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About Portland observer. (Portland, Or.) 1970-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 5, 2018)
Page 4 December 5, 2018 Shared Stewardship c ontinued from f ront reallocation of resources from things like prisons and police to services for things that can ful- fill the basic needs of community members, like affordable housing, health care, mental health care, and education. Mohamed Shehk, visiting com- munications director for the na- tional Critical Resistance organi- zation in Oakland, Calif., told the Portland Observer that advocates for the group see most of the ex- isting polices around policing and law enforcement, for example, as ineffective tools against crime that fail to solve bigger problems. “The Prison Industrial Com- plex is a term that we use to de- scribe the inner-locking systems of policing, imprisonment, sur- veillance, and the intersection of interests between government and industry that use those systems as solutions to problems that are ac- tually political, social, economic in nature,” Shehk said. United States’ disproportion- ate housing of the world’s prison population, and in particular of communities of color within the U.S., has been a contentious po- litical issue. Civil rights leaders in Portland and nationally have photo credit d anny p eterson /t he p ortland o bserver Social justice and communities of color advocates Cory Lira (from left), Myell Thompson, Anna Swanson and Mohamed Shehk promote the opening of the Dismantle, Change, Build Center, a new community gathering space in the former In Other Words feminist bookstore located at the corner of Northeast Killingsworth and Williams Avenue. called for changing laws for bet- ter fairness, drawing support from liberals like Vermont Senator Ber- nie Sanders to former President Barack Obama, who commuted or pardoned 1,927 people for federal crimes, mostly for drug charges, by his last term in office. In 2013, the United States rep- resented about 4.4 percent of the world’s population, but housed around 22 percent of the world’s prisoners, according to World Prison Population List from Inter- national Centre for Prison Studies. What’s more, African Americans and Hispanics made up 56 per- cent of all incarcerated people in 2015, though they comprised only 32 percent of the U.S. population, according to National Association for the Advancement of Color People’s website Cory Lira, chapter member of Critical Resistance Portland, said she found the organization at a time when she needed a new po- litical home after seeing first-hand the devastating effects of the dis- proportionate impact that policing and imprisonment often has on communities of color. Having worked on the front lines of migrant justice work and education, Lira said she began “seeing the ways in which young people are policed from such an early age and pipelined into pris- on.” “Once I found CR, I was able to see the interconnected ways that government and institutions rely on the prison industrial complex to control and cage and kill us,” she said. The Dismantle, Change, Build Center has become a home base for a myriad of other organiza- tions including the anti-police vio- lence group Don’t Shoot Portland; an empowerment group for young girls of color called Brown Girls Rise; and an outdoor program for youth, called Urban Nature Part- ners PDX. The center also houses Portland Books to Prisoners, a non-profit that sends literature to those who are incarcerated, and Crescent Shine, a multi-vendor artist and consignment shop. Donations, which can be made through Critical Resistance, help to keep the non-profit communi- ty based center afloat, organizers said. This month Critical Resistance will host a postcard and holiday party at the Dismantle, Change, Build Center to send mail to those that are in prisons and jails. The event, designed to remind those who are incarcerated that they’re not alone and there are those fighting for them on the out- side, will be from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Monday, Dec 17.
