Protecting Our Children: Ensuring the Rights of Incarcerated Mothers

Submitted By Iresha Picot, The Assata's Daughters Project
Melinda is currently serving a thirty-six month sentence in state prison. She leaves behind two small children with her elderly aunt, whom after eight months in the aunt’s care, can no longer care for the children. They are placed into foster care and Melinda looses contact of them. Upon her release from prison, Melinda has learned that she has lost all parental rights of her children under the 1997 Bill Clinton initiative Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA). While the ASFA was to ensure that children be moved out of foster care into adoption, this act has made it far more likely, that incarcerated mothers of children in foster care will lose their children permanently. The state can terminate parental rights in certain circumstances, with a shorter timeline for parents to complete services and regain custody or face termination. If a child is in foster care for 15 of the past 22 months of a parent’s incarceration, the state can move to terminate the parent’s rights except under certain circumstances (i.e. kinship). In addition, for women who are incarcerated for longer than two years (women in state prison serve an average of 36 months), this law can almost guarantee the loss of custody of their children. In most cases, after parental rights are terminated, they cannot be regained.

According to the 2008* Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1.7 million children under age 18, had a parent in state or federal prison. The number of children with a father in prison increased from 881,500 in 1991 to more than 1.5 million in 2007, a 77 percent increase.  During that time, the number of children with a mother in prison increased by 131 percent, from 63,900 to 147,400.  Over half of the parent’s incarcerated stated that they were the caregivers of their children.

Prison Abolitionists today have attributed the dehumanization and economic profits of Black and Brown bodies in the Prison Industrial Complex to that of Slavery. The thief of children from their incarcerated parents is with no exception. During slavery, children were ripped away from their mothers and sold into slavery without ever seeing their children again. This Adoption and Safe Families Act is no different. Moreover, with Black Women being the fastest growing group in prison, and being sentenced to prison six times more likely than white women, we can almost be sure as to whom this affects the most.

Forty-eight states besides Hawaii and Vermont have implemented ASFA. Last year, New York passed The Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) Expanded Discretion Bill. The new law allows for foster care agencies and courts to take into account the special circumstances of parents in prison or residential treatment when determining a child's fate. I think all states should push this law to amend this act and demand the government for reunification of incarcerated parents with their children.

The Assata’s Daughters Project, an organization that my comrade Natasha and I created, is seeking to garner signatures to amend the Adoption and Safe Families Act for Pennsylvania. Our hope is that with enough interest, we can get Senators to sponsor this bill and take it all the way to the Governor! I propose that people help to amend this bill in their own states!

Please sign the petition! (<< Click link)

In Solidarity

(Originally published on Facebook, Monday, October 17, 2011)

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Inside the Belly of the Beast : The Exploding Prison Growth in the USA

For years now the prison population inside of the United Snakes of Amerikkka has grown at an incredible rate. Today the U.S. is the largest manufacturer of neo-slavery; with only 5% of the world’s population, it has incarcerated nearly a quarter of its population behind bars. Almost 1 out every 100 people in this country are locked behinds bars as you read this article. For the past forty-one years, since 1970, we have witnessed an increase in Amerikkka’s prison population by 700%, placing 2.4 million people directly inside of the belly of the beast! 

In the state of Maryland, the northern-most state of the U.S. south (it sits on the Mason-Dixie line), we have seen a serious spike in the amount of kidnapped people being placed behind the wall of these neo-Nazi concentration camps, otherwise known as prisons, correctional facilities, and so on. The prison population here has tripled to over 22,000, at a cost of more than $783 million dollars a year. In 2009, it cost an average of $33,000 per person to hold a person inside of a so called pretrial detention center. Last year in Maryland 23,000 people were arrested for possession of marijuana while another 13,000 were arrested for trespassing. Trespassing in this state is a catch-all law that is used to round up people suspected of committing some sort of criminal offense; it’s a modern day form of anti-black slavery law. The Baltimore City Central Booking Center easily process between 130,000 to 135,000 people each year; many of them rearrested for non-violent crimes such as drugs, loitering, petty thief and parole violation. Furthermore, parole violations are the easiest thing to be rearrested for, and not just here in Maryland, but also in other states. It is the number one thing members of the African Working Class are rearrested for in any state! Most of them are rearrested and found guilty of technical violations, such as failure to report a change of address, to meet with a probation officer or going out of state without proper notification. There were over 4,000 cases in 2010 of people violating parole in the state of Maryland alone. 

All across the capitalist-colonialist boarders of the United Snakes of Amerikkka, people are calling for a reform movement addressing the current problems of prison overcrowding and brutality that seems to plague the prison industry. While the expansion of the U.S. prison system has continued, many of these prison reform movements have not addressed the immediate concerns of Amerikkka’s vast inmate population. For any prison movement to truly be successful it must work on two fronts. The first front is inside the prisons themselves in order to address the immediate concerns of the people being held prisons. The second front must be launched on the outside by the family and friends of those currently housed inside of the vermin infested, disease ridden, overcrowded, penal institutions. Once these two aspects are brought about, there must be open, institutional communication between the two fronts of the movement that allows them to collectively develop strategy and tactics around the issues affecting those housed that are incarcerated. Along with all of the above, a national movement must be established and a united front must be formed to extend the movement as far and wide as possible. Finally, we need to make the world understand that any attack on one African is an attack on all African people and it will not be accepted or tolerated.

The prison movement must take on the issue of bringing home our political prisoners and our prisoners of war who are currently incarcerated inside of these places. Comrades like Mumia Abu Jamal, Marshall Eddie Conway and Assata Shakur, just to name a few, need to be brought home to a hero’s welcome! We then need to demand reparations and an apology from this filthy, rotten government on the way it has treated all of our brothers and sisters and for the counterinsurgency program that it waged against our comrades under the disguise of the COINTELPRO, a program that is still currently being waged under various names. 

We need to have a massive protest movement going on all over Amerikkka to call attention to the plight of African people; it needs to be waged under the ideology of Pan-African Internationalism, the correct ideology of African Liberation! Every African man, woman and child needs to be educated, organized and mobilized under the guidance of Pan-African Internationalism so that we can collective come to realize that the only freedom and independence that African people are going to get is going to come from our own hands and not anyone else! 

Comrades, Brothers, and Sisters lets “Rebuild the Revolution of the 60’s” under the ideology of Pan-African Internationalism and move to push forward the revolutionary process of true African Liberation here in the U.S. and abroad! Let’s form a principled united front that refuses to sell out the movement because Africa and her children need us all. Uhuru Sasa!

Brother-Comrade Abdul Jabbar Caliph, Chief Editor

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Prisons and the Criminal Injustice System

Every since the technical end of slavery there has been a desire and need for Imperialist Capitalism to find a way to continue to control and dominate the masses of Afrikan peoples inside the United Gates of Amerikkka. Prisons have helped to make that possible, along with the entire U.S. Criminal (In)Justice System, and are a vital tool used to accomplish the mission of neutralizing and destabilizing the majority of Afrikans in Amerikkka

In the not so distant past, just as recent as the start of 2011 there has been remarkable and courageous actions taking place across the nation behind the gates, walls and bars of federal and state prisons, detention, and correction facilities. Prisoners all over the United States have gotten together to organize a movement to demand that their voices be heard and their human rights returned and respected.

In both the states of Georgia and California this struggle for human rights has been pushed to the forefront of the overall prison movement. There is no question, no doubt, that no matter their location the conditions inside and throughout U.S. jails are poor, less then inhabitable. The protest and resistance to the policy and practices of the federal and state prison administration and officials is what has lead up to these events. Because of this resistance, circumstances and conditions inside the “belly of the beast” have certainly gone from bad to worse. Prisoners have been brave enough to come together and organize around the issues and concerns faced by all inmates. They are demanding access to quality healthcare, chances for real educational opportunities, an end to torture and humiliation techniques being used against them, abolition of the use of solitary confinement,  and an end to inmate population overcrowding, as well.   

Georgia Prisoners all across the state have made a major contribution to the Prison protest of 2011. Towards the beginning of the year the inmates initiated a work strike protest which took place across the entire state. Prisons for a very long time have relied on and profited from the exploitation of the prison labor force. I response to this exploitation, inmates across Georgia organized peaceful protest around this issue and a number of others. Yet, no matter how peaceful the demonstrations where, the resisters were still meet with the utmost force by government bureaucrats and law officials.

There has now been an ongoing round of damage control and public image responses in the state of Georgia to the protest and demonstrations in the state prisons. The governor and state congress have called for and have, ironically but not unusually, also been put in charge of creating the Prison Reform Commission, a body comprised of s big conglomerate research firm and other individuals with ties and allegiance to the ruling class and the systems and institutions which hold the current prison system together. This is an obvious hustle to give the appearance of solving the problems, while actually covering their own tracks.

Most recently the Prisoners inside the state of California have also taken the role of a vanguard in the fight for human rights. Prisoners in Pelican Bay, Corcoran, Tehachapi, Folsom and Calipatria have organized inmates around a hunger strike to protest overcrowding, little to no healthcare, and no accesses to any form of educational services of programs. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, along with all other elements of the California prison-industrial complex, have become perpetrators of torture. The CDCR has done all in their power to downplay, disrupt and break the California state prisoners’ hunger strike. Nearly 6,600 prisoners across the state have participated in the mass protest. Prisoners are demanding changes in the practice and policy of humiliation, gang classification/validation, as well as long-term and severe solitary confinement and segregation.

Theses prisoners have shown extraordinary bravery in the face of extremely hostile treatment and brutal repression. Suffering alongside many of the brave individuals are the families and friend of these courageous prisoners. The sacrifices and efforts being made behind bars cross the country from Georgia to California must serve as a call to action for all those who still have their rights and freedoms, or at least the perception of such. We must take up the struggle, for it is ours too, to check mate white power, its methods, and tools of exploitation and repression.

In whatever way we take action, we must do just that and build upon the protest and demands made by those currently engaged in this struggle for their human rights. In solidarity with the hunger-strikers, we urge each and every one of you to get involved and show your support to those brothers and sisters locked up and being held down by the prison-industrial complex. Clearly this is glaring evidence of the systematic and structural injustice perpetrated through policing and imprisonment, particularly in poor/working-class and communities of color.

The fight for the rights of prisoners and all poor and oppressed working class Afrikans are intertwined, for we are made up of and from one another and not only our enemy but also our interest are also a commonality we must realize. We stand in solidarity with the efforts, and demands made by the bruthas and sistas that are waging the struggle from the inside…. As long as there’s still one of us is locked up and held down ain't none of us FREE!

Brother-Comrade Kosse Sankofa

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