#prisonindustrialcomplex

Now, after being released on bond since November 2018 with a GPS tether on her ankle for almost a year, Siwatu’s conviction was reversed on August 20, 2019, and the tether finally removed in late October. Her legal team is urging prosecutors to dismiss the case and not recharge her. Her next hearing is scheduled for November 15, 2019, and the tentative trial date is February 18th, 2020.

The environmental activist has spent much of her life as a community organizer. As a teen, she worked with other youth to tackle environmental concerns affecting their local communities and later became the co-director of the East Michigan Environmental Action Council, where her voice and ability to resonate with people was crucial. She was following the footsteps of her mother, Rhonda Anderson, who has been an environmental justice organizer for the Sierra Club for almost two decades. In her interviews, she expresses how being convicted of felonious assault and felony firearm was not like anything she’d ever experienced in her life or could have been prepared for. 

Michigan’s Stand Your Ground

The details of Siwatu’s case were reported by many including dream hampton in Essence, the New Yorker, and Democracy Now! as it became clear that pieces of the case weren’t adding up. 

In July 2016, Siwatu was visiting her mother at her Detroit home with her two-year-old daughter when a young girl came by to visit Siwatu’s niece, who also lived in the home. The family became concerned about the presence of the girl as the niece was recently jumped by her at school. They decided it was best she leave. The girl’s mother, Chanell Harvey, arrived to pick her up, infuriated that her child wasn’t welcome. 

Siwatu testified that she’d asked Harvey repeatedly to leave the premises. Harvey then drove her car and rammed into Siwatu's parked vehicle, where Siwatu’s two-year-old daughter was playing inside. Then she tried to hit Siwatu's mother—she’d forcefully brought the car within a hair of her. At that point, after taking her daughter inside, Siwatu reached into her car's glove compartment and brandished her licensed, unloaded gun to demand Harvey leave. 

Harvey took snapshots of Siwatu, took the pictures to the police, and filed a report that Siwatu had assaulted her and her daughter by pointing a gun at them. Siwatu dropped off her daughter and picked up her husband from work, and arrived hours later to report the incident as an attack on her family by Harvey. One day, after over a month with no response from police, Siwatu’s home was surrounded by police who arrested her because Harvey’s report, in which Siwatu had been named the aggressor, had been on file first.  

Of the many controversial details of Siwatu’s case, the most impactful one is the fact that Michigan is a self-defense "stand your ground" state, which gives a legally licensed, law-abiding gun owner the right to use deadly force if they believe it is necessary to prevent death or great harm to themselves or another person. 

Siwatu was a licensed gun owner with a concealed carry permit and her gun was unloaded. And Michigan law has consistently interpreted aiming an unloaded gun as non-deadly use of force, according to Wade Fink, one of Siwatu’s attorneys appealing the case. He also states that her case should have hinged on whether Siwatu used reasonable force to meet the threat posed by Harvey, rather than whether or not she feared for her life. 

Another issue, Fink points out, is that at the time of the event Harvey was on probation for assault; it was her third felony, and violating probation would have gotten her into trouble. Fink contends this could've been a valid motive for lying. But the defense wasn’t allowed to pursue this line of questioning. 

A YES! article that details the rise in Black gun ownership despite the racist origin of the second amendment, explores the perspective of Black gun groups who view the right to self-arm as basic for self-defense in a climate of constant violence. Yet, we also see where laws like Stand Your Ground don’t always work out positively for people of color, as we saw with Trayvon Martin and Marissa Alexander. 

As reported by Vox, the Urban Institute found that Stand Your Ground laws seem to worsen racial disparities. When the shooter is Black and the victim is white, only 3 percent of deaths are ruled as justifiable versus the 34 percent when the shooter is white and the victim is Black.  “Even when black shooters kill black people,” the article states, “those shootings are less likely to be deemed justifiable in a court of law than those involving white shooters who kill white people.” 

The dominant, false narrative that Black people are intrinsically violent obscures genuine issues of equity. It’s why we can have a criminal justice system that operates on implicit biases, even when all persons concerned are Black. 

Siwatu’s jury had to ultimately decide, based on Michigan self-defense law, whether Siwatu was truly afraid in that moment to warrant invoking self-defense. Despite the question as to why a woman whose daughter and mother are being endangered by a vehicle would not be afraid and feel a basic human need to protect, the jury ruled guilty because they didn’t believe Siwatu could be afraid, only angry. And the felony firearm charge, which means that a firearm was used in an assault, came with a two-year mandatory minimum. 

The power of a community

As she details in conversation with adrienne maree brown on The Practice of Freedom: A Conversation with Siwatu-Salama Ra and Rhonda Anderson on the How to Survive the End of the World podcast, when Siwatu learned that she was having charges brought against her for, essentially, acting within what she believed were her rights to defend her family, she couldn’t wrap her mind around how to continue. But then community showed up.

Siwatu was showered with love. Fellow activists, co-workers, and friends poured in. They showed up at her house asking what they could do to help. There were so many people coming to meetings that were organized on her behalf that they moved gatherings to the larger home of a friend.

At one point in The Practice of Freedom, Siwatu's mom remarks that what was truly notable was how many of the people that came to support were women with children. 

They formed the Siwatu Freedom Team and have not only accompanied Siwatu on her journey for full freedom and justice, but also collaborated with a broad coalition on several campaigns including: developing a set of bills to fight for the rights of incarcerated pregnant and postpartum mothers, parents, and caregivers in Michigan; working to end the felony firearm mandatory sentences that disproportionately criminalize Black people in Michigan; and continuing to support and work in solidarity with women Siwatu met inside prison as they return home. 

Finding a way through madness

From the moment that charges were brought against Siwatu—through her court case and eventual sentencing, right up to her release and the reversal of her conviction, and now as her legal team works to put this case to rest completely —countless people have poured enormous dedication towards supporting her, spreading the word about her case, raising legal funds, writing letters, and organizing meetings. In prison, however, she was alone, facing close walls and prison bars. The letters that poured in from community across the country were like beacons of light in the darkness. 

In the isolation of her experience, she stumbled across a book called Deep and Simple, by Bo Lozoff, who had co-founded the Prison-Ashram Project and worked for 20 years guiding people behind bars to reach their own inner peace. “He was able to steer men and women who were inside of a prison to that oneness,” Siwatu says in The Practice of Freedom. “My community, Bo, my mom, literally saved my life in prison.” 

“I remember reading this book and being just so blown away...it was answering the questions I had, the why me, the what do you want, what am I supposed to do?” Then one day she noticed a copy of Deep and Simple on her pregnancy counselor’s office desk; the counselor offered her all the Bo Lozoff books she had in her office. 

Siwatu reflects that in prison, a person is stripped of everything and anything that could offer them comfort. Reading Bo Lozoff helped her reach a place of peace inside herself despite the deep sadness all around her. “If anybody walks out of a prison...who is enlightened,” she says, “it is the work of themselves, and it is despite of the prison. Bo helped me take advantage of that hell.” 

She also witnessed the spirit of fellow inmates around her. They inspired her. She said in a recent interview with Earth First! “You normally see women on the frontlines fighting, and you saw the very same thing inside the prison: women fighting to hold on to some of their dignity and humanity to say, ‘This is not how we will live.’” 

She says there were women working on so many issues—from trying to get treatment for the yellow water coming out of prison pipes to making sure the food on their plates was sanitary.

When Siwatu learned that her challenge getting a hijab, a Quran, and the meals she required for the daily practice of her faith was not her challenge she faced alone, she led other Muslim women prisoners in organizing for religious rights that legally should have been accommodated by the facility. Her efforts attracted attention from the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Michigan, which filed civil rights complaints on a number of the prison’s practices regarding religious freedom.

Disheartened by the ways in which life behind bars was designed to cut down a person’s humanity, Siwatu also created a poetry group and fostered close bonds with the women around her as they co-created a space of beauty, where poetry offered gateways to emotional freedom.

Finally, her harrowing experiences of pregnancy and birth in prison led her to inform herself of her rights as a parent and mother, which she then shared with other prisoners. At the time of Siwatu’s delivery, the Michigan Department of Corrections did not allow loved ones to be present at labor or delivery although Siwatu’s family, community, and other activists and organizations made every effort to get the MDOC to humanely shift its position. 

In early October 2019, as a direct result of this organizing, the Michigan’s House Appropriations Subcommittee on Corrections added new language to the budget bill that states that anyone in prison due to give birth in prison can consent to one visitor being present during labor and delivery. The language states that person must be an “immediate family member, legal guardian, spouse, or domestic partner.” It’s a signal that change is happening. 

A more humane and discerning system of justice

For every person that is able to have a protest, or national news attention, or a community of devoted people call out that a wrong be brought to light, there are hundreds more sitting in a jail cell without any of these options. 

Siwatu, speaking to Earth First!, said that knowing she was innocent only made it easier for her to see how many more women were likely in prison unjustly. 

“...You have a large population of women who will be returning citizens who have literally been face to face with the very beast we’re fighting,” she said. “They are walking out of that prison cell, out of custody, with much knowledge, so resilient, and so beautiful. I encourage that everybody support women and men coming out of these prisons because they have seen so much. They know what it will take to win this.” 

When asked how being incarcerated changed her perspective on environmental issues, she explained how it strengthened her belief in looking at how different issues are connected.

“It took me to literally be taken away from my family and taken away from my children and placed in a prison cell to understand we have to step away from... self-identified work and dedicate our entire selves to a better world.”

“You have to look at everything,” she said, “and take everything into consideration of how all these injustices are interconnected and feeding off one another.”

And then what could justice look like? Life-valuing structures that value healing more than they value practices that dehumanize, and where deeper understandings of history and social problems are incorporated, so that there are sustainable options for actual accountability, wellness, and growth in communities. 

Showing up to speak, listen, learn, share, and organize wherever and whenever possible is essential for this shift to take place. We can learn from and build upon cases and experiences like Siwatu’s.

ACTIONS:

Support Siwatu’s legal fees as her hearing approaches on November 15, 2019, help sustain her family throughout this arduous process, or support continued organizing Siwatu’s freedom and policy changes, by donating here. 

Go to FreeSiwatu.org to learn more, stay posted, and find more ways to get involved.

Host a house party or community gathering to share Siwatu's story, have discussions, process the impact of this and similar stories, and brainstorm organizing ideas.