Dan Berger joins Brian Sonenstein and Kim Wilson for episode 9 of Beyond Prisons to discuss his book, "Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era."

We begin the conversation by looking at whose voices are heard in conversations on mass incarceration and the importance of telling the history of this struggle from the vantage point of incarcerated people. Dan explains that although jails and courtrooms have been critical battlegrounds for Black people's human rights movements throughout American history, the influence of Black prison organizing is often glossed over, despite its central role in struggles from emancipation to the 1960's era civil rights movement and beyond.

We discuss the increasing use of prisons as props in mainstream culture, where the focus is placed on the phenomenon of mass incarceration instead of the problem that is prison. We also talk about the erasure of Black political prisoners, who have their revolutionary ideas stolen from them by white American and European intellectuals.

In addition to telling us what abolition means to him, Dan shares how letter writing with Black political prisoners was formative to his understanding of race, capitalism, and incarceration in America from a young age.

Dan Berger is an associate professor of comparative ethnic studies at the University of Washington Bothell. He is the author of several books and won the 2015 James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians for "Captive Nation."

Buy "Captive Nation" from UNC Press.

Follow Dan Berger on Twitter @dnbrgr.

Read Dan's work at AAIHS.

Free Alabama Movement: http://www.freealabamamovement.com/

Jailhouse Lawyers Speak: https://www.facebook.com/BlkJailhouselawyer/

Episode Transcript

Jay Ware: Welcome back to Beyond Prisons! This is Jay. Today we are excited to have Professor and author Dan Berger to speak with Kim and Brian about his research and work. Before I kick it over to Kim to introduce Dan, I wanted to bring you a clip from a recent conversation I had with Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun of the Free Alabama Movement about the DOJ investigation of prisons in Alabama that was announced last October and the prospects of that investigation under Alabama’s former US Senator Jeff Sessions.

Bennu: Yeah, they’ve investigated the Alabama prison system before, they investigated in… they’ve investigated Tutwiler Prison, they found over twenty years of sexual abuse, they found women were being beat, they found women were being raped, being impregnated, they were having children, they were being forced to have abortions, and nobody got prosecuted, nobody went to jail. 

They are talking about with this new prison reform bill, they want to build a new prison. The FBI said, they’ve got to make changes, so when the media went to Tutwiler, the commissioner took the media in with him and they told them [the media], “You can’t talk to anybody. We are only going to take you to one part of the prison.” 

The only part of the prison that they took them to is where they invested a few dollars in improving the showers and putting some shower curtains up, but they didn’t do that in the whole prison. They just did that in one section of the prison and so the FBI has allowed that to be sufficient. They have not went back and held them accountable for… we don’t even know how many children were born. We don’t know where these children are, we don’t know what their conditions are. If the mother is incarcerated and the father is married and has another secret family, where is that child?

If the mother got a life sentence or life without parole, where is that child? And how many of those children are there out there? Okay, in order for those abortions to occur, the healthcare workers and professionals had to be involved. They had to give those women something to make those abortions occur. They had to also give these women prenatal care, who were pregnant and carried those babies to term. Those people are complicit in crimes also. 

Not a single person in here lost their life, so when you say, “Federal investigations are going and ongoing and this and that,” what does that mean, you know? When we found out about it, we asked, “What are your intentions? What is it that you intend to do? Are you going to hold some people accountable?” 

Ain’t no men turnover in the Department of Corrections, I think I read something somewhere that since they announced their investigation, eight more people have been killed. Are they going to bring wrongful death lawsuits? Are they… what are they going to do? And it’s not, “What’s going to happen when Jeff Sessions is in office,” but why did Obama wait until the end of the term to try to investigate a problem, because Alabama prisons, in 2012, there were 32,000 people in Alabama’s prisons, 32,000 who were in triple-bunk cells. 

So it has been worse than what it is now, you know what I’m saying. The Department of Justice was not doing that then. These issues that we see in the news that these issues have not become issues until the Free Alabama Movement made them issues, we made them talk about it, because we blasted it, we put it out there in the public and exposed it. 

So when they come in and say they’re investigating, we have to look at that very cautiously and I’m a pessimist when dealing with things like this, ‘cause we have seen it too many times before and then in addition to that, the Federal government if they want to investigate prisons, why don’t they start with the Federal prisons?

They don’t have to come to the state. Federal prisons have the same and worser problems than we have in the state. So, I just can’t buy it. 

Jay: I’d like to thank the Free Alabama Movement and Jailhouse Lawyers Speak for allowing me to use these audio clips we’ve used over these recent episodes. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Bennu has a fundraiser right now and you can find that as the pinned tweet on my profile on Twitter, @jaybeware. 

And, in terms of supporting Jailhouse Lawyers Speak as well as the Free Alabama Movement, both organizations are asking all of us to support the Millions for Prisoners Human Rights March, which can be found at iamweubuntu.com 

Now, I will send it over to Kim and Brian to introduce Dan Berger. 

Kim: Dan Berger is an interdisciplinary historian, specializing in 20th century American social movements and the carceral state. He is assistant professor of comparative ethnic studies at the University of Washington Bothell and adjunct assistant professor of history at the University of Washington Seattle. Berger is the author or editor of several books, including The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism and the forthcoming Rethinking the American Prison Movement, coauthored with Toussaint Losier.

His award-winning book Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era showed the central role that prisoners played in the modern Black freedom struggle. His writings have also appeared in numerous journals, newspapers, and magazines. He is an active member of the American Studies Association’s Critical Prison Studies Caucus and a co-founder of the organization Decarcerate PA. 

You can follow him on Twitter @dnbrgr. 

So one of the things that stood out to me, as I read your book, Dan, has to do with who gets heard in this conversation about prisons. And I think that it’s also one of the takeaways of the book, but it’s also an important point about history in general and about official history in particular. Can you talk about what informs Americans’ views of prisoners and prisons, but also how your book approaches the telling of the history. 

Dan: Yeah, thanks, that’s a great question. One of the things that was really striking for me in setting out, you know, on this research, which I began after a good ten years… more than ten years of corresponding with people in prison and really being kinda mentored politically by long-term political prisoners, as well as formerly incarcerated people. And so on the one hand, I knew sort of personally or had access personally to some of those voices, but you know growing up in the 80s and 90s, there was no sense of where you could find people in prison, that was not part of the political or social landscape. 

And so I was really struck with wanting to understand how… what seemed like the period right before the rise of mass incarceration was also the period that had some of the loudest and clearest voices coming from prison and you know, not only describing life inside, but also describing the world and prison was sort-of recognized vantage point within that and one of the things that really became clear in the research was that mass incarceration didn’t just happen to coincide with that or happen to follow that, but that it was actually a deliberate strategy and goal of expanding the carceral state to remove currently and formerly incarcerated people and their loved ones and their communities from political discourse. 

Now, I don’t want to romanticize it, it’s not like currently and formerly incarcerated people and their communities had a major seat at the table in conversations about prison reform or abolition in the late 60s and the early 70s, but they were at least able to break through some of the traditional, sort-of black-out or white-out that exists within mainstream media and to some extent, within policy circles. 

So it was important for me to try to correct for that in telling that story. I knew that I was going to do a lot of interviews with people and I did, but I started out trying to just see the paper trail, what were the archival collections and the voices that were evident there? 

And it was pretty remarkable to find all these… to see how much a part of social justice movements prisoners were, albeit for a brief time period, so that became part of the telling of the story, really trying to understand the role of prison within the Civil Rights and Black Power movements by looking to currently and formerly incarcerated people themselves. 

Brian: Great, thank you. You know I am wondering how that sort of methodology changes the history for you. I was particularly struck in the beginning about your… you pointing out that jails were a central part of this Civil Rights movement, but commonly the way that we talk about it, it really kind of takes… it doesn’t really take the higher level detail, we talk about Martin Luther King Jr.’s letters from jail and we talk about the filling of the jails, but I was really struck by how you sort-of raised the jail as a setting and later on, the courtroom as well, as a setting for struggle and for transcendence and for transformation.

I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that, that two-sided question there. One, how your methodology changed the common understanding of history that we have and two, how jails and courtrooms are actually places of struggle here. 

Dan: Yeah it seemed it to me that prisons were really at the center of the upsurges of the 60s and 70s and again, we need to understand how central they were to understand how bad things have gotten since, to understand mass incarceration as, in part, a kind of counter-insurgency against Black radicalism and other related social movements. 

And with the Civil Rights movement, for me, entering this history thinking about people like George Jackson, Angela Davis, and Assad Shakur, thinking about the people who are identified with the more sort-of militant, outspokenly radical sectors of the movement. I was trying to understand where do they come from? How do we get to a point where someone like George Jackson can become a best-selling author? And that, going back and going back, that’s what led me to the Civil Rights movement, to see part of what George Jackson did, and not by himself, but part of what he did, was to really remove the stigma, that being in prison meant that you were a bad person and had nothing to offer. And I think part of what enabled him to do that was several years of dedicated, militant civil disobedience in the South to contest Jim Crow from people, who otherwise have middle-class comportment, the kind of stereotype of the church-going elders, alongside the sort-of radical students and youth.

And so to me those things seemed really related, whether it’s King or Rosa Parks or Diane Nash or him (George Jackson), or a number of other people, you know, we need them. Not only for their work to overturn Jim Crow, but also to really show how central political repression through the criminal justice system was and is to racism. It’s interesting to see how… sort-of the secret hidden in plain sight. If you go to memoirs of civil rights activists, you go to histories of the Civil Rights movement, jail is everywhere, jail’s all over the place, but very few people had actually analyzed that as a central site for the development of politics and for the kind of emboldenment of the movement. I have a number of quotes in the book from Martin Luther King and a number of other people, talking about how going to jail was a communal experience, how it was a right of passage, how it was this experience that really strengthened the movement and not…it’s not like jail is automatically going to do that, that comes from training, that comes from dedication, that comes from the moment, but it really struck me, right, the criminal justice system is being repurposed, the movement is really successful at saying, “What you are throwing at us isn’t strong enough to break out will or break our spirit.”

That translated into the court movement, less for the Civil Rights movement, but more for the Black Power movement, and a series of radicals going into the mid-80s, you had handfuls of radical prisoners and radical activists, who were trying to turn the courtroom into a site to convey their politics and to really show that they were more powerful than the system [inaudible] against them.   

Kim: So, something that you said earlier about mass incarceration as a reaction to and you write about this in the book, to being a reaction to Black radicalism and social justice, it really stood out to me, but so did the point that you made about what you learned through the writing of this book regarding the connection between prison conditions and marginalized communities and I would love to hear a little bit more about that, if you would. 

Dan: Yeah, for sure. I think people often talk about mass incarceration by talking about the ‘mass-ness’ of it, “The prison system exploded by more than 500%,” “There are more than 2.3 million people in prison,” “More than 5 million people under some form of state supervision,” “100 million who have a criminal record of some kind,” ticking off all of these statistics is certainly sobering, it’s horrifying, but it can become kind of rote at some level, it can become sort of mechanical.

And after a certain level, how do you even make sense of that many people, right? It just sort of washes over you. So I think for me it’s important to not only think about, you know, numbers, but think about it in terms of human beings, to think about the communities that are devastated and to really think about it in terms of a kind of expanse of degradation, right? It’s not just that more people get locked up, it’s that being locked up gets harder in a number of ways. 

I think part of what happened after the… really starting in the 70s, different prison systems move away from the pretense of rehabilitation, this idea of rehabilitation that we know was always more rhetorical than substantive, right? (Kim agrees.) That’s part of what makes people like George Jackson or Malcolm X or any number of other prison authors so compelling, right, is that they are describing all of the violence that they experience at the height of what was supposed to be rehabilitation, right?

The system is based on rehabilitation, but actually they are saying, “This is not about rehabilitation, rehabilitation is this mask for all this violence and racism and so on,” and prison systems just say, “Forget about it,” and the larger state says, “Forget about rehabilitation, we are just going to do incapacitation, we’re just going to lock people up and throw away the key.” 

And so you have… I think about this as two sides of the coin. On one hand, you have overcrowding, and on the other hand, you have these new, the supermax and other kinds of experiments and isolation and I think they are both sides of the same coin in incapacitation. Prisons have, in various moments in American history, been overcrowded, but what I think what you have beginning in the 70s going onto the present, is overcrowding as a management technique. People won’t be able to organize if we shove everyone… if prisons are operation at 150%, 175%, 200% capacity or people won’t be able to organize if people are locked in a prison within a prison, in a basement cell where they can’t access other human beings for forever, right? Locked up in a cell 23 hours a day and so on. So, both of these styles really become fundamental to what we now call mass incarceration.

I think actually it became… it emerged as management techniques, as ways to shut down the kind of organizing that was happening in prison. 

Brian: Yeah, I saw this as a theme in your book, right, you talk about… there is sort of this pendulum that goes on or this blowback from each successive movement and again, I’m wondering on the subject of lessons, I wonder after researching this book and sort of looking at the give and take, what kind of lessons you would give contemporary movements to sort of prepare for something like that, or just to take it into consideration, or what your thoughts are?

Dan:  Yeah, one of the lessons for me is to fight the prison system that exists, not the one that used to exist or you want to exist, right? So I think talking about rehabilitation in some ways is beside the point, because I think prison systems aren’t really saying that they are doing that and so, I think in the last few years obviously as mass incarceration has become a recognized issue, I think it’s provided an opening for abolitionists to move from sort of just being abolitionists to really kind of think through how we can have what I’m trying to think through as an abolitionist policy. How can we actually, I think there have been a number of successful campaigns along these lines… how can we stop prison construction? How can we, you know, get people out and make sure that they stay out?

Whereas I think fifteen, twenty years ago, the great success of abolition was saying, “We can’t just get stuck thinking about this reform or that reform, we have to think about how the whole system is violent and racist and misogynist to its core.” And that’s still true, right, but in a moment when everyone is actually really paying attention to prison, we have to be able to adapt and think through how do we then advance that agenda? And now, I think we are in a sort of interesting moment where on one hand, you still have people talking about reforming mass incarceration and on the other hand, you have neo-Confederates in the White House and in the Justice Department, who are trying to really double down on things. It presents a really unique challenge where we have to be able to make common cause to people that are not abolitionists to advance struggles where we can, while still having the broader picture, right, while staying true to this idea of abolition.

 And I think that’s part of where movements sort of faltered in the mid-70s, right? People, who have the more sweeping radical or even revolutionary approach forgot how to make common cause with others and people, who were better at building those coalitions, were focused on this reform or that reform and not really able to see the whole picture. That’s a gross generalization, right.

Brian and Kim laugh.

Dan: But I think those dynamics, they are not limited to the anti-prison movement by any means, we can see this in any struggle, the split between radicals and liberals gets played out, but I think part of what was so devastating in writing Captive Nation was to see, at least in California, that the splits had some real, deadly consequences. People got in physical fights or gun battles in some cases over these differences, right, and that not only set the movement back in terms of people whose lives were cut short by violence, but set the movement back a generation, because it played into this narrative of bad guys, of what in the 1990s became super-predators, so on. 

So it really contributed to people, even other progressives, staying far away from anything that had to do with criminal justice, which was a vacuum that the Right, both Republicans and Democrats, really filled in rather fully. 

Kim: Mhmm. You said just a few minutes ago, everyone, or it seems like everyone, is paying attention to prisons now. Well, I am glad that people are paying attention to mass incarceration and there is more talk around prison abolition and the phrase, “the prison-industrial complex,” has really taken hold, and things like that. There’s also… it’s become in vogue to use prisons as props and to use people in prison as props in a lot of ways and what I mean by that is that for me, specifically, I struggle when I see mass incarceration becoming part of the more mainstream and not just in popular culture, but in other spaces as well, right? Does that make sense?

Dan: Absolutely. 

Kim: And one of the things that struck me as I was reading your book, there were a number of things, but it has to do with how we, how Americans and this goes to the first question, I am not asking you rehash it, but how people think about people in prison and there seems to be an industry now, you mention this in the book, that prison is really about bettering yourself or at least there was this notion, you know, not just for someone like George Jackson, but for a lot of people in prison, that you need to better yourself.

And I see that tied to ways in which we are talking about further managing people, right? So not arguing we shouldn’t, that people shouldn’t want to better themselves, but that becomes the end goal in itself, so it does not matter whether it’s effective or not, but it becomes a prop, right? So it’s about respectability politics, it’s about getting people to learn how to write resumes, which can be a useful skill, it becomes about checking off a bunch of boxes, and having people, or organizations, who you can turn to and say, “Look! This is what we did in this prison!” And that’s what I mean by using the prison as a prop, or using prisoners as props and I’m connecting that to what you wrote about imprisoned Black intellectuals specifically and I think that the work of the imprisoned Black intellectuals so often gets relegated to a lower status, right, particularly when we are talking about academia. 

And I know you have more to say about this, because you wrote a book on it (all three laugh) and I’d like to hear more from you and less from me right now. I think there is a question in there, and maybe, 12 (all three laugh). 

Dan: Yeah, I mean I think the idea of prisons and prisoners as props is very well-put. Usually, when I give a talk somewhere, someone will ask me what I think of “Orange is the New Black” or “Locked Up” or one of those shows. 

Kim: Do you watch the show, Dan?

Dan: No, I don’t.

Kim: Okay, neither do I, I’ve seen maybe…

Dan: I can’t bring myself to watch it…

Kim: Okay, neither can I. 

Dan: It would be work at some level, it’s not work that I choose to do, so it feels sort of nonconsensual in some way. At the same time, I want to be true to what I was saying earlier about recognizing the moment, that is something that people are responding to. It does create an opening, maybe, but I think the prop can then stand in for the real in so many ways, that becomes so much about the spectacle and the shock value or just sort of keeping up with pop culture in some way, rather than being connected to human beings, rather than being connected to the possibility of social change and so I think that notion of props, actually goes into many different directions. 

I think the other, obviously in a more… moving from the cultural theater to the political theater, when Obama started doing some prison reform initiatives in the last year or so of his presidency, everything was exactly stuck in that sort of rehabilitation notion, that you were just talking about, Kim. “I believe in second chances, people make mistakes, we need to give them another shot,” but that was only true for, in the grand scheme of things, for a few hundred nonviolent drug offenders, the lowest hanging fruit of the prison state. On the one hand, it showed how brutal the War on Drugs is, you can pick so many people sort of at random, [saying] “This person has a life sentence for such a minor thing, that person was serving 80 years for…” and so on and so on, there’s actually not only a drop in the bucket for the kinds of changes that were needed, right, but it also left untouched the very logic of the prison-industrial complex. 

Everything was about second chances, it was only about second chances for the smallest categories of prisoners, and it was all commutations of sentences rather than pardons and so people that got out still faced the same stigmas and limitations and structural barriers that any formerly incarcerated person with a felony record faces. 

Kim: Mhmm, mhmm. Yeah this notion of bettering yourself, one puts the onus of responsibility on the individual, has nothing to say about the system itself or the structure, but it also gets narrowly defined in terms of what we think of as what should be acceptable behavior from categories of people. So if you better yourself, better yourself gets translated into things like “okay, you have to have a college degree,” and I’m not saying “don’t get an education,” I think we need to open more access to education, but I think that my critique comes in more… and this isn’t a critique of the book, I think it’s a critique of the way the system operates and I think you do a good job of bringing to light in terms of drawing upon, not just the oral histories and prisoners’ voices in your work, but that we are seeing every single day. 

It’s like if someone is required to follow a script in order to be “accepted” into society and I’m putting giant air quotes around “accepted,” because that work is always happening, it’s never finished, you’re never fully reintegrated because as you just pointed out, having a felony conviction carries a lot of, not just stigma, but collateral consequences as well. I think that’s one of the things that resonated with me when I was reading your book. 

Dan: I think the last few years, the focus on second chances comes attached to a conversation about recidivism, but also a conversation about reentry. On the one hand, I’m very fortunate to have spent almost a decade in Philadelphia and to see some very profound, transformative grassroots re-entry programs and organizations like Reconstruction and the Institute for Community Justice, but the world of reentry has been this boon for a variety of private, often conservative, religious institutions that just because everyone is talking about reentry has become this sort of buzzword of a field, to me, I was joking with people that someone needs to write an article, called “Reentry is a Scam,” you know. 

Brian: I think he raises a point in your book, too, Dan, where I think it’s in your first chapter, where you say that America means prison and prison is really a regime of institutions that constrain Black life and I think a lot of the conversation around reentry and personal responsibility takes a lot of the pressure off of the conversations that we need to have about entry in the first place, but I was wondering if you could talk about this concept of America means prison and the regime of institutions that restrain Black life, because I think that’s another important part of your book as a way to conceptualize really what mass incarceration is beyond the simple jail or prison cell. 

Dan: Yeah, that chapter title comes from Malcolm X and something that he often told audiences, when talking about his own time in prison and telling people not to be shocked when he says that he was in prison, because America means prison and that’s something that the Black Panther Party really picked up and became really central to their structure and worldview. So part of that for me was to be able to work through how formerly incarcerated people were joining these Black nationalist organizations, first the Nation of Islam and later the Black Panther Party, but also others that there needs to be more research done about, other organizations whether they are national or local really recruited from formerly incarcerated people, so again it was a way for me to think through how the problem is not just mass incarceration, if we understand mass incarceration to be the number of more people that have gone to prison since the 1970s, but really to see how working-class Black communities in particular, have a much longer and consistent struggle with police and prisons as the kind of iron-fists next to the housing and employment and education discrimination. 

So to see how many people were coming, whether out of juvenile, the various kinds of juvenile detention or juvenile imprisonment, or the adult criminal prisons, that became the kind of recruiting grounds and an important kind of connector from the community to a kind of radical struggle on behalf of the community. To see when people like Malcolm X say that, “America means prison,” or someone like George Jackson or Angela Davis says that the state of prison conditions is a sign of incipient fascism within the United States, I have to keep in mind that they are saying that at a time when the prison population is around 200,000 people. So again it gets us back to the issue is not mass incarceration, the issue is prison. The issue is what a number of scholars talk about as racial capitalism and prison becomes the most concentrated expression of all the same hierarchies of power and violence that exist throughout society and I think currently- and formerly-incarcerated people were and remain such sharp critics of that and that was something that the book tries to surface, how there is a certain almost prophetic voice there that people reflecting on their own conditions and surroundings saying, “This is messed up and it’s not just messed up because of what is happening to me, it’s messed up for what it says about the society, for what it reflects about the society as a whole. Not because prison is this exotic, strange, unfamiliar place, but precisely because prison is a familiar, but more exaggerated form of everything else that we know in society.”

So that to me was such a sharp insight, whether you are talking about Malcolm or Huey Newton or any number of other Black radicals in the 60s and 70s were really putting out there, that I think history has proven them tragically right about, but it is shocking to keep coming back to that. They are describing fascism, they are describing state terrorism, and the criminal justice system is a fraction of its current size, not just the prison system, but the criminal justice system is a fraction of its current size. 

Kim: Absolutely, as Tony Monteiro likes to say, “The canary in the coal mine.” 

Dan: Yeah, yeah exactly. 

Kim: So you raise an important point that I think often gets glossed over when we are talking about prisons and Black intellectuals, right, and in this case in prison, Black intellectuals and the use of their ideas by white European thinkers, who fail to credit, or even acknowledge the debt that they owe to people like George Jackson, or as you point out in the book, the Black Panther Party. The section that I am thinking of specifically, and this has caused some issues between me and some folks that I know, so I am giving you a heads-up because they’re upset, I’m not because it’s nice to read it and to have it in black-and-white, but it also speaks to a number of problems that I have, and many other people have noted. 

And this is on pg. 155, I’ll tell you right now, no I lied, it’s not on pg. 155, it’s on pg. 154 and the paragraph begins with:

“One of the most enduring influences Jackson had was in France, thanks to Jean Genet’s support Jackson’s book circulated widely among the French intelligentsia and his ideas informed the development of what ultimately became known as poststructuralist French critical theory. Historian Rebecca Hill argues that “Soledad Brother” ‘inspired the young Michel Foucault to think about the relationship of the reform of the soul to the maintenance of power.’ Working with philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and Gilles Deleuze among other prominent intellectuals, Foucault was one of the spokepersons of the GIP…”

I am not even going to attempt to say that in French, so let’s just stop. 

“…which investigated and reported on French prisons, borrowing from the American prison movement, and approached to join the public’s right to know with the prisoner’s right to dignity. GIP released several reports about American prisons, including one about Jackson’s death. What most survives this encounter between Black American prisoners and white French intellectuals is Foucault’s classic “Discipline and Punish,” first published in 1975. And here’s is the kicker, the book makes no acknowledgement of Jackson’s influence.”

And I’ll stop there. Everyone can pick up Dan’s book and read the rest of that paragraph, but that right there for me, speaks to the erasure that happens, when some white intellectuals coopt, take, borrow, steal the intellectual labor of Black people and fail to credit them, so can you talk a little bit about that, since you spend time bringing that up in the book. 

Dan: Yeah thanks for reading that passage, I’ll have to enlist you for an audiobook version.

Kim laughs.

Dan: As I am sure you know in your experience, Kim, “Discipline and Punish” is such a classic text of a variety of intellectual traditions that read Foucault, that’s still assigned in grad programs around the country and surely around the world and it’s within a kind of critical criminology tradition within the US it remained a touchstone, even for people who say that he’s wrong about this thing or that thing and certainly he is wrong about a number of things in the book. 

But still, more than forty years after it’s released, it remains a book that people go back to, that continues to offer insight and it’s just so striking to go back to it and then, it’s striking to be reading Jackson and Davis and other, the Attica brothers and other prison intellectuals from that time period and then, to trace out those connections, through Jean Genet and to see how a number of people are really bringing what’s happening in the US and then, trying to make sense of prisons and the state in their own country, in their own context, based on what’s happening in the US.

And you can read some of that work in different anthologies and some of it is quite stunning. It has this urgency of responding to conditions in really robust ways, but when that begets the moment of the scholarly invention in Foucault’s case, it becomes a kind of example of a pure scholarship, the detachment, the quote unquote “objectivity.” Even though it’s fiercely argued in this way, there is no sense of its intellectual emergence, right, of where, why and where, and from whom, he is thinking through these questions, so it allows the book to stand alone as Foucault’s brilliance and obviously, no book gets produced in isolation, no book gets produced in a vacuum, out of the author’s genius alone, every book is sort of co-created but perhaps, “Discipline and Punish” more than many.

It is co-created. Some of what I write about on the page that you read part of, some of it is from my own research, some of it was drawing on a scholar named Brady Heiner, who went to France and actually translated, found some of the G.I.P.’s pamphlets from the time period and translated some of them, including the one that they wrote about Jackson’s death and he wrote… for people who have access to it, he [Brady Steiner] wrote a brilliant article called “Foucault and the Black Panthers” in a British journal called City, that really teases this out in much more depth.

But to me, it’s stunning, not only does Foucault erase his debt to Jackson specifically, and the Panthers specially, for whom we can really tease out he is just two people removed, those directions are very direct, but he even makes no mention of his own activism in GIP. There’s no sense that he is engaged in these issues at all and I don’t think every statement by every person has to list their full resume by any means, but to not see any emplacement of the collective context is very distressing and I think, you know that book has been roundly and appropriately criticized for ignoring racism generally. 

Foucault’s argument that prison moves punishment from the body to the soul misses all manners of ways in which Black people generally and Black prisoners in particular, face a set of physical violence that continues to scar the body and not just the soul. There is this sort of problem of racism that he is eliding, but just to have no mention of that kind of collective struggle or collective conversation that shaped those ideas is really devastating to what that book could be. 

And to me, it’s part of why I started my book with the preface that does try to say, “This is a book that is co-created. This is a book that I could only write because of the years of mentorship and relationships and chosen family relationships as well as organizing around prisons that taught me what I know.” I did not deny the hard work that I put into it, but that is to say that that hard work only makes sense within that collective context. 

Kim: Yeah and you talked about this a little bit earlier when you said that, or you had been mentored by a lot of people in prison as well people outside of prison, and then, your experiences in Philly organizing and all of these things have informed how you think about and write about prisons and can you talk a little bit about what you do say at the beginning of the book? I think it’s pretty clear and I’m encouraging folks to go out and pick up a copy, order a copy of the text, but I think that it’s part of this conversation especially in this context of other things that we have been talking about, not only in terms of whose voices get heard, but also in terms of the acknowledging the debt that is owed to other people that have helped you and I think that you do a good job of that from the outset and I think that it’s… to make it clear for the audience that they should know a little bit more about who you are and what brought you to this work. 

Dan: Well thank you for that. I’ll say, the other reason why I did the preface as a more personal kind of positioning was also a polite counter or polite alternative to Michelle Alexander does at the start of the “The New Jim Crow” and what a number of other popular commentators have done, which is to present a personal preface that was “I was blind and now I see. I used to not think about prisons and then, suddenly I realized mass incarceration is a problem.” 

And what I wanted to say is that to give other pathways and to kind of normalize how much prison affects all of us, it affects all of us in different ways based on the set of circumstances, but to sort of challenge this easy conversion of “I want to write to more liberal, middle-class people to say, ‘You too should care about this thing that doesn’t affect you at all.” For me, it was being a teenage activist in high school and moving not long after getting into activism and politics, from upstate New York to south Florida, very big change, right, and being uprooted from a small, but developing political community, to this new and more conservative place and trying to build connections in some way.

So I wrote to any kind of progressive or radical organization that I could find and tried to build relationships where I could and ultimately came across a book called “Can’t Jail the Spirit,” which was short biographies of political prisoners in the US. This would be in the mid-1990s, all of the people in that book were people that were active in the 60s and had been incarcerated since the 70s or the 80s and the majority who had been incarcerated longer than I had been alive. For too many of them, that’s still the case. 

That to me was a real exciting moment, right? I started writing people from that book. Former members the [Black] Panthers, the Weather Underground, and other similar kinds of groups. For me, I was also in the suburbs, from a middle-class family, had not had much, certainly no encounters with prison before, had some encounters with police at different demonstrations, cops had broken my friend’s arm, and different things like that, but I also was very sheltered from the prison system.

So to me, it was not out of an interest in prison, it was out of an interest in politics and trying to understand the world and from the suburbs in south Florida, those were really the only people that I could find who had been around since the 60s and were excited to talk. As those letters became, sort of blossomed into long-term relationships and I started to visit and go through the things that people with incarcerated loved ones go through. Battles over healthcare and refilling commissary and the emotional journeys, emotional as well as physical journeys, of visiting rooms, it just sort of dawned on me increasingly and increasingly how important prison is to understanding the last fifty years in this country. 

Kim: Mhmm, mhmm. I am just sitting here saying, “Mhmm, mhmm.” Laughs. I… yeah… definitely go big or go home, right Dan? 

Dan and Brian laugh.

Kim: You know,[Kim impersonating Dan] “I’m just going to write to all the political prisoners that are here in this book.” Maya Schenwar, we had Maya on a few weeks and she said, “Okay, well, you know you start with the pen-pal,” and boy, talk about some pen-pals there, you really… that’s an incredible story. 

Dan: I like to say that it’s a cautionary tale of the suburbs. 

All three laugh. 

Kim: Man, don’t get me started. I’m an urbanist, it just… yeah, it’s like I break out in hives… the suburbs. 

Dan: I joke about it, but it is really true. The growth of these suburbs is also in proportion to the growth of prisons in rural parts of the United States. It’s kind of walled citadels of privilege and they have walled citadels of repression, but they really…

Kim: I mean it’s not called White Flight for nothing, people leaving certain communities and moving out to the suburbs to get away from Black people and immigrants and anyone they consider ‘other.’ That’s pretty much everyone that does not look like them. 

You talked a little bit earlier about an abolitionist public policy and you’re either reading my mind or you have access to my computer somehow, in which case, we’re going to have to talk, Dan. (Laugher) What does an abolitionist public policy look like to you? How do you imagine that?

Dan: Yeah, well, I am still thinking through it, but I’d love to hear how you both would answer that, but I think as abolition develops, the ideas around it have developed in the last two decades, I’ve seen a number of really striking and really important essays and initiatives that think about things like restorative and transformative justice, that think about how do we sort of decolonize our minds from thinking like people that we don’t like or “our opponents belong in jail,” “jail for bankers,” you know, “Trump is a war criminal,” “Bush is a war criminal,” etc. where jail and sort of policing occupy our minds and how do we divest ourselves from those kinds of notions that just serve to naturalize prisons and on and on. 

There are lots of really profound, both thinking and organizing, around those questions and none of those is to scale around contending with the annual budgeting processes that states go through that uphold the prison industrial complex that the daily and monthly and annual allotment of funds and resources to police, cage, and kill other human beings. 

And so for me, the idea of abolition as public policy is how can we scale up the organizing so that we are directly contending with the state around those resources, so that instead of when episodes of police violence happen that make the news so that the answer is not about body cameras, but the answer is how do we have less police, right? How do we disarm the police? That when prison uprisings happen, the argument is not about rehabilitation or reentry or the other things that we have been discussing, but how do we have fewer people in prison and how do we make sure people don’t go to prison in the first place? 

I learned a lot from the organizing that I was a part of with Decarcerate PA, which is an organizing based in Philadelphia that still exists, though I am not a part of it now that I live in Seattle, but to me, that experience was really informative and really educational to really contend with how the state works, to learn how do states fund prisons, how do states decide to build new prisons, how do states make sentencing policy, and so on and so on. 

So to me, I want to think about how we can intervene in that work, but do so in abolitionist ways, those are certainly conversations that the groups like The Sentencing Project have been following. Lots of organizations pay attention to those things, but not all of them are doing it in abolitionist frameworks. 

Kim: Which one is doing it? Did I say that out loud?

Dan laughs.

Dan: When we started Decarcerate PA… I should speak for myself, I certainly learned a lot from Californians United for Responsible Budget.

Kim: CURB? Yeah.

Dan: And the California Prison Moratorium Project and Critical Resistance are all kind of interlinked organization. The New York Correctional Association was trying to do some of that work, especially when Soffiyah Elijah was running it. I think groups like Release Aging People in Prison in New York are also sort of trying to do it. 

There are others. Those are ones that we saw ourselves in coalition with, but yeah, that’s the idea, to me, about abolition as public policy. How do we actually intervene and shape public policy from an abolitionist perspective, which I think means operating from the understanding that we can’t wait for the system to decide that it’s broken, we can’t wait for the system to decide that it’s oppressive and abusive. As we have been talking about, they are not going to do that, they are not set up to do that. 

But at the same time, it’s not enough to say, “Well the system’s never going to recognize how violent and oppressive it is, so we can only think about what we can do with our neighbors, right, or we can only think about on the sort of small, individual and interpersonal scale.”

I think we can… how do we remake the state? Whether that’s toward the ultimate end of abolishing the state or not, I don’t feel the need to decide at this exact moment, but I think we can imagine the public policy agenda and platform and approach that is squarely abolitionist and that can have those fights because I think those fights really need to be had. 

Kim: And I think to your point about abolishing the state, boy that’s another… that should be a whole series right there, but I think and this is something that I have been mulling over for quite some time, if you make abolishing the state a condition of doing the work, it becomes overwhelming, right, to say that we can’t… we’re not going to be able to get anything done, because until you get rid of the state, you know, you’re not really doing abolitionist work and I think that there are really good, well-formulated arguments that go into depth about that, right there and that there are also valid arguments on the other side, so I think that part of what I appreciate about what you’re doing with your book, but also in this conversation is pushing us to think a little bit more about all of these different questions and then having to come up with an answer isn’t necessarily the thing that we are… isn’t necessarily the goal, but it is to craft, perhaps, better questions, to be empowered to ask those questions, and to push us beyond the ways that we are thinking about these issues currently, which is... a lot of times at least in my thinking, very oversimplified and not helpful in terms of imagining something… other ways of being with people in the world other than, “well we just have to lock them up and forget about them.”

Brian: Right. 

Dan: Often times, I’m sure you guys have both experienced this as well, but when I talk to my students or other people and I say the word, ‘prison abolition,’ they’ll panic and think, “What are you going to do if there are no more prisons tomorrow, what are you going to do with the worst of the worst?” or whatever, fill in the blank or whatever sort of bogeyman people conjure up. I’ve started to just sort of call out that question itself as a problem, as it rests on this idea that, whereas I used to say, “Well, we could do this or this or this,” you know what that question is bogus as there is no central switch that we are going to go flip and all the prison doors are going to open and the prisons are going to collapse. 

The idea that abolition is somehow this sort of instant event that someone’s going to go into prison headquarters and just press the button that says “abolish,” right … 

Dan laughs.

Kim: Oh my god, if only.

Dan laughs.

Brian: Where’s that button?

Kim: I’m willing to take… I’m willing to do this for everyone. I volunteer, yeah go ‘head I’m sorry. 

Dan: Well, there is not this button, so public policy, that’s the potential of what I’m trying to think through an abolitionist public policy, which is to say like, “Let’s figure out how the state works and let’s figure out how the state can do at least… if the state can’t do more good things, at least, how to figure out how to get it to do less bad things.” To me, as I said a minute ago, learning about how budgets get made, the actual processes through which prisons get funded and prisons get staffed and therefore, learning how prison could get unfunded, to me, this is the opening. There is not prison headquarters for that button, but there is a budget that happens every year. There are these different kinds of moments that we can actually, you know, organize, right, grow our power as abolitionists, as organized communities to actually say, “We’re not going to open that prison. We are going to close prisons. We are going to have fewer police. We are going to think about universal health care,” and recognizing things like universal health care are abolitionist demands.

We think about how many people would not go to jail if they were not self-medicating, if people had their needs met, how many of a whole set of offenses would not even occur. So to sort of recognize those things as abolitionist demands, but not only recognize them intellectually, but organize around them, which is to say, even people talking about single payer are not connecting that to issues like mass incarceration, but we can make that connection. The fight for health care is also a fight against prisons and vice versa. 

Brian: Yep.

Kim: Mhmmm, 

Dan: And I think that is more realistic than that the prison headquarters central button.

Kim: Mhmm, mhmm. In terms of thinking about an abolitionist public policy and what you just said about people not connecting universal health care to prisons or to mass incarceration or thinking about it in carceral terms, as someone who went through a graduate program in public policy, I can tell you there was never, not once, ever, in any course, any discussion ever of prisons at all. None. None. And this is… this is one of the things not just a sore point for me, but a major obstacle because it’s also one of the critiques that I have of public policy. The function of public policy is not necessarily to raise these questions that we’re raising. The function of public policy is “Okay, so this is how the state functions,” so it takes the state for granted and it takes the functioning of the state according to a particular model for granted. Much of the approach that is esteemed in public policy is about cost and benefits. 

We hear that when we hear policy makers debating and talking about mass incarceration, right, or whatever issue is happening, it’s about “What are the costs? What are the benefits?” And I think that’s part of the problem, that lens right there informs how everything else gets done, so there is no room in that conversation to talk about a different approach, because the esteemed approach has to do very narrowly with costs and benefits. 

You know you have other approaches in public policy, but those tend to be thought of a little more esoteric isn’t quite the word that I’m looking for, but for lack of a better term right now, those approaches tend to be less well-regarded and the approaches that policy makers look to are the ones that are tried and true and it’s like, “Okay, just give me the numbers. What are the numbers? What do we get out of this? What’s in it for me?” basically and I think that’s a huge problem, that’s a critique. 

I think you articulate it well when you talk about these various approaches and getting people to understand not just how budgets get done, but that more generally that disrupting and abolishing this system also requires a look at local politics, right, and it’s happening at the local level so when people are doing this hand-wringing about “How do we get to abolition? We’re never going to get there,” I don’t expect this project to be done in my lifetime and that was something that… and I’ve wrestled with that because I felt that I’m going to live for three thousand years and if we can’t do this in three thousand years, what the hell! 

But I think that it speaks to how, the difficulty that people have with getting on board with an abolitionist perspective. We get emails all the time, we get people commenting on various things and they’re like, “What about this solution? Can you give us examples of this? What about that?” and part of the thing that is being reflected in these comments is a desire to see a solution, right? So, people are searching for that abolition button. They are looking for “Okay, well how do we do this? What’s the model?” And there is not a single way, there is a lot of disagreement about what abolition is, how it’s constituted, how we make it happen, how we get there, some people are too radical, some people aren’t radical enough, there’s so much happening in this space, but I like what you said about “Okay, let’s look at something very simple,” simple, I say that in jest- “How do budgets get made? So let’s ask those questions” and moving people to focus more locally… I don’t know, do you have any final thoughts about this?

Dan: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right and to me, that was really helpful outside of… to get away from some of the abstractions that can sometimes happen on the Left, “Well in our ideal world, are we going to say toe-mate-oh or toe-mat-oh?” We can sort of go down the rabbit hole about what it’s going to look like after the revolution or something like that and obviously, a lot of that is unknowable, but in the meantime, if we all agree that prisons are vile and violent, that caging human beings is not a solution to… 

Kim: I don’t know, Dan, did you see that discussion around the excerpt from Hillary’s book last week, I don’t think that we have agreement about prisons, from what I can see people are really, “It’s not so bad. This is…” anyways sorry, I didn’t mean…

Dan: No, no, quite alright. Not in the broad sense we don’t have agreement, but we as abolitionists can agree on that, then we can agree that we need… that getting people out of prison, stopping prison construction, stopping the expansion of police departments, right, those things are innately good, right, and we can sort of throw energies there that will actually get us along the way towards abolition. I think if we can sort of free ourselves on the Left from having those kinds of abstract, in the future debates, I think it allows us to wage those fights and do that organizing that can make an intervention in the way that you’re talking about, Kim, with people who can read that abominable passage from Clinton’s book and not see it as a problem. Because I think we still, even though mass incarceration is a phrase or a concept that people think they understand, that think they have an awareness of, we obviously have a lot of work to do to get people to really understand what it is, how it came to be, and perhaps most importantly, what it will take it to end it. 

Kim: And I think that sums it up quite nicely. Thank you so much, Dan.