Welcome to the AI Community Blog!

After Incarceration is Live. 

This space is for us, the growing After Incarceration community. This space is for you, regardless of your perceived proximity to our cause--because our fight is your fight too. In this space, we are they and they are us. Always.

Trigger Warning: this shit is real, and sometimes, it’s raw. Sometimes the pain people are pushing through can get displaced. We speak it how we live it, and we welcome every opportunity to be accountable to our words. We will never attempt to control the way people think about a thing, but we will ask people to think about why they think the way they do. When we use words we don’t really mean, for instance--what does that mean?

Transparency: We are starting this blog to increase the visibility of grassroots organizations and the community leaders emerging from the margins. Blog posts are a cost effective way to optimize your search engine results--but it takes time to create content. We are proposing a collaborative effort. You can increase the visibility of your efforts and issues by sharing them, and by being in the audience for us. Drop, follow, and share links in the comments. We all win.

This isn’t chainmail or TikTok, though. Our content, like our community, is connected by a determination to be better. We refuse to accept the ideological limitations of capitalism, refuse to have our freedom defined by the market, and refuse to be fueled by fear. We have lived in our fears long enough. We imagine life after incarceration without the confines of fear. Each of us has our own relationship to the words “after incarceration.” For some, after incarceration is still a dream, still a place they can only visit in their mind. For others, it starts on a specific date. For all of us, a world after incarceration is our future if we make it so.

Finally, the forms of expression we seek to share are not uniform. People who are rebuilding our lives after incarceration wish to share some of the wisdom we learned in the darkness, where you have to dream just to get through the day. You could find a scholarly article review in one post--and a haiku in the next. We encourage you to pay attention, or at least give a second look, when you come across something you aren’t accustomed to talking about. It’s just as important to show up and listen as it is to show up and shout. If you want people to care about what’s important to you, try caring about what’s important to them. We all live in the nuances of our own lives. The multiplicity we see in the world, will be read in this blog. And, by being true to our selves, we will see the sharedness of our seemingly separate experiences. Being unique does not require separation. It requires relationships.