The impact of mass incarceration on families

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Submitted by T. Forsyth on Mon, 2014-11-10 15:39

On Monday, October 20, 2014, Pastor Nina Warr, of Inner Faith Gospel Tabernacle and Precious Bedell of Turning Points Family Center were invited to sit on a panel looking at how mass incarceration impacts families. The panel was apart of the Flying Squirrel Community Space's stop mass incarceration programming for the month of October.

The impact of mass incarceration on families

Pastor Nina Warr spoke about her experience raising multiple sets of grandchildren, grandnieces, and grandnephews even as her own children languish in prison. She spoke about the barriers she encounters everyday as she raises these children even as an unjust system of police, lawyers, judges and prisons strip her loved ones of their freedom and creates unnecessary and unfair challenges for familial care and community dignity. Pastor Warr also talked about her husband, Benny Warr, and his difficulties physically, emotionally, and psychologically since he was brutally attacked by Rochester Police Department officers Joseph Ferrigno, Anthony Liberatore, and Sgt. Mitchell Stewart, while waiting for the bus on Jefferson Avenue more than a year ago.

Precious Bedell spoke about her organization and what they do. In short, Turning Points Family Center acts as an information center where families whose lives are touched by incarceration can get access to resources or be made aware of the resources that are available in the community. Ms. Bedell spoke about the prison industrial complex, how it negatively affects families—especially women—and what we can do about it.

Statement from the Flying Squirrel collective on stop mass incarceration programming:

The Flying Squirrel Community Space joins in the call-out for a month of mobilizing against mass incarceration! We demand an end to mass incarceration, police terror, repression and the criminalization of a generation! Our month of action and education against mass incarceration is a scream against the societal effort to cover up, white out, ignore, neutralize and suppress the reality of the prison industrial complex. The PIC imprisons over 2.2 million people, and monitors another 8 million people through parole, probation, ankle monitoring, general surveillance and other measures of state control. If the prison population in the U.S. were put together in one city, it would be the 4^th largest city in the country.

We REFUSE to live in a society that has no better fate for millions of its people than segregation, harassment, brutalization, incarceration and outright murder at the hands of its enforcers—and we will not rest until this is STOPPED. We refuse to make our peace with this “new Jim Crow” – a social system which targets communities of color, immigrants and the undocumented, disabled people, youth, elders, transgender and queer people, women, the poor, the homeless, and others. This system of correctional control, injustice, and domination is nothing but a slow, structural genocide. We will not tolerate this. WE RESIST!

Related Articles in the Flying Squirrel's stop mass incarceration programming: Vulnerable Populations/Critical Populations: The criminalization of poverty, homelessness, and dissent | Keith LaMar AKA Bomani Shakur: Live from death row | Partial Q & A from "The Whole Damn System is Guilty"