Learning How to Be an Ally: Reforming Policing & Punishment

Minnesota Women’s Press, thanks to a grant from Minneapolis Foundation, was able to go deep into our series about

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Some of the questions we have been exploring

Is the Minnesota Legislature on track toward criminal system reform?

• April 22 update on omnibus bill that passed in the House
• The Journey (so far) for Legislation About Sexual Assault

Op-Eds & Commentary

• Why Video Surveillance Is Not a Good Crime-Fighting Tool
• My Perspective From BLM Protests
• Alexis Yeboah: The Emotional Labor of Black Women

How is Minnesota re-thinking incarceration?

• Creating True Safety and Healing
• Reform within Shakopee Women’s Prison
• Deportation: Reform Step #1
• Legacy (1999): drug-related incarceration needs reform
• Legacy: what Shakopee prison reform looked like in 1987

How is Minnesota re-thinking policing?

• Police Reform in Greater Minnesota
• Trauma-informed legislation and law enforcement
• Responding to mental health issues
• Seeing the Missing & Murdered Indigenous Relatives Crisis

What Minnesota women are leading changes?

• Robin Wonsley Worlobah: clips from Visual Q&A
• Valerie Castile & Deneal Trueblood: protecting our children
• Molly Theis & Madeline M. Young: life after prison
• Marika Pfefferkorn: database and surveillance
• Sasha Cotton, Andrea Jenkins, and Kenzie O’Keefe: Minneapolis safety
• Nicole Archbold: Big Picture thinking at state level
• Huda Ahmed: leading statewide conversations

How are other cities and states dealing with police reform?

• Baltimore
• Albuquerque
• Camden, NJ

Deeper Thinking

• Book Discussion: “The New Jim Crow,” by Michelle Alexander
• Book Discussion: “Prison By Any Other Name”
• In the News/March 2021 on impact of trauma, restorative justice for veterans, and more
• Michele Braley: Seward Longfellow restorative justice
• COMING — Book Discussion: “The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity,” by Dr. Nadine Burke Harris; TED talk, “I Was Thinking Too Small”

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Commentary

My daughter came home from college with books given to her by a professor she works with at Chapman University — Prexy Nesbitt who worked with Nelson Mandela against the apartheid regime in South Africa, and alongside Dr. Martin Luther King. He has featured many Black feminists as guest lecturers in his class. The first book in my daughter’s collection that I perused is “Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the 21^st Century,” by Barbara Ransby (2018, University of California Press).

The book quotes Ruth Wilson Gilmore, director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, based in New York, and author of the forthcoming “Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition.” She is quoted saying that to move society toward the abolition of inhumanely caging human beings is to get involved with an intensive process of building jobs, housing, new cultural practices, new ways of thinking about work, rights, restorative justice, and community.

The book also quotes Keeamga-Yamahtta Taylor, of Princeton University, and author of “Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership,” (2019, University of North Carolina Press): “The challenge before us is to connect the current struggle to end police terror in our communities with an even larger movement to transform this country in such a way that the police are no longer needed to respond to the consequences of that inequality.”

“When our political activism isn’t rooted in a theory about transforming the world, it becomes narrow; when it is focused only on individual actors instead of larger systemic problems, it becomes short-sighted. We have to create a vision that’s much bigger than the one we have right now.”

Patrisse Khan-Cullors, co-founder of the #BlackLivesMatter movement