Logan Correctional Center. Wednesday July 12th.

Alisha Walker and the other women in her cell block were put on full lockdown, constrained to their cells with no exercise and no showers, no phone calls, no visits, for over 6 days.

These women were deprived of the limited mobility of which prisoners may avail themselves- the sunshine of a fenced in prison yard, the social contact with another inmate’s face, the ability to stretch their legs and see walls other than those of their cell.

These women were deprived of the basic dignity of a shower.

These women were deprived of these basics for simply uttering the words “Black Lives Matter”

For asserting a fact that should be self-evident and for affirming that her own life matters, Alisha Walker was swiftly and unjustly isolated.

Black Lives Matter.

Black Sex Worker Lives Matter.

Alisha Walker is in prison right now because a racist system produces racist ideas of victimhood that in turn produce racist verdicts. Alisha Walker has been abused in prison for naming that system as racist.

Imagine this: A drunk and belligerent middle-aged man, by day a schoolteacher, attacks a young woman in his home because she won’t have sex with him without a condom. Imagine that she is white and a student. Imagine that he lunges at her with a knife. She gets the knife away from him. She stabs him in self-defense. Imagine that a few days later the police find her hiding, terrified and traumatized, in a hotel. Imagine that she is questioned. When the situation is revealed she is offered supportive therapy to work through her PTSD. After she has recovered she tours the country, sharing with young women her brave story of self-defense and self-care after a harrowing attack.

The first part of this story is not imaginary. The first part of this story happened.

Alisha Walker defended herself against that man.

Alisha Walker is mixed race.

Alisha Walker, despite being only slightly older than her attacker’s students, is not a student.

Alisha Walker is a survival sex worker.

Alisha Walker is not giving speeches about safe sex and self-defense to young women like the hero she should be regarded.

Alisha Walker is in prison facing a twenty-year sentence.

The judge who convicted Alisha Walker used shaming and stigmatizing language about her occupation. He probably saw more of himself in her attacker than in the young woman of color in front of him in this notoriously racist American judicial system.

The perfunctory attention the media paid to Alisha Walker’s case, before the Support Ho(s)e started speaking out, sensationalized Alisha’s occupation. And even attempted to portray her attacker — the drunken, aggressive, violent sot who attacked her — as a pillar of community. Even when those same reports could not avoid noting that he had an abusive personality in his own classroom.

The justice system that allows white men to shoot unarmed black children, that allows police to turn routine traffic stops into lynchings, that exists in a larger system that stigmatizes the survival of the poor and aggrandizes the abuses of the rich — that is the reason Alisha Walker is in prison today.

In prison Alisha Walker has faced the same abuses from racists in positions of institutionalized power that created her incarceration.

Without our actions, without our demand, and without a strong appeal, Alisha Walker will not be free. It is by joining together from where we are on the ground and building a community of support that we can demand justice.