![\"Dr.](\"https:\/\/blogs.winona.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/28\/2019\/05\/Prisoners.jpg\")
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On April 1st, 2019, students from Dr. Mary Jo Klinker\u2019s \u201cQueer Theories and Politics\u201d Class (WGSS 374) at Winona State University went to Madison, WI to meet and volunteer alongside the organization LGBT Books to Prisoners. This allowed them the opportunity to gain hands-on experience in activism and what queer scholar Cathy Cohen refers to as \u201csubstantive solidarity.\u201d As she defines it in her December 12, 2014 lecture \u201c#DoBlackLivesMatter? From Michael Brown to CeCe McDonald on Black Death and LGBTQ Politics,\u201dThis is a form of solidarity which ‘engages in an intersectional politics of resistance.’\u201d As students, we have the privilege and ability to access books, and as we\u2019ve studied in this course of queering prison abolition, prisoners\u2019 access to books is often harshly limited or denied. Seattle-based activist of Books to Prisoners Michelle Dillon Skyped in to discuss this reality and continues this work in Washington where access has recently been denied<\/a>.<\/p>\n One of the first readings assigned in class that provided necessary understanding of mass incarceration was \u201cComing out of Concrete Closets<\/a>: A Report on Black and Pink\u2019s National LGBTQ Prisoner Survey.\u201d Some of the data found from this study that reflects on the population and hardships that incarcerated LGBTQ+ individuals are subjected to includes that \u201c67% of respondents have been diagnosed with a mental illness; of these, 48% receive no therapy.\u201d Additionally, \u201c70% of respondents experienced emotional pain from hiding their sexuality during incarceration\/throughout their interactions with the criminal legal system\u201d and \u201c85% of respondents have been in solitary confinement at some point during their sentence; approximately half have spent two or more years there. Altogether, respondents have spent a total of 5,110 years in solitary confinement.\u201d<\/p>\n When discussing the importance of books, it is necessary to also note that \u201conly 20% of respondents have access to LGBTQ-affirming books\u201d and \u201c15% of respondents have been barred from programs offered by the prison because they identify as LGBTQ\u201d (2015). For many who are privileged, it is easy to view books and education as human rights, or accessible to all. However, these statistics show that not only are prisoners forced to experience staggering rates of violence, suicidality, and minimal social interactions, they are also deprived of expanding their knowledge and the brief escape that books can provide.<\/p>\n Moving from statistics to quotations, another reading that was valuable to furthering our knowledge before this event in regard to prison abolition was \u201cQueering Prison Abolition, Now?<\/a>\u201d by Eric A. Stanley, Dean Spade, and Queer (In)Justice. In this reading, it is stated that \u201cprison imagery has served its purpose as a weapon to secure compliance beyond trans\/queer communities while painting all queers with a brush of sexual depredation that contributes to our criminalization and violation inside and outside prison walls\u201d and \u201cqueer liberation and sexual and gender self-determination require that we reach toward abolition, not just of prisons, and for some of us, police, but of the systems that produce them, and which replicate systems of policing and punishment beyond prison walls.\u201d These statements provide insight into some of the key viewpoints behind the prison abolition movement, including the notation of intersectionality that while prisons and police are a part of it, to completely abolish something means to get rid of the system that created it entirely.<\/p>\nBackground Research and Classroom Discussions\u00a0
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<\/strong><\/h4>\nStudents’ Reflections<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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\u201cI had previously learned in class about the reality of prisoners’ lives through watching \u201c