Join us to Close CA Prisons at Freedom Friday on July 30th from 3-7pm!
Prison closure is on our horizon. After CA’s horrifying wave of prison construction was halted by the historic Delano II campaign, abolitionist organizers have fought hard for years to free us from the prison industrial complex. Together we have created a CA where the prisoner population has been decreasing for 15+ years, the lowest it’s been in 30 years. The non-partisan Legislative Analyst’s Office has recommended the state close 5 prisons for logistical and financial reasons. As part of Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB)’s prison closure workgroup, we are demanding the state start by closing 10 prisons in the next 5 years and then keep going after that!
Prisons have always been a public health crisis, and we saw this exceptionally so during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Governor Newsom’s inaction led to hundreds of deaths inside California cages. Prisons reproduce the gender, racial, and economic violence that plague our communities, and harm our most vulnerable people. Let’s close prisons and put our resources to what truly keeps us safe across our communities statewide: Sustainable community infrastructure, such as education, affordable housing, and environmental justice, access to stable jobs, and responses to harm that don’t involve punishment, policing, imprisonment, or surveillance.
While both the Oakland and Los Angeles chapters of Critical Resistance has joined CURB’s prison closure campaign, fighting to close prisons from southern to northern CA, CR Oakland is using this month’s Freedom Friday event as an opportunity to build resistance with Bay Area communities, to get informed on the prison closure campaign and learn how to support this fight.
Join us July 30th from 3-7pm at 4400 Telegraph for July’s Freedom Friday where we will uplift the call for prison closure with an art-making collage with CR’s The Abolitionist newspaper and go over an interactive exhibit and workshop about the catalysts of the prison boom and the opportunities we have today to tear them down. We will be joined by Bandung Books and Understory will offer food for purchase.
We can free our people from cages across the state. The time is now!
Freedom Fridays is a socially-distanced series at 4400 Telegraph Ave (back lot on 44th) where we put abolition into practice through organizing and community engagement. The events are an opportunity to bridge the organizing work of movement partners and Critical Resistance to the Oakland community AND to people inside prisons. We are fighting to increase urgent anti-prison organizing in this time, create and strengthen our movement space, and fight with and for people on the inside and build our collective people power. See you there!
When: Friday, July 30 from 3-7pm
Where: 4400 Telegraph, North Oakland
