Hi, it's Milo! I consider myself an
organizer and a scholar of social
justice,
so thinking and writing about the prison
and police state that I live in comes up
frequently in my life,
even when we're not in the middle of an
international uprising against the
police, but what we have seen over the
past few weeks has been a massive
increase in the percentage of people
who see police brutality as an issue. I
know from talking to my own family
members who were once having
conversations about whether or not
Michael Brown stole cigarettes before he
was murdered and are now outraged at
police brutality that you know political
consciousness on this issue is shifting
quite dramatically. What has been really
interesting for me to see is that even
though there are a lot of people who
were voicing that they see an issue with
the police in the United States, there
are still a lot of calls for reformist
solutions, shall we say, that still keep
the police force and criminal justice in
place. I have listened to so many people
acknowledge that policing in the United
States constitutes a systemic racism but
then propose solutions that recreate
the same violent systems. We are
collectively so used to policing and
prisons that we are caught up on the
assumption that having these systems in
place is necessary for a society to
function. Falsely taking prisons as a
necessity prevents a lot of people from
seeing the reasons why prisons were
built in the first place and from
imagining a world without prisons. I know
that there's a lot of people who are
voicing their opinions on this right now
that you could be listening to, but I
want to offer a brief argument about
really what convinced me to become an
abolitionist, kind of my journey into how
I first understood abolition as well as
some reasons why I think reformist
solutions represent a lack of
imagination that I really think needs to
be brought to abolitionists
conversations. This isn't an exhaustive
list by any means of all the reasons why
I think we need abolition and reforms
that will bring us to abolition,
but this is what feels necessary for me
to
contribute in this moment.
Editing Milo
here, just wanted to pop in and add
before I get into the video the names of
some of the leaders and scholars who
have helped me get to where I am today
in terms of understanding abolition, to
credit and give thanks to them. I believe
that the first abolitionist text that I
read was Angela Davis's Are Prisons
Obsolete. Afterwards, I have received
political education from Frank
Chapman, who is the executive director of
the National Alliance Against Racism
and Political Repression, and he is a
formerly incarcerated political prisoner
himself. I've really lucky to be
able to share community with him and
learn from him a lot personally, and he
is also an author. I have learned about
transformative justice from Adrienne
Maree Brown, and I have picked up some
restore justice tools from Tomas Ramirez
and the writings of other indigenous
leaders. I have studied the black radical
tradition in part from the writings of
Charlene Carruthers and Kathy Cohen, and
I am continuing to try and push myself
to take my understanding of abolition
back to its more radicalized roots
through a scholarship by Joy James and
Ruth Wilson Gilmore. I will link to some
of these authors in the description and
I would recommend checking them out. I'm
really trying to develop ways of
communicating my ideas to people who
believe that policing is systemic racism
but who see, you know, a solution to that
through anything other than totally
stopping the use of policing and prisons.
It's important to know that the police
didn't suddenly start disproportionately
perpetrating violence against poor
people of color since stop and frisk or
Rodney King or the war on drugs, like
policing in the US originated with
white vigilantes enforcing laws that
protecting slavery and criminalized
runaway slaves. Policing has always
disproportionately targeted people of
color and protected white property
owners. That's nothing new. That is the
function of the system. There is no way
to reform the police system in the US
because it is doing exactly what it was
designed to do.
I think that the current conversation
about abolishing the police is lacking
in a lot of ways because we can't talk
about abolishing the police without also
explicitly talking about abolishing
prisons. We know that there will always
be an institution to arrest and surveil
people if there are still prison beds to
fill, so we also have to acknowledge that
prisons are not necessary. They cause
additional harm to communities, and they
don't rehabilitate people or keep
communities safe.
We know that prisons aren't
rehabilitating people when the
recidivism rates for people within their
first year after release is forty four
percent and eighty three percent within
nine years after release. Prisons aren't
preventing crimes because the threat of
punishment does nothing to keep
communities safe.
It does nothing to prevent crime. It does
not work. Some of the first conversations
I had about abolition were through
refuting carceral feminism, which
makes it seem like women will be safer
if only we could incarcerate rapists.
Criminal justice frames wrongs committed
in terms of broken laws, not harm done to
communities, so there is really no
encouragement of accountability or
repairing harm. Like, when it benefits
people to plead not guilty to crimes
even if, you know, they did do the crime,
like there is no chance to take
accountability. As if sending people to
jail is the only way that we have to
repair harms done to communities. As if
people who have done harm are incapable
of, you know, doing anything to repair
that harm. A survivor of violence may
feel better knowing that their attacker
is incarcerated, but like I can only
imagine the trauma of having to sit
through a trial and hear your attacker
claim no wrongdoing, like that has
to be another source of harm. Carceral
feminism is also hypocritical because it
mostly ignores the sexual violence
perpetrated in prisons against
incarcerated people, which is an issue
that really greatly affects queer
people who are incarcerated. I think to
add to this point that I'm making here,
my partner suggested I add the critique
naming this as neoliberal feminism. I
think that is a very accurate critique
because carceral
feminism frames the issue of sexual
violence that is justified in our
culture and widespread in terms of
fixing it by locking up individuals and
encouraging individuals to bring up
cases against their rapists. Carceral
feminism identifies the issue as
individual acts of violence, which is
pretty inaccurate because even pop
feminists use the word 'rape culture' to
describe how there is a culture of
justifying rape, that even if we
locked up all of the rapists in the
world, we would still see acts of sexual
violence happening because it's not just
a few bad apples.
It is like the way that we teach about
consent and sexual violence and bodily autonomy
Just how widespread sexual
violence is, is indicative of the fact
that it's not gonna be solved by
incarcerating people because if we
incarcerated everyone who's ever
committed acts of sexual violence, that
would be an enormous amount of people.
That is clearly not a plausible solution,
and so we need to think of ways to
actually prevent that violence rather
than incarcerating individuals. That takes
looking at ways that we can prevent
sexual violence within communities and
recognizing what are the other
systems at play in our culture that
justify this violence and that leads to
crimes. Maybe not super specific to
sexual violence, but in terms of talking
about abolition, we also need to be
naming systems such as capitalism, for
example, that create conditions of
poverty where crimes are committed.
We can't have abolition if we're not
also talking about deconstructing
capitalism and these other systems
at play that are like creating the
conditions for violence to happen
instead. I believe in restorative and
transformative justice because I believe
communities can be made safer with
solutions that do prevent crime, like
funding public health and education. I
believe that sexual and other forms of
violence can be prevented through restorative
justice approaches that help people
who have caused harm to see the harm
that they have caused and to change
their behaviors, which we know is not
happening in the criminal justice system.
That is not what prisons are for.
Transformative justice is an approach to
addressing a harm through trying to
change the actual root causes of
harm, and restorative justice is kind of
the same thing but specifically as an
alternative to the criminal justice
system. We wouldn't see prisons as
necessary to protect communities from
all of the supposed "bad" people out there
if we actually funded programs that
helped prevent the conditions where
crimes are committed in in the first
place. This gets to how we need to think
critically about whether or not prisons
are necessary, too, and I think that takes
looking at the formation of the prison
industrial complex and exactly how that
process happened. It's not just that
private prisons are the issue because
most prisons are state-funded,
since it's easier to get funding for
prisons and corrections than it is to
get funding for social programs that
would actually get rid of the need for
prisons. Correctional officer unions are
really powerful and have helped secure
the construction of prisons in order to
create jobs, but I know that there are
also people who work on the inside of
prisons who also really believe in how
flawed the system is. My dad used to work
in a prison as a psychologist, and really
generations of my family have worked in
relation to criminal justice in various
different ways. Most of my family is from
a really rural area where prisons
constitute a large part of the economy
and the jobs that are available, but I
think there's also, you know, it's also
useful to just think about how the
existence of prisons in rural areas
or in urban areas is very normalized,
that like you just live in a town where
there's a prison, and that's just a part
of everyday life, and, you know, then
people get to think we can't have a
world without prisons because prisons
are just a staple. I really believe that it
is unsuccessful to try and change the
system from inside by working in prisons.
While I'm really critical of that
approach, and I am aware that people who
work in prisons are also implicit in
that violence in some ways. I know that
my dad is well-meaning, and he thought
that he could help people, and through
conversations with him, I know that he
still acknowledges the wrong and the
violence that he saw perpetrated against
people who were incarcerated. I know that
he thinks of prison abolition as a
pretty far off ideal, but I think the
fact that people who
can have worked with in prisons see the
system feeling is pretty indicative of
the fact that we need to start imagining
alternative worlds where we don't have
prisons. Restorative justice alternatives
are already taking place on a small
scale. The Restorative Justice Community
Court in Chicago is working with young
people to repair harms within their
communities instead of sending them to
prison. Other abolitionist reforms that
are taking place are working to stop the
construction of new prisons and working
to reduce the prison population
nationally. Abolition is a really big
part of my politics and my vision for
social justice, I think especially
because I got brought into leftist
politics around the time and through
viewing the uprising in Ferguson in 2014.
I'm really drawn into abolition because
I think that transformative justice
really aligns with my values. I think
about my experience as a survivor of
sexual violence, and I ask like what
did I really need after that
happened? I think my answer is restorative
justice, and some type of community
accountability. I do not think that any
type of punitive response would have
benefited me in any way, and I think I
intentionally like did not seek out any
support at the time because I thought
that punishment was the only option. I
also really strongly believe in
following the leadership of currently
and formerly incarcerated people. I know
that the abolitionist movement has sort
of been de-radicalized over time because
it has been brought into academia and
away from its grassroots start through
the organizing of black currently
informally incarcerated people, so it's
really important to me to ground my
abolitionist work within that radical
history and try to get away from
reformist approaches as much as I can. I
am a member of Black and Pink's pen pal
group, and that's a great way to get
involved in supporting incarcerated
LGBTQ people. If that is something that
interests you, I have found other ways to
get involved in person, too. Really
fundamentally, I
but there is no justice in the justice
system, and you know if transformative
justice doesn't convince you of that, I
went to several pack the court events for
Gerald Reed, who is an incarcerated man
who was convicted on a false confession
that he was tortured into giving, and
he's been incarcerated for thirty years,
and he just had a court process drawn
out over the past year that just ended
in a decision that he is not going to be
given a retrial. This system is
massively harming people. I would say
it's broken, but it's really, you know,
has been like this for a while,
was never really functional, but this is
not a way that we can get justice, and I
think it's really important to be
talking about abolition right now. If
you want to support currently and
formerly incarcerated black and
indigenous trans and gender
non-conforming people, I'm gonna link a
fundraiser down below, and I'm also going
to include a different list of resources
on abolition. If that is something that
you would like to do more reading on, I
would recommend that you do it.
Definitely center the voices of black
people and currently and formerly
incarcerated people in the research that
you were doing, but that's just my two
cents.
Thanks for watching. Peace!
