00:00:00.000This podcast is brought to you in part by support from our partner, the Kalliopea Foundation.
00:00:06.060Kalliopea believes in uplifting individuals and organizations that work to transform our
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00:00:18.200Kalliopea for their ongoing support of creative projects that we believe in. To learn more,
00:00:23.720visit Kalliopea.org. Welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young.
00:00:29.580Today, we are speaking with Mariam Kaba.
00:00:34.820What we saw happening was that people were trying to make an appeal to the state for
00:00:39.600protection, and the state then turns around and criminalizes the people who are appealing
00:00:45.080to it for protection, and also decides which kinds of survivors are perfect victims and
00:00:51.240are the ones we ought to be caring about, the ones who we ought to put up on pedestals,
00:00:56.720and then the rest of us being, quote, non-perfect victims, then get the full power of the state turned against us.
00:01:07.500Mariam is an organizer, educator, and curator who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice.
00:01:16.120She is the founder and director of Project Nia, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration.
00:01:23.320She has co-founded multiple organizations and projects over the years, including We Change Genocide, the Chicago Freedom School, the Chicago Task Force on Violence Against Girls and Young Women, Love and Protect, and most recently, Survived and Punished.
00:01:41.920As a researcher-in-residence at the Barnard College for Research on Women,
00:01:48.020Mariam Cabo works with Andrea Ritchie, fellow researcher-in-residence on New Social Justice Institute Initiative, Interrupting Criminalization, Research in Action.
00:01:59.880Mariam is on the advisory boards of the Chicago Tortured Justice Memorials, Critical Resistance, and the Chicago Community Bond Fund.
00:02:08.000Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation Magazine, The Guardian, The Washington Post, In These Times, Teen Vogue, The New Inquiry, and more.
00:02:23.960Miriam's work has been recognized with several honors and awards.
00:02:29.220Miriam, thank you so much for joining us today.
00:02:32.260It is really an honor to be speaking with you, and we are so looking forward to diving into your work more together.
00:02:40.920Wonderful. Thank you so much for having me.
00:02:43.640Much of your work currently revolves around the movement for transformative justice.
00:02:48.820But for listeners who aren't familiar with this work, I know that restorative justice and transformative justice are often conflated.
00:02:56.800To begin, I'm hoping we can differentiate the two.
00:03:00.220And as I understand it, restorative justice looks at a single situation where harm has happened and seeks to find a resolution amongst the community impacted by said situation, whereas transformative justice looks at the system and conditions that enable harm to happen in the first place.
00:03:19.080So can you begin by sharing why you're working for transformative justice and how TJ takes
00:03:26.120us a step further by looking to create a world beyond the one we have now?
00:03:32.240I like to make sure that people really understand that restorative justice is how I came to
00:03:40.980gain an understanding of a possibility of repairing harm.
00:03:46.660I started engaging in thinking about restorative justice before I took on really thinking about PIC abolition, prison industrial complex abolition.
00:03:59.100So my kind of interest in restorative justice predates my politic around prison industrial complex abolition.
00:04:07.280And I say that because while restorative justice has been picked up in the world much more fully since I started getting trained in the mid-1990s and in some ways has been co-opted by the system, the roots of what restorative justice was about are still incredibly useful and valid.
00:04:31.360restorative justice is focused on the importance of relationships it is focused on the importance
00:04:40.440of repair when those relationships are broken when violations occur in our relationships
00:04:47.420it is very much interested and concerned obviously in community because it asks a question about
00:04:54.860whose responsibility is it to actually meet the obligations and needs that are created
00:05:02.880through violation. So it asks the community to step in fully to be less of a bystander and more
00:05:10.220of an actor in trying to repair harm. And finally, it's very much a framework and an ideology
00:05:18.000and a way of living that is concerned and interested in making sure that we remain in
00:05:24.700right relationship with each other, with the land, with the environment. So that's an expansive view
00:05:34.700of restorative justice. Over the years in practice, people have focused very much on
00:05:42.180an individualistic model of addressing harm using restorative justice modalities and restorative
00:05:51.360justice practices. Among those are people often will say things like, I'm running a circle,
00:05:58.140therefore I'm doing restorative justice. That is ridiculous. It's just a tool that people use0.92
00:06:04.900within a larger framework of restorative justice, which asks people different kinds of questions.
00:06:09.960So I like to not fall into like binaries too much, like it's this and or this. It's many different kinds of things to many different kinds of people who use it in many different kinds of ways.
00:06:22.220How I came to focus on transformative justice really was that you were right in the sense that transformative justice takes as a starting point the idea that what happens to us in our interpersonal relationships are mirrored and reinforced by larger systems that also shape our relationships.
00:06:45.020And that if you can't really be thinking all the time about the kind of interplay between those fears, you end up in a position where you're too focused on the interpersonal and therefore cannot transform the conditions that led to the particular interpersonal forms of harm and violence that you're dealing with at the moment.
00:07:07.120So I like it because it feels like more expansive framework and ideology for me than restorative justice currently as it's being practiced is, and it's being practiced by a certain segment of the population, not everybody, because there are many restorative justice practitioners who acknowledge and even act in the way that I'm talking about when I talk about transformative justice.
00:07:33.020The other thing is that the histories of both frameworks are just different. They come from different places, they come out of different communities, even if there are overlaps.
00:07:44.280And so I think it's important always to think about where things come from and where things are rooted in order to understand what they are.
00:07:52.000So for me, transformative justice is really just about trying to figure out how we respond to violence and harm in a way that doesn't cause more violence and harm.
00:08:02.000It's asking us how we respond in ways that don't actually rely on the state or social
00:08:08.140services necessarily if people don't want it.
00:08:11.280It is really focusing on the things that we have to cultivate in the world so that we
00:08:20.660We have to have things like healing and accountability and things like that.
00:08:24.580transformative justice also is kind of militantly against the binary and dichotomies between
00:08:32.500victims and perpetrators, but rather tries to think about the world as more complex than that,
00:08:40.760that sometimes in a particular situation, we're victimized. And in other situations,
00:08:45.740we're the person or the people who perpetrate harm, that we have to be able to hold all those
00:08:51.040things together. And so I always like to think about transformative justice as a practice and
00:08:59.440an ideology and a framework that might be something we can rely on, just one of the things we need to
00:09:05.860rely on to get us towards liberation and towards freedom and towards, for me, a PIC abolitionist
00:09:12.780horizon. Wow, Miriam, thank you so much for explaining that in such depth. Now, in thinking
00:09:21.020about the carceral state, it becomes clear how perverse the system is. And that's not just in
00:09:29.540context to the ways in which we define justice through a punitive lens, but also the policies
00:09:35.180and culture within prison and our growing obsession with detention facilities. Now,
00:09:41.220in preparing for this interview, I came across stories in which prisoners in Illinois have been
00:09:46.580denied eye surgery based off a one good eye policy. Simultaneously, it was revealed this
00:09:53.700month that the United States currently has the world's highest rate of children in detention.
00:09:58.960So I'd like to ask you a little bit about where you see this urge for punishment stemming from.
00:10:06.140Who benefits from the inhumane treatment of people across the board?
00:10:09.980yes a question about punishment and where it stems from I think it's a question that lots
00:10:18.160of people have are writing and have written over the years dissertations and books about
00:10:22.520in terms of philosophers and people who think about politics and kind of morality and all of
00:10:28.660those things often people think about punishment as rooted within religion and many forms of
00:10:35.280religion that really talk about punishment and vengeance that various gods reap on humans and
00:10:42.060others. So there's such a long history in terms of people's thinking about punishment. I read a book
00:10:48.520by Brett Story, and she talks about prison and the landscape of prison. And Brett is a geographer
00:10:55.880and really thinks about the way that the prison is more than just the building that we think about
00:11:02.160when we think about the prison, but the way that the prison grows into the landscape and grows from
00:11:08.060the landscape into these spaces. And it's really kind of a beautifully written piece that follows
00:11:14.420a film that Brett Stoy put out. And the reason I preface it is because she makes the case that
00:11:20.920she thinks prisons, rather than coming from or centered in our desire for punishment,
00:11:28.520are actually instruments to punish. So they create punishment, right? So it's an issue of
00:11:36.360directionality as to whether it is the mindset and our thoughts and our kind of morals around
00:11:43.680punishment and vengeance that drive the making of the prison, or if it's the other way around,
00:11:48.900if the institutions are what create and reinforce punishment in and of themselves.
00:11:54.780So I was reading that recently, actually, just a couple of weeks ago, and it's been making me think anew about what I have thought about how punishment works or doesn't work.
00:12:05.120And I have always maintained that there's something within us as human beings that when we are hurt, often we turn to wanting to hurt back and that we spend a lot of time thinking about retribution and vengeance because that is conditioned in us, both, as I mentioned, through religion and through how we grow up in the culture and through how we think about being in right relationships.
00:12:35.120again with each other, that the punishment feels like a necessary ingredient towards being able to
00:12:42.480get back to right relationship in some way. And transformative justice kind of challenges
00:12:48.740those values quite a bit. And it's hard, I think, to hold because I too am conditioned in this very
00:12:55.960same culture and, you know, grow up in these same spaces and was punished myself as a child.
00:13:03.180very hard to think of what else to do when violence or harm occurs in the world, but to
00:13:12.080punish. That's the water we swim in. It's the air we breathe. It permeates so much that when
00:13:19.560somebody chooses to do something else, we sometimes react violently towards that person
00:13:25.800who doesn't choose to punish, who says, actually, I want to try a different way.
00:13:31.780then it's like you aren't holding up your end of the bargain here you know what are you saying
00:13:37.540about what i think about my values if you refuse to go after this person in a punishing way so it's
00:13:44.620really complex it's really complicated it's something i do think a lot about on a regular
00:13:50.560basis i'm working actually currently on a resource you know it's tentatively titled
00:13:56.320interrupting the punishment mindset. And it's intended to be a resource that can be used by
00:14:02.160teachers to work with younger people and helping them to think about punishment differently, to
00:14:09.100move from a focus on punishment to a focus on accountability and consequences. And I'm struggling
00:14:16.580quite a bit with that. I've been working on it for a long time now, and it's been a struggle
00:14:21.680because it's so hard to find materials that are the opposite of the thing that we do, which is to punish.
00:14:29.940Much of your work challenges us to reframe our understanding of perpetrators of violence,
00:14:37.160as well as, to some extent, violence itself.
00:14:41.560And approximately half of the people currently imprisoned in the U.S. are serving sentences for violent crimes.
00:14:47.420So it feels obvious that we need to talk about how and why violence is being used in our society and how we should contextualize violence more broadly.
00:14:57.920And then within that, how does this reframing also aid us in understanding what has been referred to as the abuse to prison pipeline?
00:15:07.740I guess one of the things I want to say up front is that when you are a victim or a survivor,
00:15:17.160however you feel that you want to identify, it is painful to be victimized. It is painful
00:15:25.920to be a recipient of any form of violence. We have to acknowledge that up front. So whatever I say
00:15:33.580is not in any way to minimize the experience of violence. I myself have been a victim and a
00:15:40.120survivor of violence. I feel very specifically on a regular basis that I want to always uplift
00:15:47.440the harm that's caused and not minimize that in any way. So just to begin with that.
00:15:53.580The second thing that I really want to point out from your question is it is true that half the
00:16:01.200people who are currently incarcerated in our state prisons are there for violent crimes of
00:16:07.260some sort. And that's also a complicated thing because what gets termed as violence versus what
00:16:12.940doesn't, all those things are judgments and political decisions and don't get applied equally,
00:16:19.220right? So I've been thinking quite a bit about the importance of talking about what it means
00:16:25.940to use violence and what it means to be violent. And a lot of times, people who cause inordinate
00:16:34.680amounts of harm are not considered to be violent people or to have done violence. And by that,
00:16:42.080I mean people who are polluting our rivers through toxic waste, through corporate crimes,
00:16:50.320people who are signing off on sending thousands of people off to kill other people in wars all
00:16:58.340around the world are not considered criminal we barely talk about the violence of the military
00:17:04.560industrial complex as a form of violence that we need to be accountable for in some way people who
00:17:11.380are on the anti-war side try to make that case on a regular basis and we're very much drowned out
00:17:16.700by other people who don't consider those things violent because for them, they may consider it
00:17:22.280self-defense or righteous or any sort of kind of thing. But I want to hold those up because those
00:17:30.780harm millions of people in real ways. And sometimes people lose their lives through those
00:17:38.740kinds of harms. And yet, when Johnny down the street takes a gun and shoots another person,
00:17:48.040that's held up as the pinnacle of all forms of violence that we ought to then take Johnny and
00:17:55.480lock Johnny up, or worse, kill Johnny under the state's auspices of capital punishment.
00:18:02.120that is the worst of the worst form of violence and I wonder why that is and how that makes any
00:18:09.780sort of sense at all and I'm not arguing here that all those folks who cause inordinate harm
00:18:16.140should also be locked up in torture chambers that's not my argument but it is a thought that
00:18:22.360I wonder why certain kinds of violences get weighted very differently based on who causes it
00:18:30.860and what we ourselves are willing to tolerate because of it.
00:18:35.860So as someone who thinks about violence quite a bit,
00:18:38.820I also think about the contextual and situational violence of people, for example,
00:18:44.140who are survivors of domestic violence or sexual assault,
00:18:48.920who when they are protecting themselves against the violences they've been receiving,
00:18:53.660decide to fight back, resist, kill somebody as a result of it in self-defense,
00:18:59.800and yet are punished for long periods of time and end up locked up for sometimes the rest of their
00:19:06.300lives because they used violence to end the violence that they were experiencing. We're just
00:19:12.960unable to think about the contexts that surround violence, ask ourselves how we might seek
00:19:21.120accountability. We just need a lot more thinking about all of this. It's such a good point.
00:19:29.800regarding who is doing the violence and how that is taken into consideration with what we deem
00:19:36.740violent and what we're willing to put up with like oil companies or mining companies who
00:19:44.200poison millions of acres of waterways and soil contamination that leads to cancer and deaths
00:19:53.380and how that isn't necessarily deemed violent behavior in this dominant culture.
00:20:00.860And when those corporations enact this type of harm,
00:20:05.420they're harming so many people and non-human kin, the soil, the air.
00:20:11.400And somehow we put more pressure on one person potentially being violent.
00:20:17.980And not that I want to, now that I'm saying this out loud, I don't want to necessarily...
00:21:20.060Because ultimately, for me, what harm is, is that harm engenders particular needs that must be met, that must be taken into account, that must be responded to. All forms of harm engender needs. And we have to then figure out as a community, as a society, as a world, how are we going to attend to those needs?
00:21:42.900Who is responsible for attending to those needs?
00:21:45.980How are we going to be in a position where we stop using violence ourselves when violence occurs to then cause more harm?
00:24:58.380within the criminal punishment realm and kind of skim off of all the other things that people had
00:25:03.420asked for. And folks took that money at the time because they needed the funds, because they thought
00:25:09.160this might be a way to transform the culture for multiple kinds of reasons. Along the way,
00:25:14.860many people, particularly women of color, were saying, we should not be going down this road.
00:25:19.920This is going to really end up kind of backfiring on us, on us. Those mandatory arrest laws will be1.00
00:25:26.780used against us, women of color. And sure enough, what we saw were many more people, women of color,1.00
00:25:34.840who were getting caught up within the criminalization net that got widened when the
00:25:40.280movements to end gender-based violence got into a partnership with the criminal legal system,
00:25:47.580with law enforcement. And so that's a very simple sketch. It's much more complicated than that.
00:25:53.680there were contestations and contesting forces all along the way. But over the years, something
00:25:59.820that has now been termed carceral feminisms came into being where people believed that you could1.00
00:26:07.220end violence by using violence of the state. So you're going to end gender-based violence1.00
00:26:11.820that's interpersonal by using the state to adjudicate, evaluate, and then punish those
00:26:18.220particular harms. And what we know is we live in a profoundly, deeply unequal society with social
00:26:25.920oppression forces like racism and classism and transphobia and sexism and all these other things
00:26:32.420at play. So that means that if you're engaged, then the folks who are going to be most likely
00:26:38.340to be marginalized and punished are the people who are already marginalized and who are already
00:26:43.700oppressed under those forces in the system. So that's in part what we saw happening was that
00:26:49.640people were trying to make an appeal to the state for protection. And the state then turns around
00:26:55.480and criminalizes the people who are appealing to it for protection and also decides which kinds of
00:27:01.760survivors are perfect victims and are the ones we ought to be caring about, the ones we ought to put
00:27:08.260up on pedestals, and then the rest of us being, quote, non-perfect victims, then get the full
00:27:14.960power of the state turned against us. So there are cases and examples like Marissa Alexander's
00:27:21.400case recently in Florida, trying to defend herself from an abusive husband, shoots a warning shot
00:27:27.840into the air to ward him off, ends up being the one who gets arrested, ends up being the one who
00:27:33.960goes to trial, ends up with a 20-year mandatory minimum sentence. There was thankfully a kind of
00:27:40.220a community participatory defense campaign that came up against that verdict and tried to work
00:27:46.840with Marissa and her family to get her freed. And eventually she was, but that took years and it was
00:27:52.620a struggle. So these are ways that you can see the criminalization of survivors and the
00:27:57.360criminalization of survival that takes place because we're in partnership with these systems
00:28:04.280and institutions that are in and of themselves inherently racist, classist, transphobic,
00:28:10.320all that stuff together. Wow. Now, culturally, the justification for the carceral state exists
00:28:20.260in our understanding of safety and the conflation between safety and security.
00:28:25.160this is a topic that we haven't really discussed much on for the wild but feels so important not
00:28:32.880just to the realm of abolishing the prison industrial complex but for anyone who is vested
00:28:38.460in ways of knowing being and co-creating community can you talk a little bit about
00:28:44.540your understanding of safety how can we all contribute to lessening our insidious reliance
00:28:52.560on incarceration and surveillance. And furthermore, how does a new understanding of safety
00:28:58.860impact our understanding of justice? Yeah, that's a great question. A few years ago,
00:29:04.080I worked with my friend, Sarah Jane Rhee, who was a photographer on a project called
00:29:08.780Community Safety Looks Like. And people can go and find that project on Tumblr. And we basically
00:29:15.080asked community members what they thought community safety looked like for them. What
00:29:19.760would make them feel safe. And of course, you would not be surprised that, you know, cops and
00:29:24.460prisons and all that stuff really never comes up for the folks when you talk to them and ask them
00:29:29.620directly what would make them feel safe. But those are what we are offered, you know, those are what
00:29:33.980were offered as quote unquote, the ways that we're going to be kept safe, that these institutions are
00:29:38.960what are standing in the way of us and complete and utter chaos and lawlessness, which of course
00:29:46.300we know is ridiculously untrue. So I think about all of this as it relates to safety. We really
00:29:52.820gain safety through building relationships that are strong enough to allow us to be able to take
00:29:59.940accountability when we cause harm. And that's a really different way of thinking about safety
00:30:05.380in the world. And when I say take accountability, I mean take responsibility for what we know we did
00:30:12.740wrong in order to be able to repair that so that we can get back in right relationship with each
00:30:18.900other. And I know a lot of people feel, I don't know, maybe discouraged about the possibility
00:30:25.620that people will take accountability because it's so hard in the world to see examples of that
00:30:32.520in a broad way. At least, you know, it's not popularized. You know, we don't put that up on
00:30:37.820TV, we show all the ways that people are unaccountable to each other. I think also we know
00:30:43.780just with ourselves how hard it is to change our behavior ourselves. Mia Mingus says this all the
00:30:49.800time, that if you can't work on taking accountability for the small things, then you're not going to be
00:30:54.900ever able to take accountability when big things happen that you absolutely have to take accountability
00:31:00.300for. I use the term take accountability regularly because people always say, I'm going to make this
00:31:07.020person accountable. And you're never going to make someone accountable because accountability
00:31:11.600is an internal resource people have to use to be able to decide that they've done wrong and be able
00:31:17.720to transform and shift that. That's a mirroring in some way of the current state and the way that
00:31:23.720we are operating, which is that the state is incredibly coercive, right? And forces people
00:31:28.140to do things that they then don't really do. And we end up continuing the harms that occur in
00:31:33.540society. So safety is very much rooted in having everything that we need in order to be able to
00:31:40.960live dignified lives, you know, and that's where transformative justice is so critically important
00:31:46.500because it tells a story about the need for us to have the conditions in place that would allow us
00:31:54.500to do the things that we want to do around transforming harm. So that means that you have
00:31:59.260to have a living wage, at least, at the base. It means you have to have universal health care
00:32:04.240to be safe. It means you have to have a clean environment to be safe. You have to have a good
00:32:11.640school for your kid to go to to be safe. Safety is an expansive concept that is beyond the kind
00:32:18.820of individualistic violence, interpersonal harm framework that it's so deeply shaped in. And I
00:32:26.580know because it feels most immediate, like you're afraid of getting killed when you're afraid of
00:32:31.540being hit in the face by somebody or being stolen from. So that's a visceral sense of your personal
00:32:37.880safety. But safety is within a broader context. And if we could get all the other stuff that I
00:32:43.320mentioned broadly correct and right and be in right relationship with those things, all of this
00:32:49.740interpersonal harm that occurs will be so diminished so that then we won't even know the
00:32:56.140kind of world that we can be living in. The world will have been so transformed that our
00:33:00.880relationships to each other are necessarily also going to be transformed. We can't even know where
00:33:06.320the kind of virtuous circle of that could end. And that's the work, I think. At least that's the
00:33:12.440work I'm committed to as a both and. Yes, attending to the harms that happen in our interpersonal
00:33:18.460relationships because we're human and those will continue to happen, but also having this much more
00:33:23.780expansive view of safety. Security is so focused on the weaponry and the tools that exist to lock
00:33:34.020people out, right? Like the gates and the alarms. And those are things that are the illusion of
00:33:41.400safety. The real safety comes from our ability to be able to get what we need to live dignified
00:33:47.840lives. So powerful. Gosh, Miriam, I feel like you just sliced right through so much false
00:33:58.000conditioning of this dominant culture. I think about just how the United States has the most
00:34:06.820quote unquote powerful military in the world and all of the energy we put behind and our taxes and
00:34:14.640so on and so forth behind this violent way of quote-unquote protection, but yet it's not
00:34:21.040protecting us from the ones who are actually doing the real harm. Absolutely. Also, the other part
00:34:29.120that I think about on a regular basis is one of the reasons why we absolutely have to do away with
00:34:34.800the apparatus of the criminal punishment system is because the forces of oppression are actually
00:34:40.240maintained and reinforced through that system. So if you're anti-racist and one of the things
00:34:45.760you're trying to do is end white supremacy, you have to end the apparatus of the criminal
00:34:49.880punishment system. If you're a feminist and one of the issues you have is about resisting1.00
00:34:55.620domination and uprooting oppression, then you have to get rid of the apparatus of the criminal1.00
00:35:00.980punishment system, you know, because what do those things do? They oppress and they maintain
00:35:05.360domination over people. So it's so clear to me on a regular basis that we cannot hold the current
00:35:14.000apparatus of the criminal punishment system that's maintained through these social forces
00:35:19.560that we're trying to uproot and transform and change so that we can all have more well-being,
00:35:26.000so that we can all thrive. And rather than just people that are trying to survive every single
00:35:31.680day, that we actually have an opportunity to thrive. And without kind of uprooting of these
00:35:38.720systems, we're not going to be able to thrive. And therefore, what we need to do is all of the
00:35:45.340ways that these systems are reinforced and maintained, you know, that the punishment system
00:35:50.060and other systems that are oppressive are maintaining all of these oppressions. We have
00:35:54.720to dismantle those in order to be able to build something different that would be much more,
00:36:00.900as my friend would say, my friend Shira would say, probiotic rather than antibiotic.
00:36:07.860Wow. Thank you for that. I'd love for us to transition into a conversation around
00:36:15.500how our current policy and movements are being formed, which is to say that they sometimes stem
00:36:22.320from very strong and powerful, albeit individual voices. This topic feels especially difficult
00:36:29.520because there should never be an intent to negate any survivor's desire to see justice.
00:36:35.960But at the same time, it feels really irresponsible to apply one's personal quest for justice
00:36:44.060to an entire population as a sort of standard.
00:36:48.200So where is the balance between having policy and response that is both less personal,
00:36:54.320but is still informed by survivors?0.99
00:36:56.420Oh, my gosh, you're asking me the questions today that are great, hard questions, because I keep threatening to write an essay called Abolition is Not About Your Fucking Feelings.0.98
00:37:12.920and I at some point I some point wrote that in a tweet on my Twitter page and got so much blowback0.96
00:37:23.100from folks because people felt like I was insulting their ability to feel what they
00:37:29.460want to feel and I was like that's really not what I'm saying the concept of like the personal
00:37:36.200being political as a basis for a lot of feminist organizing in the past is so true, and yet it is
00:37:48.160so fraught at the same time. Because what it's not saying, and I think what sometimes people
00:37:55.500kind of want it to be saying, is that how I personally feel then should be made into policy.
00:38:02.460And we can't operate in a world where that's true. We shouldn't want to codify our personal feelings of vengeance to apply that to the entire world and how we're going to basically find a just way to adjudicate, evaluate, and address various forms of harms in our society.
00:38:25.500you know and and sometimes you find the criminal punishment system has all these
00:38:30.100contradictions right because on the one hand the state sets itself up as the ultimate arbiter
00:38:38.180of quote fighting for the victims right but nowhere in those proceedings does the quote
00:38:45.300victims real interest in terms of like if the victim doesn't agree for example with capital
00:38:53.080punishment. The state still supersedes that and decides, yeah, we're still going to kill this
00:38:58.400person on your behalf, right? We're going to do that, the state says, because it's to protect
00:39:03.440the entire community. So in that instance, your personal feeling doesn't matter at all.
00:39:09.000But when the state wants to justify its vengeance, it'll say, we're doing this in the name of the
00:39:14.480person who was harmed. Yet when we go to court, it's the state versus the person who caused harm.
00:39:20.960Nowhere does it say Miriam against this person that harmed her, right?
00:39:26.800So I barely get a chance to even talk.
00:39:29.360If I'm not called to the witness stand, I don't get a chance maybe to even at the end
00:39:33.740of the proceedings give a victim impact statement.
00:43:26.260And I thank you for your passion and your dedication to this.
00:43:31.560And I'm also really curious to hear more about community accountability.
00:43:39.060And I know you touched on accountability earlier.
00:43:41.340But specifically, how does it work in terms of addressing domestic and sexual violence? Because these are certainly two areas where it would seem trickier to convince people potentially of a transformative justice approach when the harm we're talking about is such an intimate violation.
00:44:00.040Yeah, thanks for asking that question. Actually, the modern aspects of community accountability work are rooted exactly in communities of color, Black, Indigenous, and Latinx people who were overwhelmingly feminists, who started talking about harms that were occurring in terms of interpersonal harms related to sexual harm, sexual violence, domestic violence.
00:44:27.680These were also obviously folks who were gender nonconforming, trans folks who were not either able to access the state for quote unquote redress or did not want to access the state because they knew they were already marginalized and might then be criminalized.
00:44:46.500And in some cases, it was also where people didn't want to access the state, right?
00:44:52.940So they couldn't or they did not want to.
00:44:54.860And so the question was, well, how do we intervene? And so a group called Insight, Women and Trans People of Color Against Violence, began in the early 2000s to codify things that our communities had always been doing in various ways, which was to solve issues that arise, to find a way to be present when somebody was harmed,
00:45:19.040to figure out how to transform the person who caused the harm, have them encouraged to do that transformation work, right?
00:45:28.340So this was just a way to codify what many in our communities had been doing for many generations before
00:45:34.240in countries where there was no state in the way that we think about it in the United States
00:45:39.260to intervene or to protect or to, you know, police.
00:45:43.120And so if people are interested, there's a wonderful guide created by Mimi Kim, Rachel Herzing, and others from Creative Interventions, which is like 700 pages long. It's online. You can go to Creative Interventions to find it.
00:45:58.080And they just spent several years doing community accountability work in the Bay Area, in California, and then took all their lessons that they learned and put it together in this toolkit, which they've gifted us.
00:46:11.360That was about 15 years ago, I think, 10 years ago at least, that they gifted us this resource to use in our communities.
00:46:20.660I think there's something to really be said and people should be thinking about this more seriously, which is a lot of people get mad when we talk about community accountability.
00:46:29.980They're like, well, this doesn't work. And I'm always like, first of all, I don't know what you were doing, but it wasn't community accountability work.
00:46:36.320It was something else. Like often people will use terms with things they didn't understand or don't know how to do and didn't really practice.
00:46:43.680Or I did a circle with a person. I'm like, that's not a process. Since when did you talk to a person once and they transform their entire lives? It doesn't work that way. Think of yourself, put yourself in that position and think of how hard it is for you who decide to do something basic like give up sugar and you cannot stick to it, right? Because it's hard to do. It's hard to change our behavior, right?
00:47:08.180So I always think like that comes up a lot for people.
00:47:11.180Another thing that comes up for people is like,
00:47:12.840you're telling me I have to act a certain way.
00:47:14.820And I'm like, I'm not telling you, you have to act anyway.
00:47:24.900never contact law enforcement at all in the first place.
00:47:30.020And so that means they prefer nothing at all.
00:47:33.080As my friend Danielle Sarad says from Common Justice,
00:47:35.680They prefer nothing at all, rather than what we currently offer. That's a huge number of people
00:47:43.460who are harmed, but don't seek any sort of redress from, quote, the state. The thing that is being
00:47:49.420offered is the end all be all, the only way to transform any harm, right? So that's already the
00:47:54.780case. So I'm always like, why are you upset? Why are you so invested in being upset with people
00:48:00.200who are trying something else in order to get the redress that they feel like they need,
00:48:04.180when over 50% of the people don't even avail themselves of the system that you're fighting
00:48:08.980so hard to protect and that you're fighting so hard to keep entrenched, right? So even at that
00:48:14.540list of 50% that do go in to the system, 50% of those folks don't even make it to the point at
00:48:20.580which there would be a prosecutor sending their case on to petition in the court in any sort of
00:48:26.900way. Like, so they're not even going to grand jury. And then by the time it goes to grand jury,
00:48:31.500another 50% are out, they're not even going to be in a position to be able to go to a trial.
00:48:37.140And since we know that 98% of the people who are in a situation where they might want a trial
00:48:43.440are actually going to plead out and not go to trial, that's 2% of the people in that list who
00:48:49.180actually go to trial. So by the time you get to a place where we talk about somebody serving a
00:48:54.240prison sentence, so many people have not been served by that point that we got to find a
00:49:00.800different way to be able to address harm. And since for me, as an abolitionist, what I care about are
00:49:06.280two things, relationships and what I care about is how we address harm. And the reason I'm an
00:49:12.080abolitionist, a PIC abolitionist, is because I know that prisons and policing and surveillance
00:49:17.800cause inordinate harm. So if my focus is on ending harm, transforming harm, then I can't be
00:49:26.200probe those institutions that are death-making and harmful institutions, because I'm actually
00:49:32.500trying to eradicate harm, not reproduce it, not reinforce it, not maintain it. So I find that we
00:49:41.320really have to just realize that sometimes our feelings and our kind of really valid sense of
00:49:48.800wanting some form of justice for ourselves gets in the way of actually seeking the thing we want.
00:49:55.680And so for me, I'm constantly talking with folks. You know, I only facilitate community accountability processes within my communities. I don't, you know, I'm not getting paid for it. I'm not a paid facilitator. These things are important.
00:50:07.880We all have to gain skills within our communities so that we can hold harm, transform it and come out the other side, because that is so critical.
00:50:19.340And so few people are having the harms that they experience attended to at all, at all.
00:50:25.220Most people get nothing. So community accountability is like, can we offer something?
00:55:50.580You know, anything that we see coming at us through bills, if we're seeing more money
00:55:55.620being poured into the police or the prison industrial complex, that needs to be a red
00:56:00.480flag that we can understand that that is a false solution and it's just strengthening
00:56:03.940corrupt institutions and not benefiting the communities. Also, in preparing for this
00:56:09.600interview, I came across a lot of your dialogue around the push to address domestic and sexual
00:56:15.220violence in the 60s and 70s through non-carceral forms, and then comparing that to movements of
00:56:22.820today, specifically liberal feminist ones, which are incredibly punitive, something that I believe
00:56:29.320you've referred to as carceral feminism. So I'm just wondering, why do you think this move towards0.98
00:56:36.800the carceral state has happened? Yeah, I mean, it's seductive. The state doesn't stay put in
00:56:43.360the state is dynamic. So anything that's going on that the state thinks that it can have some
00:56:49.680sort of power over, it's going to try to incorporate it, it's going to try to co-opt it.
00:56:54.120That's just the way that it operates. And so to me, it's not surprising at all that feminists and others who were trying very, very hard to, as I mentioned earlier in the conversation, who were trying very, very hard to really end violence against women and girls in that particular conceptualization.
00:57:15.200They weren't focused on gender nonconforming folks at the time or trans people at the time.
00:57:21.880And so it's like we have to figure out some way to end that, to come up with solutions.
00:57:26.660And the law enforcement, as I mentioned to you, offered money.
00:57:30.340And that was a way where people could actually then supposedly impact this problem that they saw in the world.
00:57:38.540And so this is always the thing. It's the seduction of funding that is needed to actually address real problems that then takes those things and transforms them and mutates them into more problematic behavior.
00:57:52.840and this is in part what happened and the person who I think is the person who started talking
00:57:59.880about carceral feminisms if I remember it might be Elizabeth Bernstein I think in the context of
00:58:06.260thinking about anti-trafficking work who started talking about carceral feminism like I mentioned
00:58:11.280before I gave a little bit of a definition of what that term is but you know many people have
00:58:16.280good intentions. And I just think sometimes your intention and the outcome aren't aligned. And I
00:58:25.740think that happened. I think for some people, they did want a very punitive response. They intended
00:58:31.660the response that they got. They intended the outcome that came out of it. But for many people,
00:58:35.960it was just like, we need a way to transform this situation that is terrible. And we need to find a
00:58:42.920response and these people are offering us some resources to address that. So I'd be remiss as
00:58:50.360we're talking about the prison industrial complex to not talk about prisons in relationship to
00:58:56.220climate change and I'm thinking about this in terms of two areas really one being the climate
00:59:02.320related catastrophes incarcerated people face semi-regularly whether it be overheating,
00:59:09.120flooding, and failure to be properly evacuated. And then the second in terms of climate refugees
00:59:16.160globally, and the continuation of semi-permanent detention facilities and the weaponization of
00:59:22.120migrants through narratives that position them as threats worthy of punishment. So I'd like to
00:59:29.500open this conversation up to you in any way you see fit, or perhaps to ask you more specifically
00:59:35.240why it's vital to have anti-prison organizers and abolition workers listen to in the movement
00:59:42.100for climate justice. Oh my goodness. So important. So, so important. So I have to say that it's only
00:59:50.620recently in the last, I would say 10 years, maybe, or even, I mean, maybe eight years that I've
00:59:56.140gotten much more curious about climate change and more than just curious, started to try to read
01:00:05.040more to inform myself about what was going on. And in part, it was because many of my friends
01:00:11.940who are PIC abolitionists are also people who are very concerned about climate and climate change.
01:00:17.600And there were many kind of things that come up for me around that. And I just read a piece,
01:00:22.640gosh, I would love to remember the title and who wrote it. It was in Jacobin, actually,
01:00:29.240And about how prisons and the New Green Deal need to be thought through together in various ways. And so I was thinking the other day about how the U.S. in particular, through this current regime that we're in, has been really trying to turn away climate refugees, right?0.71
01:00:48.880The people who recently in, you know, the U.S. Virgin Islands, like Bahamas, the U.S. was like actually actively trying to turn away people who were coming who were climate refugees into the country.
01:01:00.080So on the one hand, I was just thinking this is kind of a white supremacist immigration policy, right, that it's being put into action.
01:01:08.860But it made me start thinking about just within the country itself, the way that climate has caused havoc.
01:01:17.400So, for example, what happened when Katrina came in and people were not willing to evacuate the prisons, right, when the hurricane was coming.
01:01:26.140So leaving prisoners to quote the elements, right, and not including them within any sort of emergency disaster relief plan.
01:01:35.480So the disposability of those folks who are locked up being so glaring, the lack of concern, like they could just all drown and we don't even care about it, right?
01:01:46.940I was thinking about that. I was also thinking about the concept of disaster, which we're hearing more and more about in the press and the media. But the fact is, the very concept of climate disasters, they don't necessarily impact everybody in the same way.
01:02:05.120We're vulnerable in very different ways, right? Like if we can't escape, get in a car, go further inland, then we are at the mercy of not just nature. We're also at the mercy of the human policymaking that doesn't care about us at all and thinks of us as like basically fodder for what is going on, right?
01:02:27.680And so I was just thinking about all of that and how that connects directly to disposability. And we think a lot about disposability when we think about people who are incarcerated and the ways that we just don't consider their well-being at all. And in fact, the ways that prisons make people sicker in every possible way exploits human frailty to harm more and more people.
01:02:50.840There's so many places of overlap. I have been really thinking about that. I've been thinking that we really do need the environmental toxicity of prisons and then what is actually happening in terms of environmental justice.
01:03:05.240Sometimes these things don't connect with each other. People don't see them together, but they absolutely are co-constitutive of each other as well as influenced by each other. And the impacts will have so much negative effects on people who are vulnerable already. I think this is so important to think about.
01:03:24.580Mm-hmm. Now, as we're beginning to close, I'd love to talk about how fatalism is not
01:03:32.460an option or how we can understand abolition as the antithesis to fatalism. And I've come across
01:03:41.300so many beautiful proclamations in preparation for this interview that abolition is not just
01:03:46.540about dismantling, disavowing, and resisting. It's an exercise in imagining what exists
01:03:52.200beyond our current world, what possibilities and relationships exist in a world without
01:03:58.160dehumanizing incarceration. So I'd just like to ask you personally, how do you see abolition
01:04:04.760changing everything? And what work can we do every day to abolish these systems of oppression
01:04:11.980as we commit ourselves to a world without dehumanization? Yeah. So I say this often,
01:04:19.140but I just think that Audre Lorde talks about despair being a tool for your enemies.
01:04:25.220I think that fatalism is the same. I don't have the luxury, I feel like, as a person in the world
01:04:33.960who doesn't just care about my own survival, but also loves many, many small people. I call
01:04:42.120them small people, but children in my life who are not my own, but are deeply loved by me.
01:04:49.140I can't imagine a fatalistic viewpoint serving their ability to live.
01:04:57.100I want them to live beautiful, long, happy lives.
01:05:02.280And I think that I just can't support a notion that there's nothing to be done to be able to improve the world and improve our own likelihood to survive whatever is to come.
01:05:18.300I've said it often but fatalism I think abets premature death0.93
01:05:22.760I think it's death for the marginalized0.65
01:05:26.440I also think like I'm not going to be here to see the end of the world0.99
01:05:30.900I'm pretty certain of this okay like I'm pretty certain that that's the case
01:05:35.200So I feel like I might as well do my best to fight now
01:05:38.400What do I lose by trying for a better world than this one?
01:06:16.360but I'm not talking about optimism for the sake of,
01:06:20.580like I'm not an optimistic person at all,
01:06:22.960but I am profoundly and deeply hopeful.
01:06:27.980And for me, that means that I believe in every single day
01:06:32.200waking up and making a choice to continue to fight
01:06:34.800for something better than what we currently have. And I want to do that for myself, of course,
01:06:43.200because no organizer is doing work in an altruistic way. We are all doing work because
01:06:49.400we recognize that we are interdependent, that we need each other profoundly and desperately,
01:06:54.800and that we have to fight in order to be able to preserve and then improve on and then build
01:07:01.120together no space and no room for fatalism at all and I really really want people to recognize that
01:07:10.200like you're not going to be around for the end of this long-term human project that's been going on
01:07:14.920forever in our lifetime forever right like the forever that we live in the forever of our lives
01:07:20.740we're not going to be around to see the end of it so we better fight now to make sure that it's
01:07:27.220better for the people who come next than it is this moment that we're living in. So yeah,
01:07:34.860I think I'll just say that. Okay. So for my very last question for this episode,
01:07:41.440I know you've often mentioned this while covering Cyntoia Brown's clemency, but I'd like to ask you
01:07:50.580about what sort of community support is needed for criminalized survivors of gender-based violence
01:07:56.040following their release oh gosh so many things so many things then Toya is a is a kind of unique
01:08:03.460case right because she had a national international you know set of supporters over many years
01:08:10.920who pushed for her clemency folks raised money to support her while she was inside
01:08:16.980people have raised money for her to be able to live now she just has a book out so she's touring
01:08:23.880that her life is so different from so many, many other criminalized survivors who, when they get
01:08:30.160out, if they get out, don't have a support system to help them integrate, often for the first time
01:08:37.320in society. I always talk about the myth of reentry, you know, the notion that people who
01:08:42.500end up incarcerated were often not integrated into society in the first place. They were in the
01:08:48.020margins of society before their incarceration. And when they come out, they're even more
01:08:53.680marginalized. And so I feel like our work is to try to draw people into our circle as they come
01:09:01.220home, to offer soft places to land for people, and to do our best to do mutual aid and mutual support
01:09:10.220so that folks have what they need to be able to survive on the outside. It is not easy to do,
01:09:15.980especially if you've been locked up for many many years to try to figure out what everything looks
01:09:21.320like now after you've been gone for 10 20 years is hard and difficult and if you were cut off
01:09:27.400while you were on the inside and had little support from family and friends and didn't have
01:09:32.340anybody sending you letters you just are lost when you come out I've heard that from so many people
01:09:38.620and comrades who came out and felt so bereft, so lost. So Centoya is, you know, an exception in
01:09:46.420that sense, that she has a lot of support, newly married, a lot of other things going for her,
01:09:52.520but most people don't get that. So one of the things I would just want to flag for people,
01:09:57.840if they have a chance, is that you mentioned that I co-founded a formation called Survived
01:10:02.100and Punished, and we have a New York affiliate that I'm a member of, and right now we're raising
01:10:06.680money for giving some commissary support to some incarcerated survivors. And we have a PayPal pool.
01:10:13.960If you follow Survived and Punished New York on social media, Facebook or Twitter, you can find
01:10:19.520the link there. And that's a concrete way of supporting people on the inside to get what they
01:10:24.480need. And then look for groups, A New Way of Life. And the West Coast is a group that creates homes
01:10:30.600for formerly incarcerated women in particular, and gender nonconforming people who are coming0.74
01:10:36.260home so that they have a place to come to that's welcoming, that will help them, that'll be a soft
01:10:42.040place to land. And a house in Omaha, I found out, it's called Leiden House, and it's sponsored by
01:10:48.020Black and Pink. And they have a home where they're going to be welcoming up to five LGBTQI,
01:10:55.020formerly incarcerated people into that space. Because housing, it's just impossible for everybody
01:11:00.500right now to find affordable housing. Forget it, you know, whatever your status is in life. But
01:11:05.320When you are a formerly incarcerated and criminalized person and trying to find housing, it's even more difficult.
01:11:11.680And so that puts you in a position of being housing insecure, leads you into the pipeline of criminalization, and being housing insecure when you come out leads you back into that very same system.