"Please don't build another jail for my children and grandchildren," said Dorsey Nunn, leader with All of Us or None at a press conference proceeding the SF City Council hearing on San Francisco's million dollar new jail. "And i think building this jail is a flat-out racist thing to do",.Dorsey went on to critique the lie of scarcity and the hypocritical building of a million dollar jail, when we supposedly are in a budget crunch.
The powerful words of Dorsey seemed to summarize the whole day, which began at an unveiling of the Punishing the Poorest Report by Coalition on Homelessness(COH) - a powerful collection of what we at POOR Magazine call Poverty Skolarship ( poor people lived, not academically learned knowledge/ experience) on the 21st century violent war on poor people in one of the richest and increasingly elite cities in the world (San Francisco) and ending at a surreal hearing about the texts from racist San Francisco slave-catchers (aka po'Lice) followed by the proposal for new plantation (jail) in San Francisco.
"At least one of my friends had a miscarriage after being sprayed by Dept of Public Works(DPW) with that chemical that they spray on homeless people all the time, "said Juliana, a fierce single mama who was houseless in San Francisco while pregnant and added her powerful voice to the Punishing the Poorest Report presentation.
"Waking While Trans", said Woods Ervin, a fierce warrior from Critical Resistance who spoke about the way that Trans people are far more likely to be profiled, stopped, questioned and often detained or harassed by police
Shuttling from the COH report release to the jail hearing with David Campos, Eric Mar, All of us or None, Critical Resistance and so many powerful organizers i was thrown into a vortex of removal, terror and my own raw and un-healed PTSD After years of struggling with poverty and criminalization one of the saddest moments in me and my mama's loca vida was when i was incarcerated for being houseless. While in jail i met 10 other women who literally didn't have the money for bail or a lawyer and like me were in jail for crimes of poverty, white-supremacy and colonization.
My mama and me went on to launch POOR Magazine with other poverty skolaz like us with mentorship and advice from plantation prison skolaz like Dorsey Nunn and Roma Guy and so in some ways like Dorsey noted at the press conference, "We have been here many times before, and the lie of force and fear shouldnt the way we trying to "solve" anything.
From CPS to ICE to UC Berkeley to Pelican Bay, our poverty and struggle provides an endless source of dollars for people to study, test, incarcerate and arrest. Meanwhile the mis-education system, the lie of kkkapitalist "success". extreme gentriFUKation and rich people devil-opment continues to provide an ever-growing population of evicted, torn-apart and broken peoples to fuel the criminal In-Justice system and the always on duty slave-catchers.
At the end of the hearing poltrickerism was hard at work, with board supervisor Jane Kim postponing the vote to July 16th for some un-known reason and considering the yes vote the day before by Oakland city council for a gynormous rich people devil-opment of E 12st public land to the no vote for the Rich people housing moratorium in San Francisco the week before, not to mention the privatization of public housing in San Francisco under RAD and our endless removal by real estate speculators, the new jail is obviously the only poor people housing proposal that might actually get funded.
