We Will Not Forget You
by Amos Stevenson, CTF Soledad, CA
Dear Kirsten
You’re up in Heaven!!!
But it hurts us so much
We would be pretending if we said anything else
We know God don’t make mistakes
But you not being here feels like one
Our feelings won’t change the fact
Our feelings won’t bring you back
But we thank God for all your memories and pictures
Even though they don’t fill the emptiness of a great daughter, friend, student, mother, and mentor that you are
You’re with the angels, right where you belong
You made us laugh
You made us feel connected reading books together
So now we cry ‘cause we miss you
So now we will smile, because you always smiled
The vision you imprinted on us will be your legacy that will carry on everywhere we go
We Will Not Forget You
______
In recognition of Domestic Violence Awareness, the Soledad Prison Project hosted a donation drive in honor of Kirsten Mai Castle. Kirsten, a 37 year old mother of four, graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Kirsten first participated in the group’s combined Transcommunal Peacemaking Class in 2023. Then she went on to co-create “Soledad Prison Project” book reading class that meets every Thursday at the Correctional Training Facility from 4-6 pm. She mentored the class until late in her pregnancy. August 2024, Kirsten and her unborn child were found dead, strangled by her suspected boyfriend. The men hosted this donation drive to support resources in her hometown of San Mateo with the nonprofit organization “Community Overcoming Relationship Abuse” in honor of her memory.
As Chairman, I led the donation drive and felt a deep responsibility to speak on this issue. We as men must take a stand to be accountable and responsible for the abuse of women. Intimate partner violence is a man’s problem that we need to address as incarcerated persons and community citizens.
________________
All We Have is Each Other
by Mitra Zarinebaf, LSPC Communications Associate
What does it mean to grieve where you’re not supposed to?
I met Amos Stevensonand Kirsten Mai Castle in Spring of 2023, in one of my last classes before graduating UC Santa Cruz. We were enrolled in Dr. John Brown Child’s Transcommunal Peacemaking Class that took place at CTF Soledad. Both of them were in my small breakout group, where we would discuss and debate peacemaking in a country built on and that sustains violence. Topics included race segregation in and outside of prisons, armed struggle versus nonviolence, and building community against oppression.
This was the first time I had ever been inside a prison: while I knew formerly incarcerated people, my life was typical for someone living in white flight suburbs with parents who had stable jobs and a higher education. It was not until my senior year of high school in 2018 that I would learn about the veiled truths of mass incarceration, policing, and the prison industrial complex.
Compared to Kirsten, I was only at the beginning of my journey in becoming an abolitionist. When we met, her presence was calm and confident; she radiated a passion for justice rooted in scholarly and personal connections. Kirsten’s ex-husband and father of her children was incarcerated while they were together. Although now divorced, this experience and learning about the carceral system continued to fuel her abolition.
Above all, her smartness is what stood out to me most. During breakout sessions, Kirsten would speak with intentionality and kindness. She was a natural teacher who prioritized patience when navigating complex discussions, asking questions to encourage curiosity. This wasn’t a surprise, though, when I learned more about her studies. As a 2nd year PhD Sociology student, her research centered around interpersonal relationships between women whose partners were incarcerated. She was at the forefront of much needed feminist research on building community around the prison system.
After the class finished, we went our separate ways. I graduated, moved to the Bay Area, and began working at Legal Services for Prisoners with Children. Kirsten would continue her PhD program and also announce her pregnancy. Amos continued to lead Transcommunality classes and began to study feminism. However, we both stayed in touch with Amos, and in Fall of 2023, I learned that Kirsten and Amos were planning a new curriculum and class called the “Soledad Prison Project.” I was surprised and ultimately thrilled to hear they had culminated a group of interested inside students and would read Are Prisons Obsolete by Angela Davis. I didn’t even realize you could teach this book in prison, especially at CTF Soledad!
I was lucky and grateful to participate in one of the sessions, along with receiving updates from Amos on how the class was going. After finishing Are Prisons Obsolete, they moved onto Abolition. Feminism. Now. by Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth Richie. It was incredibly moving to pick this critical text about intertwining abolition and feminism. For me, it spoke to the deep intentions of picking apart the prison industrial complex from the inside and understanding our roles in a highly gendered, carceral country.
The last time I saw Kirsten was during a Soledad Prison Project session in May of 2024. A few months later, on August 4th, her boyfriend murdered her and her unborn child in her own home. She was nine months pregnant. After her boyfriend escaped, Kirsten’s children found her slain body and called 911. I didn’t learn about her death until Amos called me a few days later and delivered the news. In a shocked state, it was difficult to hold back tears and not be stunned at the ultimate brutality and callous timing of her death. After CDCR ended our 15-minute phone call, I frantically looked up her name online to find it at the top of the search bar. Instead of her usual UC Santa Cruz profile appearing, several news headlines highlighted the murder.
On that day, I learned that the number one cause of death for pregnant people is homicide. On that day, I realized that distance, prison walls, and staticky phone calls separated me from our shared community when I needed it most.
After the news spread and grief sank in, there came a point where we could no longer grieve alone. Thanks to the incredible staff sponsor of Transcommunality, Ms. Schweers, and the UC Santa Cruz professor sponsors, outside students and professors were able to quickly get approved to visit the class we were once all a part of. Professors and I carpooled down to the prison, where we were met with a bittersweet yet unexpected reunion. While we all shared stories and attempted to understand her sudden death, I soon learned that leaders of the class, including Amos, were committed to honoring Kirsten’s life and death beyond this session. Some of us huddled into a smaller room of the prison library, and with time quickly approaching the end of the class, students deliberated ways to support Kirsten’s children, how to host a formal memorial service, and how to bring awareness of domestic violence to the rest of the prison. Personally, I was amazed at the dedication to organize despite the limitations of being confined in prison. This would take collaboration from the inside and outside, and a few months later, Kirsten’s memorial service was held at the CTF Soledad parish.
Professors and classmates of the Transcommunality class, along with professors who advised Kirsten’s PhD, and Kirsten’s Mom and family all attended. About 40 CTF students sat in the pews with us to remember her life, as we took turns reflecting on how our lives crossed paths and her impact on us, however brief.
Poems were performed and members sang, and many of us couldn’t help but blot our eyes with toilet paper as it was passed around the pews. Kirsten’s Mother spoke last, and with emotions high in the air, she thanked the students who organized the memorial, telling us that Kirsten would have loved this. She exclaimed Kirsten’s passion for collaborating on the Soledad Prison Project, and knew that as a mom, she wanted to know the people Kirsten continuously organized with.
I have never experienced or confronted emotions like this before. Here we were, three hours away from the Bay Area in the Central Coast, in a prison where we all were confiding in each other, being vulnerable, and letting ourselves grieve with one another. When I told people that I was attending a memorial service in a prison, I had to fight back my own insecurities of prison stigmatization, as I would often hear people be confused, shocked, and have their own prejudices against incarceration. However, I knew deeply how my heart ached for gathering all together: our relationships overcame the barbed wire borders of prison walls, and we all worked together to ensure we could meet once more. Amidst us connecting with each other in the parish, there was the context of how difficult it was to make this all happen. Pages and pages of paperwork, visitation dress codes, bringing proper identification, facing the brutal carceral architecture of security gate after security gate. Even with the dedication to make this memorial a success, we still faced trouble, as prison guards rejected Kirsten’s children from going inside.
When I reflect on the role of prisons, I think about the exaggerated and oppressive role of gender. Hyper masculinity is projected by the carceral state through gender segregation and instigation from correctional officers. It acts as a tentacle of our white supremacist, patriarchal country to further oppress and disorganize us. Yet, what I witnessed at the memorial was the complete opposite; a form of resistance created by formations of community. Our lives and relationships were deeply entangled in knowing Kirsten, and the collective process of mourning felt radically humanizing. We cried together, laughed together, and sang together. While the ultimate act of this memorial service was to honor our beloved friend, it was also in complete resistance to what the carceral state attempts to tear apart.
I am grateful to experience my personal grieving with my community. Kirsten and her legacy will continue to guide my politics, along with the students at CTF Soledad. Soon, they will be reading her research paper dubbed, A Sisterhood: The Collective Resilience Born in the Periphery of Prison, and continue discussing abolitionist feminist politics.
This experience will forever lay in the center of my heart. It reminded me of why we do this work. For me, the callous murder was a confrontation with reality and forced me to truly reflect on my position in this country as a woman. For many of us, incarcerated or not, we know that this country is a violent one. Now more than ever we must come together: as all we have is each other.
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