Abolition & Community Care

Dan Marshall:

I don’t know if this is HRDC’s position on it, but I’m personally not an abolitionist. I do think it is a good idea, though, for the police to focus on what their main job is, which is preventing crime, responding to crime in progress, arresting people who have committed crimes. They need to be out of the business of providing mental health, responding to someone who is suicidal; that is not a crime. That person needs a mental health counselor; that person doesn’t need a police officer to come help them out. Many of the police officers I talk to as well would love to be out of the mental health business too. They’re not well-trained for that; they don’t like doing that. Cutting that out of their portfolio, giving it to somebody who is specifically trained to do those things, and reducing the police department’s role needs to be done to then use some of that money to fund people who actually can help with the mental health and other things too.

Well, I don’t think true abolition has ever been tried, recently in the United States. Even in places where they have said they defunded the police, like in Camden, New Jersey, it wasn’t really getting rid of the police. They overhauled the department, they downsized it, they changed it, but there’s still a police department there. It’s just different. I do think there needs to be somebody there to… When somebody is breaking into someone’s house, there needs to be somebody there to stop it, which is the police or what we have now, is the police. Even if it’s a little different, it’s still the police. They are certainly taking care of way more problems than what their core competency is. They should focus on what their core competency is, and we should have other people dealing with the things they’re not so good at dealing with.

Rachel Gross:

Specifically with that question, a lot of people on death row have lost ties with their families, either because they killed a family member or their families are ashamed of what they’ve done, so they don’t have much connection with people on the outside at all. One of the things that my husband learned from his experience from being in prison—and he was in a minimum security facility, so that’s a completely different situation from people being on death row—was that people who got more mail were better treated by the guards. There was a sense that it must mean something more; they had people caring about them on the outside. So that was like this person had more worth or there were people on the outside looking out for what was happening to this person; it could have been either or both of those things. That was just his observation, and so, one of our ideas for our project is just for those who are in prison to get more mail to show that they matter to somebody on the outside.

I’ll add to that phrase too about lifelines and say that we’ve heard from so many prisoners that it just makes them feel more human. Some people are worried on the outside—“Oh, I don’t want to write about, you know, ‘We went on vacation or, we did this or that,’ because they can’t do those things”—but what we hear from prisoners is that they really appreciate that. It just expands their world, and it makes them feel more human to have that kind of connection and to know that all those things are going on in the world outside.

Rachel Gross:

There are European countries that have completely different models, and I recently saw—I think it was a TEDTalk done by somebody who had toured Germany and visited some of their prisons—that their prison cells looked like college dorm rooms. It was just clear that the philosophy was different.

I’m also going to weave to a different thing too since it’s on my mind. I just listened to a podcast yesterday with Chris Hayes interviewing a guy who has been a police chief—he was a policeman in New York City for a long time and then he ended up in Burlington, Vermont as a police chief. He said that he thinks what we need to do to make policing more effective is to frame it as: What do police need to do in order to make communities healthier? I think that we need to ask: What are we trying to accomplish with prisons? Where we are at this point is that it’s just about punishment. You could say it’s about public safety also, but I think that the climate in most prisons—there are some people who are more likely to offend after being in prisons than if they hadn’t gone to prison because there are just so many problems there. So, if we could just reframe it in terms of what needs to happen in order to make our communities safer and healthier… I mean, it’s a big prospect! It’s really easy to just say I’m a prison abolitionist; that’s really easy to say. It’s a huge thing! It would take a huge shift in the way that we do things, but I think it’s a worthy goal.

Rachel Gross:

I’ll go back to Mariame Kaba again because I think she speaks so eloquently on it. ... She gave the example of when she was living in Chicago. There were kids that were creating some sort of disturbance in the apartment building where she was living. She had a relationship with them; she made a point of having a relationship with the kids, so they paid attention to her. So whenever there was a problem in the neighborhood, the neighbors would all call her and say, “Would you talk to these kids and tell them they need to stop making noise in the middle of the night?” So one thing for sure is just relationship building and learning to know people. One of the things that came up in the conversation yesterday that Chris Hayes brought up—I know Heidi in Chicago has been experiencing this for the last 2-3 weeks—is that the firecrackers are going off all the time. So many firework displays got canceled this year, so there are all of these fireworks cheaply available for sale. They’re probably all 14-year old boys who had just been setting off these fireworks. They were saying in the conversation yesterday that this is clearly something the police can deal with. They can go out and deal with this, and I’m thinking no! This is where we need people who know the 14-year olds to go talk to the 14-year olds, and say, “You guys are being a pain!” And just sit down together and creatively figure out some other way to deal with this. They were saying yesterday, “Of course, it’s 14-year old boys. It’s something they like to do.” I’m not going to argue with that; that’s probably true. It’s not fair for them to be disrupting people’s sleep for two weeks either. So, it’s a lot easier to call the police and say, “Come lock these kids up!” It might make it quieter for a few weeks, but what does it do to them locked up for a couple weeks? It makes more sense just to sit down and talk with each other.

Rachel Gross:

It was introduced first to me by my husband. I don’t think he had that idea before he went to prison, but I think he probably came out with that idea. There was a really strong movement—Angela Davis was an early proponent of that at the time—in the late 60’s and early 70’s. Part of that is the idea of restorative justice. If you haven’t already, and I’m sure you will at some point, you will hear the name, Mariame Kaba, who is also very much an advocate for that. I just recently listened to a podcast with her, and one of the points she makes in that is that there are models out there for different ways to deal with problems other than just sending people to the prison system. But they’re not well funded. So, there hasn’t been a good attempt at trying those alternatives. There are other cultures, though, that work through communities to solve problems, rather than using the prison system.

So, for example, several years ago, my husband was in Chicago, and somebody tried to steal his car, and that person got interrupted, and so, left part way through. The car was still there, and Bob just refused to call the police. Bob just said, “Well, I don’t know how they would be helpful in this situation.” Our daughter, Heidi, in Chicago, one night, witnessed somebody breaking into the restaurant across the street. I don’t think she called the police—somebody did, but she didn’t. It was a person of color that was doing it, and how is it going to help anything to have one more Black person locked up?

It feels like a far out idea in some ways, but I think it’s really important to look at goals. For example, originally, penitentiaries were an idea that came from the Quakers, and the idea was that a person would go and be by themselves and have time to reflect. They would be penitent for what they had done. In theory, it sounds like a good idea, but it has evolved so far away from that. I have seen very little attempts in any place I’ve been—there are some exceptions—but there isn’t anything about prisons that’s trying to reform people or to help them be a different person when they come out. There are those exceptions, but if you look at the system as a whole, all it’s accomplishing is keeping people off the streets. Looking at the death penalty, it’s just about vengeance. It hasn’t done anything to reduce the murder rate. It doesn’t do anything to help the victims.

A really important group in our life is murder victims’ families who are against the death penalty. We don’t have that experience ourselves, but having spent a lot of time with people who have lost a loved one to murder, it’s just clear that the death penalty doesn’t do anything. It just means that another family has lost another family member. I think you have to have a lot of faith in human nature. For me, it all comes out of my faith in God and that God created us to be good people, not sinful, but good people—giving people a second chance, always trying to look for the best in people, providing opportunities in that way.

Jonathan Simon:

So that’s a quote from Brown v. Plata and Justice Kennedy, who we much regret retired from the court a couple of years ago, giving President Trump the opportunity of appointing, I believe, Justice Cavanough to the court. Kennedy was the great, in modern times, expounder of human dignity as a constitutional value. It was powerful when in Brown v. Plata, he was essentially—and justices do this, and law is a little bit different than other fields—deliberately echoing earlier ways of describing the same thing. Sometimes they actually cite the earlier quote from the earlier case, and sometimes they actually create a similar phrase that will always be then joined to it. He was actually referencing a quote from Chief Justice Earl Warren back in the 1958 case of Trop v. Dulles, where Chief Justice Warren had said that human dignity was the underlying—and I’m paraphrasing—meaning of the Eighth Amendment. Kennedy, I think was saying the same thing, where some people think the Eighth Amendment—the bar on cruel and unusual punishment—would only limit torture or things that are exactly like torture. But in expanding its meaning, Justices like Warren and Kennedy were saying no; the reason why we don’t torture people is because we believe in human dignity. If you didn’t believe in human dignity, torturing people would actually be an effective way to punish people probably, in terms of deterring others or vindicating victims, in some cases. The fact that we don’t do it is because we believe in human dignity, and so, there must be more meaning to that than just that we don’t torture.

To me, the term “animate” is about as strong of a word as we have in English to describe how one thing can help define another. If you animate something, you’re bringing it to life. Life is what we care the most about, I would say.

Just to punctuate it, for a long time in our country, the Supreme Court was not a friend to prisoners, from roughly the 1980’s through the Brown case, with very few exceptions. They ignored the majority of the suffering of prisoners, which allowed states to get away with mass imprisonment and overcrowding without having to pay a price to address the issue. I thought that Brown, both by forcing the prison to reduce its population and by signaling to the rest of the system that they take human dignity seriously, might be a turning point.

Jonathan Simon:

No, actually. I’m worried that that will be one of the ways that we kind of just do our couple-time-a-century-ago shuffle between hospitals and prisons again. What I really think we should do is send people home. Send them home. We failed to do that in the end with the mental hospitals. We can have community care and help people stay in their homes and get mental health care. I think everybody agrees that that failed largely because of failure to invest in community mental health, failure to keep marginalized communities in urban housing adequately—there are lots of problems there. I’d start with sending people home; if I were governor, I would use the urgent actual risk caused by the pandemic, to take every prisoner in the state that had served more than a fraction of their sentence, who could be sent home, who had a home to go to, and send them home right away. Send them all home. Then, we can start trying to find homes for the ones that don’t have homes.

I don’t think you can really separate… the more I look at the period of mass incarceration, I don’t think we can actually separate it from mass homelessness, which happened in the same period. It’s almost as if they’re part of the same larger social formation—the fact that we can’t care for people when they’re in the community and then we incarcerate them as soon as they get defined as a problem.

Jonathan Simon:

But what about situations where human dignity requires us to respond beyond a preventive way? So let’s go to violence, let’s go to rape, let’s go to crimes that we tend to overemphasize in our courses on criminal law and our TV shows on criminal law. Those are so dramatic and so distinctive. I think there, we have to start—first of all, with victim-centering. If we’re really concerned with those crimes… because those are crimes where human dignity has been assailed by damage to a particular person or a group of people, in a way that the very ignoring of that would make it an added injury of their dignity—like imagine that your father is Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader in Mississippi who was shot to death on his driveway in 1963 at the height of the civil rights movement in America, and the local Mississippi justice system did nothing about it because some of them were the ones that shot him, except they were off-duty or whatever. Or if George Floyd’s murderers weren’t to be prosecuted—there, the failure of the system to do anything would strike us as further diminishing the human dignity of George Floyd and people like George Floyd. So, we obviously need answers in those settings. I would start with the victims. What do they want? What are their choices? What kinds of choices are available to them? What are their primary concerns? I’m not saying the victims should decide everything or be able to do whatever they want to the person because that would be a terrible loss of human dignity too. But it’s striking that in so many cases, the people we hold out as the reason that we punish harshly violent crime, the victims of murder of rape, etcetera, are not necessarily the ones that want long prison sentences or prison sentences at all.

In one of the federal executions that took place last week, the victims were saying that they didn’t want the person executed. That actually comes up a lot on the death penalty. So, we ought to be victim-centered. We ought to be focused on the human individuality of the person who caused the conduct.

Jonathan Simon:

To the extent that we think that keeping people locked up prevents them from committing other crimes, there’s very very few women incarcerated who were the primary movers of the criminal conduct that they were ultimately convicted of. Most women who are convicted are the accomplices, which is a legal term for somebody who aided in the crime of a, usually, partner, who may well be abusing and coercing them. So, you could cut all those categories out, so what do we do when a woman kills her partner? Well, usually there’s a story there. There’s been abuse; there’s been history. We need to have a fuller picture of it, but I think we’re a creative enough society to find ways to address that.

One thing that prisons came out was the monastery tradition. It was only one model for them, but Christian religions—and other religions too; Buddhism has their own version of this—had developed a tradition of going into self-imposed deprivation as a spiritual practice of transformation and work. I could imagine a society that had monasteries, where a woman who killed her abusive partner might spend some nights to a year. But it would not be the prisons that we think of today.

Jonathan Simon:

Very very little. I think that is one of the things that people have to reckon with if they want to use prison to express their punitive feelings about people’s actions or other values that they have. It would be one thing if the prisons that we sent people to were places where their human dignity was respected and in good hands. In my religious tradition, in the Bible and the book of Numbers—we just finished reading it in the Jewish tradition; we read through the first five books of the Bible every year. We call it the Torah—there are descriptions of what we call cities of refuge, where people who kill accidentally, and therefore should not be put to death under the Biblical vision of justice, are to be held in custody to protect them from vengeance-seekers and also to acknowledge their wrongness of their actions, even if it wasn’t as severe as murder. What’s really interesting to me is that these cities of refuge were put under the responsibility of the priesthood and of the high priest of the whole religion. So, the idea was that we can hold people in confinement to reflect our moral concern about what they've done, but we’re going to put them in charge of the top people in our society who are responsible for maintaining our relationship with divine ordinance. In other words, their humanity, insofar as divinity, as a reflection of our respect for human dignity, was going to be held in the greatest possible care. I believe that if we were to send people to prison of any kind, we ought to treat them like astronauts or like drafted soldiers and give them every level of protection and care that we possibly can with our current level of technology and skill. If we’re not doing that, we’re actually degrading our own legal system and our own society by exposing them to a lack of regard for their humanity.

Orlando Mayorga:

I spent a lot of my time on the streets, and my role models were the people that were actually on the streets because I really didn’t have a positive role model in my life that I could look to, even within my family structure, to give me that guidance. I don’t want to say that the message of education being important and work ethic wasn’t there; it’s just that a lot of the stuff I learned on the streets made me go deaf to a lot of the things that were piercing me at home. Again, I made some very bad decisions leading up to my teenage years, when I decided to join a gang. That’s what I did; I think that choice was more based on the feeling of camaraderie and a brotherhood with other people who were hurting, just like me. We all found a way to feed off each other’s trauma, but in a way that we felt that we were showing each other love, a brotherhood bond.

Orlando Mayorga:

One of the best programs that I had been a part of while incarcerated was a group that was formed and created by incarcerated men at Danville called Community Anti-Violence Education. The acronym for that is CAVE. It was in that space that I began to learn about trauma and trauma-informed care, and I really started processing a lot of childhood issues that I didn’t know how to, even as an adult. So, being in a space with other men and growing as a result of that—sharing the trauma and sharing our truths and hurts, but also our greatest joys—is what really helped me to become a better version of me.

Orlando Mayorga:

So, currently Father Kelly, my executive director, and other restorative justice practitioners are in the process of creating a model of turning these measures to community issues. The idea is to build up community people: mothers, fathers, young people that can serve as agents of support within the community. This last week, there was a group of mothers that have been impacted by mass incarceration. The mother had either lost a child to mass incarceration or had lost children to street violence. This group of mothers meets once a month to have this healing space, which is called the mother circle.

They were recently trained in restorative justice peace circles that can then serve as a model to engage people who may have been harmed or may have caused harm in the community. The idea is to offer an alternative to people in the community to be able to call upon and rely on instead of the police. Many of the issues in the community will not require the police, but that is the automatic response that community and society has when any issue arises in neighborhoods. Our plan, or Father Kelly’s plan, is to create this alternative model to community building that relies less on the police and more so on organizations like Precious Blood in the community to be able to be the response team or the response people to a lot of the issues that don’t require police in the neighborhood.

What we’re hoping is that this model can then be able to address the more serious issues in the community when it comes to violence in the neighborhood.

Orlando Mayorga:

For me, ideally, if someone were to steal from me and I had an idea of who the person was that stole from me, if there was an alternative in place that could be the liaison between me and the person that may have done me wrong, I would want to be able to sit and get to know the person. I would want to know not only why they did it but also what the community can do to support both people. I think that is a game changer to me. It doesn’t remove or create the absence of police. It creates an alternative to police. When we hear the term “Defund the Police,” it automatically puts the police on defense, right? The police don’t really understand how disinvested and disenfranchised and marginalized our communities are. A lot of these day-to-day police officers don’t understand how they perpetuate that state-sanctioned violence just with their presence on an everyday basis.

I kind of lost myself in that rant, but being able to have that system where I feel comfortable enough to call Chilly, to call Jojo, to call Father Kelly, to call Sister Donna, or anybody else that’s not the police to hopefully bring some resolution to any “crime” that has been caused is what is needed.

Orlando Mayorga:

Another step is going to be to invest in social service programs, mentoring programs, afterschool programs, and spaces where people can come in and play video games and get tutoring for school. People should really be able to have the space to go to afterschool where you feel safe enough to be yourself.

I think another more important component is being able to have families and especially children reconnect in an intentional way with their fathers, brothers, aunts, uncles, who are currently incarcerated. That is another component of being able to build community. Truth be told, the majority of people incarcerated are Black and Brown people, and being able to reunify and reconcile those broken relationships that were caused because of the prison industrial complex is another component.

Another component of that is going to be—How do we keep our community dollars in our communities for as long and as much as possible? How do we create banks that Black and Brown people are welcomed at and maybe they own those banks, so that that money is actually invested in a way that supports Black and Brown communities? How do we create more sustainable gardens and urban farming in our community, so that we don’t rely so much on those larger big corporations? The KMarts, the Targets.

It’s all about community building and community reinvestments. It takes everything—educational, political, economic, spiritual aspects—to instill a sense of belonging and ownership of our communities. I don’t know if that really answers your question, but those are some of the thoughts that I know a lot of people express. It’s not going to be just one thing. It’s not just going to be creating more jobs. It’s not just going to be offering educational advancement money. It’s going to take all those different things, including creating an alternative to policing.

Orlando Mayorga:

When it came to those I viewed as family—I don’t just mean my kin family; I mean those I consider my brothers prior to incarceration—I would say that 98% of those relationships were cut off due to the time that I was incarcerated. That’s what the system does; you end up incarcerated for long numbers of years. Those friends, those relationships you had are cut off. Our innate human condition to be social and to want to have a support system compels us to want to create relationships—this was my experience; I’m not going to speak for everyone else that was incarcerated. I allowed myself to be open to creating new, meaningful relationships with other incarcerated people. So, again, they became my brothers. They became my father figures, in a way that helped me to grow as a better person.

When it comes to the community building part, I think our human, innate condition wants to build community, wants to be in community, wants to have healthy relationships with other people. Everything that the system of incarceration does breaks all that apart. So, even with my family, I had two little brothers—my two beloved brothers and my sister. They were very young when I was incarcerated. I was never able to build that strong bond with my baby brothers because I was away from them. The way that systems of prisons are set up is to make people forget about us because of the distance that a lot of these institutions have between where we are from and where those institutions are at. So, after I was convicted and sentenced, I was sent to a prison that is 5 hours away from Chicago. So, even though my bond and my relationship with my mother was strong, I was only able to see her once every two or three months. I was only able to see my brothers maybe once every two or three months. As the years went by, I saw them less and less. So when it comes to connection, that connection is broken because you’re not able to touch the people you love. You’re not able to hug the people that you love. You’re not able to eat at the same table with the people you love. These are all components of being able to build a healthy relationship with someone.

The phone calls at the time were also very expensive, so even making a phone call wasn’t something that I could really do because of not having the means to pay for the phone bill. At the time, I think for 15-minute phone calls, it would be $20-$25—for 15 minutes of being able to speak with family members or friends. Very quickly, people started putting blocks on their phones from receiving my collect calls. My mother never did that, but I also never wanted to burden her with a bill so high that she couldn’t pay because of my calls. At the end of the day, I understood that she had to feed my brothers, my sister, pay for rent, pay for a home. That called me to call less and less and really to focus on making my time constructive and as smooth as it could be while I was incarcerated.

Paul Wright:

I see the ruling class giving up the police and prisons as not being too likely to happen. At the end of the day, wealth, privilege, and inequality rest on strong police states and strong prison systems. So, I don’t think that that’s happening any time soon, but who knows? Things that didn't seem possible 90 days ago suddenly seem like they might happen, so who knows? One of the things, too, is that we have a long history of uprisings and things like that in the US, and then, everything goes back to usual. It’s kind of like that lack of sustained response at any level that perpetuates the systems. I think one of the things to keep in mind is just that every day, as we’re doing this interview, at least a million people are sucking down a government payment or a taxpayer dollar caging two and a half million people, whether it’s prison, jail guards, the secretary, the doctors, the bureaucrats, whatever. What’s our opposition? If you look at the people that are doing anything to surround conditions of confinement, for example, I’d say there’s probably less than 200 of us, and our collective organizational budgets are probably under 25 million dollars. So, we’re going up against a million people with 90 billion dollars at their disposal. That’s not even really… I’m not going to say it’s a fair fight; it's not even a fight.