are invited to join us and become part of the movement!

The issue of refugee´s struggle was perhaps always injustice; We left out home countries because of having inhuman laws, injustice kingdom systems have broken the system for a common person life. Life is cheaper than anything, politics is business, religion is being used to make conflicts between people, cities or even countries in all around the world. Never the less we have so called “DEMOCRACY” but in reality it´s worse then dictatorship. Sometimes a person flees alone, sometimes with families, with companion. Sometimes because of political issues, because of religion or just for freedom. Because of these conflicts some die in their homelands. Some die on their way to secure countries. Some they never could achieve their destinations and when someone could finally arrive in advanced country than discrimination, restrictions and the lack of having basic human rights force them to suicide.

Never the less a process of injustice is failed to provide justice. So refugees have no access to justice and basic human rights. Even the asylumlaws differ according to the federal district, the city or the village they have to live and according to the refugee’s nationality. The invitation for the asylum-interviews, the possibility to do German classes, restriction of mobility via “Residenzpflicht” (obligation to stay inside a several district, just because of being a Non-Citizen), workpermission and deportations by force is made by an asylum-system, that is not based on justice but on nationalities.

These issues are not impossible to solve. But justice is somewhere and nowhere. We don´t demand that all the 50 million refugees all over the world should fight for their rights. But all who have the possibility to go on a protest should join us in our fight for basic human rights. One percent of the german population are refugees. We, the one percent, want justice and our rights. Right to live like humans, freedom of movement, education, work and private homes.

Sice the last hunger strike and the round table meeting with politicians in Munich two years passed. Now we want to ask you to come with us, to show our responsibility, to demand our rights because

WE WANT RISE AND WE WILL RISE

Refugee Struggle For Freedom

||Exact time and place will be announced||

Contact:

English: 015218998331 (whats app)

Deutsch: 015212935253 (whats app)

017656952558:  فارسی

015218998331:  اردو

Türkçe: 017656952558

Français: 01796532100

E-Mail: inforsff@gmail.com

facebook: Refugee Struggle For Freedom

We decided to organize a European caravan which will go from the largest number

of European countries towards Brussels (Belgium), where the European institutions

are settled. Showing that we don’t respect the borders they impose us, holding us

prisonners of the states borders and in the lagers, we will exercise our basic right of

freedom of movement and adress our demands directly where the decisions come

from.

We have a dream :

– Freedom of movement and of residence for all asylum seekers,

– Stop the Dublin trap and the obligatory residence in Lagers throughout Europe

– Permanent documents without criteria (not depending on working contracts

or individual state prosecution)

– Stop the imprisonment and deportation of migrants

– Same working conditions for all

– Same political, social and cultural rights for all: right to study and to work

– Stop the European imperialist policies: no more free trade treaties and NATO wars

– Abolish Frontex, Eurosur and other anti-migration policies and measures

Download MP3 File

Der Rundgang wird von der Germanistin Dr. Marie Onana und der Spoken Word Künstlerin Lahya Aukongo durchgeführt.

Die Teilnahmegebühr für die Rundgänge beträgt 8 Euro. Eine Anmeldung ist nicht erforderlich.

Die Veranstaltung wird in Kooperation mit Berlin Postkolonial e. V. durchgeführt.

https://ReflActionistCollective.noblogs.org

excerpt from the introduction:

1. Introduction: Man spricht Deutsch on the ‘Balkanroute’

Summary: Many activists from Germany started going to the ‚Balkanroute‘ during last summer to support migrants– it seemed like a new trend. After our own trips to the ‚Balkanroute‘, we wanted to reflect more about the connection between this kind of activism and our own privileges. On the one hand, direct signs of political solidarity with migrants1 seemed important. On the other hand, we realized that sometimes our presence and activities stabilized our privileges and the system of white supremacy.

Heading from Belgrade Eastwards to the Croatian border. Stopover in Adaševci, the gas station where most of the migrants are waiting for hours, before continuing their journey by train. While searching for a parking lot for our van, we recognize two other vans: German license plates, full with kitchen equipment, clothing and shoe donations. Some people in their mid-twenties with hoodies and outdoor jackets hang around the cars and smoke. As we approach them, it’s clear very quickly, man spricht Deutsch, the common language is German. The group has just arrived, isn’t quite sure whether they will stay at that border or travel to the Southern Serbian border. Some consider to go to one of the Greek islands as well. Their plans? Cooking food and tea, distributing info material. Pretty much what everyone is doing on the ‘Balkanroute’. Pretty much what we have been doing.

More on:

https://ReflActionistCollective.noblogs.org

“Eritrea’s fierce independence has put it in imperialism’s crosshairs.”

The United States is methodically setting the stage for a so-called “humanitarian” military intervention against the small northeast African nation of Eritrea, under legal pretexts much like those used to justify NATO’s war of regime change against Libya, in 2011. As in Libya, the U.S. has hijacked the United Nations human rights apparatus to claim a “responsibility to protect” (R2P) Eritrea’s citizens from alleged abuses by their own government. War and regime change are the intended result.

Washington engineered UN sanctions against Eritrea, beginning in 2009, on the patently bogus charge that Eritrea’s determinedly secular government provided “political, financial and logistical support” to Islamist Shabaab fighters in Somalia. Islamic jihadism is anathema to Eritrea, whose population of six million on the shores of the Red Sea is about evenly divided between Muslims and Christians. But few people in the United States knew Eritrea existed, much less its secular revolutionary history and politics. The lies stuck, as did the sanctions, even after the UN Human Rights Council conceded there was no further evidence of Eritrean aid to the Shabaab.

A three-person UN panel now alleges that Eritrea is a lawless state that has committed “crimes against humanity,” enslaving up to 400,000 people and engaging in murder, forced disappearances, rape and torture. Mark Smith, the Australian chairman of the UN Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in Eritrea, demands that Eritrea be put on trial before the International Criminal Court, a body that has indicted only Africans – and only those that were on the wrong side of U.S. foreign policy – since its creation in 2002. Smith laid the legal groundwork for the overthrow of the Eritrean government:

There is no genuine prospect of the Eritrean judicial system holding perpetrators to account in a fair and transparent manner. The perpetrators of these crimes must face justice and the victims’ voices must be heard. The international community should now take steps, including using the International Criminal Court [ICC], national courts and other available mechanisms, to ensure there is accountability for the atrocities being committed in Eritrea.

The UN commission demands that Eritrea be put on trial before the International Criminal Court, a body that has indicted only Africans.

In February of 2011, the United Nations Security Council, led by the U.S., Britain and France, referred the case against Libya to the ICC, to provide a criminal justice rationale for the military assault that was already underway against Muammar Gaddafi’s government. This time, Washington has instructed its UN proxies to give “humanitarian” legal cover in advance for an attack on Eritrea. The demonization campaign is built around two Big Lies: one, that Eritrea’s system of national service – a form of draft, which is the right of all nations – amounts to “slavery”; and two, that domestic oppression in Eritrea is a prime source of African refugees to Europe, with the tiny nation allegedly accounting for more cross-continental emigration than every other country except war-ravaged Syria.

National service in Eritrea, as in many other countries, includes not only military duty on the front lines with Ethiopia – which still occupies parts of Eritrea in clear violation of an international arbitration agreement – but also labor in public works projects as well as service in health and education infrastructures. (Most teachers in Eritrea, for example, are national service workers.) Lots of folks would call that socialism or nation-building – which is how the Eritreans see it.

The Eritreans defend extended national service on grounds of necessity, citing an existential threat from the Ethiopian military, backed to the hilt by Washington. Economic sanctions have also necessitated that Eritrea mobilize the population to develop its own national resources. However, self-reliance is also a cornerstone of Eritrean domestic development policy, and seen as central to maintaining true national sovereignty and independence. Eritrea rejects foreign “aid” and entanglements with structures of international capital, and is one of only two nations in Africa that has no relationship with AFRICOM, the U.S. military command on the continent (Zimbabwe is the other).

It is insane to believe that little Eritrea, with only six million people, has set more people to flight than neighboring Ethiopia, one of the poorest countries in the world, with a population 15 times greater.

Eritrea’s fierce independence has put it in imperialism’s crosshairs. Eritrea is “Africa’s Cuba” – and the United States treats it as such in a striking variety of ways. Indeed, the other Big Lie against Eritrea – that it is the second largest contributor to the waves of refugees risking life and limb to reach Europe – is directly related to European immigration policies, urged on them by the U.S., that put Eritrea in much the same bind as U.S. policy towards Cuba.

It is insane to believe that little Eritrea, with only six million people, has set more people to flight than neighboring Ethiopia, one of the poorest countries in the world, now in the throes of a devastating drought, with a population 15 times greater; or neighboring Sudan, also desperately poor and afflicted by multiple wars, with 40 million people; or nearby Somalia, a nation without a state, inhabited by 10 million people. Indeed, economic, political and war refugees from all across Africa claim to be Eritrean because, unlike citizens of any other African country, Eritrean refugees are afforded special status on arrival in Europe as presumptive political refugees who might face torture if returned home. As with U.S. Cuba policy, the Eritrean exception was designed to weaken and destabilize the country through a brain and human resource drain. Inevitably, however, the policy has made Eritrean identification papers the hottest selling documents on the streets of Khartoum and other refugee gathering points. Europe is awash, as is Israel, with fake Eritreans fleeing various military, political and economic catastrophes – most of them rooted in Euro-American foreign destabilization policies and the global capitalist Race to the Bottom.

If Latin Americans could pass for Cubans, the populations of U.S. “Little Havanas” would number in the tens of millions, full of Hondurans, Guatemalans, Salvadorans and Mexicans.

“Economic, political and war refugees from all across Africa claim to be Eritrean.”

Ethiopians pass most easily as Eritreans, since millions of them share the same ethnic background. About half of Eritreans are Tigrayan, the ethnic group that is the fourth largest in Ethiopia and dominates the ruling party in Addis Ababa. The Austrian Ambassador to Ethiopia, Andreas Melan, last year estimated that “among the thousands of Eritrean migrants in Europe, 30 to 40 percent are Ethiopians.” That may be an underestimate. And many more “Eritreans” actually hail from as far away as West Africa.

The Eritrean ambassador to Israel believes that Ethiopians account for half of the purported Eritreans seeking refugee status in that country. “They know the Eritreans automatically receive a six-month visa, so they pretend to be Eritrean,” said the ambassador.

The Eritrean refugee scam is an open secret all across Europe, and is well known to the American and European governments. The Big Lie is maintained to serve imperial purposes, and will now be deployed to justify an armed assault on Eritrea as an alleged mass enslaver and rogue nation. The UN Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in Eritrea will submit its manufactured findings to the Human Rights Council on June 21, setting the imperial lynch mob in motion.

“They know the Eritreans automatically receive a six-month visa, so they pretend to be Eritrean.”

Eritrea cannot expect a fair hearing from a UN apparatus that is puppeteered from Washington. As the Eritrean government stated in its preliminary response to the UN commission’s charges:

The purposes of national service in Eritrea are clearly stated in a legal proclamation of 1994 and are three-fold: national defense, economic and social development and national integration.  The service is not indefinite although for a time and in certain cases it has been prolonged due the already explained existential threat of war.

The commission based its findings on the testimony of about 800 (alleged) Eritreans interviewed in various foreign cities, while ignoring the 42,000 Eritrean expatriates that have petitioned the world body to lift sanctions against their home country.

The UN panel is ignoring what is “effectively a continuing state of war with Ethiopia, the illegal occupation of Eritrean territory which constitutes a flagrant violation of human rights, repeated armed aggression, sanctions and mistaken policies that consider almost all Eritreans asylum-seekers,” said Eritrean government spokesperson Yemane Gebreab. That’s a diplomatic way of putting it. By referring the case to the International Criminal Court, and implicitly threatening military action against Eritrea, the commission has become a warmonger.

On Monday, the New York Times reported that thousands of Ethiopian and Eritrean troops were rushing towards the disputed border, the site of heavy artillery duels. The Times quoted an Eritrean dissident living in Sweden as their expert of the moment. “If there is a war, or the rumor of a war, it could be a way for the Eritrean government to get support and divert attention,” said the dissident. The newspaper also relayed a Twitter message from an Eritrean American in his homeland’s capital. “Here in Asmara, it’s peaceful despite #EthiopianAttacks against #Eritrea on the Tsorona front. And you wonder why there’s national service?”

President Obama seems intent on adding War #8 to his imperial legacy.

Spread the word - Bitte Weiterleiten -

(Text in engl. / german - Please translate to others - Bitte für andere
übersetzen)

KUNDGEBUNG / MANIFESTATION at OranienPLATZ - Berlin

Welcoming WOMEN IN EXILE ON TOUR2016

SATURDAY      13.08.2016

15.00 – 19.00 UHR / 3 – 7 P.M.

Women in Exile & Friends are finishing their Summer Bus Tour 2016 in Berlin. Since 25th of July they have been visiting refugee women all over the country to fight for their rights and against the discrimination they face as women and as refugees.
Berlin's welcoming group for Women in Exile invites you to the rally when they arrive in Berlin!

PROGRAM:
- Statement from Women in Exile
- Some words from supporters
- Photo exhibition from the tour
- Madalenas/Kuringa: Theatre of the Oppressed
- Las puchachitas - feminist Son Jarocho
- Football

AT 6 P.M. DEMONSTRATION: OPLATZ - MARIANNENPLATZ

“WE ARE GETTING LOUDER AND LOUDER! ABOLISH ALL LAGERS!”
(This has been the slogan of the Women in Exile Summer Bus Tour 2016.)

Women in Exile & Friends kommen zum Abschluss ihrer Bustour 2016 nach Berlin. Seit dem 25. Juli haben sie geflüchtete Frauen im ganzen Land besucht und sie ermutigt, für ihre Rechte und gegen Diskriminierungen zu kämpfen.

Die Berliner Willkommensgruppe lädt Euch ein:

Kommt und begrüßt sie mit einer KUNDGEBUNG UND KULTURPROGRAMM!
- Rede von Women in Exile
- Grußworte von Unterstützer*innen
- Fotoausstellung der Bustour
- Madalenas/Kuringa: Theater der Unterdrückten
- Las Puchachitas - feministische Son Jarocho
- Fußball

UM 18.00 UHR - DEMONSTRATION: OPLATZ - MARIANNENPLATZ

“WIR WERDEN IMMER LAUTER! WEG MIT DEN LAGERN!”
(Das war das Motto der Bustour 2016 von Women in Exile.)

link :

https://www.facebook.com/events/2125254107698735/ [1]

The actions will represent a powerful, long-awaited blow against the status quo in what has become the most incarcerated nation on earth. A challenge to mass incarceration and the prison-industrial complex in general, the strikes will focus specifically on the widespread exploitation of incarcerated workers—what the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC) describes as “a call to action against slavery in America.”

The chosen date will mark 45 years since the Attica prison uprising (pictured above), the bloodiest and most notorious US prison conflict. The 1971 rebellion—which involved 1,300 prisoners and lasted five days—and the state’s brutal response claimed the lives of dozens of prisoners and guards. The events left a lasting scar, but have inspired a new generation among today’s much larger incarcerated population.

Tomorrow (August 10), information campaigns, speaking events, and solidarity demonstrations will take place in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Missouri, Illinois, Minnesota, California and elsewhere.

The organizing coalition includes The Ordinary People Society (TOPS), Free Alabama Movement(FAM), Free Virginia Movement, Free Ohio Movement, Free Mississippi Movement, New Underground Railroad Movement (CA), Formerly Incarcerated, Convicted People, and Families Movement (FICPFM), and IWOC—which has chapters across the country and with which I’ve been involved for several years.

FICPFM has scheduled a national conference September 9-10 to coincide with the main strikes, which have also been endorsed by the National Lawyers Guild.

These widespread and coordinated actions haven’t happened overnight; they’re the result of years of struggle by people on both sides of the prison walls. Significantly, it’s incarcerated people who are taking the reins in organizing the strikes this time around—despite intimidation by the state.

If history is an indicator, the state will do all it can to limit media coverage. So organizers inside and outside are organizing communication via YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. The “revolution” may not be televised, but these strikes will be accessible in real-time via social media, despite prison officials’ efforts to keep them hidden.

Leaning on History and Technology

Organizing incarcerated people on such a large scale is unprecedented for a reason. As recently as 2009, during my two-year stay with the Georgia Department of Corrections, simply talking about unions was unthinkable for fear of retaliation and isolation.

Now, not only are incarcerated workers in Georgia and across the country talking about fighting back against an unjust system—they’re actually doing it.

Many of us involved with organizing this wave of strikes weren’t even born when Attica happened. But we do have the twin resources of plenty of history to learn from and modern communications—especially mobile phones and social media—to lean on as we seek to shape resistance.

Attica happened at a time when, like today, racial tensions and conflict between police and people of color and poor people were high. In 1971, the Civil Rights Movement and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X were fresh in the public mind, and the government was systematically targeting and eliminating leaders of more militant groups like the Black Panthers.

Three months before the Attica Uprising, President Richard Nixon had declared his War on Drugs. The combined US state and federal prison population then hovered below 200,000 people.

Through the Reagan and Clinton years—which ramped up the drug war and introduced mandatory minimum sentencing—until today, that number ballooned to over 1.5 million. In total, over 2.2 million people now behind bars—in jail, prison, immigration detention, or youth detention—on any given day.

This makes the United States the world’s number one prison state and massively raises the stakes for organized resistance. Millions of people’s lives and freedom are on the line.

Earlier Uprisings and the Long March to Reform

The few improvements we’ve seen to the US incarceration system have been painfully slow in coming—and they frequently occur only after resistance from inside or public pressure from outside, like the 2009 Rockefeller drug law reforms

The Attica uprising led to sweeping changes in New York’s penal system, but many of the particpants’ grievances remain problems today. The demands of recent prison strikers strongly echo Attica’s Manifesto of Demands and the earlier demands of inmates at Folsom in California: basic medical care; fair pay for work; an end to abuse and brutality by prison staff; fair decisions by parole boards; sanitary living conditions; and adequate and nutritious meals.

One of the clearest, and least known, examples of prison workers striking to improve conditions came from North Carolina Correctional Institute for Women (NCCIW) in 1975, four years after Attica. Incarcerated women there staged a sit-in strike against conditions at the state’s only prison laundry facility.

Their nonviolent protest was met with force by prison guards, who corralled them into a gymnasium and assaulted them. The women fought back, triggering the state to send in 100 guards from other prisons to quell the uprising. The prison resumed normal operations four days after the strike began, but the prison laundry was closed shortly after the incident. [1. & 2.]

The NCCIW strike, the Attica Uprising, and the Lucasville, Ohio prison rebellion of 1993—the only major prison uprising in the US to be resolved peacefully— provide vital lessons for prisoners and their allies on the outside.

Siddique Abdullah Hassan, who participated in the Lucasville uprising and remains incarcerated, was recently interviewed by IWOC members. He expressed the need for solid support from the outside during prisoner resistance:

“[I]t is a sad commentary on our part, meaning both those people behind enemy lines and on the outside who are activists. When people step up to the plate and fight in a righteous cause, I think that we should not leave those people for dead.”

 

2010: A Flashpoint in Georgia

The wave of hunger strikes and work stoppages that have built up to the September 9 coalition began in December 2010, when inmates at six Georgia prisons refused to report for meals and work assignments.

Since almost all the work that allows Georgia’s prison system to function comes from unpaid inmate labor—cooking meals, maintaining facilities, picking up trash, repairing storm damage, and doing other work for county government that would otherwise be filled by members of the community (many incarcerated workers work alongside workers from the free world), even building new prisons and handling administrative tasks for prison officials—the strike made an immediate and lasting impact.

The strikers’ demands were simple and familiar. So was the State’s response. The Georgia Department of Corrections reacted by shutting off water and electricity to the strikers’ living quarters. Most of them quickly succumbed to these harsh measures, but a handful dug in and continue to resist.

The state retaliated against 37 inmates who were identified as organizers with extreme isolation and punishment.

Prison guards at Smith State Prison in South Georgia were captured on film brutally beating Kelvin Stevenson and Miguel Jackson with hammers [caution: graphic violence]. In what prisoners say is a long-running practice, the two men were isolated from public view and denied visits from family members and legal counsel until their wounds healed.

Three Georgia corrections officers were convicted in 2014 for an earlier beating, but justice continues to elude Jackson, Stevenson and their families. The Georgia Department of Corrections responded to the beatings by asking Google to censor the YouTube video.

Four of the original Georgia strikers, now under close security, staged another hunger strike in 2015. This time their only demand was that their security level be reconsidered, per state policy.

The Rising Tide

The Southeast, which incarcerates more of its residents than any other US region, has been a focal point of prison organizing.

Inspired by the actions of their Georgia neighbors, incarcerated workers and supporters in Alabama began organizing work stoppages and hunger strikes of their own under the banner Free Alabama Movement (FAM). Since its inception, FAM has organized for a flurry of work stoppages and minor uprisings at St. Clair, Holman and Staton Correctional Facilities in 2014, 2015 and earlier this year.

FAM organizers explain in this YouTube video why they’re organizing incarcerated workers:

“They [Alabama Dept. of Corrections] not gonna make this man go to school if he needs a GED. They’re not gonna make him get a skill or trade. They’re not gonna make him do the things that will help him be successful when [he] gets back to the streets. They gonna make him work for them and provide free labor. And that’s where Free Alabama Movement comes in.”

FAM developed a manifesto called “Let the Crops Rot in the Fields,” which lays out a framework that’s spread to prisons across the country. Instead of relying on support from the outside or passive actions like hunger strikes, incarcerated workers are utilizing the most powerful tool they have: their labor.

Incarcerated workers are paid pennies an hour—or not at all in Georgia and Texas—for often-backbreaking labor that keeps prisons operating and benefits the state and, increasingly, private corporations.

If they refuse or are unable to work, inmates say they’re subject to punishment, including “isolation, restraint positions, stripping off our clothes and investigating our bodies as though we are animals.”

FAM is also working within the system to enact legislation geared toward improving conditions for incarcerated people in Alabama. They recently presented the Alabama Freedom Bill, which would expand access to education, rehabilitation, and reentry services—services which are already supposed to exist on paper, but rarely do in practice.

Pastor Kenneth Glasgow, a formerly incarcerated person whose organization, The Ordinary People’s Society (TOPS), was a critical player in the early resistance in Georgia and Alabama, says: “They created the School-to-Prison Pipeline, we want to flip that and organize a Re-entry Pipeline.”

Considering the barriers to employment, education and housing created by a criminal record, reentry services are vital, yet the state rarely gives them priority—if they provide them at all.

An Alternative to the Silence of Mainstream Unions 

At a time of high tension, this coalition finds itself at a critical intersection of racial, structural and economic oppression.

Mainstream unions have been largely silent on the issue of inmate labor. In fact, major unions likeAmerican Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), Service Employees International Union (SEIU), American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), and theTeamsters represent corrections officers and police across the country—placing them in direct conflict with prison workers and the most marginalized people in our society.

These unions frequently fight to keep prisons open, even when their members are guaranteed work elsewhere. This effectively puts them in the same boat as private prison companies like Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group, whose contracts often contain quotas which require a certain percentage of beds remain filled.

IWOC currently counts about 1,000 incarcerated members, a number which continues to grow as September 9 approaches. This  makes it the largest area of organizing within Industrial Workers of the World—a labor union controlled directly by workers which operates outside the mainstream union model.

Most, though not all incarcerated people have committed crimes—or at least, what are considered “crimes” under our current system. But they often do so out of necessity, sometimes to support drug problems where treatment or harm reduction services don’t exist and, too often, to support families or just survive in a system which discriminates by race, gender, sexuality and economic status, and robs anyone with a criminal record of opportunities.

Incarcerated workers are still workers, regardless of criminal records. Other than by ending or massively reducing incarceration itself, it is only by building connections between workers behind bars and in the free world that will we begin to reform a system that feeds on human suffering.

A Canary in the Coal Mine

September 9 could be the most powerful call in over a generation to reform—or dismantle—a system that IWOC organizer and Ohio prisoner Sean Swain calls a “third world colony” within the US and a “canary in the coal mine.” Conditions in prison today foreshadow what workers on the outside might face in the future, because the oppression inside is merely an amplified version of the oppression faced by poor people everywhere. In this way and others, this issue impacts allworking people, not just those living in prison.

Most incarcerated people will be released one day. Do we want people who are bitter, humiliated, lacking work skills and education, desperate just to put food on the table and at great risk of reoffending living next door?

Or do we want people who can work, who have ties to their communities, have maintained relationships with loved ones, and who have a vested interest in helping build stronger, more socially and economically just communities when they return home?

If we succeed in making the US pay attention to the events of September 9, it might just help the country decide which of those paths to pursue.

References:

1. The New York Times, “Women Inmates Battle Guards in North Carolina,” June 17, 1975.

2. Dixie Be Damned: 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South, “On the 1975 Revolt at the North Carolina Correctional Center for Women,” Neal Shirley and Saralee Stafford

Jeremy Galloway is harm reduction coordinator at Families for Sensible Drug Policy, program director at Southeast Harm Reduction Project, co-founder of Georgia Overdose Prevention, and a state-certified peer recovery specialist. He lives in North Georgia with his wife and three cats. He writes and speaks regionally about drug policy reform, harm reduction, his experiences, and the importance of including the voices of directly impacted people in policy decisions. His last article for The Influence was “Let’s Abandon the Assumption That If You’ve Been Addicted to a Drug, Total Abstinence Is Essential.”