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Originally published on It’s Going Down
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On March 18th, prisoners at Allegheny County Jail in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania began a sit-in. Eighty prisoners took part in the action to demand more case workers, better medical services, and a legitimate grievance procedure. Last night, masked demonstrators converged on the jail in solidarity with those protesting inside and smashed windows of the jail, a security camera, and several police vehicles. The action was broken up after police arrested eleven protesters.

Allegheny County Jail (ACJ) imprisons more than 2,500 people, and its population has increased by 70% in the last two decades. ACJ has a long history of abuse and was the subject of a 2010 FBI investigation that found officials there were covering up abuse of prisoners. Health conditions at the jail are also notoriously bad; eleven people died while incarcerated at ACJ in just 2014 and 2015.

Eighty-one percent of the people being incarcerated at Allegheny County Jail haven’t been convicted of a crime and are in being incarcerated pretrial. Many of these people are being held on bail they cannot pay, meaning they are only incarcerated because they lack access to a certain amount of money.

In a monetary bail system, access to money determines whether someone will be released or detained pretrial. Someone who can’t afford bail will likely be incarcerated for the duration of their trial, which could be years. Even a few days of pretrial incarceration often means the difference between working and being fired or paying rent and being evicted. Right now, more than 450,000 people are incarcerated in US jails—most of them in pretrial detention and most of those people because they cannot pay bail. In effect, our legal system is punishing people for being poor.

In the past year, there has been a dramatic increase in action being taken by incarcerated people across the US, most recently at Vaughn Correctional Facility where prisoners demanding better conditions took over a wing of the prison. In August and September of 2016, 22 mothers held at an immigration detention center in Pennsylvania went on hunger strike to protest the ongoing incarceration of themselves and their children. Last September’s national prisoner strike involved at least 29 prisons in 12 states. The strike was organized by the Free Alabama Movement (FAM) with support from the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the Anarchist Black Cross (ABC), and a wide variety of anti-prison organizations. Tens of thousands of prisoners participated in the strike, affecting facilities across the country.

Especially as Trump and Sessions push for even more criminalization of targeted communities, it essential that we pay close attention to and amplify resistance inside US jails, prisons, and immigration detention centers.

Solidarity with those rising up and resisting at Allegheny County Jail.

There is no denying the severity of our situation. The systemic and violent oppression of women, people of color, the LGBTQ* community, the 99%, neurodivergent folks, and countless other marginalized identity groups is about to escalate. It’s time we escalate in return.

Late last night, around a thousand Pitt students and Pittsburghers flooded into the streets. Some of us answered The Fourth Wave‘s call to action, others gathered spontaneously. We built barricades to obstruct the police tails. We attempted to occupy the Cathedral of Learning and Hillman in order to shut down campus and create a hub for organizing sustained resistance. We wrote this shit mad drunk at 5am because fuck this noise about “tolerance” – it’s time to revolt!

We are three pissed off queers, and we do not speak on behalf of anyone but ourselves. We hope that many, many more of you release statements, communiqués, strategic proposals, and calls to action so we can build a dialogue and figure out where we go from here. That 1am march was lit af, but we have work to do. Change is not a television show where two racist millionaires desperately try to convince their audience that the other is more racist. Change is not a woke-ass facebook post. Change is a rupture in the spectacle of what they call peace.

To Our Friends,
To the hundreds of kids that spontaneously gathered in opposition to a Trump presidency last night, we’ve spent our entire college careers looking for you! It figures that we’d meet only briefly, sharing no knowledge of each other outside of a collective moment of militant passion and defiance. We don’t know where you hang out, or what you do for fun, or how you balance the uncertainty of the future with the anxiety of the everyday. But we want to. We hope that someday soon we’ll find each other again, if only to enjoy another chance at cheering each other on as we confront the political manifestation of a Fox News article’s comments section.

But we also hope to know you by more than our shared practices of self-defense and intolerance of bigotry. Imagine what we’re capable of should we meet again on our own terms? The administration and its police recognize the threat: that’s why cops have been profiling and harassing any students that even look like they might oppose Trump, that’s why Vice Provost & Dean of Students Kenyon Bonner sent out a super sexy photo of himself with a plea for students to tolerate the rise of fascism. There’s a question that they’re scared we might ask: what if instead of endlessly talking about tuition hikes and their inherent racism and classism, or the terrible wages of Pitt workers and adjunct professors, or Pitt’s investments in environmentally destructive industries, or the administration’s utter inaction in the face of campus rape culture, or the fact that this election is trash… what if we instead decided to do something about it ourselves? No more dead-end negotiations and debates, no more polite “thank-you’s” for the free t-shirts and the new recycling bins and the years of indentured servitude spent working off student debt and the promise of a stable life in a perpetually shrinking job market, no more wishing Bernie was here to save us. What if we started taking concrete steps towards actual fucking revolution?

We could take over the lobby of Posvar and convert it into a Free Store, where we would share and exchange textbooks, toiletries, clothes, food, ideas, tactics, strategies. We could throw parties in Market, taking turns cooking free food for students, workers, and faculty alike, and then doing our own damn dishes afterwards. We could finally unclench our fists and pass around a fat-ass blunt on the rooftops of a newly autonomous dormitory, because this really could be our campus if we keep creating more situations that attract those that are ready to fight. If only for a few days, we could create another world here and now, become the long-awaited, uncontrollable crisis of priorities that forces those in power to make real changes—like students are doing in Montreal, Santiago, London, Oaxaca, Athens, Paris, Rome…

In the meantime, we look forward to screaming our hearts out by your side, laughing and crying because holy shit those ignorant fuckbois preaching hate actually won…

[our lazy asses reworded most of this from “Fascist Scum, Off Our Campus!” after last night’s events…hopefully other people will take the time to write something original]

[photo cred to The Pitt News]