prisons police and punishment through incarceration are they with us forever in the land of the free reign campaigns for change are beginning to payoff and at the community level it turns out that a whole lot of people in places already make peace with out  today we imagine a world beyond prisons it may be closer than we think that's coming up on the laura flanders show the place where the people who say it can't be done take a backseat to the people who are doing it it is sometimes said that we can't be what we cannot see so are we able to imagine a world without jails and prisons we've heard the mind blowing statistics the us is the world's leader in incarceration we've read about the atrocities that continue to take place in prisons and as a result of being imprisoned there has been some progress a growing movement to abolish prisons and jails they call abolition but how and where would we even begin to dismantle this enormous so called prison industrial complex and one of the real solutions that encompass the needs of the vast and diverse communities that have already been harmed there is so much to think about as it relates to economies harm repair justice accountability asked three people in the come and help me think it through three individuals who are doing this work on a daily basis community organizer with the order lord project and the answer coalition kirby joseph writer activist and strategist  senior editor of the body dot com and esteban kelley who is a co founder of the movement training cooperative aorta based in philadelphia and executive director of the us federation of worker own cooperatives welcome all thanks for coming a great panel of folks enormous question and there may be people saying abolition can we just talk about reform so why do we talk why do we want to think about abolition what makes it an important thing to think about him and work towards who wants to start kirby i think well one evolution has happened before and he's only five when slavery was and there does abolition this act the problem is that they put a really that it's not only reform that we have to look towards building our community but also building in a way to liberate ourselves from the system in general you work with some organizations to do yeah so and save us out a system coordinator at the project safe outside the system oh yeah so literally creating ways that we are safe side of the system that oppressive and what does it involve on a daily basis of what you're doing so in the work that i do i teach deescalation i teach community safety i do in the course of your economic or one of my co ops is an organization called the order and we do political education and so part of that work involves helping institutions individuals community leaders understand possibilities visioning and even do some of the take some of the steps inside of their own work and their own institutions to shift to different and alternative models of justice and then i've also been doing organizing for over ten years now with a collective called philly stands up where we're similarly trying to expand political education and understanding and play in the visioning an imaginary space of envisioning a world without prisons and doing the mental work and the har work of what it would take to get there and a lot of that actually starts with zooming in on a smaller scale because we can magnify and amplify all the problems it's not just a structural issue that prisons are an institution it actually is a question of relationship of even conceptually what do we see as harm and what do we see as our response to addressing harm or trauma let alone recovering for from it and what do we do with the humanity of the people which turns out is everybody who has caused harm not that it's all proportionally the same harm or as grave but we all have been perpetrators of harm in one way or another and so starting to actually shift and re center is is a point of departure for looking at this work in a really applied way and then beyond the political education work a lot of what we did in philly stands up as worked very directly on a volunteer basis  around sexual assault situations and specifically our collective was designed to work directly with people who caused harm in instances of sexual assault in our own backyards in our own grassroots community so this was not nonprofit work it was not funded work but really working in communities of color in queer communities and political communities to hold people accountable and it's not like we started that work with a whole bunch of training at the time none of us were licensed in anything any counseling or any any of that work but actually by just slowing down with integrity and taking the time to meet people where they're at and accompany them in the journey it turned out that it taught us a lot of lessons and so that ended up being what we rebroadcast to other grassroots community organizers in some of the lessons that can be extrapolated for how we move toward transformative justice work can you what's your point of departure for that yeah i think you know when the question about you know why focus on evolution as opposed to reform i think that we often kind of get stuck at the question of prison abolition or jail so we think about just the physical kind of like building where people are you know i prison and i often kind of tell people i'm actually interested in prison industrial complex abolition and so it which takes us to a broader kind of perspective which i think some of the panelists are getting at to think about really what is the wor which we've constructed through which punishment and kind of punitive measures drive daily life in so many so many ways so i think about not just about what happens to you know the person who you know gets arrested and goes through the system but i also think about you know the people who you know for which you know get suspended him in public schools right or who get expelled in schools i think about when public benefits like food stamps or food or you know other welfare benefits get taken away for you know a drug offense or for you know having to do mandatory drug testing for those things i think when i think about you know a world without you know prisons i'm also thinking about a world to which we don't resort to kind of punishment in punitive measures for either things that we have constructed as crime quote unquote or things that but it really are about you know some division around sort of harms that are real and some things that are completely kind of constructed in the magic does harm you up for a long time of course for economic justice among other groups  god started it was because of the kind of impacts on queer particularly queer women after the welfare reform act of the big ninety's in the clinton administration so people started to see in new york city more queer women entering the new york city shelter system so it's a kind of folks who are mostly queer folks who are you know do working in the nonprofit you know system of social service and they were seeing all these women coming to the shelter system because of the provisions in the welfare reform act that you know demanded that sort of you know father had to be named on a birth certificate in order for the family to get benefits and so what if you had queer women who  in relationships together who were raising children often times the sort of non biological parent would be afraid once the case manager came to the house that day that the kids were going to be taken away if it was discovered that the father wasn't there or that there wasn't and so they just would go into the shelter system so that the family could keep the benefits and so that to me is the prison industrial complex right at work in a way that is not just about the prison itself and so i think for us as an organization when q j was still around was really thinking about you know how do we think about the ways in which the social safety net system kind of perpetuates forms of harm and depriving people of things that they need you know through very sort of punitive measures so you're talking about the queer communities largely where people of color but not exclusively i think of two things one which is we are in an era where also surfacing concern and attention to the brutality that this community also experience in the incarceration system but also out of it so how do you think about justice in that context i mean we have you know i don't want to say an epidemic of violence specifically a go against you know trans block where member you could say that we are experiencing a new degree of awareness of how much violence there is against a population that's had very little voice or been given very little amplification for the say what about before we have abolition we have to have justice you know we need to have people so the accounting for being at the moment they've been going with impunity so people have not had any rights yet i think sometimes when we talk about math or conservation i would listen we don't think about all these things of course the work in tandem i think is very important to have that analysis to gether because we live in a system that works together every day to find different ways to oppress our communities there are already at the bottom of the barrel and when you mention just as i think about stuff again who died of records island a few weeks ago because the old refused to help her in any way while she was dying in her cell after latina woman who died in solitary you know owing five hundred dollars cash bail and it's all interesting because there's people who say well you know in these prisons to face multiple layers of abuse from other inmates from other seals from the state no no jails is actually a campaign that is kind but i'm one of the organizers of that's looking at it in that way of like we need to be working to transform our society and there's resources there that can do that that would be justice that the resources that comes from our tax dollars be used to be put into our communities so our people are not going to jail for survivor programs or what the system labels as violence which is i think another thing to face to who definition of violence are we looking at and who's being defined as violent but just to be a pedant on this for a nd i mean she died incarcerated and yes one problem there's been a lot of trans people and others dying in the streets because of violence committed against them what about those people so what we have is the system at work in terms of indoctrinate us to be very backwards to hit ourselves and to have no resource in survival to blame it on people who look like them or people who aren't like them and i think when you were talking about this cultural shift even if evolution happened we were discussing that actually even of evolution happens tomorrow even if we have all the material resources that we need to survive as a community as a people across this nation the richest country in the world there's still a mental pressure in the have to face and have to deal with and that's what our communities deal with every day that people who look like you who can be an elder who can be a single mother who can be somebody in your  classroom can look at you and unleash violence against you whether be verbal mental or physical and then to be in a system where it tells you that the only thing you can do is call and i want to deal with that issue instead of bringing people into maybe mediate the issue instead of bringing people into the political education to reframe people's mind in addition to the punitive we also have the separate yeah distance how are you dealing with that because what you were talking about just about in your example you're saying ok we have the harms amma harm or and everyone actually probably has been harmed we need to stay in the room together or in the community or in the town or in the building or in the family or in the workplace we don't have what if we didn't have the option of just banishing yeah what happens how do you do well it's about moving closer right as opposed to distancing and pushing away which is what the current punitive systems are set up to do it's not addressing the problem it's saying it's reducing the problem to a person not to enact or their behavior or something that happened but it's total izing it into the person embodying it and then removing them from the community and so what we're doing is actually the opposite it's drawing them in and moving closer and that what's actually important is that these need to be community responses because it can actually be up to a survivor to step in and be like let me move closer to the person who caused harm absolutely not so it's not about like i'm a middle school me the peer mediation model although there's a lot of lessons from that and in fact i draw on some of the peer dreaming that i got when i was twelve doing this work it's actually ways that the community can step up to be an intermediary to take on that work to be the  surround and move closer not just to the person who caused harm but also all of the attention that needs to go toward the healing to the person to the community of survivors and the people who who have been harmed who also need attention they need love they need care so will we learn anything for example from immigrant populations who are very aware that the state is not going to help them i'm thinking of undocumented people who dare not call the police and that's just one population there are many of us represent at this table are we learning from those communities how to address this in an interesting way i would say i mean i can take this from my own life i grew up in cleveland ohio in a housing project in the eighty's right you know of the crack era and  generally speaking people did not call of a right for you know any reason and there were definitely situations that happened that were in a community violence my mother would take in women who were being abused by their partner male partners in the community and we have sometimes woman and two or three other kids of the one who are in our house for sometimes a couple of weeks at a time my stepfather other minute my uncles other men in the community sometimes went to that ma house to then like you know respond you know you're like well you can talk about you know what happened or whatever or would step in and so i saw very early examples of people being able to as much as they could try to kind of manage those those sort of dynamics i would think i would say to just part of the kind of mass incarceration itself and that system help perpetuate the kind of isolation that people feel in communit so when you've started to kind of arrest so many people and you create such levels of instability so then people in communities don't know each other anymore you know in ways that they did so then that the response to call the police becomes seems like a logical was the number of people that the new york city is completely built on these are very old strategies that have been you before police were able to walk to be fugitive slave act people were finding ways to live together collectively and deal with the hard situations and not dispose of community members but look at legal as human beings whereas this system doesn't it doesn't look at of these at all we're number that can be from a been in this speaks to the conditions in which we are all operating living finding ourselves and it seems that on this question the conditions are kind of changing and one example i look at recently is the queen district attorney right here in new york where  at the primary level to make a bomb look said to be the next day she was endorsed by two people running for president plus the new york times i mean this isn't the revolution but it is speaking to can change conditions he thought it absolutely is and we were able to i think that forward a little bit in my community in philadelphia where we had da larry elected and that came from movement that came from  long standing campaign from groups like to put people st and even some of the organizations i was talking about that were connected to these smaller completely below the radar unfunded unincorporated initiatives projects and even just community relationships like we've been talking about that have been pushing a different kind of politics for how we address harm justice and even the the epidemic in the phenomenon of all of the problems all the ripples of violence from the criminal legal system from police violence in for in our case one of the poorest large cities in the united states so that coalition of coming together because this was a multi racial coalition this work doesn't move forward otherwise of bringing together straight people q people black and brown people and in lockstep with progressive white folks doing this organizing and understanding that in order for our communities to be sustainable we've got to all come together and forward and center a different completely different kind of politics and it does happen at that primary level of like who are the candidates who are running and vetting and finding a candidate in the kind of profile that larry president for i mean it was someone who'd been defending our communities for decades and decades and to actually say this is the person that we want in this type of role was instructive and then we started to see different versions of that happen all around them and i'm definitely inspired by what's imagine say tiffany had the support you saw in the clip there from that she has a platform to bring up some of the things that we've been organizing for for a very long time but i think on a very micro level that the work i know i focus on is literally building community members piece by piece to actually teach them what about evolution is what the car situation can be and what plans politicians who are in our favor actually putting into order their people in our community who don't know who this person is there are people in our community who don't know what we're talking about because a language because of being so hit by repression that they can't even think straight to go have a conversation even though their lives are political their existence as a political existence and i that our program runs is literally teaching businesses deescalation if something happens in their stores or teaching shelters deescalation or something happens with their youth or teaching schools on how to deescalate instead of calling the police that's already in the hallway to come in then the rest of you as a way so police don't interfere to arrest any more than people can and we often ask people on this show what's the story of the future will tell of this moment kind of potential co optation of our movements and our language so that we hear people talk about abolition but the sort of the details of which are actually just about sort of moving the pieces around so that there is still some form of kind of physical state control right whether it's more people on house arrest or these other kinds of technologies but i'm hopeful in thinking that as much as you know folks like my co panelists who are doing that work in communities that once people begin to really kind of experience what a real sort of abolitionist politic and kind of new society can look like in their own lives no amount of spin that a politician could put out could could move them towards something that  ts us away from them and i think is very important that we focus on really building people power i think one it being that we experience as people is feeling that we can't do anything what can we do when  system feels bigger than you are really work on the fact that this is them is actually afraid of people coming together the work that she did in building her coalition that is work that is feared by folks who want to maintain their power and maintain the status quo that she was speaking about last ten seconds to us tonight i think transformation needs to be systemic and it needs to be interlocking right so centering on the politics of prison evolution means that we're actually changing everything about our economic lives or social relationships emotional intelligence all the ways that we become interdependent that's how we transform both institutions at a large scale in our society and at the very micro level our relationships with one another perfect last word thank you all you've started the ball rolling on what i think will be