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WANTED - ARTWORK BY PRISONERS - Please broadcast widely to your friends behind bars...
- Wisconsin Books to Prisoners was the recipient of a powerful set of posters created by 20 printmakers from the JUSTSEEDS Visual Resistance art collective. These posters were created in anticipation of the 10th anniversary of Critical Resistance, a prison abolitionist movement, and call attention to the human rights catastrophe in U.S. jails and prisons, and the use of policing, prisons and punishment as a solution to social, political and economic problems.
The posters and artwork by prisoners will be displayed at Project Lodge,817 E Johnson St., Madison, at the end of January 2009. Art that addresses the condition of prisons and the daily drudgery and cruelties of prison life would be particularly appreciated.
Please do not send anything that you want returned or is not copyright free. Also, please let us know how you wish to be (or not be) identified.We welcome artwork year around,but for this show the due date is: January 1st, 2009.
Please send artwork: Wisconsin Books to Prisoners, Rainbow Bookstore, 426 W. Gilman St. Madison, WI 53703 wisconsinbookstoprisoners@yahoo.com
Learn more about the work of the Wisconsin Books to Prisoners:
Bill Christofferson on WNPJ Weblog: Time was when politicians who wanted to show their anti-crime bona fides would rail about how prisoners were watching color television -- or any television at all. In Wisconsin these days they don't even want prisoners to read books.
In 2007 Wisconsin Books To Prisoners began a LGBT Project thanks to a starter grant from the New Harvest Foundation of Madison. This project sends new and used books to LGBT prisoners nationwide, addressing an often marginalized and mistreated segment of the national prison system. New Harvest has twice renewed its support during which the Project has grown from seven prisoners who had requested LGBT materials in mid 2007 to over 860 LGBT prisoners who have received at least one package of books today. WBTP is grateful to NHF and also to OutReach LGBT Community Center in Madison for their support and continued donations.
"The Department of Corrections has rejected a proposal to restart a Shakespeare Behind Bars program that operated successfully in a Racine prison for four years," reports WI Public Radio.
While DOC officials claim there is no evidence the plays reduce recidivism, director Dr. Jonathan Shailor disagrees. If DOC's criterion of "evidence-based practice" was applied to all prison activities, then the prison's softball games and poetry readings would also be cancelled, he says. Moreover, 80% of the inmates at Racine Correctional Institution were not involved in education programs last year, even though there is overwhelming evidence that education in prison leads to lower rates of recidivism.
States across the country are taking a hard look at "Supermax" prisons and the widespread use of solitary confinement at those facilities, citing high costs, lawsuits and new research that shows that the Supermax model doesn't reduce prison violence. Illinois will be closing its Supermax facility, saying $26 million cost of the prison - about $62,000 per inmate per year - could no longer be justified in a time of budget crisis. Mississippi has cut the number of prisoners kept in solitary confinement by nearly 90 percent, and Colorado reduced the number of prisoners in solitary by half in the past year and will shut down a Supermax facility that is only two years old. In Maine,
For WNPJ's 20th anniversary, a grassroots lobby day was held on February 23, 2011. One of the focus issues was the opposition of Arizona-like Anti-Immigration Policies. Below is information that was created for the lobby day and to help with on-going advocacy.
Issue Backgrounder: Earned Release Program
A bill to end use of the death penalty landed on the desk of Illinois Governor Pat Quinn (left) on January 11, after a 32-25 Senate vote. Governor Quinn has not yet signed the bill, and Amnesty International is urging citizens of all states to email the Governor to urge him to make Illinois one of the growing number of states which ban the death penalty (New Mexico became the most recent state to abolish the death penalty in 2009.)
In a victory for justice that has been 20 years in the making, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed into law SB 3539, a bill that adds Illinois to the ranks of 15 other states that have abolished the death penalty. Quinn's predecessor, Governor George Ryan, placed all executions on hold after a series of high-profile cases in which death-row inmates were found to be innocent or the victims of police wrongdoing. Explaining his decision to commute the sentences of 15 death-row prisoners to life in prison without any chance of release, Quinn told the Chicago Sun Times that "once the decision was made to sign the law abolishing the death penalty, it should be abolished for all." The Illinois Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty has set up an online form here to allow you to send a message of thanks to Governor Quinn and the bill's sponsors.
More than 500 federal inmates won release from prison last week, due to a change in federal sentencing policy which brought sentences for crack cocaine closer to the penalties for powder cocaine. (Photo: Susan Cardwell hugs her brother Darryl Flood as he arrives at a bus station in Woodbridge, Va., after his release.) The disparity in sentences for crack versus powder had long been criticized as racially discriminatory because it disproportionately affected black defendants. The Fair Sentencing Act passed by Congress in 2010 and signed by President Obama reduced the disparity for future cases, and this summer the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which sets federal sentencing policy, decided to apply the act to inmates already serving time. The releases are the result of months of work by public defender offices around the country, which reviewed hundreds of files of potentially affected inmates.Gil Halsted of Wisconsin Public Radio reports...
608-250-9240, Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice, 122 State Street, Suite 405A, Madison, WI 53703, Send an email to the office diane@wnpj.org.
WNPJ is a member of the Community Shares of Wisconsin.
