At a time when anti-immigrant vitriol substitutes for US immigration policy,
     No Option  But North deftly blends heartbreaking accounts of the journey
     north with cogent insights into the systemic causes that make the trek north
     an almost impossible option if you’re poor and from south of the border.
     Essential reading for anyone who cares about the human rights implications
     of US immigration politics.
                             ―Antonio Villaraigosa, 41st Mayor of Los Angeles

At a time when the only thing anyone is talking about is COVID-19, I took a break to read Kelsey Freeman’s astute look at the struggles of migrants to cross the border, recently published by IGPublishing. 

“Migrants will risk everything because their alternate options for survival and decency have run out,” writes Freeman, and with urgency, she shows us portraits of the people who want more than anything to escape the violence in their countries and make better lives for their children.

There’s Roberto who had to pay “rent” to gangs because he had a business before he “look[ed] for a border.” There’s Evelia who made it with her children to Oregon through detention centers and immigration authorities, but lost her husband, who became one of the “disappeared.” There are those that hop the train, and those that get caught, sent back, and try to come again and again to the US seeking a better life.

Some of the stories are brutal and important to share especially for the author who admits her privilege and attempts to use her own experiences (sometimes sucessful, sometimes not) to bring us into the pain of what the migrants endure. The kidnapping of Abrahám seems impossible to understand when so little money could have ever come from him but Freeman tells it unsentimentally as she shows how powerful the drug cartels are. The fact that Fernando was tortured on his journey north, needed to take six months to recover, and returned again to cross the Sonoran Desert shows the desperation felt by so many. As Freeman writes, “Migration, regardless of the numerous perils it held, was still his best choice….The more they try, the more likely they are to get through.”

The book also touches on the brutality of Donald Trump’s policies and his horrendous denial of humanity of anyone who seeks asylum in the United States. Although the book was written before Trump’s complete failure as a president during the coronavirus pandemic, it is easy to see how statements he has made (such as how loss of life is insignificant) are similar to his administration’s cruelty towards migrants. In a news conference in March, 2020, Trump said that a final US coronavirus death toll somewhere in the range of 100,000 to 200,000 people would be a sign that his administration has “done a very good job.” And equally cruel, according to Truthout, the courts are still not freeing migrant children, in spite of COVID-19.

Freeman’s writing is best when she is deeply moved by the people in the community of Mexico where she has gone to teach, and with a Fulbright grant comes to write this book, embarking on learning about the migrants and their lives. 

          There was beauty in the woman who spent her days sitting outside her corner
          store, her pudgy legs sprawled out over the edge of the sidewalk…There was
         beauty in the house a few doors down that left its doors open so that the
         chickens could roam freely into the street. And there was beauty in the old
         man who always seemed to be asleep in his chair, his chin folded into his
         collar.

It’s a book worth reading to get a glimpse into a world many of us are far from. Freeman’s intention is to share stories, as she says, “not because migrants are incapable of powerfully crafting their own narratives” (i.e. The American Dirt controversy). Freeman’s aim is to call for a “more sensible, decent approach to immigration policy,” which as she says, and this reader firmly believes, should not fall only on immigrants, but on all of us.

At today’s press conference, Commonwealth Magazine asked Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker about how he is doing with prisons. Here’s how he answered (It starts at 45.12). 

Q. “I was just curious, almost every day I get something, a lawsuit, or advocates asking for the release of prisoners, or more testing of prisoners. How do you think it’s going? I see that there are 7 deaths and several hundred cases, but [INAUDIBLE] it doesn’t seem as severe as the nursing home situation. How do you think the state prison system is doing in dealing with COVID-19?”

A. “Well the state prison system spent a tremendous amount of time with the public health folks in developing their strategies, both for, uh, what went on inside the prisons and what went on outside the prisons as well, before people showed up for work and all the rest. Um, I think the long story short is that they are in constant contact with the Department of Public Health around the policies and protocols that they’re using, whether it’s related to hand sanitizer or uh, testing protocols or almost everything they’re doing with respect to disinfectant and visitation and everything else. And I think that’s going to continue to be the way they go about doing their work. Um, but this was obviously something that from the very beginning we took really seriously. The conversations between the Public Health and the Department of Corrections literally started, those might have started in early March, right? (to Secretary Sudders)”

Q: “Do you think they’re handling it pretty well?”

A: “Um, I think generally speaking they are following the guidance that they are getting and have benefitted from that. But I think there’s always going to be room for improvement on all this stuff, and I think we constantly try to make adjustments based on the data and information that we gather as we go.”

___________________

And no, we’re not doing fine. Prisoners’ Legal Services, the Committee for Public Counsel Services, The American Civil Liberties Union of Mass., and Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys have all sued the Governor, the Sherriffs the Department of Correction, Parole, and/or the Executive Office of Public Safety. Read my article about it all here.

                    PHOTO VIA RELEASE AGING PEOPLE IN PRISON (RAPP)

Please see and share widely my newest article written for the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism (BINJ) about what activists across the country are doing to end the sentence of life without parole.

It begins: “With 2.3 million people behind bars, the United States is the world’s largest jailer. Yet after decades of holding this dubious honor, many Americans have begun to question what Fordham law professor John Plaff calls “this massive experiment in punitive social control.” Decarceration is being discussed in states across the country.”  MORE

Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center. Photo courtesy of prisonfinder

In a piece titled “Thinking Out Loud,’ Karter Reed, the subject of my book Boy with A Knife, and a young man who has become my friend, wrote his take from the recent Souza-Baranowsji fiasco which I wrote about last week:

“In the Spring of 2006, I was imprisoned at MCI Shirley Medium, just a stone’s throw from the SuperMax where the latest DOC manipulation has garnered so much media attention. I had spent the morning speaking to High School students in the institution’s visiting room as part of a youth outreach program at the prison. As the other participants and I exited the visiting room we saw that the line outside the cafeteria for staff access period—colloquially known as “happy hour”—stretched around the corner and almost the length of the prison’s main walkway. I arrived back at my housing unit only to discover that an institutional memo had been posted that morning announcing that “tier time”—the time prisoners are allowed outside their cells in the unit—was being cut in half, along with other institutional cutbacks, due to staff shortages, despite the fact Massachusetts has consistently held one of the highest staff to prisoner ratios in the country.

After ten minutes or so of the institution’s Superintendent fielding the same question from one prisoner after another and responding only that it was a security issue which he would not address with prisoners, he simply walked away leaving hundreds waiting in line to be heard. The process was repeated with the Deputy Superintendent and Director of Security before it was announced that no further questions about the reduction of tier time would be addressed. The two to three hundred prisoners who remained stood there dumbfounded. Moments later, dozens of Correctional Officers and Inner Perimeter Security descended upon them screaming that this was a demonstration and the institution was going into lockdown to address the insurrection. No one resisted, no one threatened or even suggested violence, and everyone headed back to their cells as ordered.

Meanwhile, I had been waiting in my own cell for my unit to be called to lunch. The call never came and my cell door never opened. The lockdown lasted more than six weeks. The DOC released numerous official and unofficial statements to the public and media citing informant information that violence was imminent if the lockdown ended. But it was all a farce. There was never a threat or even a risk of violence. But this “incident” and the department’s account of it would serve to support the idea that the original reduction in tier time and visitation days was indeed necessary for security reasons. The DOC emerged even more victorious than could be imagined—they painted a wholly compliant prison population as dangerous and insubordinate, all while completely silencing them with intimidation and an unparalleled show of force. They made it clear that they could do whatever they wanted without reason or justification and could forcefully suppress any protests, no matter how legitimate.

When the lockdown finally ended, tier time had been cut in half, visiting days had been eliminated, and twelve hundred prisoners were left with the unmistakable impression that their lives were insignificant and their rights arbitrary. Though it has been nearly a decade and a half since I found myself at the mercy of such an oppressive and mentally crippling system, I bear the scars in grotesque and indelible fashion. The latest news filtering out from Souza-Baranowski has washed over my psyche and disrupted the the peace and tranquillity I have worked so hard to establish since my release. Undoubtedly, it is a textbook case of PTSD, the vivid and all too real recollection and reliving of that long ago trauma, triggered time and again with random unpredictability.

Some days I am fine, others I am not, and I wonder at the psychological damage being inflicted on thousands of prisoners throughout the state, and millions across the country. How many will fare worse than I have, will never recover enough to rejoin the rank and file, never again feel safe, secure, or whole, and will grow exhausted from the futile effort of trying to escape a inescapable past? My heart aches for them and I can only hope the supposed “evolving standards of moral decency” we as a society profess will permeate the unseen world they live in. Until that day comes, the nightmare of my past will be the reality of their present.”