Introduction: Crises of Homelessness and Mass Incarceration as Crises of Public Imagination

In 2019, a local Seattle news station (KOMO) released Seattle is Dying, a now-infamous documentary that argues the city is being destroyed by a lax criminal response to homelessness. The documentary links rising homelessness to an increase in crime in the city. The film then advocates for what the community organizer Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “The Prison Fix:” an increase in arrests and incarceration in order to solve social problems. There is a widespread public belief that if we just policed where people can live then there would not be homelessness.

In our organizing with our communities, we have come to understand that imprisonment and access to shelter are connected — but not in the way that people in power try to claim. Prisons, jails, and mental health facilities leave people abandoned after they are released. Policing is increasingly used to control who can live in what type of shelter and where that shelter can be located. Even a short stay in a county jail or mental health hospital can mean the loss of income, can break our most important social relationships, and can create life-long traumatic experiences. One in five people booked at King County Jail does not have access to formal housing. Often when people are released from prison in Washington, there are almost no post-release housing resources and the small amount of resources that are available are usually created and designed for cisgender men. A criminal record prevents many people from passing housing background checks.

This project responds to these linked problems by bringing together community organizers who support these linked communities. We believe one of the reasons that incarceration and homelessness have expanded so much is that social struggles that are actually connected have been shown to us as separate. In order to meet these linked problems, we believe we must create new conversations between groups of people who otherwise organize separately. Seeing linked struggles resists how institutions like prisons try to control the boundaries of our communities. Noticing linked struggles transforms the role we see our organizing work playing in the world.

The goal of this conversation is to transform the self-understanding of our movements through creative and critical conversation. We want to create new ways of describing our world — not to test a hypothesis. Our questions are open-ended and are not designed as interview questions or ethnographic research. We believe the process of being in conversation with each other will be as generative as the final products.

That given, our central question is: how should we reimagine “home?” If you would like to contribute, here are some questions you might consider:

• How have you experienced home in your life? When have you felt at home?
• How do you see home represented in your life? How has this differed from your experience? How has the idea of home been policed in your life?
• How has private property produced certain ideas of home and excluded other forms of shelter as “not-home?”
• How do you think about “home” in the community organizing you do?

How will this conversation work?

• We welcome all modes of composition with which you would like to respond including visual medias, video and/or voice recording, written word. We will work through any logistics with you in order to create the piece you want to create.
• We are sometimes able to support collaborators with small stipends depending on availability of funds.
• We envision this project as a collaborative effort and not owned or controlled by any single participant. The guiding question is open to revision or creative interpretation.

There are multiple ways to submit your contribution:

Email: alec.b.fisher@gmail.com

Email: alexmeany5@gmail.com

Mail:

1143 MLK Jr Way

PO Box 146

Seattle, WA

JPay: allenjohnson9191@gmail.com