Black Dove Support Network's New Website

by Tick Monday, Mar. 09, 2009 at 11:13 PM
blackdove@riseup.net

This website is meant to be an online resource for anti-prison organizing and prisoner solidarity work. Here one will find a collection of prisoner news and updates as well as developments on the organizing to abolition prisons. We hope y'all enjoy.

We are proud to announce the launch of the BDSN's new website.

Check it out at Blackdovesn.blogspot.com

Black Dove Support Network

Welcome to the age of prisons. An era which creates a George Orwell-an

notion of fear and imprisonment. This is a period in the U.S. history

where the government may boast of capturing and holding 2.3 million

individuals behind bars. These mass incarcerations are not a

representation of a properly functioning penal system. If that were the

case we would not have the 2.3 million people behind bars. Or the

startling facts which prove people in Black, Latino, and Native American

communities now have a greater chance of going to prison than of a getting

a deceit education. Rather these truths point to a justice system which is

fueled by oppression, racism, and slavery. For instance, after the

abolition of slavery in post civil war America, the south instituted

various laws which basically made living for a Black person impossible.

Laws which outlawed improper spending of money, vagrancy, absence from

work, breech of job contract, possession of firearms and so on. The

punishment for being convicted of one of these “crimes” was to be placed

in a hard labor camp. In other words, back into slavery. So, though

slavery was technically abolished, various southern capitalists used these

laws to legitimatize this form slavery through the states force. Which

ultimatley increased their wealth. These were and are the foundations from

which the current justice system, prison system was built. This is a

system that does not allow race, gender, and/or sexual orientation to be

separate from any conviction. Need we mention the 1 out of every 100

adults in this country that are behind bars? Or of those numbers 1 out of

every 9 Black Americans from the age of 20-34 are behind some from of bars

in this country. This is institutionalized racism. This is internalized

slavery. As early as 1883 Frederick Douglass writer, feminist,

abolitionist had written about the government’s ability “to impute crime

to color,” which is merely highlighting issues that are still completely

relevant today. We must be clear, that it is not our intentions to suggest

we are an authority upon the prison industrial complex, nor that we have

answers to this sherade which dances under the false pretenses of justice.

However, it is our intentions to say this prison system is completely

fucked and as long as the prison industrial complex continues build

prisons at the same rate in which they are filling them. We will raise our

voices and bodies in defiance.

This website is meant to be an online resource for anti-prison organizing

and prisoner solidarity work. Here one will find a collection of prisoner

news and updates as well as developments on the organizing to abolition

prisons. We hope y'all enjoy.



The Black Dove Support Network is a collective group of individuals who

help facilitate prisoner emotional and material needs. The group is

consensus based, with its major emphasis being placed upon the abolition

of all prisons and other forms of state enslavement. This is to be

achieved through the continual rejection of the state and its

interconnected hierarchal oppressive facets. In addition, we maintain

solidarity with all those who oppose the state and its dominant behavior.

If you would like contact us, hit us up at blackdove@riseup.net

Original: Black Dove Support Network's New Website