Queer and trans activists are coming together to fight Seattle’s proposed jail-building project. The City currently rents jail space from King County and the County has announced that they are going to need to use all the jail space for their own arrestees and prisoners soon, and Seattle and the other local jurisdictions who rent their space must find another option.

Supporters of the new jail proposal frame the issues as “inevitable,” arguing that the City has no alternative but to spend $226 million on a new jail. Opponents of the jail argue that it will increase criminalization of oppressed communities because if they build it, they will fill it. A coalition of organizations have proposed Initiative 100. If I-100 were to get on the ballot and pass, it would do four things: 1) force the City to engage in public negotiations with the County to try to find alternatives 2) develop a strategy to address racial disparity in arrest and incarceration rates (black people make up 6% of the population and 36% of the jail population currently) 3) study ways to decrease incarceration including studying how investments in social services will lower crime and arrest rates, and 4) put the issue of building a new jail or not to a popular vote. In order to get I-100 on the ballot its supporters must gather 23,000 signatures of registered Seattle voters by early June. The effort is being led by Real Change, an organization that publishes Seattle’s homeless newspaper and organizes homeless vendors. Real Change has been a loud opposition to Mayor Nickels’ increasing sweeps of homeless encampments and aggressive arrests of homeless people and people with psychiatric disabilities in the last few years. This new approach has also promoted the creation of a roaming tent city called “Nickelsville” that exposes in a daily way the failure of the City to provide accessible housing while criminalizing homelessness.

Many organizations and individuals have joined the fight for I-100. Another loud voice has been activists concerned with public education. Controversy has erupted in recent months as the City has planned the closure of two public schools predominantly attended by students of color. Many parents and teachers have come out in full force with the message “Schools Not Jails,” connecting the racist failures of the public education system and the high rates of imprisonment in communities of color.

Queer and trans activists have joined this fight as well. As we mark the 40th anniversary of Stonewall this year, many of Seattle’s queer and trans activists are eager to remind other queer and trans people of the roots of the contemporary queer/trans struggle in resistance to police brutality and criminalization. Many queer and trans activists are canvassing local queer bars and events to gather signatures for I-100 and spread the word about the new jail and why queer and trans people should be concerned about it. Some of the activists have put together various posters and flyers, one of which outlines five reasons that queer and trans activists are opposing the new jail. These are:
1. Jails and prisons are enormous sources of violence for queer and trans people. Queer and trans people are targeted for rape and sexual assault in prisons, jails and juvenile punishment facilities regularly. Trans women are placed in men’s prisons and jails all over the US, experiencing enormous violence. Queer and trans people also experience severe medical neglect in prisons, jails, and juvenile punishment programs.
2. Queer and trans people are overrepresented in prisons and jails. Queer and trans people, especially people of color, are disproportionately poor and homeless due to job discrimination, school discrimination and family rejection. Many are discriminated against when they seek help from social services, foster care systems, homeless shelters and drug treatment facilities. Many survive by doing criminalized work, like sex work, and face profiling and harassment and brutality by police. All of these conditions result in high incidence of arrest and imprisonment of queer and trans people.
3. Issues of gender and sexual violence are being used to justify the ongoing growth of imprisonment, and we won’t let them create more state violence in our names. In recent years social movements that have pointed out the enormous amount of sexual and gender violence in our culture have found our arguments co-opted by the state to justify increased policing and imprisonment. We’re now told that policing and punishment is the solution to domestic violence, sexual assault and hate violence, but we know that imprisonment does not address the root causes of these problems, does not make our communities safe, and increases our vulnerability. The prison is the worst rapist, batterer and predator of queer people, trans people and women, and we won’t watch it expand in our names!
4. Imprisonment has quadrupled in the US since 1980, and targets people of color, poor people, women, and sexual/gender outsiders. The US imprisons 25% of the world’s prisoners though we have only 5% of the world’s population. One in one hundred people in the US are imprisoned, and one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34 are imprisoned. We won’t stand by while this expansion continues in Seattle.
5. We want community responses to violence, drug use, and poverty that actually make us safer, not prisons and jails that ruin people’s lives and expand violence. Seattle wants to spend $200 million on a new jail while it closes schools and cuts social services. We want that money for real solutions to the root causes of social problems.

Given the strong pro-“law and order” messaging of media and government over the last 30 years, opposing the new jail is both challenging and urgent. Canvassers have reported that most people they talk to about the new jail are surprised to hear that anyone would oppose it, believing that more jails must make people safer and that the City wouldn’t build it if it wasn’t needed. Engaging conversations about why new jails do not make people safer and in fact are places of extreme violence and exploitation is urgent to shift this thinking. Often helping people remember their own experiences with police, and talking about the contradiction of the City defunding social services and drug treatment that can prevent criminalization can break the “more jails are good” spell, but it is a tough conversation. The queer and trans activists involved have identified both a desire to expand critical understanding of criminalization in queer and trans communities and to use the campaign to increase queer and trans political organizing that is centered on anti-racism and anti-poverty politics. Well known gay Seattleite Dan Savage, who distinguished himself with racist remarks after Prop. 8’s passage, recently derided some of the activists’ propaganda on the Stranger blog, which may suggest they should keep up the good work!

What alternatives to the new jail are its opponents proposing? Many of the alternatives focus on reducing arrests in both Seattle and in King County so that no new space would be needed. The Defenders Association (which incidentally recently sought out trans awareness training and made it mandatory for 100% of staff—cool!) has proposed a reduction in certain minor drug arrests that their own research suggests could reduce the jail population significantly enough to eliminate the jail capacity problem. People from the criminal defense and drug treatment communities are also vying for an expansion of certain drug diversion programs that have been proven to have high success rates in Seattle and help drug users avoid jail time altogether while also getting support for addiction issues. Prison abolitionists are also part of the conversation in Seattle, articulating a vision for addressing poverty, addiction and violence issues without jails or prisons, and arguing that none of these issues are resolved by imprisonment. Organizations like Communities Against Rape and Abuse (CARA) stand out not only in Seattle but also nationally as visionaries in strategizing how sexual, gendered and domestic violence can be addressed outside of a criminal punishment model. (You can read more about this in The Color of Violence (ed. Incite!).) This issue is particularly important because Washington State has mandatory arrest laws for domestic violence and some domestic violence advocacy organizations are arguing for increasing the prison sentences for felony domestic violence. Women of color feminists and queers have raised ongoing critiques of the use of criminal punishment to address interpersonal violence and bias-motivated violence. These issues come to the fore as various criminalized communities fight to stop the expansion of jail and prison systems, even while others argue that these systems are the answer to our safety issues. In Seattle, these issues are an urgent domain of contestation and resistance as the battle over resources and the city’s policing policies emerges around the I-100 campaign.

If you live somewhere where a jail is being planned or proposed and want to connect with allies fighting jail and prison expansion elsewhere, contact SRLP and we’ll put you in touch with people fighting similar battles around the US. To watch a video of a forum that was recently held by the Seattle jail’s opponents, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CrByNwp5Gw.