00:02:06.020Well, Jackie, I'd like to begin by discussing the function of the carceral state amidst late-stage
00:02:11.480capitalism. In carceral capitalism, you specifically cite predatory lending and parasitic governance
00:02:18.120as areas that we must give our attention to if we want to understand this beast.
00:02:23.040And I'd like to really focus on what you describe as financial states of exception,
00:02:27.900which as I understand it, are instances in which indebted local governments
00:02:32.200authorize austerity measures while relying on predatory techniques
00:02:36.760through policing and incarceration to fill revenue gaps.
00:02:40.840And I'm especially interested in starting at this point
00:02:44.280because in the past couple of months, we have seen so many states, cities, and towns begin to
00:02:50.220declare financial deficits in response to the impacts of COVID-19. So can you talk about
00:02:55.800previous historical instances of predatory behavior during times of debt and what this
00:03:01.580time might reveal about our immediate future as it relates to the carceral state? Why is it that
00:03:07.960while state and local governments are already looking to cut early education, senior care,
00:03:13.000disability services, etc., they're not touching money allocated for incarceration?
00:03:18.520Yeah, so this is a really great question and one that is very important to think about
00:03:25.980in this particular moment. And this is something that I've been thinking about
00:03:32.060as various stimulus bills are being debated, and the most recent one is geared towards providing
00:03:41.300money to states and municipalities, because we see that the loss in tax revenue and also
00:03:50.360the cost of managing the coronavirus has forced municipalities and states to go into debt.
00:03:58.980And in some places, they were already heavily indebted, so it just exacerbated the crisis.
00:04:05.800So in late May, the Democrats proposed a bill that was geared primarily towards providing funding to states and municipalities.
00:04:19.800And this is supposed to give them liquidity so they can maintain their operations without having to make substantial cuts to remain solvent.
00:04:30.100And this is something that the Republicans are very reluctant to pass. So Mitch McConnell actually said, let the states go bankrupt, which actually is not allowed in our bankruptcy code.
00:04:45.860municipalities can file for bankruptcy, but states can't. And so this is creating a situation
00:04:53.260where states and municipalities are going to have to make cuts if the federal government doesn't
00:05:02.340provide them substantial financial backing. The situation is quite paradoxical because
00:05:09.160As someone who believes in investment in the welfare state, in public services, in health care, I'm very resistant to the lack of support for municipalities and states.
00:05:29.480You know, higher ed when it comes to state budgets is often the first area to be slashed.
00:05:36.500So this is why I think we need to provide funding to local governments. But the paradox is that that money will often go towards expanding prisons and police, as opposed to providing social services. So this is no accident. This is kind of how the state has been built since the 70s.
00:06:01.140so if we want to think more historically about the situation starting in the late 70s
00:06:08.140and this is after there was a financial crisis that began in 1973 stagflation they call it or
00:06:17.120oil shocks and yeah the money was inflated also but what happened was
00:06:23.860there was a simultaneous buildup of the carceral state that came with a reduction in spending for
00:06:35.420things like disability and anti-poverty programs. Spending for health care has increased over time
00:06:46.580because we have an aging population, Medicare has been expanded, but there's really been
00:06:54.080dramatic reductions in other areas of the social safety net. And so what I'm worried about in this
00:07:01.940moment that we're in right now is that when the municipalities and the states are suffering
00:07:11.000financially, they're just going to resort to extracting from poor people. Because, you know,
00:07:18.860politically, Wall Street controls the political apparatus. And it's more convenient for them to
00:07:29.900squeeze the people on the bottom rather than tax the people on the top. And so this is what happened
00:07:37.760across the country, and in particular in the Midwest and the South, you saw that in the wake
00:07:44.300of the 2008 financial crisis, municipalities that were struggling financially decided to ramp up
00:07:53.040ticketing and the use of the courts and the police to extract from residents to fill revenue gaps.
00:08:00.740So this is something that I'm very concerned about in this moment. And when we think about the kinds of things that are done on the government level during financial crises, what we see happening, and David Harvey kind of begins his story of neoliberal statecraft with the 1975 bankruptcy of New York.
00:08:28.920But what we see happening is there's austerity that's imposed on residents. So what that means is spending for things like education, anti-poverty programs, health care, even money towards public hospitals, all of these areas are cut substantially.
00:08:51.060And I think that there are actually a lot of activists who are trying to shape how bailout money is spent and make sure that what happens now isn't an instance of what Naomi Klein calls disaster capitalism.
00:09:12.360I'm wondering, is decarceration even a possibility amidst coronavirus? I get the impression that in order to fill revenues, there is a possibility for the police state to increase. But simultaneously, I think that there are also predictions for decarceration by necessity. Is that true? Or what is this sort of decarceration going to look like?
00:09:37.140This is a great question, because I think that the way things are going now, I think that there will be a dip in incarceration, but it might not be substantial.
00:09:50.120So what we saw post-2008, and this crisis is going to be more severe than 2008, but what we saw in the wake of 2008 was a slight dip in the rate of incarceration, and it wasn't across the United States.
00:10:08.800There were places that didn't experience a decrease in incarceration.
00:10:13.160Some people who study the political economy of prisons might argue that it's actually cheaper for the government to incarcerate and lean on the criminal legal system to act as a kind of welfare system than directly provide resources to people.
00:10:40.160I do think that there is a political need to put pressure on states and governments,
00:10:48.660on them to spend their money not on increasing incarceration, but investing in things like
00:10:56.100education, for example, K to 12 and higher education. So it's unclear which direction
00:11:05.860it's going to go in. There are a lot of factors at play. But one thing that I am worried about
00:11:12.680is the rapid adoption of cheap technologies that could serve as alternatives to incarceration.
00:11:22.560GPS, ankle monitoring shackles, the use of risk assessment tools, predictive policing tools.
00:11:31.680These are all tools that are attractive to governments in times of crises because they can reduce spending on things like physically confining people.
00:11:46.860It's much cheaper for the state to track someone using cheap technology than it is to provide them shelter, health care, food, even though the services that are provided in prison are notoriously bad.
00:12:05.840I'm curious to talk about the debt economy a little bit further.
00:12:09.000I think debt is a linchpin in American society, but we don't take the time to examine how it shapes our lives.
00:12:16.860And of course, there are different degrees and facets.
00:12:20.140Some of us are born into debt, some are pushed to take on debt in the name of class mobility,
00:12:24.520and some take on debt in the pursuit of consumer culture.
00:12:28.740So can you talk a little bit about how the debt economy structures our lives or the temporality
00:12:34.720of debt, as well as how debt has become historically racialized, thus posing even further problems
00:12:42.080to the way in which the criminal justice system operates?
00:12:46.860I'm a millennial, so we're part of the debt generation, and debt is so normalized.
00:12:53.740So one thing that I write about in my book was when I was trying to decide where to go
00:12:59.660to college to do my undergraduate degree, I was working a job at a grocery store, and
00:13:06.340I was talking to one of my co-workers, and he was like, so you're going to take out student
00:13:13.600and I was like, oh, I think I'm going to go to public school and I got this scholarship that
00:13:18.100covers it. He's like, oh, but you have to take out student loans. Everyone takes out
00:13:22.560student loans. That's just a normalized part of how you pursue a college degree and particularly
00:13:33.120if you don't have assets or resources or come from a well-off family. And it's been so normalized
00:13:42.540that in some ways we can't imagine life without it. It even affects how employers compensate
00:13:53.360and entice employees with benefits. Now there's a shift towards providing student debt relief
00:14:01.860rather than retirement benefits because people have so much debt when they graduate and enter
00:14:08.660the workforce. And if we think about the scaling back of the welfare state, the crushing of the
00:14:19.520power of labor unions in this country in the 70s and beyond, all of these things have created a
00:14:28.020system where you increasingly need debt not only to buy property, but even to cover subsistence.
00:14:37.180So I was reading the financial press and came across an article a few months ago that was saying very recently that the cost of subsistence, so including housing, health care, and all of a family's expenses, the cost of subsistence is now higher than the amount of money people make on average per year.
00:15:06.440And this is calculated by households. And so it's literally the case where for the average person, even covering the cost of subsistence is more money than you have just working and getting a salary.
00:15:25.480So how is that gap filled is then the question. And increasingly, people use debt, whether it's pay for their car loans or pay for groceries.
00:15:35.900I am very concerned that rather than directly transferring wealth to people in this moment to help them weather the economic crisis caused by coronavirus, that they'll just encourage us to go into more debt.
00:15:56.240the ideas that, oh, well, you don't have a job now, so we'll create means for you to borrow
00:16:03.780money to pay for your groceries and rent. And when you're back on your feet, then you can pay
00:16:12.060that money back. And I don't think that that's going to work over the long run. And even
00:16:18.660mainstream economists would argue that debt is actually dragging down the economy and is going
00:16:27.780to slow any recovery we could possibly hope for. But just to go back to, because there are a few
00:16:35.380things that I'm trying to cover all my bases here with the question, but when we think about race
00:16:42.280in debt. I talk about the racialization of student debt in my book. There's also the
00:16:50.780racialization of subprime mortgage lending, which was something that was revealed in the wake of the
00:16:58.5602008 financial crash. But every area of consumer debt is racialized insofar as debt burdens are
00:17:09.920not proportionately born across demographics. So a book that I read recently was Kiyanga Yamata
00:17:17.780Taylor's book, Race for Profit. And in that book, she talks about how when redlining, which was
00:17:26.960basically a federally sanctioned practice of barring Black people from accessing mortgage
00:17:37.580loans to buy property. So the way that redlining works was certain neighborhoods were excluded from
00:17:47.980mortgage lending. These were predominantly Black neighborhoods. And when redlining ended in the
00:17:56.56060s, what happened was all of the various interests involved with real estates, from the real estate
00:18:05.320brokers to the mortgage lenders, all of these actors saw African Americans as a demographic to
00:18:16.860prey on to generate profits using the end of redlining to generate those profits through
00:18:25.320predation. So Kiyanga Yamato-Taylor calls that predatory inclusion, where the idea is this was
00:18:34.320the way that the government was pitching it was that they would foster expanding mortgages to
00:18:43.480African-American homebuyers. And ultimately what happened was they sold junk properties0.99
00:18:52.160that they then repossessed and they weren't forthcoming about the deep structural problems
00:19:01.500of the properties that they were selling. They basically were scamming the African-American0.99
00:19:07.180buyers of homes. And I think this is something that we also saw leading up to the 2008 financial
00:19:16.160crisis, which mortgage lenders were basically preying on Black and Latinx homebuyers for
00:19:25.800predatory loans that would lead to their houses being repossessed.
00:19:55.800Terms like the prison industrial complex, mass incarceration, and the likes have gained a
00:20:10.400tremendous amount of traction lately, but many of us struggle with really pinpointing the economic
00:20:16.000benefit of prisons. I think when we hear or experience juvenile sentencing laws or
00:20:22.740are reminded that at any point, 70% of people being housed in jails are legally innocent,
00:20:30.440we're forced to recognize that the system is not intended to rehabilitate or prevent harm.
00:20:36.660So I know this is a bit of a primer, but can you explain how and where the money is made?
00:20:42.300Why this isn't just a conversation about private prisons and what many of us are missing when it
00:20:48.180comes to understanding the economical and political roles in upholding the world's
00:20:57.120I think that in the United States, the way that people understand the nature of the prison
00:21:05.940problem is through this narrative of private prisons.
00:21:12.180The majority of prisoners, I think it's something like, I want to say...
00:21:18.180it's like 92% of prisoners are held in public prisons. And so the portion of the prison system
00:21:29.840that is privately run is quite small relative to the rest of the system. But we have such a huge
00:21:38.240system. So it is a source of profit for these companies. This focus on private prisons
00:21:47.020perpetuates this narrative that the cause of mass incarceration was greedy private prison companies,
00:21:56.020which is not actually the case if we look at the history of the carceral state and the buildup
00:22:04.520of the prison system. The buildup started long before private prisons even entered the scene.
00:22:13.440And so when we think about the political economy of prisons, we also need to think about all of the areas of the prison system that are a source of profit outside of just running the prisons.
00:22:31.540So we can think of the telecommunications services that are provided inside prisons.
00:22:38.460We can think about the commissary items.
00:22:41.520We can think about the construction companies that profit from building prisons.
00:22:47.380We can think about the technology companies that profit from these high-tech forms of surveillance.
00:22:54.760And we see that private interests are deeply embedded with every part of the prison system.
00:23:03.220But then we also need to think about the economic side of the public dimension of the prison system.
00:23:12.240So I have a chapter in my book that talks about municipal fine farming and the political economy of fees and fines.
00:23:21.080And that's connected to private interests insofar as municipalities are trying to remain solvent by paying off their creditors.
00:23:32.360But really, they're trying to raise revenue, which is different than capital, because they're not investing that money in producing commodities.
00:23:45.240And so if we look at public finance, we also see the ways in which the expansion of prisons are financially incentivized.
00:23:57.680One thing that I write about in my book is what we're calling now offender-funded criminal justice, which is becoming increasingly attractive to municipalities that are suffering.
00:24:15.780but we when we also look at you know public finance state entities are trying to make
00:24:24.920calculations about costs and savings so they might decide that well we could invest in public
00:24:35.340education we could invest in you know food stamps medicaid these kinds of things but maybe
00:24:44.460it's cheaper for them to invest in building prisons. And also, there are other incentive
00:24:52.060structures set up in different parts of the country. So one thing that I've been thinking
00:24:58.480about lately in relationship to the bail system is in Louisiana, the bail bonds industry was
00:25:09.300protected by state legislation that basically ensured that a cut of the money that was made
00:25:22.620from commercial bail bonds would go to the state and it would fund the courts and the criminal
00:25:28.900legal system. And it's a similar situation with the telecom services that are provided inside
00:25:37.460prisons. Every time a prisoner's family member puts money on their account and they use
00:25:46.720that money to pay for a phone call to the family and loved ones, what happens is the state will
00:25:56.120take a cut of the revenue that's raised from that phone call and put it towards funding the prison.
00:26:04.020So this is basically a system where the jails and prisons get kickbacks from the prison telecommunication companies, and they price gouge prisoners by charging large fees for the use of the phones.
00:26:22.440There's so much to take in here. Thank you for explaining this to us in a way that is really detailed.
00:26:30.060so yeah i'm now thinking that for many of us prisons evoke a very physical understanding
00:26:39.460we think about their spatial infrastructure or the containment of bodies in cages which in turn
00:26:47.340somewhat obscures the technological dimensions of prisons and i'm thinking about the corporations
00:26:54.020that supply prisons with surveillance technology like Amazon and facial recognition technology
00:27:00.260and the sort of precedents that this establishes.
00:27:04.200As someone whose work focuses on these dimensions, what is digital carceral infrastructure comprised
00:27:10.300of and what can it tell us about the state's growing surveillance apparatus and the ways
00:27:15.860in which technology is poised to be the next frontier in terms of wealth and exploitation?
00:27:19.980Yeah, this is a great question, something that I've also been thinking about during the coronavirus crisis, because we've been seeing now that there were certain technologies that the public resisted the adoption of.
00:27:42.620So I'm thinking of Clearview AI's facial recognition software.
00:27:48.580There was a huge feature in the New York Times about how hundreds of law enforcement agencies,
00:27:57.640law enforcement departments across the country were using this facial recognition software
00:28:05.200that basically would scrape the internet for photos of people on social media.
00:28:13.660And if someone deleted that profile or changed their privacy setting,
00:28:21.040all of those pictures, all of that data would stay in Clearview's system.
00:28:26.140There was no regulation or anything of what data could be held by this private company.
00:28:37.320And so I think that there was strong resistance, even though police departments did adopt this software and they said, wow, it's so accurate.
00:28:48.300it's more accurate than the other facial recognition softwares. There was a strong
00:28:54.140public resistance to the adoption of this technology. Now that coronavirus has hit
00:29:03.980and these technologies are being framed as ways to fight the virus, basically what is happening
00:29:13.260is the crisis has created an opening for these companies and all of us have moved our lives
00:29:22.240online very rapidly that is all of us who aren't so-called essential workers and we're using things
00:29:30.540like zoom and other apps to mediate our work and all of our interactions and the adoption
00:29:38.900of technologies, both by users, but also by the state for the purpose of fighting
00:29:45.380the virus is happening largely uncontested. And this is something that I'm worried about.
00:29:53.460But one thing I think about in terms of the relationship between prisons and the adoption
00:30:01.760of these surveillance technologies, I think about the way in which prisoners are used to test these
00:30:08.300technologies. So you mentioned Amazon and their contracts with police departments, for example.
00:30:19.640Amazon is developing voice recognition software to analyze things like the accent of the speakers
00:30:29.060who are using home assistance in their houses. So the prison telecom companies that provide
00:30:37.300telephone services to prisoners have technology built into the phone system that analyzes the
00:30:47.540voice of the person using the phone. So allegedly, this is to prevent fraud inside prison. So
00:30:57.160what they say they're trying to do is prevent someone from taking a prisoner's PIN number and
00:31:05.720using another prisoner's account to make a call. When you actually dig into the contracts that
00:31:13.200these telecom services have with prisons, and if you actually look at their surveillance patents,
00:31:20.680they're collecting data and creating security products for the prisons. And we can think of
00:31:29.920basically every dimension of a prisoner's life is being tracked and monitored in some way.
00:31:40.680So, you know, even prisoners' interactions with people on the outside are perpetually being
00:31:50.260monitored. And now that all communication is mediated by digital services, even
00:31:59.480prison messaging services. They're collecting huge reams of data that they're then using to
00:32:07.120improve their products and further securitize and surveil prisoners.
00:32:15.260In Carceral Capitalism, you write about the self-fulfilling nature of a technocratic world
00:32:22.720wherein algorithms determine future outcomes completely on the past. I believe in the past
00:32:28.720year, California became the first U.S. state to eliminate cash bail, a move that was praised by
00:32:34.720liberals, but it was replaced with so-called risk assessment tools, tools that rely on data that is
00:32:41.340the product of perpetually discriminatory system that's solidifying racial bias and white supremacy
00:32:47.860under a new, less threatening name. And I see this as probably the most dangerous aspect of it,
00:32:53.680and that these risk assessment tools are presented as evidence-based, objective technologies usually
00:33:00.640pushed during periods of reform as liberal concessions. So can you talk about these
00:33:06.420predictive algorithms, how objectivity is negating our space to contest, and how we can stop the
00:33:13.660ascension of predictive policing in our own communities? Yeah, this is a really, really
00:33:21.060important question to think about in this particular moment. And I've actually done
00:33:28.000quite a bit of research on the history of risk assessment and algorithmic policing,
00:33:35.240and in particularly the domain of bail. So California did recently adopt Senate Bill 10,
00:33:43.720SB 10, which replaced cash bail with risk assessment, although it hasn't been implemented
00:33:51.960because the American Bail Coalition organized to have another referendum on the bill to try to
00:34:02.400crush the bill that was already passed. And so basically, what happened in the California
00:34:09.300context was there was a lot of organizing around reforming the bail system because of how
00:34:16.120predatory it is and because of how it preys on poor people and it becomes a source of revenue
00:34:25.500for bail bond agents and private interests and also state revenue. So the bail system has,
00:34:34.460I think rightfully been contested. And there's been lots of mobilization around
00:34:42.360getting rid of cash and money bail and the private bail system. But I'm very, very critical
00:34:50.560of the adoption of risk assessment as a liberal alternative to bail. And I think you're right to
00:34:58.480point out that the technical dimension of it masks the way in which it's racialized and how it
00:35:08.480actually just perpetuates racial and class inequality and obscures the way in which it
00:35:16.780perpetuates these forms of inequality. So risk assessment has actually been around for a very
00:35:24.640long time, almost 100 years, although it's really only in the post-war period where it's been
00:35:32.760adopted. But basically, what it does is, and if we look at the risk assessment tools that
00:35:41.620were created, for example, in the 60s, and they're pretty similar to the ones that are
00:35:46.960use now, what these tools do is give defendants a risk score based on sociological data about
00:36:02.320that person. So different factors that could be calculated in one of these tools include
00:36:09.820employment history, access to stable housing, education, community ties, marital status.
00:36:22.340These are all things that these tools assume correspond to levels of risk. So if we take
00:36:31.880the factor of marital status, for example. The tools are designed such that a married person
00:36:40.220is considered low risk relative to an unmarried person, which we can see how that would discriminate
00:36:48.720against queer people and people who don't have a normative family structure. Many of the actual
00:36:57.160empirical evidence supporting these tools is quite questionable to begin with, but I kind of
00:37:06.220don't want to critique the tools on those terms because I think the big problem with these tools
00:37:14.660is they don't consider the social determinants of someone's position in society and try to address
00:37:25.720the things that cause someone to be, for example, socially marginalized.
00:37:31.600The main problem with these tools is that they punish the most socially marginalized
00:37:39.460people on the grounds that they're higher risk.
00:37:44.440And so I think that even the language of high risk and low risk when it comes to the criminal
00:37:51.640legal system is something that we should contest completely, because that language is about
00:37:58.360making distinctions between deserving and undeserving people, and thus marking some
00:38:07.780people as worthy of punishment by the state. You speak and write about the temporal aspects
00:38:16.820of incarceration, especially in terms of the toll it takes, how timelessness can be its very own
00:38:23.400kind of torture, which often goes unrecognized because it is a violence that is not bounded to
00:38:28.600time or place. For listeners, can you share the temporality of punishment and its racialized
00:38:35.880dimensions? Is this phenomenon unique to the American prison landscape? The American prison
00:38:43.180landscape is unique insofar as our sentencing regime is so dramatically out of step with the
00:38:54.240rest of the world. You know, I wrote a chapter on juvenile life without parole sentences and
00:39:03.840mandatory juvenile life without parole. And the U.S. is really singular in that no other country
00:39:12.560in the world practices these kinds of sentences or no other country in the world treats juveniles
00:39:21.240as harshly as the United States does. So when you think about the temporal dimension of the prison
00:39:29.540system, it's completely tied to this expanded sentencing regime where, for example, someone
00:39:40.040who's a juvenile lifer and a lot of people think we don't have juvenile life without parole now
00:39:46.920which is not true we just have discretionary juvenile life without parole but if we think
00:39:53.860about what that means is that we're locking up people before they're even adults and telling
00:40:04.080them that they have to live their entire adult life in a cage. And that in itself is a kind of
00:40:13.840torture because that person's temporal horizon is completely defined by the criminal legal system.
00:40:23.560And my work on the use of time as a form of torture was partly informed by some reflections that I made in my book when I think about my brother's situation and how he was incarcerated when we were teenagers and thinking about how our lives have diverged from that moment.
00:40:51.220And even the way in which the system is so slow, appeals are so slow, there's a way in which an uncertainty is weaponized against people.
00:41:09.000We see this happening over and over again with people who are on death row and have an execution that's scheduled and at the last minute there'll be a stay and the execution will be stopped and then the stay will be overturned and then it'll be rescheduled and it might be deferred and then it might not be deferred.
00:41:34.420And for me, I can't even imagine what it would be like to be in that situation where you have no agency at all over the horizon of your life and what your life is moving towards.
00:41:54.080I think that there's been a qualitative shift as well in terms of how prisoners are allowed to spend their time.
00:42:05.480And some people think that mass incarceration was some like neoconservative conspiracy and it was led by the Republican Party.
00:42:15.720But I think in terms of the main architects of mass incarceration, a lot of the blame should fall on the shoulders of Bill Clinton.
00:42:28.760And one of the things that he did, in addition to passing his crime bill and perpetuating a law and order policy program, was he dismantled prisoners' access to different forms of programming inside prisons.
00:42:47.140So prisoners' access to Pell Grants, which they could use to get an education while in prison, the dismantling of Pell Grants for prisoners destroyed prison education.
00:43:01.220And there's been a lot of effort to find other ways to fund prison education, but that was something that Bill Clinton did. And a lot of the scaling back of programming for prisoners happened under Clinton's administration.
00:43:22.060So basically what that does is prisoners are subjected to hard time where they have to pass their time in the state of waiting where there are no outlets for meaningful activities.
00:43:40.060But people still find ways to engage in things like collective education while incarcerated by trying to start covert prison education programs, reading groups, things like this, even just sharing literature inside prisons.
00:44:04.840I would just like to emphasize that the U.S. is unique
00:45:21.740Well, Jackie, I really want to turn our conversation in the direction of dreams,
00:45:26.360particularly your work as a scholar of the dream state.
00:45:29.780And I know you've also been exploring the function and operation of dreams
00:45:34.480amidst pandemic. Dreams are so accessible, intimate, and unique in the way we tend to them.
00:45:41.380So to begin, I'd like to ask you how you approach this liminal space as a place of respite and
00:45:47.380communication. Why do you dream? It's a great question. I've always been kind of obsessed with
00:45:54.860not only my dream life, but also just the fact that we dream at all. And the mind is so complex
00:46:03.840that you know we have this double life that we live that we're not always fully aware of
00:46:12.540and there are things that we can't do with our mind while we're awake or things that we can't
00:46:19.900face while we're awake that we can only face in our dreams I'm fascinated by the fact that we
00:46:27.040dream at all and I think dreaming has a particular place in these times and particularly you know
00:46:35.740life in quarantine and life during a pandemic. We're seeing a kind of resurgence in interest
00:46:44.500in dreams. I think a lot of people are experiencing more vivid dreams because of the anxiety-inducing
00:46:55.560nature of the pandemic, but also our lives have been altered such that there's more space to dream
00:47:05.600in some ways. I mean, if I don't have to bolt up in the morning and run out of my house to
00:47:12.700do my daily commute, then I might linger in the dream state a little bit longer and actually
00:47:21.400let the dreams reverberate and think about them throughout the day more than I would if I
00:47:29.460was turning my attention to something else. So for me, I see dreams as kind of a bottomless
00:47:38.600source of creativity. Whenever I'm creatively stuck, I just kind of
00:47:45.100turn to my dreams and I let the dreams guide me, even if they're difficult, disturbing, or
00:47:54.900unsettling dreams. I am interested in just listening to what dreams have to tell me
00:48:03.680and listening to my dreams for insights about where I want to go. I have a practice of
00:48:12.520documenting my dreams immediately upon waking, and it's taken many different forms. I used to,
00:48:22.380well, I occasionally record my dreams using the memo app in my phone. I keep a dream journal,
00:48:31.560and sometimes I write down dreams in my notes app on my phone.
00:48:38.600and then I go back to my dreams and I try to work with them in my poetry so yesterday I just
00:48:47.140finished a batch of edits on a book that I have coming out on Nightboat Books in January 2021
00:48:54.880and this book is all poetry that is based on dreams and so dreams are the raw material for
00:49:05.140my poetry and my poetic practice. But I also think that dreams are not just deeply personal
00:49:16.560and significant on a personal level, but I do think we index everything that's happening in
00:49:26.380society in our dream lives. So I think about recurring dreams that I've had about ecological
00:49:36.820apocalypse, dreams that I've had where I'm trying to figure out why humans are so slow to react to
00:49:50.580impending ecological collapse. I have dreams of white supremacists being called to rise up by
00:49:59.880people like Alex Jones. Dreams where there's something that I notice and I'm worried
00:50:09.580about when I'm awake, but I might not sit with that fear or worry long enough while I'm
00:50:21.980awake to, you know, let it actually shift my attention. So I often find myself worrying about
00:50:31.880the rise of fascism in my dream life. And then I wake up, I'm like, oh, I think I'm
00:50:37.720picking up on something that's deeply disturbing that I see happening around me. So I think
00:50:46.100that is happening on a collective level around the world right now in relation to coronavirus,
00:50:55.700but also in relationship to other things that are happening in the world, geopolitics,
00:51:01.980environmental disaster and the pandemic.
00:51:08.060Well, Jackie, I'd like to close with the recognition of how carceral logic bleeds
00:51:14.060onto every facet of our society. It often feels as if we are forever holding conversations on
00:51:21.300decarceration and abolition, trying to convince people to care through accounts of vulnerability.
00:51:26.560but your work shows the profound impacts that the building up of and normalizing of this
00:51:32.640infrastructure holds as well as the historical truths behind it so as we close i wonder if you
00:51:38.900can share why it is a problem to continue to frame the carceral state as an issue of personal
00:51:45.260responsibility or some of the problems with our reliance on the concepts of innocence low risk
00:51:51.940high risk and what it means for our future should we continue to blindly invest in a system that
00:51:57.360tries its hardest to break and consume people, that takes away time? How do we break the economic
00:52:03.960and psychological logic of prisons? What will happen should we continue to co-invest in a world
00:52:10.300where state-administered harm is justified? I think your question really demands that we be
00:52:17.680social visionaries. When we think about the prison system, it's so normalized and punishment itself
00:52:28.500as a way to address harm is so normalized. As you said earlier, prisons aren't actually designed
00:52:38.140to reduce harm in society. It actually increases harm. It harms people who sometimes may have
00:52:48.780perpetuated harm, and sometimes there are social reasons why they've perpetuated that harm. A lot
00:52:58.380of people who have been traumatized can traumatize other people, and it perpetuates a cycle
00:53:07.980of harm rather than breaking the cycle by trying to support and nurture people and when there's
00:53:21.280something that's happened in a community when there's actually harm that's been done the way
00:53:28.540that we deal with it now is by banishing those people but most of them come back to society
00:53:35.420And they're worn down and broken by the system. It doesn't help the community. It doesn't help anyone, this system.
00:53:48.600So I think the emphasis needs to be on thinking about how to break these cycles, thinking about systems and community infrastructure that actually nurtures and nourishes people and their needs.
00:54:08.780think about other forms of accountability besides punishment, because punishment doesn't
00:54:16.540ultimately help anyone, and to also think about the need to try to not make these distinctions
00:54:27.300between innocent and guilty, because those distinctions can ultimately strengthen the
00:54:34.680system overall. And in many cases, the people who are marked as undeserving, as guilty, as high
00:54:43.820risk, as perpetrators of so-called violent crime, they might actually be subjected to forms of
00:54:52.280racial discrimination that people who are accused of committing lower level crimes are subjected to.
00:55:00.620So, you know, we think of the system as deeply discriminatory and biased, but for some reason that analysis flies out the window when the language of violent versus nonviolent offender enters the equation.
00:55:17.520so the trap that we're at risk of falling into is actually expanding and strengthening
00:55:26.020the system by increasing punitivity for the people who are considered undeserving and
00:55:35.780decreasing punitivity for the people who are considered deserving which in our
00:55:41.560contemporary discourse is non-violent drug offenders the person who is caught with
00:55:47.520small amount of weed and got a lengthy sentence because of three-strike laws that criminalize
00:55:55.120drug possession, for example. I don't think it's productive to bifurcate people in those ways. I
00:56:02.840think we need to address the problem of the system overall. And I think transformative justice and
00:56:12.260And other forms of community accountability and methods of folding people back into communities are important and a very important piece of addressing that issue.
00:56:27.220Jackie thank you so much for your work your dedication to informing people about this extremely harmful system that we're in certain ways indirectly supporting so I really appreciate the time you spent with us today and yeah thank you so much again.
00:56:56.000Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
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