A World Without Prisons

To celebrate a year of publishing a monthly newsletter, Iowa City Mutual Aid solicited responses to the prompt “what does a world without prisons look like?” Here is my response.

Prisons are a symptom, edifices to a culture insisting people are either good or bad—a lesson we learn as children and one that saturates our media, politics, policies, and the ways we move through the world.

Prisons are places where we lock people away for their faults and imperfections. We build them to contain those who harm so we can pretend to rehabilitate them; those who are mentally ill because we don’t have treatment for them; those without homes because we don’t have houses for them. We build prisons to hide, out of sight, the people we choose to discard rather than care for.

And then we build more. We rebuild them. We expand them. Prisons become an excuse not to construct—or even imagine—something better.

A world without prisons is a world that accepts each of us as a human with imperfection and responds with care, rather than exile. It is a world oriented toward healing and transformation and justice for those who cause harm and those who are hurt. It is a transformed world of peace that knows people are not simply good or bad. It is a world that knows each and every one of us needs healing, causes harm and is worthy of care.

‘Dilbert’ Creator Scott Adams Dies at 68

Mark Kennedy for The Associated Press:

It all collapsed quickly in 2023 when Adams, who was white, repeatedly referred to Black people as members of a “hate group” and said he would no longer “help Black Americans.” He later said he was being hyperbolic, yet continued to defend his stance.

Almost immediately, newspapers dropped “Dilbert” and his distributor, Andrews McMeel Universal, severed ties with the cartoonist. The Sun Chronicle in Attleboro, Massachusetts, decided to keep the “Dilbert” space blank for a while “as a reminder of the racism that pervades our society.” A planned book was scrapped.

“He’s not being canceled. He’s experiencing the consequences of expressing his views,” Bill Holbrook, the creator of the strip “On the Fastrack,” told The Associated Press at the time. “I am in full support with him saying anything he wants to, but then he has to own the consequences of saying them.”

It’s OK to Be Angry. You Should Be Angry.

Look. We don’t have to agree about policing in America. We don’t even have to agree that the state shouldn’t have the power to kill. But I hope we can agree that the state shouldn’t be able to kill someone in the street.

We call that murder.

Can You Imagine What We Could Do If They Spent This Time On Our Community’s Urgent Issues?

On Tuesday, Jan, 6, 2026, the Iowa City Council will hold its organizational meeting where they will elect the mayor and mayor pro tempore, and assign councilors to a variety of other roles of various power.

The amount of work and focus this biennial decision takes is absolutely ridiculous: opaque, petty and ego-driven.

What if our elected leaders spent this energy and urgency on something that actually mattered?

Watch when later this month they give less attention to advancing a multimillion-dollar budget.

State Dumps “Healthy Kids Iowa” and Returns to Summer EBT

Erin Murphy and Maya Marchel Hoff in The Gazette:

 Iowa announced on Monday that it will return to a federal summer food assistance program, while tying the program’s $40 per month per child to Iowa’s new healthy foods initiative.

The announcement came on the same day a report made available to The Gazette showed Iowa’s program in 2025 fell well short of reaching the number of children that the federal program would have.

Last summer’s Healthy Kids Iowa replacement program for Summer EBT required families to find time to locate and show up to distribution sites during limited hours and local pantries and other volunteers to set up, staff and market these pop-ups, which only had pre-packaged boxes of food, which is a lot to put on overburdened people and organizations.

It’s bad enough that, of the 220,000 Iowa children eligible, the replacement program managed to serve less than a third of them. What’s worse is that was exactly what the State of Iowa expected.

Is a Replica Important or Not?

Executive Editor Zack Kuckarski of The Gazette in an email to subscribers:

While Christmas falls on a non-print day for us, we will not be producing a local digital edition on Christmas Day. This allows our staff some time to spend Christmas Eve with family and friends. Any major local stories will be posted on thegazette.com.

We will also have a short section of national stories that will be available. We will resume local digital replicas on Dec. 26 and will be in print like normal on Dec. 27 and 28.

We will produce a local Green Gazette digital replica edition on January 1.

I don’t get it.

Either the “Green Gazette1 digital replica” is important enough to produce daily or it isn’t. Laying out a “digital replica” is wasting resources and keeps The Gazette locked in a print-first mindset instead of freeing it from the bounds of producing a daily news bundle.

Skip Christmas, I say, and never start doing it again.

  1. “Green Gazette” is terrible branding. I think it’s supposed to suggest it’s more environmentally friendly than a paper driven over from Des Moines and then driven to your house, but it makes it sound like it is a completely different product than The Gazette which it isn’t. ↩︎

Incarcerated People Don’t Have Enough Period Products

Amanda Watford writing in the radical prison abolitionist rag (checks notes) Iowa Capital Dispatch and States Newsroom:

When Yraida Faneite was on trial for drug-related charges, the judge had to halt proceedings at one point because her period was so heavy that blood was running down her legs.

The same struggle followed her into a federal prison in Florida after she was convicted. For about a decade, officials allowed her only a small ration of menstrual products, and she couldn’t afford extra pads from the commissary. She bartered with other women. On her worst days, she tore up her own T-shirts and used them as makeshift pads.

When she told officers she needed to see a doctor and couldn’t safely continue a mandatory kitchen shift, she said, she was placed in solitary confinement. She eventually found out that her heavy bleeding was caused by cysts.

Incarceration is inhumane, and this is also inhumane.