Works of Justice is an online series that features content connected to the PEN America Prison and Justice Writing Program, reflecting on the relationship between writing and incarceration, and presenting challenging conversations about criminal justice in the United States.
As part of an effort to share our work with a national audience, the PEN America Prison and Justice Writing Program Team has created a series of media outputs from our events, including video and audio formats. We invite you to follow the feeds on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, and YouTube.
We’re introducing these assets with A Question of Justice. Many Americans agree that our criminal justice system needs thorough reform—but how can public sentiment lead to effective systemic changes? On May 11, 2019, as part of the PEN America World Voices Festival, the Prison and Justice Writing Program team staged a dynamic debate moderated by Andrea J. Ritchie that featured six of PEN America’s Writing For Justice Fellows, as well as experts in New York City-based reform efforts. The conversation, which borrowed from artist Lois Weaver’s experimental “Long Table” model, fostered dialogue about difficult subjects by combining the comfortable informality of a private dinner party setting with the urgency of public debate. Panelists and audience members brought their questions, comments, and opinions to help confront this defining issue of our time.
Watch the video below, or listen to an audio file of the riveting dialogue between Nadja Eisenberg-Guyot, Keeonna Harris, Priscilla Ocen, David Sanchez, Beth Shelburne, David Heska Wanbli Weiden, Kandra Clark, Lorenzo Jones, Fred Patrick, Marlon Peterson, and Bianca Tylek. Biographies for each participant can be found here.
Recently our community lost an incredible advocate. We would like to acknowledge the life of Fred Patrick, whose commitment to justice reform and advocacy for the human dignity of all incarcerated people shines in his contributions in the debate below. Fred brought a light-infused pragmatism that made a profound impact on our team. Thank you, Fred. You will be missed.
CAITS MEISSNER
Please welcome Andrea J. Ritchie.
ANDREA RITCHIE
Thank you, Caits, for spreading the, you know, pressure. Welcome everyone, good morning. Thank you so much for joining us on a Saturday morning for A Question of Justice, which is a conversation featuring this brilliant group of PEN Writing for Justice Fellows and also an incredible group of New York City-based experts who we’re going to invite into the conversation shortly. So I’m Andrea Ritchie. I’m really excited to be your host this morning and to engage not only the fellows, the experts, but all of you in a conversation, dialogue, and debate about how we imagine safety and justice in New York City and beyond.
We are living in a time of unprecedented criminalization, incarceration, detention, and expansion of systems of surveillance, control, and punishment in virtually every aspect of our lives and every institution of our society. Criminalization has become the default response to every harm or need or conflict in our society, from littering, to schoolyard bullying, to homelessness, to unmet mental health needs, to complex issues like domestic violence and sexual assault. And criminalization is also the primary weapon that’s being deployed to advance right-wing social, political, and economic agendas in the current political climate, from targeting migrants to restricting gender, sexual, and reproductive autonomy. Criminalization is also at the center of neoliberal strategies disguised in progressive clothing, which promote things like broken windows or hot spot policing strategies as a response to the effect of organized abandonment and gentrification of communities of color, and those kinds of neoliberal policies and ways of thinking fueled divisions between “deserving” and “undeserving” communities in a way that is rooted in criminalization.
So we’re all too familiar with the numbers that result. There are two million people in cages, seven million additional people under correctional control. There are 10 million arrests every year. There are a thousand people killed by police every year, and there are countless lives forever changed by the criminal legal system. Arrests of migrants at the border and in the interior continue to increase, contributing to deportation of a quarter of a million people in 2018. The U.S. spends more than $100 billion every year on policing and $80 billion on incarceration. New York City has the highest police budget in the country at $4.9 billion annually.
So those are the numbers we might be more familiar with. There are a few that we’re less familiar with, like women are the fastest growing prison and jail populations over the past four decades, and the population of women in jails has increased 14-fold over that period. We might not know that black women continue to be incarcerated at twice the rate of white women, and that one in two black trans women will face incarceration in their lifetime, compared to one in three black men. Half of the women’s jail population and a third of both the men’s and women’s prison population have a disability, both because people with disabilities are disproportionately incarcerated and because incarceration is disabling. Native people experiencing the worst—yes, maybe that deserved an accent or an extra emphasis—Native people, indigenous people to this continent, experienced the highest per capita rates of incarceration and police killings. And half the people who are killed by police each year were or were perceived to be in a mental health crisis. And black women are the group who are most likely to be killed by police when unarmed. And the last statistic that we’re probably not familiar with is that a law enforcement agent is caught in an act of sexual misconduct every five days. Sexual violence by law enforcement officers is the second most complained about form of police misconduct but it’s not the second most frequently talked about, even as we’re in the middle of a national conversation about sexual violence in the Me Too era.
So in the face of this bleak picture we are also seeing unprecedented challenges and resistance to criminalization. Marijuana decriminalization is sweeping the country, right? Decriminalization of broken windows or poverty-related offenses is happening in many urban centers across the country, as well as efforts to decriminalize prostitution offenses here in New York and D.C. The discussions of abolition of prisons and ICE have made it into mainstream publications, mainstream candidate platforms, and mainstream conversations, and more of us are quick to catch on to and push back against proposed reforms that produce change in name only, or worse yet, expand the reach of systems of surveillance punishment and control while downloading more and more costs on to criminalize individuals, families, and communities. We’re living in a time when communities are organizing to close jails and prevent new ones from opening, are shutting down detention centers, and are pushing police out of schools and social services. This week thousands of people came together across the country and contributed and organized to bail out 70 black mothers who would have otherwise spent Mother’s Day in a cage. Not because they were convicted of a crime, but because they couldn’t afford to buy their freedom to be home with their children. And people put their bodies on the line also to end the practice of money bail and pretrial detention. So if you do nothing else today, when you hear from all these brilliant folks that we’re going to turn to in just a second, go to nomoremoneybail.org and make a donation to bail a mother out for Mother’s Day tomorrow or next week. Your phones, pull them out. I’ll wait. Nomoremoneybail.org, free a black mama today, tell your mom tomorrow that was your Mother’s Day gift. That’s what I’ll be doing.
As well, this PEN World Voices Festival is called Open Secrets, and we’re living in a time where writers and organizers are exposing the open secrets of torture and solitary confinement and physical and sexual abuse, sterilization, family separation, shackling of pregnant people giving birth, and warehousing of people whose mental health needs are not being met in jail and detention centers and prisons. Living in a time where people who have been criminalized and incarcerated are speaking out and living on their own terms, and where hundreds of people came together last week in New York City to imagine transformative responses to harm that don’t rely on punishment and violence to end violence. We’re living in a time where we have an opportunity to radically reimagine our visions of safety, and the means that we devote to achieving it in the face of mounting policing, punishment, exile, and exclusion. So today we’re fortunate to be in conversation with people who are writing, advocating, and organizing on the front lines of these struggles: PEN Writing for Justice fellows, New York City-based experts, and all of you. So this is not gonna be a formal panel, that was the most blah-blah that you’ll hear. It’s a dynamic public dialogue around questions of justice. How do we respond to harm, and where do we invest our resources as a society? There are two ground rules: We’re not gonna talk over each other, and we’re gonna challenge ideas and not attack people. Other than that, everything’s gay. So we’re gonna start with the PEN fellows. I’m gonna ask each of you to imagine you just got on an elevator with someone you know has the power to make a change with these issues. It could be the current occupier of the White House. It could be a Congressperson. Everyone could also leave, yes. It could be the mayor of New York City. It could be the head of the Ford Foundation, the editor of The New York Times, or Jay-Z, or Meek Mill, or Kim Kardashian, because at this point, who has influence? It’s all up for grabs, right? All right, so you walk in the elevator, they walk in the elevator, they hit the button for the 10th floor. You tell them what your top three priorities for change are. Priscilla, go!
PRISCILLA OCEN
So I think for me, I have had conversations with folks like this. So part of the work that I do, in addition to Writing for Justice fellow is that I’m the vice-chair of the Civilian Oversight Commission for LA County Sheriff’s Department, which is one of the largest law enforcement agencies in the country and the largest jailer in the world. Every day we have approximately 17,000 people caged in facilities in LA County funded by taxpayers. Half of those people are there pretrial. Many of them, most of them, have mental illnesses. And I have these conversations with policymakers all at the time.
RITCHIE
Who was in your elevator today?
OCEN
Who was in my elevator today? You know I think I would be talking . . . I think part of the work that I do with LA County is, because it’s such a huge department, right? If we can make some changes with regard to LA County, then we can make changes with regard to our national populations and international populations. So I think I would be talking to either the governor or the sheriff of LA County, although I’m not gonna go into detail about that. But I think what I would say is that we have a crisis of imagination, right? How do we understand safety, how do we understand justice, how do we understand accountability? We cannot police and punish our way out of poverty, we cannot police and punish our way out of sexual violence, we cannot police and punish our way out of homelessness. So how do we have a new vision that respects the harm that is often committed in our communities without doubling down on that harm through caging people? What are other mechanisms that we can rely on to divest from policing and punishment in prisons? So that’s the big point that I would emphasize: is to have a broader imagination that doesn’t rely on policing punishment in jails to solve what many consider to be intractable social problems, which are only intractable because we’ve decided not to deal with them.
RITCHIE
And you’ve just hit the seventh floor.
OCEN
Well, okay! Just hit the seventh floor. So how do we do that, right? So I have about a minute, I’m looking at the timer. So how do we do that? I’m very efficient with my words here. So how do we do that? So part of what we’ve been pushing for in LA County is to shut down jails. We’ve just organized to halt the creation and construction of a women’s jail which would be in Lancaster, California. If you’ve ever been to Southern California, it is like a different state, but it’s technically in LA County. So we’ve organized to shut that down. We’re also organizing with folks like Justice LA to shut down what’s called a community correctional treatment facility, because you can’t get well in a jail cell, right? We need to be investing in community-based programs where folks can go to get well and alternatives when folks are having crises to calling the Sheriff’s Department, which tends to kill folks who are in mental health crises. The other thing is part of my project. I’m working on trying to describe how women are impacted by a community controlled by probation and parole, and what I think we really need to be doing is to radically scale down how we use probation and parole to change, fundamentally, the model to support rather than punishment, and essentially making people compliant with court orders and punishing them when they don’t do things like report to their probation officer or have a job or all these other things that are nominal and not essential to what the actual person needs. So I think we need to be having serious conversations about how we use probation and parole because that’s actually the largest population in LA County. We have about 40,000 people at any given time under community supervision.
RITCHIE
Thank you so much. The elevator just made that annoying sound that I will not replicate, but don’t worry Priscilla because we’re gonna corral all these people into a room later and then we’re gonna keep talking to them. So, Nadja, elevator door opens . . . who walks in?
NADJA EISENBERG-GUYOT
I would say folks in New York City, some of my New York City community who are fighting to close Rikers right now, is who I want to be talking to right now, and Mayor de Blasio. Can I have a couple people in the elevator?
RITCHIE
Sure, okay, but let’s just say Mayor de Blasio is the one who’s a surprise. Okay, alright, go!
EISENBERG-GUYOT
So I just want to say before I start that what I’m about to share is not my original analysis. This comes out of generations of struggle and organizing and political analysis, primarily folks who’ve been struggling for abolition for centuries really and also more explicitly around prison abolition for the past 50 years. And so what I’m sharing comes from black community organizers, mostly black women, who’ve been on the front lines of prison abolition.
So the first thing I want to say is that prisons, jails, and police, and U.S. criminalizing systems more broadly, are crucial institutions of white supremacy, patriarchy, and class domination. Criminalizing and punishing systems do not end violence, they perpetuate it. Prisons, jails, and police provide the illusion of safety, or safety for some, while subjecting oppressed people to extreme brutalization, trauma, and premature death. And criminalization and punishment systems additionally and continually produce whiteness both as innocence and as property, and so mass incarceration is a function of reproducing whiteness under a particular regime, right? As innocence and as property. And so finally criminalizing and punishing systems are working exactly as intended. Rhetoric of safety or rehabilitation or reform aside. They are working to reproduce the violent social arrangement of power in our society, and of race, class, and gender discipline, and there’s no getting out of that. Mass incarceration is doing what it’s intended to do. Incarceration is doing what it’s intended to do. It’s not a mistake that mass incarceration does this work in the United States.
And so for me the most urgent issue facing us in these conversations is abandoning reform, abandoning a vision of reform, and practicing, imagining, and experimenting with abolition. We don’t need another study on how pretrial detention harms communities. We don’t need another study on how being incarcerated reproduces violence and domination. We just need to start, as Priscilla said, investing in alternatives. And so specifically in New York, just to talk about the incarcerated population in New York, 80 percent of people currently incarcerated in New . . . so New York City incarcerates about 8,000 people per day, that’s 40,000 people a year cycling through the system. Eighty percent of those folks are detained pretrial. So we could close Rikers now, right? We could close Rikers now if we ended pretrial detention in New York City. An additional eight percent of people incarcerated in New York City jails are incarcerated on technical parole of parole violations like missing curfew. So we’re looking at 90 percent of our currently incarcerated people in our city who are just being punished and brutalized and harmed, right? With mountains of evidence that that just perpetuates harm, violence, poverty, inter-community violence, intra-community violence, and no evidence that it improves public safety.
RITCHIE
Wow, thank you! In 10 floors! Amazing. Let’s pass the mic down this way to Beth.
BETH SHELBURNE
I’m a journalist and I write about prisons in Alabama. You can imagine what that’s like. And in my elevator steps head coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide, Nick Saban, because I’m convinced if he doesn’t get involved in this discussion, people in Alabama just are not gonna care about prisons. So that would be my dream to talk to Nick Saban about what’s happening in our prisons.
Alabama is, I think, the worst example in the failure of mass incarceration. Our prisons are completely overcrowded, the most overcrowded in the nation, the most violent. The Department of Justice just called them cruel and unusual in a system-wide investigation that I’ve been studying and writing about. What does that mean for people who are locked up in these kinds of places? It means that they live in constant terror, in constant trauma. They are retraumatized over and over again. The system is broken. It is criminogenic. It makes people who are already traumatized and need help worse.
So how do we address these conditions of confinement in a way that’s meaningful and sweeping and not just piecemeal through litigation, which is how it’s been addressed since the beginning of prisons in our country? I think Nick Saban, people like you, need to care about this issue because it’s all of our issue. It’s not just an issue for people that have a loved one that’s incarcerated. It’s not just an issue for people that work in the criminal justice system. This is all happening on our dime. We are paying for these taxpayer-run institutions to commit violence, to be indifferent to people suffering, and so all of us have a stake in this, and I think people of influence need to speak out and demand that there be changes made in the system. Until abolition can be a real reality, we have to address conditions of confinement because I think it is the human rights disaster of our generation happening. I also would like to tell Nick Saban that there needs to be more of an even playing field across the board in the criminal justice system between the prosecution side and the criminal defense side. Alabama has no statewide public defender. That means after you’re convicted and you’re in prison, unless you’re one of the 180 people on death row, you are on your own trying to appeal your sentence. There are no resources given to the criminal defense side of law in many states but especially in the state that I live in. The guys that I talk to that are incarcerated that try to appeal their sentences are working in un-air-conditioned, cluttered law libraries that have typewriters and no copy machines. How do they make copies to send their appeals into the courts? They pay the administration a dollar a page which they don’t have or they hustle somebody else that’s in the prison that can make the copies for them. So things like that lead to disparate outcomes. It’s not about justice, and there needs to be a more even playing field.
RITCHIE
Keeonna, tell us who you’re hopping onto an elevator with, and what you’re going to be telling them.
KEEONNA HARRIS
I’ll probably be hopping into an elevator with Jay-Z.
RITCHIE
Excellent.
HARRIS
Reason being I feel like he has a different kind of reach and following, and he also comes from a certain place and he knows what it’s like to have a single mom and to struggle and things like that.
RITCHIE
I’m excited because I’ve actually been in an elevator with Jay-Z and did not take advantage of the opportunity. So I’m going to watch you do this and take notes. Go Keeonna!
HARRIS
Okay, what I think one of the biggest problems is for women like me who are trying to raise a child with someone that’s incarcerated, we have been left out of the conversation a lot and silenced. The main conversation around incarceration usually is centered around men, but what happens to women who have children with these men and we’re not supported by society, we’re not supported by our family? So I think that a lot of women, when you focus on the police scene and surveillance of mothers, especially black mothers, and because that’s all rooted, Nadja suggested, in white patriarchy and capitalism. And also it creates this cycle of shame and silence, and we don’t know who each other are because we’re scared to disclose out of judgment. So I definitely think that’s one of the things that needs to be addressed. So what I’m currently working on right now, I’m working on a memoir about my life, raising my children with an incarcerated parent for over 20 years. But also I would like to see a lot more facilitation workshops and resources for women to learn how to navigate between the “free” and “unfree” world. What that looks like; how to advocate for themselves, their family; and how to move in the world and not to be ashamed of that.
RITCHIE
Thank you, I feel inspired to write an album with you. Appreciate it. We’re gonna come back, Jay-Z is gonna get corralled, and we’re going to make him listen to everything else we have to say. I’m gonna pass it down to the Davids. Which is David getting an elevator with . . .
DAVID SANCHEZ
I live in Miami and I think the most influential guy there is Pitbull, probably. It’s starting to seem like that, so, yeah, I guess I’ll address Pitbull. And the aspects of mass incarceration that I have experience with and that have touched me most closely is the war on drugs and the criminalization of mental health problems and drug use as a whole. And I’m a fiction writer so I tend to think in stories, and when I was going through all these phases of the criminal justice system I really wasn’t looking at big-picture issues. I was thinking mostly about myself, honestly. It was pretty selfish and worried about myself and just consumed with my own thoughts or whatever. But I remember there was a guy that really helped me. This was a pivotal moment for me that changed the way I thought about things. There’s a guy that really helped me. He was just like a role model of what life could look like. He had been sober a few years, and he would pick up the phone in the middle of the night and talk to me if I was struggling with something. He would give me rides all over town. He was just like a model. And at, like, three years sober he got sentenced to go up the road for a crime that he committed years, years before that, you know what I mean? And me and all the other guys that he helped went to the courtroom to be like this guy . . . No! You know what I mean? Don’t do it! And it seemed like the judge believed us, listened to us, and believed us that he was an upstanding member of society or whatever, and then sent him away anyways. And so that made me ask the question: So what is this really about? If this is in the name of safety or public safety or whatever, this is a man that is doing undeniable good and helped me and helped a bunch of other guys like me. And yet he’s still going away. So from there, that was the initial “something is really up here.” This doesn’t seem like this is really what it seems. So thanks, Pitbull.
RITCHIE
What can I do about this? This is awful.
SANCHEZ
Just like how, once you get branded as a felon, how hard it is to rent an apartment, or get a job, or go to school. When I was trying to work my way back into school, after going to community college and trying to go get a bachelor’s, I had to go in there, and I went into all these deans’ offices and just pleaded my case, right? And they finally let me in, but they let me in on a whole different kind of probation. Like where I was on academic probation no matter what, and I wasn’t allowed in the dorms and all this stuff. I’ve always done okay in school so it wasn’t a big deal for me, but just getting a C would have gotten me thrown out. And what kind of attitude is that to bring to school where you’re supposed to be learning and feeling, I don’t know, intrigued and excited by learning. But to be worried about all this bureaucracy and stuff over your head. And I don’t know . . . so yeah, Pitbull, make it better.
RITCHIE
I appreciate it. I think I’m gonna think about how to do that with all my Pitbull cash. David tell us who you got into an elevator with.
DAVID HESKA WANBLI WEIDEN
Hi, I’m David Heska Wanbli Weiden, and I should say, I’m waiting to get on the elevator. I wasn’t nervous here today until I saw Jennifer Egan sitting over there. And just last month I sat with my friend Tommy Orange in a dive bar in Denver talking about A Visit From the Goon Squad until late in the evening so, and he cites it as the major influence on his work, so I know, I know . . . But I’m gonna depart from my prepared comments. I have three people in the elevator with me. I have Colorado Governor Jared Polis, I have Mitch McConnell, and I have Nancy Pelosi.
RITCHIE
That’s a scary elevator.
HESKA WANBLI WEIDEN
Yeah. Trust me, I know. I’m gonna tell you why I have Governor Jared Polis of Colorado in the elevator with me. Four days ago I received a phone call that every parent fears. My 11-year-old son Sasha is a student at Stem School Highlands Ranch. My ex-wife calls me screaming, there’s a shooting at the school, we can’t reach Sasha. I raced to the school and we cannot reach my son for five hours. My son was in the school shooting huddled in a closet with his teacher with a tennis racket so if the shooters came in they’d be able to fight them off. For 20 minutes he was in a darkened room hearing boom boom boom boom, shots go off, not knowing if he’s going to live or die. The door opens, he doesn’t know if he’s going to see the shooter, but it was the SWAT team. This was just four days ago. This is my son. We need rational gun control laws and mental health programs for troubled youth. I lived the nightmare. This was literally . . . we’re still traumatized, we’re still dealing with it. So I know this is slightly off topic but this is something that you know, again, is a major deal in Colorado. You think it’s never going to happen to you, but it did happen.
Let me now return, since we’re on the fifth floor here, to my prepared comments. I am deeply concerned with issues of criminal justice for American Indians. I’m a fiction writer, as well, and I address these issues fictionally in my forthcoming novel Winter Counts, which is coming July 2020 from Echo HarperCollins. And I am deeply concerned with the law the Major Crimes Act. And now I’m talking to Pelosi and McConnell. The Major Crimes Act is a federal law which only applies to American Indians, and it means that American Indians who commit felonies on reservations are prosecuted in federal not state court. They go to the federal court system, they go to federal prisons. There is no parole in the federal system. Because of the Major Crimes Act, which applies to one group only, in this country Native Americans are incarcerated at a much higher level. And it’s not fair. In the state court system, sentences are less punitive and you have probation, you have parole. There is a law which applies only to American Indians. And then when my people come back to the reservation, they can’t get jobs for the reason that my friend David here said, because they’re felons. And almost every regulation on reservations say you can’t get housing and you can’t get a job if you’re a convicted felon. So it creates a vicious cycle of poverty for incarcerated people on my reservation and others. So the Major Crimes Act, it’s almost unknown even among our policymakers. It’s still enforced. It’s a law that deeply penalizes indigenous people. So I would ask Speaker Pelosi and Leader McConnell to please, please, please eliminate the Major Crimes Act. And I address these issues fictionally, again, in in my novel Winter Counts. So thank you, everyone.
RITCHIE
Excellent. I’m gonna stay with you and the Davids for a second, and then come on down and let everyone else speak. Feel free to jump in. But, you know, we’re at a literature festival and there are fiction writers and nonfiction writers here and the theme is Open Secrets, and I think I just have a question about whose secrets are we sharing? Who is sharing them? How are we sharing them, and why, right? So you’re writing about your brother’s experience. David, you’re writing about your own experience. Beth, you’re writing about other people’s experience that you’re sort of investigating as a journalist. Other folks are writing from your own experience or from maybe an academic perspective or otherwise. So what do we need to keep in mind about whose stories we tell, how we tell them, what words we use? Unfortunately, Reginald Dwayne Betts I don’t see here, but you know is doing a whole one-man play about the word “felon” and about how that has become his name and how he is rejecting that as his name, and saying I’m a person who has a felony conviction but I’m not a felon, right? So what responsibilities do we have when we tell these stories? Then also, the reason I want to start back with you is, what responsibility do we have to tell these stories about people whose experiences are also open secrets just because we don’t talk about them, like indigenous people?
HESKA WANBLI WEIDEN
I feel like I just spoke a lot, too much, maybe, but I think we have a duty to tell stories that are marginalized and people that are marginalized, not heard from. That is obviously American Indians in this country. We are the invisible minority, where people think we’re gone. So I think that artists and journalists have a duty to bear witness to what is going on and to tell these stories, so absolutely.
RITCHIE
Let’s just bring this onto some of the other journalists and then I’m going to come to you Keeonna, as both an academic and a person telling from your own experience. I mean what’s our responsibility in terms of how we tell these stories if they’re not ours? And how do we do that in a way that’s respectful and where we’re not sort of telling other people’s secrets in ways that are harmful to this conversation?
SHELBURNE
Well, I can speak from my point of view, and I’m specifically writing about people incarcerated in Alabama serving life without parole. And I wanted to tell the lived experience of this sentence that is used at unprecedented levels around our country. But there’s not a lot known or talked about, getting in people’s heads of what is it like to walk into a building and know that you will never leave. So I have developed relationships with the people that I’m writing about and it’s been a long process to unpack their lives, their histories, how they have reckoned with where they are, and it’s been a collaboration. It’s had to be a collaboration, I think, to do this kind of writing. So I consider them my comrades, not just my subjects, and I care about them, and we have a back-and-forth collaboration on how to present their stories in a way that’s truthful and honest.
RITCHIE
We’ll maybe talk more about that. I know that other folks have chosen the approach of sort of making a way for folks to tell the stories themselves. I’m thinking, for instance, of Dream Hampton just did a documentary of a radio show from people from prison, life in prison, they’re telling their own stories, and is there a value to doing it one way or the other or both, and so it’s a question. But I do want to ask, Keeonna, in terms of your experience of telling your own story, both as an academic and then in this context more from a personal space, do you have thoughts about telling stories—your story and people’s stories—quickly from what you’re saying around the notion of that practice as breaking isolation?
HARRIS
Yes. When I’m doing interviews with people or things like that in an academic sense, I think it’s very important to allow people to tell their own story. I’m just a vessel. I’m not here to change your words, or make it sound a certain way to make it sound pleasing to other people’s ears. And so I think that adds to people being seen and heard and feeling authentic, and not me making someone a spectacle. Because I think when you talk, have conversations about incarceration, or people that have any kind of relationship to it, that’s what a lot of the time is done. They’re made to be a spectacle. Like, look at them! Look! You know, when I’m talking about myself I think that words are very important in how I’m labeled. And, for myself, I kept it a secret for years. Just out of shame. If you didn’t know me closely, friends and family, I did not disclose. And so now I walk into that power. And we call ourselves regulars. I call myself a “mainline mama.” That’s what I am, and that’s important to me.
RITCHIE
And I feel like another sort of open secret is how many children, especially black children, have an incarcerated parent, who also hold that secret.
HARRIS
Correct. And I’ve seen that a lot with my children, who are grown now. Some are grown, one is in elementary, where it kind of feels like teachers or whoever out them. And what I instill in them is our family is just as “normal” as everybody else. There’s nothing different. So to walk into that and not be ashamed of that and also not let people judge them. So my older sons or what-have-you, they get in trouble like all kids do. It’s this whole . . . they have another layer of . . . well, do you think it’s because their father was incarcerated? Or do you think it’s because you’ve kind of made it okay that, you know, you’ve kind of said prison is okay because you took them to visit their father? So they don’t get the same kind of second chances that other kids do when they have detention or whatever they do. It’s a different layer, so I think that’s also a problem.
RITCHIE
Definitely. I just ask also about how we tell stories about people when we’re trying to make a case for repealing a piece of legislation or for making sure that reentry programs act in a way that further education and an opportunity, not foreclose it. Or when we’re trying to make a case even for closing a jail or abolition, how we tell stories without kind of reinforcing criminalizing narratives or romanticizing redemption stories, right? Making it so that you have to have sort of the “comeback kid” story in order to be the one that then gets lifted up as the poster child and then that leaves so many stories behind and then therefore shift so many solutions behind. I don’t know if you have thoughts on that.
EISENBERG-GUYOT
I mean one of the things that’s really important for me and my work is to center not just people’s stories but people’s analyses of their own stories and how they arrive at those analyses through conversation, through collective organizing, through collective struggle, right? And so it’s not just experience that gives us knowledge, it’s how we talk about our experience, and how we organize around our experience, and how we arrive at an analysis of our experience. So when I’m writing about the fight to close Rikers in New York and speaking to people who’ve experienced incarceration and state violence, I really focus not just on their story of brutalization, because I agree with Keeonna that it can turn into kind of a spectacle of violence and end up reinforcing the relationship between blackness and dehumanization. So I really try to focus on how people have understood those experiences and what they’re doing to enact their analysis in practice. So for me, that’s how I respond to that concern.
I had something to say about secrets as well. I mean, I think for me the secret of mass incarceration is that it’s been for generations fueled by progressive notions of reform and rehabilitation. The notion that these institutions are reformable, right? That institutions of white supremacy can be reformed, not abolished. It’s the secret hidden history of jail expansion and prison expansion across the United States. And in that sense mass incarceration taking off in the 1980s with a return to kind of a punitive apparatus is a blip in a history of prison expansion that was theorized and enacted by progressives who had a progressive notion of prison as rehabilitation. And it’s really important that we understand that the history of prison and jail expansion is a history of trying to rehabilitate these institutions. And so then the corollary of that is the way in which resistance to mass incarceration and resistance to white supremacy is a hidden history that our communities are robbed of knowing. That folks have been struggling against these institutions for generations. And yet that history is constantly erased and effaced in the face of this progressive teleology of, like, “we’re gonna get better. These institutions are going to get better.”
OCEN
So I think one of the things that’s interesting is when we talk about open secrets, I wonder to whom are we addressing that? For whom is mass incarceration, criminalization, an open secret? Because if you talk about the communities, it is palpable, it’s lived every day. And so I think beginning with that acknowledgement around who are the experts about this system and who experiences the systems is number one, right? So for me that means I’m talking about black women and girls because they experience the system from all kinds of different angles, from the experience that Keeonna has with . . . A great study that Essie Justice Group just did found that black women, one out of every two black women, has a family member who has been incarcerated or touched by the criminal justice system. Or the experience that black women and girls have with regard to community control, right? I could tell you all these statistics about how women are 25 percent of the of the population that’s under community control. They’re seven percent of the incarcerated population.
But that experience sounds quite different when you start with the premise that black women’s stories matter, that the stories of Latinas matter, that the stories of poor white women matter. When I can tell you the story of Ingrid, who I connected with through Susan Burton and A New Way of Life. Ingrid’s story is that she was off and on, in and out of the criminal justice system for 22 years. She experienced criminal supervision, either on probation or parole, for 22 years of her life. She lost custody of her children because she failed to report to her probation officer, and the probation officer decided to “sit her down” for 30 days. Where she lost her job, she lost her housing, she lost her child. I could tell you the story of Taylor, who is another black woman. Who was criminalized at age 12 because she was in a foster home, she was being abused, and she fought back. She got put into the juvenile justice system on an assault charge, which then basically created the circumstances under which she would be policed until she was 29 years old. The criminal justice system was her parent, literally, as a legal matter. The delinquency system supervised her as a child.
I can tell you the statistics, but the stories matter. The stories of black women for whom the criminal justice system is not an open secret. It is an everyday part of their lived experience and we need to acknowledge that part, right? Because often our narratives are shaped by people who are completely distant but they set the policies. And we need to be focusing the conversations for the people who are immediately impacted because that’s where the answers are.
RITCHIE
And I think, Nadja, that’s what you call, and I don’t totally understand this term, but I think I know what it means, and that’s what you call epistemic justice, right? Which is basically that we need to reshape how we know and understand the criminal legal system through the stories that we tell and how we tell them, and that they don’t need to be, again, this sort of redemption narrative. It’s just an everyday experience of criminalization every day. David . . . I’m gonna get the last names correct with the Davids. David Sanchez, can you just tell us when you’re doing writing about your own experience, or those people in your community, do you feel a push to clean it up? Do people want you to, kind of, tell the story in a way that has everyone sober and living a productive life at the end and it’s kind of an ad for a 12-step program?
SANCHEZ
Yeah, I mean I don’t really feel any pressure to do that because I don’t . . . I think ultimately when you read something that’s fiction, you want it to be good and that doesn’t sound very good. It doesn’t sound like a good, compelling book. But thinking about the secrets thing, it’s interesting because I poured a lot of time and money to get my charges sealed, right? And to kind of keep it all close to the chest and not tell anybody. And in this program, in an MFA program, and then I got this fellowship and it’s just bizarre to me. I don’t know, it’s like a reversal where now I’m speaking into a microphone. Yeah, so I’m not sure I fully reconciled all that stuff in my head quite yet, but it’s getting there. I wish I had known that this would be something I would do and that I didn’t actually have to go get that. It costs a bunch of money and it took a lot of time on probation and a lot of Amscot money orders to that guy and whatever. So yeah, I wish someone had told me, “just take your time and pay it off.” Because I can actually just come here and . . . and it’s whatever.
RITCHIE
No, I hear you. And also it is something that it sounds like, you know, from what you’re saying, what Keeonna saying, and even what other panelists are saying, is that there’s consequences of it being a publicly-known thing, and then what we’re resisting here as part of our epistemic resistance or our resistance through storytelling is to bust open those consequences. And also to bust open, as you’re saying Nadja, the notion that prisons are about rehabilitation or reform, right? So one of the things that in the past few years in New York City has . . . Again it’s an open secret and the reason we say “open secret” is because it is known in the communities that are affected by it very well. But the open secret of what the conditions are behind prison bars, right? That Kalief Browder story and the stories of sexual violence in epidemic proportions at Rikers and beyond have busted open the open secret that prisons are about anything but torture, policing, and punishment. So I’m going to invite Fred to join us to pull up a chair to this family conversation here to talk a little bit about how you’ve seen that open secret. I’m not reading folks’ bios to not waste time and keep it conversational. But you know how you witnessed that open secret coming to light both in the system and, since you’ve come out of the system, and how you’re pushing stories out, or using stories’ narrative to shift that. To either make it clear that this is not about reform or rehabilitation or to, as Beth was saying, try and at least reduce some of the harms inside while we work toward a different world.
FRED PATRICK
So at the Vera Institute of Justice, one of the things we’ve sort of thought about and have done a lot of intentional work around in the last several years is the fact that there is not enough focus on conditions of confinement, which was brought up here earlier. You know, as we’ve talked about, whether you call it the criminal justice reform movement or what-have-you, a lot of that has been about re-entry—so how do we better support people when they come home—and then a lot on the front end in terms of sentencing reform, and keeping people out of the system. The reality is you still have that vast middle. You know, the 2.2 million people that are there today as we speak, and those are horrific conditions. And if you haven’t, I would encourage you to read the Department of Justice report on Alabama. And this is the Trump Department of Justice by the way, and you had a former attorney general who was from the state of Alabama and yet they don’t pull punches in just how horrible the prison conditions are in Alabama. And by the way, they may be worse on the margins, but the reality is you find that prisons across America, as with jails, are horrible places. And I think we’ve long ago lost sight of the fact that when someone is sentenced, on the prison side, when someone is sentenced, that sentence, that deprivation of liberty, that’s the punishment. Nothing else needs to be done to further punish that person. And yet, when you look at the punishment paradigm, that is really infused all across American correctional systems. It’s clear that somewhere along the line, we lost sight of the fact that the criminal sentence was punishment. Because the jails and prisons are all about how do you further punish people, how do you further dehumanize people in situations. And so we, and someone talked about the notion of sort of reimagining, sort of thinking about a better way, and so one of the things we stipulate at Vera is that we’d like to see human dignity be the foundation principle of how our justice system operates. Whose reality is it’s a horrible system, but you replace it with what, what’s that, what’s that foundational core principle by which you reimagine or erect a much better system. Yes, it should be smaller, drastically smaller. Yes, fewer people should be going in in the first place. But if you assume that it’ll be some years from now before we get to see the reality of abolition, then the question becomes how do you treat those individuals who are there today in a respectful and meaningful way? Where you respect the intrinsic worth of every human being. When you respect individuals’ ability and capacity to grow and change. And if we can begin to think about how we build and erect the system that way, that’s the way you can begin to combat the notion of the horrible prison conditions. And yes, there needs to be much greater light and transparency as it relates to showing and exposing the prison conditions. And we need to take the Nick Sabans and everyone else to those prisons and have them understand it, and have that be part and parcel to their work, in terms of how they help expose what happens behind those walls.
RITCHIE
Thoughts? Go ahead.
SHELBURNE
I just wanted to say, as a journalist, and I know a lot of writers are up against this when you write about people that are in prison or prisons in general. You know, there is no transparency and the entire model is to block you out and to control your access, what gets said, so I realized pretty early on in writing about Alabama prisons that I was just gonna have to go rogue if I was going to be able to tell these stories honestly. So for this project I started writing to people that are incarcerated in Alabama and they wrote me back and I never involved the prison administrations in this project, because I knew the minute I did they would try to control my access or control what I was doing. So I think that nonfiction writers and journalists need to think outside the box more. You know, oftentimes when reporters are under deadline, there’s a hierarchy that you have to go through in a chain of command to get answers about prisons, but it’s so tightly controlled and it’s America’s black box. I mean, they’re closed institutions. They’re like that by design. They don’t want us to know what’s going on.
RITCHIE
So let me push further with you, Fred, because, you know, you weren’t always at the Vera Institute. So what was your role when you were at DOC and running program at Rikers, or when you were the community affairs person at NYPD, what was your role as a systems player, to kind of illuminate and expose the kind of things that we’re talking about and the fact that we’re not talking about reform or rehabilitation here, we’re talking about punishment and torture.
PATRICK
Yeah, so exactly as it is now, quite frankly. I thought that, as I still believe, you need actors both inside the system and outside the system to generate real change. And those individuals, by the way, should be partners so that you can find ways to bring some bit of transparency and accountability. I’ve always thought that you can use, for those who are in the justice system, that can be an opportunity to intervene and in some ways to kind of countermand some of the dysfunctions of our broader system, in terms of failing schools, failing workforce development, failing economic development policies, and in neighborhoods that lead to, that other feeders to mass incarceration. So I’ve firmly believed on the program side that while individuals are in the system, for all the horrors of the system, it can be an opportune time to focus on skill building and education. Not that that’s preferred. Ideally you should be doing it in a better way, in an efficient way, in the community. But to the extent that we have this system that currently brings people into these facilities, and I don’t imagine that that system is totally eradicated in the next 10 years, I’m not willing to write off a whole generation of people who are currently in that system and as someone talked about earlier, we also have this system of perpetual punishment, which we like to call collateral consequences. That sounds so clinical. The reality is it’s perpetual punishment, in terms [of] all the barriers people face once they have a criminal conviction. And so there needs to be intentionality with respect to rolling back those efforts.
RITCHIE
Thank you for answering that question, and I think it comes to this other open secret of the hidden forms of incarceration, right? How probation, parole, supervision is another form of incarceration that’s also premised on supposed reforms. Supposedly we’ve looked inside prisons, we’ve seen they’re horrible places, and now we’re gonna do something outside that’s different. Tell us about how those reforms are working, Priscilla.
OCEN
So one thing, we have had some of these conversations about how we should think about reform. And I think the idea that jails or prisons or detention centers can be grounded in human dignity, I think, maybe is a little far-fetched in my opinion. So I think we need to be talking about this as harm reduction, right? So how do we reduce harm, knowing that these systems are inherently violent, inherently white supremacist, that they are successor institutions to enslavement. How do we do that work while acknowledging that these systems are fundamentally corrupt, fundamentally rotten, and fundamentally premised on a system of injustice, not justice. So I think we need to, as Andrea is encouraging us, I think we should be careful about language, because in some ways in describing these institutions as potentially able to support human flourishing, I think, in some ways legitimizes them and ensures their continued existence. So I think we need to call . . . you know, one of my friends, he’s a pastor. I’m not a pastor, but he says, “look, you got to call the devil by his name.” And I think that that’s true. And so with regard to probation and parole, which is called a very clinical term like community supervision. So you’re like, oh that’s very nice, we can see you over there. I’m supervising you as you go about your daily life and you’re free in the world. When folks hear somebody got probation, they’re like what? Probation? That’s nothing! That’s the way we think about probation, like it’s a slap on the wrist. It’s insignificant.
But for folks who are supervised or controlled by the state under probation or parole . . . and increasingly in California, I should say, we’re turning to probation and parole as a sort of an antidote to mass incarceration, expanding the populations that are under supervision. It’s not, right? There are regulations about who you can see, where you can go, how long you can be there, where you can live. For example, one woman that I’ve interviewed was potentially going to be violated because she moved without telling her probation officer where she was going to be living. One person was gonna be violated, was in fact violated, because she was, I think, seven months pregnant and had been a victim of a violent crime. She was violated because she couldn’t do community hard labor, right? Another person was violated because she left state lines to go to her mother’s funeral without authorization, right?
So these are not minor conditions. This is the perpetual punishment that we’re talking about. So you say, oh you know you can just get three years of probation, but again you’re saddled with twelve to fifteen conditions on average—some people get even more. One woman I interviewed had 10 pages of conditions. Plus you have to pay $50. One woman I interviewed, the moment she got out of jail her probation officer said, I need $50 from you. She’s like, I just got out of jail. I literally had to get a bus token from the jail. I have no money. And he was like, you better come up with it.
RITCHIE
And then people want to then criminalize people for trading sex. I’m not sure where they thought they were going to get the $50 from.
OCEN
Right. Then she goes back to jail, that’s a no-bail warrant. She doesn’t get out on bail. She’s gonna sit there, right? And the judge may extend her probation even further. So it started out as three years, now it’s six. It was six now, it’s nine. And now she’s on probation or parole for 22 years. Because of a single . . . it’s, in some cases, because of a single conviction. So these are not reforms. They are net-widening systems, they further entrench the police and prisons in our communities. People are incarcerated in the community and we need to be clear about that. So language matters, description matters, stories matter, particularly for people who are the closest. So I want us to understand probation and parole not as—I mean, it’s better than being in jail—but it’s still a form of unfreedom and we should be clear about that.
RITCHIE
So let me invite Lorenzo up. Yes! Because we’re going to talk about other reforms that involve alternatives to incarceration or alternatives, diversion programs and how are those diversion programs maybe similar sites of surveillance and conditions that then maybe net-widen rather than diverting or not.
LORENZO JONES
Thank you all for having us. Really quickly—I’m glad you asked the question about diversion. So we could talk today about law enforcement-assisted diversion, lead pre-arrest diversion for folks, right? Which ostensibly, in its best form, is like a 2.0 version of community courts and drug courts. The partnership, city police partnerships, to address drugs as a criminal issue has always resulted in some entry into the system, period. So it’s that diversion . . . So, tricky word. I do want to say this, though: To understand diversion you have to go back to the Clinton crime bill and Joe Biden.
RITCHIE
Let’s talk about Joe Biden.
JONES
Let’s talk about Joe Biden. There’s a guy who gets drafted number one, number two, by the Boston Celtics. 1989, 1990. They called him the new Jordan stopper. So Michael Jordan’s in Chicago. Chicago’s been molly-whopped by the Celtics for, like, a decade or so. I’m a Bulls fan from Chicago.
RITCHIE
I can tell.
JONES
And, right, Jordan comes that he’s scoring 40, 50, 60 points. He drops, I think, 60 on the Celtics. They draft his guy Len Bias. Len Bias came out of the college. The college he came from was University of Maryland. So Len Bias is at practice one day and he dropped dead of a heart attack in practice. They immediately equate that heart attack to a cocaine overdose. When that news breaks, Joe Biden and all of these white men who live in Maryland and work in D.C. are in the gym at the congressional whatever gym, and they see it, they leave the gym and they go back to their offices in that moment and they start writing the drug, the crime bill. What we now know as the infrastructure of the Drug War. Along comes Hillary Clinton, who would bring them to heel, and so on. And I guess it just happens, right? Clinton follows this up with welfare reform, and then there’s some immigration stuff in there. Some Native American stuff in there. All this is happening with Clinton. Clinton’s doing this. The first black president is doing this, right? And we end up losing all these people who were born, who are a part of and utilizing the safety net—social services, mental health addiction services, alternatives to incarceration—people get moved off of that system, the same people, and they get moved into the Department of Corrections. Exact same population of people. And then we start to reverse-engineer things like alternatives to incarceration and community courts and drug courts and immigration courts.
Diversion, for all intents and purposes, is like shuffling the chairs on the deck of the Titanic. Ostensibly, if we’re not limiting the power of law enforcement to violate . . . I’ll just put this into perspective and I’ll stop. There’s only one group of people who can stop you at their judgment and suspend your civil rights at their judgement. Just look at you, alright your civil rights don’t count right now, come here. And that’s law enforcement. To have those exact same people be the people who house and control diversion programs literally is like having a fox watch the hen house. So that’s, to me, that’s diversion in a nutshell. And we’d be diverted out of the legal system, out of this system period, and allowed to participate in full civic democracy.
RITCHIE
And that comes to the point that Fred was making, is that people should be able to access education. It shouldn’t depend on a cop deciding that you’re deserving of it, and it shouldn’t depend on a cop being able to say, well I could refer you to this program that would give you full housing and benefits and whatever, what you gonna do for me? Which is what’s giving cops more power. And also net-widening, right, because someone who they might not have probable cause to roll up on, they might have a reason to walk up and be like, oh, well you look like you need some help and now I’m gonna pull you into the system because I think you need help. Instead of just restrictive access. So these alternatives to incarceration often are premised on stories of violent versus non-violent offenders, right? Deserving versus undeserving, which I mentioned earlier. So pull up a chair Marlon because I know that you have something to say about this debate, this notion that we tell stories about nonviolent offenders to get the changes that we want, when in fact we aren’t going to get free or get abolition or get to anything that’s an alternative or even different than what’s happening now until we deal with all of it.
MARLON PETERSON
I mean the conversation of violent versus nonviolent is first of all a non-starter, but it’s literally like where we are when we think about this conversation around reform. So earlier I think you mentioned that the story of mass incarceration is the story of constant progressive reforms around incarceration. So the idea now that we should first work with the people who have been convicted of nonviolent offenses is another iteration of that. But also thinking about secrets—it’s not necessarily secret, but just since we’re using that term, the people who packed jails and prisons tend to be people of color, poor people, people from certain types of communities, right?
RITCHIE
Queer people.
PETERSON
Queer people. Exactly. People from marginalized populations across the board. And these people happen to also commit nonviolent offenses, and they also happen to commit violent offenses, right? I’m gonna come from the same place—they’re all responding to the same conditions and the communities that they come from. I think the secret is that it’s easier, it’s politically expedient, to deal with folks to find some level of reform, to work with folks who committed nonviolent offenses largely because the idea is that a person who’s committed a violent offense is incorrigible and will at any point come out and do something to you again. So that means, like myself would be somebody who fit into that category, or somebody who we consider that incorrigible type person, that you should all be as free of at this moment.
But if we’re speaking about narratives though, and stories, we start these conversations, debates from false narratives largely in the first place, so that’s why we are at this place speaking about nonviolent versus violent offender. That we understand what incarceration is about in and of itself, right? That’s where the debate needs to start from. And then secondly, the fact that I mentioned at the outset, that the communities that these folks are coming from themselves, they come from traumatized conditions. Not absolving people of whatever they may do, but they’re coming from something. So we really want to address what’s happening to people in communities. We have to address the communities. And out of these communities are people who commit harmful offenses. They do commit harm to each other, to themselves. But they all come from the same conditions, and that’s the thing that we don’t deal with. To me, it’s a non-starter. It’s false, it’s completely false, but we debate about it.
Similar to how, right now, if you keep bringing the conversation around what’s going on at the border and the criminalization of immigration, right? It’s sort of happened so insidiously, that we don’t see what’s happening. It’s a debate about whether or not we should let these people in the country, because, as the debate has been framed, we’re letting in these terrible actors, right? And now that becomes a place from which we debate who should we let in? The good people or the bad people?
RITCHIE
Exactly, exactly.
PETERSON
And that frames the debate. I think largely when we speak about nonviolent versus violent offender, that is not what the debate should be at. That is not what it should be at at all, but that’s largely where it goes, where it starts, and that’s what policy comes from. And that’s on the activism side as well. Yeah, just being straight up, right? Even thinking about what happened in ’94 or then ’98 even with the immigration act, bill, law, sadly there were people who were from our communities advocating for some of these things, largely, right? And they were paraded in front to say that this was happening to these people, this is happening to us, so you need to do this thing.
And we need to be aware that for those of us who consider ourselves advocates, activists, or even directly impacted folks as well, to have a strong analysis of what it is that you’re speaking about. I’ll end off here, but I don’t believe that everybody . . . This is small. I can say whatever, right? But I don’t believe that everybody who’s had experience deserves a microphone. Right? And I’m saying I think there’s not an analysis associated with that. Sometimes to announce this is that, oh I went to jail, I got some programs in jail, look at me now! Ta da! That is not an analysis of the experience of incarceration, that you were able to do those things in spite of incarceration. Just to think about somebody who went to the perp, who went through some sort of torture or enslavement, and he said, well look where I am now! No, you may have been able to come out of that not necessarily unscathed as you may think you are, but you were able to come out of it despite that thing. And if we don’t have that proper analysis then we say that, we fall into the place of well, that prison is a good prison. Or, as we hear in the news, that’s a country-club prison, right? Do we question those comments? There’s no such thing as a country-club captivity. There’s no such thing as that. So that’s what I think about the conversation around violence and non-violence. It’s the mere fact that that is a non-starter. It’s a false conversation that we built. It’s actually building more debate from a fruit of a poisonous tree.
RITCHIE
Absolutely, and also recognizing that prison is violence. I’m gonna ask—I know y’all are being very patient, you brilliant fellows, I’m just trying to get everyone to the table and then we’re gonna all jump in together. So, Bianca can I just ask you what the social cost is? Pull up a chair, and help us understand the social cost in terms of money, but also in terms of human potential, life, the violence we experience, of this investment in criminalization and punishment as the response to everything, including conditions of violence in our community that we’re trying to survive, right? Priscilla told a story of a young woman who was defending herself against violence in her home and the response was to put her in a condition of violence in a prison. What’s the cost of all of that, not just money-wise, but completely?
BIANCA TYLEK
Yeah, thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. So yeah, I think the costs are really high, as you say they cost our people. I think the costs are really dramatic, right? So a lot of our work does focus on how much wealth kind of factors into all this, and part of that, as I’m listening to everything that everyone’s saying, I’m thinking about diversion programs. By the way, if you want to participate in those you got to pay for them, so that’s only available to certain people anyway. Probation—I think Priscilla mentioned obviously the cost of probation, but again if you can’t afford that, if you can’t pay for that, that’s your freedom, right? Bail was mentioned. I mean bail is literally paying for freedom. There’s no other way to define that process. It is literally exchanging money for my liberty, or asking others to do so, and if I can’t afford that then there goes my liberty, my life, my job, my family, my children’s, perhaps my parental rights, all types of things. And so when you think of those social costs, some of those things are magnified in that sense. If I lose my apartment, if I lose my parental rights, you can’t give me a value of that. There’s no actual number that I can put on that.
And there’s all the costs for folks who are supporting people on the inside, right? What is the cost of putting money on commissary, what’s the cost of communicating? How expensive is it for a mother to parent with somebody who’s inside with their children, trying to be able to connect with those people, with their fathers, with their mothers, with their brothers, sisters, and whoever those folks might be. And in fact, and so you know it’s interesting because New York City just became the first city to make phone calls out of city jails free. And I say “first” is sort of a lie. I would say they used to all be free everywhere. We’ve gone backwards on that and now we’re reversing that. And in the first day, overnight, when phone calls were free, phone calls jumped 38 percent. And what does that mean? Yes, we can say that this saves directly-impacted communities almost $10 million a year, over $25,000 a day. But there are also so many more people that got in touch in that day that have never been able to talk to a person, a support line, or a mother, or a father, or an aunt, an uncle, a grandmother, whoever it might be, right? And you can’t put a value on what that line feels like, or what that communication is, or what that voice means. And it’s interesting because folks can talk for up to 15 minutes a call. The average call is seven and a half minutes. So what is that wait, right? I think there’s an exceptional amount of monetary costs that obviously weigh in on this system, in addition to the social costs that are waiting here.
And I wanted to say one thing about language, as I know there’s been a lot of conversation about language as it pertains to the predatory actors that act in this space. No language is neutral; all language comes from somewhere, and what language we use amplifies those voices. And if we use the language of oppressive structures and oppressive beings, then we are amplifying those oppressive voices and those narratives. And one of the things we do is we use advertising language for the companies and commercial actors that operate in this field. So, for example, video visitation. That is not a thing. You have never FaceTimed somebody and said, I’m about to visit you, right? Right? Facts? Facts. Super facts. So you have never visited somebody in that way, right? I’ve never told my sister in California, hey I’m visiting you in 10 minutes via this device right here. What we’re doing when we do that is this is language that was brought in by the companies that charge $12.50 for a video call. They’ve synonymized this idea of video calling with visitation by using the term video visitation in order to do away with in-person visits. To synonymize those two to get facilities, to get sheriffs, those who are also, by the way, taking a cut of all that money, who have a relationship with those companies to do so. By synonymizing those things. And so we need to be really, especially when we’re talking in a literature festival, we’re talking about language and what we’re writing, really careful about the language we’re using to humanize folks, but also not to advertise and market for those who are actively, every day dehumanizing them.
RITCHIE
Thank you so much. Okay. We in New York City have an opportunity to engage this crisis of imagination that was identified because there is a current conversation about closing Rikers. So you told the person in the elevator, close the damn jail. You told people in the elevator, this is all reform, is all bullshit, it’s all, like, we need to move to a whole different thing, right? And we’re hearing that re-entry, probation, parole, division between violent and nonviolent, alternatives to incarceration, it’s all different faces of the same coin. So here we are. What in New York City is the answer eliminating inflow completely through decriminalization? Of poverty, survival, and developing alternate responses to the harm that comes from the harms in our community? Is it just redistributing surveillance and containment, to alternatives to incarceration, to probation, to parole, to other things? Is reducing the number of cages overall harm reduction, or is it leaving something that we have to come back and tear down later? So I see Nadja is on the edge of their seat and, Kandra, I just want to invite you to pull up a chair to the table, and I’ll let you two negotiate who talks first.
KANDRA CLARK
So I think the conversations we’re having now in New York City, we never could have had previously, right? I think right now we’re in a state where we can really transform and reimagine the whole aspect of it. When I think about NYPD, we’re trying to create new systems where people don’t have to call NYPD in order to reduce harm, right? We have credible messengers and violence interrupters and nonprofit organizations that are on the ground, that have been doing the same work as DOC, in reality, when you talk about alternative to incarceration programs, specifically. I worked for one for three years where we only took people who were facing violent felony charges. So they were facing five, sometimes fifteen years upstate. And they would get to do an alternative program, not paying for it, with a nonprofit organization, where they could get housing, employment, mental health services, substance use services, so really getting at the root causes of incarceration. And I think when we’re having this conversation now around closing Rikers, that’s what we’re really trying to do, is reimagine all these systems, decarcerate as far and as fast as possible to eventually get to that zero number. And then even with my work with Beyond Rosie’s, most of us are directly impacted, and we’ve also done focus groups with women on Rose M. Singer. So I think it’s not just about having leaders out here who are directly impacted, but it’s us building up the leadership of other people who are directly impacted. And I haven’t been on Rikers since 2010, before I went upstate. We’re going and getting the information from our ladies who are there right now who were just released last week, or who are there currently, to really get information around how can we transform this system.
So like for Beyond Rosie’s, specifically, we want to close the Rose M. Singer facility. We know that we can decarcerate now down to 100. We know that then we can work further to decarcerate that other 100. And the facility and this can be very strange for people to think, because we want it to be a trauma-informed facility, meaning DOC is completely removed, first and foremost. Second, there are no cages. It’s gonna look like little housing units, right, with the whole kitchenette. Where children could spend the entire weekends with their mothers and their families. And again this is for the cases that we still haven’t figured out how to hold accountability for. So, like, the very serious violent cases or the serious rapes. We still need to, as a society, figure out some type of accountability structure for that.
As a victim and a person who’s committed 10 years of criminal history, I have an extensive rap sheet. I’ve spent time in counties in Illinois and in New York. One thing now I’m still paying for is therapy every week because of all the trauma, and I endured living through domestic violence and being sexually assaulted and abused. And my stepfather was never held accountable, right? So I think coming up with, really reimagining what these systems are gonna look like and how are we still going to make sure that people who have experienced harm have some type of accountability. But how we’re not further harming people. The root of it is providing the support and opportunities so we don’t have a cycle of crime, right? So we don’t have this vicious cycle of mass incarceration. If everybody was offered the opportunities and support and the treatment that they needed from the get-go, we wouldn’t be in this boat. So I think that’s where we’re really at right now, around closing Rikers. And one thing I’ll say specifically is, one thing I do agree with Fred on is we’re not going to be able to make the changes without infiltrating the systems, right? So we need directly-impacted people in the mayor’s office, in the DA’s offices. We need to completely change our judicial system also, to recreate a non-adversarial system, where a win does not equal incarceration, a win actually equals the support and opportunities and that person breaking that cycle of crime, right? And we can’t do that if we’re not in those conversations, if we’re not the leaders at those tables. So I think that’s really important too, as directly impacted people, we need to be at all those tables. We need to infiltrate even more. And that’s politics also, you know, the more of us that can get into office in politics, we can change it then from the inside. So that internal/external is very important.
RITCHIE
With the caveat that Marlon said, that there needs to be the analysis that goes along with it.
CLARK
Yes.
EISENBERG-GUYOT
Thank you so much for sharing that, and I want to say something about the current plan to build these borough-based jails. Right now we have a plan to build four new jails. And a part of the goal of closing Rikers . . .
RITCHIE
That’s part of the plan to close Rikers? Is to build more jails?
EISENBERG-GUYOT
So the plan is to build four new jails, that’s the plan, and the ground will be broken on the jails next summer. There’s a goal of closing Rikers in 10 years, but there’s no promise, there’s no legally binding document that says New York City has to close Rikers. In fact, that’s not up to the current mayor. He will not be mayor in 10 years. Maybe he’s running for president, right? It’s up to the Department of Corrections. And so for the next 10 years, if we break ground on this jail construction plan, we’ll have four new jails plus Rikers. That’s what we’ll have for the next 10 years. Four new jails plus Rikers, with no legally binding commitment to close Rikers, right? And the Department of Corrections is ultimately in control of the decision to close Rikers, and we know what the DOC is like. The DOC doesn’t want to give up control of the current facilities and doesn’t want to want to give up control of Rikers and these new jails.
So I think it’s really important when we’re talking about reforming these systems, kind of going back to what Fred was saying, the punishment is supposed to be the deprivation of liberty, as you said, not the conditions, right? And so at the outset of the emerging conversation around prison abolition in the United States in the 1960s, people were talking not just about prison abolition but the abolishment of punishment, right? That was where the conversation emerged, is abolishing punishment entirely, and one of the components of that analysis that’s so important is this recognition that in systems that are designed to punish, everything that happens in those spaces eventually turns into punishment, right? So solitary reflection on your crime becomes solitary confinement. And we see that historically in these rehabilitate efforts, how they constantly slide into punishment in these institutions that are designed to punish, not to rehabilitate.
And another way of thinking about that is, we build the institutions and then the institutions remain and the will to provide programming crumbles, right? So we see that in the 1970s in New York. So the Brooklyn House of Detention was built in the 1950s. Anna M. Kross was this progressive Department of Corrections head who wanted to create these new facilities around rehabilitation. She had all these ideas about more humane caging, social services programming, that she’s gonna bring into the facilities. What happens in the 1970s? The fiscal crisis hits, all of those programs disappear, and we get jail expansion nonetheless.
And so when we talk about abolishing prisons, I think we need to be talking about abolishing punishment, and then we don’t need a single replacement. We need many different kinds of things, right? We need reinvestment in communities, we need transformative justice, we need low threshold harm reduction services. We don’t need a single replacement to incarceration. We need multiple systems of support and community investment. And so, specifically, when we’re talking about Rikers, Rikers has been under an independent monitor for years. The Nunez agreement implemented an independent monitor in Rikers. And ever since that independent monitor has been in place on Rikers, conditions on Rikers have gotten worse. The rate of force has gotten worse. As the population has decreased, instances of violence and brutality on the part of the Department of Corrections have increased. The New York Police Department is currently under a consent decree post the settlement around Stop and Frisk, that they’re supposed to be releasing data on racial disparities and arrests. Do they do that? No. Right? So these systems that we are implementing to try to reform policing, reform incarceration are generating a lot of data on how those systems are just as violent and just as brutalizing as they’ve always been. And we know that when young people were moved off Rikers into Horizons, the youth detention facility, they’ve been moved off Rikers now for about six months, that’s not run by the DOC, the rate of their use of force in Horizons is higher than it was for youth on Rikers. So this notion that we could somehow have a different agency in control of facilities that are meant to punish and dehumanize and degrade, I think doesn’t fully account for how the system is meant to do that work, and it doesn’t matter if you have a mental health professional or a guard, on some level, because a mental health professional turns into a guard under those conditions.
RITCHIE
Alright. So, inviting folks in the room to join in with your visions of safety, your reflections on the conversations that you’ve heard, and then we’ll start to bring this to a close.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 1
I work with immigrant survivors of domestic and sexual violence, and Joe Biden’s the architect behind the Violence Against Women Act, and I recently read that the Violence Against Women Act was birthed from the ’94 crime bill. And as an advocate I feel stuck, because VAWA has created paths for survivors, immigrant survivors, who come here on fiance visas or conditional visas, or come here on visas that later expired so they find themselves undocumented. And the only way they can go through VAWA is by working with the criminal justice system and law enforcement and speaking against the abuser, who they don’t always want to send to jail or there’s also the fear of deportation. So, as an advocate, I’m overwhelmed by what to support because VAWA hasn’t been reauthorized, it’s just been passed by the House, and it’s sitting in the Senate, and I just don’t know what to advocate for anymore, because I don’t want to send more people to prison, but I also care about the safety of survivors. But I don’t agree with how safety is being defined anymore through VAWA. So if you all have any recommendations . . .
RITCHIE
That is in fact the trick, right? And that’s what we’re hearing about. It’s like, you can get drug treatment if you need it, but only if you do it through this program. And you can get education, but only if you get it in a cage, or only if we decide you’re nonviolent and therefore redeemable, or only if you’re not indigenous and being forced into a federal prison, right? So we are all being tricked into that trap and I think everyone in this panel has been saying we need to bust out of the trap, because the trap is leading to more punishment and confinement. But if folks have a specific answer to that question . . .
JONES
At Katal, we believe you don’t win because you’re right, you win because you’re strong, okay? So we make cogent and clear arguments about stuff all the time. Well, usually we’re making cogent and clear arguments about the problem and we’re not actually strategizing and developing stuff to go after the issues coming from those problems. So for instance, the criminal justice system only exists for the purposes of catching all the people the other systems throw away. So the education system, the housing system, the healthcare system, the transportation system, at some point there’s a threshold that says you’re no longer a student, you’re no longer a patient, you’re no longer a patron. You are now a threat to public safety. You’re now violent, you’re now something else. All the criminal justice system is doing . . . It’s not going out and scooping people up. It’s literally just sitting there waiting for the school to put up a police resource officer inside. And that’s it, right? I live in Connecticut. In Avon, Connecticut, a kid with a mental health issue, and in Hartford, Connecticut, a kid with a mental health issue—and I’ll stop here—in Avon, they call the nurse, and in Hartford, they call the police.
OCEN
I’ll also add to that that there are probation officers in schools. I’m just gonna leave that there.
RITCHIE
Sometimes cells. Full prisons.
OCEN
Right. To the question of VAWA and requiring folks to have to cooperate with law enforcement in order to get the specialized visas. I think they’re called H-visas, is that what they’re called?
RITCHIE
T, U . . .
OCEN
There are a variety of different visas. But that’s common, right? So you also have something called the TVPA, which is the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. That’s the T-visa, right? So in order to get that obviously you have to cooperate with law enforcement, and their domestic violence interventions are often structured around interactions with law enforcement. That’s the primary mechanism by which you can get some support, is if you call the police and invite the police into your home, which can create all kinds of other problems, up to and including somebody being killed, and up to and including the person who called the police to try to get some support, which is often what happens to black women and Latinas. And one of the things that we need to emphasize with regard to these programs that require survivors to interact with law enforcement is to emphasize the way in which that requirement actually undermines public safety, because it makes it so that folks actually, even though they may or may not know about the availability of these visas, they don’t want to call the police because of the other problems that will emerge as a result. So we really need to disentangle the availability of these vital resources, which are these visas for folks to stabilize them, to get them out of very precarious, violent situations, but often they don’t want to do it because it may create more problems than it solves by calling the police. So we need to emphasize that it actually goes against the goal of the program, which is to protect survivors and to promote public safety.
RITCHIE
Alright Marlon, and then I’ll come back to the audience, and then I’m coming back to this end of the table over here.
PETERSON
Great question. Great question. What comes to mind for me is, has anybody ever wondered—and I’m going somewhere with this—why prisons are so violent in the first place? And there are many reasons, right? One of the reasons why, obviously, is that I think that prisons don’t work. They’re places that you have people who have a huge amount of other issues and you put them all in one place and you say figure that out in this place with all your issues together, and it becomes this conflagration of people who are acting out trauma amongst themselves and each other in a concentrated environment. We would listen to jokes all the time about these prison shows, we watch TV shows and movies, and we hear about prison rape and we laugh and there are movies and all this sort of stuff. Yet still we are convinced, somehow we’re conditioned to believe when something happens in our community or even to us, that the prisons work. Right? It’s like a cognitive dissonance. And the reason I’m going with that is here: There’s no question that . . . The other thing that we don’t realize when we think about what to advocate for . . . So Andrea you had mentioned a conference last week they had at Columbia by Miriame Kaba looking at transformative justice and other ways to address harm, particularly violent and sexual harm. One of the things about RJ, restorative justice, is that it’s not new. Indigenous communities have been practicing for a very long time. The investment is not there though, right? The investment is in this thing that we know doesn’t work, but we keep believing it works. So when we think about what to advocate for, there are models that are not used enough, that are not practiced enough. That’s a secret, right? These models themselves are “secret” for various reasons, largely because they’re coming from marginalized populations. And the reason I gave that sort of way to get to that point is that there’s no question that harm happens, and that it needs to be addressed. What I’m saying is that what we currently have in place, we know it doesn’t work, but still we’re left in this place where, well if I don’t advocate for this, what am I going to advocate for? Once again I go back to what I said in the first comment, is that we have debates started from completely false places. One is that there are other things that are out there that have not been tried enough—that have been tried in smaller locales and indigenous communities—that just in general we discard or we don’t pay attention to, because we already have an institution in this country, where you have biases, and we think that things that come from certain populations are worthless and not useful. So that informs what we think we would want to implement in our own daily practice in terms of dealing with accountability. And I’m saying that we need to transfix our minds and to literally act on what we know. Prisons do not work. So don’t allow us to be pushed into the place of saying, well if I don’t advocate for this sort of thing that sort of expands this net, then I have nothing no other option. That’s not true. That is false.
RITCHIE
And so we’re back to the beginning of the conversation, which was about having a crisis of imagination. So there are immigrant rights advocates who are like, uncouple that shit. We’re not gonna let you continue to do this. But I understand when you’re advocating for your individual person, that’s back to this storytelling. How do we tell narratives or advocate for people who we’re trying to reduce harm for in that moment without building up the system?
TYLEK
What I’m hearing, and also to answer your question, they’re not there to protect you. That bill won’t protect you. It’s not designed to protect, right? And that’s the thing that we need to get out of our head, is that we’re thinking that if we support this, it’s what’s gonna protect us, but I realize that I’m making somebody else vulnerable. No, no, no. It’s also not going to protect you, and in immigrant communities it’s not designed to. It’s designed to use, create an actual utility out of immigrant communities and victims, and therefore becomes its own abusive entity in that right. And so once you stop thinking that that bill is, or any of those things are, meant to protect, you can actually start going looking for protection or those necessary things in the places that are actually going to offer it to you and are thinking about all of these other things, too.
RITCHIE
I think the difference here is that it’s coupling relief for survivors of violence with collaboration, right? As the same ways coupling treatment or education with incarceration, and so that’s what we need to break: the coupling, while still figuring out how to get the relief, I think is the question. Okay, so down here and then I do want to speak to David, David, and Keeonna before we go back to the audience. I want to make sure that before we close out that we get to hear from the three of you about anything that we’ve been talking about, so just let me know if there’s something that you want to jump in on.
OCEN
I just wanted to just sort of bring a couple of threads together. I think the question teed up something about something that Keeonna said, and maybe Keeonna will want to talk more about this, which is shame and respectability. What these programs like the TVPA or the VAWA require is the perfect victim, right? The person who doesn’t have a criminal history. The person who speaks English or trusts institutions.
RITCHIE
Stops trading sex.
OCEN
Right, who stops trading sex, and was not participating in any kind of agency. That person gets help. It’s the same thing around the sort of felon, violent felon, nonviolent felon, right? Or in the immigration context, families not felons. These ways in which we use respectability, and trade on stigma and shame to determine where we’re going to put our public policy resources around deserving this. So these people are deserving of support and relief—those people aren’t. Even though all these folks are victims, all these folks have experienced trauma, all these folks are survivors. And yet the state is the one that determines who is deserving of support, whether it’s immigration, whether it’s sentencing reform, or whether it’s VAWA. So I just wanted to bring together those different threads around deserving-ness and respectability, and invite us all to resist those very sort of simplistic narratives about who deserves love and support because the truth is we all do.
RITCHIE
Great. So, David.
HESKA WANBLI WEIDEN
Well, since we have a couple extra minutes here, I’d just like to unpack the Major Crimes Act a little bit more. So the Major Crimes Act, it’s a little bit beyond the scope of what we’re talking about today. The Major Crimes Act is such a major public policy disaster in Indian country right now. I’ve been talking about one half of it today, which is over-incarceration, but the other side of the coin is under-prosecution. So the Major Crimes Act gives exclusive authority to arrest felons to federal prosecutors. So what this means is that the FBI and federal investigators and district attorneys are not prosecuting or arresting violent criminals on reservations. So eight of every ten Native women will be raped in their lifetimes, if you live on a reservation, because they catch these offenders and the feds are refusing to prosecute them, so that we have them in custody on our reservation. We’re like, “Please, federal authorities, come get this child abuser, come get this rapist,” and the feds say “Sorry we’re [going to] let him go” So it is a crisis on Native reservations: Our people are getting—when they do punish, they’re being put away and incarcerated way longer than they should be. But the feds are not prosecuting these crimes 70 percent of the time. They’re letting child abusers, rapists, and murderers go free. So thus has sprung up private vigilantes; that is the protagonist of my book. We hire on our reservation—if somebody rapes your little girl and the feds won’t do anything about it—you hire a private enforcer. Like my guy in my book, Virgil Wounded Horse, who will beat up a pedophile for—he charges $100 for every tooth he knocks out and every bone he breaks. This is a real thing because the federal government is both over-incarcerating and under-prosecuting. So it’s a massive criminal justice problem on American Indian reservations right now that is really just unknown, and we remain marginalized and invisible.
RITCHIE
Thank you. I think that brings up a few questions that can then bring us back to our Rikers conversation. One is that we tend to idealize indigenous communities, of which there were tens of thousands of nations on this land, before genocide and colonial attempt at conquest. And therefore we idealize as if indigenous communities are all about restorative justice processes, right, and in fact, there’s a wide variety of responses in indigenous communities to harm. And some of those restorative justice practices, as Andrea Smith is fond of telling me, involved exiling people into a place where they would die, because it was cold and they would be outside of a community and without food. So it was the death penalty, it just looked different. And so we just need to be clear that the instinct to punish is everywhere, and that all of us need to challenge ourselves to rethink how we end the epidemic, for instance, of sexual violence against indigenous women in the country and the violence of the missing and murdered indigenous women, and that we not then also colonize or project onto indigenous people colonized practices that have been historically used or project them onto people. So I just I feel like that’s specific to the conversation that you’re having because I do feel like, as we’re trying to respect sovereignty of indigenous nations, we might see folks pursuing things that we’re not excited about or that we’re not sure are gonna pursue safety, and that those conversations are the same as the ones we’re having in New York City about whether we’re closing Rikers or not, whether we want to abolish mandatory arrest policies that are criminalizing victims more than they’re helping anyone who’s a survivor of violence. These are the conversations we’re having everywhere, so I appreciate you making sure that as we’re thinking through those things, that we’re thinking through how we respect other people’s conversations about that. I’m gonna go one more from the audience around New York City and then come back, and then we’ll close.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 2
Thanks so much. Thanks to PEN America for even hosting this. I have a question. Let me give you a little context. I’m poverty-born, I’m from Bedstuy/Bushwick, Brooklyn, I’m a black woman, I’m also a felon who was recently released from probation, and I’m a writer. So I’m really interested in hearing from you, Keeonna, on how you’ve been able to attack the page, particularly knowing that your story is a counter-story, right? It’s not a narrative that’s often or traditionally told. As a matter of fact, most often it’s ignored. So what are some of the resources that you’ve been able to lean into in order to write your narrative in a way that you were talking about earlier, that it has some actual intellectual depth and emotional, human honesty?
HARRIS
Well, first up, I’m really grateful for PEN because I’ve often thought like, “Oh, who wants to hear my story,” or “Why does it matter,” so it was great to get that kind of support. But for me, I lean into my community. And I feel like we’ve been doing that for decades, especially black women. So my community, that can uplift me, that we have the same exact story, and of my neighbor that I didn’t even know are going through the same thing that I’m in. So reaching back to people like me in my community, and kind of supporting and holding our stories, and lifting one another. And also, it’s been very therapeutic for me to tell the truth in a way that it’s my truth, right, and not have other people which are often—they tell our stories for us—whether it’s academics, whether it’s journalists—no shade, Beth. But, you know, for me telling my story in my own words, the way that I talk, the way that I talk to my community at home, that was very important to me. Like when I read my story, I wanted it to read like how I talk in a street, and I want it to be accessible to people that it matters. It doesn’t matter necessarily to people in the classroom. It’s nice for professors and other academics to read it, but I wanted to reach back to my little sisters, so that’s how.
RITCHIE
Thank you. Okay, so actually we corralled everyone you all were in the elevator with into a room and they’ve had to listen to this conversation for the last hour, and now you’re hopping back on the elevator but this time they hit nine because they’re like, I’m not trying to be on elevator with this person for another whole ten floors. But you’re leaving with them, you have one floor, ten seconds: What’s your final, parting thought or word to them on the way out the door? Lorenzo.
JONES
Rebuild the safety net.
CLARK
Collective leadership, really reimagining and transforming justice and really having the leaders in this conversation be those directly impacted.
TYLEK
If you don’t carry the burden, you don’t make the decision.
HARRIS
I’m happy to piggyback off of you guys. I think that people that are directly impacted need to lead and everybody else needs to get out of the way, and also I think that it’s important also to look toward the youth, because they’re dope and they’re gonna be our next generation, so we need to start listening to them.
EISENBERG-GUYOT
Give the $6 billion NYPD budget back to communities who are criminalized and harassed and murdered to make other programs.
OCEN
So I’m gonna borrow a phrase from a woman that I heard who I’ve connected with named Rich Fox. She’s from New Orleans, and she says—or Fox Rich, I think it is, Fox Rich. She says: “when we fight, we win”; and I think that’s true. And so I would say to the assembled delegates that we’ve corralled that either you get on board or you step off, because when we fight, we win.
SHELBURNE
I would say violent offender is a political term, plain and simple. It means nothing, it has no context, it tells me nothing about the human being that that label is put on, and it is a label created to subjugate, just like inmate, felon, convict.
SANCHEZ
I would just say, to go along with a lot of stuff that’s been mentioned, we’ve got to abandon this idea of punishment as something that works or is effective.
HESKA WANBLI WEIDEN
I’ll simply say respect Native sovereignty.
RITCHIE
Yes.
PATRICK
Reimagine justice, reimagine prisons with human dignity as the foundation as we work toward shrinking the size of the system, of completely abolishing the system. There are still, as we sit here today, 2.2 million people and we need to care about conditions of confinement in relation to the fact that 95 percent of those folks are coming home, and the additional damage and harm that we can do to those individuals through our current system, it’s really not worthy of who we are as a society, and all we have to do is look to Norway and Germany, while not perfect, clear examples of how you can have facilities that are grounded in human dignity and that rule one, they don’t do for the harm, and two, they respect the dignity and intrinsic worth of those individuals.
PETERSON
I’ll say for a mentor of mine who passed away recently, no prison problems, only community problems. I would say that abolition is a project of creation, not a project of confinement.
RITCHIE
Thank you for being part of this conversation today, for being here to reimagine what safety and justice and our communities look like. I’m really thankful to be part of this conversation. Give it up for these panelists. I think as a first step to healthier communities, Caits wants you to eat all the bagels.
Transcript edited by Eleanor Mammen
