Community Event: Assembling Reentry Kits
When we bail people out of jail, they leave with what they came in with. That is often just whatever they were wearing when they were arrested, plus maybe a few personal items that they carry in a trash bag provided by the jail. People might step outside for the first time in weeks, into the frigid winter air without warm clothes or necessities. Decarcerate Western MA Bail volunteers wanted to explore ways to expand our work to include re-entry support, and we started with a simple way to support people upon release: providing them with a re-entry kit.
On November 20, 2022, we held our first event to assemble re-entry kits. Three core DCWM organizers and fifteen volunteers gathered at a community space in Great Falls, MA (a.k.a. Turners Falls) that also houses Books Through Bars and the Pioneer Valley Workers’ Center food distribution project. We spent an hour and a half sharing conversation, building relationships, and stuffing backpacks. These backpacks include personal hygiene items like shampoo, hand sanitizer, menstrual products and condoms; warmies like gloves, socks, a hat, and hand warmers; and some snacks and bottled water. They also include KN95 masks; COVID testing kits, thanks to our comrades at Panther Solidarity Organization (PSO) of Western Mass; and Narcan, thanks to Tapestry Health. In the backpacks are also cash, a pen and notebook, and a letter of support handwritten by a volunteer at the assembly event. We put together 24 backpacks that we have been distributing to the folks we bail out of the Franklin and Hampshire County jails.
This project centers mutual aid as a vital tactic for harm reduction and community building towards our mission of abolishing prisons. In the words of Dean Spade, mutual aid is “collective coordination to meet each other’s needs, usually from an awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them” (Mutual Aid, 2020). In fact, systems like the prison industrial complex create the problem (separating people from their resources) and make it worse (prolonged time away from their communities makes it harder for incarcerated people to return, reintegrate, and access the resources they need to survive). Mutual aid is a practice we use to help people survive, and to mobilize our communities to counter injustice. The backpack re-entry kit is both an offer of material resourcing and a gesture of care.
To be clear, mutual aid is not charity. Charity is a paternalistic model that centers rich people and the government deciding which poor people get help and the limits to that help. Unlike charity, which is moralistic and often has eligibility requirements, mutual aid offers no-strings-attached resource-sharing that is connected to a broader movement to tackle the ideologies and root causes that underly injustice. Our work is centered in a conviction that in the face of the oppressive structure of prisons, only communities can help each other survive and achieve liberation.
The majority of the supplies for the re-entry kits were donated by our volunteer base and by fellow organizations fighting poverty and injustice. Additional funds came from the Peace Development Fund, which supports our grassroots movement- building. We hope to make these kits a regular part of our bail work through continued events in the coming months. And hopefully the backpacks will be only the first piece of re-entry support as we consider other strategies for building trust with the people we bail out.
