Category: CCWP Archives from our Website

October is Maafa Awareness Month. Maafa is a Kiswahili term for disaster, calamity or terrible occurrence. This term has been used to describe the European Slave trade or the Black Holocaust. For the past 12 years, this month is a time for the San Francisco Bay Area community to reflect on the legacy of slavery, its economic, political and social impact on the region and nation, and the residual psychological effects on descendants: perpetrators, victims, and beneficiaries. Maafa Awareness Month is a time to look at how Africans or Black people, in particular, can heal from the trauma.

Continue reading “Maafa Awareness Month Events Organized by CCWP Advisory Board Member Wanda Sabir” →

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation?s (CDCR) Family Foundation Program in San Diego, which allows women prisoners to be incarcerated with their children, is under investigation for severe child neglect and abuse by the San Diego Police Department. The investigation began in January when incarcerated mothers and their family members contacted Legal Services for Prisoners with Children to report the severe lack of medical care for their children. Child Protective Services is also investigating Family Foundations for its treatment of the children living there.

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CCWP held its third annual Family Visiting Day event this past February, providing transportation from both Oakland and Los Angeles to Central California Women?s Facility and Valley State Prison for Women, both in Chowchilla, to the loved ones of prisoners in each institution. The response this year was bigger than any previous year showing the enormous desire of women, transgender and gender variant prisoners and family members and loved ones of these prisoners to visit one another. This huge response also illustrates the absolute need many have for assistance in getting to the prisons, as the cost and distance of the trip is often prohibitive, especially considering the disproportionate number of people from poor communities and communities of color being locked up. The fact that we received information for over 800 visitors while we had the resources and capacity for only 170 shows how much this opportunity means to people in California women?s prisons and their loved ones on the outside.

Continue reading “Family Visiting Day 2007” →

This year marked the tenth anniversary of the CCWP newsletter The Fire Inside. A celebration of this occasion was held on November 7, 2006 at the African American Art and Culture Complex in San Francisco. This amazing event featured author Alice Walker as our guest of honor who read from her recently released book We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For and shared her thoughts on the prison industrial complex, the oppression of political prisoners in the United States, and the current state of our world.

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