Our History
Our Elders will not be forgotten or silenced.
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We must demand their release.
Liberate the Caged Voices serves as a portal between people experiencing legal slavery (commonly known as mass incarceration), codified by the 13th Amendment, and the general public.
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Started just over seven years ago as a project of California Prison Focus, the idea was- and continues to be - to provide a platform to hear directly from our caged community members, their families and loved ones to foster engagement with the local community, while exposing the truth of the toxic conditions and treatment experienced by California’s incarcerated people, and the impact on their families.
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We will not normalize, justify or try to simplify genocide, crimes against humanity or Mother Earth’s destruction. Instead, We will give voice to and build alternative systems that empower the People and respect the gifts of Mother Earth.
Adding art and culture, we will build awareness, solidarity, and human relationship amongst community members on both sides of the wall, and take collective action. ​
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Finally, through transformative and political education, truth telling and a recommitment to love of the People and planet over money and things, We will dismantle and rebuild to win our collective liberation.
Over 50 years ago, George Jackson said:
“Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of your situation…Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.”
Why we must act
The current socio-political environment continues to uncover systemic failures, which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described as the three evils of racism, poverty and war – and we’ll add the overarching systems of white false supremacy and patriarchy to that trio. All of these evils threaten human and planet life.
The past 8 years saw the ascendance of trump. A downplayed insurrection. And now an ongoing televised genocide.
In October of 2021, international jurists found amerikkka GUILTY on five counts of genocide against Black, Brown and Indigenous people; and crimes against humanity continue within our prisons as legal slavery.
