• of a Generation

In 2015 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 Veterans

Women

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 MexicoJohn Crawford III, Beavercreek, OhioAnd many more police murders across the

country – RESISTANCE!

FERGUSON!

Took Resistance to a new level.

Justice for Michael Brown!

The defiant ones of Ferguson woke the country.

Thousands took to the streets to stop the murder of Black and Brown people at the hands of the police

They blocked highways and bridges . . .

Marched through malls – stopped business as usual . . .

Mall of the Americas

Held die-ins everywhere

Philadelphia

Los Angeles Medical Students

White coats for Black Lives

At 70 Medical schools:

From athletes to symphony halls . . .

Standing against injustice

This was a rising

long past due & a

real advance in the

struggle to stop

these outrages!

But the horrors have not ended

And our people are still being murdered:

Tamir Rice (12) ClevelandJohn Crawford III (25) DaytonCamaron Tillman (14) LouisianaLaquan McDonald (17) ChicagoCarey Smith-Viramontes (18) Long BeachJeffrey Holden (18) Kansas CityMiguel Benton (19) GeorgiaLevi Weaver (18) GeorgiaKaren Cifuentes (19) OklahomaSergio Ramos (18) DallasRashad McIntosh (19) Chicago Diana Showman (19) San JoseDillan McGrae (18) Jackson, Tennessee Antonio Zambrano Montes (35) Pasco, WashingtonAND MANY, MANY MORE since Ferguson . . .

Like Antonio Zambrano Montes, a farmworker in Pasco, Washington executed by three police on February 10, 2015.

Arrests, repression and lies -- the “powers that be” . . .

want to shut down the protests.

Heavy charges and fines have been placed against some protesters, for example the BART protesters in Oakland, Noche Diaz in New York.

Proposals from the halls of power want to criminalize protests as a form of “terrorism”.

The media has used the killing of two Brooklyn police to turn reality upside down and portray police as the “real victims”. Murdered police are victims of “senseless killings” while killings by police of Black and brown youth are always justified.

“One was a newlywed, the other a dad of two sons who had just celebrated his 40th birthday a week ago.”Portraits emerged of the two -officers slain in a senseless Brooklyn ambush Sunday, men who were liked and respected . . . “ -- New York Post

We are now at a crossroads . . .Which way will we go?

Passivity in the face of more brutality and murder?

Or take the struggle to a new level!!

Carl Dix: A revolutionary Communist

Cornel West: A revolutionary Christian activist.

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

Have initiated a call to make April 14, 2015 a day to take our movement back!NO WORK! NO SCHOOL!NO BUSINESS AS USUAL!

DEMANDS FOR APRIL 14

THE MURDER OF BLACK AND BROWN PEOPLE BY THE POLICE MUST STOP.

JUSTICE FOR ALL VICTIMS OF BRUTAL, MURDERING POLICE.

INDICT, CONVICT AND SEND KILLER COPS TO JAIL, THE WHOLE DAMN SYSTEM IS GUILTY AS HELL.

STOP THE REPRESSION TARGETING THE PROTESTS –DROP ALL THE CHARGES AGAINST ALL THOSE ARRESTED.

All of us must act on April 14 to

declare loudly:

We will not go back!

Stop the police murder of our

people!

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

The murdered youths of Mexico (Ayotzinapa) and the U.S. (Ferguson) are victims of the same

criminal system.

Mexico City, summer 2014

Washington DC summer2014

Links to STOP MASS INCARCERATION materials

Carl Dix on No Business as Usual April 14 Video

Alice Walker’s poem “Gather”Alice Walker's Garden

Stop Mass Incarceration pledge of resistance Poster

Revolution newspaper Website

Uncle Bobby and the Pledge of Resistance Video

Stopmassincarceration.net Website