police-jobs-suck.com:

Would you wear a uniform that evokes fear & distrust in your neighbors?

Would you risk your mental well-being, affecting you & your loved ones?

Would you be comfortable with helping send someone to prison for years because of a petty parole violation or non-violent offence?

Would you participate in actions that split apart families?

Are there other ways you can build safety, beyond policing, in your community?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/8465104

The allegations against L.B., made by an anonymous caller at 4:45 a.m. that day, were false. These included that she was a stripper (she worked at a home for people with disabilities); that she used drugs (none were found, and a drug test was negative for all substances); and that an abusive man lived with her and that she owned “machine guns” (after an exhaustive search and interrogation, both claims were deemed baseless).

In fact, L.B. has never been found to have committed any type of child maltreatment, ACS and court records show.

Yet the anonymous caller, whom L.B. believes to be a former acquaintance with a grudge, has continued to dial in to New York’s state child welfare hotline. Each time, this person or possibly people make outlandish, often already-disproven claims about her, seeming to know that doing so will automatically trigger a government intrusion into her domestic life.

And ACS obliges: Over the past three years, the agency either has inspected her home or examined and questioned her son at school more than two dozen times. Caseworkers have sought a warrant for only three of these searches, most recently in August. All of those requests have been rejected by judges, according to court records.

In recent days, scientists from the School of Plant Sciences at Tel Aviv University have announced that they have recorded with special ultrasound-sensitive microphones the screams of pain that plants emit when they are cut or when they lack water. In Gaza there are no microphones.

Giorgio Agamben, October 30, 2023

Via /u/IWWUpstateNewYork on Reddit

In Part 1, Dr. Rodríguez explains his belief that abolition is our obligation, touching on the development of anti-Black algorithms used to keep people in prison, what it means to be vulnerable in the context of doing this work and how vulnerability is the starting point for an abolitionist practice, and the profound impact that Robert Allen’s book Black Awakening in Capitalist America had on shaping Dylan’s own thinking.

Excerpt:

The notion of “double punishment”, also known as “banishment”, refers to the process undergone by foreign nationals sentenced to a prison term who, at the end of their sentence, are then transferred directly to a closed centre in order to be repatriated to their country of origin. These are not just a few isolated cases, since the double sentence affects a very large proportion of people held in closed centres. The over-representation of foreign nationals and undocumented migrants in prisons is mainly due to the treatment they receive from a racist police force that acts on the basis of race, and to the precarious living conditions in which the authorities keep them, forcing them to expose themselves to repression.

For petty bourgeoise aspirationals and the ultra-wealthy, the NPIC provides the perfect platform for the co-optation of our mass movements. Protests become photo opportunities; elements of resistance and revolution are appropriated to market an individual's brand or NGO to philanthropists, funders, and sponsors. Brand recognition is key. Locally, we’ve witnessed executive directors and NGO boards claim police abolition, only to turn around and hire ex-police officers to perform union busting on their behalf. We’ve seen blatant misogynists and homophobes win the title of “Activist of the Year” throughout a near-endless stream of self-congratulatory awards ceremonies. Milwaukee suffers an ongoing plague of micro-celebrity activists, bolstered by an NPIC culture that actively blocks opportunities for effective, revolutionary organizing. Our point is simplistic, the conclusion feels trite, but it’s a message Milwaukeeans need to hear. If any real work is to get done, the NPIC and career/celebrity activism need to be abandoned or eventually destroyed.

Prison industrial complex abolition is “a political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment." — Critical Resistance

Abolition requires us examine and do away with the ways in which all systems and institutions replicate methods of surveillance and punishment as a means of social control. Resources in this section cover fundamental concepts of abolition and histories of what it looks like in practice.

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From Prison Radio's Instagram.

Today, more than ever, it remains crucial to center any discussion about Palestinian liberation through the lens of abolition and a complete rejection of carcerality. In this context, Incarceration is not only related to prisons and prisoners, but touches upon every aspect of our life. From the moment of birth, Palestinians must contend with being criminalized for existing. We are surveilled and censored, our oppression normalized, and our bodies corralled into various open-air and closed prisons.