The gist is that prisons suck, the long version will follow

Just had another one of those days so long that I forget it had a beginning.

It did, though. For the first time during my stay, it was raining and I spent a long time fumbling in the dark for clothes before I finally got out at a quarter till eleven. New York feels pessimistic when it's rainy, and the wind blew my umbrella out, but the QEJ office was warm as always.

I spent the first hour coding data to the question, "How do you keep yourself and others safe?" and got to have a check-in with my boss Reina. She's an exceptional listener, I'm trying to take pointers. She makes you feel like what you've got to say is of the utmost importance, and takes notes on it in her book even if we're just talking about our weekends. Today, she updated me on a bunch more meetings I'll be going to this week, and gave me a stack full of literature to prep me for them. Besides the education I'm getting from working on the research, I've had an extensive schooling on all of the issues QEJ works with from Reina, Michelle and the people in the office. And today's pile was not the easiest material to get through.

First, there were essays on how reproductive rights are an LGBTQ issue. I'd never thought about this, and just assumed that because those rights concern the liberal ideology, LGBTQ people probably cared about them. I'm going to post an essay here tomorrow, but for now I'll explain what I internalized: it's not so much that LGBTQ people should have the right to terminate pregnancies, as per the reproductive rights headlines in the mainstream media, but that LGBTQ people should have a right to HAVE children. This includes being able to adopt where we want, but adoption and fertilization techniques are expensive. It's simpler than that - LGBTQ people have the right to not be sterilized.

This is where my readings on the Prison Industrial Complex, or the PIC, come in. Prisons in the U.S. also function as population control, because the people inside them are disproportionately people who are low-income, of color, LGBTQ or disabled. Inside prisons, people can't have children. And when they come out, they don't have the same rights, and so they often end up back in prison. But back to sterilization - a trans person who goes into the prison system isn't going to be put in the men or women's space based on what gender he/she/zie identifies OR the marking on the birth certificate - the person is going to be put where their genitalia matches. Pay no mind that a trans woman in a male shelter is much more likely to be sexually assaulted - the prison system's main goal is that nobody gets pregnant. If that's not enough, the social security system also tries to sterilize trans people. In order for people to change the gender on their cards, they need to have a specific kind of sexual reassignment surgery - bottom surgery - that sterilizes them. There are many types of gender reassignment practices that people can take, and much less invasive ones, like hormones, where they can have biological children down the line.

It gets worse. Most of the time, the PIC doesn't let trans people who are on hormone therapy continue it when they're in prison. This completely messes up the body, and causes confusion and humiliation. Prisoners can beg the guards to let them in the correct gender facilities, but guards only let them change with gender reassignment surgery of the genitals, but don't offer them access to those services. It gets brutal, people. There are cases - and by no means isolated cases - of trans people in prison taking matters into their own hands. Yes, they perform their own genital reassignment surgery in prison. Which is, needless to say, dangerous and sometimes fatal.

I also learned about hate crimes legislation. Sounds nice, right? Except that the legislation puts even more people into the criminal justice system, without dealing with their homophobia, transphobia or psychological issues. It's a straightforward idea, but listen to this - the legislation sends them to prison. Who's disproportionately waiting for them in prison? LGBTQ people, and all of the other oppressed minorities. If they're a trans person in the wrong gender section of the shelter, they may even be in the same cell.

And just as a side note, these prison systems - they're not just there to house "criminals." Whole systems of economy are based on them, and they are often built for the sole purpose of providing jobs to the builders who build them, the guards who guard them, the people who feed the prisoners, etc. Out there in this free nation of ours, there are even prisons that the government charters for private businesses to build. Guess how much accountability there is in those prisons?

These are just a couple of examples, and I read about so much more. I want to share all of it. In the end, we have to imagine a world where there is a completely different prison complex, and there are different systems of power, and that almost sounds science-fiction-y in the context of our reality. But it's what the people oppressed by this system do, every day. Reina reminded me that we don't have to be hopeless. We all just have to be conscious, and ready for change.

After my reading, I got to take a trip to Bluestockings, a famous activist, anarchist and queer bookstore/cafe. A group in QEJ called Connecting Communities is looking into making a zine, which is an artsy magazine, with some of the survey data combined with an emotional, personal twist. I poured over the zines, eagerly identifying different design elements that would work for them - interactive features, shorts, poetry - and it made me miss my journalism days so much. I don't want them to be over. So they won't be. Good, glad that's decided.

Again traveling into a different class world, I went to the upper west side to meet cousins I've never seen before for dinner. They were lovely, and musical, and big shots. The father owns a recording company, famous for the Kidz Bop compilations (yeah, they're still happening) and apparently, although I didn't know this, representing some of my favorite singer-songwriters. He asked me if I knew Dar Williams, and I said that of course I did. I was listening to "Iowa" on the subway to his house. "Yeah," he said, "Dar and I were just talking about 'Iowa' on the phone earlier today - she decided she's not going to re-record it for her new album." No big deal.

I had a pleasant cab ride home (I splurged because it's on the opposite end of town) with a man from Guinea. Cab conversations are my favorite. This man talked to me about systems of power in his home country - some things are sadly predictable - and how he wants to go back to school. "Good luck with all you do," he told me as I got out, and I said back, "Go to Guinea and change things!" before grabbing my umbrella. He laughed and said he'd do his best. And that's really all that we can do, all of us individuals making tiny rebellions against systems of oppression that have wound their way around billions of people for as long as we can remember.