On Mother’s Day, NYC Anarchist Black Cross calls for a world without cages as most of the women in prison are mothers, and the prison system makes it very difficult for women and their children to be in relationship with one another.
The West Side Highway in New York, which traces Manhattan’s westerly edge, is dotted with luxury condo buildings and office blocks with views onto the Hudson River. Around 20th Street, an eleven-story modernist mural of geometric shapes, “Venus,” decorates the south face of a vast concrete block, but the famous painting by Knox Martin is now almost entirely obscured by a recently completed condo complex.
Just as “Venus” now goes largely unnoticed by the cars whizzing up and down the highway, so, too, does the building it decorates: Bayview Correctional Facility, a medium-security women’s prison and rare example of a state penitentiary in the middle of a major metropolis.
Original article by Natasha Lennard for Truthout, posted May 15, 2012.
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