A Critical Resistance Donor Call, June 2016
The core of CR’s work is to push—through grassroots mobilizations, popular education, campaigns and coalition efforts—a reinvigorated common sense in which the key to health and safety is not aggression, policing, & imprisonment, but healing, stability & liberation. Our speakers, who have worked with or alongside CR in different ways, shared lessons and strategies from campaigns and projects that advanced this common sense.
Our featured participants:
Craig Gilmore was active in the campaign to stop the Delano II prison with Critical Resistance, CURB (Californians United for a Responsible Budget, formed during this fight), California Prison Moratorium coalition, and many others. Craig has worked to shrink California’s prison system since the late ’90s and is a member of CR’s Community Advisory Board.
Dolores Canales has emerged as a powerful public voice in the anti-solitary confinement movement in California. She is the co-founder of California Families to Abolish Solitary Confinement (CFASC), serves on the Advisory Board of Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB), and was on the Mediation Team during the massive California prisoner hunger strikes of 2011 and 2013.
Lorraine Halinka Malcoe is a coordinating member of Transforming Justice (TJ), a collaborative effort of university faculty, filmmakers, youth and other community members to document and invigorate grassroots resistance to mass criminalization and imprisonment in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. During the past year, Lorraine organized with other educators, community members and youth to successfully halt the implementation of STOP (Students Talking it Over with Police), a pro-police curriculum for youth in Milwaukee public schools. Lorraine is also a faculty member and social epidemiologist at the Zilber School of Public Health, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Melissa Burch is near completing her PhD in the department of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her current research tackles the question of how the struggle to increase employment opportunities for job seekers with criminal records might be expanded and refocused toward the broader goal of PIC abolition. Before she went back to school, Melissa worked with A New Way of Life Reentry Project in Los Angeles and before that in the greatest job of her life–as an organizer with CR in New Orleans and Louisiana.
*Dolores intervened in a situation on BART during the call and had to get off abruptly. We want to let you know that she is OK, and so is everyone else. We’re proud of her abolition in action as she responded to a situation without engaging the cops.
Check out more Critical Resistance Donor Calls & Webinars here.