference resolutions: "We support all transformative measures which enable us to live better in community with those we as a society find most difficult, and most consistently marginalize or exclude" (emphasis added)¹. A major figure in ICOPA even accused a small group of people of color in attendance of being "racist" when they attempted to constructively criticize the overwhelming white homogeneity of the conference and the need for creative strategies to engage communities of color in such an important political discussion. Several black student-activists I met at ICOPA told me how alienated they felt at the conference, especially when they realized that the ICOPA organizers had never attempted to contact the Toronto-based organizations with which these student-activists were working: a major black anti-police-brutality coalition, a black prisoner support organization, etc. So I certainly share your frustrations with ICOPA. At the same time, I find myself wondering how a new political formation of prison abolitionism can form in such a reactionary national and global climate. You have been involved with a variety of prison movements for the last 30 years, so maybe you can help me out. How do you think about this new political challenge within a broader historical perspective?

Angela: There are multiple histories of prison abolition. The Scandinavian scholar/activist Thomas Mathieson first published his germinal text, The Politics of Abolition, in 1974, when activist movements were calling for the disestablishment of prisons -- in the aftermath of the Attica Rebellion and prison uprisings throughout Europe. He was concerned with transforming prison reform movements into more radical movements to abolish prisons as the major institutions of punishment. There was a pattern of decarceration in the Netherlands until the mid-1980s, which seemed to establish the Dutch system as a model prison system, and the later rise in prison construction and the expansion of the incarcerated population has served to stimulate abolitionist ideas. Criminologist Willem de Haan published a book in 1990 entitled The Politics of Redress: Crime, Punishment, and Penal Abolition. One of the most interesting texts, from the point of view of U.S. activist history is Fay Honey Knopp's volume Instead of Prison: A Handbook for Prison Abolitionists, which was published in 1976, with funding from the American Friends. This handbook points out the contradictory relationship between imprisonment and an "enlightened, free society." Prison abolition, like the abolition of slavery, is a long-range goal and the handbook argues that an abolitionist approach requires an analysis of "crime" that links it with social structures, as opposed to individual pathology, as well as "anticrime" strategies that focus on the provision of social resources. Of course, there are many versions of prison abolitionism -- including those that propose to abolish punishment altogether and replace it with reconciliatory responses to criminal acts. In my opinion, the most powerful relevance of abolitionist theory and practice today resides in the fact that without a radical position vis-a-vis the rapidly expanding prison system, prison architecture, prison surveillance, and prison system corporatization, prison culture, with all its racist and totalitarian implications, will continue not only to claim ever increasing numbers of people of color, but also to shape social relations more generally in our society. Prison needs to be abolished as the dominant mode of addressing social problems that are better solved by other institutions and other means. The call for prison abolition urges us to imagine and strive for a very different social landscape.

Dylan: I think you make a subtle but important point here: prison and penal abolition imply an analysis of society that illuminates the repressive logic, as well as the fascistic historical trajectory, of the prison's growth as a social and industrial institution. Theoretically and politically, this "radical position," as you call it, introduces a new set of questions that does not necessarily advocate a pragmatic "alternative" or a concrete and immediate "solution" to what currently exists. In fact, I think this is an entirely appropriate position to assume when dealing with a policing and jurisprudence system that inherently disallows the asking of such fundamental questions as: Why are some lives considered more disposable than others under the weight of police policy and criminal law? How have we arrived at a place where killing is valorized and defended when it is organized by the state -- I'm thinking about the street lynchings of Diallo and Dorismond in New York City, the bombing of the MOVE organization in Philadelphia in 1985, the ongoing bombing of Iraqi civilians by the United States -- yet viciously avenged (by the state) when committed by isolated individuals? Why have we come to associate community safety and personal security with the degree to which the state exercises violence through policing and criminal justice? You've written elsewhere that the primary challenge for penal abolitionists in the United States is to construct a political language and theoretical discourse that disarticulates crime from punishment. In a sense, this implies a principled refusal to pander to the typically pragmatist impulse to demand absolute answers and solutions right now to a problem that has deep roots in the social formation of the United States since the 1960s. I think your open-ended conception of prison abolition also allows for a more comprehensive understanding of the prison-industrial complex as a set of institutional and political relationships that extend well beyond the walls of the prison proper. So in a sense, prison abolition is itself a broader critique of society. This brings me to the next question: What are the most crucial distinctions between the political commitments and agendas of prison reformists and those of prison abolitionists?

Angela: The seemingly unbreakable link between prison reform and prison development -- referred to by Foucault in his analysis of prison history -- has created a situation in which progress in prison reform has tended to render the prison more impermeable to change and has resulted in bigger, and what are considered "better," prisons. The most difficult question for advocates of prison abolition is how to establish a balance between reforms that are clearly necessary to safeguard the lives of prisoners and those strategies designed to promote the eventual abolition of prisons as the dominant mode of punishment. In other words, I do not think that there is a strict dividing line between reform and abolition. For example, it would be utterly absurd for a radical prison activist to refuse to support the demand for better health care inside Valley State, California's largest women's prison, under the pretext that such reforms would make the prison a more viable institution. Demands for improved health care, including protection from sexual abuse and challenges to the myriad ways in which prisons violate prisoners' human rights, can be integrated into an abolitionist context that elaborates specific decarceration strategies and helps to develop a popular discourse on the need to shift resources from punishment to education, housing, health care, and other public resources and services.

Dylan: Speaking of developing a popular discourse, the Critical Resistance gathering in September 1998 seemed to pull together an incredibly wide array of prison activists -- cultural workers, prisoner support and legal advocates, former prisoners, radical teachers, all kinds of researchers, progressive policy scholars and criminologists, and many others. Although you were quite clear in the conference's opening plenary session that the purpose of Critical Resistance was to encourage people to imagine radical strategies for a sustained prison abolition campaign, it was clear to me that only a few people took this dimension of the conference seriously. That is, it seemed convenient for people to rejoice at the unprecedented level of participation in this presumably "radical" prison activist gathering, but the level of analysis and political discussion generally failed to embrace the creative challenge of formulating new ways to link existing activism to a larger abolitionist agenda. People were generally more interested in developing an analysis of the prison-industrial complex that incorporated the local work that they were involved in, which I think is an important practical connection to make. At the same time, I think there is an inherent danger in conflating militant reform and human rights strategies with the underlying logic of anti-prison radicalism, which conceives of the ultimate eradication of the prison as a site of state violence and social repression. What is required, at least in part, is a new vernacular that enables this kind of political dream. How does prison abolition necessitate new political language, teachings, and organizing strategies? How could these strategies help to educate and organize people inside and outside the prison for abolition?

Angela: In order to imagine a world without prisons -- or at least a social landscape no longer dominated by the prison -- a new popular vocabulary will have to replace the current language, which articulates crime and punishment in such a way that we cannot think about a society without crime except as a society in which all the criminals are imprisoned. Thus, one of the first challenges is to be able to talk about the many ways in which punishment is linked to poverty, racism, sexism, homophobia, and other modes of dominance. In the university, the emergence of the interdisciplinary field of prison studies can help to trouble the prevailing criminology discourses that shape public policy as well as popular ideas about the permanence of prisons. At the high school level, new curricula can also be developed that encourage critical thinking about the role of punishment. Community organizations can also play a role in urging people to link their demands for better schools, for example, to a reduction of prison spending.

Dylan: Your last comment suggests that we need to rupture the ideological structures embodied by the rise of the prison-industrial complex. How does prison abolition force us to rethink common assumptions about jurisprudence, in particular "criminal justice?"

Angela: Since the invention of the prison as punishment in Western society during the late 1700s, criminal justice systems have so thoroughly depended on imprisonment that we have lost the ability to imagine other ways to solve the problem of "crime." One of the interesting contributions of prison abolitionists has been to propose other paradigms of punishment or to suggest that we need to extricate ourselves from the assumption that punishment must be a necessary response to all violations of the law. Reconciliatory or restorative justice, for example, is presented by some abolitionists as an approach that has proved successful in non-Western societies -- Native American societies, for example -- and that can be tailored for use in urban contexts in cases that involve property and other offenses. The underlying idea is that in many cases, the reconciliation of offender and victim (including monetary compensation to the victim) is a much more progressive vision of justice than the social exile of the offender. This is only one example -- the point is that we will not be free to imagine other ways of addressing crime as long as we see the prison as a permanent fixture for dealing with all or most violations of the law.

Hilda Solis Secretary of Labor

Obama appointed Hilda Solis, Democratic Rep from California's 32nd Congressional District (including East LA) as Secretary of Labor on Friday.



Prior to her election to Congress, Solis served eight years in the California state legislature, where she made history in 1994 by becoming the first Latina elected to the State Senate. In August 2000, Solis became the first woman to receive the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award for her pioneering work on environmental justice issues in California.

See her acceptance speech and thoughts on environmental justice here.

In 2003, Solis became the first Latina appointed to the powerful House Committee on Energy and Commerce where she is the Vice Chair of the Environment and Hazardous Materials Subcommittee and a member of the Health and Telecommunications Subcommittees.

The LA Times reports:

Rep. Hilda L. Solis (D-El Monte), a Congressional Hispanic Caucus leader considered to be one of the most reliably pro-union voices in the House, is President-elect Barack Obama's choice to head the Labor Department, a Democratic official said Thursday.

Solis, 51, would be the third Latino member of Obama's Cabinet, a measure of diversity that has garnered praise from this fast-growing slice of the electorate...

Elected to Congress in 2000 from a district that includes swaths of East L.A. and the San Gabriel Valley, Solis has consistently voted in support of labor's interests. A congressional voting analysis conducted by the AFL-CIO showed that she voted with organized labor 100% of the time last year.

She supported measures increasing the minimum wage, making it easier for workers to organize and preserving a ban on privatizing jobs at the Labor Department. Other labor groups that study congressional voting patterns gave her a 100% rating in 2005 and 2006.

J.P. Fielder, spokesman for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, suggested that Solis' voting record is overly weighted in labor's favor. "The business community recognizes that economic growth has happened in a number of non-unionized states. She has sided with the AFL-CIO in 97% of the votes that she has cast on the Hill," he said.

Solis also serves on the board of directors of American Rights at Work, which advocates for the right to form unions and bargain collectively. The chairman is former Rep. David Bonior of Michigan, who was also in the running for the Labor secretary post.

"I'm very excited," said Maria Elena Durazo, executive secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. "This is an extraordinary moment for all women, but especially for the Latino community."

Durazo said Solis would be effective in the job because she is a "coalition-builder" who "doesn't walk in thinking everything has to be a battle with business."

Complete article here

Also, Affirmative Action Blog Spot reports that:
While Rep. Solis is most regarded for her environmental support, her record on civil rights is strong. She is rated 100% by the NAACP and reflects a "pro-affirmative action stance," according to the website "On the Issues." According to this site, Solis also voted:

YES on prohibiting job discrimination based on sexual orientation
NO on Constitutionally defining marriage as one-man-one-woman
Voted NO on making the PATRIOT Act permanent
Voted NO on Constitutional Amendment banning same-sex marriage
Co-sponsored a Constitutional Amendment for equal rights by gender
Rated 87% by the ACLU, indicating a pro-civil rights voting record
Issue a commemorative postage stamp of Rosa Parks
Co-sponsored the bill to Reinforce anti-discrimination and equal-pay requirements
http://www.ontheissues.org/CA/Hilda_Solis_Civil_Rights.htm