Minneapolis, Carceral Systems, and Seeing the Humanity in Each Other

Queer Voices
Written By A Crue Life

By Sam Correia

Like so many of you, I’ve been following the news out of Minneapolis. Particularly, the stories of bravery and community, of people showing up for neighbors and protecting one another against ICE. When things get scary or uncertain, I tend to look back to see how people dealt with things in the past.

Back in November, I was in the Queer History Boston archives (formerly The History Project), flipping through material for an upcoming oral history project. As we were looking through printed editions of Fag Rag, a Boston-based paper from the ‘70s and ‘80s, I was struck by the fact that every issue included something related to incarceration. Though the paper didn’t have an overall carceral services focus, every issue contained articles written by gay and trans prisoners. There would be calls for pen pals, special articles such as “Mastery Key: A Guide for Staff Training in Correction,” and ongoing columns titled “Prison Pages.”

The paper might put out this call to their readers, such as this brief write-up in their Issue No. 27/28 from 1980:

“PRISONERS! Please send us a note if you have received this issue (No. 27), as we need to know who is receiving the paper and which ones are being thrown away by prison officials. Also, send us something about what is happening with you if you want to: writings, graphics, whatever. Tell us what books and newspapers are read in your prison.”

This article could have been written yesterday by people I know working in carceral services whose materials are censored and thrown away by prison guards. These articles about incarceration seem to have a “know your rights” theme. I got the sense that, because gay people were facing higher rates of incarceration in the ‘70s and ‘80s, as evident in the people writing into the newspaper, the focus on incarceration was one of “here’s how to keep yourself and others in our community safe.”

LGBTQ activist and historian Michael Bronski (and founding member of the Fag Rag collective) wrote in 2024 that “gay liberationists understood the harm that the criminal legal system did to queer people. Same-sex-loving people in the 1960s and ’70s continued to be imprisoned and institutionalized for engaging in same-sex acts, faced arrest and harassment for simply being in a gay bar…but gay liberationists’ solution was not simply to pass or repeal laws, but to question the prison system itself.”

A few months back, I conducted an oral history interview with a local man who was at Stonewall the night of the raid. You might have heard the phrase “Stonewall was a riot,” but what was evident to me in talking to this man was that Stonewall was an act of police violence. For early queer activists, “questioning state authority was intrinsic to the very fabric of how [they] thought about the larger oppression of homosexuals.” And in the pre-Stonewall era of New York, as written about in Hugh Ryan’s The Women’s House of Detention, “one trait, in particular, that seemed to put youth in increased danger of criminal legal involvement: being gender nonconforming.”

The issue of ICE kidnapping our neighbors is one that is deeply tied to this country’s history of mass incarceration. I’ve gotten more involved in carceral services work throughout the last year in jail outreach services, with the organization Prison Book Program, as well as writing to an incarcerated individual through a penpal program. I’ve seen firsthand how mass incarceration impacts people. And even before I started doing this work, or rather, because of it, I knew my framework would be centered around abolition. If there’s one person who has informed my overall viewpoints as an adult, it’s Angela Davis.

Angela Davis has written many books on the prison industrial complex, but in her 2003 book Are Prisons Obsolete?, she writes, “The uncontested detention of increasing numbers of undocumented immigrants from the global South has been aided considerably by the structures and ideologies associated with the prison industrial complex. We can hardly move in the direction of justice and equality in the twenty-first century if we are unwilling to recognize the enormous role played by this system in extending the power of racism and xenophobia.”

It’s common knowledge that the U.S. has a problem with mass incarceration. Our country incarcerates more people than any other prison system in the world, and for longer periods of time. Maybe you’ve seen the Ava Duvernay documentary 13th, or maybe you’ve read The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. Most likely, though, you know someone who has been incarcerated in some capacity. And as you learn more about the prison system, you’ll learn that people who were historically controlled through slavery and colonization, particularly Black, Latino, and Native peoples, are now controlled through the prison system. But if prisons worked as rehabilitation centers, why are there still so many prisons? Why is recidivism still an issue?

According to the Sentencing Project, an organization that works to end mass incarceration, 1 in 5 Black men born in 2001 is likely to be imprisoned in their lifetime. People of color remain massively overrepresented in prisons, accounting for nearly 7 in 10 people in prison. Systemic causes range from a history of racial and ethnic subordination to ongoing police tactics that unfairly ensnare people of color into the system, and also include charging and sentencing practices that create stiffer punishments for people of color. Recent estimates find that 1 in 81 Black adults in the U.S. is in a state prison. Black people are 2.8 times more likely to be killed by police in the U.S. than white people. There were 6 days in 2025 when the police did not kill.

In the New Yorker article “The Forgotten Ones: Queer and Trans Lives in the Prison System,” author Cyrus Grace Dunham states that “To shrink, let alone eliminate, the prison system would require a drastic and total restructuring of society … Abolition envisions a world in which accountability is decoupled from punishment.” Again, pulling from Bronski, “The contemporary national gay rights movement in the United States has been relatively silent on issues of incarceration, prisons, and the criminal legal system itself… National and state organizations promoting gay rights have had very little to say about systemic injustices in the carceral system.”

The reason I care about mass incarceration and abolition is not that it could have an effect on me. Centering ourselves in any sort of activism work is not going to get us towards liberation. That’s the purpose of solidarity: to work towards an awareness of how things impact others while knowing that you’ll never understand it. But I can’t forget that people like me, that is to say, “butch,” “masculine,” or whatever, were put into prison for wearing men’s clothes in the first half of the 20th century.

The reason I support the abolition of ICE is not that my mom and all four of my grandparents are immigrants. And not that immigrants do so much labor for our country, but because they are human beings who deserve safety and care, no matter what. We often hear government leaders refer to immigrants as “criminals.” While this is inherently untrue, still, people who have committed crimes are human beings who deserve someone to care about them. And in the U.S., race has always played a central role in constructing presumptions of criminality.

Being anti-ICE is one step towards abolitionist thinking. But we can do better. If you are against ICE and the atrocities they are committing, I can assure you that Black and Brown people have been faced with similar atrocities at the hands of the police for hundreds of years. ICE is inherently tied to police violence. They cannot be separated.

Remembering the names Renee Good and Alex Pretti also means remembering the names Trayvon Martin, Philando Castille, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, and Breonna Taylor, to name a few.

In a recent opinion piece for The New York Times, Roxane Gay wrote, “I’ve been thinking about how we talk about the people who are killed by law enforcement. Our first instinct is to invoke the myriad ways in which the deceased contributed to the world. We talk about their work, their character, their families — this is how we attempt to humanize people killed in such inhumane ways. We have done this for Black people murdered by police, and more recently, we have done this for the men and women who are being killed or injured by federal law enforcement officers. The instinct to humanize the slain is instinctual…It’s a way of trying to make the atrocity of their deaths clear, as if the fact of their humanity is not enough. Because their humanity was not enough to save their lives. But we have to remember that humanity is, always, enough.”

It is not a coincidence that George Floyd, Renee Good, and Alex Pretti were all killed within blocks of each other. It is not a coincidence that in June of 2011 in Minneapolis, Cece McDonald, a Black trans woman, was harassed by a group of white people. This group shouted racist and transphobic slurs at McDonald and her friends, and then one of the white women smashed McDonald’s face with a glass bottle. McDonald then stabbed one of the men with a pair of small scissors she had for her fashion school classes. The man died, and despite her plea of self-defense, McDonald was sentenced to 41 months in prison for second-degree manslaughter. Now, Cece McDonald is free and an activist who speaks about trans issues and the carceral system.

We have so much to learn from the people of Minneapolis. They are teaching us what resistance can look like. Liberation as a concept does not mean reforming ICE by requiring body cams and the removal of masks. Liberation means abolishing these systems that send kids like Liam Ramos, the child with the blue bunny hat in the widely-circulated photo, to detention centers across the country.  My partner is a teacher’s aid in a preschool. Every day, when my partner comes home and tells me about their day and the kids in their class, I think about these kids in ICE detention centers. James Baldwin said, “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.” The children in Gaza are ours. The children being sent to detention camps are ours. And the children in my partner’s preschool classroom are ours.

The neighbors and mothers and elders and siblings and the unhoused and the poor are always ours. As Roxane Gay wrote, “If human life is sacred — and I firmly believe it is — then all human life is sacred…What’s working so well in Minneapolis is that people are collaborating. They are caring about others simply because they are part of the local community, simply because they are human.” Incarcerated individuals matter because they are human beings. Immigrants' lives do not matter because they are hardworking or contribute to our economy, but because they are our lives. Every life contains multitudes and every life is always ours.

Further Resources:

Sam Correia is the Reference and Community Engagement Librarian at the Duxbury Free Library. Their work focuses on outreach, equity-based programming, accessible resources for all, and radical librarianship. They are passionate about LGBTQ history, community archiving, and collective liberation.

A Crue Life
Next

On Trans Day of Remembrance and Political Grief