Mothering Under Surveillance feat. Maya Schenwar

In episode 6 of Beyond Prisons, Brian Sonenstein and Kim Wilson speak with Maya Schenwar about her book, "Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn't Work and How We Can Do Better."

Maya discusses her experience living a "dual reality" as a journalist covering incarceration and as someone with a sibling who has been incarcerated multiple times while struggling with addiction.

She shares her thoughts on the detachment common among journalists who cover the justice system and how their relationships with law enforcement are accepted as standard. "The view from nowhere is a view from power," she said.

She also talks about the importance of pen-palling with incarcerated people and how it has shaped her work and knowledge of the issue.

We talk about the struggles facing incarcerated mothers and pregnant women—from the various ways they are forced into the prison system to their experiences finding basic, humane medical treatment behind bars and the harm of separating families.

In this emotional interview, we hear from Maya about her sister's struggle and how her family has been impacted by this experience. If you have read the book, you'll want to tune in because Maya shares what has happened since it was published.

"When you break up particularly a mother and her newborn child, you are saying this person should not be reconnected with society, this person should be isolated, and separated, and shamed, and disposed of," Maya said.

Finally, she tells us what abolition means to her.

Maya is the Editor-in-Chief of Truthout and the co-editor of "Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States." She has written about the prison-industrial complex for Truthout, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, Salon, Ms. Magazine, and others. Maya lives in Chicago and organizes with Love & Protect and the Chicago Community Bond Fund.

Get your copy of "Locked Down, Locked Out."
Read Maya Schenwar's work at Truthout: www.truthout.org

Visit Maya's personal website: mayaschenwar.com

Follow Maya on Twitter: @mayaschenwar

Transcript

Brian Sonenstein: Hello again and welcome to another episode of Beyond Prisons podcast, where we examine incarceration from an abolitionist perspective and elevate the voices of people directly impacted by the system. I am your host Brian Sonenstein and I’m joined, as always, by my co-host, Kim Wilson. Hey Kim!

Kim Wilson: Hey Brian, how’s it going this week? 

Brian: It’s going well! I am, as always, really excited for our conversation. It’s been a couple weeks since we’ve talked so I’m excited to be back at it and I apologize to people who may have been looking out for a new episode, but here we have it and I’m excited to get to it. 

Kim: Indeed, indeed. 

Brian: So who are we talking to today?

Kim: We are talking to Maya Schenwar today of Truth Out. Maya Schenwar is the author of the book, Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t Work and How We Can Do Better and the co-editor of Who Do You Serve? Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States. She is the editor-in-chief of Truth Out. She has written about the prison industrial complex for Truth Out, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, Salon, Miss Magazine, and others. Maya lives in Chicago and organizes with Love and Protect and the Chicago Community Bond Fund. 

Brian: So Kim, you just want to kick it off. 

Kim: Absolutely. I have some questions here and the first one is, what motivated you to write the book? 

Maya Schenwar: So I’ve been writing about prison as a journalist for about, I guess, seven or eight years when I decided to write the book and I had been covering it as a reporter and then commissioning articles, editing articles, writing columns, when I became an editor and the reason that I had gotten into it was, of course, because I had a personal connection to it and I think I actually started writing about prison, when my sister went to juvenile detention. So it was like, it was always this personal thing for me, but I had never put that into writing and then, when my sister went back to prison, I guess it was like in 2012, I realized that I [laughs]… I was kind of living in this… this dual reality writing about prison as a reporter, we have this weird thing we do with journalism and I don’t think it’s very natural or even very honest, where we pretend that the author or the journalist is invisible and that’s supposed to be professional?

Kim and Brian: Yeah, yeah. 

Maya: Like that’s what you do if you’re being professional and I think there is something really wrong with that. I think it’s connected with capitalism and colonialism and all kinds of things, but I kind of decided that I had to stop doing that if I was going to talk about prison in a way that made sense to me and I was encouraged by people I was corresponding with in prison, because I had been also corresponding with pen pals over the years, in addition to having experience with my family, and they were like, “This is the way that Truth Out covers prison, we are appreciative of it,” but they also felt that it was lacking in humanity, so that was one of the goals of my book, was to bring to life, not only my sister’s experience, and my family’s experience, but also the experiences of other people that I knew who were incarcerated and to demonstrate, you know, that this isn’t just about “politics,” this is about people. 

Brian: Yeah, absolutely. Could you talk a little more about pen-palling? I noticed that’s a major source for your book through a lot of your correspondence with people on the inside. Could you talk a little bit about how you got involved in it, your experiences with it, and the role that it plays in your book. 

Maya: Yeah definitely. For me, it’s funny, it kind of comes out of this issue of being a journalist covering prisons, so when I first started writing about prison, I was covering activism happening on death row in Texas and so I wrote to people on death row, who were on hunger strike and this was in 2005 and I quickly found that when you write to people in prison, very often they keep writing to you, particularly when they are extremely isolated, like so many people on death row are. I thought, “Okay, well, you know, I know that the practice, as a journalist, is you kind of treat your interview subjects as research subjects very often and like it’s not ‘professional’ to keep in touch with them afterwards. Of course, unless they are the police, and then you’re supposed to become friends with them somehow…”

Brian and Kim laugh.

Kim: That tells you something, right?

Maya: Right, right, exactly. So I decided to keep in touch with people that I was corresponding with as a journalist and to me, that pen-pal relationship that grew out of that first story was, for me, more transformative than actually writing the story, you know, because people are really living this experience every day and it’s not like an isolated, political happening. And actually, the pen-pal that I was first in-touch with ended up being executed in 2011 and so, you know, his story ended that way and it was a tragedy, a real tragedy. So yeah, one of the action-steps that I often recommend to people when they are just like, “What can I do?” particularly if they are people who are not connected to the system in any way and they want to start getting involved, one of the first things that I suggest people do is to get a pen-pal and make a connection, you know? And I consider that a political step, as well as a personal one. 

Kim: I want to go back for a moment because ironically, before you jumped on the call, Brian and I had been talking about this and I raised the issue of this notion of the unbiased researcher. One of the things, one of the many things I appreciate about your book is that you do collapse that invisible line between being detached or engaged, and you’re like, “Okay, no, I’m part of this narrative, I’m part of this story, this is not only happening to me personally, but the way I’m thinking about this.” I really appreciated that and…

Maya: Thank you. 

Kim: … thinking about this, you know, this notion of how journalists specifically are supposed to be disengaged, not disengaged, but detached or keep their topics/subjects/issues that they are writing about at arm’s length. Do you mind talking about that just a little bit more because I think that there is a lot there and that this is something that you capture really well in the book and I don’t just want to skip over it. 

Maya: Thank you so much. I really appreciate that about your writing, too, by the way. I think that it’s something that I continue to come up against and struggle with as an editor as well as a writer because this notion of objectivity is really prized in the journalistic world, particularly in the United States. This thing, I mean the reason I talk about it kind of in terms of colonialism and capitalism and white supremacy is that it’s the ideas that it’s a fly on the wall and the reporter is invisible so doesn’t have a perspective or a bias, but of course, the perspective and the bias are the status quo and the forces of power, you know? That’s why it’s customary to befriend the police and actually, I didn’t go to journalism school or anything, but I did take a couple of journalism classes before I jumped in and I was shocked that the first thing that we learned and this was something that I found even with reporters coming to Truth Out over the years, that the first thing they said was that you develop connections with your local police department. Those are the people that you are supposed to befriend, those are your sources, and then they contact you if something happens because of course, crime is a story.

And to me, I look at that and say, “What’s objective about that?” (Kim agrees) That’s a perspective but it’s something that’s kind of built-in, that the press release that you get from the police department or the city, those are things that are considered facts. And actually, I found that when I’ve written for mainstream sources, mainstream publications, they will fact-check my work by looking at court records, right, and looking at police reports, and then they say, “Well, this doesn’t fit, like this is factually inaccurate.” And I say, “No, this is what the incarcerated person is saying,” you know? So you are fact-checking it by looking at the court documents that actually doesn’t tell you the truth, that tells you what’s been documented by the system and there’s just this chafing there. And actually, something I wrote for a well-known mainstream publication that I won’t name, they took someone out of the story that I had written because they said, “Well, this person is not sympathetic, according to the court documents, and so if anyone looks up this person and you know, wants to dig into their story, they are going to find things that reflect very badly upon that person and that’s not sympathetic, so that’s not going to help accomplish your point.” 

And I found that so revealing of kind of like the journalistic standard, that you know, it’s like you’re… it’s intentionally erasing so many people because you’re supposed to be holding up these examples of phenomena. So even if you’re supposed to be like the progressive journalist or like the journalist reporting objectively, but yet from this progressive vantage, you’re still supposed to be supporting yourself and supporting your arguments with this system, with information validated by the system. So I think that view from nowhere is a view from power and when I think of that as an editor, what I’ve tried to do is to kind of grapple with that in the face of also wanting to be taken seriously as a publication. And that’s a struggle because you can kind of throw objectivity out the window, but then you also have to acknowledge that you’re not going to be seen the same way as a lot of publications are seen. And I think that’s the place we’ve gone with Truth Out, is we’ve kind of said, “Fuck it,” in that way and I think that for me, that actually had a lot to do with covering the criminal-legal system, was like… I don’t believe that we can pretend to do this thing that we are “supposed to be doing” and cover the criminal-legal system responsibly. 

I don’t believe we can do it and so I think that what’s encouraging right now is that journalism as a field has been a little bit eroded and I think that some people would say that, “This is a tragedy that newspapers are fading a little bit and traditional media have less pull right now because of social media,” and I’m like, “Okay, social media, obviously there are a million problems with it, but also, it is also helping to lift up voices that might have not been heard otherwise, empowering people to make their own media and people are making their own media in all kinds of different ways online.” I think we are seeing shifts and I just would hope that the direction that things go is kind of letting those shifts happen, as opposed to this constant push to bring back mainstream journalism, which I feel like even on the left is still happening really strongly. 

You saw this thing about like, “Support the New York Times and the Washington Post in the face of Trump!” And I’m like, “Why?!”

Kim laughs.

Brian: Oh my god, yeah.

Kim: And then at the other end, you have, “Oh that’s fake news.” It’s infuriating, it’s infuriating, I just… ughhhhhh, anyway. Well thank you for that and let’s switch gears a little bit. I want to talk a bit and there is so much in your book to talk about, but I want to hear a little bit more about incarcerated mothers. You write a great deal about this, both from a very personal perspective, but also in terms of telling other people’s stories and honoring that and I think that that’s another really important part of your book, so could you say something about incarcerated mothers? 

Maya: Yeah, yeah absolutely. Actually it’s interesting, since this book came out, I’ve become very involved in advocacy around incarcerated mothers, and part of this group Love and Protect in Chicago, it specifically works to protect and defend incarcerated women and gender non-conforming people that are incarcerated for defending themselves, so survivors. I think that the issue that comes up so often with incarcerated mothers, is you talk about the issues they face and the issues faced by their children and you’re met with this response of, “Well, they should’ve thought of that before they were locked up,” which, of course, we hear on all fronts, right? But with incarcerated mothers, there’s this shaming that happens where it’s like, “Well you’re a mother and you did this to your child,” and really so often, mothers are incarcerated for mothering in all kinds of different ways. So people who are mothering in the face of extreme economic violence, who are dealing with poverty, very often they are incarcerated for doing things that they did in the face of poverty to provide for their children. 

They are incarcerated for defending themselves and their children against abusers, they’re incarcerated for doing all kinds of things in the face of survival. Then, once they are incarcerated, they face all of these barriers to parenting obviously because parenting from within prison is a paradox. And so, I think that this issue is really important to focus on even though, obviously the majority of the people in prison aren’t mothers, but the majority of the people in prison do have children and then, within women in prison, the majority are parents of young children, of minor children. So when you go into a women’s prison, almost everyone you talk to is going to mention their kids at one point or another, whether they are adult children or minor children because these are the people that they are being separated from.

And when my sister was incarcerated, when she went to the penitentiary the last time, she’s been incarcerated since then, but the last time she was in the penitentiary, she was pregnant and I had read a lot and learned a lot about the incarceration of mothers and still, I was completely shocked by this experience. I think that part of it is like pregnancy, on the outside, is kind of celebrated so much for a lot of people, and inside the way my sister and so many others experience it, it’s like torture. And part of it of course, was like the physical thing, they are not giving you the things you need to be at all comfortable or nourished or any of the things that you might need as a pregnant person.

In fact the only thing that my sister got, which was so funny, was a different color jumpsuit in prison, and they told her the reason why they needed her to have a different color jumpsuit was in order to distinguish her in case there were fights because then the person, who was fighting with her would get in more trouble because she was pregnant. And the thing that they kind of emphasized, everything was about they didn’t want the pregnancy to end because then they were afraid of being liable. It was almost like protecting the fetus and then, once she gave birth, that was an issue and one of the things, of course, for her, the thing that she was feeling most after giving birth was the loss of her child, but also after she gave birth, she had a million health problems and nothing- nothing was treated. 

She was bleeding for weeks and weeks and weeks and it was like nothing was done, and so it was like she was of course abandoned after that point. But her experience of both pregnancy and giving birth, I think, has been repeated to me so many times over the years since it happened to her, which was… everything is isolating, so she… and choice is removed from the situation, so she didn’t… she was not able to wait to go into labor naturally, they gave her a date. And they didn’t even tell her what the date is, because the whole thing was built around preventing her from escaping. Which is really laughable, the idea that you would use a pregnancy as an opportunity to run away from prison. As far as I know, that actually has never happened. 

Kim: And clearly… not to cut you off… but, I’ve been pregnant…

Kim and Maya laugh. 

Kim: And I can tell you, when you’re nine months pregnant. A, you’re not running, you may have some people who are doing acro-yoga, and god knows what else in their ninth month, but for the most part, you just… it feels like you’re going to explode, or at least I did. The idea that… 1, you know that when they’re moving you, that they shackle you, not just your ankles, but your hands as well, on top of being pregnant. So the idea that somehow you’re going to Houdini your way out of these shackles, overtake the guards, the COs, who are armed, who are escorting… it’s not just one weakling, little CO, it’s usually a couple of people, if not more, it’s like to the hospital or to the maternity wing, if they have that arrangement within the prison. It’s just ridiculous, it’s just ridiculous. 

So this idea that you’re just protecting the public, or that you’re a safety risk, or an escape risk, it makes zero sense, absolute zero sense. In terms of policies that need to be done away with, this is certainly one of them, because it’s really one of the most cruel ways to deal with women who are pregnant. 

Maya: Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, I mean what they did to prevent this “flight risk,” was they woke her up at four in the morning one day and it was kind of around her due date and they just said, “Get up, you’re going to the hospital, you’re giving birth.” She was like, “No, no, I’m not. I’m not having contractions, I know that I’m not, I’m not supposed to be going into labor right now,” and they said, “No, you’re going.” And they took her against her will and they actually told her that she would be punished if she kind of protested anymore, if she continued saying no, which of course, would have meant going to solitary after she got back.

So, they shackled her, they took her to the hospital, and they basically jailed her inside the hospital. So, people always ask me, “Were you able to go?” [Maya responds] “No, they wouldn’t let my family anywhere near the hospital, we couldn’t have come in the hospital that day.” They had her in a hospital room, the only person allowed in there beside medical personnel was a guard. So they had a guard in the room, outside the room, outside the hospital and they had this guard just watching her the whole time, so over 24 hours, just watching her, while labor is being induced. She said at one point that the guard was just sitting there eating chips and staring at her and she is, of course, in enormous pain. 

So, in Illinois, there is a law that says, you can’t be shackled during childbirth, so you can’t be shackled while you’re giving birth, but what they did for her was when she finally gave birth, as soon as the baby came out, as soon as my niece was born, they shackled my sister to the bedpost, so it was very hard for her to even hold her baby, like once the baby... Then, they said that she would have one phone call after she gave birth to let us know, because we were worried, we were kind of standing by the phone. But the warden was not at the prison that day and the warden had to authorize the phone call, so she wasn’t even able to call us after my niece had been born, her first child. So we’re just sitting there, we thought something awful happened because it had been so long and finally, my mom was able to get through to someone at the prison and he said… the COs always make you feel that if they tell you anything, they are doing you this enormous favor. 

The CO finally was like, “Well, I’m not supposed to say anything, but yes, the baby was born,” and told us the information that he had, which was very, very limited and so that was how we found out. And then, my sister was allowed to spend a little over 24 hours with her baby at the hospital and they took a couple pictures of her with her baby. Then she was taken back to prison by herself and she still had a few more months on her sentence. So she was there alone, knowing the whole time that she didn’t know whether she would be reunited with my niece once she got out, because that’s the way the system works is that you’re at risk of your baby going into foster care if you’re coming out of prison after having given birth. So that's what people have to contend with and of course, in many ways, she was lucky, because she only had a few months on her sentence after that. 

Many, many, many women go through a much greater ordeal. 

Kim: And she also had family…

Maya: Exactly. Yes.

Kim: … that could and would support her and her daughter, when they needed it… I gotta tell you that this is one of the toughest parts of the book to read for me, or it was for me, because I was just… oh my god… I was angry, I mean I’m generally angry and that’s just the way I operate in this world…

Maya and Brian laugh. 

Kim: … just being pissed off most of the time. I read that and I just… oh my god… I think that’s when I sent you that DM and I was just like, “Oh my god, I don’t know if I’m going to make it through the rest of this book,” it was so difficult. 

One of the things that I want to highlight as you just described what happened with your sister and what happens with so many women is that one, we make the distinction often times between violent and nonviolent prisoners, which in a lot of ways is really just ridiculous for many reasons and we can attend to that at some other point. But when you describe the level of security around your sister, I think it’s important for people to know that she was not a violent offender, that at no point had she really… she didn’t go to prison because of a violent offense, she hadn’t attacked any of the COs or anyone else there, so the level of security around a woman, who is being forced to give birth, like my God, we talk about what they do to people’s bodies in prison. This certainly illustrates that and you know, we can have you back on to have you talk about this issue a little bit further, there is also a racial component here as well. 

Because you know, your sister’s white and what happens often times with Black and Brown women is just as horrific and sometimes even more violent because often times, they are not even given the treatment or attention and there have been cases of women giving birth in the prison cell and dying along with the fetus. So it just… I don’t even know where I was going with that, I just think it’s horrific, it’s one of many ways in which the prison system tears people apart, tears families apart, not being able to have your close family around you, her mom, you, for this really important moment, right? Like, Okay, you’re in prison, but if you’re really trying to help people- and I’m using that term very loosely we all know- it would make sense to do whatever you can to facilitate having those people that bring you comfort be there with you through these moments and not just using this kneejerk kind of response and saying, “Okay, we are going to tear apart this mother and child.” I mean right after birth, right after birth, the violence of that should make people sick. 

Brian: I, actually, I have a passage open that I was going to raise up here, Maya, that I just wondered if you would respond to, but I thought it was good and you start off, you go, 

“For prisoners who have already been severed from their communities, the mother-baby bond can forge a key path to societal reconnection, heightening their chances of avoiding re-offense and recidivism. Conversely, severing the bond can feel like yet another way, and perhaps, the most painful way, to have been cut off from the free world.”

So yeah I was just wondering if you had anything else to say on that and on the struggles of newly-released moms, on top of the experience of being pregnant and having to give birth while you’re incarcerated. 

Maya: Yeah definitely, yeah I think that like Kim was saying, it kind of belies this idea of rehabilitation, right? Like a lot of “correctional systems” now have added rehabilitation to their names. So it’s like the ‘State Correctional and Rehabilitation System,’ that’s the correctional system. This is just one of many, many ways in which it’s demonstrated that that’s just a fallacy. 

When you break up… particularly a mother and a new-born child, you are saying, “This person should not be reconnected with society, this person should be isolated and separated and shamed and disposed of.” I think for me, one of the most useful people to read in understanding motherhood in connection with the prison system and other punitive systems in our society is Dorothy Roberts, who writes about, particularly about black mothers and foster care and in connection with prison also. She writes about how this system is not set up to reunite mothers and children, it was actually... evolved and was created out of slavery and it was actually built for separation, you know.

And it was built in a way, in which it’s saying, “Children are actually better off without their mothers in this circumstance,” so whether, it’s through the foster care system, predominantly, it’s black mothers, and also, of course, in the prison system, disproportionately, it’s black mothers. 

In my sister’s case, she was addicted to heroin, that’s a thing where it’s actually built into the legal system, that children are better off without their mothers, if their mothers have drug dependencies. Actually when my niece was in the hospital after my sister had gone home- home, gone back to prison, we came, we visited my niece, you know we were allowed to come and visit after a couple days, after my sister had gone back to prison. The way in which she was being treated was so weird, it was at this hospital where there were a lot of volunteers from the surrounding areas, who were coming in through their church groups and they kind of viewed my niece as someone, who had been saved from my sister, you know? 

It was actually the separation [that] was the goal. I think that’s what happens so often with the children of incarcerated mothers, that it’s like, the priority is the opposite of reunification and of course, like I think it needs to be said that, “That’s bad. That’s actually fundamentally evil and racist and it’s also something that shows us that this system can't just be reformed, right?” 

Brian: Right, right.

Maya: (sarcastically) “Okay, well, in that case, we should make sure that mothers are able to keep in touch with their children better from within prison,” because it’s like, “Okay, well, the entire system is built on separating them, is built on disposing of the mothers,” and in some cases, in my niece’s case with this white baby, who ended up in this hospital, “Well, she’s one we are going to save from her mother.”

And in so many cases with black and brown babies like the foster care system, you know? I think particularly, in thinking about which babies have families that they can be placed with, very, very often, families are willing to take the babies and want to take the babies of their family members within prison, but the conditions that they put on you to be able to accept a child very often exclude people, who are targeted by police and by incarceration. 

So they’ll say, “Well, if you have any prior offenses on your criminal record, then you can’t take the baby.” So for example, my niece’s grandparents on her other side wanted to take my niece, they had a set-up, where they were like, “Okay, we could take her for the next three months.” That was kind of the initial plan and because then, my niece would have been able to be with her father and they said, “No.” So I think… it was a very weird situation because the “No” was because my niece’s grandfather had… I think it was a gun offense on his record, so they said, “Oh, he’s a violent offender, she can’t stay there,” even though it would have been probably the best place for her to be during that time.

And so in families where there is not immediately a household where no one has a criminal record, then very often, those babies are funneled into the foster care system. 

Kim: The passage I’m looking at here, and it’s on page 86, it’s the one where you write about… or it says,I’ll just read it, 

“Scholar Beth Ritchie points to Child Protective Services as yet another arm of the prison nation. Using stringent regulations, surveillance, and policing to punish women, particularly black women, poor women, and single mothers by taking away their kids.”

And right before that, you describe what happened with your sister and Child Protective Services coming in to, you know, basically do that visit right after the birth and not sure she would be reunited with her child. So, we look at these agencies, oftentimes, as you pointed out, being... saving kids and people say, “We need more of this.” 

Maya: Right. 

Kim: But we fall short in the analysis, if we don’t look at how these agencies are part of the prison industrial complex and how they function to further erode, not build, family ties and family connections and to facilitate that. So if you’re, as you pointed out with your niece and her grandfather, if you’re basically going to exclude anyone that has a previous conviction, violent or not violent, it doesn’t… unless it’s, and I hate even putting these caveats on there, but if it doesn’t have anything to do with endangering children, we’ll put it that way, then it doesn’t make sense, right? 

So if you have a gun charge or a drug charge or something like that, there’s a big difference between you selling crack to two-year-olds, if you can even do that, it’s a ridiculous example, OR you know, it’s like you’re talking about… you were smoking crack yourself, these are not… we treat every offense with such broad strokes, we don’t look at the nuance, not only in the legal system, but also through these agencies. It doesn’t matter what the circumstances are and one of the things that, until we can get rid of this, right, one of the things that might be helpful is to… context matters, right? 

Things are situation-specific, and if we are really, truly trying to do what it’s in the best interest of all of these children, then we need a different approach and what we have isn’t working, you know? 

Maya: Yeah, I have come to… I’ve been suspicious of the Child Protective Services system for a long time, obviously, and I think that it’s evolved out of the prison industrial complex and in connection with it, but over the past two years, I’ve come to see kind of even more of its underbelly and I feel like that this is a field that is really… really there are so few people writing about it and talking about it and I think it’s because it predominantly affects black women and there is no one studying this system besides black women and it’s not covered in the newspaper.

The ways in which it’s covered in the newspaper are basically like, “It’s good and then, sometimes foster parents are abusive.” The system is not questioned at all, except by certain really important scholars like Dorothy Roberts, Charity Tolliver, Beth Ritchie, but it’s just not taken seriously as something to center in any mainstream organizations or publications. I’ve been thinking about it really intensively, because my niece actually for the past two years has been really embroiled in this system as a result of actually a huge tragedy in my family and I’ll try to be brief about this, but I think it illustrates how horrifying this system is, particularly in connection with anyone who has a criminal record or has been incarcerated for any period of time.

So, a couple years ago, I guess now it was summer of 2015, my sister had another child and when my second niece was born, which I guess was early August 2015, they immediately, the Child Protective Services, came and were kind of surveilling her immediately, because she had had so much involvement with the criminal system and also, had a record of drug dependency and opiate dependency. It’s very strange the way that this country has responded to the “opiate crisis” because when my sister first started being incarcerated for this, it was something that was always punished. There was not any kind of disguise of rehabilitation or whatever around opiate addiction, and now that it has become kind of like associated with wealthier, upper-middle class, white, suburban youth, it’s been this kind of push to recognize it as like, “Addiction is an illness and blah blah blah.” But at the same time, it’s still criminalized and it’s particularly criminalized for people, who have had involvement with the system in other ways, and my sister has been going to jail and prison since she was 15. I think that the way that she has been responded to has not been very caring or rehabilitative at all. 

And so, this last thing, so basically, Child Protective Services was immediately kind of surveilling this situation. They came to the hospital, they actually were trying to figure out whether they should make the father of my niece, the primary guardian, or whatever their phrasing was. So this was all in process and then, a little over a month later, my niece died, my niece who had just been born… yeah, she died. 

Brian: I’m so sorry. 

Maya: Thank you, yeah, and it was SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome). It was this very tragic, you know, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, where the baby just dies in their crib, so you know, she was sleeping and then, she was dead and it was just the saddest thing you could possibly imagine. 

And, so when my sister went to pick up my niece and she realized immediately that she was dead, but she screamed and she was staying with my mom at the time actually with her two kids, and she screamed for my mom to call 911 to have the paramedics come. 

And so my mom called 911, paramedics came and then, eight police officers came. So my mom called me right after she called 911 and I went over there immediately and there were police just surrounding the place and I went in and there were police in every room and I was like, “What’s going on here?”

And they had taken the baby away to the hospital and my sister was basically incarcerated in her bedroom and like, there were police officers standing at the door…

Kim: And basically what they are saying without coming out to say it is that they suspect your sister had something to do with your niece’s death and…

Maya: Right. 

Kim:… and that you know, it couldn’t possibly be an accident, so she is always suspect, which makes it extremely difficult to parent because you are always parenting from a place of fear because if your child is at the playground and they fall down and break their arm and you end up in the ER, then, that automatically triggers a whole set of processes that they are legally required to do.

So it’s like they call social services, social services comes and interviews, you know, etc. etc., there would have to be an investigation and everything. So mothers who are in this position are always suspect, you know, they are always suspect, and they can never… it’s as if you’d have to put your child in a bubble suit and you have to hope and cross your fingers that nothing ever happens, you have to walk a line that is impossible to walk. If they fall at home and they bump their head and you’re like “Oh my gosh, I should go get them checked out,” and you take them to the pediatrician, the pediatrician would have to say something, because they would be obligated to say something, right?

We have all these different ways of surveilling formerly incarcerated people that prevent them from ever actually moving forward, so instead of coming together and saying, “My God, this is a tragedy, this poor young woman has suffered enough, her family has suffered enough.”

What do we do? We send in eight cops. How does that help? That doesn’t do anything, right, especially in a moment of deep crisis, of deep tragedy, it piles on to that tragedy and it makes… God, it’s like I’m so angry just listening to this. But one of the questions that I had and I scratched it off because I didn’t know if you didn’t want to give anything away at the end of the book or whatever, but it was to ask you how your sister and your niece are doing now and it just… because God, Lord, I don’t even know what to say. I was angry before Maya, I’m pissed now! JESUS! Ohhhh my god, I need alcohol at this point, I’m so sorry, I’m sorry. 

Kim and Maya laugh.

Maya: Oh thank you, yeah, it’s so sad because when my sister first got out of prison and was reunited with my niece, it was like she got a whole new life, you know? She just… I mean she had a lot of restrictions on her, she was on parole and everything, but she was just, you know, so in love with her daughter that she was really recommitted to building a life for herself and she was actually doing pretty well and I think was about to get off, finally, off of the supervision of DCFS or Child Services and then this happens. 

And after this happens, they actually, because they suspected my sister, and of course, DCFS, it’s like, in some ways it’s even more bizarre than the police because if they just suspect you of something, then they can basically convict you of it. They don’t have to have evidence, and so because they suspected my sister of somehow doing something to my niece, which there was never ever any evidence for and didn’t happen, I was actually there the night before all this happened. Because of this, they took away my older niece and my niece, Aniella, who is Angelica in the book. So they took her away and they placed her with her grandparents, ironically, the ones that they wouldn’t place her with when my sister was incarcerated. 

Kim: Lord! See that right there is some bullshit, that, that is just like…

Maya: I know!

Kim:… that tells you that this had nothing to do with nothing, that’s bullshit!

Maya: Exactly! Exactly.

Brian: Seriously. 

Kim: That’s what it comes down to, it’s some bullshit. 

Maya: Right, right. So they took her away, they wouldn’t let her stay with my parents or with me because they said we were associated with the incident and actually, Child Services were investigating my parents for a while. The police took everything out of their house. They still have half of their stuff and this was almost two years ago. They won’t give back a lot of their stuff. So my niece is still away from my sister and now, I’m able to visit her, my parents are able to visit her, and my sister’s able to visit her in a regulated way, but my sister has really and she’s comfortable sharing this, she has really been negatively… I mean that’s the understatement of the century… been negatively affected by this and has struggled a lot since it happened and has been back to jail and is now fighting a couple of cases for kind of just similar things, you know, retail theft. 

And it’s just been the biggest blow to have her child taken away. When she got out, she said, “I have something to live for,” and you know, “I have a daughter to live for,” and because of that, she felt really strongly about working to stay in recovery and then, the system just tore everything out from under her.

Brian: Totally. 

Kim: The system basically said, “Well, fuck you, it doesn’t matter what your plans are.” This is the frustrating part, you describe this in the book earlier as well... in a conversation or a letter-writing between you and your sister about the future plans, this is in one of her early incarcerations, I think it was, where you had been sort-of talking about what you would do when she got home. You can plan for whatever you want and this is something that so many people are struggling with right now and I could name probably 30-40 people off of the top of my head, no lie, who have come out of prison and every day, it doesn’t matter what they planned, it doesn’t matter what they planned, things can be snatched from right from under you in a moment.

You could be living your life, which is basically what your sister was doing, and something happened that was beyond her control. We are placing upon people expectations that no one, human, can possibly live up to, right?

Brian: Right.

Maya: Yeah.

Kim: No one, who’s never had a record, could possibly meet these expectations, but now we are adding a layer and another level to this by saying, “Okay, well you’ve been to prison and you’ve did all of these ‘horrible things’ so now we are going to make it even more difficult.” We are expecting people to be superhuman, to require of them something we don’t require of other people,” right?

Maya: Exactly, exactly. Without providing any of the resources that would actually support them in living their lives, you know? So it’s like fewer resources, higher expectations, and anything that happens to you in your life is held against you, yeah. 

Brian: Yeah. 

Kim: Not just against you, but against the entire family. It’s like the consequences spill over into everyone else that is part of your network, if those people are around, if that network exists. It impacts your family, your mother, your father, you, in ways that we don’t often talk about and describe. But we are running against time here and my god, I think Brian and I both have 100 other questions, you know, if we had five hours with you, we would love to ask you… maybe we can do another more… Maybe we can workshop the book, that’s what we need to do, it’s so cool…

Brian: Yeah, I’m grateful for this conversation. 

Kim: …Yeah, but we ask all our guests, what does abolition look like to them and posing that question to you. 

Maya: Yeah, for me, I’ve come more and more to understand abolition as something that’s about building, you know? So I think on the one hand, it’s about chipping away at the walls, it’s about decarceration, it’s about shrinking the prison system until it doesn’t exist. I think that’s essential and it’s something that I do in a lot of my organizing work. I’m part of the Chicago Community Bond Fund, I’ve participated in a lot of defense committee work, and this is about shrinking the system, decarceration, making sure that we are actually decreasing the number of people that are incarcerated. But at the same time, I think that some of the things that we are getting at the end here, about the total lack of support for people, that’s something that needs to be addressed by an abolitionist framework as well. 

So we need to be thinking about, how do we build structures in our communities for dealing with harm and conflict and violence, and not just interpersonal harm and conflict and violence, but also structural harm. How do we build up our communities in ways in which people’s health and people’s lives and people’s joy is facilitated, you know? I think some of the conversations that are happening now around healthcare, I see that as part of abolition. 

I don’t think you can have an abolitionist society, in which large numbers of people don’t have healthcare just because they don’t have money. And good healthcare and mental healthcare and things like childcare and education and the arts. To me, these are abolitionist values that we need to be prioritizing these things and making sure they are things that are not only accessible to certain segments of the like white, middle and upper class. I think that there is also… when we talk about abolition, we have to conceive of it as something that’s not just the abolition of buildings that are called prisons, you know? 

Because right now we see people, as states try to reduce their prison budgets, we just see enormous numbers of people being put on electronic monitoring and completely kept on house arrest and we see this at the county level, too. They are trying to reduce the number of people in Cook County jail in Chicago and, with some of these people, particularly if they are white, they will say, “Okay then, they are not incarcerated, we are releasing them on an I-Bond,” but then they are placing enormous numbers of black and brown people on electronic monitoring. Basically, incarcerating people in their houses, which even… I mean it’s bizarre… even fewer resources, so they will say, “You’re incarcerated in your house and you’re not allowed to go grocery shopping and you’re not allowed to go to your job,” which would actually give you money to buy food and no way to get healthcare and stuff like that.

So, I think we really need to be thinking about abolition as a broader thing that’s about ending the whole network of confinement and surveillance and policing and moving toward a system of support and really bolstering, not only services, but also finding ways to facilitate the bonds between people, instead of tearing people apart. 

Kim: Absolutely, absolutely, I think there is a final passage that I would like to read from your book, it’s on pg. 195, you wrote:

“But really, effective treatment means bringing people out of isolation, not imposing more of it.”

Brian: Definitely. 

Maya: Absolutely, absolutely, thank you. 

Brian: Well, thank you so much, Maya, this was… I’m really grateful for the conversation today and I hope we can have you on in the future and we look forward to reading your work, so thank you so much.

Kim: Thank you so much, we appreciate it, thank you. 

Maya: Thank you so much, wonderful questions, thank you!

Brian: Have a good one!

Kim: Thanks Maya, take care!

Maya: Bye!

Kim: Bye!

Thank you for joining us again this week on Beyond Prisons. You can rate, review, and subscribe to us on iTunes. You can also find me on Twitter @phillyprof03…

Brian: … and you can find me on Twitter @bsonenstein…

Kim: … our twitter handle for the podcast is @Beyond_Prison and you can also email at us at beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com. See you next week!