- Welcome or welcome back.
My name is Carol
Steiker, and I'm
a professor of criminal
justice at Harvard Law School,
and also a member
of the committee
that planned this conference.
I welcome you to our afternoon
session, and the last panel
discussion of the
conference on abolition,
and I'm going to turn you over
to the very competent hands
of our panel chair,
Professor Tommie Shelby, who
is the Caldwell
to come professor
of African and
African-American studies
and of philosophy and
chair of the Department
of African and
African-American studies
here at Harvard University.
Thank you.
Welcome, and Professor Shelby.
[APPLAUSE]
- Thanks so much Carol, and
good afternoon, everyone.
- Good afternoon.
- It is a great pleasure,
really quite a tremendous honor
to be able to participate in
this conference on the life
and legacy of Angela Davis.
I've been actually
learning from Davis's work
for a number of
years now since I was
a graduate student in the '90s.
And indeed just last
fall I taught two courses
that featured her
work, a freshman
seminar on autobiography
and black freedom
struggles and philosophy
graduate seminar
on philosophy and imprisonment.
So I'm enormously pleased to
be able to thank you publicly
for your tremendous contribution
to the struggle for freedom
and justice and
peace, both obviously
in theory and in practice.
Very powerful writings.
And for your personal
example, a great
deal to me, particularly
as one of a small number
of fellow black philosophers
who look to you for inspiration.
So thank you.
So this afternoon's
panel is on abolition.
Many now think that prison
systems around the globe
are in need of major
reform, however
some, like Angela Davis,
believe that we should not
seek to reform prisons, but
to end their use altogether.
In books and essays and
speeches and interviews
spanning now nearly
50 years, Davis
has defended a world without
prisons as a morally required,
indeed a realistic
political goal.
Although this position
is quite radical,
strikes some as
absurd, I myself come
to think that it
is a position that
merits quite serious
consideration rather
than dismissal.
Prisons do great and
sometimes irreparable harm,
and this harm is not
restricted to prisoners.
If a society is to
rely on them, this
use I think demands
quite compelling defense.
Now, of course, philosophers
have written quite
extensively about punishment
and its justification.
They devise theories based on
retribution, on deterrence,
on fairness, reconciliation,
rehabilitation,
moral education, many
of the things, anything
you can dream of.
However, these
theories typically
abstract away from the concrete
and grim realities of prison.
These philosophical
theories also usually assume
that the societies within
which imprisonment occurs,
these societies
are basically just.
But what has to be
shown, if it can be,
is that imprisonment
is a justified
practice in our own
unjust society and world,
or at least that it would be
justified in a world not too
distant from our own.
And what Davis does is
raises quite serious doubts
about whether this
kind of justification
is actually possible.
Davis's critique of
prisons is situated
within a broader critique of
racism, of sexism, imperialism
and capitalism.
She has many objections to
the practice of imprisonment.
Just for example, she believes
that it is dehumanizing,
that it is a form and
a legacy of slavery,
and that it is an immoral
alliance of crime control
measures and the maximization
of corporate profit, a prison
industrial complex.
She has argued that the
function of the prison
is among other
things to facilitate
economic exploitation,
to perpetuate racism,
to repress political resistance,
and to conceal sometimes
intractable social problems.
Davis's anti prison
stance is best understood
as a component of a broader
revolutionary socialist vision.
She believes that
capitalist societies are
oppressive and
undemocratic, and that
an alternative
social arrangement is
possible and within our reach.
In a truly just and democratic
society, prisons she insists
would be unnecessary.
To help us better understand
this radical vision and Davis's
role in developing it, we have
quite an extraordinary set
of panelists, which I'm sure
you're all eager to hear from.
Kathy Boudin, co-director
and co-founder Center
For Justice at
Columbia University;
Ruth Wilson Gilmore is professor
of earth environmental sciences
and of American
studies and director
of the Center for Place,
Culture, and Politics
at the Graduate Center at
CUNY University in New York;
Beth Ritchie is professor and
department head of criminology,
law and justice and professor
of African-American studies
and gender and women's studies
at the University of Illinois
at Chicago.
Now, unfortunately,
Alicia Garza could not
be with us this
afternoon, but I think
our panelists will more than
fill the space and time.
So each will speak for
about 10 minutes or so,
and then I'll moderate
a brief discussion
amongst the panelists, and
then we'll take questions
from the audience.
And the panelists
will speak in order
in which they appear
in the program,
starting with Kathy Boudin.
[APPLAUSE]
- First, thank you so
much for inviting me here,
and thank all of
you for being here.
And it's been tremendous
learning and sharing
experience, and I'm
really glad that it's
going to be able to
be watched after this
because it's hard to absorb
it all that we've seen.
I'm going to use this
moment to repeat something
that Angela always does when
she speaks at our annual Beyond
the Bars conference that the
Center for Justice at Columbia
does hold each year.
Namely, she always
comments that we
are in the same
small high school
class for our junior and
senior years of high school.
I always wish she wouldn't
do it, so I'm doing it now.
I don't get to do this now.
Our relationship was going
from teenage slumber parties,
to a lifetime of certain
experiences in common,
to trying to visit me in
prison and being turned away,
to sharing some high school
reunions, to being an almost
annual participant in our Center
for Justice at where I work,
and now having the opportunity
to say how honored I am
to be able to talk
about this journey
that I've taken
towards abolition.
I first heard about the
concept of abolition
when I was in prison.
By that time I'd been in for
about 20 years, 22 years,
and a lot of lock down, cell
searches, deaths from AIDS,
life stories, the parenting
classes of young mothers
who had lost their own
mothers to the crack
epidemic, lifelong
friendships created
in the cauldron of
the prison yard.
And I remember
thinking, it's great
that people are talking
about building a movement
to abolish prisons, but
we need toilet paper.
We need sanitary napkins.
This was a beginning,
although I wasn't
really conscious about it
then, about the relationship
between abolition and reforms.
The issue of a relationship
between abolition reforms
continues to come up for
me around where do we
put resources.
The issue is often
defined by a question,
are we focusing
on making prisons
better or are we focused
on getting rid of prisons?
Well, my question
is, can we do both?
I think we have to do both.
Ruthie Gilmore, who has come
to our annual Beyond the Bars
conference educating so
many of us about abolition,
often has been
asked about reforms
and has always said, of course,
abolition is support reforms.
I know it is in the
specific situations
that the issues may arise.
The toilet paper is a
small example of it,
but the need to always
be aware of the fact
that people are in
prisons and jails still
and creating a safe and as
humane conditions as possible
for our loved ones is so
important, even though it does
include an ongoing investment.
An example, we've been
building a movement
to reinstate the Pell Grants
so that many people in prison
have access to higher education.
This often seems absurd
to be putting resources
into higher education
in prison when
people should be able to
get this in the community.
But there's no
question in my mind
that we have to struggle to
put higher education in prison
at this point because what
it does for people inside
is so deeply important.
This is just one
example of recognizing
that we may have to put
money into improving
prison conditions even though we
want to get rid of the prisons.
But the concept and vision
of abolition I think still
needs to be part of
how we work on reforms
and also how we analyze
one reform or another.
At some point when I
came home after 2003,
I heard about the
book that Angela
wrote Are Prisons Obsolete?
And I read it.
I knew that prisons
were terrible.
I knew from sharing
life stories with women
with whom I lived when I
read it that if we were
to deal with the problems
that lead people to prison,
addiction, poverty, abuse,
of course capitalism,
we wouldn't have
people in prison.
I agreed with that.
It made sense to me.
But linking this analysis to
the idea of abolition of prisons
was only a seed.
It was a seed
placed a beginning.
The concept of actual
abolition of prison
still did not seem
very real to me.
Still I had that
concept in me, and it
impacted on conversations.
I heard so many times, both men
and women say, prison saved me
from abuse, from drugs,
from violence, from age,
from lack of education.
So I began to say when I heard
that, isn't it sad comment
on our society that people have
to go to prison to avoid abuse?
That they have to go to prison
to get a college education?
This dialogue with people
became a starting point
for conversations with
people about abolition,
although I don't think I even
use that word at that time.
As I slowly began speaking
in different contexts
about my time in Bedford Hills
and maximum security women's
prison in New York, I
initially would always
begin about the
amazing things that we
as a group of women in prison
did over a 20 year period.
I mean without the details,
we took on the AIDS epidemic
in the 1980s and '90s.
Taught ourselves
parenting classes and we
created and fought to
bring higher education back
into the prison.
It was a community of
teaching, learning,
and supporting each
other and changing
the environment in the prison
and also creating models
that other prisons could use.
All of this led over
decades to the creation
of a community of women
who have come home
and are doing similar
extraordinary work.
And when I talk about this, I
am challenging the narrative
about women in prison as their
deficits with their weaknesses,
where there need to
be rehabilitated.
And I think that abolitionist
thinking penetrated
about this because
now when I start,
I never start by talking
about the amazing things
that we did inside.
I start talking about
how terrible prison is.
It's destructive.
It's degrading.
It's a punitive
environment, which people
are locked in cages
always reminded
that they are bad people,
defined by a number
as if to strip
them of their name.
Your room, your
cell is searched.
You are told to stand outside
and you watch the guard
as they throw the
sheets on the ground
and they empty the lockbox
that has canned food
and they take your toothpaste
and throw it on the ground
and they throw your
sheets and then
they stand and they say,
OK, your cell's clear.
You can come back now.
And there's nothing you can say
and there's nothing you can do.
And you develop a sense of humor
that allows you to survive it.
So it's in despite
of the punishment
and despite the
inhumane conditions that
in the activities and
programs and mentorship
mainly develop by the
men and women that
are inside prison,
that people emerge,
fully grown leaders and able
to reimagine a life outside.
So my journey of
abolition included
the inspiration
that people can do,
can be the enormous human
capability that I experienced
and still experience,
the enormous potential
in communities outside
that are defined still
by their weaknesses and
their deficits instead
of seeing the larger social
context as a weakness.
One of the hardest
aspects for me
and thinking about the
abolitionist vision
is the framework
that has been issued
about how to deal
with the harm done
by people who use violence.
Over and over again
I'm in conversations
with people who
are afraid to talk
about people convicted of
murder or other violent acts.
I mean the national
policymakers have of course not
wanted to talk about
it and the movement
has wanted to avoid it.
And I think it's
really a problem
and I think that
people don't want
to face the fact that
some people in prison
are there because they
have been involved
in the death of
somebody of harm done,
and the movement has
focuses on the nonviolent,
the nonviolent of the
good the people in prison.
We know that's beginning
to change a little bit.
The statistics are out that more
than half the people in prison
are there for some
kind of violent act.
But I think that it's
recognized inside prison
that these long termers
are lifers, which
is what we call
ourselves, are actually
the role models of
people inside and they're
the models and the inspiration
that help younger people when
they come in have some hope
about what they're going
to do with their
lives as many years
as they have to have in prison.
And I would say even when you
ask a lot of men they'll say,
are you kidding?
I don't want to let that guy
next to me out of prison.
I would never have wanted to
let everybody out of prison.
So I think that we're grappling
with the question of when
we use the term
abolition, how do we
face the issue of
harm that's done,
harm that's done in the future,
and especially harm that's
done right now?
I think that when I raised
this with Angela one time
maybe three or four
years ago, I think
being in her
traditional self, she
was very open to saying
there's other people that
may have thought about
this more than me
about what we do about that.
She said you should
talk to my sister Fania.
And I think that's
one of the strengths
that Angela is that
she understands
of sharing this process
of developing what
this abolition actually means.
I think Angela has a
courage of fearlessness
about raising hard issues
that abolition raises.
She's always kept the
vision of abolition
as a growing idea and able
to ask hard questions.
What should we do when people
are killed by state violence?
Or when women are abused, what
should happen to their partner?
Shouldn't they be put in prison?
I remember Beyond
the Bars conference
happened as there was
still a search for George
Zimmerman, who had
not yet been arrested
after killing Trayvon Martin.
The 1,000 people in
the audience were
on fire looking for
George Zimmerman
to pay for what he had done.
In the Beyond the Borders
conference, Angela asked,
all of you are probably
waiting for George Zimmerman
to get caught, aren't you--
Everybody's like nodding.
You can hear it. --and
to be prosecuted?
And she said, what will
the arrest and prosecution
and incarceration of George
Zimmerman actually do?
What's it going to do to the
system where what happened
is going to be repeated
over and over again?
And then she moves on.
So well, what
about all the women
that have been able to get the
men that beat them in prison?
Has that actually
changed the culture
that we're dealing with about
the violence against women?
What has it done?
And the audience
was just like nobody
knew what to say because
she had challenged them
and was able to ask
those questions.
I think that Angela has stayed
firm on the vision of abolition
while leaving the
discussion open.
I work with group called
RAPP, Release Aging People
in Prison in New York.
We face the questions and
what should accountability be?
How can we end the
punishment paradigm?
How can we make public safety
rooted in communities made safe
by an investment in them?
How do we build a
strategy from work
that's moving forward
and looking realistically
about dealing with, but also
protecting people from harm?
It understands the
roots of violence
and recognizes what
a small proportion
of people it is that actually
are a tremendous threat.
Angela Davis's approach
is to firmly hold
the conception about
abolition, yet she
knows that the process
of working it out
is part of the challenge
that we need to work on.
I think Angela has
been a force of support
for the critical role
of people incarcerated
and people who have
been in prison, formerly
and now in building
the movement for change
and always supporting the
growth and the voices of women
who have been in prison.
Formerly incarcerated people
carry inside themselves
a particular force for
change through their courage
to carry out the work
and the dehumanization
that the current carcel
state places on them.
Michelle Jones, who
is here today and who
is a sister and colleague with
us at the Center for Justice,
was accepted by Harvard
to the PhD program
after 20 years in prison
and was then ejected.
And now in a PhD
program in New York,
she carries with her the
inner strength and dignity.
Sometimes it's the formerly
incarcerated working as a group
that Angela and Gina
took time to spend.
They took time to
spend an evening
with a group of women
activists meeting in our women
transcending leadership
collective in New York
recently to share
movement history,
knowing to connect the
history to the present
and supporting the role
that this group of women who
are all activists who
have all been in prison
or directly impacted are
playing in a force for changing
the system.
I know my time is
like nine seconds,
so I'm just going
to squeeze this in.
There are forces of
people who have come home
from prison who are now part
of an abolitionist movement.
I never would have believed
three or four years ago
where we're at now.
I think that the National
Council of Incarcerated
and Formerly Incarcerated
Women and Girls,
of which I'm a
member, has its goal
to end the incarceration
of women and girls.
That's the goal stated.
They may not get funded by the
big foundations to do that,
but they're building.
There was a conference in
Montgomery two weeks ago.
Almost 300 or 400 women and
girls and their families
and their men and their
children were there.
And this is a goal.
This is an abolitionist goal.
As one woman said, Fox Rich, and
everyone called out with her,
when we fight, we win.
And now we see
abolitionist activity
among people in different
cities actually closing down
jails and closing down prisons.
It's Los Angeles, Milwaukee,
Philadelphia, New York.
The issues are complicated
sometimes, but it's happening
and I think that
when you're in prison
it's hard to focus on anything
but your immediate needs,
your immediate trials
and tribulations,
seeing your children, the
harassment by the guards.
When will you get out?
It's so important
that Angela has
held onto this
vision of abolition
and for that vision of abolition
to keep empowering people who
get shrunk into
just self survival
and need to think
about the longer range
and for the people who are
at home and doing things.
So I just want to thank you
and say the idea of abolition
is no longer absurd.
Thank you for making that real.
[APPLAUSE]
- We've come a long way, sister.
I'm glad we're here together.
Back and forth and
back and forth and back
and forth, but always forward.
It's not just side
passes for those of you
who follow not
American football.
All right.
So I want to make
a general claim
and then talk about abolition.
So we are individually and
collectively spacetime.
That's what we are
on this planet.
And what prison is
is an incapacitation
that it enables
time to be extracted
from the territory of the self.
That is the main thing
that prison does.
It's not about convict leasing.
It's not about private prisons.
It's just taking time, and
that time coming up out
enables the circulation
of resources
for all different
kinds of things.
That is the corruption
of the social wage, which
is to say ours, our wage.
So abolition is
presence, not absence.
It's a vision, but
it's not a blueprint.
Abolition then, I
say after 20 years
of being shoulder to shoulder
with my sister Angela Y.
Davis in the struggle,
abolition has got to be green.
To be green, it's got to be red.
To be red, it must
be international.
We see that criminal justice
professionals from the United
States fling themselves
into airplanes and jet
to Scandinavia to study
the prisons there, and then
jet back to the United States
to say we have seen heaven.
It is within the walls.
We can do this.
But they didn't really look
at what they were looking at,
because if they
had, they would have
looked at the entire society.
And without saying
that Scandinavia
has solved everything
because we know
about the ongoing
eruptions and struggles
for migrant workers
and other people
and the destruction even
there of the welfare state,
the fact that those lockups
are small and as they are
has to do with
the whole society,
not with some vision about
what punishment should be.
[APPLAUSE]
Abolition is, as everyone
was saying on the first two
amazing panels today, is about
the evolution of consciousness.
So we followed Angela's
longtime friends
and colleagues and
lawyers and sister
and comrades talking about the
evolution of Angela Y. Davis's
consciousness.
And then in the
feminism's panel,
we followed different
ways of seeing
the evolution of
feminist consciousness,
or as Barbara says, left anti
capitalist, black feminist
consciousness and who it's
for and what it's for.
So abolition is the narrative
of changing consciousness,
of thinking what
and thinking how,
of thinking what
and thinking how,
and it constantly is in motion.
Cedric Robinson five years
ago, one of the last things
he did before he passed, agreed
to participate in a conference
that I and some comrades,
Jordan Teacamp and Christina
Hetherington organized at
the Graduate Center at CUNY,
and he insisted that Angela
Y. Davis be on the panel
because his teaching for
us over his entire career
was about consciousness, about
consciousness and change.
Not about having the right
answer and applying it,
but about constantly
evolving our understanding
toward the goal of
making a world that
is green and red
and international.
50 years ago, 51
really, I met Fania.
We were students together at
Swarthmore College, and Fania
and I and a small handful
of students decided
that we weren't going to take
it anymore from the admissions
office, Fred
[? Hargenaugh, ?] and we
were going to take
it over and make
some non-negotiable demands.
And in the context
of that struggle,
Angela came to town
to give a lecture
because her old
professor from Brandeis,
Dan Bennett I think his name
was, was teaching at Swarthmore
and he invited her to come.
So Angela came and
gave her lecture.
And I was a first year student.
I had no idea what was going on.
I mean I knew about
the political part
because I was raised in
a political household,
but the idea of going to
a lecture on philosophy I
just didn't cross my mind.
But I couldn't wait to have
the political meeting with her
afterward to talk about
strategy for our struggle.
And I should have
gone to your lecture.
I apologize.
[LAUGHTER]
We fought.
We fought.
We sat in.
We did all of these things,
and then there were two deaths
one right after another.
The president of
Swarthmore College
died, and several days
later, my cousin John Huggins
was assassinated in Los Angeles.
John's mother and
mother's sisters.
So one thing that
I learned to do
a gloss on the thinking of my
old dear friend and comrade
and colleague, Alan Feldman,
is that like murder, arrest
is the political art of
individualizing disorder.
The political art of
individualizing disorder-- so
the murders of John and Bunchy
and all of the other people
who were murdered, the arrest,
eventually, of [? Erica, ?]
my cousin [? Erica, ?] and other
people in New Haven, of Angela,
were all efforts to
individualize disorder.
Angela's arrest, of
course, because I'm tall
and the color I am,
prompted a series of stops
and searches of
me over the years,
over the time that Angela was--
we were cheering her fugitivity.
And many years after that
time, in the year 2000,
Angela and I were
walking down a street
in Irvine, California
where we'd gathered
with Gina Dent and
a few other people
to try to bring abolition
into a more theoretically
coherent framework.
And an undergraduate who
was showing some students
around campus walked up to us.
And she kept walking toward
me with this big smile.
And I'm going--
And she got to me and
said, "Dr. Davis."
I said, "I'm not Dr. Davis.
That is Dr. Davis."
That child turned like
I hadn't been there.
She goes, "Oh, Dr. Davis."
But Dr. Davis, of course,
being Angela Y. Davis, said,
"I want you to meet my
colleague, Ruth Wilson
Gilmore."
Some years ahead
of that encounter
with that bright-eyed
undergraduate, Angela
came to Rutgers where
I was doing a PhD
as a relatively old student.
I was 44 years old at the time.
And Angela came to give a talk.
And two things that
happened in our encounters
there stayed with me
from then until now.
One, Angela talked
about how she realized,
one day as she was leaving
the San Francisco County
jail after having taught
there, as she taught there
for many, many years, that it
didn't make any sense that she
had keys to that place.
It didn't make any sense.
That was the one
thing that she said,
and I said, OK,
this is something
to think about persistently.
The other was when she
asked me what I was going
to write my dissertation about.
And I said, I'm going
to write about prison
expansion in California.
I haven't figured it
all out, but it all
comes from work I've done
with an organization of mostly
women, most of whom are black
mothers of adults and children
in the juvenile justice system.
She said whatever you do,
don't write about crime.
Don't write about crime.
So that then turned into, for
me in my research and writing
and activism, what we
came to call the "prison
industrial complex," which
is to say write about all
of labor, not crime.
Write about all of
land, not crime.
Write about all of capital
and capitalism, not crime.
And write also about
our social ability
to organize these factors--
land, labor, capital-- and
how they're disorganized.
So that means you have to
think about gender, race,
citizenship, migration,
urban/rural, industrial sector.
You have to think about
everything if you're not
going to write about crime.
So that was the best
advice I ever got, and I'm
grateful to you to this day.
So the question then of
what questions to ask
raises the issue of curriculum.
And abolition is, in a
sense, a self-perpetuating
but always expanding curriculum,
where we look at the world
and we say, what
are those problems?
And how can we understand
undoing a world
that resolves problems by
displacing them to cages,
and as Angela always
says, not sending somebody
to prison for punishment,
but sending them
to prison to be punished.
How can we then understand
whatever struggle
we encounter in different ways?
Having this sense
of curriculum means
that abolitionists have to be
good at listening, listening
closely.
And we listened to
Pirate Jenny last night
with that beautiful,
beautiful rendition.
Thank you all for that.
And Gina Dent reminded
us this morning
that that's a Bertolt Brecht
lyric, Kurt Weill music.
And then that also reminds me
that in my earlier training,
which was in drama--
dramatic literature and
criticism, surprise, surprise--
my main guy with Bertolt Brecht,
and the alienation effect,
and him teaching me to
think about the world
by watching people very
closely and understanding
their actions--
not their emotions,
their actions.
And it's in paying
close attention
to action, as that song
Pirate Jenny invites us to do,
that we can think at the
smallest detail, as well
as the hugest detail, of how
to do the work that we must do.
The curriculum
that abolitionists
have tried to put into
practice through the way
that we organized,
whom we organize,
how we organize,
how we encounter
each other in conferences, in
organizations, and movements,
and constantly
change brings to mind
some of the great historical
achievements of earlier
revolutionary struggles,
such as the education
program of the PAIGC
in Guinea-Bissau,
[? Cabral ?] somebody who I
believe Angela met, and others.
And there's a new
book out called
Militant Education, Liberation,
Struggle, Consciousness
by a young Portuguese scholar
called Sonia Vaz Borges that's
all about that curriculum, which
is a curriculum in which we can
undo the kinds of understandings
of action and possibility
and change that
otherwise keep us narrow.
In 1997, we got to--
I'm going to go over
two minutes, too,
reclaiming my time.
[APPLAUSE]
Feel free.
In 1997, during the time the
critical resistance organizing
committee had started forming,
and Cassandra Shaylor,
who's here, and others
had put together
the seeds of calling it
"Critical Resistance"
and thinking about what we
were going to think about,
Angela participated
in back-to-back panels
at American Studies Association.
The first one was on the PIC.
And she was on a panel with
Eddie Ellis and Jerry Miller,
and what's his name,
Donziger, Harvest of Rage?
Is that who it was?
And Angela.
Nobody came.
That room with empty.
The very next panel was
on The Blues Book, which
was about to launch, and Angela
and Robin Kelly, that Robin,
were on that panel in the room.
People were hanging from
the rafters, same room.
First thing Angela
Y. Davis did was say,
where were y'all an hour ago?
As we organized
Critical Resistance,
Angela had an accident,
messed up her knee.
So we had to take over her
house to do our organizing.
And so we were all set up in the
living room, and in the office,
and so forth.
And we were writing and
rewriting the program.
And Gina was the head editor
of the entire program,
and taking things out
of people's hands,
and fixing the writing.
And we were just, like,
all-- it was just--
it was pretty intense.
And at one point,
the doorbell rang.
Larry Clark was at the door.
And he said he needed to
borrow-- he was making a film
and he needed to borrow a gun.
And Angela said, "You
know, the last time
I loaned somebody a gun--
[LAUGHTER]
- Didn't turn out so well.
- I got in trouble."
But he did leave with the gun.
We were, as Gina Dent
told us this morning,
planning for 400 or
500 people, but then we
went to the Black Radical
Congress in July in Chicago,
and thousands and thousands
and thousands of people
arrived for that.
And we rushed back
to the Bay, and said,
we gotta get ready ready.
And it at least
3,500 people came.
Now, of those 3,500, they kind
of stand in for the 70 million
or more people who either
are documented not to work,
because they have some
disqualifying arrest
or conviction record, or
they're not documented to work.
Add them up.
That is a bit more than
half of the US labor force.
This is who we're talking about.
This is why abolition
is a vision that
must be green and red
and international.
The last thing I want to say--
and I've used my two extra
minutes--
is that as abolition has
extended, and encountered,
and revised, and extended,
and encountered, and revised,
Beth is going to give us some
insights into the question
that Kathy raised about
violence and harm.
But I want to share with you
that I met a young lawyer
called [? Zahra ?] [? Ahmed, ?]
who has been doing work all
over the planet on
the War on Terror.
And she sees from
the ground up that we
need the kind of inspiration,
vision, statement,
and collaboration that Beth
is going to share about
to talk about the
entire War on Terror,
not only the drone strikes and
the reaction to drone strikes,
but the entire War on Terror,
with her view focusing
especially on the
Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
So abolition persists
in connecting us.
Angela Y. Davis was
freed by the people.
And we must continue the
freedom of the people,
by the people into the future.
Abolition now.
[APPLAUSE]
- Abolition now.
- Now.
- Now.
So I'll repeat the thank you's.
I'll repeat how honored I am
to be here-- what a privilege.
Just even right now on this
panel with these three people,
it's kind of an amazing moment.
I've been humbled.
I've learned a lot.
The panelists, the
framers, the people
who imagined that this
was possible, all of you
who came to reflect on the
radical commitments of Angela
Y. Davis, to all the people who
are watching, wherever you are,
I'm glad to be here with you.
I've been deeply moved
by the rich stories
that so many have shared.
I feel like I got
invited into this kind
of quiet space of Angela's
revolutionary heart.
And I'm so grateful for those
who spoke from the heart
about Angela's work.
I've been inspired by the
magnitude of her legacy,
and those who have talked
about the kind of huge moments
of courage, the public,
steadfast, radical commitments
that have spanned black
liberation, Palestine,
anti-capitalism, imperialism,
the arts, human rights.
The space for me feels
like it has sort of
overflowed, if you will,
with your greatness, Angela.
I feel like it kind
of rolls out the door,
and down the streets
of Cambridge,
and across the river, through
the city, out of this state,
like this great wave
of greatness that
has so impacted so many
people in this country
and around the world.
It's almost like the
space, the physical space,
can't contain it.
And as the event
comes to an end,
I realize I'm the last
panelist between you hearing
from Angela Y. Davis herself.
As we come to the
end of the panels,
I do feel a need to kind of
pause and recognize what that
greatness has been, and say
that as we stand on stolen land,
and as we try to make sure that
the revolutionary work that
we've talked about-- the left
feminist women of color work
that we've talked about,
the abolition work--
will reach not
just those who can
be here to witness or
to listen, but those
who are still not free--
people living in
jails and prisons,
in cages, trying to survive
the constant threat of violence
in those spaces, in their
homes, on the streets.
And it feels to me like
we have to find a way
to reconcile the celebration
of radical commitments
that we've been talking
about with such realness,
with real work that
we need to do--
work for justice and safety,
and work for freedom--
so talking about work, and then
figuring out how to do work.
And for me, the
work of abolition
comes right at the right
moment when we pause and figure
out what the real work in
honor of the legacy and life
of Angela Y. Davis could be.
So after three panels,
it's become obvious to me
that what Angela
Y. Davis has given
us is a model of what it means
to have lived these panels--
to be revolutionary,
to be a feminist,
to be an abolitionist,
all at the same time.
As I was witnessing, taking
in, enjoying, laughing at,
worried about the panels
that came before me,
I found myself wanting
to play the drums
and then wanting to sing.
I wanted to sneak
up on the panel,
and just sit like an Amen
Corner for the revolution.
And then I was up there
watching the feminists.
From up there, you see
a whole other view,
because you can see all of you.
I was sitting up there,
feeling like yeah,
I'm down there with
the feminist panel.
It's really all about that,
when you talk about abolition.
It's about arts and culture
and music as freedom.
That's abolition.
It's about the stories that have
been shared about organizing
and writing from jail.
That's abolition work.
Traveling and teaching about
freedom all across the world,
that's abolition work.
It's even abolition
work to raise children
in households where they grow
up to be freedom fighters,
like we heard last night.
That's abolition work.
For me, I feel
grateful for being
able to think about all the
places that abolition work can
happen and the ways
that it has to take
with it a spirit of revolution
and feminist principles.
So I'm going to share my
reflection on the life
and legacy of Angela Y. Davis
in the form of a thank you
letter, a radical,
revolutionary, urgent love
letter to you from
antiviolence activists who
learned to be abolitionists
because of your groundbreaking,
revolutionary, left-- thank
you, Barbara-- feminism.
Dear Angela Y. Davis,
beloved friend,
I speak for many in the
radical antiviolence movement
when we lift up your legacy with
deep appreciation for the ways
that our work has
been transformed
into an abolitionist
praxis because
of the influence of your
revolutionary left feminism.
Angela, you know that
for more than 40 years,
black and other women of
color, queer, and trans people
have been organizing against
gender-based violence
in the context of
other social movements,
we hope, including freedom
from mass criminalization.
That work has taken many
forms over the years,
most notably working to
respond to those among us who
have been harmed, deeply
harmed, and simultaneously doing
the political work that puts
the issue of gender freedom
at the center of other
mobilizing efforts
like the work for
black liberation.
As you know, Angela,
that work has been met
with considerable resistance.
First, we have struggled
against a kind of tyranny
of mainstream, liberal,
glass-ceiling, white feminism--
those who insist on
continuing to rely
on the carceral state for
remedy for gender-based violence
in the form of law enforcement,
surveillance, legislation,
call-out culture, et cetera.
Second, you know we
have found ourselves
in oppositional positions
with some black liberation
formations who have attempted
to silence our work,
erase our demands, focusing
instead on the most
exclusive focus on the crisis
facing black cisgender men, who
the state defines as men,
ignoring other forms of gender
oppression like violence,
inserting patriarchal solutions
that trivialize gender
violence, undermine
the leadership of
women and queer people,
creating what I call
a "trap of loyalty"
that causes further harm.
Gender essentialism,
on the one hand,
a master race narrative
on the other--
that's the bridge that's called
our back, isn't it, Angela?
- Mm-hm.
- It leaves us with
no selves to defend.
It's the question of
intersectionality,
the challenge of carceral
feminism, a black patriarchal
of the need to say our name,
and a sense that we aren't safe
until she is safe.
Now here, I'm calling
out the slogans
of black and other women of
color, feminist responses,
queer organizing,
campaigns that ensure
that the mobilization
against gender violence
is embedded in the work to end
state violence so that when we
respond to the
degradation of rape,
and partner battering, and
sexual harassment, and forced
sex work, and forced
sterilization, and forced
abortion, we understand from
your revolutionary work,
Angela, that these harms are
linked to the disappearance
and murder of trans people, of
police excessive use of force,
of sexual coercion
by state authority,
of torture that happens
inside jails, and prisons,
and hospitals, and police
precincts, and patrol cars.
We know that these violences,
because of your work,
are expressions of the
mean-spirited carceral state,
that system of
capitalism, of patriarchy,
of anti-black racism,
settler colonialism,
persistent poverty, failing
educational systems--
Chicago teachers are on strike--
lack of health and
mental health services.
Your work, Angela,
as an abolitionist
helps us remember that when we
are doing antiviolence work,
we have to do it understanding
that we live within a prison
nation, a place where
criminalization has become
the first political instinct--
to arrest, detain, charge,
sentence, incarcerate,
then surveil people as
a way to end violence.
The carceral state is violence
and it won't solve violence.
Indeed, many people who have
survived violence are actually
captured in those actual
places where we have designed
to put people,
theoretically to punish them
by the carceral
state, especially
black people, queer
people, disabled people,
immigrant people, young
people, violated people.
Yes, Angela, your
abolitionist praxis
has given us voice so that we
can connect gender violence
to state violence to
mass criminalization
and other systems of
institutionalized oppression.
And looking forward to
thinking, Ruthie, where else we
could make those connections.
This isn't a theoretical
discussion, Angela,
as you know.
This is life-saving work that
you have helped us do better.
It's more than a set of
theoretical connections.
Abolition praxis
compels us to bring
all of the sources of
danger into urgent view,
and to respond to those in
the ever-expanding curriculum,
Ruthie, around social justice
so that our activism can
move beyond our narrow
analysis of services.
Our work can move beyond
an archive and an exhibit,
beyond discussions to those
places of danger where
people really live, literally
trying to save their own lives.
And as we do that, we are
compelled to think about how,
in fact, that might help us
save the souls of our movement.
I say that because
indeed, prisons
are destroying our antiviolence
work, not providing remedy
to those who are
most affected by it.
Brings me to the second
part of the love letter.
And since this is an
archive after all,
I'm assuming that there's room
for a little longer letter,
some of the work that has
happened here, so I'll
take a few more minutes.
So this, dear Angela,
is the second part
of the letter, where
beyond the work that you've
done to provide us
a way to critique
the carceral state as a way to
solve the problem of violence,
this is a place where we can
appreciate what you've taught
us as antiviolence activists
about how to respond
in abolition praxis instead.
You've taught us that we
must take seriously the harm
that gender violence causes
to individuals, to families,
and to our movement
and organizations.
I will never forget the moment
at the Critical Resistance
conference where you said that
out loud to those thousands
of people who were in the room.
And it felt like,
for those of us
who had been doing the work for
so long, like breath had been
filled into our lungs,
actually, and our ability
to give voice, to use our
voices toward this work.
You've taught us that
responses to harm
demanded different kind
of first reaction, one
that doesn't build
up the prison nation,
but actually sets people free.
You've taught us that instead
of using prisons, using police,
using law enforcement,
we have to pay attention
to root causes of violence like
economic inequality, hetero
patriarchy, anti-black
racism, and that we
need to think about care,
like jobs and schools,
and how communities can
care for themselves.
We have to be led by those
who are most impacted.
And you've taught
us that we need
to have a much broader set
of things that we work on.
In my world, that means working
beyond mandatory arrest,
beyond sex offender registries,
beyond new surveillance
technology, beyond Title IX,
Beyond MeToo, beyond Time's Up,
even beyond showing up and
fighting for guilty verdicts
for men who use violence,
including police officers.
We need to fight for a
different kind of society.
Angela, you taught us
that prisons are obsolete.
We know they don't make sense,
because they don't work.
They don't work to end the
most brutal forms of violence
at all.
Instead, you've
taught us to demand
that we respond to harm in
ways that people who experience
want us to, that we
listen to survivors,
that we create systems
of accountability.
We consider
reparations that might
help us build communities.
We expand opportunities.
You've taught us that insight
matters, that project NIA, Love
and Protect, the Black
Women's Blueprint, [? CARA, ?]
National Network for
Women in Prison, BPY100--
over time, you've taught us that
step by step, person by person,
organization by
organization, we have
to get ready to
fight for freedom.
As black and other
women of color and queer
activists, Angela
Davis, we thank you
for Critical Resistance.
We thank you for
the work that it
did that allowed
us to start INCITE!
following in the wake of that.
We thank you for allowing
us to dream bigger and do
our work better.
We have new theories.
We have new analysis.
We have new framework.
But most of all, we
have better politics.
I know that from talking with my
antiviolence activist friends.
I know that from talking with
my students at Stateville Prison
and at UIC.
I know that from
talking with my daughter
and from the women and
gender queer people who
are locked up as survivors.
You've taught us through your
example of the rich and radical
life that you've led,
a courageous life,
that survival is
possible, but even more
than that we will prevail
when we fight for freedom.
Abolition is part of
that freedom fight.
It's beyond survival.
It's a freedom fight.
And so in closing, Angela
and Gina, when you get home,
pull out another box.
Put this letter inside.
And as you continue to build an
archive of the work that is yet
to be done, the aspirational
work, the abolition work,
label the box, "How I
helped a movement move
from carceral feminism to the
liberatory possibility that
comes with abolition."
How I helped a movement
move from carceral feminism
to the liberatory possibility
that comes with abolition.
And when you look at that
box, pause for a moment,
and consider the lives that
you have quite literally saved,
and the movements that have
been organized around them.
For that, we are deeply,
deeply appreciative.
And we signed the letter, "with
radical revolutionary raging
feminists, left feminist,
abolitionists, love."
[APPLAUSE]
- So we have some time
for a little discussion
to follow up on these
initial remarks.
And then we'll turn
to the audience.
So be thinking of your
questions for the panelists.
So I thought maybe I
would try to channel
some of the questions I get
from students and from teaching
around abolition,
the kind of questions
they ask, and I'm sure some
of the people in the audience
might be curious.
You anticipated some of the
things I might have asked,
but there are other things.
So here's one thought for
anyone who wants to speak to it.
It may surprise some
people, but my dissertation
was actually on Marxism.
But one of the things you find--
(LAUGHS) but one of the
things you find in Marx,
is, I always say, Marx doesn't
invent the socialist tradition,
obviously.
He comes along, has a
particular brand of it,
they also call it scientific
socialism, [INAUDIBLE]
historical materialism, but
he was very critical of what
he called "Utopian socialists."
And indeed even, from
the beginning to the end,
Engels writes,
socialism [INAUDIBLE]
Utopian is scientific, to
critique Utopian socialists.
So I'm sure you've heard many
times questions from people
who are not Marxists, or not
influenced by that tradition,
and say well isn't this Utopian?
You have a Utopian conception
of human nature, and so on.
But I mean, you can
imagine the same line
of questioning
coming from someone
in the Marxist tradition
or in the broader
socialist tradition.
And I wonder what you
might say in response
to those who think it
seems like maybe in a back,
and as a conception
of human nature,
that the causes of unjust
aggression against others
are always rooted in
social injustice as opposed
to springing from
other motives that
might be a part of the kinds
of flawed beings that we are.
What might you say to
that sort of questioning,
anyone who might
want to speak to it?
- Yeah, I'd love to speak to it.
- I thought you might.
- That's a Ruthie question.
- If it were true that the
kinds of violent and undignified
ways, actions that
we do to each other
were just some aspect
of our species' being,
it would be the same everywhere.
And it's not.
That's the first
thing I want to say.
I just don't accept that.
That said, I'm not
trained in philosophy.
So I might have already gone
way out of my lane by saying
"species' being."
But the second thing I want
to say is more-- (LAUGHS)
but the second thing I want
to say that is back in my lane
is that all of the work
that the three of us
are talking about up here,
that everybody shared
on the feminism's panel,
and that everybody shared
last night, everything
we've been talking about
is all from the ground up.
So it is work that tells us--
and then the revolution period.
How could I let that slip?
All of it is were that
people already do.
So there is not a kind
of an idealist Utopianism
that is floating
over the world hoping
to drop its form onto
the social at all.
Rather, what
abolitionists try to do,
what the communists
did in Alabama
that Robin has written
about, what the PAIGC did
in Guinea-Bissau that many
people have written about,
and so on, and so forth, is
to see what people already do,
what Harriet Tubman did.
See what people already do.
See how they
understand themselves.
And then do with people the
kind of reflective moving work
to change actions from
one thing to another.
That's what abolition is.
It's not idealist at all.
So Dubois talks about it.
In Black Reconstruction in
America, you can see examples.
During the first Intifada in
Palestine when I was there,
there were people
in the West Bank
and Gaza building these
alternative worlds already
that got crushed,
but they were there.
There was there was nothing
idealist about it or Utopian.
But it was better.
- It's also what Kathy Boudin
did with ACE at Bedford Hills
prison.
So there is a very
important, I think,
starting place to look at the
organizing, the resistance,
the teaching, the
sharing of resources,
the protection, the
love, the analysis that
happens on the inside far
from a Utopian situation,
that happens on the ground
every day on the inside--
inside of prisons, and
jails, and detention centers,
and with people who are
under house arrest--
that's really about
abolition praxis.
And I think as we think about
where abolition is living,
where it's alive,
where it's happening,
where we can look to
examples, I want to make sure
that it includes inside those
places that are sometimes,
for some people, the hardest
to imagine, life-saving work.
- And I also think that if we're
looking at abolition in terms
of not needing prisons, I
think you have to root it.
I do think you have to root it
in the realities of capitalism,
I mean, in the reality of the
structure of social, economic,
and political inequality.
Race, gender-- all
of it penetrates it.
And I don't think that we
can separate it from that.
I think that--
I always say it seems so easy.
If you look at the
communities that are made safe
and don't mainly have
anybody in prison,
they're made safe because
they have housing.
They have decent education.
They have jobs for teenagers.
They have jobs for adults.
They're treated with respect.
And the issue of
prisons is not relevant,
or the police, primarily, to
making those communities safe.
And you look at communities
of people of color,
of poor people.
And how you make
those communities safe
is to have those prisons,
to have the school to prison
pipeline, to have the police.
And so we have a completely
different standard.
And I think that that different
standard can inform us when
we think about what's possible.
- I'm sure there are a number
of students who are involved
in an ongoing campaign to divest
from prison-related industries.
And I'm curious if
you have any of you
have thoughts
about the role that
might play in an abolitionist
vision, whether that is,
as Ruthie already
pointed out, [INAUDIBLE]
evolution in consciousness.
So where does that kind of
campaign around private prisons
or the investment in
prison-related industries--
how does that figure in a
broader abolitionist vision
or does it?
- This is my hobby horse.
- It is.
Go.
- Everyone should fight how they
need to fight, but plan to win.
So let us say the
Divestment Committee gets
Harvard to divest from
of CoreCivic tonight.
What changes for anybody
in a cage tomorrow morning?
Nothing.
Nothing.
If every private prison
contract were canceled tonight,
how many people do you
think would go home late
at night hoping
that their Angela
and their brother-in-law
Evan were waiting there
with their baby?
None.
None.
So plan to win.
So if that's the
fight, figure out
what the effect of waging
that fight would be.
That said, a
multi-multi-multi-multi-billion
dollar empire like Harvard,
which has greater wealth than
the sovereign wealth of probably
most of the countries on this
planet, could use its economic
clout to compel banks that
issue bonds to municipalities
and states to build prisons not
to do that business,
if Harvard said,
we won't do business with any
bank that will write a bond
to build any prison
whether public or not,
that would be meaningful.
Because then the municipalities
couldn't build them.
[APPLAUSE]
In terms of evolution,
I know that people
of goodwill who are
serious about revolution
get into the groove of thinking
that stopping private prisons
is a way on the path.
I invite you not only
to think about what
it would be like
the next morning,
but also to think
really hard about why
it is that over
the past 30 years,
round after round after round
of this kind of organizing
hasn't produced the kind
of change in consciousness
that it could?
And then think, if this
is what your campaign is,
how to do that
consciousness-building work.
Again, fight where you're
fighting, but think about what
happens the next morning.
- So I was at Columbia when
the students there, students
against mass incarceration
decided to do,
I think it was probably
maybe the first or one
of the first
disinvestment campaigns
against private prisons.
And Barbara
[? Ramsey's ?] daughter
was the leader of
that, actually,
one of the leaders of it.
And I think the way that
I thought about it was--
I knew at the time that private
prisons are at most 11%,
If that much, of the
numbers of prisons.
They're mainly-- it's public.
Prisons are public.
Immigration centers
are a different issue.
But I think that part of the
thing that I saw happening
was for the first time, people
on the campus in a large way
were thinking about prisons.
And so when I knew that
Ruthie was thinking,
wait a minute, what
are private prisons?
I thought-- on the
one hand, I felt
like this was a step forward,
because the people who
were organizing
this campaign, they
had prison cells in the
middle of the campus.
People were thinking
about prison
in a more widespread
way than anything else
that they had done before.
So I thought--
I think what you're saying
that you have to think about
how do you talk about
what you're doing, if it's
a partial thing,
seems very partial,
in a way that has a
broader view to it?
And I don't remember how
much their literature
and what they were
talking about in general.
I saw a mobilization of
students thinking about prisons.
And I thought that that was
a really important step.
- So I'll add something that--
these are more questions.
I really appreciate
this discussion.
One is, I think embedded
in the question about what
campaigns to engage
in is a question
about a long-term strategy.
And I think often
our campaigns--
and I think abolition
is long-term strategy.
And I think campaigns
that are more
short term need to be
evaluated against a set
of unintended consequences.
And that's not a
direct answer, but I
do think sometimes
we haven't evaluated
what the unintended consequences
of short-term campaigns
would be, that end up to work
against a long-term commitment
to abolition.
I also think that the notion of
divestment is an important one.
And I think certainly
activism around divest/invest
is important.
And the part of that
that's important is
the invest part-- well as
important is the invest part.
And so if we think
about divestment from--
you can fill in
the blank, and we
measure the campaign
against what
our potential
unintended consequences,
and if we, as Kathy said,
use it among other things
as an opportunity to
build mass mobilization,
to change public opinion,
to raise consciousness,
to engage more people, to link
issues, build coalition, if we
think about that as part
of what the work is,
we have to also think
about investment.
We can't only divest our way
out of the problem, the project
of mass criminalization.
We have to figure out
the investment part.
That's what abolition
offers us, I think.
- I'm sure the
students are provoked,
and they will come
and ask questions.
So here's another question
about the scope of abolition,
I think it will be.
So it might help
me and others think
about what's most objectionable
about incarceration
by thinking about the scope.
So you could imagine abolition
extending to policing,
to electronic surveillance.
You could even
imagine that extending
to involuntary
commitment of people
to psychiatric hospitals.
So I would like to
get your reflections
on how you conceive
of the scope of what's
included in the things that
you imagine that ultimately
want to end or not rely on?
But connect that,
if you can, to what
it is about those things, all
four of those things-- prisons,
psychiatric hospitals,
police, and surveillance--
what is it about those things?
What do they have in common?
Maybe it's not
something they have
in common, that's objectionable
such that they become
a part of the broader
vision of what
needs to be done away with?
I think it might help
people to kind of have
a sense of what the
opposition is to when
one's thinking about prisons.
Is that clear?
Is the question clear?
- I think the question
is clear, but I'm not
altogether sure that's the
question I want to answer.
But since you asked
it, Professor Shelby,
I will do my best.
And the reason I'm
not sure that's
the question I
want to answer is,
you've gone back to prisons
and that particular form,
those carceral and freedom
instances, all of which
are crucial.
And it seems like all the
rest of the social order
dropped out again when we're
trying to keep together.
- I don't mean to suggest it.
- OK, all right, good.
Phew.
We're in the same lane now.
- Because I assume,
to make it clear,
I assume that there are
plenty of radical reformers,
I take it, that would have
it as part of the vision
to transform--
I mean, people who don't think
of themselves as abolitionists,
who also would like to see
a radical transformation
in our social order, maybe
even a socialist direction,
but they might not
themselves be abolitionists
when they wonder why.
So what is it about prisons
and prison-related, or things
that look like prisons, that's
so objectionable that we should
imagine that as also
a part of our efforts
to transform things?
- Go ahead.
- I mean, there were like
a million things that
came to my mind.
One is state abuse of power.
One is feeding a system
that violates human rights.
I mean, I don't know if
that's the sort of specificity
that you're looking
for, but I almost--
and I don't mean this to
be flippant or sarcastic--
there's nothing that
I've heard in the years
that I've been
going into prisons
or identified as an abolitionist
that would suggest we would
want to keep any part of that.
There just isn't.
I mean, I haven't seen them
work to do anything except take
my voice away when I'm talking.
Sorry, I'll come back.
- Could I pick up there, or
Kathy, Mike, am I cutting you?
- [INAUDIBLE] no.
- OK.
So maybe one way to
respond to what you asked,
Professor Shelby--
may I call you Tommy?
- Of course.
- Please call me Ruthie--
is to think about the
centrality of organized
violence in the context of the
racial capitalist social order.
And racial capitalism is all
of it, all of it, all of it,
all of it.
And that the forces
of organized violence,
which include
electronic monitoring,
include civil injunctions like
gang injunction zones as well
as involuntary commitment,
and so on, and so forth,
go hand-in-hand with the
organized abandonment that
our constant return to the
impossibility of reforming
capitalism-- as it's constantly
saving itself from itself--
presents to us.
So it's the trying to put
organized violence together
with organized
abandonment that gives us
some insights into, for
example, as I was saying
toward the end of my
remarks, the importance,
the urgency of putting
together with some clarity,
in constant debate and
conversation with our comrades
around the world, an
understanding of how
to think about, and
therefore, fight
against, the war on terror,
but also to understand
that so many people
who are displaced,
who wind up in
immigrant detention,
for example, in
the United States
and elsewhere, if they
even live on their journeys
to wind up in detention, are
people displaced pretty much
by climate change and war--
climate change and war.
And this is why
abolition has to be
green and red and international,
because of climate change
and war.
- That's what I
was trying to say.
[LAUGHTER]
I don't have to talk now.
You can skip me.
It's all right.
- Did you want to speak?
- No.
- So I think it would be
good to hear some questions
from the audience.
So as before, the microphone's
right here in the center.
Please try to keep
your questions brief.
Try not to repeat questions
already been asked
or ask questions that have
already been answered.
And please identify
yourself, if you don't mind,
because we're filming.
- Is this on?
- It is indeed.
- Well, I'm Carol
from New Jersey.
- Hi, Carol.
- And basically what
has concerned me
about this conversation
about incarceration
is that there really has
been, in my mind, a real lack
of discussion about the
imprisonment of people of color
in this country,
and how race has
played such a fundamental
role in this incarceration.
So I'd like to hear
what the panel really
does, really deal
with that issue
and what we can do about that?
- Thank you.
We going to take all of them?
- Let's take all the
questions and then--
- Hi, everyone.
Thank you so much to the
panelists for speaking.
My name is Zoe Hopkins.
I'm a sophomore here
at Harvard College.
I'm also an organizer with No
New Jails in New York City.
For context, some
of you in this room
may know New York City just
decided to spend $11 billion
building four new jails.
They are masking this under the
guise of closing Rikers Island.
There is nothing in the
plan that they came up
with that mentioned
closing Rikers Island.
Something that we came up
against in the struggle
against the building
of these jails
are actually people who claim
the mantle of abolition,
but then said that they wanted
to build four new jails.
And I think that
this is related to--
I think that this is
related to a larger
puzzle in conversations
around abolition, which
is sort of the tension
between long-term vision
and the urgency of the issue.
I am asking for abolition
now, as you all are.
And I know that there are
concrete steps for abolition
now as embodied in
movements like No New Jails.
So I'm wondering,
first of all, what
would you say to people who
call themselves abolition,
but who want to build new jails?
And then also, how
would you respond
to the tension between
abolition as a long-term vision
and abolition as something that
is about life and death, that
is urgent, that needs
to be accomplished
as immediately as possible?
That's my question.
[APPLAUSE]
- Maybe we'll just take those
two, and get a few answers,
and then we'll come back.
- Where'd Carol go?
Carol, Carol from New Jersey.
- Carol [INAUDIBLE].
- Yes, hi, Carol.
So it is very clear.
I think it's very clear to me
that mass criminalization--
beyond mass incarceration--
mass criminalization
is a racialized project.
It's very clear.
I mean, it takes one step
inside a jail prison detention
facility that it is
a racialized project.
In the years that I've
taught at Stateville Prison,
I've had one non-black
male student.
And it hasn't been
that many years.
But if I continued for the
rest of my career teaching,
that's what the
situation would be.
Just out of proportion in any
urban area, in any urban area,
in any state facility,
in any federal prison,
black and other people of
color are overrepresented.
It is a racialized project.
There is no doubt.
And it is interesting
that you reflected,
and I sort of hold myself
accountable to not saying
that clearly, sometimes it's
like, I know you all know this,
but we could go down the line
about the number of people,
why they're there, what
communities they come from.
In Chicago, if we put up a
map of the five communities
that have experienced
most abandonment,
Ruthie, most
abandonment, the five,
those are the five places where
people come from in the jail
and in the prisons.
And they aren't the places that
have the highest crime rate.
They're the places
that are targeted
for the racialized project
of mass criminalization.
And that's true no
matter where we were.
And it's the places with
the highest rate of asthma,
and the highest foreclosure
rate, and the worst
public transportation, and
so-called "food deserts."
And those are the schools where
the leadership is on strike
in the cities of Chicago.
And those are the places
where people are unemployed.
So it's a perfect alignment
around the questions
of disadvantage, divestment,
and institutionalized racism,
as well as all of
the other issues
that feed into the build-up
of mass criminalization.
- So I guess in terms of--
with the dialogue
about how we deal
with this institutionalization
of the imprisonment,
and the destruction of people
of color in this country,
when we talk about
that, and I guess
these are the issues
where we talk about what
is it that we're doing?
Because these young
black men and these
young black women are dying.
- Absolutely.
- And we need to
address it headlong.
And I guess my
frustration is that,
yes, I was not hearing that.
And what are the
strategies that we can be
able to do to eliminate that?
- I want to say, sister
Carol from New Jersey,
that if you are
at all interested,
we and others have shared a lot
of work that directly addresses
the issues that you raised,
that is available on YouTube
and other places.
So I'm not being flippant.
We came here together
to do something,
and we couldn't do everything.
But I totally feel
what you're saying.
And our work has gone
exactly in that direction,
because the thing that we're
fighting against every second
is how I define
racism, which is group
differentiated vulnerability
to premature death.
Yes.
That's what we are doing.
Yes.
- I'll just say, I think that
it is striking that none of us
talked about it.
And I think that was sort of
an assumption, in a sense,
that that was an understanding,
a basis from what
we're coming from.
I think that--
I just know that in all
the work that all of us
do, the issue of
talking about race,
the connection to slavery,
the racism, the communities,
and in a sense what I was
trying to say when I said
some communities are made safe
because they have schools,
and they have jobs, and
they have self-worth.
They have respect.
They're treated with respect.
And other communities,
mainly communities of color,
are not treated that way.
And I think that race
and racism underlies.
I mean, we know
from the statistics
of who gets arrested for
using drugs, for example.
We know that black young people
were called "super predators."
We understand how that happened.
And I think that my point
of view, the only reason I
can imagine we
didn't talk about it
is because there was kind of
this assumption about what
we believed.
But I think you're absolutely
right to have raised it.
- Thank you.
- And thank you.
- Would one of you like to speak
to the question of building
new jails, the campaign
against building jails?
- Yeah, no new jails.
No new jails.
We might disagree about this.
So you know there's
nothing we can
do about people appropriating
terms, names, shining us,
for their own ends.
So I call them
"fauvolitionists."
And you might be able to
say that from time to time.
That said, in the New
York case, the problem
is that in a legit movement
to close the horror that
is Rikers Island, which
is a whole bunch of jails
on that island, all the city
has done is planned to build,
as Zoe said, $11
billion of new jails.
The buildings are not going
to solve the problems.
People pretend that things fix
relationships between people.
It's the relationships
between people
that lead Rikers to be
a murderous rape place.
It's nasty, too, and they
should fix the draining.
And then close it, and
close it, and close it,
and close it, and close it, and
close it, not build a new one.
- I think there's also
a really important--
this is the unintended
consequences discussion I
alluded to before.
I lived in New York
City for a long time.
And I spent time
at Rikers Island.
And that sort of answers the
previous question in some ways,
about why would we ever argue
to not close Rikers Island?
I mean, unless we were deeply
committed to the death, which
is, I think, obviously, what
some people are committed to,
because they argued to
not close Rikers Island.
We can't reform our way
out of the premature death.
So that's, I think, one part.
But also, I think
we need to refine
our definition of abolition and
understand that decarceration
is different than abolition.
And the way-- because
we are so committed
to carcerality and
criminalization in our society,
it's possible to imagine that
we will decarcerate people,
and they will continue
to be under the kind
of mean-spirited,
life-taking surveillance
of the carceral state,
because they're wearing
electronic monitors, or have
to pay for their probation,
or are under house
arrest, or whatever
else people might come up with.
And they will come up
with something else
until we dismantle the system,
not just close the jail.
So I think broadening
the discussion
or clarifying the
discussion about abolition
and decarceration is worthy
of some of our activist time.
- So we'll take two more
questions, and then--
- Hello.
My name's Jackie.
I'm a PhD student here at
Harvard and a Radcliffe Fellow,
as well, writing a
dissertation on prisons
and the history of prisons in
mostly the '60s and the '70s.
So I just wanted to start off
by saying a couple of things
about the Harvard prison
divestment campaign, which
has been deeply, deeply informed
by Ruthie Gilmore's work,
and because people who have
been organizing this campaign
have been so engaged with
Ruthie's work in particular,
it hasn't focused exclusively
on private prisons.
There's this more
capacious understanding
of the political
economy of prisons,
and even the role of banks
and underwriting bonds.
And investment has been a
component of the campaign,
as well.
But I think the question
of whether the strategy is
the most useful is still a
question that's on the table.
But I wanted to return to this
question of the relationship
between abolition and
reform, which is related
to Zoe's question, as well.
And I'm thinking about a
quote from Angela Davis that's
something to the effect of
the history of the prison
as an institution is
a history of reform.
And I think that this is slowly
getting more and more lodged
in my brain as I study
the history of prisons,
and particularly the reform
moment in the '60s and '70s.
Because when we think
about the creation
of the modern
penitentiary, we think
about the late 18th century,
and the early 19th century,
and Quaker penal reformers
that thought putting people
in prison was a way to
reform the souls of people.
But there is another
reform moment,
which is what I'm writing
about in my dissertation,
where there is a question
of whether or not
more or better prisons should be
constructed during this period.
And I'm looking at debates
around the national campaign
for a moratorium on prison
construction in the 1970s,
and how there was a
group of reformers
that were essentially
technocratic reformers
who thought that through
design and architecture
that you could build
more humane prisons,
and that that would
solve the problem.
And reformers were very actively
conscripted by the state
to legitimize a system
that was in crisis.
And it's something that seems
to happen over and over and over
again throughout history, or
whenever the criminal legal
system is challenged, the way
that the state co-opts reform
is by--
- Jackie, I have to cut you
off, because we're basically
out of time.
- I was just going to ask
about how do you balance
the urgency of the present?
And I really appreciated
the way that Kathy
introduced the topic.
And how do you
balance those concerns
with keeping your eye on
abolition and not kind of being
a part of legitimizing the
apparatus through the process
of non-reformist reform?
Thank you.
- First of all, I
think you have to look
at the moment in history, and
look at the particular context
in order to figure out exactly
how you work within that.
I think right now, there
is a real action push
to not build new prisons
and not build new jails.
And I think that it means
that at this moment,
keeping that in the
forefront really matters.
It doesn't mean that you don't
try to make conditions better
in any given situation.
I feel like work that
we do in New York,
for example, is reformist to
try to get elderly people who
have been convicted of
violent crimes out of prison.
That's reformist completely,
because people are dying.
We call it "death by
incarceration" at this point
is happening, because of
the length of sentences.
That's a reform.
But at the same time,
we always keep in mind
the fact that we have to talk
about what is the system that
has created this?
So I think that
really, if you're
somebody that's keeping in mind
the vision of no new jails,
no new prisons, you
have to figure out
at any given situation
what is necessary to do
in terms of reform that may
be right in front of you.
And I think you have to do both.
- And if I can just add,
I think the same people
have to do both.
And the reason I'm thinking
about that is I know in my work
around ending gender-based
violence that to talk to people
about the long-term
strategies of social change
and social justice when someone
is immediately being hurt
won't work, unless we
deal find ways to deal
with immediate harm,
and at the same time
find ways to create the kind
of radical social change
that will allow for the ending
of gender-based violence.
And I think there's an analogy
around abolition and reform.
And the reason I say the same
people should do both is I
think what happens if we don't
require that of each of us,
we start to feel like the
object of our criticism
is like the abolitionists
when I'm the reformer,
or the reformer when
I'm the abolitionist,
instead of saying,
within our organizations
and within our own
activist strategies,
we have to pay attention to
individual needs for safety
and protection.
And we need to also be engaged
in creating social change.
- With sincere apologies
to those waiting in line,
we're actually overtime.
And so what we're going to do
is take a really brief break,
just a 15-minute
break to come back
for the keynote conversation.
So please thank the panel
for this quite stimulating
discussion.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you so much, Tommy,
Kathy, Ruthie, and Beth,
for that powerful discussion.
We ask-- we are
completely at capacity.
And if you leave
the building, you
will not be able to get back in.
So we ask that you
stay at your seats.
If there's room in between
you and your neighbor,
please get nice
and cozy as we just
wait this last 15 minutes
out before our closing
keynote presentation.
