#FreeOurMamas: Happy Mother’s Day from Critical Resistance

Build Families and Communities, Not Cages

Dear Allies & Abolitionists,

While we join many today in celebrating all the mothers in our

lives, our hearts are also heavy with the numerous ways the prison industrial complex tears apart our families. For many of us, Mother’s Day is yet another holiday that reminds us that we are not whole, as many of our mothers, caregivers and people who brought us into this world are behind bars--from state and federal prisons to local jails and detention centers; or our relationships to our mothers and parents have been strained and even broken due to the trauma from imprisonment, policing, and separation.

According to the Prison Policy Initiative, in 2018 jail separated 2.3 million mothers from their children, as 2,879,000 people are imprisoned in women’s jails each year, 80% of whom are mothers or parents. With escalated family separations through detention centers as a common xenophobic practice in the Trump-era, the number of mothers and parents behind bars and barbed-wire fences, separated from children and families, is now surely much higher.

We also know that the trauma of being caged falls heavily on the children of imprisoned parents, as over 10 million children in the US have experienced at least one of their parents being locked up in prison at some point in their lives. And as our brave youth allies at Project WHAT have taught us, children are punished along with their parents--as imprisonment marks families with social stigma, financial deprivation, household instability, and isolation.

Lifting Up Resistance

At the same time, Critical Resistance is also uplifting and celebrating all the people actively resisting. Over 200 people in the Mesa Verde Detention Center in Bakersfield waged a hunger strike for two weeks and won release for a number of prisoners this past week by exposing the fact that the administration could not effectively prevent the spread of COVID inside.

We also send our never-ending gratitude and appreciation to all the mothers, women, and LGTBQ care-givers in the healthcare system. They are on the front lines of the COVID crisis, providing critical care in this grave and urgent moment, battling the “organized abandonment” and neglect of racial capitalism, keeping people alive, and also tending to difficult or abrupt transitions and deaths.

In crisis, we see opportunities for alliances between groups with differing identities, priorities, and strategies--all toward the shared interest and mutual benefit in abolishing the prison industrial complex. Today and every day we are deeply inspired by our collective resistance and resilience, as well as the courageous work many organizations are doing to fight against the separation of our families, against imprisonment, and criminalization of mothers and parents--from national bail out efforts to advocacy for both prisoners and their children, and mass release campaigns to stop the spread of COVID19.

9 Actions You Can Take TODAY
to Grow Abolition:

Here are some projects, campaigns and events to support mothers, parents, children & families that we hope you donate to or find ways to support this Mother’s Day & beyond:

1.) Buy Art from People’s Paper Co-op & support Philadelphia Community Bail Fund, getting Mothers out of jail & prison.

2.) Ride Out and Join Essie Justice Group, CA Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP), Justice LA, A New Way of Life, All of Us or None and other LA-based & CA organizations for a Mother’s Day Caravan if you’re near Los Angeles

3.) Attend, Celebrate & Give to a Virtual Benefit Concert with Release Aging People in Prison (RAPP) from 4-4:45 pm (Eastern). Register for the Zoom link here.

4.) #FreeBlackMamas through the National Bail Out Fund that our movement partner SONG helps organize. Learn more about SONG’s involvement with National Bail Out campaign here

5.) Support CCWP's #BringThemHome Call to Action by signing & circulating CCWP’s petitions to CA Governor Newson to grant immediate clemency to three elders who are at extremely high risk of death and fighting for their lives--Patricia Wright, Maria Adredondo, and Lucia Bravo. CCWP has also sent money to prisoners they visit in women’s prisons throughout CA so that they can send video-grams to their loved ones on Mother’s Day. Donate to CCWP today so this work and CCWP’s other mutual aid efforts continue in the future.

6.) Donate to Project WHAT! to support the children of imprisoned parents

7.) Help #FlattenICE with Asian Prisoner Support Committee and also keep refugee families together, by signing APSC’s petition to US Governors to grant pardons to people Trump is trying to deport here.

8.) Support organizations like Moms4Housing (in Oakland), Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), One Sioux Falls Fund (South Dakota) and Right to the City Alliance (a national network) to grow the movement for our rights to affordable, quality, stable housing and land access, and end evictions houselessness.

9.) Donate and ask your networks to give to the Navajo & Hopi Families COVID-19 Relief Fund, a mutual aid source led by indigenous women in Arizona and Utah.

For the health and wellbeing of communities and future generations--from prisons to hospitals to homes, camps, shelters and reservations--we act in solidarity with moms and caregivers to demand ABOLITION NOW!

Thank you for your continued support and commitment to building a global movement for abolition. Sending you and your families radical love and strength.

In Solidarity,

Critical Resistance