Activists rally to stop Massachusetts prison expansion

Hundreds of prison reform activists gathered on Boston Common on Saturday to call on state lawmakers to enact criminal justice legislation that spends less money on building prisons and provides more support services including education and job training. The event was part of the ongoing Jobs Not Jails campaign.

Hundreds of prison reform activists gathered on Boston Common on Saturday afternoon to show state lawmakers that prison policy must be changed and to decry the estimates from Gov. Deval Patrick’s office that the state will spend $2 billion by 2020 to build 10,000 new prison units, as well as $150 million each year to fill them.

Organized by the Jobs Not Jails coalition the event, dubbed “Rally to End Mass Incarceration and Fund Job Creation,” also gave activists a stage to express outrage that Massachusetts has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world and more than 60 percent of prisoners released from the jails in the state recidivate within three years.

Those rallying and organizations such as Jobs Not Jails coalition organizer Ex-Prisoners and Prisoners Organizing for Community Advancement, Families for Justice and Healing and Boston Workers’ Alliance, joined an estimated 80 other groups from across the state on Boston Common. Other groups varied from nonprofits that support the formerly incarcerated to family service providers to religious organizations.

“This rally is just the beginning of everything we are working for,” EPOCA organizer and event emcee Cassandra Bensahih told the gathered crowd to kick of the event. “Thank you for standing together today for change.”

Jobs Not Jails is pushing for a reduction in prison spending and funneling the resulting savings into jobs and employment programs that can help the formerly incarcerated during re-entry into the working world and help reduce recidivism rates in the state. Activists point out that other states — including New York, Washington and Texas — have overhauled their criminal justice systems and thus reduced prison populations and closed prisons.

Sunni Ali of the Boston Workers Alliance belabored this point when he spoke to the rally.

“This is a terrible condition that is going on because mass incarceration has defined what is going on in our state today,” Ali said. “We have mass incarceration of people that are being unjustly accused of things and given time for non-violent crimes that is just the same as the time given for armed robbery — 10 to 15 years.

“The state has money to build prisons, so why don’t they have money to build jobs, to make jobs not jails. We need education, we need job training and we need help in the industry for employment,” he added.

The rallying point for activists on Saturday include many of the following prison reforms: ending mandatory minimum drug sentences; diversion of low-level drug offenders to treatment even before trial; eliminating counterproductive “collateral sanctions” such as an automatic driver’s license suspension for drug offenses, and high fees for probation, parole, court costs and telephone charges; reforming the systems of parole and probation; bail reform; restoring educational programs including vocational education as well as college-level courses in prisons and jails.

“Every day more than 5,000 women and men are jailed pre-trail, that is they have not been convicted of anything — 5,000 here in the state of Massachusetts. Most are held for months only because they do not have the money for bail, often as little as $500,” said Andrea James, a lead organizer for the Roxbury-based Families for Justice and Healing. “We are advocating for a cost-effective criminal justice system that ensures the human rights of residents as well as public safety. We are working to create alternatives, such as pre-trail services and community-based wellness alternatives, instead of building new jails. We are proposing pre-trail services that begin at the initial arrest when tax dollars can be most effectively spent and intervention is most effective.”

James stressed that state lawmakers must put a stop to legislation that is currently pending to build more jails. “We got it slowed down. We need everybody to stand with us to say: ‘We need jobs. We need health care. We need housing. We need education for our children. We need everything, but we do not need more jails,” she added.

Several speakers target the criminal justice system and its impact on the state’s youth.

“We need to stop feeding the prison-industrial complex. We need to concentrate on our kids from K through 12. They are being sent straight to prison via the criminalization of our youth through discipline and unfair disciplinary action in our schools. Stop suspending our kids, stop arresting our kids. Get the cops out of our schools,” said Vira Douangmany Cage, of the Massachusetts ACLU. “Stop arresting our future. Stop arresting our kids.”

“If you are asking the white power structure for jobs, that is only a temporary solution,” said Ivan Richiez of Youth Against Mass Incarceration. “What we are demanding for, begging for at this point, will not resolve the problem. It only seeks to solve the problem for you and me right now, but not for our children. And as long as we accept a temporary solution, the problem will go unsolved.

“Today we stand here on the Boston Common ground to say that the whole system is entirely flawed. We know it is. We have all the power to address it and to change it,” he added. “When this campaign succeeds — and it will — it will be one step towards ending a system that feeds off of inequity, fear and racism.”

Larry Turner of EPOCA called for around-the-clock, community-based intervention programs and programs that replace juvenile court and imprisonment to address the criminal justice problem at its root with youth.

The rally also drew out political candidate Maura Healy, who is running for Massachusetts Attorney General. Healy said she was on hand to support prison reform efforts and pledge her action on that regard as attorney general.

“It is so heartwarming to see all of you out here today, speaking out and speaking up for a cause that is so important. I am proud to be with you today and to stand with you today and, as your next attorney general, you will have a partner in that office who will lead on this reform. I promise you that,” she said. “I understand what happens when too many lives get embroiled in and cannot get out of a criminal justice system that is not working, that is failing to you, failing our families and failing our communities.

“If we’re going to talk about economic inequality; if we’re going to talk about closing achievement gaps; if we’re going to talk about everybody in this state, every resident having an opportunity for housing education, health care and the like — we can’t have that conversation unless we talk about needed criminal justice reform.”

In addition to the rally, Jobs Not Jails also has plans this week to have a smaller group of activists march on the State House and publicly present a petition calling for criminal justice reform, halting the construction of new prison units until reform is in place and re-directing the $2 billion planned for prison expansion into a jobs program. Jobs Not Jails organizers say the petition is on track to collect about 30,000 signatures by the end of the month.

Reverend Paul Robeson Ford, senior pastor of the Union Baptist Church in Cambridge, spoke to the Banner just before addressing the gathered crowd on Boston Common about why his church was supporting the Jobs Not Jails campaign.

“This is just so important because people have to get organized, have to lift up their voice, to let elected leaders know, to let communities know that we are concerned about the state of people coming back home, people who are looking for opportunities, people who are looking for jobs, for the opportunity to flourish not floundering,” Ford said. “And the Jobs Not Jails campaign and what it is seeking to do is one of the steps that moves in that direction because as long as we have our focus on building prisons, building juvenile detention centers, focusing all the money on law enforcement without also looking at rehabilitation, restoration, job training and building people up we are going to continue to have the type of challenges that we do right now that undermine public safety, tear at the fabric of communities, disproportionately affect black and brown communities and create a real moral injustice.”