OWH believes that controlling and locking people up do not solve problems or make us safer. Poor people and people of color are particularly targeted by over-policing, racial profiling, police harassment and disproportionate incarceration rates.
We demand that our community works towards meeting people’s basic needs rather than controlling people and locking them in cages. We demand that the government fund housing, employment, and rehabilitation, not policing and prisons!
We are organizing to expose the injustices of the criminal justice system, and challenge the surveillance, harassment and scapegoating that homeless people face on a daily basis.
As a citizen and former employee of the State Public Defender, although I knew of racial profiling and had seen it with my own eyes, the first time I went to the jail to do intake, even I was amazed at the sea of black faces incarcerated in a county that is no more than 6 % African American. We learned that in our so-called ‘progressive’ county, we incarcerate African American men at the highest rate in this country. Dane County comes in first place every year, including every county in every state of this United States. Well, sometimes we come in second or third, but this has been going on for some time, and it’s time to stand up for the population that has been so completely disenfranchised for so very long. We have lost 5 generations of (mostly) men in the African American community to incarceration and charge this group at higher levels than others, where a white guy might catch a misdemeanor charge, the African Americans would be charged with a felony, or worse kicked to the Feds, to make us look just a bit better. It’s time to stop the attack on families in the black community and time to step up to the plate and take responsibility for not standing up for them sooner.