July 18, 2018 • 34 mins
The prison system is a well-oiled, oppressive machine that affects Black people disproportionately, continuing America's legacy of slavery and government-backed racism. As Bridget and Yves discuss in this episode, prison reform isn't an option — it's a necessity. Common Justice offers an alternative to locking people in cages.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
I have put in place a zero tolerance policy for
illegal entry on our southwest border. If you cross the
border unlawfully, then we will prosecute you. Is that simple.
If you smuggle illegal aliens across our border, then we
will prosecute you. If you are smuggling a child, then
(00:26):
we will prosecute you, and that child may be separated
from you as required by law. In June, the Trump
administration introduced a zero tolerance policy for migrants entering our border.
Under this policy, if you were caught crossing the border
someplace other than a legal entry point, you'd be arrested.
(00:47):
If you were with your child, as many people escaping
violence in their home countries are, she would be taken
from you and housing facility you knew nothing about. Sometimes
the facility thousands of miles away. This border patrol processing
center there in McAllen, Texas is kind of the epicenter
of all of this family separation debate where the majority
(01:10):
of these families are green separated um from their kids.
And that's the place which is often called the dog kennel.
So you see these kind of chain link fence rooms
where people are kind of divided. The parents are put
to one side, the kids are taken to another that's
really like a place where people pass through. It's not
designed to hold people for a long time. So that's
(01:30):
why they have the see through kind of cages, if
you will, where they put parents on one side, kids
on the other, so that they can send them in
different directions. Kids go to the shelters. The parents are
often sent to federal court to face the criminal charges.
That same month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the United
States would no longer accept fleeing gang violence or domestic
(01:52):
violence as reasons were seating asylum. The outcry field at
the kids to demand the abolition of ICE. Once considered
to be a radical stance, now even mainstream lawmakers joined
the growing chorus. All right, we're going to turn out
to another Democratic lawmaker, Senator Curiston Gilibrad. She's also got
(02:13):
some positions that are even to the left of Bernie Sanders.
She wants to get rid of ICE. I don't think
ICE today is working as intended. I believe that it
has become a deportation force. Um and I think you
should separate the criminal justice from the immigration issues. And
I think you should reimagine ICE under a new agency
with a very different mission and take those two missions out.
(02:34):
And so we believe that we should protect families that
need our help. And that is not what ICE is
doing today. And that's why I believe you should get
rid of it, start over, reimagine it, and build something
that actually works. I never thought i'd see the day
we're dismantling a racist, unjust system like ICE was a
position that was considered practical and achievable. But family separation
(02:57):
isn't new. In fact, it says an American is apple pie.
I'm Bridget Todd and I'm Eves jeffco. You're listening to
afro Punk Solution sessions. Afro Punk is a safe place,
a blank space to freak out in, to construct a
new reality, to live our lives as we see fit
(03:17):
on making sense of the world around us. Here at Afropunk,
we have the conversations that matter to us, conversations that
lead to solutions. Here's Susan Burton, who will hear more
(03:38):
from later. Susan works to help formally incarcerated women reenter society.
She says, we ignore the fact that prison has been
tearing apart families for hundreds of years, right now we
look at what's happening at the border, But that stuff
has been happening to us for hundreds of years, all
the way from slavery up until today. And you know
(04:00):
where is the outcry for the black woman who's incarcerating
her child, that is separated from her child, her child
a snatch from her arms. Just just my dad who
(04:27):
in nine he was arrested by the New York Police
Department and he was incarcerated for four years. He was
charged with attempted murder, and he eventually died in prison
from eight. Sean Cipher Wall is a black intersex man
an advocate for intersex rights. Probably like two or three
(04:47):
years ago, my mom gave me a packet, thick packet
of my dad's letters that he wrote while he was
in prison. He wrote to me, he wrote to my mom.
He wrote over a thousand others, one for every day
that he was incarcerated. When I read those letters, all
these memories started coming back, things that I had suppressed
(05:09):
because I think to put my life in a context,
we're talking about the war on drugs. We're talking about
crack flooding inner city communities, destroying like black families. There
were a lot of children that ended up and forced
to care as a result of crack impacting people's families.
We're talking about the rapid expansion of the prison industrial complex.
(05:31):
I hurt you to say that it's just like man
he turned or sometimes, but you know, you had the
rapid expansion of incarcerating the poor, the black, the most marginalized,
the people with mental health issues. My dad existed at
the cross section of all those. He had mental health issues,
(05:51):
he was crack addicted, he was substance using, and he
was black. When I read those letters, it brought back
all the memories that I guess I had suppressed, right
because I think in that moment, during that time, I
was just trying to survive. Cyphist documentary letters to an
unborn son documents the ways in which the prison system
(06:13):
doesn't work. If you care about creating safe communities, prisons
aren't doing that. If you care about systems being cost efficient,
prisons are expensive. And if you care about having a
country that treats its citizens with basic decency, prisons don't
do that either. That's something Solutions Sessions panelist Paul Butler
knows well. My name is Paul Butler, and I represent
(06:37):
the people. Paul used to be a prosecutor. Now he's
a law professor at Georgetown, an author of the book
show called Policing Black Men. At Afropunk Solution Sessions in Atlanta,
he talked about locking up people who looked like him
in cages for a living. I represented the government and
(07:01):
criminal court, and I used that power to put black
men in prison, and black women and poor people and
Latino people. Like a lot of prosecutors. That was pretty
much all I did. But Paul isn't a prosecutor anymore.
So now I'm no longer about building that system up.
I'm about tearing it down. That's what we need to
(07:23):
do with our criminal justice system. We need to tear
that shut down. I had to learn the hard way
while living in d C. Paul was arrested for a
crime he didn't commit. That was on a team that
was prosecuting a United States senator for public corruption during
the time that I was working in that case. I
got arrested and prosecuted for a crime that I didn't commit.
(07:47):
It was a stupid little Fred and Barney dispute about
a parking space. A neighbor had said that I had
run up to her and pushed her, and she was
mad at me because I was using a parking space
days that she thought was hers. The thing is, she
called the police, and now it's really clear what happens
when folks call the police on black people. It seems
(08:10):
like we are talking about these viral videos of people
of color dealing with calls to police for ordinary, non
criminal things every day. In the past few days, stories
surfaced about Native American students attending a college tour reported
by a suspicious parent, a black grand student who fell
asleep in a common area in her dorm reported by
(08:30):
a white fellow grand student, and a group of friends
who were detained by police while they were checking out
of their Airbnb rental reported by a white neighbor of
the homeowner. And the Airbnb guests and their lawyer are
calling on rialto police to hold the caller accountable. Tonight
a controversial call. This woman don't want to let a
little girl sell some water. She called the police on
(08:53):
an eight year old little girl. This woman on the
phone with police about an eight year old girl she
says was loudly selling water outside her apartment. Four hours
the lady called the police on me because I didn't
have a permit. The normal standard for law enforcement right
now is if you see something, say something, pick up
(09:14):
the phone and call nine one one. But there's a
court case pending in the dating area that could put
a chill on that theory. At Therkay Walmart Ferry, the
gentleman walking around with a gun and the store is
he got it pulled out? Yeah, he's like people frontal.
Richie made that call inourteen after seeing John Crawford inside
the store, but private citizens linked his audio to surveillance
(09:36):
video and said the words don't match the pictures. That
judge agreed and ruled there's probable cause for prosecutors to
consider charging Ritchie with making false alarms. Police shot Crawford,
claiming he refused to drop what turned out to be
a pellet gun. Please rolled up, didn't ask any questions,
just arrested me. People say, well, didn't you tell him
(09:58):
you're a prosecutor, Darren right idea cops that so you
probably know this already. You got the right to remain silent.
Anything you say can and will be used against you.
For Paul, the experience showed him how much privilege he had,
but also the limitations of that privilege, because I could
afford to hire the best lawyer in town. Things worked
(10:22):
out fine for me because I had a kind of
social standing. We made sure that jury knew that I
was a lawyer, that I gone to Yale. Those kind
of things shouldn't matter, but they do, and so I
knew how to look like the kind of black man
a DC jury wouldn't want to send to jail. Things
worked out fine for me because I had legal skills.
(10:42):
I literally prosecuted people in a courtroom where I was
being prosecuted. And the last reason things worked out fine
for me is because I was innocent, But that didn't
seem like the most important reason. But what happened was
being prosecuted made a man out of me, a black, black,
black black. You might be wondering how someone like Paul
(11:06):
wound up working to put people behind bars in the
first place. Part of it is growing up in a beautiful, loving,
low income all African American community in Chicago, Illinois. I
grew up there in the seventies and eighties and what
Martin Martin Luther King described as the most segregated city
he'd ever seen. I remember once riding my bicycle to
(11:30):
the library, which was literally across the tracks in the
white neighborhood. I was about twelve thirteen years old, and
when I crossed those tracks, this cop car pulled up
alongside me. White cop rolls down the window and says,
is that bicycle yours? And I say, yeah, is that
(11:51):
car yours? And I speed away And when I get home,
I tell my mom what I said to the cop.
She spanked me. Don't I know what happens to black
boys who talked to the police like that. It was
one of those bankings where the mom cries as much
as the kid. It turns out that she was exactly right.
(12:13):
Literally during the time that that happened. The police, we
now know we're torturing black men. The Chicago police had
an off site location where they attached black men's testicles
to electrodes. Uh they put poison in their noses to
(12:34):
try to course them into confessing to crimes that they
didn't commit. The city of Chicago has paid millions of
dollars now to the victims of that kind of atrocious
police torture. We begin today with an explosive new report
that Chicago police continue to operate a secret compound for
detentions and interrogations, often with abusive methods. According to The Guardian,
(12:58):
detainees as young as fifty years old had been taken
to a nondescript warehouse known as Home and Square. Some
are calling it the domestic equivalent of a CIA Black
Site overseas. Prisoners were denied access to their attorneys, beaten
and held for up to twenty four hours without any
official record of their detention. Brian Jacob Church, who was
(13:19):
arrested during Chicago's two thousand and twelve anti NATO protests,
said he was shackled to a bench for seventeen hours
without being read his miranda rights. When they first arrested us,
they took us to his building. Um we were never booked. Her,
we were never processed. Um I was in I was
in Homeland Square for about seventeen hours, handcuffed to the
(13:42):
bench before I was actually finally allowed to see an attorney.
At least one victim was found unresponsive in an interrogation
room and later pronounced dead. The Guardian says the detainees
brought to the Home and Site quote are most often poor,
black and brown. We'll have more solution sessions after this
(14:02):
quick break, I actually went into the prosecutor's office as
an undercover brother. I was hoping I could make change
from the inside, But what I learned is that the
system is too broke to fix. We need radical transformation
criminal legal process. I won't say criminal justice system because
(14:24):
there's nothing just about it, but our criminal legal process
is so broke down we can't think about reform. We
have to think about transformation. And I learned that lesson
as a prosecutor the hard way. After his arrest, Paul
cannot continue his work as a prosecutor. He had seen
the system from the inside and wanted nothing to do
(14:46):
with it. When that Drury said not guilty, I could
have gone back to the prosecutor's office, but what had
happened was so mind blowing I didn't feel like doing
that work any more. A lot of things that defendants
who I prosecuted had said to me, like the cops lie,
(15:09):
like there were people who knew the real deal but
they wouldn't come forward. All of that happened in my case.
So when I look back, of course I regret it.
I regret having to go through that process, but I
don't regret it. Holy that prosecution, being prosecuted, being put
on trial. It made a man out of me, It
(15:30):
made a black man out of me. So Paul became
a prison abolitionist, which means that he thinks we need
to get rid of prisons altogether. I don't get it twisted.
This is different from someone who advocates for prison reform.
Paul doesn't think changes to the system will meaningfully help.
He says we need to abolish prisons entirely. Abolition is
(15:53):
a part of the struggle for racial justice for black people.
It always has been. So when we think about slavery,
we didn't talk about reforming slavery. We didn't talk about
making the slave masters do better. We talked about albolishing slavery.
We think about the old Jim Craw. How right here
in this city, the white only, the black only water fountains, cemetery, schools.
(16:16):
We didn't talk about reforming the old Gim Craw. We
talked about abolishing um. So when we think about the
new Jim Crow, About how one and three young black
men have a criminal case, About how they're more black
people in the criminal justice system now than there were
slaves in eighteen fifty, About how Black women are the
(16:37):
fastest growing group in prison. About tim person of people
who are in prison are old. Do you know that
prisons are literally operating assisted living facilities? What kind of
ship does that? Assisted living facilities? Those folks, they don't
need to be locked up. Of the people who are
(16:59):
in prison are either mentally ill or addicts, so they
don't need punishment. They need treatment. They need treatment for
the therapy of being for their trauma, that is being
as almost all of them are low income people of
(17:20):
color who live in environment where they don't have a
chance where from jumps. The system was set against them,
and so rather than punishing them, what we need to
do is to create opportunities for them. You might think
that getting rid of prison sounds a little far fetched,
but it just nearly happened. Okay, So in two there
(17:55):
was this gay inmate named one Gi Morales, and he
was being prevented from exchanging letters with his lover who's
also in prison. Yeah, this is totally against the rules
of what they're supposed to be allowed to do in prison.
So guess what he did. He filed a suit against
the prison in federal court, which is kind of ballsy
moves that's pretty bold. The judge James E. Doyle sided
with Morales in his ruling, he wrote, I am persuaded
(18:18):
the institution of prison probably must end. He goes on
to compare it to slavery, saying that prison is quote
as intolerable within the United States as was the institution
of slavery, equally brutalizing to all involved, equally toxic to
the social system, equally subversive to the brotherhood of man,
even more costly by some standards, and probably less rational. Wow.
(18:40):
So he really called out that very clear line from
slavery to mass incarceration like a lot of other people wouldn't.
And he wasn't some super radical activist guy. You know,
his son went on to be the forty fourth of
governor of Wisconsins. These are pretty mainstream political people, and
yet they were already advocating for prison an amblition as
early as the seventies. So that same year, Republican Congressman
(19:03):
Stuart McKinney he kind of wanted to see what all
the fuss and all the talk was about, so he
spent two days in a prison to research life behind bars.
When he got out, he basically was like shut this
ship down. He said prison was quote a big waste
of money and human life. He told reporters, quote I
can't see co signing any human being to this kind
(19:23):
of existence. And it only took him two days, so
he was kind of a pioneer. And what they do
in reality TV today going undercover and pretending you're supposed
to be there in prison and having something to say
about it afterwards. Undercover boss first undercover boss. So the
ultimate goal is to keep our community safe. Why are
we doubling down on a system that has proven to
(19:44):
be ineffective time and time again. The reality is the
last thing the current prison system aims to do is
keep us safe. And so the question is can we
use our creativity, ingenuity, comorality to come up with better ways,
(20:06):
more effective ways of keeping us safe and of making
people who have caused harm responsible for the harm they've caused.
And the answer is yes. The great news is that
their communities all over the country that are working on
(20:26):
lays to resolve conflict, ways to help people in crisis
that don't evolve calling the men with guns and batons,
that don't respond to people's mental health issues by locking
them in cages, we'll talk to one woman who's helping
(20:48):
transform criminal justice. After this break, I had been entrapped
in the criminal justice system for almost two decades and
was able to sign some help in a wealthy neighborhood,
the neighborhood of Santa Monica. What happened for me there
(21:12):
was so much more humane than incarceration. I thought about
all the women just like me who were traveling in
and out of prisons, in and out of jails, struggling
to make a life for themselves, and figured if I
duplicated what happened in Santa Monica here in South l A,
some women like me would have a chance to recreate
their lives. That's Susan Burton again. Writer in prison abolitionist
(21:35):
Michelle Alexander has called Susan a modern day Harriet Tubman.
After serving stints in prison herself, Susan entered a California program.
It helped her get back on her feet. After that,
she went on to help other incarcerated women find freedom
and brighter tomorrows. She started a new way of life
to help women find their footing after leaving prison. Like Paul,
(21:57):
she sees the ways that our prison system seems more
interested in punishment and rehabilitation, and she sees it as
a sickness. Society has a major problem. It's almost like
an illness around um um, the use of force. I
guess we say state sanctioned killings. It has a problem
(22:18):
around wanting revenge and wanting to punish to the place
of over punishment. It's like a deep dark hold that
will never be feled. Retribution has no point where it's
keppt off, you know. It's a deep dark hold that
yearns for more. And what we have here is the
(22:40):
society that is uh sick with revenge. I know myself
from losing a child who was killed by law enforcement
that that need for revenge and to get back is
something that cannot be feel. It cannot be satisfied. Uh. Instead,
(23:03):
we should work towards rehabilitation and forgiveness. Those are things
that make people holder and better. After the policeman killed
my son, why didn't someone try to help me? Wasn't
(23:25):
I words, a rehabilitation investment? Or were there only changed
for me? Was there only cages for me? So we
see this whole shift around the approach to addiction because
white people are affected. While we call it a war
on drugs, it's actually a war on people here in
(23:47):
the United States. To think that for decades and decades
and decades, we have punished people for a illness, punished
black people, poor people for an illness. And then we
get here to this point where there is opioid epidemic,
(24:08):
and the opioid epidemic is coming out of the medical industry,
and it's sweeping across White America. And at this point
we're talking about rehabilitation, and I think about, you know,
why wasn't there rehabilitation there? For me, White people sell
(24:31):
drugs at a rate higher than black people do. Blacks
are less likely to sell drugs and much more likely
to be arrested for There seems to be a disparity
between the number of black individuals that get incarcerated for
drug related crimes versus the number of white individuals who
get incarcerated for drugs related crimes. Because of race, of
(24:52):
profiling and unfair senison, you become a target for the
law enforcement, especially if you're Black and Latino or asn't
or Native Americans. And what I've come to know is
that the United States approached the drug use is worse
than the drug use, it's more destructive than the drug
(25:14):
use itself. So, for instance, you can take a mother
with a couple of children and say she is using
drugs to incarcerate her. Break that family apart cost California
two hundred and forty five thousand dollars a year, and
those children are snatched away from their mothers. The mother
is caged like an animal instead of given support. Researchers
(25:39):
made it clear that fostering family ties is not only
better for the children of people who are incarcerated, but
it makes the incarcerated person less likely to re offend.
And research has also made clear that without actual support
when they're released, people in prison will be more likely
to return to prison. So why are we investing in
models that continue to separate families. So there are systemic
(26:01):
issues around a recentivism, the lack of people's ability to
actually break through all of those barriers. The American Bar
Association documented forty eight thousand barriers to re entry. A
near impenetratable wall of no is what I call it.
(26:22):
When you are pushed all the way out and pushed
back based on the color of your skin and your past,
and there's no opening for you to make a future.
You're pushed back into a cycle, you're pushed out, and
that is why we have such high recentivism rates. At
(26:44):
a new way of life, we support people and help
them to break through all those barriers, and therefore we
have a four percent recipivism rate versus a six reciivism
rate in the state. And it goes to say, if
you get people opportunity and support, they will overcome. Policy
(27:06):
is the same thing in his work too. Why can't
folks get health care? Why can't they get counseling, Why
can't they get addiction treatment? Why can't they get job training?
People say it's gonna cost too much money. Well, prisons
way more expensive. So prison isn't working. It's ineffective and expensive.
(27:30):
So what do we do? Well, there actually is a
solution abolish prisons. When I think about abolition, it doesn't
mean we go to every prison in the country let
everybody out tomorrow. What we understand is that it's a
process of gradual decarceration where we start with again what
I think are the easy cases, like the drug cases
(27:52):
and other kinds of non violent crime, and we work
our way through the system again with the focused on say,
with the focus on making sure that folks who are
causing harm are going to get the kind of services
that they need so that they don't cause harm anymore.
Paul is careful to point out that under this model,
(28:13):
if someone has done harm to someone else, they still
face consequences for those actions, and just because they aren't
doing so in prison doesn't mean it's going to be easy.
Common Justice is one organization advocating for productive alternatives to prison.
It uses the restorative justice principles to hold perpetrators accountable
and address the needs of victims instead of turning to
incarceration is the only option. What they do in Common
(28:35):
Justice is, first of all, have a person who has
caused harm get the kind of help that he needs
so he's not going to hurt anybody again. Often that
involves therapy and evolves treatment for addiction or for mental
health disorders, and evolves that do getting in touch with
(28:56):
themselves and sometimes brothers who are in the middle of
what might be a two year therapy, a two year
being forced to confront your own demon. Sometimes those brothers said, man,
I wish I'd gone to jail, because this stuff is
getting in touch with why I caused us this is
too hard. It works way better than prison. And the
(29:22):
other thing they have to do is to make it
up to the victim in a way that she feels whole,
in a way that she feels even though whatever this
guy did to her it can never be undone, in
a way that she now feels respected and made as
as whole as she can be. It sounds kind of like,
(29:45):
you know, groovy kum ba yah, But guess what it works.
The people who have gone in this program, they're much
less likely to re offend. They're much less likely to
her anybody than people who've been locked up in prison.
And so we think now about not being tough on crime.
(30:08):
We think about being smart on crime, and common justice
points the way to being smart on crime not locking
up people and throwing away the key. America has to
stop ignoring the fact that the prison systems don't protect Americans,
that their goal has always been to keep marginalized folks detained,
embar them from their rights as citizens, and Americans have
(30:31):
to stop pretending incarceration is the best option and start
truly caring about creating a better and safer country. That's
because it's hard to imagine in America that prioritizes healing
and treatment over exploitation and punishment doesn't mean that we shouldn't.
Abolition is going to be difficult work. Abolition movements take
a long time. Pas An. Abolition doesn't mean that everybody
(30:54):
gets to go home tomorrow, but it means that that's
our vision, that's our goal, a world which nobody is
put in a cage like animals. Ultimately, Paul says, it's
important to remember that incarceration over policing, how is it
going to quality education, and all the issues you've talked
about on solution sessions are interconnected. We should see them
(31:15):
as symptoms of the virus that is a white supremacy.
You can't talk about the problem of black men being
killed by the police and disproportionate numbers without also understanding
that black girls get kicks out of school for disciplinary
reasons way more than almost anybody else, even though they
(31:36):
don't present more problems. You can't think about those problems
without thinking about the fact that the average net worth
of a black woman is one hundred dollars. I'm an
unmarried black woman one hundred blocks, compared to the average
net worth of a white man seventy one thousand dollars.
And that's related to eviction. Some people who have said,
(31:58):
what mass incarceration is to black men, eviction is to
black women. And so we also think of all of
these kind of as symptoms again of this larger disease
of light supremacy. We spent eighty billion dollars just funding prisons. Now,
if you pay taxes, that means that you, yes, you
(32:21):
personally spent about two and sixty dollars of your money
unlocking people in cages for what. The data says. It
doesn't make us any safer. The data says it doesn't
make incarcerated people any less likely to return to prison.
So what are we doing and who are we making
rich by doubling down on funding something we already know
doesn't work. And while we're busy spending all that money
(32:44):
and what we know doesn't work, what aren't we funding
what does it look like to dream of a new
and better system? So why don't we have the courage
the integrity to take care of our young black men
rather live than just kind of sending them down via
somb melo for proven And what message are we telling
(33:07):
the two point three million people a disproportionate number of
whom are black, who we are locking up in cages?
What are we telling them about their humanity? The most
important thing that a person needs to know is that
they are more than a prisoner, and that they have
purpose in their lives. They have possibilities in their future
(33:32):
and they have to hang on to that and work
towards it. I know that they're valuable, that they're not
throw away people. What's the solution? Bridget realized prisons are
a part of a legacy of America subjugating black and
brown people. What's the solution? Bridget recognized that mass incarceration
does not work. What's the solution? Bridget advocate for alternatives
(33:56):
to imprisonment. What's the solution? Bridget? Shut prisons down? M
Afro Punk Solution Sessions is a co production between Afro
Punk and How Stuff Works. Your hosts are Bridget Todd
(34:17):
and Eve's Jeff Cope. Executive co producers are Julie Douglas,
Jocelyn Cooper, and Kuan latif Hill. Taylor Chicken was our
audio editor this week. Dylan Fagan is supervising producer and
Kathleen Quillian is audio engineer. Many many thanks, to Casey
Pegram and any Reese for their production and editorial oversight,
and many thanks to our on the ground Atlanta crew,
(34:38):
Ben Bowland, Corey Oliver and Noel Brown. The Underside of
Power is performed by Al Jeers. Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter,
and Instagram at afro Punk
I have put in place a zero tolerance policy for
illegal entry on our southwest border. If you cross the
border unlawfully, then we will prosecute you. Is that simple.
If you smuggle illegal aliens across our border, then we
will prosecute you. If you are smuggling a child, then
(00:26):
we will prosecute you, and that child may be separated
from you as required by law. In June, the Trump
administration introduced a zero tolerance policy for migrants entering our border.
Under this policy, if you were caught crossing the border
someplace other than a legal entry point, you'd be arrested.
(00:47):
If you were with your child, as many people escaping
violence in their home countries are, she would be taken
from you and housing facility you knew nothing about. Sometimes
the facility thousands of miles away. This border patrol processing
center there in McAllen, Texas is kind of the epicenter
of all of this family separation debate where the majority
(01:10):
of these families are green separated um from their kids.
And that's the place which is often called the dog kennel.
So you see these kind of chain link fence rooms
where people are kind of divided. The parents are put
to one side, the kids are taken to another that's
really like a place where people pass through. It's not
designed to hold people for a long time. So that's
(01:30):
why they have the see through kind of cages, if
you will, where they put parents on one side, kids
on the other, so that they can send them in
different directions. Kids go to the shelters. The parents are
often sent to federal court to face the criminal charges.
That same month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the United
States would no longer accept fleeing gang violence or domestic
(01:52):
violence as reasons were seating asylum. The outcry field at
the kids to demand the abolition of ICE. Once considered
to be a radical stance, now even mainstream lawmakers joined
the growing chorus. All right, we're going to turn out
to another Democratic lawmaker, Senator Curiston Gilibrad. She's also got
(02:13):
some positions that are even to the left of Bernie Sanders.
She wants to get rid of ICE. I don't think
ICE today is working as intended. I believe that it
has become a deportation force. Um and I think you
should separate the criminal justice from the immigration issues. And
I think you should reimagine ICE under a new agency
with a very different mission and take those two missions out.
(02:34):
And so we believe that we should protect families that
need our help. And that is not what ICE is
doing today. And that's why I believe you should get
rid of it, start over, reimagine it, and build something
that actually works. I never thought i'd see the day
we're dismantling a racist, unjust system like ICE was a
position that was considered practical and achievable. But family separation
(02:57):
isn't new. In fact, it says an American is apple pie.
I'm Bridget Todd and I'm Eves jeffco. You're listening to
afro Punk Solution sessions. Afro Punk is a safe place,
a blank space to freak out in, to construct a
new reality, to live our lives as we see fit
(03:17):
on making sense of the world around us. Here at Afropunk,
we have the conversations that matter to us, conversations that
lead to solutions. Here's Susan Burton, who will hear more
(03:38):
from later. Susan works to help formally incarcerated women reenter society.
She says, we ignore the fact that prison has been
tearing apart families for hundreds of years, right now we
look at what's happening at the border, But that stuff
has been happening to us for hundreds of years, all
the way from slavery up until today. And you know
(04:00):
where is the outcry for the black woman who's incarcerating
her child, that is separated from her child, her child
a snatch from her arms. Just just my dad who
(04:27):
in nine he was arrested by the New York Police
Department and he was incarcerated for four years. He was
charged with attempted murder, and he eventually died in prison
from eight. Sean Cipher Wall is a black intersex man
an advocate for intersex rights. Probably like two or three
(04:47):
years ago, my mom gave me a packet, thick packet
of my dad's letters that he wrote while he was
in prison. He wrote to me, he wrote to my mom.
He wrote over a thousand others, one for every day
that he was incarcerated. When I read those letters, all
these memories started coming back, things that I had suppressed
(05:09):
because I think to put my life in a context,
we're talking about the war on drugs. We're talking about
crack flooding inner city communities, destroying like black families. There
were a lot of children that ended up and forced
to care as a result of crack impacting people's families.
We're talking about the rapid expansion of the prison industrial complex.
(05:31):
I hurt you to say that it's just like man
he turned or sometimes, but you know, you had the
rapid expansion of incarcerating the poor, the black, the most marginalized,
the people with mental health issues. My dad existed at
the cross section of all those. He had mental health issues,
(05:51):
he was crack addicted, he was substance using, and he
was black. When I read those letters, it brought back
all the memories that I guess I had suppressed, right
because I think in that moment, during that time, I
was just trying to survive. Cyphist documentary letters to an
unborn son documents the ways in which the prison system
(06:13):
doesn't work. If you care about creating safe communities, prisons
aren't doing that. If you care about systems being cost efficient,
prisons are expensive. And if you care about having a
country that treats its citizens with basic decency, prisons don't
do that either. That's something Solutions Sessions panelist Paul Butler
knows well. My name is Paul Butler, and I represent
(06:37):
the people. Paul used to be a prosecutor. Now he's
a law professor at Georgetown, an author of the book
show called Policing Black Men. At Afropunk Solution Sessions in Atlanta,
he talked about locking up people who looked like him
in cages for a living. I represented the government and
(07:01):
criminal court, and I used that power to put black
men in prison, and black women and poor people and
Latino people. Like a lot of prosecutors. That was pretty
much all I did. But Paul isn't a prosecutor anymore.
So now I'm no longer about building that system up.
I'm about tearing it down. That's what we need to
(07:23):
do with our criminal justice system. We need to tear
that shut down. I had to learn the hard way
while living in d C. Paul was arrested for a
crime he didn't commit. That was on a team that
was prosecuting a United States senator for public corruption during
the time that I was working in that case. I
got arrested and prosecuted for a crime that I didn't commit.
(07:47):
It was a stupid little Fred and Barney dispute about
a parking space. A neighbor had said that I had
run up to her and pushed her, and she was
mad at me because I was using a parking space
days that she thought was hers. The thing is, she
called the police, and now it's really clear what happens
when folks call the police on black people. It seems
(08:10):
like we are talking about these viral videos of people
of color dealing with calls to police for ordinary, non
criminal things every day. In the past few days, stories
surfaced about Native American students attending a college tour reported
by a suspicious parent, a black grand student who fell
asleep in a common area in her dorm reported by
(08:30):
a white fellow grand student, and a group of friends
who were detained by police while they were checking out
of their Airbnb rental reported by a white neighbor of
the homeowner. And the Airbnb guests and their lawyer are
calling on rialto police to hold the caller accountable. Tonight
a controversial call. This woman don't want to let a
little girl sell some water. She called the police on
(08:53):
an eight year old little girl. This woman on the
phone with police about an eight year old girl she
says was loudly selling water outside her apartment. Four hours
the lady called the police on me because I didn't
have a permit. The normal standard for law enforcement right
now is if you see something, say something, pick up
(09:14):
the phone and call nine one one. But there's a
court case pending in the dating area that could put
a chill on that theory. At Therkay Walmart Ferry, the
gentleman walking around with a gun and the store is
he got it pulled out? Yeah, he's like people frontal.
Richie made that call inourteen after seeing John Crawford inside
the store, but private citizens linked his audio to surveillance
(09:36):
video and said the words don't match the pictures. That
judge agreed and ruled there's probable cause for prosecutors to
consider charging Ritchie with making false alarms. Police shot Crawford,
claiming he refused to drop what turned out to be
a pellet gun. Please rolled up, didn't ask any questions,
just arrested me. People say, well, didn't you tell him
(09:58):
you're a prosecutor, Darren right idea cops that so you
probably know this already. You got the right to remain silent.
Anything you say can and will be used against you.
For Paul, the experience showed him how much privilege he had,
but also the limitations of that privilege, because I could
afford to hire the best lawyer in town. Things worked
(10:22):
out fine for me because I had a kind of
social standing. We made sure that jury knew that I
was a lawyer, that I gone to Yale. Those kind
of things shouldn't matter, but they do, and so I
knew how to look like the kind of black man
a DC jury wouldn't want to send to jail. Things
worked out fine for me because I had legal skills.
(10:42):
I literally prosecuted people in a courtroom where I was
being prosecuted. And the last reason things worked out fine
for me is because I was innocent, But that didn't
seem like the most important reason. But what happened was
being prosecuted made a man out of me, a black, black,
black black. You might be wondering how someone like Paul
(11:06):
wound up working to put people behind bars in the
first place. Part of it is growing up in a beautiful, loving,
low income all African American community in Chicago, Illinois. I
grew up there in the seventies and eighties and what
Martin Martin Luther King described as the most segregated city
he'd ever seen. I remember once riding my bicycle to
(11:30):
the library, which was literally across the tracks in the
white neighborhood. I was about twelve thirteen years old, and
when I crossed those tracks, this cop car pulled up
alongside me. White cop rolls down the window and says,
is that bicycle yours? And I say, yeah, is that
(11:51):
car yours? And I speed away And when I get home,
I tell my mom what I said to the cop.
She spanked me. Don't I know what happens to black
boys who talked to the police like that. It was
one of those bankings where the mom cries as much
as the kid. It turns out that she was exactly right.
(12:13):
Literally during the time that that happened. The police, we
now know we're torturing black men. The Chicago police had
an off site location where they attached black men's testicles
to electrodes. Uh they put poison in their noses to
(12:34):
try to course them into confessing to crimes that they
didn't commit. The city of Chicago has paid millions of
dollars now to the victims of that kind of atrocious
police torture. We begin today with an explosive new report
that Chicago police continue to operate a secret compound for
detentions and interrogations, often with abusive methods. According to The Guardian,
(12:58):
detainees as young as fifty years old had been taken
to a nondescript warehouse known as Home and Square. Some
are calling it the domestic equivalent of a CIA Black
Site overseas. Prisoners were denied access to their attorneys, beaten
and held for up to twenty four hours without any
official record of their detention. Brian Jacob Church, who was
(13:19):
arrested during Chicago's two thousand and twelve anti NATO protests,
said he was shackled to a bench for seventeen hours
without being read his miranda rights. When they first arrested us,
they took us to his building. Um we were never booked. Her,
we were never processed. Um I was in I was
in Homeland Square for about seventeen hours, handcuffed to the
(13:42):
bench before I was actually finally allowed to see an attorney.
At least one victim was found unresponsive in an interrogation
room and later pronounced dead. The Guardian says the detainees
brought to the Home and Site quote are most often poor,
black and brown. We'll have more solution sessions after this
(14:02):
quick break, I actually went into the prosecutor's office as
an undercover brother. I was hoping I could make change
from the inside, But what I learned is that the
system is too broke to fix. We need radical transformation
criminal legal process. I won't say criminal justice system because
(14:24):
there's nothing just about it, but our criminal legal process
is so broke down we can't think about reform. We
have to think about transformation. And I learned that lesson
as a prosecutor the hard way. After his arrest, Paul
cannot continue his work as a prosecutor. He had seen
the system from the inside and wanted nothing to do
(14:46):
with it. When that Drury said not guilty, I could
have gone back to the prosecutor's office, but what had
happened was so mind blowing I didn't feel like doing
that work any more. A lot of things that defendants
who I prosecuted had said to me, like the cops lie,
(15:09):
like there were people who knew the real deal but
they wouldn't come forward. All of that happened in my case.
So when I look back, of course I regret it.
I regret having to go through that process, but I
don't regret it. Holy that prosecution, being prosecuted, being put
on trial. It made a man out of me, It
(15:30):
made a black man out of me. So Paul became
a prison abolitionist, which means that he thinks we need
to get rid of prisons altogether. I don't get it twisted.
This is different from someone who advocates for prison reform.
Paul doesn't think changes to the system will meaningfully help.
He says we need to abolish prisons entirely. Abolition is
(15:53):
a part of the struggle for racial justice for black people.
It always has been. So when we think about slavery,
we didn't talk about reforming slavery. We didn't talk about
making the slave masters do better. We talked about albolishing slavery.
We think about the old Jim Craw. How right here
in this city, the white only, the black only water fountains, cemetery, schools.
(16:16):
We didn't talk about reforming the old Gim Craw. We
talked about abolishing um. So when we think about the
new Jim Crow, About how one and three young black
men have a criminal case, About how they're more black
people in the criminal justice system now than there were
slaves in eighteen fifty, About how Black women are the
(16:37):
fastest growing group in prison. About tim person of people
who are in prison are old. Do you know that
prisons are literally operating assisted living facilities? What kind of
ship does that? Assisted living facilities? Those folks, they don't
need to be locked up. Of the people who are
(16:59):
in prison are either mentally ill or addicts, so they
don't need punishment. They need treatment. They need treatment for
the therapy of being for their trauma, that is being
as almost all of them are low income people of
(17:20):
color who live in environment where they don't have a
chance where from jumps. The system was set against them,
and so rather than punishing them, what we need to
do is to create opportunities for them. You might think
that getting rid of prison sounds a little far fetched,
but it just nearly happened. Okay, So in two there
(17:55):
was this gay inmate named one Gi Morales, and he
was being prevented from exchanging letters with his lover who's
also in prison. Yeah, this is totally against the rules
of what they're supposed to be allowed to do in prison.
So guess what he did. He filed a suit against
the prison in federal court, which is kind of ballsy
moves that's pretty bold. The judge James E. Doyle sided
with Morales in his ruling, he wrote, I am persuaded
(18:18):
the institution of prison probably must end. He goes on
to compare it to slavery, saying that prison is quote
as intolerable within the United States as was the institution
of slavery, equally brutalizing to all involved, equally toxic to
the social system, equally subversive to the brotherhood of man,
even more costly by some standards, and probably less rational. Wow.
(18:40):
So he really called out that very clear line from
slavery to mass incarceration like a lot of other people wouldn't.
And he wasn't some super radical activist guy. You know,
his son went on to be the forty fourth of
governor of Wisconsins. These are pretty mainstream political people, and
yet they were already advocating for prison an amblition as
early as the seventies. So that same year, Republican Congressman
(19:03):
Stuart McKinney he kind of wanted to see what all
the fuss and all the talk was about, so he
spent two days in a prison to research life behind bars.
When he got out, he basically was like shut this
ship down. He said prison was quote a big waste
of money and human life. He told reporters, quote I
can't see co signing any human being to this kind
(19:23):
of existence. And it only took him two days, so
he was kind of a pioneer. And what they do
in reality TV today going undercover and pretending you're supposed
to be there in prison and having something to say
about it afterwards. Undercover boss first undercover boss. So the
ultimate goal is to keep our community safe. Why are
we doubling down on a system that has proven to
(19:44):
be ineffective time and time again. The reality is the
last thing the current prison system aims to do is
keep us safe. And so the question is can we
use our creativity, ingenuity, comorality to come up with better ways,
(20:06):
more effective ways of keeping us safe and of making
people who have caused harm responsible for the harm they've caused.
And the answer is yes. The great news is that
their communities all over the country that are working on
(20:26):
lays to resolve conflict, ways to help people in crisis
that don't evolve calling the men with guns and batons,
that don't respond to people's mental health issues by locking
them in cages, we'll talk to one woman who's helping
(20:48):
transform criminal justice. After this break, I had been entrapped
in the criminal justice system for almost two decades and
was able to sign some help in a wealthy neighborhood,
the neighborhood of Santa Monica. What happened for me there
(21:12):
was so much more humane than incarceration. I thought about
all the women just like me who were traveling in
and out of prisons, in and out of jails, struggling
to make a life for themselves, and figured if I
duplicated what happened in Santa Monica here in South l A,
some women like me would have a chance to recreate
their lives. That's Susan Burton again. Writer in prison abolitionist
(21:35):
Michelle Alexander has called Susan a modern day Harriet Tubman.
After serving stints in prison herself, Susan entered a California program.
It helped her get back on her feet. After that,
she went on to help other incarcerated women find freedom
and brighter tomorrows. She started a new way of life
to help women find their footing after leaving prison. Like Paul,
(21:57):
she sees the ways that our prison system seems more
interested in punishment and rehabilitation, and she sees it as
a sickness. Society has a major problem. It's almost like
an illness around um um, the use of force. I
guess we say state sanctioned killings. It has a problem
(22:18):
around wanting revenge and wanting to punish to the place
of over punishment. It's like a deep dark hold that
will never be feled. Retribution has no point where it's
keppt off, you know. It's a deep dark hold that
yearns for more. And what we have here is the
(22:40):
society that is uh sick with revenge. I know myself
from losing a child who was killed by law enforcement
that that need for revenge and to get back is
something that cannot be feel. It cannot be satisfied. Uh. Instead,
(23:03):
we should work towards rehabilitation and forgiveness. Those are things
that make people holder and better. After the policeman killed
my son, why didn't someone try to help me? Wasn't
(23:25):
I words, a rehabilitation investment? Or were there only changed
for me? Was there only cages for me? So we
see this whole shift around the approach to addiction because
white people are affected. While we call it a war
on drugs, it's actually a war on people here in
(23:47):
the United States. To think that for decades and decades
and decades, we have punished people for a illness, punished
black people, poor people for an illness. And then we
get here to this point where there is opioid epidemic,
(24:08):
and the opioid epidemic is coming out of the medical industry,
and it's sweeping across White America. And at this point
we're talking about rehabilitation, and I think about, you know,
why wasn't there rehabilitation there? For me, White people sell
(24:31):
drugs at a rate higher than black people do. Blacks
are less likely to sell drugs and much more likely
to be arrested for There seems to be a disparity
between the number of black individuals that get incarcerated for
drug related crimes versus the number of white individuals who
get incarcerated for drugs related crimes. Because of race, of
(24:52):
profiling and unfair senison, you become a target for the
law enforcement, especially if you're Black and Latino or asn't
or Native Americans. And what I've come to know is
that the United States approached the drug use is worse
than the drug use, it's more destructive than the drug
(25:14):
use itself. So, for instance, you can take a mother
with a couple of children and say she is using
drugs to incarcerate her. Break that family apart cost California
two hundred and forty five thousand dollars a year, and
those children are snatched away from their mothers. The mother
is caged like an animal instead of given support. Researchers
(25:39):
made it clear that fostering family ties is not only
better for the children of people who are incarcerated, but
it makes the incarcerated person less likely to re offend.
And research has also made clear that without actual support
when they're released, people in prison will be more likely
to return to prison. So why are we investing in
models that continue to separate families. So there are systemic
(26:01):
issues around a recentivism, the lack of people's ability to
actually break through all of those barriers. The American Bar
Association documented forty eight thousand barriers to re entry. A
near impenetratable wall of no is what I call it.
(26:22):
When you are pushed all the way out and pushed
back based on the color of your skin and your past,
and there's no opening for you to make a future.
You're pushed back into a cycle, you're pushed out, and
that is why we have such high recentivism rates. At
(26:44):
a new way of life, we support people and help
them to break through all those barriers, and therefore we
have a four percent recipivism rate versus a six reciivism
rate in the state. And it goes to say, if
you get people opportunity and support, they will overcome. Policy
(27:06):
is the same thing in his work too. Why can't
folks get health care? Why can't they get counseling, Why
can't they get addiction treatment? Why can't they get job training?
People say it's gonna cost too much money. Well, prisons
way more expensive. So prison isn't working. It's ineffective and expensive.
(27:30):
So what do we do? Well, there actually is a
solution abolish prisons. When I think about abolition, it doesn't
mean we go to every prison in the country let
everybody out tomorrow. What we understand is that it's a
process of gradual decarceration where we start with again what
I think are the easy cases, like the drug cases
(27:52):
and other kinds of non violent crime, and we work
our way through the system again with the focused on say,
with the focus on making sure that folks who are
causing harm are going to get the kind of services
that they need so that they don't cause harm anymore.
Paul is careful to point out that under this model,
(28:13):
if someone has done harm to someone else, they still
face consequences for those actions, and just because they aren't
doing so in prison doesn't mean it's going to be easy.
Common Justice is one organization advocating for productive alternatives to prison.
It uses the restorative justice principles to hold perpetrators accountable
and address the needs of victims instead of turning to
incarceration is the only option. What they do in Common
(28:35):
Justice is, first of all, have a person who has
caused harm get the kind of help that he needs
so he's not going to hurt anybody again. Often that
involves therapy and evolves treatment for addiction or for mental
health disorders, and evolves that do getting in touch with
(28:56):
themselves and sometimes brothers who are in the middle of
what might be a two year therapy, a two year
being forced to confront your own demon. Sometimes those brothers said, man,
I wish I'd gone to jail, because this stuff is
getting in touch with why I caused us this is
too hard. It works way better than prison. And the
(29:22):
other thing they have to do is to make it
up to the victim in a way that she feels whole,
in a way that she feels even though whatever this
guy did to her it can never be undone, in
a way that she now feels respected and made as
as whole as she can be. It sounds kind of like,
(29:45):
you know, groovy kum ba yah, But guess what it works.
The people who have gone in this program, they're much
less likely to re offend. They're much less likely to
her anybody than people who've been locked up in prison.
And so we think now about not being tough on crime.
(30:08):
We think about being smart on crime, and common justice
points the way to being smart on crime not locking
up people and throwing away the key. America has to
stop ignoring the fact that the prison systems don't protect Americans,
that their goal has always been to keep marginalized folks detained,
embar them from their rights as citizens, and Americans have
(30:31):
to stop pretending incarceration is the best option and start
truly caring about creating a better and safer country. That's
because it's hard to imagine in America that prioritizes healing
and treatment over exploitation and punishment doesn't mean that we shouldn't.
Abolition is going to be difficult work. Abolition movements take
a long time. Pas An. Abolition doesn't mean that everybody
(30:54):
gets to go home tomorrow, but it means that that's
our vision, that's our goal, a world which nobody is
put in a cage like animals. Ultimately, Paul says, it's
important to remember that incarceration over policing, how is it
going to quality education, and all the issues you've talked
about on solution sessions are interconnected. We should see them
(31:15):
as symptoms of the virus that is a white supremacy.
You can't talk about the problem of black men being
killed by the police and disproportionate numbers without also understanding
that black girls get kicks out of school for disciplinary
reasons way more than almost anybody else, even though they
(31:36):
don't present more problems. You can't think about those problems
without thinking about the fact that the average net worth
of a black woman is one hundred dollars. I'm an
unmarried black woman one hundred blocks, compared to the average
net worth of a white man seventy one thousand dollars.
And that's related to eviction. Some people who have said,
(31:58):
what mass incarceration is to black men, eviction is to
black women. And so we also think of all of
these kind of as symptoms again of this larger disease
of light supremacy. We spent eighty billion dollars just funding prisons. Now,
if you pay taxes, that means that you, yes, you
(32:21):
personally spent about two and sixty dollars of your money
unlocking people in cages for what. The data says. It
doesn't make us any safer. The data says it doesn't
make incarcerated people any less likely to return to prison.
So what are we doing and who are we making
rich by doubling down on funding something we already know
doesn't work. And while we're busy spending all that money
(32:44):
and what we know doesn't work, what aren't we funding
what does it look like to dream of a new
and better system? So why don't we have the courage
the integrity to take care of our young black men
rather live than just kind of sending them down via
somb melo for proven And what message are we telling
(33:07):
the two point three million people a disproportionate number of
whom are black, who we are locking up in cages?
What are we telling them about their humanity? The most
important thing that a person needs to know is that
they are more than a prisoner, and that they have
purpose in their lives. They have possibilities in their future
(33:32):
and they have to hang on to that and work
towards it. I know that they're valuable, that they're not
throw away people. What's the solution? Bridget realized prisons are
a part of a legacy of America subjugating black and
brown people. What's the solution? Bridget recognized that mass incarceration
does not work. What's the solution? Bridget advocate for alternatives
(33:56):
to imprisonment. What's the solution? Bridget? Shut prisons down? M
Afro Punk Solution Sessions is a co production between Afro
Punk and How Stuff Works. Your hosts are Bridget Todd
(34:17):
and Eve's Jeff Cope. Executive co producers are Julie Douglas,
Jocelyn Cooper, and Kuan latif Hill. Taylor Chicken was our
audio editor this week. Dylan Fagan is supervising producer and
Kathleen Quillian is audio engineer. Many many thanks, to Casey
Pegram and any Reese for their production and editorial oversight,
and many thanks to our on the ground Atlanta crew,
(34:38):
Ben Bowland, Corey Oliver and Noel Brown. The Underside of
Power is performed by Al Jeers. Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter,
and Instagram at afro Punk
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