00:01:42.660So I want to just start off grounding listeners in the theories that underscore much of your
00:01:50.000work. So I'm wondering if you can offer an explanation of what critical geography is
00:01:55.700and explain why it's a necessary lens in a time where space and our understanding of it are
00:02:04.080rapidly changing because of climate change and globalization. Sure. Yeah. I mean, geography is a
00:02:11.720funny thing. And when you say the word geography, I think a lot of people think maps, right? They
00:02:15.920think you're a person who, who, who draws maps or looks at maps. And that's certainly part of it.
00:02:22.460But for me, geography, and particularly critical geography is really the social understanding of
00:02:28.840space. It's a, it's a way of thinking about how human beings, us on the planet produce space and
00:02:37.360are in turn shaped by the spaces that we produce. So, you know, I'm sitting in a, I'm sitting in
00:02:43.220an office in a leafy neighborhood in Toronto the city is a produced space by it's produced by human
00:02:49.280activity ideas historical circumstances this office is produced I've decorated it in a particular way
00:02:55.740I'm sitting in it because of you know the the things that have landed me here are particular
00:03:01.820to my history so it's a produced space and I make meaning out of it and it shapes the kinds of work
00:03:08.760that I can do. For me, critical geography, which I came to sort of late, I mean, I didn't study
00:03:16.360geography in school until I was a graduate student. But critical geography is really
00:03:24.120also a reminder that we have an impact on the world, which sounds both obvious, but also is
00:03:32.400really easy to forget. I mean, you know, the very fact that we're sort of born into a particular
00:03:37.420time and place. The world as it appears to us can feel almost like a given, like, you know,
00:03:43.400it could be no other way. And it's really useful to remind ourselves that no, just because this
00:03:48.980is the world as it appears to us, as we've landed in it, doesn't mean that it's unchangeable. And
00:03:56.120in fact, thinking about how we've produced the spaces that we inhabit is an important reminder
00:04:01.520that we can make them differently. We can produce them differently. We can live in a different and
00:04:06.340imagine and make a different kind of spatial habitat for ourselves and for the species that
00:04:12.560we live with. And I think that that's really important for any kind of socially oriented,
00:04:19.640justice oriented activity or project. But certainly, and most, you know, obviously,
00:04:27.960I think it's essential to thinking about the climate crisis, because the climate crisis is
00:04:34.680itself produced by human beings and can be transformed by human beings and our activities.
00:04:44.800Yeah, thank you for defining some of those nuances for us. And I wanted to bring into
00:04:52.740the conversation your book, Prison Land, and you write, quote, the United States operates the
00:04:58.640largest archipelago of jails and penitentiaries in the world. And yet it can be hard to find the
00:05:05.580prison in today's landscape. Prisons are, after all, by design and definition, spaces of disappearance.
00:05:13.420They disappear, or attempt to disappear, the people inside them. And they are themselves
00:05:18.700increasingly disappeared from the dense social spaces where many of us live and move around.
00:05:24.660Prisons today are built far away from urban areas, often invisible from major thoroughfares, end quote.
00:05:31.240I'm really moved by the way you write, and I'm wondering how does this disappearing of landscapes weaponize land and our relationship to it?
00:05:43.420hmm yeah I mean I think it's I think the prison system is a great example of how thinking
00:05:49.620spatially about the world is also a way of thinking politically about it um so among other
00:05:55.600things we can think about prisons as a space I mean that's why you know I describe it as a space
00:06:01.680and I describe it as a space of disappearance but taking it seriously as a space right it's a
00:06:06.460building. As a mechanism of punishment, the very idea of the prison or the penitentiary was to
00:06:17.700take punishment, state punishment on the so-called criminal or the criminalized person
00:06:26.880and take it out of the public sphere and transform it and move it to a new space,
00:06:34.020a space that would be hidden behind closed doors and high walls. The penitentiary in American life
00:06:41.580is only 200 years old. Before penitentiaries, we didn't have incarceration as our main mechanism
00:06:49.900of criminal justice. We had corporeal punishment, public floggings, things that happened in public
00:06:57.460space. And with the advent of the penitentiary, there was what we can describe as a spatial fix
00:07:03.820for the problem, the so-called problem of crime and criminality. So the idea was that you build
00:07:09.640this edifice, this building, and within it, a series of locked cellular structures and punishment
00:07:17.720itself would be one's removal from their life, one's removal from their home, their family,
00:07:23.380their neighborhood, and their relocation to this closed cell within the penitentiary space.
00:07:30.600And being reminded of the geography of the prison, I think, is really useful in terms
00:07:35.760of thinking about and rethinking the function of not just punishment, but also ideas of
00:07:51.900It was actually Quakers and Enlightenment humanists who championed the idea of the penitentiary
00:07:57.560form, because in their minds, these public corporeal punishments weren't actually having
00:08:04.160the desired effect, the supposed desired effect, which was to rehabilitate people or convince
00:08:11.340them to no longer do these deeds that were considered criminal. And the hope or assumption
00:08:19.680was that the isolation of the prison chamber would offer the criminalized person the requisite
00:08:29.080peace and quiet, strangely enough, to commune with themselves and with God and find the kind
00:08:36.000of requisite transformation necessary to go back out into society. Now, this is a complicated
00:08:43.880history. That's one version of the narrative. And it's the sort of reformed version of the
00:08:48.540narrative, but that was certainly a part of it, right? The idea that actually you couldn't beat
00:08:53.340the criminal out of a person. Instead, you needed to give them sort of just a time out and a time
00:08:58.400away in order to reflect. Now, prisons over the past 200 years have ceased really to have any kind
00:09:08.080of rehabilitative function, even if one imagined that they used to in the first place. And I think
00:09:13.020it's important to think about geography at a number of different scales. So one of the
00:09:18.300interesting things about penitentiaries as a space 200 years ago is that even though punishment was
00:09:24.360taken out of the public sphere and the punished person was relocated to these cells behind closed
00:09:32.340doors and high walls, the prisons themselves were located in urban areas. They tended to serve a
00:09:37.800dual function. So on the one hand, punishment itself was rendered less visible. It didn't
00:09:45.040happen in the public sphere anymore. But people who resided in the city would constantly come up
00:09:53.140against the prison. So these prisons, their outside architecture would be very gothic in
00:10:00.400presentation. There would often be gargoyles built on them. You were meant to see the prison.
00:10:05.540There was a function of visibility that was also really important to how the prison functioned. You were supposed to see the prison and be reminded of what kind of consequence might be, what might be consequent to one's actions if those actions were deemed illegal or criminalized.
00:10:23.560And over the past 30, 40, 50 years, really with the advent of this era that we describe as mass incarceration, when prison rates have dramatically increased, not only in the United States, but elsewhere, we've seen another interesting geographic shift, which is that prisons are no longer really built in dense urban areas.
00:10:46.880and then they're instead built in the industrial areas, rural areas, isolated areas. And I think
00:10:54.220that that's what I mean in this passage about disappearance. There's a way in which prisons
00:10:59.660themselves were meant to disappear state punishment. So you no longer saw it and were
00:11:03.980confronted with it. It instead happened behind these walls and these cellular structures.
00:11:11.040but prisons themselves are actually disappeared in that they're very geographically isolated
00:11:18.140and it's important to ask questions about why that is it's not it's not an accident it's historical
00:11:24.780and I think that there's a few different ways of thinking about it I mean one way is just to think
00:11:29.680about the relationship between mass incarceration and de-industrialization what are the towns and
00:11:35.640the communities that are becoming hosts to these penal institutions, but also what kinds of
00:11:42.780invisibility are actually necessary for the project of mass incarceration to be so accepted
00:11:52.860in a society, right? I mean, this is largely a wild experiment. This is what else I say in this
00:12:00.280passage, you know, no other country in the history of the world has locked up so many human beings.
00:12:04.720and for such long periods of time. And it just seems to me that there is a relationship between
00:12:11.040that fact that we do that to human beings without any kind of real, you know, advantage in terms of
00:12:21.040safety or decreases in violence as a society. And the fact that those places of punishment are
00:12:29.580increasingly invisible, right? So we're not confronting every day the visible fact of the
00:12:35.620incarceration of so many human beings. And in fact, that project that I describe as a project
00:12:43.700of state violence is hidden in lots and lots of different ways. And it's certainly just hidden
00:12:49.920geographically in that, you know, those of us who are not incarcerated are not seeing spaces of
00:12:54.800incarceration in our daily lives um and that's that's a political problem in terms of our our
00:13:02.420ability to um to be faced and confronted with the horrors that might be happening and that we
00:13:11.680yeah it's really fascinating in a disturbing way to consider what our fantasy of prisons
00:13:24.680are and what they're actually doing. And I think there has been so much cultural conditioning
00:13:32.340around this false security that prisons offer society. And it just seems like so much of the
00:13:43.000supposed security we have, at least in the United States, is based on a false stability
00:13:47.400predicated on control of crime and also of nature and the climate
00:13:54.680So I'm wondering, what does this need for control suggest about society? And how might your films, The Hottest August, and The Prison in 12 Landscapes engage with anxieties around the lack of control regular people have over these issues?
00:14:12.040i think that's a great i think that that's a great question because i think we can think about
00:14:17.820the idea of anxiety on a number of different levels right i think we can and we should think
00:14:24.200about who and who's anxious and about what and i think um i think you know we can differentiate
00:14:31.420between the anxieties of those who are profiting from a social order that's predicated on so
00:14:40.360much exploitation and inequality and oppression. And then the anxieties of ordinary everyday people
00:14:51.020that are sort of satisfied, more eased under sort of false pretenses. And I think your use of the
00:15:02.040word fantasy is a really important one, because I do think that there are lots of very good
00:15:09.860reasons to feel anxious every day. I mean, we're doing this interview, um, on, on May 25th,
00:15:16.980you know, I've spent the morning reading about gun violence, uh, against school children in Texas.
00:15:23.380It's, it's, I have a three-year-old. It's absolutely devastating to wake up in the morning
00:15:27.880and think about the kinds of violence that are every day inflicted on, um, on, on our friends
00:15:41.720And so the question is, what do we do with our anxiety?
00:15:45.320And what are the ways in which the anxieties of those
00:15:48.680that might profit from a given social order
00:15:51.520that itself contains so much instability,
00:15:57.440what are the mechanisms by which those anxieties
00:16:00.880get transformed into what some geographers,
00:16:04.820for example, like David Harvey and Ruth Wilson Gilmore call a social or spatial fix. So prisms
00:16:12.800are an example, in Ruth Wilson Gilmore's words, of a spatial fix. And they're a fix for a number
00:16:19.620of different kinds of crises. They're the crises that are really endemic to neoliberal capitalism,
00:16:28.600A capitalism that requires and enshrines racialized inequality at a variety of scales. The instability and crises of many, many people living paycheck to paycheck who are faced with the possibilities of unclean and contaminated water to drink.
00:16:51.760the criminalization, their criminalization for not paying their water bills. This is something
00:16:56.100that I explore in, in, in one of the chapters in the book, when I'm looking at the role of police
00:17:02.900and, and prisons in this, in the state of Michigan and the city of Detroit, where the summer I was
00:17:09.940doing field work there, the city was in the grips of a housing crisis, and there were huge
00:17:17.800water shutoffs and individual families were being criminalized for supposedly, you know,
00:17:25.520stealing water because they were trying to bathe their kids and have water to drink.
00:17:31.100So there's all sorts of instability and crises that's already inscribed in the very rules of
00:17:38.400capitalist economics, right? And economics that requires some people to make endless amounts of
00:17:45.160profit from, um, the resources of, um, of the earth and as quickly as possible, not in a
00:17:54.140sustainable way, but in a unsustainable way. Um, and then also, um, requires the exploitation
00:18:01.840of human beings. So one way in which, um, we can theorize and think about, um, the role of the
00:18:09.160criminal legal system is as a way of producing a class of people, a class of people that we
00:18:16.400come to know as criminalized people, people who come out of the prison system with criminal
00:18:21.540records. This becomes a kind of class of people that, like many other classes of people like,
00:18:28.560you know, so-called undocumented migrants, other people that are, you know, denigrated
00:18:36.680and dehumanized in the popular imagination, whose status on the lowest rungs of the social order
00:18:46.460is considered somehow natural, right? Somehow inevitable, somehow their fault, rather than
00:18:53.660actually produced by the inequities of the capitalist system. So, I mean, I think that,
00:19:02.540yeah, we can think about the prison system, and we should think about the prison system
00:19:06.520not so much as a product of a criminal justice system or product of crime and criminality,
00:19:13.560but actually as a manifestation of the anxieties of a capitalist state and a capitalist class
00:19:19.820who need and require to continue, you know, activities of exploitation that produce inequality
00:19:29.920and produce the instabilities that are intended to inequality.
00:19:36.580I mean, I think inequality is unstable because human beings want and know injustice in their
00:19:43.000They know and want that it's not right to commodify water, to contaminate water, to
00:19:49.800criminalize people for trying to feed their families, to treat some people as less than
00:19:56.080human and some people as more than human.
00:19:58.220And I think the natural instinct of most people in the face of injustice, in the face of gross amounts of inequality, is to stand up for themselves. I mean, I think that's why we live in a world of ongoing social movements as well.
00:20:13.160And the function of a one function of the criminal legal system and the prison industrial complex is, in fact, to to legitimize state violence and control, social control on a particular class of people.
00:20:31.420So, you know, I could go on about this, but I think that the last thing I should say is just that there's a way in which living in the era of the climate crises is like living and breathing anxiety every day.
00:20:49.200I don't know if this is how you feel, but it's certainly how I feel, right? And I'm raising a daughter in this world and imagining, like, how do we think about, how do we imagine living in this world when the future itself feels unstable, even unlikely sometimes?
00:21:08.360How does that, how does the anxiety of that, of, you know, reconciling ourselves to that, what does it produce? And I think it can, we can choose to let it lead us in a few different directions. Certainly the anxieties of living in such a world can produce the desire to blame some people and not others.
00:21:29.900I think that that's why some narratives and vocabularies that that have us, you know, demonizing some people are saying, you know, you're it's this group of people that are at fault or it's this group of people that are that are taking all the resources.
00:21:44.340that's why they can have such traction in anxious times. But I think and hope that we can also
00:21:50.000translate our anxieties into a commitment to live in different ways and to band together to find
00:21:57.500our power from different sources. And I think that that's why in anxious times, you also see
00:22:04.480a resurgence in all kinds of social movements and social coalitions, including coalitions between
00:22:10.540prisoner rights advocates and climate crisis advocates and activists.
00:23:33.960oh there's so much there in your response and there's this thought that's coming up for me
00:23:42.900around just in the individualized realities of a neoliberal world i'm wondering how current
00:23:52.080conversations around crime and climate change place emphasis on controlling the individual's
00:23:58.060actions and yeah how much pressure can we really put on the individual yeah that's a that's a great
00:24:06.760question there's a there's a um an anthropologist who i like um uh alan feldman who described arrest
00:24:15.820you know like police arrest once as the art of individualizing disorder and i have often thought
00:24:21.580about that not just in the realm of again the criminal legal system but in all walks of life
00:24:26.720So a few years ago, I made this film, The Hottest August, which, you know, the logline of the film is a film about climate change, just a film about climate change disguised as a portrait of collective anxiety.
00:24:44.780and um i set out to just explore the city of new york over the course of one month not to
00:24:55.700offer a kind of take on the question does climate change exist or does it not change
00:25:02.760is it is it terrible or is it not so terrible because i feel like those questions have already
00:25:08.100been answered, but rather to explore this question you're asking of how we live and metabolize our
00:25:15.340own anxieties and how those anxieties interact with the narratives that are dominant in our
00:25:23.860world, you know, that come to us through our media and our politicians and so on. And I set out to
00:25:31.260really, you know, ask a very honest question, which is, I feel like a fundamental question,
00:25:36.880And then one that I still ask every day, which is how how is it that we can continue to sort of slow walk our way into our own extinction?
00:25:45.260Like why is does it seem like climate the climate crisis is failing to produce action on a on a mass level?
00:25:53.340And I think this this problem of individualization is really at the heart of it.
00:25:59.320So one of the things I did in this film was I just I just engaged in a series of kind of spontaneous conversations with people.
00:26:06.660I didn't even bring up the climate crisis. I would, you know, tap people on the shoulder and I'd say, hi, I'm making this film. It's made up of just conversations with ordinary people in public space. And I'm wondering how you're doing, what you're thinking about, how you're thinking about the future.
00:26:20.960and a couple of things surprised me one is that I think I expected people to express a lot of
00:26:28.480negativity and cynicism about the future you know to say kind of explicitly oh god I feel terrible
00:26:34.380things are really bad um and instead I what I encountered often was a kind of dual move where
00:26:41.440someone would say oh yeah I'm having a really hard week you know I served an eviction notice
00:26:47.100and I need to find a new place to live and I can't afford a new place to live, or I'm
00:26:51.880dealing with this trouble or that trouble with my employer, all sorts of ordinary, but
00:26:57.680very common, you know, struggles, especially for those living in an expensive city.
00:27:05.520But in the, in the, almost the next breath, they would say, but it's going to be fine.
00:27:13.260I'm going to turn things around for myself.
00:27:14.980and almost always they sort of projected their own um optimism about how things would go
00:27:22.860in totally individual terms you know I will make a better decision I will a good thing will happen
00:27:29.380to me I will be lucky in this way and there was a kind of for me anyways a feeling of real tragedy
00:27:36.320in that um because it it rhymed and it resonated with this other narrative that I kept encountering
00:27:43.140I mean, I was making this film in the summer of 2017. Trump was in office. There was a lot. I mean, there still is, but there was certainly then a lot of of racist, you know, immigrants scapegoating, talk about hordes of migrants at the border.
00:28:00.080this is also the summer of the racist white supremacist attack in Charlottesville and on
00:28:09.380occasion I would also get people talking about how you know certain people were stealing jobs
00:28:15.120or certain people were were were getting all the resources and it seemed to me and it still does
00:28:22.080that you know when we're afraid as there's every reason to be there's lots of reasons to be afraid
00:28:28.160But when we're afraid, and yet, and at the same time, convinced by all the kind of dominant narratives, that the world is just composed of individuals, maybe acting, you know, within families, that those are the only units that matter.
00:28:46.400um then you then the sort of um all one's left with is the is the feeling that like
00:28:55.260that either things are totally hopeless or that the only hope that might be possible for them
00:29:02.120is to decide how how they as an individual are gonna you know get what they need and everyone
00:29:09.620else be damned. And I think that, I think that that tragedy is especially clear in the era of
00:29:17.240the climate crises, because, I mean, if there's anything that tells us that there's no future in
00:29:23.260aloneness, it's the specter of planetary collapse, right? It is the very notion of ecosystem. It's
00:29:30.940the very notion of planetary interdependence. That's, we live on a planet, we are dependent
00:29:37.300on the trees. The trees are dependent on the birds. The birds are dependent on the insects.
00:29:42.420It all goes round. We know that. And certainly, people are interdependent on each other.
00:29:53.880And there's just no individual way of getting out of this crisis. The crisis is too large.
00:30:00.100And in fact, individuality, I'd argue, is what got us into the crisis, is the individual desire
00:30:05.820for profit, for exploitation at all costs, an inability to think sustainably about
00:30:13.600intergenerationality, you know, a desire of some to plunder the earth's resources for their own
00:30:20.240gain. That's the opposite of thinking through the lens of belonging to an ecosystem. And I'd argue
00:30:29.340that the idea of society is a way of thinking about ecosystem, right? Margaret Thatcher, the
00:30:35.000famous British prime minister who, you know, was contemporaries with Ronald Reagan in the 80s
00:30:43.960and considered the sort of one of the main architects of a kind of like era of neoliberalism.
00:30:50.300She's very famous for saying this thing, which was, there's no such thing as society. There's
00:30:58.360only individuals and their families. And the reason she said that was because she was engaged
00:31:04.260in a fulsome attack on all sorts of public resources, public housing, nationalized industry,
00:31:11.320unions, all these societal forms that had at their basis the idea of people taking care of each
00:31:17.720other, there being such a thing as a public, there being such a thing as a union, as a social
00:31:22.860formation. And she was attacking those institutions in order to privatize all these resources. And0.86
00:31:30.320along with that project was the necessity of convincing people that not to believe in such
00:31:37.400a thing as society, only to believe in the individual. And I think that that is, you know,
00:31:43.160hearing all these people over the course of this one month in New York want to be optimistic about
00:31:51.560the future, but have no other vocabulary for being optimistic other than the hope or desire
00:31:57.380or fantasy that they, as an individual, will somehow be the lucky one that gets through,
00:32:02.380I found and still find very devastating, because I really do believe there's, you know, there's a,
00:32:11.280what's been lost is the commons, not just as a way of thinking about resources, but also a way
00:32:18.140of thinking about how we belong to each other. That's really beautiful, how we belong to each
00:32:25.140other. Yeah. I think that that sentiment has definitely been lost on many of us because of
00:32:32.260the divisiveness of our conditioning of the media. Yeah. I feel like it's very much by design
00:32:40.880that we feel like we don't belong to each other. And yeah, it's like a divide and conquer tactic
00:32:48.240to, I think, for those who have power to stay in power and to centralize that power for themselves.
00:32:59.780And yeah. Yeah. And can I just say, you know, I think that this is why I think it's really
00:33:04.880important to think about these things that often get treated separate, like the climate crisis and
00:33:10.180mass incarceration together. Because actually, when you think about, okay, how are people divided?
00:33:15.600What are the actual mechanisms? What is the actual work being done to describe and carve out, you know, the idea of difference and the idea that there are some people that are deserving and some people that are not deserving?
00:33:31.020Well, I think that the language of criminality is actually one of the most powerful mechanisms for that, you know, because it's so naturalized.
00:33:38.220You know, even I, you know, I imagine your listeners hearing me and thinking, well, yeah, if someone's a criminal, if someone's done a criminal act, they, they are a different, you know, in a different category, they are less deserving.
00:33:49.700But I think we should, I think it's so important to be critical of that. I mean, especially when we recognize certain things about how the criminal justice system works, right? When we recognize the fact that the majority of people inside prisons and jails are poor people, right?
00:34:05.880When we think about how the degree to which people of color and African-Americans are hyper incarcerated and think about this overlap between criminality, the mechanisms of criminalization and mechanisms of racialization.0.58
00:34:23.960And we think about just sort of the, you know, that as one among many other kinds of projects in which we as a society are somehow convinced that there are people that are deserving and undeserving.
00:34:40.680And what does it, you know, what gets, what kinds of harm get naturalized as being acceptable when you make those kinds of demarcations?
00:34:49.720And even though it's really challenging for people to say to, you know, recognize, I mean, not even just through the lens of innocence and guilty, not just to say, oh, there's lots of people inside prisons and jails who are who are innocent to even let go of that binary and say even people who did the thing that got them criminalized, you know, maybe stole something.
00:35:10.120Well, you know, who else is stealing all the time? Employers are stealing all the time. You could argue that, you know, mining companies are stealing all the time. And yet that's not rendered illegal. But stealing something from a grocery store to feed your kid is.
00:35:26.540And so we have this mechanism that is in some ways, you know, if we look at it sideways, we can see it as both sort of arbitrary, but also historically produced in and functioning to uphold systems of inequality.
00:35:50.880And I think that if we task ourselves with actually trying to think capaciously about how those mechanisms of division and demarcation work and try and unthink them, you know, again, like it's so arbitrary to decide that there's, you know, there's, you know, there's such a thing as an illegal migrant and a legal migrant or an undocumented migrant.
00:36:18.340you know what's the difference between an expat and a and an immigrant and yet we we we hold these
00:36:24.740distinctions as if they're as if they're natural um rather than again socially produced and um1.00
00:36:33.060and necessary to break down i'm so with you especially in terms of what is stealing the
00:36:42.460mining companies or the Enrons or the corporations, they're stealing all the time or they're getting
00:36:49.680major fines for polluting and never paying. And they're completely able to destroy the earth
00:36:57.380and human communities without any consequences, which is so much more massive than somebody
00:37:04.920going into a convenience store and even stealing something that seems big or going into a
00:37:13.600department store and stealing even thousands of dollars I mean that's nothing in comparison
00:37:18.660to what is being stolen from the earth and from communities every day wage slavery I mean like
00:37:26.680the list goes on and on and on it's actually something intellectual property right patents
00:37:30.760Right. Yes. How do we not think about like the fact that the vaccine patents are held by private companies, you know, even while public money, which is to say our tax dollars, you know, underwrote all that science.
00:37:45.140Right. Like what is that if not theft? But yet in the public imaginary, it doesn't get considered that that way because the idea of theft is reserved for individual action, usually by by poor people.
00:37:59.900And I think that that's precisely why we need to turn these narratives on their head.
00:38:04.540Yeah, the social constructs are really, oh, they can, yeah, I can really get frustrated
00:39:10.080and instead the film takes place through and across 12 discrete places um in which
00:39:19.200you know the audience is sort of tasked with figuring out how is this how is the prison in
00:39:27.400this space right the title says it all there's a prison in 12 landscapes and you're landed in this
00:39:33.000place that is not a penitentiary or a jail and asks like how is the prison functioning in this
00:39:37.840place. And the project, I mean, the idea came from a lot of thinking and activism around the
00:39:48.840contemporary criminal legal system and the prison industrial complex, and was informed by the work
00:39:57.180of a lot of prison abolitionists who, among other things, ask us and invite us to think about the
00:40:03.860prison as a system, right? The prison, again, not just as a building or an edifice over there,
00:40:11.140but as a system, an institution, a public institution that is very much tied up with
00:40:21.260all sorts of other systems and institutions. And that's a sort of interesting challenge for
00:40:29.300someone who's working like I am in a visual media I'm a filmmaker I work through images
00:40:34.640and so I was interested in a couple of things I was interested in on the one hand and just
00:40:40.020the fact that I don't find a lot of prison documentaries to be all that surprising or
00:40:48.900compelling I mean I think there's some really powerful you know prison documentaries that
00:40:53.260showcase the plight of an individual who's facing an injustice of some kind. They're often
00:41:00.260innocence narratives. And they can be absolutely devastating and heart-wrenching and are important
00:41:07.060in that way. But there's a kind of sameness to a lot of prison documentaries that I've found
00:41:12.360frustrating over the years. And part of it is that I've questioned the amount of work they can do,
00:41:17.440even when they have really good sort of social justice convictions, because they tend to, again,
00:41:25.780sort of showcase the system gone wrong, but don't help us make it, you know, don't really help us
00:41:31.100understand why the system functions the way it does in the first place. So you get a lot of kind
00:41:36.240of bad apple takeaways from these films, like it was a bad prosecutor, it was bad cops, they
00:41:42.940They misused the evidence and the wrong person landed in jail. And so I tasked myself with making a film, not only in which we wouldn't see a prison, because I wanted, again, to think about the prison not as a building, but as a system that organizes, you know, is very, is implicated in how, like, the entire social structure of America is organized, but also a film about the prison system in which we wouldn't talk about crime, you know.
00:42:12.360and if we talk about crime at all, it's to put crime in quotations. And this, this very much
00:42:16.560relates to, you know, the, the conversation we were just having in which actually, if you think
00:42:21.900about it carefully as, as sort of naturalized as the language of crime sounds like, of course,
00:42:28.980murder is a crime. Of course, rape is a crime. They're bad things. How else would we recognize
00:42:33.700them as a society as bad things? Actual crime as a sort of social legal construct
00:42:40.000is very, is not just socially produced, but is very particular, right? There are things that
00:42:47.960get called crimes and there are things that are not called crimes. There are things that used to
00:42:51.300be called crimes, but are no longer called crimes. You know, interracial marriage used to be called
00:42:56.040a crime. It's no longer called a crime in most places. You know, sex between consenting adults
00:43:06.780of the same sex used to be called a crime, it's no longer called a crime. So there's lots of ways
00:43:10.640and reasons that we can put the idea of crime in quotations in order to suggest that it's a
00:43:16.180malleable construct, that it is as much to do with rules of the social order as it is anything else.
00:43:24.360But also to think about how it can be very misleading in terms of this basic question of
00:43:31.200asking again, why do we put, why do we think taking people away from their homes and communities
00:43:40.700and putting them inside cells for long periods of time is going to help us solve endemic issues of
00:43:49.220harm and violence in society? And also how does it reify or calcify ideas of what counts as harm
00:43:57.180and violence and what doesn't count as harm and violence. So I wanted to do two things. I wanted
00:44:01.900to make a film about the prison system in which we never saw a prison. And I wanted to make a film
00:44:05.600about the prison system in which we didn't talk about crime. And, um, and I think that that's what
00:44:12.520I, what I try and do because, you know, I think that as you explore the film, you know, we start
00:44:18.280in the film, we start on a bus. Um, it looks like an ordinary bus. It's a night bus. Um,
00:44:23.860and we discover it's taking a group of mostly women of color to a prison far away to visit
00:44:31.660their loved ones. We start there. We spend some time in the suburbs of St. Louis, where people
00:44:38.960are in a long lineup paying, you know, fines for sort of ridiculous poverty ordinances, like not
00:44:47.200putting their trash can lids on correctly, and then landing in jail when they can't pay their
00:44:51.560fines because they're low-wage workers, to the coal fields of Appalachia, where there's
00:45:00.240a building spree right now of penitentiaries, many of them being built on top of decommissioned
00:45:05.760coal mines, as the economy of central Appalachia is transformed from a coal economy to a bright
00:45:15.440new future in prisons. And so the themes that emerge are not actually about crime and violence
00:45:24.320and criminality and innocence and guilt, but are about things that are just really fundamental to
00:45:31.100the organization of everyday life, like jobs. What we discover in Appalachia is that not only
00:45:38.480are prisons being built on top of decommissioned coal mines, but the reason that most people in
00:45:43.240these towns want a prison to come to their towns is because they're unemployed and they're being
00:45:47.540promised good jobs as prison guards. Often those, those desires are going unfulfilled. Those promises
00:45:54.480are going unfulfilled. Those jobs aren't actually good paying jobs, but the, again, talk about
00:45:59.500anxiety and about fantasy, the fantasy that there could be another, um, there could be a future for
00:46:07.920them and their families has been hitched to the promise of a of a carceral building spree and so
00:46:14.500the the the hope and like you know constructing a prison film made out of scenes like that is that
00:46:20.440we're actually better equipped to have an abolitionist imagination because abolition
00:46:25.000isn't just about or even very much about just um you know closing down these spaces of confinement
00:46:32.920but it's about reimagining what's possible what kind of what kinds of things that we can can we
00:46:39.600build if we understand how prisons function what they're actually do what they're there to fix
00:46:45.200then we're better equipped to imagine alternatives to them so if we understand that prisons are being
00:46:51.140built in Appalachian as a as a job creation strategy for unemployed coal miners then actually0.64
00:46:57.960the abolitionist alternative becomes not that hard, right? It's just don't build more prisons,
00:47:04.960build something else that will give people good jobs, right? It could be wind farms. It could be
00:47:10.900solar panel, panel factories. It could be, you know, wonderful, like national parks and everyone
00:47:17.100gets trained as, as park rangers there. It could be not jobs at all. It could be like a more robust,
00:47:23.660social wage and free daycare and free school so that people don't have to just sell their
00:47:32.260labor all the time in order to pay their bills. So there's just lots and lots of ways to imagine
00:47:36.460possibility in these places where prisons are being built if we understand what prisons are
00:47:41.620actually about in the first place. And so long as we're sort of unable to think past this narrative
00:47:47.420that prisons exist because we're all in imminent danger and because the world is rife with
00:47:52.840interpersonal violence and harm and bad people, the only thing we can do with bad people is put
00:47:58.380them in jails. As long as we're sort of tied and married to that narrative, then we can't imagine
00:48:04.080alternatives. And we have to, I mean, the hope for that film is that it would de-center that
00:48:12.820narrative from our imagination of what prisons are even about, where else we can see carceral
00:48:20.260logics operating, and what alternatives we might imagine for these landscapes.
00:48:24.260You keep telling me to climb this ladder
00:50:24.940I mean, I'll say I'll speak personally.
00:50:27.620You know, I've been involved in activism in one way or another, often, but poorly.
00:50:35.460I'm not a very good organizer, actually.
00:50:37.040There are people that are much better activists than me.
00:50:39.740But I've been at least, you know, proximate to social movements since I was a teenager. And I think it's important to admit that I do that not just out of principle and out of belief, but also as a way of fighting my own misanthropy.
00:50:57.780you know as you say it's a way it's an antidepressant for me um because there is so
00:51:04.960much reason in this world i mean like i said this morning the news is devastating um there's so much
00:51:11.820reason to feel despair and hopeless the the stories of suffering are unending they're unending you
00:51:19.960know i have a three-year-old daughter will watch will watch um blue planet and and look at all of
00:51:26.580these amazing species. And I think about like the world in which we humans are just needlessly
00:51:31.980rendering them extinct by making the oceans inhabitable. And it makes me hate myself. It
00:51:44.060makes me hate humans. It makes me want to give into this narrative that like actually maybe the
00:51:48.900best thing that could happen to the world is if humans just cease to exist. And I think it's
00:51:55.100really important to fight that because that that kind of nihilism just produces more violence um
00:52:00.960and the fact is that we do live on this world and we have to we you know we're living here we have
00:52:06.960to we have to continue living here and um and the fact that we were capable of producing this mess
00:52:15.180means that we're capable of of producing something else and that gives me faith and for me the reason
00:52:22.060to stay close to social movements, and I have certainly found this, especially actually in
00:52:30.240movements for prisoner rights, is that there's such an important reminder that people are
00:52:40.160intolerant of injustice and people will make enormous sacrifice for themselves and for each
00:52:47.040other to live in a better way. I mean, the prisoner rights movement in the United States
00:52:53.420is not filled with intellectuals and armchair activists. It's led by mothers. It's led by
00:53:01.080women. It's led by people who are tasked with doing care work all the time. I spend a lot of0.99
00:53:08.540time with people who, again, mostly women, who take these long bus rides from New York City to
00:53:14.480the something like 54 penitentiaries that are located in remote areas, upstate New York.
00:53:20.560And they'll take these long bus rides for 10, 12, 14 hours, not sleeping all night. Even, you know,
00:53:27.460women in their seventies and their eighties, mothers with young children will take these0.93
00:53:31.520rides. And one of the things I heard over and over again from many of these women was,
00:53:36.260I, you know, I'm my, I'm my son's only visitor. I'm my brother's only visitor. You know,
00:53:42.820I need to show those guards that this person is loved. You know, if that, if, if the guard knows
00:53:48.620that this person is loved, they'll bother him less. So they see their work as like the work
00:53:53.560of keeping their loved ones alive. And that is an important form of activism. And they're the ones
00:53:59.520who have been on the forefront of, of actually, you know, doing the organizing work of trying to
00:54:06.920get their loved ones free and and being close to that kind of freedom struggle I mean it's it's
00:54:13.560intoxicating in its um in its like antidote to all to misanthropy it's like it's like the opposite
00:54:22.780of waking up in the in the morning and reading the news about how horrible human beings are to
00:54:28.100each other and to the planet it's like tremendous what people will do for each other right um I'm
00:54:34.280making I'm making a film right now following the a small group of workers who's been working at the
00:54:41.580an Amazon fulfillment center in Staten Island and I've been following them for about 14 months as
00:54:48.940they you know this is a group of five six seven people who are doing 10 and 12 hour shifts in a
00:54:55.080warehouse day in and day and night and they've been organizing for an entire year to try and
00:55:00.320start a union. And in April, they were successful. They formed the very first unionized workplace
00:55:06.380of an Amazon facility in all of America. And they did that while everybody around them told them
00:55:11.740they couldn't, you know, nobody believed in them, no politicians, no other organized unions.
00:55:19.440And they did it, you know, because what else could they do? They understood that there are
00:55:26.560things were fucked up. They understood that it's not okay for the company not to let them take0.97
00:55:33.020time off when they're showing symptoms of COVID during a pandemic in which people are dying.
00:55:38.120They understood that they deserve better. And so even while there's all this reason to be cynical
00:55:47.240about how selfish people can be and how willing people seem to be to hurt each other and to try
00:55:54.560and get ahead I think that there's just as much evidence and actually if we if we know how to look
00:55:59.040for it much more evidence of how how how um unstoppable people are in their quest to feel
00:56:10.740dignity for themselves and to um live a livable life and I think that that's kind of what's at
00:56:18.340the crux of all of these struggles the struggle for the climate crises the struggle for labor
00:56:22.680rights, the struggle for prisoner rights is an understanding that, um, that, that life as it is,
00:56:29.300is unbearable and unlivable. Um, and that the only way to create the conditions for a livable
00:56:37.420life, a life when people, where people can take care of each other, can touch each other, can feed
00:56:42.320themselves, can be well, um, requires people banding together in struggle. And that for me
00:56:51.500is not just good work for intellectual reasons,
00:56:55.760but it's good work for spiritual reasons.
00:56:57.800It's the only way I wake up in the morning
00:56:59.700and feel okay about the day is to remind myself
00:57:02.060and to stay close to the people that are doing that work.
00:57:05.320Because it can seem like it's against all odds, right?
00:57:08.920Again, it can seem almost unreasonable at times,
00:57:11.240but it's the fact of, it's the evidence of ordinary people
00:57:15.160dealing with tremendous adversity who are doing this work
00:57:18.980that offers the reminder that that the work is is necessary and can be successful that's the
00:57:26.400other lesson of history that's the other lesson of geography of understanding how people produce
00:57:31.220space you know Rosa Parks on the bus the bus is a produced space and when she refused to get up
00:57:38.400she's changing the meaning of that space and changing history
00:57:43.780such a beautiful response thank you for that
00:57:49.520in prison land you write quote the most salient organizing features of the prison regime as found
00:58:00.380in detroit's downtown real estate corridor in eastern kentucky's impoverished coal fields for
00:58:05.420example have to do with property wage labor and race it is through the production and cognition0.88
00:58:12.540of those social relations rather than any overwhelming drive to punish that the carceral
00:58:18.280order is reproduced, end quote. And I'm wondering, how does structuring the world according to the
00:58:28.760strict lines of private property, wage labor, and race, in turn structures bodies born into that
00:58:35.600world. And how do we reproduce these values as selves within these systems? Yeah. I mean,
00:58:44.720it's very, it's very challenging, right? It's, it's like, how do you contest the things that
00:58:50.340are actually, that are, that are actually the law of the land? You know, it's like one thing
00:58:57.320to remind ourselves, oh, this is socially produced, race is socially produced, private property is
00:59:01.840socially produced, it's another thing to actually challenge it because it's how the world goes
00:59:06.080around. I mean, something I, you know, I work in documentary, so I, and I teach, so I'm often
00:59:10.800talking to my students about, you know, what is reality? What is truth? How do we represent it?
00:59:16.840And one of the examples I use as a sort of example, a benign example of how things are
00:59:23.180socially produced and real at the same time is the idea of six o'clock. So it's like,
00:59:28.520what is six o'clock is it primordial is it um is it natural is it inevitable no it's it's made
00:59:37.280by human beings it's a it's a part of a social clock you know um that's given meaning by the
00:59:44.060working day and yet even though it's socially constructed we can't just individually decide
00:59:51.400we're going to live without it i'm not going to just individually say like okay six o'clock it's
00:59:56.000meaningless to me, I'm going to live without, you know, without time. And I think the same is true
01:00:00.020for much less benign social constructions like race, and private property, and even wage labor,
01:00:07.440right? So wage labor, what does that mean? It means it's not just like work, you know, activity,
01:00:13.820toil on the land, but it's the parceling out of the activity of the human body into time porceles
01:00:21.600that become sellable. You know, I'm, I, my, my toil is available for a wage of X amount,
01:00:30.860depending on my status within the social system. Oh, it's, you know, I'm only worth $15 an hour,
01:00:36.440or my labor is worth $200 an hour, depending on what college I went to, depending on
01:00:41.400how I'm socially perceived, depending on what I'm wearing. So, you know, it's very,
01:00:47.020I think it's individually very hard to challenge these constructions because they do, they are just
01:00:53.700part of how the world works. But I think it's really, I think it's really important to be
01:01:01.500radical with our demands, you know, and I think that this is the other thing that I've learned
01:01:06.760from my time in the prison abolition movement is that one can be practical and utopian in one's
01:01:14.840demands at the same time. So one can be part of a labor campaign for an increased minimum wage,
01:01:23.460say it's not, it's, one can't live, one can't feed their family on $12 an hour, one needs $20 an
01:01:32.000hour, one can fight for an increased minimum wage, and also make them the important and radical
01:01:38.000demand that we not have to sell our labor in order to be able to be alive, you know, that
01:01:47.420debt should be abolished, that schools should be free, that housing should be free, that good food
01:01:56.120be available. You know, those are, you know, those are ways of both sort of recognizing that wage
01:02:04.680labor organizes the world and we need to press upon its limits in order to make life more
01:02:09.880livable for a lot of people, but also at the same time recognize because it's a social construct
01:02:14.880that upholds a social order predicated on inequality, inequality that's often enshrined
01:02:22.760in racial terms, we should and can demand more. Because again, there's no reason that
01:02:28.260we should have to live in a world in which you sell your labor power in order to buy the
01:02:33.960commodities that are necessary to live you know um imagine if you know imagine if you didn't have
01:02:40.300to pay rent you know what what might be possible um housing should be free it's a it's a human
01:02:46.660right and i think that that's yeah i think that that we can sort of apply that thinking to to all
01:02:51.540sorts of things um including yeah again private property i mean i think it's i think it's i think
01:03:00.940it's been really inspiring over the past few years to see young people have um a kind of a
01:03:07.920you know an imagination a utopian imagination to say things like to be able to imagine things like
01:03:14.860defunding the police right because that's not just a project in like canceling something like
01:03:20.520no no police it's also a project in in recognizing that the resources that go to
01:03:28.000paying for the police are part of the what's called the social wage or you know the the public
01:03:34.620commons those are our resources we paid we pay municipal um budgets out of our tax money
01:03:43.540and exploitation of of resources that should be understood as belonging socially to all of us
01:03:51.000and if they're not used to fund police then they could be used for something else like again
01:03:56.740free schools free transit free breakfast programs things that make life livable um and i think that
01:04:03.780as part of those demands i've especially in the past few years heard a lot of young people who
01:04:08.060are involved in in movements really decry the privatization of all commodities and say no
01:04:14.180these things shouldn't be shouldn't be privatized you know um they should be you know resources
01:04:20.320should be resources should be held in common and once they're held in common i mean again this is
01:04:25.560what we learn this is what we learn from indigenous communities and and and historical
01:04:32.580colonized people who who saw their resources stolen from them is that when resources are
01:04:42.420understood as belonging in common then it also enables a relationship to them of care and of
01:04:49.520stewardship. And that's a different way of thinking about our relationship to a good. I mean, I think
01:04:56.100that the other function of private property isn't just to say this belongs to you and can be
01:05:02.460policed accordingly, but it's also defines the type of relationship one has to that resource.
01:05:07.900You know, I think it's not a coincidence that resources need to be privatized in order to be
01:05:14.400fully exploited in the capitalist sense. And that's why we have this, um, crises of, uh, fossil fuels
01:05:23.000and, um, uh, and, and, uh, uh, contamination and pollution. Um, if we, if we didn't have that kind
01:05:33.400of relationship, if we said, you know, we don't have a property relationship to these resources,
01:05:38.000we have a, uh, a relationship of care and of stewardship, then it would enable a different
01:05:43.500way of thinking about how those resources are to be used and to be adjudicated, not just across
01:05:50.280geography, but also across time, which of course is essential to thinking about planetary
01:05:56.520sustainability and the planet existing at all. I'm not sure that answered your question. I feel
01:06:03.640like I went a little bit off topic there, but there's a lot to say. No, it's all good. And
01:06:09.520I appreciate all of the riffs and tangents because it's all connected and it helps us
01:06:15.360understand a bit deeper these very complicated matters so yeah I'm so appreciative of you Brett
01:06:22.760thank you for your time today on this this episode with us and for all of your work
01:06:28.340it's really deep and important and I think it will definitely shake some of those listening
01:06:36.500as it has me. So thank you so much. Thank you. It's, it's been really wonderful to be in
01:06:42.540conversation and it's made me feel more hopeful on what started out as a, as a very hard day and
01:06:49.400a hard morning. Um, so thank you so much for, for being in, inviting me to be in conversation with
01:06:54.460you. Thank you for listening to this episode of for the wild podcast. The music you heard today