Meet Annia, a young, energetic, and passionate milwaukeean with a reputation for badass local organizing who has participated heavily in projects such as the Brave Green Wave Trybe (BGWT) and the 21st Street Community Cooperative, Uplifting Black Liberation and Community (UBLAC), and MKE Good Food Bus. For the average black child having grown up in milwaukee’s segregated, incarcerated, and disinvested northside neighborhoods, Annia’s life is fairly typical – growing up with a single mother working multiple jobs for less than her worth and still struggling to pay the bills, schools stripped bare by budget cut after cut until there are no sports or arts or music programs at all, an ever-mounting stream of brutal attacks and murders of Black and brown people coupled with personal racially targeted experiences – shit pretty much sucks and no one’s going to come and make things better anytime soon.
Wisconsin’s racist legislature is at it again—this time they’re coming for the parental rights of incarcerated (and formerly incarcerated) people.
Assembly Bill 627 aims to terminate the parental rights based on the parent’s incarceration status. As recently as October 2021, research has shown that Wisconsin has the highest incarceration rates for black people in the country. Given this information, is there any other way to interpret this law? It’s clearly yet another attack on Black parents and Black youth.
As with many racist misconceptions held by those who uphold and defend white supremacy, the absentee Black parent has been shown to be a myth and a falsehood meant to delegitimize the pain Black families experience when they’re broken up by state violence. This is nothing more than a continuation of the antebellum practice of separating families.
This bill was introduced and co-sponsored by a host of republicans who’s constituencies are designed to exclude BIPoC by way of racist gerrymandering and voter restriction laws. Though it is unlikely to be signed into law by Governor Evers, it’s introduction and co-sponsorship makes clear what kinds of oppressive attacks the state intends to take once the governorship swings back to the GOP.
Having a strong connection to friends and family has been consistently linked to a reduction in recidivism. But, the state and DOC consistently put policies into place that only exacerbate the problems in our society, ruin the lives of everyone entangled in their web of corruption and perpetuate violence and harm.
On December 1, 2021, a handful of collaborators with abolishMKE went to the capitol in Madison to speak against this bill. Anticipating that the public would speak against this bill, the committee scheduled it for the end of the session, making anyone who opposes it wait all day. Nearly 3/4 of the people who signed up to speak ended up being unable to wait due to this scheduling decision. This tactic has consistently employed by these committee’s so they can ignore the public. It’s just another example of how they don’t care what we want or what we think, they get into power and do what they can to ruin all of our lives.
This is a special edition of the ABOLISHmke podcast. Rather than an audio version of an article we want to boost a powerful conversation that occurred recently in Milwaukee’s abolitionist community. On Thursday August 19, the African American Round Table hosted a facebook live conversation between Devin Anderson and Hiram Rivera called “What is Black August?” We’re sharing the unedited audio of that conversation so that more people can hear it. music by: bdwthr
ABOLISHmke, news and analysis from a bad place. We write from an anti-authoritarian perspective on police, prisons, and more in the so-called state of Wisconsin.
We will publish anything sent to us that conforms to our editorial standards for authenticity, conflict, and rigor. Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions: abolishmke [at] protonmail [dot] com.
ABOLISHmke, news and analysis from a bad place. We write from an anti-authoritarian perspective on police, prisons, and more in the so-called state of Wisconsin.
We will publish anything sent to us that conforms to our editorial standards for authenticity, conflict, and rigor. Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions: abolishmke [at] protonmail [dot] com.
This is an audio version of “Resistance, solidarity, and repression in Wisconsin” published at ABOLISHmke.com on July 29, 2021.
Music thanks to snag. snagmke.bandcamp.comABOLISHmke, news and analysis from a bad place. We write from an anti-authoritarian perspective on police, prisons, and more in the so-called state of Wisconsin.
We will publish anything sent to us that conforms to our editorial standards for authenticity, conflict, and rigor. Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions: abolishmke [at] protonmail [dot] com.
This is an audio version of “Shut’em down Wisconsin” published at ABOLISHmke.com on July 29, 2021.
Music thanks to snag. snagmke.bandcamp.comABOLISHmke, news and analysis from a bad place.
We write from an anti-authoritarian perspective on police, prisons, and more in the so-called state of Wisconsin.
We will publish anything sent to us that conforms to our editorial standards for authenticity, conflict, and rigor. Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions: abolishmke [at] protonmail [dot] com.
So, here’s how Marklein’s “normal legislative process” works: popular, well-crafted, bipartisan reforms get squanched by republican leadership in favor of unpopular, slip-shod, and logistically impracticable bills designed as veto-bait to rile up the party’s base with racially coded messaging. Calling that “good” is hilarious. Howard Marklein wins king of comedy in this session.
This is an audio version of the ABOLISHmke article titled Joint finance funnies: the prison budget debate that wasn’t. Joint Finance Funnies… describes a hearing and prison related policy decisions of the WI state legislature’s joint finance committee in June 2021.
We sifted through three long days of back-to-back two minute testimonies to pull out some highlight reels, which we’ll be sharing here. We also posted some testimonies to our instagram as they were happening, so follow us there to get more stuff.
First up, two minutes of fiery testimony given to the first hearing at UW-Whitewater.
Oshkosh CI has had over 1,000 positive COVID19 test results, this is the second highest in the DOC system.
Between March and November of 2020, ten people at OSCI died. The DOC has reported 23 deaths from COVID19 across the system, but more than that have very likely died of coronavirus while undiagnosed. There are 1,494 people currently held in OSCI risking their lives daily. Continue reading “New Years Eve Noise Demo Outside Oshkosh CI”
ABOLISHmke 