Monthly Archives: August 2021

Frank Ruiz| Guest columnist

As California embarks on a critical journey to protect 30% of the states lands, waters and ocean, as directed by Gov. Gavin Newsoms October 2020 executive order, it is all the more essential for Latino voices, historiesand priorities to be heard in the process.

During the pandemic, nature became a refuge and source of health for millions of Californians, from bird watching to taking daily walks around our neighborhoods. Never in my life have I seen so many Latino families hitting up the hiking trails as I have during the pandemic.

Yetnature were all beginning to enjoy is deteriorating, and it is most often degraded near low-income communities and those of color like the Eastern Coachella Valley, where I live.

People of color are more likely to live in nature-deprived communitiesand the most polluted parts of California,bearing a disproportionate load of environmental and health problems caused by nearby refineries, power plants, warehousesand industrial activities.

One result of this is asthma faced by Latino children, who are disproportionately likely to die from it. Whats more, our parks are often inaccessible, either located close to rail tracks, ortoo noisy to enjoy. Climate change will only exacerbate these conditions and worsen the consequences we are already facing from wildfires, drought and extreme heat.

The initiative to protect 30% of Californias lands, watersand ocean by 2030 known as 30x30 is a tremendous opportunity to ameliorate the dual crises of climate change and the ongoing loss of nature,while bringing equity to disadvantaged communities.

Access to nature for all is a way to improve health, economic prospectsand many other aspects of life that are worse off in Latino communities. As a pastor, I believe it is our moral responsibility to take care of the environment and the generations that follow us. As a mental health professional, I know that increased access to the outdoors promotes community health and well-being. As a Latino conservation advocate, I know that protecting nature must be done in a holistic way that brings Latinos and other communities, who have traditionally gone unheard, to the table.

As California proceeds with 30x30, the initiative needs to create more educational and job opportunities for Black and brown communities, as well as better access to the outdoors. And the state needs to intentionally build resilience to the climate impacts that disproportionately affect us, from wildfires to drought.

While I am hopeful for 30x30 and its potential, I fear that new resources and investments in nature and climate action will mostly accumulate benefits to wealthier communities, not those who need it most. California will not be a leading green state unless we implement these policies while ensuring equitable access to recreation and parks, youth career pipelines and access to educational opportunities.

As Californians continue to face economic and public health crises, while increasingly recognizing thedual threats of global temperature rise and biodiversity loss, we must recognize that our human communities are not separate from natural ecosystems. Just as threats to nature threaten us, protecting nature through initiatives like 30x30 will help us protect ourselves.

Similarly, we think of the desert and the ocean as two separate ecosystems, but they are deeply intertwined. Both regions are precious to Latino communities and must be protected under 30x30 to ensure our heritage, livelihoods, access to natureand global climate are preserved.

This past year, we have learned that access to nearby nature is not an amenity, but a necessity for health and quality of life just as access to clean water is. Continued funding and public engagement in 30x30 is needed to make sure nature and water accessare sustainable, intentional and equitable for Latino communities.

Since the start of the pandemic, many of our communities have been living in survival mode, concerned about putting food on the table, staying healthyand paying the rent or mortgage.

But this past year, awareness has risen that nature is a safe place for solitude and a more affordable and healthier way to vacation. When you experience nature, you love it, and when you love it, you want to care for it.

So we are calling for ambitious protections under 30x30 and new parks in the places that Latinos love, with Latinos engaged and at the table to determine our path forward.

Frank Ruiz is the Salton Sea Program director for Audubon California. Earlier, he co-founded Por La Creacin,a faith-basedinitiative by the Hispanic Access Foundation that seeks to educate and empower Latino communities in environmental advocacy, protection of public landsand public policy.

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As California works to protect 30% of its lands, Latinos need a seat at the table - Desert Sun

Afra Smith, founder and CEO of The Melanin Project, said when she was starting her company to build generational wealth for Black women, she had to continuously justify her competence and vision.

I was having to answer a million questions about my identity and target market and that creates a system where you seem like you dont belong. I dont want to have to justify why I am working with Black women. I am a Black woman and my target market is Black women, she told Madison365.

To delve into this challenge, and other challenges like this for women and BIPOC entrepreneurs Smith and five other panelists will lead a discussion during the virtual Social Good Summit on Friday, Aug. 13, noon-2 p.m.

At the free event, people can expect to hear from Smith, Elmer Moore, Judy Cooper, Maria Khokhar and Ian Aley. Hanif NuMan, of ReSCI Consulting, LLC, will be the moderator. And Shayna Hetzle, of partnering organization and sponsor, The American Family Insurance Institute for Corporate & Social Impact, will be the opening speaker.

The theme of the summit, which is in its sixth year, is Race and Entrepreneurship and will focus on how entrepreneurial ecosystems respond to the call of diversity, equity, and inclusion without harming active and aspiring BIPOC entrepreneurs.

There is a lot of focus and money spent on diversifying startups, hiring and things like that and we wanted to focus on what is beneficial, what works for people of color? Alnisa Allgood said, who is the co-founder of Social Good Madison that organizes the Social Good Summit.

Allgood said there are organizations that tout prioritizing diversity, equity and inclusion, however, they continue with their same game book and simply try to add people of color to it.

When they expect a person of color to fall in line they are saying we dont want your culture, we just want your color, Allgood said.

They say they want diversity but if they are not changing the organizational culture, and if they are a predominately white organization, they arent putting in the steps to make people of color feel welcome, respected, Allgood later added.

Smith expects to discuss some of her own struggles as a Black entrepreneur in the Madison area.

Especially a Black entrepreneur who is looking for more than profit.

When she was starting her business that uses financial advising, wellness coaching education and empowerment to build wealth for Black women, she wanted to have a positive impact on her community. And sometimes funders or people were too focused on money. She said she felt there was a mistrust in her ability to support the economics of Black and Brown communities.

Ive often had to spend some time educating people on (the importance of having an impact) so that delays me in getting what I need. If you are going to create a system that you say you want to support, you ensure your system is intentional about being inclusive, Smith said.

I dont want to be looked at as just a small business owner. I want to be looked at as someone who can create jobs and build infrastructure and impact my community.

Both Allgood and Smith said that they hope the event will start and continue a conversation about redefining entrepreneurship, and how organizations need to be intentional about their efforts to be inclusive.

The panelists will discuss a list of prepared questions before going into a question and answer session with the audience. Allgood said she is expecting an opportunity for participants to speak one on one with panelists at the end of the event.

For information, visit socialgoodmadison.org/summit/.

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Social Good Summit will delve into race and entrepreneurship - madison365.com

On another white-hot day in Kansas City, about 60 people spent Friday driving up and down streets registering the temperature and humidity every second.

The goal? To know in granular detail what intuition tells us more generally: that some places in cities are hotter than others possibly as much as 20 degrees, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In 2017, in an attempt to demonstrate and understand that temperature differential, the agency began providing funds to cities to gather weather data. Grants this year went to nine cities including Kansas City and two communities in Indiana: Richmond and Clarksville. About 30 other cities, including Detroit and Cincinnati, have gathered this data since the initiative began.

Theres some evidence that Kansas City has a worse-than-average urban heat problem. When it comes to the temperature difference between a city and the nearby countryside, Kansas City ranked seventh among 60 cities measured in a 2014 report by Climate Central. On a typical summer day, Climate Central estimated that Kansas City on average was 4.6 degrees hotter than surrounding rural land.

The question now: Which parts of the city are the very hottest?

A coalition of partners led by a University of Missouri-Kansas City researcher gathered the measurements and will now create a map combining tens of thousands of temperature and humidity measurements with a satellite map, allowing them to quickly learn the conditions in a given location.

We want to show how humans have impacted the weather, said Fengpeng Sun, an assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences at the university who is leading the project. This is not natural.

His primary goal is to educate Kansas City residents that climate change is happening in our neighborhood, not just in the Arctic.

The results also could direct corrective action more specifically to the neighborhoods most in need.

It could very well show us that the temperature is spiking in a particular area of Kansas City, said Kristin Riott, executive director of Bridging the Gap, a nonprofit whose mission includes tree planting. If we went there and found out it didnt have enough tree cover, we could plant more trees.

Expanding the urban forest is one of the lowest-hanging-fruit solutions for protecting occupants from climate change, Riott said. Every city in America is worried about its tree canopy.

As extreme heat events become more frequent due to human-caused climate change, the risks intensify for urban communities.

People who need green space most for cooling and other benefits, including social distancing during the pandemic and to decrease the amount of flooding on their streets during extreme rainfall, have the least, said Timon McPhearson, director of the Urban Systems Lab at The New School in New York City.

In 1995, Chicago suffered a sustained heatwave that killed more than 700 people, primarily in the citys Black communities on the South and West sides areas that have experienced decades of underinvestment in large part due to racist housing practices.

Formally established in the 1930s by the Home Owners Loan Corporation, redlining assigned risk grades to various communities largely based on race. The name redlining reflects the fact that so-called hazardous neighborhoods inhabited by BIPOC populations along with Jewish and Catholic residents were outlined in red on loan corporation maps.

Redlining has traditionally been associated with the refusal to approve mortgage applications, as well as disinvestment of essential services such as grocery stores and banks, and an absence of amenities in affected areas. However, many redlined areas also have large expanses of pavement and hardscape. These areas often suffer from a scant tree canopy and a scarcity of green space in comparison with more affluent and predominantly White communities.

The disparities are often stark. A June 2021 opinion article in the New York Times, citing a number of sources including Earth Define and American Community Survey, reported that trees and green spaces covered an average of more than 34% in White neighborhoods, compared with less than 20% green space in BIPOC communities.

The overlap between heat islands and redlined communities is more than a coincidence, according to Juan Declet-Barreto, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists:

All of these things are intertwined. But I dont think it was intentional in the sense that people conspired to say, Lets make these neighborhoods hotter. I think it was more a systematic denial of the good life to people of color. And redlining and land surface temperatures that are higher in those neighborhoods are just one indicator of that, Declet-Barreto said. You can see that these things go hand in hand with food deserts, for example, with the lack of schools, with the lack of a solid tax base that pays for services that many of us take for granted.

People with lower incomes, people without a social safety net, people who have to get on a bus or ride a bike and go to work instead of driving their air-conditioned vehicle to their air-conditioned office, are generally going to be more exposed and are going to have worse health outcomes.

In Scorched: Extreme Heat and Real Estate, a 2019 report from the Urban Land Institute, co-authors Elizabeth Foster and Katharine Burgess address a number of heat adaptation strategies, including green infrastructure solutions.

There is also a business case to be made for incorporating green infrastructure, such as planting trees, as part of an overall heat mitigation and urban resilience strategy, according to Foster.

Extreme heat is a dangerous hazard all by itself, but it also worsens other hazards. Really high temperatures stress utility infrastructure just when demand is highest. People tend to turn on their air conditioners and blast them all day long, leading to a risk of widespread power outages.

There are quite a number of market opportunities in increasing resilience, both at the offset and the market level, Foster said. When you implement green infrastructure, rain gardens or drought-tolerant vegetation or trees, that not only decreases or helps mitigate extreme heat or flood risk, but it also creates a really valuable social amenity.

Low-income households pay a disproportionate amount of their income for energy costs in comparison with more affluent residents. They also often live in energy-inefficient homes or apartments without air conditioning, making it even more difficult to deal with excessive heat. Disinvested neighborhoods should be prioritized for planting urban trees as a means of mitigating this disparity, according to Declet-Barreto.

A uniform application is not going to address the inequities that are already built into the city. You may end up putting a whole bunch of trees in neighborhoods where people dont need the trees because they can pay for air conditioning in their homes. You need to consider the needs of the most vulnerable, which are typically the persons with lower income in any given city. And that should be a guiding principle, Declet-Barreto said.

Enhancing tree canopies is an excellent strategy for mitigating heat island effects, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. But simply planting trees is not sufficient. Quality and maintenance must be prioritized as a matter of policy, especially in disinvested neighborhoods. Heat mitigation policies must also address the effects of decades of redlining, segregation and disinvestment for BIPOC communities.

However, the majority of funding still flows toward wealthier, predominantly White neighborhoods. This is because municipal parks budgets are often inadequate to maintain park quality which leaves local conservancy groups to pick up the slack. While affluent neighborhoods often enthusiastically take up this challenge, it is rarely possible for low-income neighborhoods to do so, McPhearson said.

The challenge that we face is we have decades of that legacy in place that make it so you cant change the status quo overnight, McPhearson said We have to change the systemic structures that are in place. When were talking about heat, its not just that low-income and minority communities have less access to green space. Its that they have lower quality housing. Its that they have streets that may have also been built out in ways that makes it hard to put new street trees in.

And so, it means that those buildings need to be retrofitted with increased insulation. It means that they need to have green roofs installed, which are very expensive, even if theyre very effective. They need to have air conditioning subsidized because maybe they cant afford them. So, were trying to at the same time deal with the current rise of heat and heat exposure and decades of racist planning that created the risk in the first place.

For his research in Kansas City, Sun identified 80 square miles in older and more developed parts of the city that include many of the zip codes where incomes generally are lower and socioeconomic challenges greater. He made it a point to include zip codes with residents with documented lower life expectancy.

In those areas, Sun said, The concern is, What is causing that? And what can we do to improve that?

Tru Keshia Smith grew up and now lives in one of those neighborhoods where, she said, the sun is just going to shine. She said street trees are lacking or, in many cases, damaged. Although the neighborhood has parks, she said they need more trees; she was at one of them recently and noticed that people were bumped up against what trees were available.

Smith, who is the program director for Bridging the Gap, has volunteered to take heat and humidity measurements for Suns project.

I am very fond of the community I live in, she said. Its very important to make sure that communities that look like me can also be part of the solution. I feel I should be part of the process.

Read more from the original source:

Urban heat island research aims to spotlight disparities and solutions - Energy News Network

Both Sing Sing and Eastern State established penitentiary models that influenced how modern prisons operate under mass incarceration. But both were left with crumbling infrastructure along the way. Eastern State, which closed in 1971, became a museum in 1995. At Sing Sing, the museum will occupy the now-empty 1936 powerhouse, which once provided the prisons electricity, as well as the cellblock constructed by incarcerated workers in 1825. The 476-foot-long, roofless structure looks and feels like a bombed-out ruin; the crumbling marble and frayed barbed wire still holds the weight of punishment and isolation.

Sing Sing village changed its name to Ossining in 1901, trying to separate itself from the prisons increasingly notorious reputation. Throughout the 20th century, the prison embedded itself into the American imagination, appearing in books, films and movies, and embodied the complicated juxtapositions of prison. While Sing Sing has long led the nation in reform through programming and education, for example, 614 people have been killed there on the electric chair.

At the start of the 21st century, Ossining officials began exploring ways to share the history through a museum. The plan faced roadblocks: as an active prison, there was concern the site would scare away potential visitors. Prison administration had its own hesitations. There was pushback in talking about what was happening in criminal justice or whats happening in prisons in general when youre right next to an operating prison, according to Ossining Town Supervisor and ex-officio museum board member Dana Levenberg. It was a sensitive subject.

The 2008 economic crisis slowed progress. When it picked up, there was interest among local politicians, prison administration and the inter-municipal organization Historic Hudson River Towns. As criminal justice started rising in relevance, the project started picking up, getting more legs, and getting more people interested in looking at this [through] a different lens than just a museum or just the history, explains Levenberg.

In 2015, the project secured $100,000 in state funds. Brent Glass, a national leader in preservation and museum interpretation, was hired not to simply oversee museum development, but to figure out the other roles that a site such as this needed to play. The board civic, cultural and educational leaders in Ossining and the surrounding Hudson Valley, former members of prison administration, formerly incarcerated, victims and a family member of someone formerly incarcerated all represent different viewpoints, but are in agreement this must be more than a traditional museum.

I only represent one small sliver of history when it comes to Sing Sing, but my message has always been the history of Sing Sing needs to be told respectfully, and we should never, ever turn it into an easy thing for a baseball cap or keychain, says Osborne, whose great-grandfather, Thomas Mott Osborne, became Sing Sings warden in 1914 with a reputation as a radical prison reformer.

People are going to come see the prison because of its name, thats terrific, says former Sing Sing superintendent and board member Brian Fischer. But once we get them there, our goal will be to ask the question: youve seen the history, what should we be doing tomorrow? We want to encourage people to ask: whats next? Fischer believes prisons represent something deeper about societal values: Primarily, a prison is a reflection of societys attitude toward criminal justice, as he puts it. Prison isnt a static thing they were created and changed over time as society changed.

The interior of the now-empty, circa-1936 Power House. (Photo courtesy Sing Sing Prison Museum)

The changing landscape of prison museums shows visitors arent afraid of the question and reflection that follows. Eastern State Penitentiary, which focused on architecture and prison design in its early years, now includes a 16-foot-tall, steel graph representing the explosive growth of the countrys prison population between 1900 and 2020. The graph, installed in 2014, dramatically affected programming and prompted the museum to hire formerly incarcerated tour guides. Attendance doubled between 2014 and 2019, according to the museums senior vice president Sean Kelley.

The graph changed the whole nature of the visit to the prison at this point, were trying to work contemporary reflections into everything we do, Kelley says. We didnt force this conversation Americans are ready to have this conversation.

Sam North, a history teacher at Ossining High School, grew up in the shadow of Sing Sing without knowing anything about it. Years later, that stuck with me, he recalls. There was absolutely [nothing] happening in the schools, or even in the community, connected with Sing Sing Correctional Facility.

Ossining is now a modest suburban village located an hour north of New York City by train. The prison sits on the base of the waterfront with the village propped above; the two locations are further divided by MetroNorth railroad tracks. Unlike prisons in upstate New York, built in remote locations often surrounded by wilderness, its an easy 10-minute drive from pretty much anywhere in town down to the prison.

Despite that proximity, North notes, It was just not a thing anybody talked about. The museum is changing that. Glass began working with the school district while North was teaching a course on racism, classism and sexism. With guidance from Glass, he and other educators from Ossining and nearby Peekskill high schools developed two curriculums on mass incarceration, one that could be integrated into existing history courses and another to be taught as a standalone class.

In implementation, North says, it felt like the district was dragging its feet, like it was still nervous to touch this particular topic. In the meantime, he recruited students to help the Sing Sing Prison Museum team vet design teams for the future museum, given that the space will someday host school groups.

The district approved the class in the fall of 2020. North has since taught four sections of the standalone course for 84 students. He screens documentaries such as The 13th and Just Mercy and leads discussions around current-day topics that intersect with the criminal justice system. To engage his students around protests against police brutality, for example, North brought in local politicians to discuss and answer questions around police reform. In another class he showed Zero Percent, a documentary about the college program in Sing Sing, which was followed by a virtual visit with members of Hudson Link.

In the coursework, the students have been engaged with the museums progress: Theyre really savvy to [the location], North notes, Theyre concerned about what the focus will be and how to make sure people wont be glorifying prisons.

North expects to teach the course fully in person this fall. Student feedback, so far, shows the class leaves an impact. Throughout the semester my perspective has shifted completely on how people who make mistakes are punished, not only in the correctional system but in general, one student wrote. This is a topic that is not talked about enough, sadly, especially in a town that has a prison, and you did a very good job of delivering the information for the first time during times like these.

Glass sees the relationship with the Ossining school district as indicative of more opportunities to strengthen the relationship of the village to the prison. Ive said to a number of public officials that Ossining can use this museum to, in effect, reinvent itself as a place where criminal justice reform is a forum, he says. Instead of being identified as a place of incarceration, as it has been for 200 years, use the museum and other places in Ossining to attract organizations devoted to criminal justice reform.

Stephanie Lynn, a self-described community builder in Ossining and member of the board, spoke of a gardening program that takes place inside the prison. She envisions how a prison garden program could connect to greater Ossining with the help of the museum; perhaps introducing culinary programming inside prison while setting up employment at local restaurants for returning citizens. We could have a museum restaurant, or a restaurant in town connected to the museum, that could be a launching point for jobs, she suggests.

Two years ago Lynn worked with other community members and Sing Sing Prison Museum staff to present The Wait Room, a dance honoring the lives of women with incarcerated loved ones. Staged in the waterfront park that abuts the prison, the performance was a boots-on-the-ground effort, with a Hudson Link employee driving his van to the site every night to watch over the performance equipment. Still it attracted visitors from across the state, earning a review in the New York Times.

The Wait Room, performed in September 2019,exploredthe physical, psychic, and emotional toll that incarceration takes on women who haveimprisoned loved ones. It was staged just outside the walls of Sing Sing Correctional Facility. (Photo by Fred Elmes)

The team faced challenges in aligning the event with the men incarcerated less than a mile from the performance. The superintendent was originally going to let us advertise the event on the prisons internal television system so men could tell their wives, according to Lynn. We intended to have a bus for the women visiting their husbands to bring them to performances.

Because of an uptick in violence at the prison that summer, the prisons superintendent quashed the plan. Instead, volunteers with the performance brought vans to the prison entrance and offered to drive departing visitors to the performance.

Sometimes the fluidity between the prison and what we want to do cant always happen, explains Lynn, Because of security restraints and concerns.

That hurdle gets to a larger challenge the museum board faces: how to meaningfully connect the museum to the men incarcerated at the prison. Its also unique, as there are few prison museums located on the site of a working prison. (The Museum of Colorado Prisons, located next to Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility, and the Angola Museum, at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, are two; neither present particularly nuanced looks at Americas relationship to mass incarceration.)

Board member Sean Pica, who was formerly incarcerated at Sing Sing and is now executive director of Hudson Link, has taken some of the responsibility. When I speak to the guys on the inside about the project, I want them to know Im on the board, he says. That theyre trying to include the voice of the men that live there makes it a very different kind of project from iterations in the past. I think the men are excited at the potential of capturing the history and voices of the other side.

About a year ago, Hudson Link kicked off a word-of-mouth archive project just spreading the word wed like your stories, Pica says. I dont care if its about the mess hall, religion, family, write it down and get it to me. These narratives, to be offered to Sing Sing Prison Museum, capture the kinds of prison stories rarely documented, Pica believes. And the board has been responsive to telling those stories. Pica characterizes his fellow board members as a bunch of community members that happen to have a notorious max-security prison in their backyard, and want to capture [the experience] in a way thats humanizing.

Most of the focus, for now, has been centered on formerly incarcerated individuals. In his interviews as a Justice Center fellow, Nacimento Blair discussed with his mother what it was like for her in the prison visiting room, where she was disrespected by guards, and about providing for a son unable to work because of his incarceration. He hadnt realized she kept many of her feelings and struggles from him as he worked to get through his prison term.

He spoke with a young man whose father is incarcerated about his feelings around having one parent missing, and if he was treated differently in school because of his fathers incarcerated status. Blair and his wife discussed the stigma of being married to someone incarcerated. Each of the other fellows he interviewed shared how they earned unofficial incomes inside, such as writing cards for prisoners who couldnt read or write.

Blair hopes these conversations will help a future museum audience understand the dynamics of punishment, as he puts it. We need to see how punishment doesnt just impact the person doing the time, but its a whole community thats affected.

Interviews from the fellows which also include interviews with a correctional officer and volunteers at the prison will be used to craft the master narrative presented about Sing Sing and how it intersects with the larger history of mass incarceration. Glass believes this early work sets a framework for collaboration throughout the museum development, so that affected people have a final say on how the story is told.

In summer 2020the museum launched Justice Talks, an online forum to discuss contemporary issues (wrongful conviction,solitary confinement, theimpact of COVID-19) as well as historical topics such as the1971 Attica Prison uprising.(Screenshot courtesy Sing Sing Prison Museum)

Projects like our museum have to tell something that was supposed to be forgotten, says Victoria Gonzalez, a museum staff member helping with research. Shes also dug into lesser-told histories of the more distant past, such as the womens prison that operated in the mid-1800s.

So far, according to Glass, the New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision has given the project free range, even though the museum board will need to work closely with administration to open the museum to the public. Sing Sings current superintendent, Mike Capra, is 100 percent behind the idea, Glass says. Hes even asked me if we could have a re-entry counseling office in the museum. (The New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision declined to offer an interview and issued a statement that we support the vision of the project and believe the museum will provide visitors with a truly unique experience.)

For all the potential opportunities envisioned for the site, COVID-19 has taken an undeniable hit. Because of the pandemic and challenges in fundraising for the $45 million project, which requires a full rehabilitation and renovation of the power house and stabilization of the cellblock, the opening of the preview center was pushed back from the end of 2020 until the end of 2021. Id still call us a startup in many ways, notes Glass. Until we actually open that preview center, I wont feel satisfied.

But, as the pandemic tore through Americas prisons and the country erupted in protests following the murder of George Floyd, museum staff and board wanted to provide a forum for discussion. Last summer, the museum launched the first of its Justice Talks in collaboration with Ossining history teacher Sam North. For the first webinar, North brought some of his students from Ossining High School, as well as students from nearby Peekskill High School, to ask questions of local and state politicians. The conversation addressed issues of systemic inequality.

Over the past year, Justice Talks have covered contemporary issues, including wrongful conviction, solitary confinement and the impact of COVID-19, alongside historical topics such as the 1971 Attica Prison uprising.

Board member Ronnine Bartley organized a Justice Talk titled Families Staying Together. Barley married her husband Lawrence while he was incarcerated at Sing Sing, and they have a son. The event is taking a look not how you go through the hardships or the barriers when youre visiting, but how visiting consistently helps transform you or your familys existence, she says. Im sick of the negatives if you keep putting the negative out there, thats all people will believe.

Still, Bartley has seen firsthand how prison operates to push people apart families, friends, loved ones and entire communities. She knows of the division inside prison, too, such as between incarcerated residents and prison staff. She adds that even though correctional officers hold power over the people incarcerated, theyre negatively impacted by the system as well.

Glass characterizes this early work with the department as building an environment of trust that were going to tell the story, the real story, good, bad and ugly, as long as we dont ignore the effort theyre making now within the culture of reform.

But theres inherent tension even as Sing Sing and other prisons look to reform. Prison abolition has become a larger part of public dialogue since last summers uprising; the movement argues the countrys criminal justice institutions are incapable of reform. New Yorks state prisons remain brutal and deadly a reality made starkly clear during the pandemic. Can a prison museum, on prison property, tell that story about itself?

That final answer isnt clear, but there are current topics agreed on by board members from Sing Sings former superintendent to the man formerly incarcerated there. They point to the vast racial disparities in U.S. prisons, the ineffectiveness of an ever-growing prison population, the negative impacts of long-term sentencing and the effectiveness of supportive services over punishment. They emphasize the importance of developing an inclusive narrative of mass incarceration, as opposed to one crafted by the state. The men that live at the prison will have a role, and a real voice, over what [future] exhibits look like and what the story being told feels like, as Pica puts it.

In many ways, the museums planning process reflects Americas larger relationship to mass incarceration: widespread acknowledgment that it isnt working, less clarity in how we fix it and how to address the overwhelming trauma it has caused. The museum, at the least, will be an intentional space to continue those discussions.

When Bartley ponders a future Sing Sing Prison Museum, she envisions togetherness. A learning space for children, alongside support and resources for prison staff and the formerly incarcerated. You have a space here everybody thats involved in the criminal justice system has a space, she emphasizes. Thats how I visualize it, and I believe the rest of the board is visualizing that as well.

This article is part of For Whom, By Whom, a series of articles about how creative placemaking can expand opportunities for low-income people living in disinvested communities. This series is generously underwritten by the Kresge Foundation.

Continued here:

Can This Prison Museum Tell the Full Story of Mass Incarceration? - Next City