Stanley-Eric-Captive-Genders-Trans-Embodiment-and-Prison-Industrial-Complex

Abolitionist Imaginingsanalysis. Anybody who wants to contact me can ask me for my personalbibliography, and I’ll be happy to send it—too many books, essays, articles,poems, and stories to name here. But let me expand on this dimensionjust a bit: Many of us, as activists, who are otherwise constantlythinking about and critically analyzing what we’re doing, far too frequentlyignore or abandon radical intellectual work as if it was an unaffordableluxury that’s best taken up by academics, lawyers, and artists. I think thisintellectual underdevelopment kills radical movements and empowers theliberal-to-conservative political circuitry that would like to see this conditionof (proto-)genocide managed, reformed, and controlled rather thandestroyed and transformed.Bo Brown: I was a white working-class Butch; bar dyke on the weekends.Then I was a social prisoner due to a conviction for a less than $50 theftfrom the post office where I was working. I was what we now call a socialprisoner in prison for less than a year in a federal prison in San Pedro,California. I was in prison in September 1971 when George Jackson waskilled. In fact, I was reading Blood in My Eye. I was still in prison whenAttica happened, a month later. So that kind of slammed open my eyesto a lot of stuff. Even though I was pretty young—23—pretty inexperienced,pretty naïve, you know, didn’t know a whole lot about the rest ofthe world. Even though I had no real political perspective or language, Iknew that was some fucked up shit that went down. It was so wrong andreally outright criminal. Murders were committed. Yet they got away withit right there in front of our eyes on TV for the whole world to see.Reina Gossett: In my life, politicization happens as a deepening process,so it was years of fermentation rather than a single event that deepened myabolitionist politics. I found out about Critical Resistance New York Citythe spring after the RNC. This was a time when Bush had won re-electionand abolitionists in New York City had been really engaged in organizingin response to militarization in NYC and the war in Iraq. I entered duringa time of reflection, burnout, and inspiration. Because of gentrification inBrooklyn, the CR office moved from Crown Heights to the West Village.What I was witnessing were people throughout different activist spacesengaging abolition, even people deeply invested in reform work.At that moment, along with other students, I was doing creativewriting and poetry workshops at Island Academy—a high school for teenagerson the Rikers Island Jail. I had strong desires for a political home325