Introduction Prison has come out of the shadows into the limelight, as not a day passes without some allusion to “solving the problem” of the State’s overflowing dungeons. Advances in surveillance technology are offering alternative models of isolation and control that could see a large number of the latters’ potentially explosive inmates defused and—opportunely tagged…
2019’s free May Day book was The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner by Saidiya Hartman, an 80-page sewn paperback, edited and designed by Crisis in collaboration with the author, and published in an edition of 1000 copies. It was available for free at Bookbound Bookstore, For Keeps Books, Hasta Muerte, Interference…
Bend the Bars 2019 is only a few weeks away! Bend the Bars is a day-and-a-half long conference about strategies and tactics for supporting the prisoner movement and the struggle for a world without prisons. It will take place in Lansing, Michigan from August 23 thru August 24. And you’re invited! We recently finalized the…
On Sunday, June 30, 2019 we was on lockdown most of the day because of three inmate drug overdoses. Guys, I want to say this: when my feet first touched down in the streets of Ferguson I felt connected suddenly, because I felt the pain of the people out there. I felt what was going…
In April 2015, Terrance Kellom was murdered by an ICE agent who was part of a seven-member unit called the Detroit Fugitive Apprehension Task Force. You’re in good company if the name of this “task force” brings to mind the slave patrols of earlier centuries. The unit broke into the home of Kevin Kellom, Terrance’s…
It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love and support one another. We have nothing to lose but our chains. —Assata Shakur Today I say, let’s lose these chains of having been victimized by the system. Let’s lose the chains of oppression. Let’s lose these…
Relationship Anarchy (RA) is a politic of relating that applies anarchistic principles to the interpersonal. The practice of RA is an emergent strategy to build non-hierarchical, anti-oppressive, autonomy-affirming community. RA’s may enact both anti-monogamy action and prefigurative building. Supportive, exclusive space is critically needed for folks who are practicing anarchistic relating. Often people come to…
Saturday, March 2 6–9 PM Riverside Arts Center 76 N Huron St., Ypsilanti Come celebrate the Winter 2019 issue of The Opening Statement with MAPS and friends! Featuring a screening of The Prison in Twelve Landscapes by Brett Story. The Opening Statement is a quarterly newsletter written for and primarily by incarcerated folks in the Michigan…
Monday, Feb. 25, 4:00 p.m. 1014 Tisch Hall University of Michigan In her new book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, serial partners, cohabitation outside of wedlock, queer relations, and…
In the aftermath of Larry Nassar, Michigan has pushed over 30 bills through the House and Senate ostensibly under the familiar rhetoric of safety. Some of the bills—expanding sexual education and requiring schools to keep records about why employees leave—make sense in treating our sex crime problem holistically. Most of the bills, however, focus on…
