Former Prisoners In...
- Southern
California have been meeting consistently and plan a regional strategy
session for early fall.
-
Northern California folks met for a report back on the New Orleans
meeting, and mobilized former prisoners for a May 8th rally and lobby
day in Sacramento, demanding “Education not Incarceration.” They are
currently working on a jobs initiative to get ex-felons hired in Oakland
construction projects, and to create a peer training that will teach
procedures for sealing juvenile records and expunging adult criminal
records.
- An
outreach meeting at Free at Last Recovery Center in East Palo Alto. Over
100 people talked about the impact felony convictions have had on their
lives.
- A
video about the history and program of All of Us or None entitled
“Enough is Enough” was produced in September by Eve Goldberg. It is
available for distribution.
-
Ex-prisoners, family members and allies have been meeting monthly in
Oklahoma. They have formed working groups around specific issues, and
are formulating action plans for the state.
-
Organizing meetings of former prisoners/organizers are taking place in
Memphis. Folks from Mississippi have also been attending.
-
Former prisoners-organizers are meeting in Boston to define issues in
their community.
-
Organizers in Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., and Toronto, Canada have
started collecting contact information and recruiting people to
participate.
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About
All Of Us Or None
All of Us Or None is a national
organizing initiative of prisoners, former prisoners and felons, to combat
the many forms of discrimination that we face as the result of felony
convictions. After serving time in torturous conditions, we were met at the
gate with prejudice and discrimination that made our re-entry into society
difficult and in some cases impossible. Many of us recognize that our prison
sentence never ends as longs as the discrimination against us continues.
In the current climate where background checks are becoming more common
place, we have been forced to watch more and more peoples’ spirits broken
and jobs taken. The ugly hidden practice of prejudice is now being openly
instituted through public policy. Many of us find ourselves unable to be
certified regardless of training in our chosen vocational fields. We are
being denied employment opportunities, student loans, access to public
housing. We are subject to lifetime welfare bans, our children are stolen
through fast track adoptions, and we are taxed but denied the right to vote.
People do not hesitate to talk openly about the need for further
discrimination against us. We must organize ourselves to fight against being
reduced to the status of permanent members of an underclass.
Over thirty millions people are walking around with felony convictions.
Seventeen million of us have served time in jails and prisons, and it
estimated that 3 million more of us will be released from prison over the
next five years. Organized, we can shape public policy and our world .
Failure to organize means that from the point of arrest, our punishment will
be life-long.
All of Us or None will also strengthen the voices of people currently
incarcerated so they can speak about the horrendous conditions that we face
while we are in custody of juveniles jails, INS detention centers, and
prisons. So often our pain and suffering go unchecked. Too often people
leave jail or prison and fail to help those we left behind speak about
issues that were terribly important to us when we were prisoners. We must
fight to establish a family bill of rights that will stop telephone
companies from exploiting our loved ones. We must fight to that our family
members have contact visiting, including domestic partners as well as
husbands, wives, children, grandchildren, parents and grandparents. We must
fight to insure that we have the support we need to reunify our families,
and we must fight against the deportation of juveniles away from their
families, and parents away from their children.
All of Us or None means that we must organize across racial, gender, age,
class, and geographic lines in order for us to regain our basic human and
civil rights. We can no longer allow divisions between us when in the end we
all face discrimination. Advocates have spoken for us, but now is the time
for us to speak for ourselves. We clearly have the ability to be more than
the helpless victims of the system. We must build a movement that clearly
shows that our unity is greater than our differences, and our solutions are
greater than our problems.
We need to unite locally and nationally so we can expand our working
relationships. We need to communicate through inter-state coalitions to
defeat specific aspects of discrimination that occur in every state, like
one-strike evictions, the welfare ban, and Three Strikes laws. We need to
share successful strategies and lessons learned from work in our local
communities. We need a platform of action so we can combine our efforts to
strategize around the following questions:
- How do we eliminate the lifelong
punishment that is the result of felony convictions?
- How do we effectively pressure local,
state and federal government to develop policies and to make resources
and services available to formerly incarcerated persons, in order to
insure the greatest likelihood of success upon release?
- How do we change the public perception
of who we are? How do we show our successes instead of allowing the
media and others to focus only on our failures?
- How do we stop profiteers and
governmental agencies from gouging innocent families and friends
(surcharges on collect telephone calls and other service) while their
loved ones are incarcerated?
- How do we overcome the fear and heal the
shame associated with being a convicted felon or formerly incarcerated?
- How do we effectively advocate for
alternatives to incarceration?
- How do we change society’s over-reliance
on incarceration and stop the expansion of the Prison Industrial
Complex?
- How do we stop politicians and others
from using crime rates and parole to advance their careers?
- How do we advocate against human rights
abuses for our sisters and brothers left behind the walls?
- How do we develop a national body of
formerly incarcerated persons and felons so that our voices will
continue to reverberate?
Here are some of things you can immediately
do to help:
- Stop hiding your felony status if it is
not life-threatening to do so. The successful among us must be seen as
more than the exceptions.
- Organize other former felons to discuss
the impact of their felony convictions on their lives. Organize an All
of Or None Meeting.
- Contact us by telephone, E-mail or
letter.
- Share this brochure with other former
prisoners or felons.
- Visit our Web site,
www.allofusornone.org.
- Help build a base so we can impact the
public policies and the private prejudices that destroy our futures.
It’s OUR responsibility to stop the
discrimination, and to change the public policies that discriminate against
us, our families, and our communities. |
All Of Us Or
None
By Bertolt Brecht
Slave, who is it
that shall free you?
Those in deepest darkness lying.
Comrade, only these can see you
Only they can hear you crying.
Comrade, only slaves can free you.
Everything or nothing. All of us or none.
One alone his lot can't better.
Either gun or fetter.
Everything or nothing. All of us or none.
You who hunger, who shall feed you?
If it's bread you would be carving,
Come to us, we too are starving.
Come to us and let us lead you.
Only hungry men can feed you.
Everything or nothing. All of us or none.
One alone his lot can't better.
Either gun or fetter.
Everything or nothing. All of us or non
Beaten man, who
shall avenge you?
You, on whom the blows are falling,
Hear your wounded brothers calling.
Weakness gives us strength to lend you.
Come to us, we shall avenge you.
Everything or nothing. All of us or none.
One alone his lot can't better.
Either gun or fetter.
Everything or nothing. All of us or none.
Who, oh wretched one, shall dare it?
He who can no longer bear it.
Counts the blows that arm his spirit.
Taught the time by need and sorrow,
Strikes today and not tomorrow.
Everything or nothing. All of us or none.
One alone his lot can't better.
Either gun or fetter.
Everything or nothing. All of us or none.
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about
us 