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Use Cases
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Resources
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Pricing
1790
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Walnut Street Jail, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, officially became Walnut Street Prison in this year, serving as the first state prison in America. Walnut Street was also one of the first units in America to use solitary confinement and to separate prisoners by sex. As evidenced by their relatively recent development, these carceral practices are not an inevitability and are not necessary for a safe or just society.
https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/prisons-and-jails/
1848
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Columbus, Ohio holds the dubious honor of being the home of America's first ordinance against public cross-dressing. Not limited to Ohio, state and local laws such as these served to police trans and gender nonconforming people's bodies for well over a century. The photo attached is from a 1912 Houston Chronicle article showing the effects of such a law.
http://www.houstonlgbthistory.org/houston-cross-dressing.html
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/arresting-dress-timeline-anti-cross-dressing-laws-u-s
1905
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Later renamed the Anarchist Black Cross to differentiate itself from the humanitarian organization, the first North American Anarchist Red Cross chapter was founded in New York in the early 1900s. The Anarchist Red Cross works "through letters, visits, material aid, as well as demonstrations, campaigns and spreading information about prisoners, the reality of prisons and the class system which created them," with the goal of ending political imprisonment. It was one of the first explicitly political prison pen pal programs.
https://solidarity.international/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/ABC-Zine-Small-for-Download.pdf
1968
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In Terry v. Ohio, the United States Supreme Court officially determined that it was legal for a police officer to search someone without probable cause. The officer need only have "reasonable suspicion" that the person is committing or may commit a crime in the near future. These "stop and frisk" practices allow the state to construct certain bodies as criminal, even before the commission of a crime, and have been used to target queer, trans, and gender nonconforming folks, especially those who are of color.
https://www.crimemuseum.org/crime-library/criminal-law/terry-ohio/
1974
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The Radical Faerie Digest, or RFD, a gay quarterly publication, has been circulating since 1974. It contains a section titled "Brothers Behind Bars" which featured letters and pen pal requests from prisoners, intending to foster community for gay men both inside and outside of prison.
https://www.rfdmag.org/
Lessons in Being Gay: Queer Encounters in Gay and Lesbian Prison Activism, Regina Kunzel. 2008, Radical History Review, issue 100.
1976 - 1978
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Join Hands: Gay Prisoners News published in San Francisco by a collective that advocated for gay men in California state prisons. Articles were contributed by currently incarcerated LGBT-identified people and prison reform activists. All 15 published issues are available in the GLBT Historical Society's archives.
https://www.facebook.com/GLBTHistory/photos/a.10155409615926176/10155512846056176/?type=3&theater
1990
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Dated July 24, 1990, this letter from inmate Albert Chui Clark to researcher Sue Rochman details the experiences of some HIV positive prisoners in the Angola Louisiana State Penitentiary. The prisoner writes about the lack of education for incoming inmates and the violence and isolation HIV positive prisoners face. These papers were contributed by the GLBT Historical Society and found via the University of California database.
http://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/ucldc-nuxeo-ref-media/ba929ede-7030-4a79-9ebb-87692fa71754
2005
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Founded in this year, Black and Pink is a prison abolitionist organization that runs one of the LGBTQ+ prison pen pal programs in America. Drawing from a history of prison resistance, it has explicitly anarchist aims and was the program that Arin used to contact Naughtia. Its founders also collaborated with RFD's Brothers Behind Bars program to develop its own database.
August 2019
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In mid-2019, a currently incarcerated queer trans woman named Naughtia created this photo collage and mailed it to Arin Yost as a token of friendship. This work, though not explicitly political, is significant in the context of the history of prison abolition and resistance movements and demonstrates the importance of community to LGBTQ+ prisoners.