Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women

NOTE: This will NOT be at the main bookfair site, but at NYU's Kimmel Hall, 60 Washington Square South, room 803

This panel will explore a variety of anarchist perspectives on the origins and impacts of incarceration, strategies and opportunities for resistance and prisoner support, and prison abolition. Dr. Viviane Saleh-Hanna will begin our discussing with a focus on the racialized militarization of justice, linking contemporary mass incarceration to a long-standing, white-supremacist confinement and genocide of Africans. Victoria Law and Kyung Ji Kate Rhee will go on to examine the particular challenges facing incarcerated women and youth, discussing current strategies of resistance carried out by those behind bars, opportunities for solidarity and support from people on the outside, and ways abolitionists can support reform without inadvertently strengthening the prison system. Finally, Brendan Story of the NY Anarchist Black Cross will discuss the importance of supporting political prisoners and how those efforts contribute to prison abolition more broadly. There will be time for questions and discussions following brief presentations by the speakers as well as opportunities to get involved in anti-prison work.

About the (other) presenters:

Kyung Ji Kate Rhee leads the the Prison Moratorium Project (now the Institute for Juvenile Justice Reform and Alternatives), a social justice organization dedicated to stopping prison expansion and mass incarceration locally and nationally. She has been featured in the Utne Reader (Top 30 Visionaries under 30), the Village Voice, The Source, (Top 10 Artists, Albums, & Political Players of the Year!), The KoreAm Magazine, the Gotham Gazette, the New York Sun and the Brooklyn Free Press among others.

Viviane Saleh-Hanna is an Assistant Professor of Crime and Justice Studies at the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth. She is an activist scholar who has done anti-colonial work with prisoners in Canada, Nigeria, Ghana and the Gambia. More recently in her scholarly and organizing work, she has been highlighting the role music plays in black liberation struggles. She is a Pan-Africanist, a Pan-Arab and a penal abolitionist.

NYC Anarchist Black Cross includes anarchists of many tendencies from IWW/class-struggle organizing, to radical-acceptance feminism, to military counter-recruitment and community organizing, to anti-racist activity, to student organizing, to environmental and animal rights struggles. They are dedicated to the support and liberation of political prisoners and prisoners of war. They hold regular Political Prisoner Letter-Writing Dinners at the 123 Community Space in Bed-Stuy Brooklyn, and has been involved with the NYC Political Prisoner Support Coalition.

Danielle (moderator) is a member of the Rock Dove Collective and deeply involved in anti-prison work, alternatives to incarceration, and transformative justice.

For more information on the bookfair, see http://anarchistbookfair.net/workshops.php