• of a Generation

In 2014 nearly 2.5 million people are locked up in U.S. prisons.

• That is 25% of all people imprisoned in the world!

60% of those prisoners are Black and Latino, among them, hundreds of thousands of women.

Growth of the prison population • From 300,000 in the 1970s

– it’s about 1000% higher today.

• The numbers of women in prison have increased 800% in the past 30 years.

• Along with this the epidemic of police brutality and murder.

• This is the criminalization of youth!

2.5 million in prison + 7.0 million on probation or parole + millions of families members = The outrageous math of MASS INCARCERATION 32% of Black men 20 to 29 years old are in prison, on parole or on probation on any given day!

Millions of immigrants have been detained and deported – including young children

Black and Latino youth of this country have a target on their backs.

Mass incarceration, police terror, criminalization = a slow genocide.

Stolen Lives – 1000s killed by police

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

The struggle of Black people for Civil Rights and liberation in the 1960s

Awoke the country, especially the youth and put resistance and revolution in the hearts of millions.

Anti-war soldiers

Farmworkers

It was the catalyst for powerful movements of . . .

Students and VeteransWomen

Chicano youth

Black Liberation

The response of the Nixon regime was to find a way to crush the resistance of the Black community without appearing too obvious about it. Thus beganthe “war on drugs” . . .

Under Reagan the “War on Drugs” was fully implemented. Mass incarceration did not arise from an epidemic of crime – it has grown beside the militarization of police and the criminalization of whole peoples.

In the 1980s and 1990s factories in the U.S. were shut down and production moved to other, low wage countries. Millions of people in the inner city were left with no jobs, no future except . . .

• What we now know as the New Jim Crow:

• Mass incarceration• Police terror• Criminalization

School cutbacks, privatization of education, children treated as criminals – even tried in adult courts =

school as a pipeline to prison.

Prison spending

School spending

The construction of super max prisons, the so-called Special Housing Units (SHU) and long periods of solitary confinement.

10s of thousands of U.S. prisoners are kept, sometimes for years, in conditions the United Nations describes as TORTURE.

Immigration detention in the U.S. has grown fast. In 2011, the Department of Homeland Security held 429,000 immigrants in over 250 facilities across the country

Obama has earned the title “Deporter-in-Chief having deported 2 million immigrants, including children from Central America put on a fast track to deportation.

Militarization: Police & the Border

Border Patrol agents have increased in number from 9,800 in 2001 to 21,400 in 2012

In 2014 the United States army gave away 13,000 armored trucks to the Department of Homeland Security which then gave them to local police forces across the U.S.

• Many of the conditions for genocide – isolation & demonization of certain groups, brutality & criminalization & massive incarceration – already exist.

• Genocide does not require a master plan but a build up of oppression and brutality that goes unchallenged.

• A slow Genocide could become a fast one.• The slide toward such horrors must be

stopped with RESISTANCE!

• Two major hunger strikes in 2011 and 2013 led by prisoners in the Special Housing Unit at Pelican Bay prison in California were joined by more than 30,000 prisoners around the state and country

RESISTANCE!

• Powerful protests to STOP “Stop & Frisk” mobilized thousands in New York, forcing the government to take a step back. RESISTANCE!

. Important outbreaks of struggle in the wake of the murders of Oscar Grant in Oakland, Trayvon Martin in Florida and Andy Lopez in Santa Rosa, California.

RESISTANCE!

Struggles have broken out in response to the police murders of ---Eric Garner, New YorkAlejandro Nieto, San FranciscoOmar Obrego, Los AngelesEzell Ford, Los AngelesCarlos Mejia, Salinas, CaliforniaYanira Serrano, Half Moon Bay, CaliforniaJames Boyd, Albuquerque, New Mexico And many more police murders across the country -

RESISTANCE!

FERGUSON!

Taking Resistance to a new level.

Justice for Michael Brown!

Carl Dix: A revolutionary CommunistCornel West: A revolutionary Christian activist.

Carl Dix and Cornel West helped initiate the Stop Mass Incarceration Network

And the October Month of Resistance to Mass Incarceration, Police Terror, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation:

“The October Month of Resistance must be like a giant STOP sign stuck right in the face of American society, day after day, so that it can’t be covered up, whited out, or ignored,or neutralized or suppressed”.”

IF you’re treated like a suspect, a gang banger or drug dealer just because of the color of your skin, IF you’ve had a friend or loved one killed by police, IF you, or a loved one, is one of 2.4 million locked up, or in the clutches of the criminal “Injustice” system, IF you, or your family are targeted, detained or deported cuz you came from “Somewhere Else”, OR, IF YOU JUST HATE how other people are treated and want it to STOP, Then . . . YOU must ACT!

Spread the Stop Mass Incarceration Pledge of Resistance:

Today we pledge: Black lives matter. Latino lives matter. All lives matter.• Mass incarceration: WE SAY NO MORE!• Police murder: WE SAY NO MORE!• Torture in the prisons: WE SAY NO MORE!• Criminalization of generations: WE SAY NO MORE!• Attacks on immigrants: WE SAY NO MORE! We will NOT be silent. We WILL resist! Until these shameful horrors really are... NO MORE

Alice Walker's Garden

Links to STOP MASS INCARCERATION materials

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7l3W4-Xs0U&authuser=0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCy-t-c-5lI&authuser=0

Videos of Cornel West and Carl Dix

Alice Walker’s poem “Gather”

Stop Mass Incarceration website:

Stopmassincarceration.net

Stop Mass Incarceration pledge of resistance poster

Revolution newspaper