Where Life is Precious, Life IS Precious

On “Is Prison Necessary” by Rachel Kushner

• Gilmore was telling the kids about how the average sentence for murder, in Spain, is seven years. She stated, “What this policy tells me is that where life is precious, life is precious. Which is to say, in Spain people have decided that life has enough value that they are not going to behave in a punitive and violent and life-annihilating way toward people who hurt people.” Where life is precious, life is precious. I love that. When we treat life as disposable, lives are disposable.
• I’m fascinated by the history of prison in England and the U.S., where jails simply served as a place for people to wait until they got their “real” punishment — rather than a long-term punishment in itself. Kushner writes, “Prison was the reform.” I think this illustrates incredibly well how punishment always means trading one cruelty for another. Addressing the systemic factors, though, the ones that encourage violence by making people feel there is no other option — that stops the cruelty in its tracks.
• I love her concept of carceral geography, which “examines the complex interrelationships among landscape, natural resources, political economy, infrastructure and the policing, jailing, caging and controlling of populations.” With this, I am brought back to the Freire/Horton conversation about how neutrality doesn’t exist, and how this fits into education. They ask, “Is it possible just to teach biology?” Within Gilmore’s Carceral Geography classes, this question doesn’t even need to be asked. There is an understanding and an addressing of the fact that geography is not neutral, that nothing, really is neutral.
• “When [Gilmore] encountered the kids in Fresno who hassled her about prison abolition, she did not ask them to empathize with the people who might hurt them, or had. She instead asked them why, as individuals, and as a society, we believe that the way to solve a problem is by ‘killing it.’ She was asking if punishment is logical, and if it works.” This reminded me of Bryan Stevenson’s question of “Do we deserve to kill?” which reframes the debate in a similarly clear (and, frankly, refreshing) way.

On the California Prison Moratorium Project

It’s hard for me to unpack this organization because, quite frankly, their website sucks. The language on the website uses generalizations that perpetuate and place blame on incarcerated people without seeing their incarceration as a structural issue. In this way, it just seems like extra strongly-worded prison reform. A “we believe strongly in punishing bad criminals, just don’t like the way it’s being done” type of situation.

But when I looked at the way they present themselves on other websites and in the publications they put out, they were incredibly grounded, well-spoken, and radical.

This reminded me not to put too much stock in how organizations like this “market” (for lack of a better word) themselves to the world. Because this organization has done so much great work, and yet they don’t have the website to match. But, at the same time, I understand that they need to have clear and concise language in order to make allies of their audience and ultimately make change in the way they want.

Their “About” statement (not the one on their own website, though, unfortunately) talks a lot about moving money around as a solution to what we would do without prisons.

“The California Prison Moratorium Project seeks to stop all public and private prison construction in California.

The money saved from California’s prison construction budget should be used to fund and actively pursue alternatives to imprisonment for as many people as possible. As a result, communities will have the power to examine the reasons people break the law and seek alternatives to prison.

Most people who are being put in prison do not need to be removed from society and could effectively be diverted into community-based programs. Since the majority of people are being sent to prison for non-violent drug-related or economic crimes, we believe these people should have access to drug treatment and/or economic assistance (such as education, affordable childcare, job training and placement, or welfare) instead of prison terms. Even the diminishing percentage of people convicted of violent offenses can be helped outside the prison system, through programs that address aggressive behavior and abusive relationships, and drug and alcohol treatment.

We consider prisons to be a form of environmental injustice. They are normally built in economically depressed communities that eagerly anticipate economic prosperity. Like any toxic industry, prisons affect the quality of local schools, roads, water, air, land, and natural habitats. We join forces with other groups working for environmental justice.

We believe that prisons do not make our communities more secure, and that alternatives will work. As long as prison construction continues, viable alternatives will not be utilized to their fullest potential.”

They are addressing a structural cause here at its root, by advocating that the money no longer being spent on prisons should be spent on resources that address the factors that make people commit crime in the first place. They recognize and advocate that, as long as California is building prisons, money is being taken away from education, health care, social services — any sort of investments in the future. It seems to be headed up not by formerly incarcerated people, but by radical activists (like Gilmore, who founded it). I think this is a disadvantage in some ways (for obvious reasons), but an advantage in other ways (namely, “marketing” or whatever you want to call it.

I can’t find information about sustainability through funding, but I think one thing they’re doing well is collaborating with other groups like them to get things done. I think this is a great and necessary strategy that will bring about long-term change.

On “The Ideas That Won’t Survive the Virus” by Viet Thanh Nguyen

To be perfectly honest, to some extent I feel I can’t really engage with this article right now because I agree with all of his points so strongly that it becomes impossible to add anything else or even comment on anything he’s said.

But mostly, I feel I can’t engage with this article because I’m worried that what he hopes for America won’t happen. I want it so badly that I’m afraid to keep writing it out, or speaking it out loud, in case it jinxes it.

I know that, in the past, things like this (well, not exactly like this — this is unprecedented — but global suffering/events) have resulted in an incredible turnover of the status quo and huge social changes, but because I’m in the middle of this and a Trump presidency, I feel particularly hopeless.

He writes, “Is it too much to hope that the forced isolation of many Americans, and the forced labor of others, might compel radical acts of self-reflection, self-assessment and, eventually, solidarity?”

At this point, this does feel like too much to hope, at this point. It feels too early in the virus to be talking about this in such a broad way. This virus is really difficult to deal with because we cannot physically come together in solidarity. Instead, we are sitting on our laptops all day, reading articles like this one (I’ve seen many).

I don’t know about the self-reflection and self-assessment. I’m doing a lot of that, personally. But if the physical action can’t come into it? I mean, that’s what we’ve been talking about all semester: praxis, visionary pragmatism, the importance of physically working with and learning from our community partners. I don’t know if self-reflection on its own is enough to transform a divided, unequal country into one that is in solidarity with each other and with justice. I just don’t know.

I do think one thing that does bode well, and will happen, is the breakdown of American exceptionalism that Nguyen talks about. The illusion of invincibility is threatened by every single thing that’s happening right now. On an individual level, this is true — everything we know was turned on its head because of one microscopic parasite that then spread across the world. On a national level, this is also true: our sense of identity as the unyielding, unthreatened United States of America.

He adds that this “myth that we are the best country on earth,” is “a belief common even among the poor, the marginal, the precariat, who must believe in their own Americanness if in nothing else.” I think that’s a great point. There is not much that binds the people of this country together, in terms of identity, other than our belief in our Americanness.

I would love it if this pandemic teaches us to be honest with ourselves and teaches us how to show our vulnerability. And I think, for most of us, it will. But, on the other hand, I’m thinking about how about half of the American public still approves of how Trump is handling this pandemic. The steadfast determination people still have to say yes, we as a country are doing everything right — even if they themselves are suffering and scared all the time — I just don’t know what to do with that.