Beautiful images of beautiful resistance and love. Endless thanks to everyone who made today’s gathering what it was. Deep gratitude to Moms United Against Violence and Incarceration and to all our co-sponsoring comrade organizations. Photos by Love & Struggle Photography.
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Alisha sent us the follow to share on her behalf, since the state of Illinois is still caging her and keeping her from her friends and family and all of you, in her broader community.
Alisha wanted us to also remind you that sex working people, hustlers, those that make their living in anyways they can are also mothers, caregivers, chosen family too. Sex workers are treated as disposable by our society and that means their families can be victimized or criminalized by association.
Please remember that, hold that hurt with us and with Alisha, today. And let us also celebrate our collective resistance and resilience in the face of whorephobic state violence.
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“Being incarcerated is already hard enough but being seperated from the ones you love, wanting to protect them from the world? How can you possibly do that over a series of phone calls and strained rushed video visits, when in person visits are an 8 hour drive and there’s no car to get them to you? I Have to hear the pain in their voices as they try to jump through lifes hoops and breakdown when they feel as though they’ve failed. Knowing there is nothing i can do to ease the pain besides suggestions that go through one ear and out the other, then they get frustrated when they can’t seem to figure it out for themselves. I am my family’s fixer, I’ve been the one that eases the pain. Over the last 5½ years they have had to learn what life is like without me there to give them the quick money fix, solve the disputes between them or be the sound voice of reason when things are scary. For them, as my mother say’s “i’m just waiting for you to come home, then everything will be normal again”… So they’ve resorted to surviving, just waiting on “normal” again. That’s a sad reality. My father acts like everything is sunshine to me on the phone, my mother tells me differently while becoming defensive of her miserable mentality, my sister is lost in pain with no real desire for direction while having to learn to raise two infants without fathers all the while becoming entitled and careless, and my brother is becoming resentful towards everyone while trying to hold on to his childhood. This family is not the family i left 5½ years ago. Incarceration is a cancer that spreads and feeds off of loved one’s heart strings. Incarceration is tearing down my family. I will keeping fighting for our survival.”