Please join us for a day of reading, listening, and discussion about prison issues at the Bring Down the Walls Conversational Convergence/Read-a-Thon - Sunday, March 28th at the A-Space, 4722 Baltimore Ave.

Click the “Continue Reading” link for a complete calendar of the day’s discussions and to download some of the readings we’ll be discussing.

Here are links to the readings we’ll be discussing (printed copies and reading time will also be provided on the day off the Read-a-Thon). Below is the full schedule of the day’s discussions.

• For the 10:30 - 11:30 session: Getting Out Alive and To Help Our People Through This
• For the 12:00 - 1:00 session: Parchman Farm Blues: Pushing for Prison Reforms at Mississippi State Penitentiary and The Land Where The Blues Began
• For the 1:30 - 2:30 session: A World Apart
• For the 3:00-4:00 session: The School to Prison Pipeline: How Zero Tolerance and Mandatory School Expulsion Policies are Accelerating the School Push-out and Juvenile Incarceration Rates
• For the 4:30-5:30 session: Role of Social Disadvantage in Crime, Joblessness, and Homelessness Among Persons With Serious Mental Illness and Letter From Birmingham Jail
• For the 6:00 to 7:00 session: It’s a War in Here: A Report on the Treatment of Transgender and Intersex People in New York State Men’s Prisons

Schedule of Sessions:

10:00-10:30 Welcome and Coffee

10:30-11:30 Prison Health News Collective Reading
Prison Health News is a national newsletter for people living with HIV in prisons and jails produced by a writing collective at the Institute for Community Justice and Reaching Out: A Support Group with Action. Members will read and discuss some of the articles in their forthcoming Spring issue.

11:30-12:00 Reading/Audio Break

12:00-1:00 Short Discussion of Parchman Prison in Mississippi, followed by a screening of “I’m Walking: A Journey Through Parchman”
“I’m Walking” is the story of one man’s journey through, and triumph over, a ten year sentence at Parchman Penitentiary, Mississippi’s notorious state prison. A former plantation for runaway slaves built in the 1840s, Mitch P. called it home after committing a crime of passion. The film is the result of a long-term relationship between filmmaker and subject, who met while Miller was researching a story on blues musicians in the Mississippi delta, and Mitch was into the 5th year of his sentence. A correspondence ensued, along with repeated trips to Parchman to document life there. The film will be preceded by a brief discussion that will use the history of Parchman prison as a lens for considering the legacy of slavery as reflected in the immediate surge of the incarceration of prisoners of color following the end of the Civil War.

1:00-1:30 Reading/Audio Break

1:30-2:30 Prison/Prisoner Organizing and the Struggles of Women Prisoners
A conversation led by Laura McTighe from the Institute for Community Justice. McTighe will focus on particular cases and history as a means for exploring larger trends and modes of resistance.

2:30-3:00 Reading/Audio Break

3:00-4:00 The School to Prison Pipeline: How Zero Tolerance and Mandatory School Expulsion Policies are Accelerating the School Push-out and Juvenile Incarceration Rates
Members of the Radical Pedagogy Reading Group and others lead a discussion about how various school disciplinary and expulsion policies are increasingly funneling youth into the criminal justice system. The session will look particularly at the results of a 2010 study by The Advancement Project called “Test, Punish, and Push Out.”

4:00-4:30 Reading/Audio Break

4:30-5:30 Cooling Passions: How to ‘Treat’ Mental Illness in Jails and Prisons
A conversation presented/facilitated by Jeffrey Draine of the University of Pennsylvania.
For the last 15 years, Draine’s work has focused largely on the process of reentering the community from jails and prisons and reducing the risk of return to jails and prisons. His primary interests are rehabilitation and recovery oriented services for people with mental illness involved in the criminal justice system. He co-directs the Center for Mental Health Services and Criminal Justice Research, and is also involved in the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program , an educational collaborative of prisoners, academics, students and interested others. His emerging projects include examinations of police decisions and police-based intervention regarding people with mental illness in Chicago, Atlanta and Philadelphia and reentry services for people leaving jail with HIV.

5:30-6:00 Reading/Audio Break

6:00-7:00 Survival, Resistance, and Resilience of TGNC People Behind Bars
This session will be presented/facilitated by members of Hearts On a Wire and will draw our attention to some of the specific issues that face transgender and gender non-conforming people behind bars, as well as strategies of resistance and survival.

7:00-7:30 Reading/Audio Break

7:30-8:30 On Re-Entry: Getting Folks Out and Keeping Them Out
A conversation/workshop led by Hakim Ali and William Goldsby of Reconstruction, Inc. Reconstruction is a North Philadelphia-based support, advocacy and empowerment organization for those returning from prison and their families.

8:30-9:00 Reading/Audio Break

9:00-10:00 “The Last Graduation” – Educational Access for the Incarcerated
A short presentation by Richard Tut Carter of the Human Rights Coalition of Chester and Rose Levine of Books Through Bars will focus on the importance and impact of educational access for those currently behind bars. The conversation will be followed by a screening of The Last Graduation. This documentary traces the history of college programs in New York State prisons, from the advent of higher education in prison in the wake of the 1971 Attica uprising to the last graduation from the Marist College program at Greenhaven Prison in 1995.