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Free Us All

PE vat toh t Rete oe Ty
abolitionist organizing.

CUCL


Originally published on The New Inquiry May 8, 2017
url: thenewinquiry.com/free-us-all/

Republished and printed for distribution to prisoners
By True Leap Zine Distro (2022)

Font: Cochin
Free Us All

Participatory defense campaigns as
abolitionist organizing.

By
Mariame Kaba

HOW do we free millions of people currently caged in prisons
and jails in the United States? As an abolitionist, who believes
that we must create the conditions for dismantling prisons, police,
and surveillance, I'm often asked how to build new institutions
that will ensure actual safety. My answer is always the same:
collective organizing. Currently, there are a range of
decarceral/anti-carceral strategies being employed across the
country to free prisoners, individually and collectively. People are



organizing for bail reform, taking on individual parole support for
prisoners, engaging in court watches, launching mass
commutation campaigns, and advocating for laws that will offer
new pathways for release.

Another important strategy to secure the freedom of criminalized
people is participatory defense campaigns. These are grassroots
efforts to pressure authorities, attend to prisoner needs, and raise
awareness and funds. This essay argues that defense campaigns
for criminalized survivors of violence like Bresha Meadows and
Marissa Alexander are an important part of a larger abolitionist
project. Some might suggest that it is a mistake to focus on freeing
individuals when all prisons need to be dismantled. The problem
with this argument is that it tends to render the people currently
in prison as invisible, and thus disposable, while we are organizing
towards an abolitionist future. In fact, organizing popular support
for prisoner releases is necessary work for abolition.




Opportunities to free people from prison through popular
support, without throwing other prisoners under the bus, should
be seized.

Defense Campaigns as a Practice of Abolitionist Care!

An important abolitionist insight is that most prison reforms tend
to actually entrench the prison system and expand its reach. 19th
century reformers, for instance, created women’s prisons to
ameliorate the brutal conditions faced by women who had to
share quarters with men in prison. But the result was that
exponentially more women were incarcerated.

Consequently, it is important to develop strategies that actually
reduce the number of people being incarcerated. Defense
campaigns are one such strategy. They are an important way that
abolitionists can address the needs of incarcerated people without
inadvertently strengthening the prison system.

Of course, defense campaigns are most effective as abolitionist
strategies when they are framed in a way that speaks to the need
to abolish prisons in general. The campaign cannot be framed by a
message such as: “This is the one person who shouldn’t be in
prison, but everyone else should be.” Rather, individual cases
should be framed as emblematic of the conditions faced by
thousands or millions who should also be free.

Speaking at an event celebrating Christina Sharpe's new book “In
the Wake,” Saidiya Hartman remarked that “care is the antidote
to violence.” Her words offer a potentially powerful feminist
frame for abolition. Effective defense campaigns provide
thousands of people with opportunities to demonstrate care for
criminalized individuals through various tactics (including letter
writing, financial support, prison visits, and more). They connect
people in a heartfelt, direct way that teaches specific lessons about
the brutality of prisons. And this can change minds and hearts,
helping people to (hopefully) develop more radical politics. In the
end, a practice of abolitionist care underscores that our fates are
intertwined and our liberation is interconnected. As such, defense
campaigns guided by an ethic and practice of care can be
powerful strategies to lead us towards abolition.

The Paradox of ‘Protection’ for Black Girls & Women

I've devoted most of my adult life to supporting and organizing
with Black women and girls. Most recently, I've been part of
cofounding local defense committees for Marissa

Alexander and Bresha Meadows.

Bresha Meadows was fourteen years old last July when she
allegedly used the gun that her father had brandished for years
against her and her family (terrorizing and abusing them) to shoot
him in his sleep. Bresha had learned to fear her father who had
repeatedly made threats to kill her and her family. The evidence of
her father’s abuse could be seen in police reports, orders of
protection, faded bruises, stories from neighbors, cries for help to
school counselors, and rumors of sexual violence.

On more than one occasion, Bresha escaped. Each time she was
returned to her abusive home. The last time, she ran to her aunt's
home. Her aunt is a police officer, but she could not protect her
niece. Instead, Bresha has been charged with aggravated murder.
The state didn’t protect her and now she enters her tenth month
in jail. Bresha has repeatedly been placed under suicide watch and
is facing trial on May 22. The state of Ohio is now her abuser.

In late January 2017, as Bresha was being moved from the
Trumbull County Juvenile Detention Center for evaluation at a
mental health facility, Marissa Alexander was throwing off the
shackles of her ankle monitor after two years of house arrest and
three years of incarceration before that.

Marissa’s journey through the criminal punishment system began
in 2010 when she was confronted by her estranged husband in her
home, nine days after giving birth to her third child, a little girl.
Menaced by a man, who admitted in a deposition to having
abused every woman he’d ever been partnered with except one,
Marissa used a gun that she was licensed to own and fired a single
warning shot into the air to ward off her abusive husband.

For this, a jury of her so-called peers found her guilty of
aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in a 12-minute
deliberation. It was that deadly weapon charge that prosecutors
used to recommend Marissa be sentenced to a mandatory
minimum sentence of 20 years under Florida’s 10-20 law. A judge
who had previously ruled that Marissa was ineligible to invoke
“Stand Your Ground” as a defense because she didn’t appear
afraid, said that his hands were tied by the law and ratified the 20-
year sentence.

Both Bresha and Marissa, a Black girl and a Black woman, are
part of the U.S.’s legacy of criminalizing survivors of violence for
self-defense. This is particularly true for women and gender
nonconforming (GNC) people of color (especially Black people)
who are inherently seen as threats, who are never vulnerable, who
cannot be afraid, who are always the aggressors, and whose skin
is weaponized, making it impossible for them to be considered
victims of violence. Women and GNC people of color seem, under
the law and in popular consciousness, to have “No Selves to
Defend.”

Black women and girls in the U.S. have long sought protections
from the state for interpersonal violence while simultaneously
organizing against the violence of state power. Ida B. Wells-
Barnett was one of the earliest Black women activist-intellectuals
to take up Black women’s physical and sexual vulnerability as a
public concern. The case that she made against lynching was not
simply that white people were lying when they said that they were
primarily targeting Black male rapists, but also that sexual
violence against Black women and girls was ignored and covered
up by those same white people. For Wells, and some of the Black
club women of the 19" and early 20" centuries, state protection
was considered a right of citizenship.

Yet Black women are (more often than not) targets of state
violence and when or if ever they are protected by the punishing

state, the costs are very high indeed. In some cases, the “gendered
paternalism” of the state (a term coined by lesbian and radic.



feminists of the 1970s) uses Black women as pawns to reinforce
racialized criminalization. For “their own protection” and often
against their stated wishes, victims of domestic violence are
threatened with jailing by some prosecutors or judges if they
refuse to testify against their abusers. Over the years, however,
the contradictions of demanding protection from the state that
also targets and kills us have proved irreconcilable.

It’s easy to understand why the oppressed and marginalized want
the criminal punishment system to apply its laws equally.
Everyone wants



ccountability when they experience harm.
Endless years of activist energy have been expended in reaction to
and reinforcement of this corrupt criminal punishment system.
But we have to contend with the fact that the system will never
indict itself and that when we demand more prosecutions and
punishment this only serves to reinforce a system that must itself
be dismantled. As Baldwin teaches us: “The law is meant to be my
servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my
murderer. To respect the law, in the context in which the
American Negro finds himself, is simply to surrender his self-
respect...”
#FreeBresha & #FreeMarissa in Historical Context

Both Marissa and Bresha’s freedom campaigns were inspired by
the 1974 effort to free Joan Little, a 20-year-old Black woman
prisoner. Defending herself against Clarence Allgood, a white
guard who was sexually assaulting her, Joan Little grabbed an ice
pick from his hand and stabbed him. Allgood died and Little
escaped, eventually turning herself in to authorities a week later
and claiming self-defense. She was charged with first-degree
murder, which carried a possibility of the death penalty. Her
plight soon inspired a mass defense campaign that became known
as the “Free Joan Little Movement.” Organizations and
individuals across the country raised money for her bond and her
defense. When Little's trial began on July 15th 1975, five
hundred supporters rallied outside the Wake County Courthouse.
According to historian Danielle McGuire’s At the Dark End of the
Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance, the supporters “hoisted
placards demanding the court ‘Free Joan Little’ and ‘Defend
Black Womanhood,’ and loud chants could be heard over the din
of traffic and conversation. ‘One, two, three. Joan must be set
free!’ the crowd sang. ‘Four, five, six. Power to the ice pick!’”
Eventually, after a five-week trial and 78 minutes of deliberation,
Joan Little was acquitted by a jury and returned to prison to
serve time for her original offense, which was a break-in. The case
is recognized as the first time a woman was acquitted of murder
on the grounds of self-defense against rape. It continues to stand
as a testament to Black women’s resistance to subjugation and
sexual predation.

The “Free Joan Little Movement” is the only example of mass
mobilization against state violence on behalf of Black women in
the US to date. The Joan Little defense committee organizers
focused their campaign on state violence rather than state
protection from violence. They remixed the politics of safety and
violence and centered the experiences of women of color in their
organizing. They underscored the ways in which the state
compounded rather than alleviated violence in the lives of
marginalized women.”

This was unprecedented in its time and remains rare today. The
work of the “Free Joan Little Movement” approximates what
some “justice” looks like: Joan Little alive, with as much love,
solidarity and community support for her as she would perhaps

have had in the glare of death.

The #FreeBresha and #FreeMarissaNow campaigns, like the Free
Joan Little defense campaign that came before it, have taken
great pains to underscore that each survivor is one among
thousands of Black women and gir!
to be criminalized for trying to survive. The message now, as it
was then, is that all of the Joans, Marissas, and Breshas should be
free. Today’s organizers work in the lineage of these lesbian and
radical feminists whose politics found their expression in
collective defense (a term coined by historian Emily Hobson) and
who adopted an organizing strategy of opposition to US state
violence. These were feminists who used the politics of
collective/mass defense to challenge the intersections of gendered
violence and racialized criminalization. These are feminists who
would say, in the words of former political prisoner Susan Saxe,
“My feminism does not drive me into the arms of the state, but
even further from it.”



who have been and continue



Abolitionist Organizing in Practice

For many survivors, especially of color, the experiences of
domestic violence and rape are inextricably linked with systems of
incarceration, policing, and criminalization. As many as 94
percent of the population in some women’s prisons have a history
of having been abused before being caged. Once incarcerated,
many cis women, trans women, and gender nonconforming people
experience sexual violence from guards and others. The work of
the #FreeBresha and #FreeMarissaNow campaigns is centered
around these experiences as they've organized for the freedom of
all criminalized survivors.>

Iam a co-organizer of Survived & Punished (S&P), a coalition of
individuals and organizations committed to eradicating the
criminalization of survivors of domestic and sexual violence. The
members of S&P believe that creating participatory defense
campaigns to support the people made most vulnerable to
criminalization is essential for educating the public, including
prison reformers and abolitionists, about the racial and gendered
terror of criminalization and incarceration. We know that
campaigns which uplift and defend Black women charged with
violent acts, like Marissa and Bresha, are often the only means for
securing their freedom. They are also necessary for popular
education to strengthen our movements: both by informing and
improving overall movement strategies, and by educating to
challenge false and damaging binaries that we use to describe
incarcerated people, like violent/non-violent and innocent/guilty.
Defense campaigns can create new forms of learning and practice
necessary for abolition. By organizing to put campaigns like those
supporting people in immigrant detention, those criminalized for
sex work, and those targeted by transphobic violence in
conversation, we can better understand how anti-Black gendered
violence and criminalization operate.

However, these short-term strategies need to be placed within a
longer-term vision for justice rather than as a substitute for that
vision. Thus, it is important first to be clear about the limitations
and dangers of some of these strategies. Second, we need to look
at how we could reframe this struggle to address the systemic
nature of white supremacy, settler colonialism and anti-Blackness.
Then, it may be easier to coordinate how a short-term strategy can
support rather than contradict our longer term vision.
Participatory defense campaigns can be a short-term strategy to
act in solidarity with criminalized survivors of violence and all
incarcerated people.

If you are now convinced to take up the invitation to create
abolitionist defense campaigns in support of criminalized
survivors of violence and all incarcerated people, here are some
key ideas to keep in mind to guide your organizing.

1. Women and gender nonconforming people are not only
targets of interpersonal violence but also of state violence.
Therefore, discussions of interpersonal violence without a
critique of state power and capitalism are at best incomplete
and at worst reifications of oppressive structures that are co-
constitutive of interpersonal violence.

2. The racial dimensions of gender-based violence must
always be addressed.

3. Mass criminalization is gendered: a facet that is too often
ignored.

4. It is important to use a politics of collective/mass defense
to challenge the intersections of gendered violence and
racialized criminalization.

5, Women and gender nonconforming people’s rights to self-
defense and self-determination must be won through
popular support.

6. Acts of self-defense are valid in order to affirm all women
and gender nonconforming people’s rights to bodily
autonomy.
7. It is critical to assert and preserve marginalized people’s
right to self-defense because we are both under-protected
and targeted by the state and sometimes by our own
communities.

8. The violent/nonviolent offense binary is an insidious
mirage and we must fight for everyone's freedom.

9. Petitioning the state which is set up to kill us for help and
protection can be untenable and therefore forces us to
consider new ways of seeking some justice.

10. Criminalization itself is sexual violence —a form of state
enactment of gendered violence —which is an important

reason to oppose it.



11. We cannot focus on addressing vulnerabilities through
criminalization, which is always racialized, classed, gendered
and hetero-normed. So a focus on criminalized survivors of
violence pushes us to ask “How do we create safety outside
of carceral logics?”

In March 2015, I had the great honor to moderate a panel at the
Color of Violence 4 conference organized by Incite! Women and
Trans People of Color Against Violence. The panel included
formerly criminalized survivors of violence including Yvonne
Wanrow, Marissa Alexander (appearing via Skype), CeCe
McDonald, and Renata Hill. Former political prisoner Angela
Davis sat in the front row of the audience.

The web of connections between these women was made visible
as Marissa told a story of watching the documentary Free Angela
and All Political Prisoners while on house arrest. She said that the
film gave her strength that contributed to her survival. CeCe
shared that she had a #FreeMarissa poster in her cell while
incarcerated and that reading Davis's Are Prisons

Obsolete? radicalized her while on the inside. Yvonne Wanrow
thanked Angela Davis for contributing to her defense committee
in the 1970s. The ethic and practice of abolitionist care links those
criminalized to each other and also to us on the outside. Hundreds
of us witnessed and understood the importance and value of
defense campaigns that night.

The mass practice of decarcerality that intends to win must
include fighting to free individuals from cages, and that must
include fighting to defend and free criminalized survivors of
violence. This will ensure that our movement for abolition is
strengthened and can grow. Free Us All!
Author's note®

This essay benefitted greatly from feedback and edits by Alisa Bierria,
Nancy Heitzeg, Colby Lenz, Erica Meiners, and Andy Smith. Sincere
thanks for your suggestions ano ideas.

Endnotes

1. I'm indebted to my friend Alisa Bierria for her help in
conceptualizing “abolitionist care” practices and tactics.

2. See historian Emily Thuma’s work for more detailed
information about the Free Joan Little Movement.

3. While this essay focuses particularly on the plight of
criminalized survivors of violence, they are just one example
where participatory defense campaigns resonate due to re-
victimization by the state and denial of self-defense. From an
abolitionist perspective, all prisoners should be freed. There
is a long history of participatory defense campaigns that
have focused on people criminalized for dissent and/or for
actions taken as part of social justice organizing (see cases of
the Black Panther Party, American Indian Movement, and
MOVE members among others). Abolitionist organizing
eschews the idea of “innocence” as salient in dismantling the
prison industrial complex.
Some nught suggest that tt ts a mistake to focus on
Jreeing indiviouals when all prisons need to be
dismantled. The problem with this argument ts that it
tends to render the people currently tn prison ad
invisible, and thus disposable, while we are organizing
towards an abolitionist future. In fact, organizing

popular support for prisoner releases us NecedSAry WOrK
Jor abolition.”