[Intro]
Crystal
abolition is for everybody is a podcast that tackles the sometimes difficult conversations around prison abolition. I’m Crystal.
Graham
And I’m Graham. This season is all about the journey of incarceration. From arrests, to sentencing, to family connections, parole hearings, and reentry.
Crystal
Just a reminder friends, though the title of this episode may give you some warning, remember that harm itself tends to create situations of alternate harms.
Graham
There will likely be other painful topics brought up too. Take care of you.
[End of Intro]
Crystal
Welcome to a new season of abolition is for everybody. This season is all about the ins and outs of incarceration, and before we dive deeper into the topic, we wanted to take a step back and talk about how we got here to begin with. How did we get to a place where the US is a country with the highest incarceration rates in the world? Today, we’re joined by a very special guest, Antoinette Ratcliffe. Welcome, Antoinette, can you please introduce yourself to our listeners who may be unfamiliar with you and your work and jump right into the conversation?
Antoinette
Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Antoinette Ratcliffe, my pronouns are she, her and hers. I am the Executive Director here at Initiate Justice. I personally am a Black woman who’s impacted by the carceral system. I’ve had older brothers incarcerated for actually the majority of my life. My brothers have been incarcerated, serving extreme sentences. With Initiate Justice, I’ve been with the organization for over four years now, and actually began my journey here at Initiate Justice, actually teaching a curriculum through our Institute of Impacted Leaders, where one primary session of it was actually just discussing in depth what the history of mass incarceration looks like. Hw we got to where we are today, and what undoing those harms and transforming our system would look like. And I’ve taught cohorts all across California, and have continued my journey at an Initiate Justice, doing our outside organizing work, and then, more recently, in the past two years as the executive director. In my current role, I actually talk about the realities of our carceral system every day to community members, to legislators, and also beyond that, to people who are requesting media interviews and researchers as well when we’re discussing or in collaboration with other partners across various sectors. And so that’s a little bit about myself and my role and how I’m showing up here in this conversation today.
Crystal
Thank you so much, Antoinette, for being here and for sharing with us. I know the three of us have had previous conversations about the history of mass incarceration, and we can probably sit here for various seasons to talk about how we got here, but curious to know with your expertise, through personal, lived experiences and like just everything that you’ve learned in history, academically, having to go through this with your brothers, where would you begin in telling how we got here?
Antoinette
That is a great question, Crystal, and I would, honestly, I would begin at the at the start, essentially, really one thing that I have learned just through being impacted, but also in doing this work, is that it’s absolutely critical that we understand the origins of things, of systems, of ideologies In our society. It’s important that we understand our history if we wish to create futures where we’re not repeating them. So I would absolutely start at the beginning and go back to maybe around the 1700s when the first jails or prison like institutions were popping up in the US. And I want to acknowledge that this is during a time when the US was one murdering indigenous people, two, enslaving Black people and colonizing our land. So back then, when there were just about three prison or jail like facilities across the country, people being jailed at that time were, of course, white. Women were instead being reformed under institutions, and disabled people were also being isolated to other institutions under religious ideologies. But when prisons began popping up, they were jailing white folks because indigenous folks were being murdered and Black people were being enslaved. And I think that’s an important place to start, because when you look at the landscape of prisons then versus the landscape of prisons now, that’s where the question really comes. How did we get here?
Graham
So how did we get here? Would be my next question. Like, what was the next step?
Antoinette
Yeah, so, as I mentioned at that time, Black people were being enslaved through chattel slavery. When we began to see a real transformation of, like, what a prison industry, or really the creation of a prison industry, was actually after chattel slavery, which is, you know, that’s the most common form of slavery that people, people today know about, and that we learn about in grade school, right? That’s people as property. So when chattel slavery began to end, and I say, began to end, and I’m over here putting air quotes around that, because and it was essentially re shaped. It was essentially recreated under new systems. But when that began to end in the in the late 1800s that’s when we begin to see the industrialization of prisons. Because what was happening was wealthy white Americans believe their economic and their political power were now threatened. They no longer had free labor to retain their wealth, and they had a demand for cheap labor or for continued free labor. And so that’s when we kind of see the first iteration of mass incarceration or mass criminalization, where you see convict leasing began, you see Black codes and vagrancy laws begin to be implemented across the south, even things like ugly laws, which criminalized folks for being disabled. So convict leasing was essentially the recreating of free or cheap labor. People were arresting mostly Black men and forcing them to work. And that’s how wealthy white states and wealthy white communities and companies maintain their wealth after the traditional form of chattel slavery as we know it was ended.
Graham
It’s interesting. You mentioned chattel slavery because I was just having, like, two days ago with my mother in law. I was having a conversation about chattel property chatter, chattel slavery, and some of the language that was used during that time, and I was walking through how like economically, and you mentioned economics, and that’s an important keynote, is economically in the north, slavery wasn’t needed. It wasn’t a like by and large. Slavery wasn’t opposed in the North for humane efforts. It wasn’t because people were being being considered human at some point when they previously doctrinally weren’t considered human. It was because economically, they’d entered into the industrial area, and plantations weren’t used drastically in the north, the climate was different, etc. The South required brute force in the fields to continue the work. So they fought. And so like the conversation I was having was around was the south fighting for states rights. And I was explaining, like, No, it wasn’t about states rights, or about states rights to have slaves right. The North just didn’t need it. The South required it. And so like walking through, as you said, people after slavery was abolished, air quotes. After they abolish slavery, they entered the 13th Amendment. They filed the 13th Amendment, and the 13th Amendment said, essentially that slaves would no longer be permitted unless convicted of a crime. And that was the key line of the 13th Amendment that was used to build out mass incarceration over the next 150 years.
Antoinette
Right? Exactly. That’s exactly true. And that’s where, that’s where convict leasing came in, right? That’s where you see, again, mostly Black men are being arrested, and then their punishment was being forced to work. And then even, even beyond that, when you’re thinking about sort of the intentionality behind that statement, slavery, you know, is abolished except for punishment of a crime. That’s where you see the slave patrols, which were groups of white men patrolling neighborhoods to arrest and violently assault and murder Black people. The slave patrols became the police, and like we said, like chattel slavery became replaced with like incarceration as we begin to know it today, or jailing people for purposes of free and cheap labor.
Graham
And then so, like over the next 100 years or so, you can see the first prison boom. You can watch, mostly through the south, prisons begin to crop up, chain games to be a regular occurrence. And then you enter into the civil rights era. And what, what happened at that point?
Antoinette
Yeah, I, I kind of want to go a little bit back before, before the Civil Rights Era, just a little bit, because you mentioned something earlier around the necessity behind slavery in the South and the essentially the non need for it in the North. And before we see the civil rights era, we actually see the great migration where free Blacks are moving to the North. We actually see increase in folks immigrating and settling in the North. So before that even happened, Northern States did begin to industrialize their prison system, to build their economies because of that, sort of those two or as a result of subsequent to those sort of realities of what was happening. So I kind of wanted to go go back to that piece, because before we even have that and where, like I said, 99% of the people incarcerated were right, were white, after we see this sort of industrializing of prisons now, 95% of the Southern prison population is Black. And then you have this large group of others who are migrating to the north, and then northern states begin to industrialize their prison system. Really, really adopting right that model of we can increase our economics in this way.
Crystal
Can you talk a little bit about because I know that when prisons first appeared, the belief was that through torture and through solitary confinement, folks can be like, set right. They criminalized them, said, I’m going to torture them, and then they’re all good. Can you talk a little bit more about what was said to be the purpose of prisons throughout those time periods, because I want to paint a history a little bit of the intentional purpose, what they said, what the purpose was, and what we know to be true?
Antoinette
Yeah, this is also going to be rooted in sort of religious based reform, right? And so, as I mentioned earlier, that was was essentially already happening for women and for people who are disabled, but it was also happening, yeah, for people who were being imprisoned. This, this idea that, like incarceration was the progressive approach to corporal punishment.
Graham
That’s exactly what it was. It’s rooted in the religiosity of this country’s founding. Of the white people who came over and colonized religiosity and their practice of religion, and it progressed into Okay, so we can’t put people in stocks, because that would be considered inhumane under our doctrines, so we’ll incarcerate them in these penitentiaries, which are literally designed to create a sense of penance. It was like a monastery. The original prison in Pennsylvania was like a monastery that was designed with smaller doors, so you had to crawl through them, so you’re in a state of humility and silence. You weren’t allowed to speak indoors. You had very limited privileges. Your food portions were scarce. You had to stay in a state of penance, and that was supposed to heal you under religious doctrine, of the things that cause you to do harm. And so from that point, so now we have several prisons, mostly Black folk are incarcerated in these prisons. We’re in the early 1920s and we start seeing, we start seeing prisons develop more across the nation. What was the reason for that? And I ask it that way, because of this, like the way I look at it, I could be wrong on this. Who knows. But the way I’ve looked at it is like, rich white people start complaining they’re in positions of power. They create laws that trickle down. They also use media sources to convince people that are in less wealthy realms to believe them, typically white people. And then things shift, and patterns change, and that’s how it’s systemic. And so like, I look at the prison shift, and the prison expansion is like rich white folk complaining about it and being in a position of power and altering the flow of how things go.
Antoinette
That’s exactly what happens. You have the Civil Rights Era, the Civil Rights Movements. You have Black communities fighting for and winning their rights right. Because before this, Black people are excluded from all like political and economic growth or stability. And so you have our political power right now, you have people securing these rights that for a long time, wealthy white people felt were only they were the only ones deserving of these rights, things like voting, things like gainful employment, the ability to simply be in public spaces without being criminalized. And so again, we, like you said, we have these ebbs and kind of flows where some progress is attained, and then those in positions of power and already with accumulated wealth feel threatened by or that their power and their status are being threatened by others attaining these same freedoms, although they were, they were not equal, right? There was, there was never any equity in it. It was the mere fact that now Black communities are attaining these same freedoms, and how could that possibly be okay for us to have any similar situated status? And that becomes of concern. And so between, like you said, now we’re in we’re in the 1900s and so by this time, leaders, lawmakers, those who are like your professors, your professionals, your policy makers, your economists, your criminal dentist, right? People who actually become experts in the concept of criminology are realizing that we can absolutely continue to link crime to race and keep social control over these groups, because now we have urban communities where Black people are living and. Where Black people are concentrated. So at this point, that’s where we begin to see the intense mass criminalization, the militarization of the police force, the things like war on crime, war on drugs, essentially a war on poverty. So before 1990 you have, what, less than 200,000 people in prisons across the entire US by 1990 so we’re talking about the 19 by 1990 it’s nearly four times that. And then we’ll, we’ll get into like our most current generations, where by the 2000s you have over 2 million people incarcerated across the country simply because those already within positions of power realize that while, while we may not be able to publicly say that we’re criminalizing Black and poor communities, we can, absolutely, by design, criminalize Black and poor communities.
Graham
I think what’s interesting about that is, like, the economic starvation of Black and poor communities, right? Like, so, like, when, when you mentioned war on poverty, like, they actually used that term. And to me, what that sounds like. It sounds for one, super forceful. For two, a logistical war on poverty would equal distribution, a redistribution of wealth, right? Like, let’s make sure that these communities that don’t have these resources that are key to survival have these resources. Let’s pour these resources into these communities so that we can treat the issue, right? But that isn’t what took place. Same with the war on drugs, and I think a good footnote to that is that the War on Drugs started with introducing introduction of key drugs by our government to our country. So, like, it shows an overlying strategy, right? And so I just started learning this stuff with you. Antoinette, in the first cohort of the second cohort in LA, honestly, I was in prison for most my life, and I’d never even heard these terms. I thought, you do the crime, you do the time. That was my thinking when I entered the cohort, it was through a friend. My friend, Ritchie, introduced me to InitiateJustice. I knew him inside. I was like, Yeah, I’ll do this. But I had never heard that. And in watching 13th and then doing personal studies so that I could better understand the issue, it’s a clear map from the 1860s all the way through to 2000 and beyond, of course, of keeping the carceral system growing so that it can serve as an economic resource in the same way that plantations do. And I think that that’s a really stark like visual image, if you were to walk back and watch the horrific visual representation of what happened on plantations, and read about that, and then watch what happens as they build out things like the prison industry authority Pia, that serves to create, it serves as an industry to create product for large corporations across the nation. And at the backs of folks that are inside like you, can see the overlying strategy to build out this system to what it is today.
Antoinette
Yeah, and it’s, it’s interesting, what you named, in terms of these just became realities, or sort of like an in depth understanding for you, and I have to relate to that, because while growing up, my auntie, my dad’s sister, lived right above Skid Row, and that was an absolute reality to walk through Skid Row walk, you know, by and over, you know, bodies and feces and in people’s living quarters as well, right? People’s where people were inhabiting to get to my my Auntie’s apartment, it was never fully understood, not even by my parents, to be able to teach it to me, the how strategic all of it was designed while my mother and my father both grew up in heavily criminalized communities and seen these things firsthand and actually migrated our family from the Los Angeles area to the inland region, particularly to ensure that we weren’t growing up in those same circumstances. We had not even realized that the police forces and Gang Task Force that were being developed in LA were then training and deploying those same strategies on communities in the inland region as it became urbanized, and my brothers became, you know, criminalized while in high school. So it’s a we live in these realities, but understanding how strategic it was was. It’s still to this day, it’s mind blowing. I even I can recall sitting in the Institute of impact at leaders, where we watched 13th, the Netflix documentary by Ava DuVernay. And I would encourage any person who has not yet seen that documentary to watch that documentary. I still recall the. Lawmakers of those times, right in the 19 in the 70s and the 80s, the lawmakers and politicians admitting now things like what Nixon’s domestic policy chief had said, we knew we couldn’t make it illegal, and I’m quoting here, we knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt their communities.
Graham
Yeah, it gives me the chills. Just I remember sitting in that because we were in the same room. Antoinette went to the same cohort, and it was an incredibly uncomfortable realization and experience for me, because, you know, I’m a white guy, and by proxy, I contributed to the system, and also was a part of it. So there was, like a contradiction of personality there for me, and it was, it was a very difficult experience. And then I think back now, and I think of like the cultural norms that were reinforced through law enforcement, through policy, through media campaigns that bolstered this system within my community and so like, I grew up poor and my family knew, like, we don’t we don’t fuck with the police, like, that’s just it. I remember my grandmother, sweet old English lady, migrated to this country in the 1950s my dad was the first of our family be born over here. Everybody else was born in Europe and and that’s 10 kids. He was the last. And she told me very clearly, like, Oh, I remember when the police came to get your dad the first time. And once you get in their system, you don’t want to be in their citizen before computers, before anything system looked different in the 1990s said, but when you get in their system, they’ll always come back for you. So don’t talk to the police. We never call the police. These are things that I was trained on from a very young age, and I agree with those things to this day. I agree with them as core values, but also the fear, like the step back from confronting that it was always stay away from them. Don’t talk to them, and avoid it as much as possible. So where else did that show up in life, and how did that feed the system? Because up until today, in the last 15 years, we haven’t, like, publicly confronted police for the wrongdoings that they do. It was more of like, turn away, shy away from this. And I feel like that was built in as a social norm, and that bolstered the system. It contributed to the system, being able to gain the power and influence and persuasion and force over our communities that it has today.
Antoinette
It absolutely was and and this, again, it dates back to the idea and the reality that the police are just the modern day, modern day slave patrol. So while that was being taught in your communities, and it culturally, had always lived with our Black communities where you don’t look a white man in the face. You see a white man, you or white woman, you turn and walk the other way. Right? You are in any white person you see is in a position of authority, and you should stop in your tracks. Cross the street, look the other way. Put your head down. Do not engage. Don’t speak again. Do not engage with these people. You should be afraid for your safety when you see the police and this riddled communities, especially during the time when there was these political wars on poverty and on Black communities where you have the police force using battering rams, tearing down and breaking through people’s homes. You have the police force stopping and arresting and assaulting young Black children for simply walking through their communities. You have the police actually contributing to the system of welfare and child care that we have, or the child welfare system, sorry, where they are breaking into and I’m going to be honest about breaking into families homes, and stripping babies and children away from their parents simply because they do not have the resources, or they are food insecure, or they are Living within the means that they only had access to.
Crystal
I think another component of this is also because when I watch 13th, when I was first introduced to the carceral system, and like going through everything that I did with my brother, and growing up in a heavily police, criminalized community, that was the norm for us. I’m like, this just happens. They incarcerated my brother, along with 30 other people. I’m like, This just happens. And I know one of the buzz words to hear a lot is the justice system doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. It’s not working, which is not the case. Another component to this, and y’all can go back to season three, is that just how smoothly everything works and how intentional everything works, there’s still the large belief that cops do keep us safe. Prisons are for our own safety. So can we talk a little bit more about for those folks who are still listening and still like, mm? Um, I don’t know. Maybe they went into that home for a reason. Maybe they arrested, arrested crystals brother for a reason. Can we talk a little bit more and give more examples on the intentionality? Because when I watched that documentary 13th, I was like, oh shit, my brother’s incarceration has been like decades in the making. So can we provide a few examples on the intentionality? One that I can think of, for example, is when they coined the word super predators so that we can view Black young men as dangerous, and every time they got locked up, you saw them in the media, it’s like, Yay, thank you. You’re keeping us safe. Another one for me is the enhancements. There’s so many enhancements that exist in the US and California alone that just stacks and stacks and stacks time to you when you’re incarcerated. Can you all provide a few more examples, maybe through your own experience, or just generally, about the intentionality and why it’s not working, actually, why it’s why it’s working the way it’s intended to, but it’s working in terms of like abolition and what true safety means for our communities.
Antoinette
Right. And key point there it is working the way in which it was designed to work. And before we jump into examples, because I don’t know how many will be able to get to I just have to plug another resource here for people who do want to understand how this system that exists today was designed from pure intentionality, political like I mentioned earlier, political strategist, economics, criminogenic and other professionals. And if you read The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, you can also gain a deeper understanding of how mass criminalization and mass incarceration was just another form of social control to relegate people to a sub class. So I have to plug that before, kind of going into some of the examples, but I also want to acknowledge and one of one very key example that we can’t leave out of this conversation is the school to prison pipeline and the embedding of police forces into our schools, and a key example of this is when you look at Los Angeles Unified School District, and it is literally the embedding of police forces into our Schools in a way that does not give youth a chance to grow through adolescence without being criminalized for adolescent behavior, for adolescent development. I use that as an example because all of my brothers were incarcerated in their teenage years, and sometimes there’s this ideology or this notion that, well, something must have been wrong at home for this to happen. We come from a two parent household. We had our needs met a stable house that has been our family home since 1999 one of my brothers was an honor roll student who wanted to be a president and a rapper at the same time, because who was going to tell him that he could not who was adored and looked at, looked to as a mentor for from teachers and coaches. And both of my brothers have been incarcerated since they were in high school, one having only actually completed, essentially one day in an actual High School. Other being continuation, like schools and things like that, and one having only completed, I believe, one full year, maybe a portion of another year in high school. That’s one, one prime example.
Graham
I love that example, and I think it’s like us in this is historically. This is the history of the country that we live in. Some people are deemed by our government and by the systems and policies that follow as more important than others. It’s a hierarchy of importance. I’ve always called it the cradle to prison pipeline, because impoverished communities that are deprived of resources from birth, you’re going to start developing the trauma responses that lead you into school, where you’re then ignored, or the school is overpopulated and over policed, and then into adulthood, where you’re criminalized and lack the resources to have adequate representation in court. So you get the maximum sentence, and you go into prison and you’re forgotten, where you have to work, by law mandatory that you have a job. If you get a job, ducket, in prison, I was there. I know this for a fact. You get a job, ducket, you’re going to work. If you don’t, you get more time that will keep you in prison essentially forever. If you refuse to work or to the maximum, the maximum exposure of your sentence. So like this, that the cradle of the prison pipeline is what I’ve always referred it to, and it’s based off of a system that deems some people. More important than others, more valuable than others. And it sounds like a simple equation, but it’s very, very complicated and obtuse when you think of the policy work that has gone into play strategically to make sure that this takes place. And the key example that I would pull up, if I was gonna pull up an exact example, is the educational model itself. We have a factory model of education, the factory. That’s literally what it’s called. The factory model of education was taken from European countries during the industrial era and basically reverse engineered to work for the stretch of this country at that time. And the factory model of education pushes kids through in a K through 12 model on a factory line. You are going to learn these things because this is what you need to become, what a good factory worker. So at the end of the industrial era, when factories were closing and things were being changed like, essentially, what do you do? So if you can’t become a good factory worker because you didn’t pick up the things that they wanted you to learn in school, you didn’t fit into their mold well enough, or you weren’t able, physically able to do that, what do you do? Then, if you don’t, if you don’t fall into their mold, then you’re penalized, and you’re penalized to being criminalized through being marginalized and pushed into the prison system, which is now expanded to 2.4 million people in this country, more than any other country in the world. So I feel like that example looking at our education model, why aren’t we teaching emotional intelligence in schools. Why is that not a required curriculum? Because they don’t give a about our emotions. They don’t care the people who are learning that are people who can afford therapy, can afford life coaches, can afford these resources, and that’s typically not within a marginalized community. Those aren’t the resources that are offered.
Crystal
That was going to be my next question to you all is, what would you say to folks who say or listeners who think don’t do the crime if you can’t at the time you hear that a lot, or say that because of the harm that was caused, that folks should be punished because the carceral system is a punitive system. And saying that, you know, incarceration rates are coming down. People are coming home, rehabilitation. It must be working, because that’s that’s still a large belief that a lot of people hold. So as people who are experts in the history and have lived experiences, what would you say to those folks?
Antoinette
Well, I would challenge them to explore where do those beliefs originate? Why do you believe this in the first place? Because, again, as I named, this is the creation of a system of social control. It’s a social construct. And so those ideologies that that you may believe were embedded into you from birth through a plethora of other mechanisms that make up what is called our society. So I would challenge that belief directly. And then I would also, I think, I think a huge piece of the understanding that, quote, unquote, prisons are rehabilitating people. I would empower you to think through in your own experiences either the worst harm that you’ve caused. There is no person walking in this earth that has never caused some form of harm to someone or something, because keep in mind there are things like property crimes as well. Right? A crime is not just a harm caused to another person or done to another person. I would ask you to question and challenge, why are the corporations that are harming our communities at large not in prison? Right? I would, I would challenge all of those beliefs by questioning everything that you have been taught, because that is a lot of the journey that I am on today and in the past few years and continuously is unlearning what those in positions of power with access to media and etc, etc, etc, have conditioned me to believe.
Graham
I love that, because that’s the work I do, and that’s like for me, because I can only go off my own personal transformation and then observe what works for other people. And I believe, like beliefs are everything. So for you to say that right now just meant the world to me, because beliefs are everything, because they’re actually really nothing. They come from nowhere. They were for a purpose at a certain time that we may or may not know, and they served a purpose in that time and as things developed, it oftentimes serves a different purpose. I believe in challenging every belief, beliefs around masculinity, beliefs around carceral system, beliefs around trust in government, beliefs around these things. That’s the root of everything at some point, we were taught all of us at some point or another, we’re taught that punishment works statistically. Is proven not to work statistically. It shows positive and negative reinforcements work. Punishment only works based on fear. So we have a culture that’s navigating a realm of fear. I like to in groups that I work with, lay out an example. So right now, in. So recidivism rates, which means return to prison, rates, are at something like 67% previously, before groups were going into work in prisons, it was at 89% that’s pretty high. So that’s averaging just about nine out of 10 people that get out of prison go back. So we can look at stigmas, how that feeds it. We can look at addiction and things that are untreated, trauma that’s untreated, and that feeds it. But all in all, let’s say somewhere between six and nine people go back. And if you line 10 people who are fresh out of prison up against the wall, you can take between six and nine of them and push them back to prison, and you go, why? Why did these people stay out? Well, the number went down because we’re working to develop emotional, intelligent, understand remorse, because most of us weren’t even taught what empathy is or that we’re supposed to show empathy. So how am I supposed to do that when another person is harmed, care what they’re going through. So you learn these things which should have been learned early in life, afterwards, the number has gone down because of that, the remaining one to two people stay out just based on fear of going back. And that shows you what the system does. So you have a society of people. The only people the only people that are staying out of prison, essentially, are staying out because of fear of going back. That’s not a working system. You’re you’re building a society that’s based on fear of reprisal. That’s a terrible system. So I fully agree and endorse the idea of questioning belief systems. I think every belief, political alignment, religious alignment, all of all of your alignments, everything that you’re like, This is an absolute truth. Look at that shit question it, walk it back and find out where it came from and why you believe it. And our belief around the prison system. If this worked, if the prison system worked, then crime rates would continually be reducing. If policing and jailing worked, then rates would be reducing. Like but we have a reactive policy. We say, Okay, well, I heard this. I call the cops, not me, someone else in a hypothetical, but this person calls the cops, and the cops respond or react to what’s taking place. There is zero preventative measure taken in that oftentimes it doesn’t stop anything from happening. What’s happening has already taken place. So we have to walk back and look at our beliefs around reaction versus prevention, right? Let’s figure out how we can be preventative in our society.
Crystal
I also want to highlight the something that you touched upon, Graham, is the intentionality of the present industrial complex when you come home. Because that was my brother. My brother was incarcerated for five years when he was in his 20s, he came home, built a life, had a daughter, and now he’s been incarcerated for five years. So altogether, he’s been gone for 10 years, and we still have a way to go. But even coming home, right, you are told you do this time because of the harm you caused, yet when you come home, you are labeled a convict, a felon. You were an inmate. You can’t in California, if you are on parole, you can vote, but in most states, you cannot vote. Housing. You cannot get housing. You cannot get jobs. There’s background checks, etc. And one quote that stood out to me, and I’m paraphrasing here, with the book that Antoinette recommended The New Jim Crow was US refusing to help these individuals and creating systems that punishes them and incarcerates them, says more about us than it does about them. And that quote stuck with me. Think about it every single day when we talk about abolition and incarceration,;
Antoinette
I want to acknowledge some of what both of you said. Crystal, what you named in terms of the way in which we react says more about us than about them. And Graham, what you said in terms of looking at where these belief systems or value systems come from, at one point in time, it was permitted for wealthy white people to rape, murder, kill and hold captive Black people simply because they were Black people, to rape, murder and starve indigenous people simply because they are indigenous people, and that was not deemed a crime. So I understand that people believe you do the crime, you do the time, or you caused harm, so now you must be punished and definitely challenge that. But crime in and of itself, where are the origins of these crimes and their creations and the existence of them? Because there are many harms to our communities that are not considered or treated as crimes. And so even that construct has to be challenged. The most critically, if we’re challenging things to understand why we why we have the systems that we have, and why society looks the way it does today.
Crystal
Thank you so much, Graham and Antoinette, for being here today and teaching us the history and also bringing in your own lived experience with this. I think that is crucial for folks to. To understand how we got here and how we’re continuing to fight toward abolition. Now, before we go, is there anything that we miss, or anything else that you want our audience to know about the history and how we got here?
Antoinette
Yeah, I think when we talk about the history, but also where we are today. We have to be hyper critical of state surveillance. It played a critical role in getting us to where we are today, and it’s still today. Is one aspect that essentially is creating a new form of social control. So if you remember at the beginning of this conversation, I said it with air quotes the beginning to the end of slavery, because that was in its current form, but it continues to persist today in other forms, and we are still pushing through the state legislature to get something on the ballot to permanently end that exception that’s in our state’s constitution. Well, while there may be some recent decline in things like prison populations, approximately 3 million people across the nation are on some form of community supervision, like probation and parole, there are some people who have been subjected to lifetime probation or parole people who have spent decades or more under state surveillance, which essentially is the recreation of this system we are working so hard to transform.
Graham
Thank you for pointing that out. I love that if I was to say something we missed, I don’t even know if we missed this, because we touched on it. Antoinette touched on it when she talked about the masses of laws and investigating the roots of it. I think it’s important to reflect on like and I can’t, I can’t quote the source of this statistic. I watched it in a documentary, and I can’t remember the name and I can’t verify its factual basis, but I will say that the documentary told me that the average, the average American breaks three laws every day without even knowing it. And I thought that that was really telling, because we have tomes of penal codes that we haven’t investigated. There’s there’s cities that you can’t like wear hats on Tuesdays and you can’t what? These are still laws that are on the books, right? We haven’t investigated, we haven’t torn down, we haven’t dismantled, and with that, we have all the laws that very intentionally marginalize the majority of our population to the benefit of the minority of the population, to the rich white business owners of our population. And so like we need to investigate those things and continue dismantling these laws and continue trying to reach some level of equity. But really it’s about tearing this system down and building a system that’s based on care that doesn’t harm and that when harm occurs, we have an actual, accountable response. That’s what I’d say, that punishment doesn’t work.
Crystal
For me, one thing I want to highlight is, I want to encourage listeners to pay attention to the stories of the guests this season, absorb everything that Antoinette just mentioned, and even though the words and their stories don’t say intentionally, intentionality, none of us really said that, pay attention to their stories. Go back and listen to the stories of Antoinette and her brothers and just realize just how intentional everything was the prison industrial complex, and just how how traumatic their stories were, and how they’re still dealing with the effects of this system. And you know, go watch their teens. Go read The New Jim Crow. Another great book is Prisons Make us Safe, and 20 Other Myths about Mass Incarceration by Victoria law, so that you can absorb all of this information and begin challenging what the media and the US tell us about prisons.
[Outro]
Graham
You’ve been listening to abolition is for everybody. Be sure to follow @abolitionis_ on Instagram, Facebook, and X for regular updates.
Crystal
To support, please rate and comment wherever you listen to our podcasts. Those 5-star rating help our people find their way to us, so thank you.
[End of Outro]