Released From Rikers Island, NYU Student Speaks Out About COVID-19
Writer, artist, and NYU student José Díaz shares his experience of being arrested and imprisoned on a technical violation during the COVID-19 crisis.
José describes the conditions and lack of medical care inside New York City jails where he was held. He talks about the organizing efforts that secured his release and how exceptionalism played a role in gaining people’s support.
Finally, José shares his thoughts on why demanding the immediate release of prisoners is important and why reform efforts so often fall short of addressing people’s problems.
José Díaz is a Master’s student majoring in Social and Cultural Analysis with an emphasis on Latino Studies at NYU. As a student and advocate, he seeks to unravel ideological narratives that underlie our common notions of race, class, and gender, and how those ideas inform public space and human interaction. He is also a writer and public speaker, where he uses the power of storytelling to highlight his personal struggles with incarceration while challenging theoretical postulations about the carceral system. He advocates and educates on the importance of inclusivity within prison initiative programs and education as well as pushing back against the language, privilege, and ideas that perpetuate the reproduction of negative notions of people of color. As an artist and photographer, he is currently engaged in a project that looks at the urban landscape of New York City as a place to explore cultural memory, the city block, and overlapping diasporas.
José’s website: jdiazmemory.com/bio
NYU Prison Education Program: prisoneducation.nyu.edu
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Transcript
Kim Wilson: Hi and welcome to Beyond Prisons, a podcast on incarceration and prison abolition. I’m one of your hosts, Kim Wilson. In this episode, Brian and I sat down with José Díaz, a writer, artist, and student at NYU. José shares his experience of being arrested and imprisoned on a technical violation during the COVID-19 crisis. He describes the conditions inside of New York Jails where he was held and the lack of medical care inside. José talks about the organizing efforts that secured his release, and how exceptionalism played a role in gaining people’s support. He is roundly critical of exceptionalism and respectability politics, and argues that these things need to be interrogated and rejected by everyone, but especially by groups that are calling for the mass release of prisoners. Finally, José tells us why he thinks that demanding the immediate release of prisoners is important, and why reform efforts so often fall short of addressing people’s problems.
José Díaz is a masters student, majoring in social and cultural analysis, with an emphasis on Latino studies at NYU. As a student and advocate, he seeks to unravel ideological narratives that underlie our common notions of race, class, and gender, and how those ideas inform public space and human interaction. He’s also a writer and public speaker where he uses the power of storytelling to highlight his personal struggles with incarceration while challenging theoretical postulations about the carceral system. He advocates and educates on the importance of inclusivity within prison initiative programs and education as well as pushing back against the language, privilege, and ideas that perpetuates the reproduction of negative notions of people of color. As an artist and photographer, he is currently engaged in a project that looks at the urban landscape of New York City as a place to explore cultural memory, the city block, and overlapping diasporas. We hope you enjoy this episode.
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Kim: Welcome to Beyond Prisons. Glad you’re home. I said that before, but I don’t think it can be said enough times. So, I just wanted to lay the groundwork here and give folks some context. Can you describe your experience with what happened with you in terms of being in Rikers, how you ended up there, and things like that? And please, please do not feel that you have to disclose anything that you’re not comfortable disclosing.
José Díaz: All right, no problem, definitely. I was rearrested early March - I can't quite recall but I think it was March 2nd - for a parole violation. I was arrested at parole in Brooklyn and taken straight to a Manhattan detention center. After being there a week, I was transferred out of that detention center due to an issue with the building - someone had broke the water main in the building, or a water pipe, or something to that extent, and it flooded the visit room and they just needed to basically move guys out so they could do repairs. At least that’s the narrative they shared with us. The elevators also stopped working so they didn’t want to continue to have to cart things up and down the stairs, especially when it comes to food, so they just moved the whole tower of guys either to the Bronx or to Rikers Island. I was sent to the Bronx at that point. I spent about a week or two in the Bronx - it's called a “Boat”. And at that point, COVID started to really become a thing and there were many cases happening, especially in Rikers Island, and quarantine and everything started to become an issue. Myself and plenty of other guys became hyper aware of what was unfolding in the streets. Basically that was what was going on. So things had changed in the facility. The correctional officers had access to masks, we stopped getting social services to our housing units, to our dorms, and medical basically stopped for us. Unless it was a medical emergency, like you were diabetic or something that they had to address, they had basically canceled sick call.
Kim: Wow.
José: During that time, we started learning about social distancing. My bed in the boat, you’re literally head to head or head to foot or foot to foot with another person’s bed.
Kim: Just wanted to clarify when you’re talking about the boat, you mean the barge and it’s an actual barge.
José: Yeah, it’s an actual barge.
Kim: Yeah, cause I'm not sure a lot of people are even... it took me a while to wrap my head around that when I first learned of it. And I'm like, are you serious? So, we’re literally locking people up on a boat, basically.
José: Yeah. Literally it’s called Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center, it’s in the Bronx, and it’s literally a boat, a boat that’s meant to operate as a prison. It’s interesting. [laughs]
Kim: Ridiculous.
José: Yeah, it's interesting. It’s filthy too. You have no actual operating windows so when the air conditioning actually went down you basically had no outside ventilation or air filtering, fresh air, at least. Then when you look at where the air is supposed to be coming in, they haven’t replaced the filter in years, if ever. And it's extremely dirty. And so at best times, the air getting in is contaminated, it’s dirty. It's really common, because of the air that's coming in to be very dirty as well as you being in close proximity to people in general, that you’re going to get sick.
And the food is extremely processed and of low quality. You’re going to have stomach problems when you first get incarcerated because your body needs to acclimate to this new condition. When I first went in within the week of me getting to the barge, I felt sick. What I felt at that point was basically my body ached extremely and I had diarrhea and at one point I had cold sweats. All I did was just huddle in my blanket for a whole day and the next day I began to get better. I don’t know what it was. I didn't see a doctor. I just thought it was common sickness. And who knows. God knows.
Anyway, due to the fact there’s no ventilation as well, my throat began to hurt, and guys were also smoking inside the facility so I had contracted laryngitis from the smoke. For like three days I had put down for sick call not realizing that it had been cancelled. No one really made us aware that the sick call was cancelled. It was a decision that was made and not spoken about. When I saw the officer who does the S Carts to sick call, I asked her, “Hey, I’ve been putting down for sick call.” She said, “Oh, it's cancelled.” I said, “I’m really in pain right now, my throat, I need to go down to sick call, my throat hurts.” And she was like, “Well, I’ll look into that for you,” and she never returned. And a day or so passed and then I basically told the officer who was a steady there and let him know, “Hey, I'm in pain, my throat’s swollen.” I had been taking ibuprofen to deal with the pain, it wasn’t getting better, and you kind of got to make it seem as though you may have contracted COVID and then they called me down to sick call. Well, it wasn't sick call but they had to bring me down to medical because you don’t know if that's what it was or not, but that’s the precaution. And I just had laryngitis. They gave me some penicillin and, it’s interesting, within the first day of being given penicillin, it made a tremendous difference in how I was feeling. And the doctor who prescribed it to me told me to come back the next day in the afternoon to get another dosage. Later on that night I would be given the rest of my medication so I wouldn't have to come down to medical. When I went down, the doctor I saw, it was a different doctor, actually tried to take me off the medication.
Kim: Wow.
José: Just after having given me one pill. So, I kind of made my case for it and she was like, “I’m not going to reverse this decision. It’s whatever.” So, it’s really about cost and them believing whether you are in pain or not even when it’s apparent. I was fine then and within a week of that passing, well within two weeks, I was told to pack up, that I was leaving. That, I believe, was around the same day that De Blasio made his announcement that they were going to begin letting guys go. I think that was the 23rd, I’m not too sure. When they told me to pack up, that I was going to Rikers Island, I was like, Holy cow! They might be fucking letting me go, you know? It bodes well. But I didn’t anticipate Rikers Island to be contaminated. You hear things through the grapevine, but when you see it for what it is, you're like, Wow, this is not good.
By the time I got to OBCC in Rikers Island, there were already cases of Corona. Within a week, they had quarantined two houses under us. And by the time I was released, because I only spent two weeks there, at that point on the dorm side of OBCC, all houses were quarantined except for mine and one other. And they were quarantined. How quarantine basically works is you have someone who might have tested positive for COVID, they take them out, ship them somewhere else, and then they lock down whoever’s been exposed, just to see whether they develop any sickness or anything. So, it’s not like they’re actively testing.
Kim: Exactly - there’s no testing. There’s no adherence to any kind of medical protocol, or anything like that.
José: None whatsoever. It's just, Lets lock them in, let’s see if they get sick, and go from there. The crazy part of this is that somehow guys were still finding ways to slip out of the doors and past the guards and finding ways to be in the hall with everybody else who was not quarantined. It was the possibility of it spreading like that as well that intensified a lot of the sentiments of fear. So, it was like really happening. And guys who were basically coming in - the day before I left, they just brought in two new guys - they only had been incarcerated for seven days. So basically they’re fresh off the street, they could be carriers, and there’s no standard of test.
And it really has just been like that. A day or two before that, they tried to bring guys in who had been quarantined. And they took them somewhere and kind of deemed that they didn’t have COVID and decided to send them with us. Guys have been basically telling other people, “Hey, you can’t come in this housing unit anymore” because, number one, it's physically impossible to social distance yourself from anybody. We don’t have adequate cleaning supplies, we don’t have adequate access to medical before COVID, and it’s only gotten worse. Now that we just wanted to prevent everybody from overpacking us, and it was nothing really personal, it was just correctional officers and DOC were going along with their business as usual. So, when I was told I was being released, I knew for a fact that Cuomo - that whole initiative and what De Blasio was saying - was not true. The only reason I’m out was because a lot of advocacy efforts and solidarity all across the board, people from NYU and other various organizations coming together to advocate for me and my release. So, I’m extremely appreciative for NYU Prison Education program and all those who stepped up to the plate and made it happen.
Brian Sonenstein: I definitely want to get more into your experiences in the different facilities and I want to hear about the organizing that happened to get you out, but I did want to take a step back to the beginning of the story to ask you something that you mentioned here on this episode. I know you brought it up on Democracy Now when you were on this morning, and that relates to the transfers that you experienced. You mentioned there was some semblance of attempting to do quarantine poorly on the inside, but you can’t really social distance during the actual transfers either, right? Can you talk a little bit about what it actually entails to be moved from facility to facility, being on busses with people? I wanted to know if you had any thoughts on that.
José: When they tell you to pack up and move, they literally give you a garbage bag and are like, “Put all your stuff in, and let’s go.” They bring you down to a holding pen where there’s going to be people in there. At bare minimum the guys you left with are going to be there and there’s no sanitizing these cells. So, you have to think about them like doing your best to sweep and mop like a train station. It’s pretty much like that, that’s pretty much it. You go into these cells and you wait for hours with whoever’s going to go with you on the transfer. When your time finally does come up, you’re going to be packed in like a school bus. We’ve seen these busses, they’re the blue and white corrections busses. Essentially, you’re handcuffed by your hand and by your foot to another individual and you have to sit next to each other on the bus, and usually the bus is filled with people whether they’re sick or not. That’s how a transfer goes until they take you wherever you gotta go. In my case, when I was transferred from Manhattan, they packed us up and we sat in the bus from like 5:30 to maybe 2:30 in the morning.
Brian: Wow.
José: The Bronx was not ready; it didn't have space for us at all. And they were maybe protesting this mass transfer from Manhattan which was three busses full of guys. It’s like a bus that could hold twenty people in the back and at least two or three individual seats. So, in our cabin that held twenty seats, there was sixteen of us. And the other busses were filled up as well. There were three other busses that were all getting transferred in at once, and we were all jam packed into a holding pen at once and then transferred into a dorm at once without any type of screening or anything. That’s pretty much what happens.
That’s what my experience was going to the barge. The same experience when leaving the barge. They put you in handcuffs, they hold you in a cell for hours, you're waiting on a bus for another three hours in front of the prison, until they open the door and say, “Hey guys, come in.” Then they put you in a cell, and I was packed up in early afternoon, I didn’t get into a housing unit till around 9:30-10. You’re pretty much just being held and told where to go and where not to go. It was pretty much the same experience when I was released: put into a holding cell, put into a bus, literally holding my bag and on top of another guy. Although I’m not handcuffed to him, I’m not even an inch, our shoulders are all touching. There was no test for whether any of us were infected prior to being released. We weren’t given any masks, no anything, just told to go. Wait for the bus and just go. I was told to pack up earlier that day, around 12-ish, 12:30, and I didn’t actually get off Rikers Island till around 2:30-ish in the morning. So, it’s an extremely long process where it took them about eight hours just to get me down into intake and at that point, I wasn’t even escorted because there was so much going on. It was just pure mayhem. I started intake from like 8:30 – in between 8:30 and 9:00 – all the way to be taken out of that facility, OBCC, at 1:30 in the morning, and being processed and basically discharged and actually leaving on an MTA bus by 2:30. I didn’t get home till like five in the morning.
Brian: It seems like even what little they may or may not be doing on the inside to keep people separate is almost completely compromised or watered down by the fact that you’re crammed in close proximity with people from different facilities on your way in or out of the facilities.
José: I think their thing is it’s not really an attempt to keep people separate as compared to, “Oh my god, someone has it, let’s just seal them in.” That’s their way of quarantining: let’s just seal them in so the disease doesn’t spread. And if the officer gets sick or whatever, it is what it is. It's just lock in.
Brian: That actually leads to the next thing I wanted to ask you about. I wonder if you could tell people a little bit more about… we’re hearing not only on Rikers but around the country they are locking prisons and facilities and dorms down. What does that situation look like on the inside, not only just in general - in terms of being locked in your cell for almost the entire day - but in terms of the services and the stress people are under? What is lockdown like in this sort of pandemic situation?
José: It’s literally placing the whole dorm on cape lock, where you don’t have any access to anything at this point. Right now, they basically cancelled social services out of fear of distancing. But I guess they began to force workers to come in and, I don’t know, it's just really weird. They cancelled barber shop. Barber shop’s important because at least if you’re a diabetic or just being able to cut your fingernails and toenails to prevent some dirt from getting under them. If you wash your hands and you still have dirt under your fingernails, your hands are still not clean. You didn thave access to that. You didn't have access to cleaning supplies. It was very rationed from the onset, without COVID, and it's also locked away. The brooms, the mops, any chemicals that would have been used for cleaning, are locked away now, and they’re also doubly rationed at this point.
I had a sponge and I wanted to clean it and keep it to the side and always have access to a sponge so I could keep my area clean. The officer saw that and took it away from me. That’s some of the stuff they do. But quarantine itself, what it looks like from the outside looking in, it's just a person’s locked in. They have a mask and if they're going to let them out, they let them out separately. But the officers are standing like 15 to 20 feet away from them and just watching them and making sure that they keep their distance from them. But if they believe people are infected, they’re still in a dorm with an individual. My bed is 3 feet away from someone using the same bathroom, the same showers, and we don’t have adequate cleaning supplies, so if there is a time that the virus is present and is on surfaces, you really don’t have the opportunity to really clean anything. If you’re going to get it, you're going to get it on your body. And you just have to be really conscious because the only thing you can do really well, at least in my situation, is just wash your hands adequately enough and just don’t touch your face at all.
So, to answer a little bit more exactly, when we saw guys being quarantined, it was just like, you're locked in, that’s it, they can’t come out. And for some reason if guys did come out and wandered away and did something - they were just out with a mask or not wearing a mask on their face - and people are like, They’re from this dorm, why isn’t anybody escorting them back? So they’re just allowing people to walk and do whatever they want to do to a certain degree. There isn’t really any active containment of COVID.
Kim: So, there’s not an actual quarantine section or unit? There’s just limited isolation to the extent that they can possibly have within the confines of a dorm unit. Is that accurate or did I miss…
José: Yeah, I think that’s accurate. If someone was tested positive for COVID in a dorm, they just lock the door, lock the dorm.
Kim: So, they’ll lock the entire dorm so the person who’s sick and everyone that’s in that dorm would be locked in?
José: They would try to, yes, but they would try to take the person who tested positive out and to verify whether they had COVID or not. But if the individual… You don’t know if the person has COVID until they show symptoms.
Kim: And that’s the tricky part with COVID is you can be asymptomatic and have it. So, even if you're not displaying symptoms, you could have it. There’s now way to actually tell unless you’re testing, and if they’re not testing everyone, it's like waiting until some people show up with symptoms. It’s kind of like a half-assed attempt to do anything. It gives the illusion that they are doing something without them actually doing anything that's going to be meaningful in terms of protecting other people’s lives.
José: Exactly! So if the person apparently shows the symptoms of COVID, they get them out and it looks like, Oh, everybody’s safe. But it’s more than likely it's already spread to the dorms so that’s why they lock the dorm down. If somebody happens to begin showing symptoms, they just do it again. I guess you’re not stopping the spread, you’re not containing the spread, you’re not testing the people who are left in the dorm to see whether they have it or not. So yes, I agree with you.
Kim: Yeah, wow.
José: And also, some guys who have jobs… One of the guys who was in the quarantine dorm, they still let him out to do his job. He was a line server in the mess hall, he would serve guys food. There was a lot of stuff going on that just didn’t make sense.
Kim: Yeah, absolutely because you’re handling other people's food and you’re… It’s just such a mess.
Brian: You were talking about sort of this deficit in hygiene products, the COs have masks, everything seems to be really rationed. I was wondering if you witnessed anyone, whether it be makeshift masks or anything like that? What were people trying to do on the inside to protect themselves to the extent that you witnessed anything like that?
José: One of the major ways people protect themselves is that if no one in your dorm was apparently sick, you stopped people from coming in who were new and you didn’t know. So when they brought a person in, you’re like, Dude, you can’t come in here, it’s over, go somewhere else. That’s one of the major ways. The second way is if guys got their hands on masks, they would use that, but the most effective way that I've seen anybody do, it's also the way I did, it’s just tie a shirt around your face. And don’t touch anybody. That’s as much as you could possibly do.
Kim: That’s an interesting thing that you said about tying the masks around your face because at many facilities, you can’t do that. You'll get written up if you tie anything around your face because they think you’re trying to start a riot or something like that.
José: Mhm, yeah. It got to the point where if they told you something, you were basically like, fuck you, give me a mask, and well, they’re not giving you a mask.
That’s pretty much it and also one of the things that is interesting, what people hold on to... So, there was an announcement on TV saying that Jay-Z and Meek Mill had donated 50,000 masks to guys in Rikers, and so it’s interesting how people were just like, Jay-Z is going to look out for us and we’re all going to get masks now!
Kim: Oh my god.
José: Yeah, and that’s what people latch onto. Also basic access to knowledgeable resources about how to protect yourself against COVID is limited. Me coming down now, I could Google a whole bunch of ways to look at things to keep myself safe outside of what Cuomo is saying. Being able to have adequate resources and multiple ways to protect yourself besides what the state is telling you and failing at, it’s important because god knows what they’re saying. And the truth is that they don’t know about the ways in which it still can be transferred to other people. Also they say, oh, if you’re young and healthy, you can’t get infected, but then there’s young and healthy people who get infected.
Kim: Which is absolute pure nonsense because, as we’re seeing, as this thing is ravaging people both inside and outside across the country, that it does hit younger people too.
José: Yeah. So one thing that I do say that I believe is effective is washing your hands! [laughs] And much of the hygiene etiquette that you do learn while incarcerated is kind of like a certain standard of things that you do anyway. You always wash your hands, you really don’t shake people’s hands, you really try your best not to make as much contact with people. But these are things that you kind of learn.
But then again, because of the incarceration of a lot of homeless people and mentally ill people... The prison system is not only a place that houses people who are awaiting parole violations or awaiting court hearings for trials for crimes, it’s also a place to warehouse people who are mentally ill, as well as homeless people. People who lack a lot of resources or a lot of the sense to keep some things clean. It’s a lot of that stuff going on. One perfect example, there was an old man - and this is like a combination of all the things I’ve been talking about - there was an old man there. He had to be in his late 60’s, early 70’s. He showed signs of dementia. You would pass by, he would lay in his bed, having a full blown conversation with himself. But when you spoke to him, he was lucid, he was clear. He knew how to converse, he knew what was going on. He was experiencing kidney failure. So, long story short, he would go to medical with his complaints. He was actually diagnosed for having something, and so they knew that he had issues, health issues, but they had given him the wrong medication. He stopped taking the medication they were giving him because it just wasn’t helping at all. And one day I saw him wiping something out of the urinal, so I was like, Why do you even have your hands in a urinal with no gloves or anything?
The only reason why he was doing that is because a lot of the fear of COVID was there and basically the guys who are the gangs who were in the house were threatening people about cleanliness. And if you weren’t clean to a certain degree, they would want to beat you up. Even though those kind of rules got skipped over with them, because they were also dirty themselves. But it’s just another level of oppression.
My whole point being that the guy was so scared that people would do something to him, and he didn’t want to jeopardize anybody else’s help. It turns out he was trying to wipe out blood. He was urinating blood, kidney failure apparently. So I basically forced the correctional officer to take him to medical.
Kim: Wow.
Brian: Wow.
José: And so they took him out and in a few hours they brought him right back in.
Kim: Oh my god. Oh my god.
José: They did nothing for this guy, probably gave him a few skittles, and told him, “Hey, figure it out.”
Kim: Which speaks to the fact that there really is no care, no healthcare that happens in prison. In terms of even a minimum level of healthcare. And the people who are working there - nurses and doctors, if there are any doctors - at these various facilities, also have their hands tied because they’re limited by what’s available to them. Some of these people may want to prescribe something else, but can’t because it’s just not available and they’re just not going to get it in for different folks. Not to make excuses for them, but just to highlight the fact that it is a complicated problem, and there are various levels here of people that share the blame.
José: I definitely agree with you. And in my case with the laryngitis, the doctor, he touched my throat and I had to push him off me, because I was like, “Yo, dude, that really hurts!” Then he looked and saw how enlarged my throat was. I was asthmatic and I had croup when I was younger and I was fearful that I would have one of those attacks while I was there. I did eleven years upstate and I’ve seen guys die just by a basic asthma attack because the person who was there for medical refused to resuscitate or do CPR or even pay attention to the person. So, I knew my mortality was in question and I knew I needed to get help. That’s why I had to use, Oh, I might be sick, to get me down to medical. I know exactly what’s wrong with me: my throat’s enlarged because the smoke is killing me and I have no ventilation. It’s those things that you continuously experience. And when I went down there, one doctor wants to help me, the other doctor wants to take me off the meds that are helping me. So, it’s kind of like that paradox. They’re only going to prescribe it if you need it and then they have the imperative of saving DOC money somehow.
It also questions the idea of pain and suffering and how it’s completely normalized, how for them Black and Brown bodies don’t experience pain, or that we lie about pain. Maybe. It’s just interesting, especially when it’s mostly coming from other people of color who are also policing us. It looks at an institution, a system that reproduces some of these logics within itself.
Kim: Right.
José: Even though there might be an underlying level of self-hate going on. One of the things that became very apparent is some of the logic of criminalization of people of color. It came to the forefront what people were really feeling about you because COVID gave an excuse for people to socially distance. Not only to socially distance, but also to treat you as if you’re contaminated. But in reality, you weren’t contaminated, they would just give to you what they really felt about people who are incarcerated.
Kim: Yeah. As if they didn’t do that anyway, right? As if it wasn’t a problem in general anyway, but I think, the situation--
José: It was intensified.
Kim: Exactly! Absolutely intensified. It also speaks to the constant calls that we hear from, what I love to call well-meaning people. Well-meaning people are going to get us all killed. Well-meaning people who are like, well all we need to do is diversify, or have more people of color in these various oppressive institutions, and everything will be okay. And it’s like, no, clearly--
José: No, that’s not the answer.
Kim: You don’t understand the way systems work and what it means to be part of that system. Because while you as an individual may not hold those views or may want to do something to challenge that, you really can’t. You really can’t. There’s no escaping the fact that this is a bigger thing than any one person.
José: Definitely right. One of the things that kind of just astonished me tremendously - and not to really divert or anything - but how Blue Lives Matter-positive a lot of the corrections officers were--
Kim: Oh, yeah.
José: Especially being people of color--
Kim: Yup.
José: And what that implies. What it means in relation to Black Lives Matter.
Kim: Yup.
José: And I’m like, What?! Having been removed from Rikers Island for about 15 years and then going back into that situation and realizing how much worse it has become, is astonishing.
Kim: Mhm. Yeah.
José: It’s become worse in two different ways. In one way, the protections that were given to guys through surveillance, countersurveillance of correctional officers stopped some of the violences. But it also creates space for other violences to occur.
Kim: Yeah.
José: And it’s just like, what’s going on? It’s just such an inverse universe going on.
Kim: I want to kind of pivot back here - just being mindful of time - and return to something that we were talking about earlier that you raised, and that was around the organizing efforts that got you out. What happened? What took place? If you want to share the folks that were involved. I also want to touch on something that I think is also part of this story, if you’re comfortable talking about it. It’s around this notion of being exceptional, and respectability politics, and how that played into it in large part. I’d love to hear how this all happened. I mean, I kind of have an inkling, full disclosure, but... [laughs]
José: [laughs]
Kim: But I want to hear it from you.
José: Many thanks to you, to Kaitlin Noss, to Raechel Bosch, everybody at the NYU PEP team, and all those who have been involved or have shown their interest in helping, and getting on the phone zaps, and stuff like that. When it comes to the actual, on the ground organizing, the amount of work that came into it, my main point of contact was through Raechel Bosch, and her informing me about the work that she was doing, and contacting the Legal Aid Society. Also with my lawyer, with my mother, you as well, Kaitlin as well. And just a lot of the work was happening behind my back. I wasn’t aware how much work actually went into it. I’m still actually learning about it, if that’s possible. [laughs] So, something happened! [laughs] I don’t know, and I got out and I was like, holy shit, I’m out! [laughs]
Kim: [laughs] Yeah.
José: But definitely to think about some of the logics of exceptionalism and respectability politics, I think that definitely plays a role into thinking about maybe who to advocate for, what narratives we think about that are worth advocating for. I think definitely people cherry-pick as to what to do. And in the case of the NYU Prison Education Program, if I was just held on a parole violation, and there was no COVID, there would have been just regular support behind it. But my life was clearly in danger and god knows when I would have gotten out. I guess the narrative to the powers that be had to be pushed that I was possibly exceptional, when in reality I’m really not, I’m just some guy who just studied and read a lot and still uses words correctly.
The truth is that I think some of the work I’ve done in the past with advocacy, and just over all educating people about incarceration and my experience, and making connections in general, provided a space or a place where people could question whether they care enough to advocate.
Honestly speaking, I’m a person who has always been critical of social justice advocacy because I’ve seen how people become this person who is propped up as this exceptional person that needs to be shown as this sample or this paradigm of what education could possibly do. When in reality it’s not. No one really discusses what goes on from point A to Z.
That’s a part of what we’re missing that most people are still under heavy surveillance. I still have another year and a half left on parole. My Bachelor’s degree didn’t really matter to them. The fact that I was in the process of graduating this May with my Master’s didn’t matter to them. And if my goals, or ambitions, or all my positive behavior did not matter at all, whatsoever, to DOC. To them I was just reduced to who I was 15 years ago.
Kim: You’re reduced to your past history.
José: Exactly.
Kim: It might be helpful for us to explain a little bit what we mean by exceptionalism and respectability politics, because I’m not sure that--
José: For me it kind of reminds me of Booker T. Washington and his Talented Tenth. Really thinking about respectability politics, thinking about who’s defendable, and who’s not defendable.
One way I could think about it is that... the narrative that held strong was when Obama was pushing the difference, or creating a taxonomy between violent and non-violent offenders. That kind of damaged a lot of stuff because people who were there for the seemingly innocuous crime of drug offenses were the people who were worth advocating for. I have a violent crime so that automatically pushes me off to the margins in a really bad place. And that kind of came to the forefront. I remember having a conversation with Kaitlin and it was a really real moment where they were like, “José, we’re doing everything that we could but because of your past, it doesn’t look too well for you.” And I was like, “Yeah, I know.” So, that's understanding how it plays out, respectability politics. Since I was a violent offender, regardless of me violating for DUI, it didn’t really matter.
Kim: Yeah. It’s just the notion that basically in order for Black and Brown people, marginalized people, oppressed people, to be treated as human, that we need to behave and act in ways that conform to what white society thinks makes us worthy of being recognized as human. And that’s at the core of a lot of the kind of advocacy that you’re talking about. People are willing to advocate for the college graduate or the Master’s student, or what have you.
José: I definitely agree with that because some of the work i’ve been doing for a long time, and along with PEP, and they’ve been backing me on this is, the message is inclusivity. It became a trend but at one point I’m like, We’re still not inclusive. [laughs]
Kim: Yeah.
José: But PEP has worked to be inclusive and pretty much is doing it. But also the narrative of civilizing a group of people. It’s a long narrative that could be traced back to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. And it’s a narrative that we all think about. It kind of makes me think of Frederick Douglass and what he said in one of his speeches, that the only reason - and I’m paraphrasing, of course - the only reason why I’m here is because I’ve been propped up by some guy and given credibility, not on my own, but through somebody else’s own credibility to have the platform or the space. I think it’s very important when we think about that space as a platform. It’s very important to acknowledge that all the people deserve a chance at humanity, I guess. And it’s not to reduce it to this neoliberal logic, but it’s to think about it. What it really is, is that many of the people who do harm, or the most harm in the world, already hold degrees, already hold power or authority, versus those who don’t. And the act of education is not an act that civilizes a group of people - that’s a western narrative - rather, it’s a tool for employment, for opportunity, or for resources. Rather than the act of civilizing the barbarians.
Kim: And that the reason why we should be advocating and working so hard, and making dozens of calls, and writing letters, and petitions, etc., is not because José Diaz is X, but because José Diaz is. Period. The end.
José: Right.
Kim: That’s it. You’re a human being and that should be good enough. You raised this when you were talking about the dichotomy between violent and non-violent, people convicted of violent versus non-violent offenses. I think it’s important to reframe that language rather than saying, “violent and non-violent offenders.” People convicted.
José: Convicted, yeah, that’s it.
Kim: And it’s something Brian and I spend entirely, I’m not going to say too much time, because I think--
Brian: [laughs] A lot, though.
Kim: A lot, yeah. We get that question so much and it’s really kind of infuriating sometimes.
Brian: We have about seven minutes left here and I know you had a really long day so I want to be mindful of your time and to let you rest. I did have one more question for you.
José: Sure.
Brian: Over the last several weeks there’s been a lot of demands floating around about what incarcerated people need, what should happen right now, or what should happen next, and I just wanted to ask you, based on what you’ve seen over the last few weeks and actually being on the inside, what do you think should happen next? What are the concrete needs? What should the demands be based on what you witnessed, and the people you’ve talked to, and so on and so forth, the conditions on the inside right now?
José: First and foremost we need to be released. There is no doubt about that being at the top of the priority list. Anything short of that falls short of any demands. But first I would call for the release of parolees, people who are facing misdemeanor crimes, and reducing bail for individuals. A lot of guys would bail out if their bail hadn’t been so high. There are many different forms of reform that are actually falling short extremely, or just fighting a very severe uphill battle. If I were to say second to being released, is give us adequate medical care. Give us adequate time to use the phone. Give us adequate access to cleaning equipment. These are just some of the basic needs that we should be given, I feel, if we are going to be incarcerated. And give us adequate access to legal resources. It’s just falling short on so many different levels.
One of the things I learned recently was that during a parole preliminary hearing: even if you requested a legal aid, and it’s written that you requested legal aid, and for some reason the legal aid doesn’t show up, the judge will automatically just railroad you and process you through like a hearing. But if you object to it and ask that a lawyer be present, it stops the process. The issue is that nobody knows you could really object to it. You’re just automatically railroaded. We need access to, at least, up-to-date legal resources. The law library needs to be, at least, updated. At bare minimum. So for people who have to go through it will be able to have up-to-date information to fight their cases so they’re fully informed.
Because I’m not a person who’s into thinking about ways to better the prisons--
Kim: No.
José: The best way to have a good prison is to have no prison, in my eyes.
Kim: You’re in good company, José!
José: [laughs] Yeah!
That’s pretty much it. And I don’t want to jump the gun and say I speak for PEP on that, but I think at our core, we’re abolitionists.
Kim: Yeah, absolutely.
Brian: Thank you.
Well, Kim, I don’t know if you had any final questions, but I wanted to thank you so much, José, for your time and for speaking with us today.
José: No problem! I’m more than happy just to spread the word and to advocate for people who are still there. Because I’m out and I don’t feel good about being out and knowing there’s other people still in there in the same danger I was. That’s just not fucking right.
Kim: Yeah. I’m so freaking glad you’re home.
José: Thank you.
Kim: I’ve been checking in with folks to get status updates and find out what was going on, and really just thinking about you and everyone else that is still inside. And as we’re working to get other people out, I’m also really, really glad that you’re home.
