When I moved to Chicago in 1995,
I think there might have been one
organization at the time that was – one or two organizations – that were focused on prisons, specifically.
One was the John Howard Association, and then the other one was the Juvenile Justice Initiative as a lobbying group.
The idea of
kind of – the idea of doing work with prisoners, on behalf of prisoners,
had fallen out of vogue, so to speak,
after a period of intense
organizing, mostly from the inside, in the 1970s.
The 1980s, I just think were just– like, nobody knew what was going on, and that's when the build-up was at its highest.
Like people were being – you know, thinking about crack cocaine and like, all over the place,
HIV/AIDS, like there were all these other things that were taking up energies of people who were organizing, though people were still
doing stuff around prisons.
By the time
it was, I would say,
10 years later,
there were a few more
organizations and people who were interested, but it was still – it was still not this kind of
bipartisan
supposed
consensus around the fact that we were in a period where
there was a hyper-incarceration
happening of particular populations and
that it – the term "mass incarceration" was not being bandied about.
I think people were trying to figure out where they were
standing, and what they were doing, and if you had friends on the inside, you were writing to them and you know, trying to figure out
what to do along those lines.
And I just – now, there's this massive
explosion of interest,
of discussion,
of research,
of books.
Like within the ten years between 2005 to 2015, it is
unrecognizable to me,
just how many people say they care about imprisonment and surveillance and policing.
And I think that has really a lot of positive
aspects to it, where I see openings for new partnerships and abilities for people to
maybe actually
bring our energies together, and our resources together, to win some things.
So I see that as very much of a positive
intervention, and that involves new openings and places that we might be able to make a difference.
I'm also really really concerned
at the ways that people are cutting the issue
where some people are very much deserving of being free,
and other people are absolutely not deserving of being free, they deserve to be where they are,
there's no questioning of the brutality and horror of the prison for those people. If you are
nonviolent, if you're using drugs, if you're mentally ill, if you're – like kind of the fissures of
you know, who gets to be free,
concern me a great deal, the conversations that are not being had about violence, and
the use of violence, and
the fact that most people are in prisons – state prisons – for use of some form of violence,
there's just no,
it doesn't feel like there's actually space to engage that, because the story has been so tilted to the drug war.
And to other things that are like the – THE explanation for how we got to where we got, when in fact that's not the main
explanation at all. There are many reasons we got to where we got, therefore
there are going to be many ways that we have to fight to get out of where we're at.
And that just feels, actually foreclosed, in this moment, in a weird way. That if you bring that up, somehow
that's like the downer thing to be doing, and you're not actually
riding the wave of all of this greatness and goodness that
people are out there selling.
And when I – what I think is that we're actually
reinforcing
the system.
We're actually reinforcing the terribleness of the system through the way that we choose to fight.
I worry a lot about that.
I worry that we're not all on the same page around the use of what language
we're – how we're talking about things, and also what theories we're using,
what analysis we're using. I don't think we're all on the same page.
And so that's hard also to figure out how that's going to, you know, work itself out.
I think, just the other day I was reading in the paper that
Cook County Jail, which is the largest single-site jail in the country, which is in Chicago,
that there's been a marked decrease in the numbers of people in jail. And on the surface, that looks and sounds great,
because that jail is a hellhole, and I've been in that jail
so often. I've had to go there when young folks were on the inside,
I've had to interact with the jail for 20 years.
But it turns out that what happened is that a whole bunch of people have been put on electronic monitoring,
which people think is better than a cage.
And I want to be really careful here, because I myself am not
in prison, I'm not locked up.
And sometimes – I always remind myself that that's true,
and I still want to also be vigilant about
extending the cage
beyond the walls.
I want to be vigilant about how we define confinement and captivity,
and imprisonment.
And I don't think that electronic monitoring is an appropriate alternative to prison. It may be something else,
but it isn't for me a viable
alternative to imprisonment, because I think it's going to be harder in some ways for people to exist in that world,
not than being caged, but how then are you going to work?
And you're expected to this time. How then are you going to go to school?
How then are you going to deal with the things that you are now
expected to do that, behind bars, you're actually not expected to do?
How are those things going to work out? How are we going to have a whole entire set of millions of people
electronically in prison now?
How are we going to fight that?
I'm really concerned about that, you know? I'm really concerned about
the push for how people are thinking about policing and the police.
You know? The rush to want to throw out these, you know, quote unquote
"reforms" that are actually really deleterious. And are going to make it even harder to
actually dismantle policing
in the short term, not even in the long term. This push for more
technologies, and more ways for people to be surveilled when you should be pushing against that very strongly.
So I'm, you know, I have places – days when I feel very
optimistic that there are real things that – openings in places where we can make a real difference, and then there are days when I'm
much more –
I don't want to use the word "pessimistic." Where I'm much more cynical,
I think is the right word for me, about what's being offered and why and who –
and who are the people that we're supposed to be in quote
"community with" to fight and what are their real intentions and motives? That matters. What are they trying to do?
So yes, I've been thinking a lot about those things
I'm thinking a lot about money and the fact that, you know, I am very much
I've been pushing decarceration as one tool to
get us towards abolition and
I'm worried that, you know,
people are – were successful – getting successful in many states at closing facilities
and those facilities are now being offered as immigrant detention jails.
The youth facilities that are closed are being repurposed for adults.
None of the money that is supposedly saved by the closure of these facilities is devolving to the community.
Communities still being divested from, and then the question is like, why aren't you all successful at being able to –
it's like, what are you talking about here, really? I'm really concerned on multiple levels.
Does it mean that I'm not hopeful? No, of course it doesn't. I have hope all the time. I have to, in
order to be able to, you know, fight another day.
