Transcripts For CSPAN2 Author Discussion On Ending Incarceration 20240713

Hay market books has more, wednesday discussion of remaking schools in the time of coronavirus and on thursday a week from today roy and conversation with the if your streaming gets choppy at any point you might want to reduce the quality. We are observing time for q a and please post questions on life video feed wherever youre watching it. Now lets go. Im mattie roy, the pandemic is some responses for covid19, policing of national and sub National Borders and more surveillance now sold to us with the message that total surveillance is good medicine, but as we try to imagine a different world and fight for abolition future theres no one i would rather hear from than ruth gilmore, the Central California Environmental Justice network. Shes professor of earth and Environmental Sciences at kennedy graduate. Author of prison, surplus, crisis and opposition and globalize in california. Brilliant study that locates prisons as the foundation of a new kind of state, the antistate state and dismiss the idea that government should guaranty social wellbeing. Her work featured in dozens of books including policing the planet by jordan kemp and kristina and her new book change everything, thanks so much for being here with me. Thanks having me. Can you start by giving us the Bigger Picture on the relationship between prison and inequality . Sure, id be happy to. My dear friend katherine who i think is listening from somewhere in greater toronto recently cited those fantastic poet and lawyer, norbenson philip. If we were truly in all of this together we would not all be in this together and this is a message i think that we can use as our study points tonight in talking about covid19, mass incarceration and struggle for abolition. Mass incarceration and related forms of detention that connect to it is a feature of places that have the deepest inequality, the deepest inequality. We have one slide to show you tonight. A slide that shows a list of the founding nations, now this slide which was created by the Prison Policy Initiative perhaps the greatest Data Collection and spreading organization in the United States and one of the great ones of the world shows us that even in the context of the organizations, the United States is off the chart, quite literally off the chart and what holds this together. What holds together the possibility of mass incarceration in the richest country in the history of the world is a combination of organized abandonment which is to say austerity or united, criminalization, missing, detention, deportation. Now we can take the slide down if people are are satisfied with this image, we could, but we are not going to tonight. Also look at images from the brazil, russia, india, china and south africa and we would see a similar pattern emerging where no one, no country is remotely close to the United States but as russia and other countries of the brits have followed increasingly with liberal policies which is to say the policies of organized abandonment and austerity, we see the number of people locked up rise and rise and rise. But as i said, the United States remains off the charts. That said, abolition actually is not a recitation of catastrophe or culture of complaint. Indeed, catastrophe and complaint, thats all we do are the kinds of practices that induce in many people who are listening what my friend the historian Darrell Scott calls contempt and pity and abolition is not looking for contempt or pity. What we are doing is rather this, we are trying in every possible way to find a way to politics thats rather than being distinguished by as the sociologist and novelist edward says, politics distinguish by style, we are looking for politics that really are grounded in the struggle of life and death. So edward lee is a french, young french writer and he wrote a fantastic book i recommend to everybody called who killed my father and its in this book that he makes this distinction. Politics and style against politics and life and death. What does politics and life and death mean for abolition. Well, abolition is presence, its already happening in so many ways in so many places around the world and many of the people who are listening in tonight and watching tonight are already doing the work and are stumped as many of us are because so many of us are under some version of shelter in place, house arrest and yet the word continues. Now james teaches us that people are conservative, conservative. They wait and wait and try every little thing until one day people come out in the streets and clear up in a matter of years the disorder of centuries and says this is the portal, this might be the portal for which people who are doing all kinds of Little Things of various kinds around the world come out and clear up the disorder of century. My friend and comrade ana maria of abolition radio listed up the black panda and we could think of what we do of survival pending abolition, so that means that the work behind and the work ahead is very, very long. I will give you an example. In Los Angeles County, decades ago, the aclu brought conditions of confinement case against the county for the horrendous condition in the jails. Over the years, the aclu was in charge of of taking care, keeping an eye on what the county did to remedy the horrific conditions. About 18 years ago, the aclu invited a few abolitionists to come and talk to them about something they had never imagined which was perhaps the way the remedy, the problem with the la county jails was not to have a jail at all rather than to build a better jail. Slowly but surely the way of understanding became central to the struggle in Los Angeles County over those jails. 16 years later abolitionists who joined forces with the forces of reform managed to persuade the Los Angeles County board of supervisors one of the biggest governments by number of people in the United States not to build new jails but rather to put the billions of dollars that would have gone into that into Housing Health care and other life affirming projects. So abolition is presence, abolition is how we connect with form, grow from and multiply organizations that have the capacity to lift the movement. I learned many years ago, work, talking, our main work is to lift the movement and not to leave it but lift it. Lift it to show how antidomestic violence people are central to formation of abolition as a movement. That Mutual Aid Organization which are now flourishing everywhere because of the emergency of covid19. Unions, food, health care, nurses, building traiting, all of the organizations have become in one way or another connected with the movement in the direction of the abolition because abolition is about abolishing the conditions under which prison became the solution to problems rather than abolishing the buildings we call prisons. There are faith organizations, neighborhood organizations, artist organizations, tenant organizations, prisoner organizations, inside and out, Environmental Justice, legal aid, transit workers, rights advocates, Public Health advocates, you name it, large and small, all of these people are coming together in various configurations around the world to try to releave relieve stress of abandonment and organized violence by changing the world in which we live. So that is the big picture that connects inequality with abolition and mass incarceration. Okay. So here we are. Now enter the covid19 pandemic. What are the possibilities now and what does the pandemic mean for the future criminalization and policing and prison . Theres nothing like fear to focus the mind and the fear has many, many aspects to it and therefore the responses that people are putting together are in many ways quite astonishing. For example, just to take one very pointed case, some people i think mostly students at New York University law school put together a sheet, a guide for all of the federal bureau of prisons in the country to show who actually has the authority to release people so that people who are organizing on the grounds could focus using this power map on those who could, brief amount of time make the decision to release people. What we know about mass incarceration is that it is class war and it is as class war very tightly knotted to the vulnerabilities that the types of organizations that i listed a few minutes ago and the kinds of organizing they do are trying to relieve. Unions are trying to relieve vulnerability as our housing advocates, as our prisoner right advocates or people who are incarcerate who had are advocating on their own behalf, families, communities and so forth. We could spend some time perhaps thinking about the fact that in the United States over the period that mass incarceration has become the catchall solution for wide array of social economic behavioral and other problems the number of prison deaths has gone up as number of hospital beds have gone down. The movement in the opposite direction is quite startling to me and as many people have seen, those who are against and those who are for the configuration of hospital and health care in the United States today, we still see the facts that many, many areas of the u. S. Are underserved if served at all places that have the capacity to take care of people are overwhelmed because of cuts to hospital and health care and the workers who are working in hospitals, working in transportation, working in all of the system to try to keep people whose lives are in danger from becoming sick and dying are struggling with inadequate resources when resources could be there, so what can we think about in terms of organizing now . Certainly a lot of the work that many people have done concerning workers, vulnerabilities should and can be lifted up now, whether we are talking about the mst in brazil and the workers led an organizing for years both to have access to land to produce food and wellbeing and to live and have shelter but also built an enormous Educational Program for themselves and others that have very Strong International connections throughout this hemisphere and, indeed, around the world or in the u. S. Highlander center which in tennessee since 1920s has been an essential place for organization, antiracist, proworking Class Organization and they will have a program on i think right after we log off tonight starting at 7 lock on 7 00 oclock on freedom movement. 7 00 oclock eastern time. When we think about housing, i can give story about a young abolitionist artist who is based in new orleans. After katrina destroyed a good deal of everyday life in new orleans the antistate came through and destroyed what hadnt been destroyed by the floods and the raw, shana and some of her comrades got together and said we are going to create a Housing Trust so that a few households at least could have a safe, secure and Pleasant Place to live so they knocked themselves out learning how to make a trust, how to take land out of the markets, found the place they wanted to buy, raised the money to buy the place, still all of the paperwork finished. What Shana Griffith had to say, we did do this, we helped ourselves and this helped me that the state that we needed will do this. Rather than think we can do this ourself or each other. We need prostate and antistate state. All are connected with the very kinds of things that people are doing immediately to try to get people out of prison and jail versus people who got out who are vulnerable because they need shelter or food or other type o there are funds in the United States, new with covid19 but they are more urgently of course reaching out and raising money. We know that in cook county in chicago shala grant and the comrades that she has been working with over the years have done an enormously wonderful job getting people out of cook county jail. This is a good thing to do and yet we also know that in the last four weeks 22 Million People in the United States lost their jobs. That means the need couldnt be greater for people to have the wherewithal to pay rent to buy food and so forth. Theresless as we save discretionary cash available and therefore discovered in the work that she did in new orleans, we have to make demands on the social wage which is our right and our requirement of ourselves. From around the world moves around the world, radical educators here in portugal, the Detroit Justice Center, the people who have been worked with mi gente, working on behalf undocumented people, Long Distance migrants all over the United States, disability organizers whose work has has been beautifully put together, people doing work on food, center in chicago. Many, many people have been working to try to extend protection and opportunities and see that in this emergency is exactly the time not to say these people are deserving, those people are not but rather to say if, indeed, in four weeks 22 Million People in the United States have lost their jobs, that means many of us with jobs, precariously employed, steadily employed or unemployed must join forces together rather than imagine that we can prevail by breaking ourselves up into smaller and smaller groups. I wanted to turn more specifically to the current calls for deincarceration and lines that mark nonviolent versus violent, low risk versus can you explain what problematic demand using these categories . Well, first and foremost, we should always plan to win and if we plan to win we should ask ourselves what happens next in the event of victory and if it happens next in the event of victory, the people who have been rightly released are the only ones who could ever be released, then we will not have one. Do i say we, people, everybody inside, of course not. I do say this, most people who go to prison leave prison. Most people are not doing life sentences, there should not be any life sentences and in most parts to have world there arent life sentences but most people do leave prison and rather than imagining that theres a magical line between less guilty and more guilty or more innocent or less innocent or more deserving or less deserving or i will say violent and nonviolent we should say why not take seriously the fact that most people leave prison do a little bit of analysis to see that we could be closing prisons already and jails already if we get caught by 2 weeks, 3 weeks and 4 weeks much less years the price of sentences people are serving. As i the example that i gave to you from Los Angeles County, this is not an impossible challenge. It did take a long time in los angeles. The next time shouldnt take as long. It shouldnt take as long because of what we learned. It shouldnt take as long because the model behavior that other qualities can follow. One of most important thinkers,s orers, leaders, revolutionaries taught us or cautioned us i should say against cleaning easy victories, hes absolutely right. That said, we should gather all of our victories and then stop and think about them and say what is this victory going to make possible next. Why do these victories matter, who have we abandoned, who have we used own capacity organize violence in order not to include them against to include victory. New york city to spend to build new jail. This is the socalled rickers jail, the mayor announced that it will shrink 2 billiondollars, 2 billion less for everything the city needs. This is really straightforward. The play mayor can learn from Los Angeles County, do not build the new jail, close rikers, use the resources and Human Resources that would have gone into that entire array of of institution that is people would be organizing to close just as people organized to close rickers which was open because people organized to close the institution that proceeded rickers and the mayor and the city council can use the money for the wellbeing of a city that has, indeed, been ravaged by unemployment, ravaged by the highest number of deaths from covid19. How can that be . Turning the corner has to happen there because where life is precious, life is precious. A young organizer and thinking who has an entire story of his own to tell called mika, just published a piece in which he argues really beautifully about what is the highrisk, lowrisk, they are humans, period. They are humans, period. The late martin wrote a wonderful book about some risks years ago in which he said the world is under neoliberalism and people who can bear more risks and we could see now with the economic collapse by the kind of Political Leadership and normalized thinking which to say that domination of neo liberalism tells us that where life is not precious, life is not precious and that is the corner we have to turn. As the death counts have been rising people have called on your definition racism and the way to name and to understand whats happening right now. Racism is, quote, the state sanction and or extra legal production and exploitation of group differentiated from our ability to premature death. Thats already amountable let me see what i can [laughter] i will be happy to elaborate. Just what i wanted to say about the definition is to caution people about falling into the trap of the performance. What do i mean . People look at me and see, oh, in the United States shes black, that means she talks about racism, shes talking about what happens to black people or they think, oh, that definition means black people have it the worst. No. What that definition tries to do and seems to do for people as different places, australia, argentina, mexico, brazil, south africa, many, many places where people have used put definition in the world, what the definition helps them do is to think about the design of things, whether the relationship leads to jogs, housing, the transportation, to health, to the justice system, to security and gender identity, to age, to vulnerability and old age and well willing as children. This definition lets people start to think systemically so that its possible to see how various groups come into being come into being and therefore then become naturally available for organizing and struggle. Thats what that definition is for. So i will give you some examples. The design of the Public Health system in the United States and i think it is true throughout a deal of the overdeveloped world as well as the good deal of the world that although dominated by resource extraction still went through several rounds of Governmental Organization in the 20th century that putting to place was scale complex governmental institutions designed to extract value from labor and land, so things like Public Health. Public health was tragic in the 20th century. The design of Public Health as we learned from shaw and others layed out a framework of care and disregard that itself has amplified over time so that if today we say certain kinds of people are more likely to have underlying conditions that makes them vulnerable to covid19 deaths, the issue is not, is something objectively pathological about a person or a group of people but rather how has the design of a Public Health system and wherewithal to make it in practice, brought some people in and pushed some people out over time, so tomorrow afternoon as i think at 2 30 in eastern time, u. S. Time, farrell, longtime activist, just activist, once upon a time resistance organizer will be in conversation with the visionary sociologist who is the best at at thinking about data and thinking data visual organization for the people and strengthening people in Movement Show that conversation will happen tomorrow. And i want to Say Something else in thinking about my definition of racism that we must all be ware of the statistics. Statistical analyst they tell us over and over again. We have to be aware of the statistics and at the same time be ware of the presumption but to recite vulnerability is somehow persuasive. If we say 50 or 3 , thats against 1 , somehow thats going to persuade people to action. That in my experience especially years ago when i was doing some outreach work with young people in high school who we were trying to kind of bring into the early days of critical resistance abolition and others talked to a group of mostly brown and black young people and one of the teachers said, well, woman, young black man is going to go to prison. First of all, it turned out that the statistic didnt hold any water, but let us even say it was true. What young person sitting in the auditorium in 1998 would be encouraged to listen and act if the scoldy older people came in and said, you are doing, you are doing. To go back to my definition of racism is, the purpose of definition is to enable people to think about activities whose vulnerability might then lead to joining forces in order to overcome that vulnerability and do something else. Example is water. Everywhere around the planet people are struggling over water so at the moment, Navajo Nation, the Navajo Nation has become a hot spot for covid19 in part because the scarcity of water. People cant do the simple thing which we are all supposed to do which is wash our hands. The Navajo Nation obviously brings to mind the people who are organized at Standing Rock and the no dapl, the pipeline people who had been trying to get people to understand that the antipipeline organizing has everything to do with protecting the land and particularly protecting water, so that struggle and the struggle that produces, excuse me, the vulnerability around inadequate water that produces likelihood of premature death connects the Navajo Nation with flint michigan and with detroit and the work that the Detroit Justice Center is doing, people in australia especially after the fires of last year, problem of adequate water and adequate nutrition is quite enormous, the fact that capetown the city, cape cod in africa are on the verge of being without water. So for all of these concerns about water, fought through the lens of my definition of racism i hope provide people with the sense of the opportunity to join forces to fight racism by fighting for water, to fight racism to fight against prisons, to fight racism to fight against housing and rather to fight against peoples attitudes. I dont really care what anybody thinks of me as long as they stay out of me way. Okay, so i am going to bring in some audience questions. Before i do i want to remind everyone about some upcoming hay market events, on sunday chris franklins superb new book of poetry and images and that launch is being hosted by mahoganyl. Brown and wednesday remaking of schools in time of coronavirus with weighing out jesse and other thursday a week from today, you can register for all and you can check them out at hay market on their web page. Hay market is doing really incredible work, crucial work, radical imagination. If youre in a position to make a donation no matter how small please consider give to go haymarket through venmo and and abolitionist groups like critical resistance at criticalresistance. Org. Let me give you a couple of questions and you can select. Okay. As you feel your appetite. Karen sent one, does abolition also apply to war and i thought possibly you could elaborate also the military Industrial Complex and how youre thinking about the prison Industrial Complex. Thats one for the taking if youd like. Also a few really good questions that are asking for just some breaking down of what is meant by the decarciration. Okay, let me take karen from way back. I will take that question. We havent seen each other in ten years, maybe. Ten years. War absolutely. Let me talk about the military Industrial Complex and the prison Industrial Complex and its interesting that we have gotten this far in our discussion and i think prison Industrial Complex just kind of great, so some of us inspired mainly by mike davis in an article he published in the nation in 1994 i think, maybe 5, started to think about what we didnt get called mass incarceration. We started to think about how come theres so many people in prison and how come theres so many new laws and how come the sentences have gotten so long and how come new prisons everywhere. Those are all the questions that animated us. Mike said asked the question, is there prison Industrial Complex and in playing off the concept of military Industrial Complex, inviting people to think about things that i even think he may not have thought about it at the outset which is to say if we think about the military Industrial Complex, we think not only about the people who go to war but we have to think about the intellectuals who designed the Public Policy that determines when the u. S. , for example, will use diplomacy and when it will send troops. It means that the military Industrial Complex needs all of the people, engineers and designers and ordinance makers and so forth who design the machinery as industrialed killing and then the pentagon, that contracts for the machinery to be made and be ready. The military Industrial Complex includes all of the bases spread around the United States and around the world. There are more than 800 u. S. Bases around the world. Not the only military around the world but there is no military that has such a wide representation on the surface of the planet than the u. S. Military. The military Industrial Complex also includes all of the people who are, you know, residents of towns that are near bases and the boosters who want to have more of the jobs for civilians that come with the bases and the people who work in the factories that make the ordinance and the bombs and so on and so forth and its all of that is the military Industrial Complex, the people who make the laws, the people who make design the policies, the people who design the weapons, the people who are actually uniform and civilian personnel, by extension the prison Industrial Complex has the same complexity and that is not to muddy the water, but rather to clarify that there are all the places to fight, that we can fight in Rural America where people in many cases welcome in prison, thinking the prison was going to bring jobs and safe the rural hospital. Neither thing happened or the people that imagined that the only kind of future they can have is First Generation College students is to major in criminal justice of one kind or another and hope to become a Police Officer or a prison guard or a worker in that environment rather than a teacher or an artist or something else, that the same amount of education could produce. Use of the land, use of the resources, uses of money and relationships between and among people are all involved in prison Industrial Complex, so thats one way of saying in answer to karins question, absolutely, absolutely. Abolition really does require that we change one thing which is everything, which is what the title of that book is about, everything, so there are some young, young, my point of view, i turned 70. Some young lawyers, legal scholars and also practicing lawyers including young woman doing postdoc and doing legal work in the socalled war on terror around the world for a long time, for example, in afghanistan, pakistan border. Africa or elsewhere. I think that the principles of abolition as i have come to understand them through the combination of inside women of color against violence put together with critical resistance give us the basis with thinking about how abolition into the most difficult struggles outside oaf of prison and detention from struggle to war and the complexity of those struggles as she put it its not as though we can say theres the wrong and everyone else on the ground is not. We have to sort them out and thats the way it works. So, yes, abolition does in a word extend toward there are a lot of really excellent smart audience questions. That style asks how can abolition practice be used for palestinians and accusations . If you were sitting in front of me i would ask you to answer it. Theres so much mutual aid that extends across the barrier of occupation, of war, of struggle that goes in both directions, so its not if so people in the United States are exclusively in the position to offer help that people who are in the occupied territories are exclusively in the position to require health. I dont think that that is the way to think and i know for a fact that thats not how things have gone, so, for example, during the very, very active days in ferguson, missouri, at the time that black lives matter becoming more and more a feature of how people understood the need to protest without succession over Police Killings of people in the country, one people and people of all ages i should say in ferguson werent from people in solidarity in palestine how to deal with teargas. Its just one example. There are other examples as well but i think perhaps the heart of the question is how can we reach through walls that seem to be so solid. What are the modes of communication of solidarity of struggle that we can put into practice and to come back to the u. S. And not turning my back in any way on palestine, 30 years, almost to the week, is to talk about how some of the very small things that people do if done persistently start to add up to something bigger, so for example, to go back to that concept survival pending abolition. Survival pending abolition. The fact that not only people have worked hard to create bail funds and other resources to help people get out of being locked up but also the people sending care packages inside and sending them over and over and over again so that people who are inside who are not expecting to be bailed or release any time soon can have some of what they need to safeguard their life and what comes with package is care and this is not a small thing. Its a big thing. The solidarity is building care and i dont mean a kind of sentimental or sometimes sentimental, okay, but a sentimental, oh, i care about you because you are because as i said at the beginning of the conversation neither contempt nor pity will get us anywhere rather the constant interactions that come from sending care packages or cheating in a program or writing to people who are in territory or being in solidarity with the womens artist group in roy Riode Janeiro means that we build the kind of communication and the trust which is to say we know the people will be there again when we need them to do more, to do more. So some examples of this sort of work over the years have included the kind of ongoing effort that people like jerry silva have done in los angeles, where shes helped to form one organization after another after another. Undaunted by what seems to be insurmountable problem which is the say the problem of how to end mass incarceration and end the detention and as well as the problem of solidarity means that we have a promise, goes into it and the promise is to think about the edges of our struggle, but as beginning of next struggle as well that an edge is also an interface so if we want to think after borders, then we have to live as though borders can go. Some really excellent questions on indigenous liberation and the indigenous struggle. One who asks is it possible for Decarceration Movement to be practice today indigenous struggle against socalled border walls and colonial dispossession . Thats a great question. My friend has written a little bit about this in a piece that while at least in one version of a piece that he published, and next piece is freedom of place and full disclosure that phrase, freedom is a place comes from my work and nick does the work, nick is one of the founders of free nation, nick does the work of showing how indigenous struggles for decolonization and is abolitionist or abolition struggle must be decolonial. I teach every year but i dont know if we will because of covid. This is an ongoing discussion that i have with activists and intellectuals from around the planet. We talk about the continuum of abolition and decolonialization rather than its one set of struggle that has to do with people regaining freedom in the context of a nation state that doesnt go away and decolonization is a separate struggle because struggle for people to undo the colonial presence that has structured their life through generations. These things must come together to make freedom be a place. Youre getting some questions about current upticks in repression and surveillance, so one question comes in the form of what are we to make at the Current Situation of us pending Civil Liberties to prevent the spread of covid and the associated Police Enforcement of covidrelated legislation and then the latest question from katherine, can you comment on the increasing trend toward home arrest and incarceration via surveillance technologies . Sure and the latter question actually informs any answer to the former question and that is this goes into what i was talking about earlier when i was talking about the importance of planning to win and for many people, for good reason, the idea of making sure that loved ones or individuals, they themselves would not be locked up in a building somewhere else with bars on the windows and bars on the doors and all of that led to or enabled the expansion of what my friend James Kilgore called e ecarceration. I googled ankle shackle but you google ankle bracelet and i googled it and always turned out martha stewart. Martha stewart. Famous felon, rich, white women, felon, so the idea that oh, well, this is a much preferable way to be incarcerated because you can be at home and how much better is that than to be in a cell with somebody quickly showed itself to be that are subjected through are incredibly shrunken although they are living in their own homes or parents homes, whoever is taking them in. Their scope of activities is extremely limited and they are not only not actually living a life for which they are responsible such as parents for their children or children with aging parents or workers for their jobs but also is the cost to the person who is wearing the shackle and takes essentially its a system that sucks time and money from individual households and communities. Organize, organize, organize. Everything else is just if were not organizing. But if were not organizing in such a way that each victory large or small, whether its getting a care package to somebody or getting new york city to close likers and not build a jail or it is achieving relief for the people of or it is getting water to capetown, whatever it is, if in the absence of organization, nothing will be done. So the question is what kinds of organizations already exist that do the sort of work that would lead to the goals that we need. Do those organizations have currently the capacity to do more than what theyre doing. If the they dont, can people help in that capacity . If they have the capacity, for example, as is the case with many Public Sector unions have had in some cases leadership that has encouraged, for example, luckily Housing Development luxury Housing Development as, again, working class Housing Development, then is it possible not to fight the union, but from within to change the unions and change the direction . We saw this happen with the biggest local sciu in california when the state employees association turned against prison expansion each though they had members even though they had members who would lose jobs. Because they realized that their larger unions in the world was about making life better for people in communities or people working in Public Sector work, for people who did home health care, for people who did everything else, and they realized that they would be very happy, content should say, to lose some jobs in prison if those resources and the people who were entrapped by those resources could be freed to do something else. So these are the kinds of things that we have to do. We have a lot of knowledge, many, many people who do lots of good work we can use for what the Environmental Justice scholar Rochelle Bosch calls data judo. Data that judo. Data judo. Data judo is when you might know something about the vulnerability of, say, men in their 40s in brooklyn who are likely to suffer the ravages of covid19 because of this, that or the other underlying condition. Just announcing the fact of that vulnerability doesnt do anything. But if we get to a point where the forces that can make certain kinds of decisions including the decision to organize are arrayed in the right way, then busting out with the data is exactly the way to slip what is into what could be. Thats why she called it data judo. So a lot of the research that many people do and this is not just people who are in schools, but many people in school is work that people can use later. But, and its work that is available, free and should be used by organizations to build organizing. There are many organizers on this call, so i want to make sure you get some of their questions, their thoughtful questions. So one question which is many of us organizers are fighting against government officials using our woeful reentry infrastructure as a cynical excuse to keep people incarcerated. What would you say to them . I dont know if i can use a swear word [laughter] lets just say i would say [bleep] [laughter] and then answer them what comes to mind in answering this session are a couple of my 19th century main people, and those are sojourner and harriet tubman. So what would sojourner say . What would harriet say . What would sojourner do . New york state, where she was enslaved in new york state, new york state set out a program of gradual emancipation. The benchmarks and achieve a certain age or having apprentice to the person formerly known as the person who thought they owned you before you, the enslaved person, could be free. So isabella, who we know as sojourner truth, i called bleep on all this and she left. She just left. So when government officials say, well, gosh, the reason we cant let more people out is because were not ready for them, were ready. Were ready as were ever going to be to. What does that mean . It means that we have to struggle over the question of shelter, we have to struggle over the question of food, and the fact that 22 more people are without employment at least four weeks ago means that all 22 million plus 2. 5 million in prison plus everybody else should be struggling together, should be struggling together. This gradualism that is all the rage and endorsed by many kinds of think tanks and Large Research institutions is an absurdity. And it is the same absurdity which we must resist and refuse politically as the one that says the way we fix whats wrong in new york is to build these four new jails. Or the way we fix the problem of people getting sick and dying in prisons in the u. K. Is to flip the prisons from being privately run to publicly run. Nobodys going to live any longer in a publiclyrun prison. People have to not be in prison or the way to resolve the problem of mass detention of immigrants, again, is to get rid of the private contractors. Nobody gets to go home when the contracts up. What we have to do is fight for what is right. Now, those words that i just shared with you are really quite general. The question is, is it possible to return to the table again and again and again and make the same man. This is what is necessary. This is what is necessary. And one of it will happen very quickly. But while certain people who are given the advantage of being able to editorialize in Mainstream Media say, well, there must be a way we can balance out about bail and blah, blah, blah, no. S that is not the answer. That is not the answer. Its not the answer. And its really quite scary to insist on what the answer should be. It is. And we all learned something that i would like us to unlearn, and its this i think that over the years, over the decades that the, what did you call it, naomi, the prison pandemic grew the people were trying and over and over and if over again to figure out a way to speak it into illegitimacy. And that the way to speak it into illegitimacy was to point out its many flaws. Now, i have done this too, dont get me wrong. Im not saying other people did something wrong and i never get it. Of course i get it. So people would say prison was designed for men, so its bad for women. People would say prison is for adults, and its bad for children. Or people prison is for people who are healthy and so its bad for vulnerable people. Or prison is for people who are, have ordinary kinds of abilities, therefore, its difficult for disabled people. Or prison is based on a twogender system, so its difficult for gender nonconforming people. All those things are true, but prison is not good for anybody. So like that healthy, heterois sexual man heterosexual man with, you know, generally no difficulties in getting around and so on and so forth, it is not good for him either, right . Its bad. But i think that the search for how to speak an illegitimacy into being came from struggles that many people have had in the beginning of the 21st century over what on earth do we mean nimby rights. What is it. I anymore by rights. What are we talking about when we talk about rights. Civil rights or human rights, either one. Why does it matter for us to talk about rights . How can we undo this scourge by raising up a concept that seems to be fundamental to the scourge itself . This is, this is, i think, where a lot of people are at. And so i think whats happened is a lot of us, were trying very hard to figure out who was relatively speaking more innocent so that in the logical system of mass incarceration itself, itll be possible to identify the people who shouldnt be there. That was a mistake. It was no more or less a mistake than telling young people, going black men 22 years ago youre going to go to prison. Unless you join our group, right . But either one is just, its not, it was not doing the work we wanted it to do. Isso today rather than go along with a way of talking about prison and detention that seems to suggest we can identify the relatively innocent and then do something on their behalf that we would never do for everybody else, we have to step back and say this entire system is corrupt, and it kills people, it compels people to die, we can see it right now with covid19 and, therefore, what are we going to do. And we have to say it over and over and over and over is and over again. Thats what i think. I love that. I want to say that over and over again right now in thinking about all the range of work thats tried to work its way into the ill legitimates she of the prison. It does strike me that so much of whats been happening for the last 20 years prison fails by its own standard which is it doesnt actually reduce crime. Those logics are off the mark, and thats also known as a sort of way of thinking and speaking that, i think, actually puts us on especially terrible footing, weak ground for the fight thats coming ahead. I agree. Okay. There are many, many excellent questions. I also, i know its so strange to just keep talking with no real feedback, so i want to let you know you are getting all kinds of exclamation points and, yes, thank you. Criminal justice majors in colleges and questions about all manner of things. How do we fight the antistate state in higher education. And there are more questions about the station between the antistate state and the prostate state. I think maybe ill you can take those. I also want to combine maybe two final questions which are sort of bigbrained questions both from annie coe. She asks how do we break the logic of [inaudible] in cages and also how do we break the economic and emotional logic of prisons. Huh. I think i wrote a book about the economic and emotional logic of prisons. And i dont know, i dont know, annie, if it gave you the level of how to, that all like. But the end of that book, golden gulag, how it needs to be done, its laid out of ten theses because i secretly wish i was the kind of person who speaks [inaudible] [laughter] but the point of the ending of that book was to lift up the very struggles so that people could look into the struggle and see, oh, i can see Something Like this somewhere else. Maybe i can do this thing. I can see Something Like this somewhere else. Maybe i can do this thing. And if i ever, ever, ever finish any addition of that book, i will make that all much more heavyhanded, lets say, than perhaps that i did. So how to fight. How to fight, is the question, i think. And how to fight has everything to do with figuring out, again, what do people who are already organized do. Is it possible for what theyre already doing to be connected to this radical vision of a future for all of us . How would that connection happen . Like, what knots those things together, and how can we trace the knot. So, for example, i cannot say that the people who organized the chicago teachers strike, the Los Angeles Unified School district teachers strike, the teachers strike in West Virginia and the other teachers strikes, i cannot say that any one of those people in their premeetings, their meetings, the way they communicated with each over, they went out at great risk to themselves theres risk and struck. I dont know that any word of them used the word with abolition. And, yes, its the abolition work because it is refusing austerity. It is demanding a future that has some sense of the voluptuous beauty that life shows hold. All of those things. So i was in chicago during the Chicago Strike last fall, and i gave a talk, and i said what i just saw said to you now. I dont know that the teachers thought they were doing abolition work, but i think theyre doing it. Well, word spread throughout the striking teachers saying, right on. Right on. I mean, there are these moments where consciousness opens. And i dont mean i opened theirs, i mean in our coming together, the teachers and me there in chicago, all of our consciousnesses opened, and that made it possible for us to think about doing things we might not have thought about before. Because, and this is an important thing, at the bottom what matters is consciousness, not experience. If it were only experience, then the sum total of experience would lead to somewhere that we dont seem to be going. Rather, its the consciousness of what the experience means and what the possibilities are for joining forces across struggle or even as is the case with many individuals, finding all of their many struggles coming together in them which is true of so many people. The multiple struggles that each of us live is what were trying to figure out how to bring together and move forward with. The late, great rose bragg who was one of the founders of critical resistance and somebody i think about every single day would say to us always when we would be dreaming up a new campaign or dreaming up a new organization, she would always say we have to be bolder. We have to be bolder. And she was the organizers organizer. One who took great pride in attention to the detail and who would make 400 phone calls knowing that 12 people might call her back, drove her everywhere, did all of these things. She, in the midst of that kind of organizing smarts, would always say we have to be bolder. We have to be bolder. And thats what we have to do. And so the economic and the emotional sort of downward drag that prison has on people are things that we can, bit by bit, push off to organizing. The example that i gave of the Public Sector union in california is an example of people who said, okay. Economically we have this much of dependence on that but so much more in all other aspects of everyday life. And im thinking a lot about essential workers. The people who have been going to work every day, theyve been told to stay home so theyre still getting paychecks but theyre working long hours at great, great, great greatly vulnerable to covid19. So as what is it about the essential workers . What are they like . They are, many of them not all of them, modestly educated people in the prime of life. Thatthat is demographically speg what prison holds. Modestly educated people in the prime of life. Then many essential workers are also people with skills that are needed, you know, in the hospital and elsewhere, when they open the schools, the teachers will be suddenly the essential worker as well. This is the backbone of, i think, the next great Labor Movement in the u. S. , in the u. K. And beyond. All of the people who see so starkly what the organized abandonment has meant when at a time, to go back to phillips, the poets beautiful world, if truly all of this in together we would not all be in this together. If anyone knows the essential workers, including the artists. I want to recommend to everyone who is look at the new york times, or theres a great artist, one of 17 or so new york artists who was asked to share in the newspaper a drawing from her window or a drawing of being shellerring in place during covid shelling in place. And she attached to her drawing a demand for rent strikes. Oh, i alone in my house see things that i never saw before and this is nothing against the other artists. Shelene put her capacity for visual expression to drawing with her insistence on what it is that we need now. And thats really what we need. Were all here, i think, because we want to do. So this has true then for our friends in australia. Annie, i think youre on the line from bris if wane. Brisbane. And our friends in south africa, in tunisia, shelley, youre there, and our friends here in portugal and shout out to vanessa in claus berg and moe in the u. K. In london. Maybe moes actually in belfast now. Davis in belfast and others. You know, weve got this international stretch. Weve got the consciousness. Weve got the need. We know whats wrong with the world, and so the question is how we do the work to turn the world green, which it should be, and then to turn it red which it must be. And in order to do those things, to make it be international, it should always be. Can i ask you to elaborate on green . And maybe here ill just is it okay if i share the aoc meditation that you and i went through before this conversation . If you want to. All right. So in thinking about the question of commonlyused language that draw cans lines that implies deserving or undeserving or points out all of the people in jail who dont have convictions, i thought about selecting a quote from alexandria ocasiocortez to use as a sort of gloss for why its troubling to think in those terms. And part of the reason we background away from it is that they didnt want people think that there are these sharp dividing lines between an abolitionist and someone whos working and organizing that has bold, radical, awe awesome ideas who maybe from time to time used this language in speaking up for things that we may have some critique with. So on that, i was hoping you could talk about the Green New Deal and what makes the Green New Deal an abolitionist idea. Sure. Well, you know, im ive already become a revisionist a little bit on the Green New Deal. I like green because green says Climate Change is a catastrophe. That said, i actually am quite taken by the revisions to the Green New Deal that was done in putting forward the are red new deal. So thats red nation deal. Red to each according to his ability and from each excuse me, to each according to his need and from each according to his ability. The idea, the urgency of rebuilding an economy that is not based in fossil fuel, endless extraction and deepening inequality between people and places is absolutely urgent. And i do think that aoc sees that urgency, and she unlike many people who get to be where she is says what she means over or and over and over again. So i am not about to disrespect in any way what aoc has accomplished to date. The problem with one of the quotations that naomi and i went back and forth about was that aoc, like many people, present the necessity of decarcerating people, which is a step toward abolition to answer that question i never answered rather than abolition itself, decarcerating people and throwing them out on the street is not abolition. Its just decars ration. But the necessity to incarcerate people seems to encourage folks to say, use words like safely or, you know, here are the eligible or that person who was the first to die in r irk rikers was there on this minor thing. Some thinking that way. As assayed, most people as i said, most people leave prison anyway. So why dont we think about that as opening the door to the portal, opening a portal that takes us away, again, from organized abandonment and our own habits of reinforcing organized abandonment even at the moment when we think were uplifting it by saying, oh, we can fix this thing but not for everybody. Not for everybody. Rather than saying we should fix this thing, lets make it as expansive as possible as quickly as possible. And to get away from not only the notion that some people are more deserving than others of the possibility of actually living a life, get away from that at the same time that we get away from and i know that my brothers and sisters and cousins and loved ones who are all over the other side of the equator, lets say, will appreciate this get away from pathologizing places because people are poor or pathologizing places because in media whether its mainstream or social, one has learned something about a certain vulnerability that some group of people might have to one or another or another role of arriving at premature death. Social movements in south africa and tanzania who are trying to figure out how to maintain a certain level of Self Determination in a new geopolitical relation with the peoples republic of china and that relationship in terms of the wellbeing of every day people on the ground. The questions come to mind but green, yeah. We need to wrap it up. I want to give you the final word. I will sign off by saying too much midnight, sunday, also, thank you to haymarket books for all the fantastic work you are doing, thank you for everyone who joined on this call, thank you for your questions, thank you to your interest in gilmore who gets the final word. Thank you, naomi. Thank you to everyone for tuning in from all over the world. I want to leave off with a sentence i have been repeating for many years that involves a repetition. When life is precious life is precious, still so straightforward and makes me think about what it makes to make life precious and making life precious arises to all different kinds of struggles so there is strife, slippages and i also want to leave off with something i learned recently, the art of caring through the reality, that a person i know who was recently released from being locked up tells me they and other people in their immediate area were singing a lot, and the sinking was bringing them a sense of being in a world they didnt have before and it reminded me of the freedom riders who got locked up in parchment person and other places who saying themselves through a terrifying time. We shall overcome but only by building that. Thank you. You are watching booktv on cspan2, television for serious readers. Here are some programs watch out for this weekend. You can find more information and a full weekend schedule online, booktv. Org or on your program guide. Nprs Steve Inskeep discussed Nineteenth Century political power couple donna Jesse Fremont who promoted westward expansion in the United States. Here is some of his talk. John Charles Fremont was an explorer, a man who in the 1840s and 50s in a series of expeditions that started in st. Louis, missouri which was the westernmost city in the continental United States, went out of the us army officer, hired skilled civilians to go along with him and mapped the oregon trail, mapped other roots, went out west again and again. Ultimately ended up by chance in california, was intrigued as people are when they come to california and then returned a couple years later to this mexican controlled territory with a party of 60 gunmen and began the process of taking over california from mexico and making it part of the United States. As an explorer he did not actually discover that much that was new. He was traveling across all land that had been traversed by native nations for centuries, but had been explored by spaniards, that had been explored by for trappers. He didnt find that much that was actually new but he codified it, made it accessible, he was making good maps and he was coming back east to washington where he was based, washington dc and writing accounts of his adventures. His job was not really to explore the west but to promote the west, to entice american settlers to move to the west because that was part of the process of taking over that territory and ensuring that it will become part of the United States. In the process of promoting the American West in the 1840s and 50s he also promoted himself. He would write these accounts of his adventures that were just official u. S. Army reports but would write them like a novel and described the landscape of the Rocky Mountains and the oregon trail and the great basin which he named the vast area reamed in by mountains that encompasses most of nevada and utah and several other states. He would also describe california very beautifully and even talkative lee and he became such an extraordinarily famous and admired individual through his writings and apparent achievements that in 1850 there was a magazine that named John C Fremont as one of the three most important world historical figures since jesus christ. And it was an american centric list. The first was Christopher Columbus who discovered america as they would have said then, established european contact with america would be a better way to phrase it. George washington, the founder of this country, the greatest achievement, and and adding el dorado as the magazine described it that much. And and real accomplishments. The most important that factor in fremont have same, may have made it possible for taking advantage of his talent and the times. Jesse fremont and his wife, born with women, allowed to make few choices for themselves, jesse found a way to chart her own course, the daughter of a senator. She provided her previously unknown husband to the highest level of government and media. It was no coincidence his career began to soar a few months after they eloped when he was 28 and she was 17. I thought as many others did that Jesse Benton Fremont was the better man of the two. She helped to write his famous report and some of his letter serving as secretary, editor, writing partner and occasional ghostwriter. She amplified his talent for selfpromotion, to publicize his journeys. She became his political advisor, attracted talented young men to his circle, promoted friends and lashed out at enemies. And she carried on with senator sweitzer age, opinion to president even when they did not agree with her, and was gradually recognized as a Political Force in her own right. Her timing was as perfect as her husbands. She was pushing the boundaries of womens assigned roles just as women were to beginning to demand a larger place in national life. To learn more, visit booktv. Org and search Steve Inskeep or his book imperfect union. Welcome to the virtual policy briefing series