“Beyondmedia’s Women and Prison programming supports formerly incarcerated women and their families to voice their stories through the arts, engaging their issues and experiences to create opportunities for dialogue, healing and community organizing. Since 1998 Beyondmedia has collaborated extensively with formerly incarcerated women and girls to create interdisciplinary, multimedia forums on women and prison. The invisibility of women’s perspectives and experiences in discussions of the growing prison industrial complex constitutes a serious gap, given that the numbers of women in this male oriented system are increasing at an alarming rate. The incarceration of women is linked to a multitude of interconnected issues facing poor women, drug-addicted women, women of color, lesbians, and women in prostitution, including interpersonal and state violence, poverty, racism, reproductive oppression, homophobia, harassment, lack of quality healthcare, homelessness, and more. By making the issues of women prisoners more visible, we expand the analysis and strategies being developed to seriously challenge the criminal justice system and work to end the cycle of crisis it creates for women and their families.”

“Beyondmedia Education’s mission is to collaborate with under-served and under-represented women, youth and communities to tell their stories, connect their stories to the world around us, and organize for social justice through the creation and distribution of media arts.

Our Vision
Beyondmedia Education envisions a compassionate and just society where universal access to media tools and information equip women and youth to document and communicate their stories, serve as educators and role models for others, influence public policy, and generate social transformation.”

“Chicago Books to Women in Prison is a volunteer collective working to distribute books free of charge to women in prison nationwide. We are dedicated to offering women behind bars the opportunity for self-empowerment, education, and entertainment that reading provides.”

sexartandpolitics:

Yesterday in the City Council chambers, Ken Tangvik, Carla Poulos, and Katie Kelly-Hankin (right), of the Hyde Square Task Force, called for more extensive sex education to be taught in Boston’s public schools. (Yoon S. Byun/Globe Staff)

Teens ask for more sex ed, greater condom availability - The Boston Globe

nanner:

glossylalia:

downlo:

ipomoeaandthestarstealers:joligreenredqueen:It’s Harder to Get Started Today:jhameia:imissedtumblr:

I told him that, although I agreed with him that young people should save more, there is also a strong case that it is much more difficult today for a young person to establish themselves financially as he did when he was a young adult.

He looked at me strangely. “What do you mean?” he asked.

So, I laid it out for him, piece by piece. Afterward, it occurred to me that the entire discussion might make for a good post here, particularly with some specific research to back it up.

Real wages Let’s start with income. In 1970, the average wage earner took home $312 per week (in 1982 dollars). In 2004, the average wage earner brought home $277 per week (in 1982 dollars) – and it’s still falling. That means that, once you factor out inflation, the average wage earner in 1970 brought home about 18% more than the average wage earner today.

Home prices Even if you adjust for inflation – and even if you take into account the crash of the housing bubble from 2007 to today – the median price for a home in the United States has gone up more than 50% since 1970. Remember, that number accounts for inflation, so what that number actually means is that the cost of a home requires 50% more of a person’s paycheck than it did in 1970.

Education prices The cost index of an average undergraduate education since 1970 drastically outpaces the growth of the Consumer Price Index. In short, disregarding inflation, the cost of an undergraduate degree today is roughly 30% higher than it was in 1970.

Other essentials In order to compete in today’s workforce, a young person often must have items – paid for out of their own pocket – that weren’t needed in 1970, including a cell phone, a computer, and home internet access. Often, when searching for work, it becomes very difficult for a young person to compete without these extra expenses.

So, to summarize, in order to have housing and an education comparable to what a young person had in 1970, they must spend 50% more on housing, spend 30% more on education, and do it all while earning about 18% less money. That doesn’t even include the extra expenses needed to compete.

I look at my own parents for an example. My parents purchased the house I grew up in for $20,000 – and that included seven acres of land. At the time, that was approximately what my father earned in a year. Today, if I were to purchase a similarly-sized house with seven acres of land, I would be spending well over $100,000 – significantly more than an annual salary.

My parents were also able to find good work without the cost of a college education. Today, the jobs they both had would be completely unavailable to someone if they did not have a college education, putting significantly more expense on the back of a young person today.

I’ve read many times that Generation X is the first group of Americans who have it worse than their parents. The numbers above illustrate that truism perfectly. What’s particularly galling about the rising cost of living (for middle classed U.S. citizens and legal residents) is that a BA is now a requirement for relatively low-paying, entry-level jobs that absolutely do not require special skills. Either institute subsidized higher education that makes it possible for as many people as possible to go to college or make employers stop requiring college degrees for jobs that don’t need them.

Truths. File under: Reasons Why Glossy Can’t Contribute To Her 401k. 

Cross file under: Reasons Why Nanner Doesn’t Have Cable Anymore and Reasons Why Perfectly Lovely, Progressive Liberal People Have to Remain in or Near Their Red State Native Lands.

curate:

Rodríguez: One of the primary reasons that they might to abolish the Pell Grants for prisoners is precisely because of people like you.

Ngo: This is a great segue into what’s going on with me right now.

Rodríguez: Let’s talk about that.

Ngo: Me and about four other men here who are involved with the college program wrote a proposal, a very strong proposal, not even asking, demanding that we have freedom of speech in discussing issues in the program and what classes are taught.

Rodríguez: You had to write a proposal to ask for your freedom of speech in a college course?

Ngo: Right. Exactly.

Rodríguez: You know what? That sounds like the university too, actually. I should be quiet. [Ngo laughs.]

Ngo: So, these four or five guys who wrote this proposal asking for Ethnic Studies, more Ethnic Studies to be involved, asking to have freedom of speech as part of discussion on prison grounds and through correspondence, so we submitted this proposal to the volunteer facilitator in here and she disseminated it through the student body and it finally got to the administration. Well, the administration came and searched the five guys, four guys who were on this proposal cell, confiscated the personal letters their legal work, paperwork and then threatened to transfer us; threatened to retaliate against us for these, for the signatures on this proposal that we submitted. And this is, I don’t know if this is indicative of why they stopped the Pell Grants, but I know that historically, through the 1900s, that nationalist movements to get rid of imperialism in countries start with the leaders of the national movements being schooled in these [electronic monitoring beep] schools. So yes, I want the college program here, I want the Pell Grants to happen here, because it allows us to critically think of our environment and this process, it has a radical tint to it when we’re critical and it’s just so evident that the United States is not all peaches and creams.
[Both laugh.]

Rodríguez: But the point you’re making to me is very similar to the way that we would make arguments for things like Ethnic Studies departments and programs in the university setting in the free world, is that it offers us a space to actually struggle.

Ngo: Exactly. And it’s not all about how am I going to get a job. It’s a problem of how am I getting a job. It’s a process of how we shape how we get a job. It’s at the very foundation of our society. It’s not just about institutions and what kind of job can I [beep] paid.

Rodríguez: Right. [“This recorded call is from an inmate at a California state correctional facility.”]

Ngo: It’s about training how I can think and how this affects my life and those lives of people like me.

Rodríguez: So thirty years ago, you had radical kind of semi-underground political education circles between prisoners that was happening totally outside the sanction of the prison. People were kind of getting together passing literature around, they were having conversations on the yard, between their cells, stuff like that.

Ngo: Study groups. They had, we had study groups.

Rodríguez: It was the same thing on the outside too. There were people who were doing political education, community-based political education, student-based political education, high school, elementary school, all the way on through, right. And then that gets crushed when they start assassinating people, when they start…

Ngo: COINTELPRO.

Rodríguez: Exactly. Yeah. COINTELPRO, and everything else, and then the way that they reform the prison is they create these college programs, right. And it’s supposed to “domesticate” you.

Ngo: Co-opts you. It co-opts to [beep].

Rodríguez: Yet a few people like yourself and like others actually take advantage of the college space to create a new front of opposition and radical resistance on the inside, intellectually and practically, which is why it is that you’re facing this stuff now with the Patten College Program.

Ngo: Man, that’s what’s happening. We’re trying to break containment and we’re being retaliated against for it, and it’s indicative of how prisons administrations work, how prisons work.

Rodríguez: With you now where they’re threatening to transfer you is that the person or people who actually chose to report you were not even prison authorities, they were actually civilians.

Ngo: That’s right. See, this is a volunteer program. So the person that actually runs this program is a volunteer. Who is a graduate student at UC-Berkeley. She reported another professor to the administration saying that this professor on his own time is supporting my case against San Quentin and CDC of racial segregation. And so she reported this to the warden and then the warden banned him from coming in.

Rodríguez: So the warden would have never known this if this civilian volunteer hadn’t done the warden’s job for him.

Ngo: Exactly. Now, the warden has full trust in her and the program.

Rodríguez: The problem of the reform mentality is that you actually become more protective of the institution you’re trying to challenge and the institution itself.

Ngo: Yes. [“Your call will be terminated in two minutes.”] You know, the issue of reform is a complex issue, but yes, that is a side effect of reform and I don’t quite know how to address that. I’m still struggling internalizing what that means, reform and revolution. But yes, that is a definite side effect.

You Have to be Intimate with your Despair | diaCRITICS