Leah Henderson wrote these words and requested that they be posted here on Mandy's blog:

March 29, 2012

Why Me?

So, this can't normally be said in jail: everything has changed.
For those of you who don't know me, I am Mandy's co-accused and I've been on a maximum security range at Vanier for the last 100 days. I've been approximately 50 feet from Mandy (though not allowed to nor able to communicate with her) and the day-to-day that you've read about on this blog is very similar to what my experience has been.

Saturday, March 17

The past few days have been the worst yet. Since I got here, I've been putting a lot of effort into a few specific things: my health, a daily routine, responding to mail, working on the blog and other projects. Those things have been keeping me pretty grounded and okay. And now, one by one, they have all been dealt some pretty serious blows.

First, I got sick. I probably brought this upon myself by writing in a couple of letters how crappy it would be to get sick in here. "Knock on cardboard," I joked, "Knock on paper bag, that hasn't happened yet." Hah hah. A few days later I come down with the unit 2F cold, waking up in the middle of the night with a headache I could feel behind my eyes, in my ears and into my teeth.

I go south to stay with M and his family, and over the next week see a number of Lebanon's significant sites of resistance and victory over the Zionist occupation of southern Lebanon, including a former prison known for its torturing of prisoners, and various villages where Hezbollah, the Lebanese resistance party, waged a resistance that eventually, in May 2000, drove the Zionists out of Lebanon. The sites and scars of the 34 day 2006 Israeli bombardment of Lebanon are remembered throughout the south and much of Lebanon.

Today is Family Day.

It seems like an appropriate time to talk about how the state uses the criminal justice system and the prison-industrial complex to rip apart families in poor, marginalized and targeted communities. Ostensibly, this is to protect the families of the upper and middle-classes - you know, the people who count.