Roanoke Jail Solidarity organized our first Mama’s Day Bail Out action this year with the main goals of helping free as many moms from local jails by Mother’s Day as possible, while highlighting the need to end money bail, pretrial (and indefinite) detention, and divest from police and prisons. We recognize that the whole damn system is guilty as hell. These practices and institutions and the criminal justice system as we know it are capitalist and white supremacist, and do not serve the working class’ interest. They overwhelmingly harm and further criminalize Black and Brown and poor people. Just a few days in jail can cause someone to lose their job, housing and/or even children, and ruin their lives. This was a chance to hopefully help prevent that for someone and show what building peoples’ power and solidarity can look like: caring for each other’s well-being and freedom while collectively confronting the systemic, not individual, root issues.
We’d love to bail out most people if we could; however, with limited resources our minimum aim was to help free at least one mother. We focused on prioritizing Black or Brown moms or caregivers, and being that the bail bonds industry profits off people getting locked up, we were trying to not go through a bondsman and just pay someone’s full bond amount. Unfortunately we were given incorrect info from Roanoke City Jail regarding paying bonds (they said “cash bonds” were the only type we could pay in cash without a bondsman and “secured bonds” we had to go through a bondsman, which we later found out is not true: any bond can be paid in the full amount), so for most of this action we were only looking for women who had a “cash bond”. We reached out to organizations who did this last year and are again, like Southerners On New Ground (SONG) for advice, and also found the National Bail Out toolkit to be fairly helpful with where to start mapping this tactic out. The main parts of the bail out were a simultaneous dance of raising funds while finding moms, and organizing any post-bail support possible.
Pooling Resources
We started an online fundraiser, had donation buckets at local events, and did a “Good Cops Quit” & “Invest In Communities Divest From Police & Prisons” t-shirt campaign. On April 27, we brought the community together and hosted a benefit concert at the Dumas Center with a very diverse lineup of some of the best up-and-coming and seasoned artists, bands and community leaders in Roanoke like Quille Shamae (a Black female MC/Singer/Poet), Stimulator Jones (an MC/DJ/Musician extraordinaire who recently signed to Stones Throw Records, and who also happened to release his new album the day of the concert), and Sophisticated Soundz (a soul/funk/jazz group who do both original songs and great renditions of classics as well).
Finding Moms
Finding moms was slightly harder than expected as none of the local jails (Roanoke City, Roanoke County, and Western Virginia Regional) will provide any type of list of who is incarcerated with a bond. We asked the public defender’s office for referrals of moms/caregivers with a bond, but never heard anything back from them. Community outreach for the first month of this (posting flyers, in-person surveying, publicizing online and just word and mouth) didn’t get us many referrals. We did, however, discover a very tedious method to find moms: searching the local jails’ online inmate databases person-by-person. The downside to this method is that it’s only a momentary snapshot, and to update it you have to search through every single person again.
We did a full search of Roanoke City Jail on 3.21.18, at which point in time there were 551 people locked up there. This provided some more insight into the local injustice patterns. Here’s some of what we found:
* Half the people in city jail were Black despite only being 28% of Roanoke’s population (254 out of 551)
* Half the people in city jail are being held pretrial (259 out of 551) [meaning they’re presumed innocent]
* The vast majority of those locked up pretrial had “no bond” (228 out of 259) [meaning they would be indefinitely held until the judges, attorneys and whatever else that affects scheduling decided their court date; it could be days, it could be months, and for some, even fucking years]
* Most of those with “no bond” had minor, non-violent charges (almost 70% of females) [like possession of drugs, or owing debt, or petty larceny, or failure to do such-and-such]
* Only 9 women out of 53 had a bond of some type (only 1 female had a “cash bond”)
We were able to reach out to and visit the one female who had a cash bond, which was $1,247.31. She was a Black 60-yr old woman who had previously served over 4 years in prison for a 3rd time offense of shoplifting, was released in February 2017 with fines of around $1,000, and was now locked up in jail since 3.19.18 for a charge of “failure to appear in court for a felony offense” (apparently a probation court date), which she claimed she was never informed of. We didn’t have the funds to bail her out at the time, and she found out her hearing for this new charge was on 4.20.18, so we stayed in touch with her leading up to this. Thankfully, and after 33 days of being imprisoned *again*, her charges ended up being dismissed and she was released, but still had the fines over her head she can’t afford to pay, and had been medically neglected in city jail (has diabetes but was being given insulin despite her blood-sugar being low, and was also being denied her prescribed neuropathy medication).
The week before Mother’s Day we did a second full search through the online jail databases and only found one other female with a cash bond, which was $100, and she ended up getting bailed out by someone else. Though we had wanted to avoid the bail bonds industry, we did want to help a mom get out if we could, so we decided to reach out to the few females who had secured bonds. Through visits we identified five who were moms/caregivers, but unfortunately we had trouble connecting with the contacts for four of them to ask them to co-sign with a bondsman, and the 5th person ended up going to court and being released. It was through a referral from The Hope Center that we were informed of another mom, Ms. Litasha, who had just gotten a secured bond that week, and we were able to connect with someone to co-sign for her. So on Friday (5.11 18), after being imprisoned for 11 days pretrial, we were able to help free her from the cage of city jail, and reunite her with her children before Mother’s Day! We greeted her at the jail with a card and roses, hosted a homecoming party @ The Hope Center and were able to get her kids waiting there to surprise her, and gave her a monthly bus pass and some info about local resources that could potentially help with finding employment, housing, local food banks, etc. With all of our hearts we’d like to say: Welcome home Ms. Litasha! This took many hands to happen, and thank you to all who helped and were a part of this.
There’s Work To Do
Bailing out Ms. Litasha was not the end, in fact quite the opposite. There are at least four other specific moms we connected with through this who need support, one of whom was released this past Friday and needed emergency housing for the weekend, and another who is pregnant and whom we are actually helping bail out today. Thankfully we have some funds left to do what we can, but unfortunately there’s many more mothers and people in general who the cops and courts will continue to unjustly and needlessly lock up every day. Seeing more of the scope of those imprisoned in the area has reaffirmed the need to possibly turn this action into/create a revolving community bail fund, as well as grow the network of Roanoke Jail Solidarity to better support those of us most affected by the local jails. We also understand that workers pooling our bread crumbs can only do so much; we cannot crowdfund or vote oppression away, and as such we must continue to fight against the systems that criminalize us.
Half the people locked up in Roanoke are presumed innocent, and most of them aren’t even given a bond despite being charged with “crimes” that for the most part shouldn’t even be considered crimes. Which begs the question: who are the real criminals? Is it people who get high, or those who legally push pharmaceutical opioids and jack up the price of life-saving drugs by 5000%? Is it people who can’t afford their rent, or the landlords and banks who profit off evicting families and then keep the houses empty to manipulate the market? Is it the people who produce everything yet aren’t paid enough to stay out of debt, or those who rob us for the value of our labor and create poverty for hundreds of thousands? Is it those who steal food & clothing for their family, or those who steal whole fucking lakes to sell us back water or steal land to build poisonous pipelines? Is it people who resist (or as they call it, “assault”) a cop or disobey unjust laws or is it authorities killing their own citizens and those responsible for bombing other countries and murdering thousands? These are the questions that need to be asked and more importantly answered.
The common narrative is that police and prisons keep us safe, but in reality that is largely not true. We are tired of wasting our tax dollars on oppressive institutions that do not meet peoples’ needs like police & prisons. We don’t need our mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters locked up because they’re trying to survive and keep their sanity in this system by any means necessary, and jails don’t reform people and aren’t a solution anyways. We need our money put into things that actually keep communities safe like affordable housing, healthy food, quality healthcare and education, jobs that pay livable wages, clean renewable energy, public transportation and meeting peoples’ needs. We must dismantle this system, and we can only do so together.
Join us.
All power to the people!
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