Looking Back at What We Wrote in 2021

As 2021 comes to end, here’s a look back at the writings and reflections we published this year on our Medium page, and the work that TAVP staff wrote for other outlets.

Prison Abolition in the Time of COVID | January 8 

Jorge Renaud, our writer in residence, discusses the necessity of freeing the most vulnerable as quickly as possible during the pandemic: 

Covid-19 has presented hard choices to abolitionists. The dangers of the virus are not assumed equally. Certain age groups are inarguably more vulnerable, as are those with identifiable medical conditions. Arguing for an unconditional release from confinement has long been our tenet, but with the virus cutting deadly swaths among certain segments of the confined population it seems almost pedantic to insist that those most likely to die not be given precedence. 

“Policy is messy. It’s not pure. Theory is fine, but if I am not willing to bend, to understand that small steps are sometimes necessary to alleviate a small piece of the pain that exists in the world, the larger pain may never be lanced.

“Freeing them all means freeing one first. And if in that freedom, the cascade is begun, I’m OK with that.”

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Perpetrating Structural Violence by Withholding Care: The Landscape of Vaccination in Prisons | February 10 

Policy strategist Jaqueline Lantsman on the state of the pandemic in prison and what needs to be done:  

“States still have an opportunity to embrace the ethical, medical, and legal arguments pointing to the necessary inclusion of incarcerated individuals in vaccine roll-out plans. States should not only follow evidence-informed guidance to include currently incarcerated individuals in the early stage of vaccination, but also involve epidemiologists and ethicists in preparing their health care infrastructure to support executing their vaccination plan. Otherwise, by abandoning individuals living within carceral settings states are re-perpetrating state-sanctioned violence by withholding medical care.”

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For Jennifer Toon, the Winter Storm Brought Up All Too Familiar Flashbacks from Prison Life | March 1 

After February’s deadly winter storm, Jennifer Toon wrote about how her experience called back unwelcome memories of her time in prison:

“Every day, something triggers me. I am constantly fighting off the lingering psychological side effects of spending 19 years in prison. […] In the two years that I’ve been home, I’ve been able to successfully slip from the grip of those terrible memories. That is, until the recent winter storm.”

“The squalor in which incarcerated people are forced to live is amplified in times of crisis, but these poor conditions exist every day. The panic I felt in my bathroom when I realized the water was off didn’t happen because I had one or two experiences with backed up sewage and lack of drinking water while in custody. 

“Access to water and good sanitation are frequently interrupted because of broken plumbing or contamination. Ankle deep sewage is not an isolated event. Blankets and coats in normal winter conditions are sorely lacking and insufficient.”

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In the Direction of Freedom | March 9 

As part of “The Home Fire,” our new series of writings and reflections on liberatory memory work and transformative justice, abolitionist scholar and organizer Jarrett M. Drake reflects on Mariame Kaba’s important new collection of essays, We Do This ’Til We Free Us.

“It is, in a way, quite fitting that the cover for We Do This ’Til We Free Us comes from the canonical canvas of artist and organizer Monica Trinidad. The illustration is of a moon’s (or sun’s?) light reflecting off the water. The image illuminates the fact that for enslaved people who sought to run away, the cover of night provided their best chance for success. The darkness would have made a map utterly useless. Instead they were guided by a general direction, one of freedom, and whatever light they needed came from the moon or stars. This is the lesson for those of us who struggle towards abolition. That a map doesn’t exist is the surest sign of our strength. All we have to do is look for glimmers of light in the dark, such as Mariame Kaba’s beacon We Do This ’Til We Free Us, and we can be assured that we’re headed in the right direction.”

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Nourishing My Nightmares | April 6 

Jorge writes about the importance of narrative, including nightmares, in achieving radical transformative justice and ending mass incarceration: “The rage and pain of incarceration has left its residue within me. I have no idea where it lives, but those remnants of violence and dehumanization seen and felt and sensed through 27 years in prison are in my body. Each night they bubble through my dreams. I nourish them. I hold them close. It is only through them that I find the strength to bear witness, to add my story to the narratives that will ultimately be used to eradicate the very cages I once lived in.”

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Talking Trauma-Informed Oral History Project Design With Gabriel Solis | May 10 

Our Executive Director Gabriel Solis talks with Taylor Thompson and Kae Bara Kratcha for the Columbia Oral History Master of the Arts blog: 

“What makes our work community based is not just the juxtaposition against institutional archives or institutional oral history projects, in which there are significant juxtapositions between the two, but how we do our work. Increasingly we’re embracing the necessity of having community members at the center of our work, from beginning to end, and we’ve been moving more and more that way. And so to me, that’s what makes it community based is not just a sort of outward focus on community issues and community stories, but also an inward process where the community members have real power and decision making.”

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A Year of Sheltering Justice | May 18

Our Project Coordinator Murphy Anne Carter reflects on a year of documenting stories from the intersection of COVID-19 and mass incarceration:

“Sheltering Justice has created its own chronology, its own unique rendering of the past year that embraces the nonlinear realities of then and now, there and here, and change and sameness.”

“The tangle of this past year has been defined by hopelessness and grief, but also by continuing conversations, pushing dominant narratives to the side, and centering the voices of those directly impacted. Sheltering Justice has weathered the events of the pandemic, while simultaneously protecting the integrity of our personal accounts, our realities, and our memories. After a year of logging onto Zoom, in the same room, with the same background I take great pride in knowing Sheltering Justice, as a collection that documents each experience with generosity and care, is one of the few things that I have felt grow, and yes, change.”

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Resisting the Allure of Innocence | August 26 

Gabe writes about the urgent necessity of resisting America’s “long-standing dominant narratives about immigration and the southern border”: 

“Transforming narratives results from storytelling and memory work by survivors, activists, organizers, artists, writers, and others from communities directly impacted by generations of white supremacist violence.”

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Introducing the After Violence Archive | September 21

This fall, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we formally announced the launch of the After Violence Archive, our new home for the Texas After Violence digital collections. On AVA, you can explore oral history interviews, digitized materials sent to TAVP and partner collections like the Inside Books Project, and browse our collections by categories, keywords, communities and more. TAVP Director of Archives Jane Field discussed the process that led to AVA’s creation in an essay for our Medium page: 

“We are a community-based archive, with collections that document the stories of individuals who have been directly impacted by state violence. Because people of color are much more likely to experience severe or fatal forms of state violence (death sentences, executions, police beatings and killings), we cannot do this work without actively working to create a space in which it is safe for people of color and anyone who has experienced state-sanctioned violence to engage with our collection.”

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Invisible Scars | November 10 

Jennifer recounts the everyday cruelty she and other women faced while incarcerated, and how those experiences inform her advocacy and activism now that she is free:

“Almost a year after I was released from prison in 2018, a friend wrote to me from the inside. She told me about a woman who had reached down and plucked a small flower while they were on their way to work one morning. ‘We marveled at the simple beauty of that flower, when out of nowhere the warden, who just so happened to be walking down the other side of the sidewalk, began screaming at us. He said, “You right there, stop! Put your hands behind your back. Do you think this is a park? Do you think you’re at home? I ought to write you up,”’ she wrote. ‘Over a flower. A flower!’ She closed her letter, ‘There is something inside of me that is tired, something that is about to break apart, unhinged and unafraid.’

“…[T]hat day, something inside of me finally broke apart. As I clutched that letter, the old rage in my chest turned into a furnace of resolve. It was then I knew how I would try to right those wrongs. I would refuse to remain silent and complacent any longer. I would write the stories of incarcerated women. I would stand in front of legislators and packed hearing rooms. I would bare this scarred soul for all the women who have suffered from the invisible violence of incarceration. The world will know the mark it left on us. We’re not laughing, smiling, or apologizing anymore.”  

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Fragile Evidence | December 8 

Gabe reflects on his earlier work at TAVP: 

“Back then, I didn’t know anything about vicarious trauma, but I remember being immediately suspicious of its premise of distance. It was becoming very clear to me that bearing witness to stories of violence and death, whether in war zones or in living rooms, is to absorb the suffering of others. Whether it’s basic human compassion or some empathic telepathy of mirror neurons, in the moment of the story’s telling, witness and storyteller are bound together as if there is no distance between them. The story enters the witness and stays for a lifetime.

“But untethered from the original violence, the pain of the witness seems baseless. Emergent from nothing. An imagined annihilation. There is guilt and shame when standing next to the pain of those who lived through it even when the texture of feeling is the same. Not only did I survive, I wasn’t even there. Who am I to suffer? Who am I to grieve? Who am I to have a story of my own?”