South Los Angeles residents who have experienced incarceration and their families will share their stories and related materials documenting how prison has affected our lives, our families, and our communities across generations at a half-day event. The day will feature community story circles; collection of pictures, letters, journals, state-issued gear, prison IDs, and other materials; a performance by the ISLA percussion group featuring Afro-Cuban drumming, and an art exhibit. The event will take place at the Southern California Library, 6120 S. Vermont Avenue, Los Angeles, on Saturday, August 27, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Admission is free and refreshments will be offered. Childcare available. All are welcome. For more information, call 323-759-6063 or check the web at www.socallib.org.
Returning to the Community
The items collected will become part of a permanent collection archived and available to the public at the Southern California Library, along with oral histories previously collected from those re-entering society from prison and from extreme poverty/homelessness. The event is offered in light of California?s soaring prison population over the last two decades, with overwhelming numbers of people returning on release to areas like greater South L.A., which has one out of four of L.A. County?s parolees but only 10 percent of the population, with little to no re-entry services.
Even as the crime rate has fallen, rates of imprisonment?and rates of spending on incarceration?have increased. The government chooses to spend ,000 every minute, or over billion a year, to deal with social problems associated with poverty?like homelessness, mental illness, addiction, joblessness, and school dropout?by locking people up. This approach has not solved the problems; it has, if anything, intensified them, ripping apart communities like South L.A. across generations. By seeing problems, rather than people, we are missing opportunities to invest in our communities so that we can begin to repair ourselves. Connecting to the real stories behind the statistics will help us learn how we can offer people options instead of incarceration.
The event is sponsored by the Southern California Library, a people?s library located in South Los Angeles. The Library was founded over 40 years ago and offers rich historical and contemporary resources on community change, particularly in Los Angeles. The day is part of the Library?s South L.A. project, ?From Generation to Generation: Making Things Better in South L.A., which invites people to ?listen for a change,? engaging residents and others in defining and responding to community conditions. Part of the California Council for the Humanities? ?Communities Speak? program, the ?Generations? project is funded by the CCH and the California Community Foundation.
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