Transformative Justice & Pod-Mapping
In the first episode of 2019, hosts Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein begin a conversation on transformative justice by discussing the concept of “Pods” and the process of “Pod-mapping.”
These exercises involve developing skills and identifying relationships that are key to intervening in harm and providing the kind of support that accountability can demand.
Listeners can learn more about Pods and follow this conversation more closely via the following materials:
Pods and Pod-Mapping Worksheet by Mia Mingus & Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective
Think; Re-Think by Connie Burk (The Revolution Starts At Home)
Transcript
Brian Sonenstein: Happy New Year everyone! Thanks for listening to Beyond Prisons. I’m one of your hosts, Brian Sonenstein, and today, my co-host, Kim Wilson and I are going to begin to explore a topic that we hope to return to throughout 2019 and that topic is transformative justice.
We are beginning this conversation today by discussing the concept of pods and the process of pod-mapping, which involves developing skills and identifying relationships that are key to intervening in harm and providing the kind of support that accountability can demand. We’ll explain this all in greater detail in a moment, but before we do, I wanted to point out that we’ve linked to reading materials, toolkits, and other resources in the episode description for people that want to dig deeper into what we are discussing today.
I’d like to give a big shout-out to Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, Mia Mingus, the folks behind the Creative Interventions Toolkit, and Connie Burke, who have all assembled the work that we are discussing today. And last but not least, our ability to do this podcast relies heavily on the support of listeners like you, so if you have a couple of dollars to spare each month, please consider joining us at patreon.com/BeyondPrisons.
If you can’t give money, but you still want to help us out, please tell your friends, family, and comrades about the show. You can rate, review, and subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Play, and Spotify and you can follow us on social media @Beyond_Prison on Twitter and on Facebook at facebook.com/BeyondPrisonsPodcast. Thanks again for listening and we hope you enjoy our first foray into transformative justice with a conversation on pods and pod-mapping. Here’s the episode.
Kim Wilson: Happy New Year everyone! Welcome to 2019! Hopefully, this will be a less shitty year than 2018.
Brian: Ugh, it’s not a high bar, so…
[Kim and Brian laugh]
Kim: We’re already starting off from a very, very dark place, so…
[Brian laughs]
Kim: Ahhh, let’s just try to push through and make sure that this year can be better. I’m not someone who does New Years’ resolutions, but yeah… What about you?
Brian: Same. I’m not one for New Years’ resolutions either, but I think given how particularly awful the last year has been for a variety of reasons, it’s definitely a time for introspection. And something that I think we like to do on this podcast is visioning and sort of imagining how things could be better and how we get there and I feel like that has been something that has been a guide post for me in the first week of this year already.
[Brian laughs]
Brian: So yeah, I’m very glad to be back with you and to be doing this. It’s been too long and I’m excited.
Kim: Yeah, absolutely.
Brian: And today, one of the things that we wanted to dip our toes into involved a term that we use a lot on this show and people in activist circles use a lot in sussing out this idea of community and doing that through something called pods. I guess I could read from the definition here. I think what’s really interesting about this, and I would obviously love to hear your thoughts about this as somebody that has facilitated transformative justice and somebody who has done workshops with this, is not only getting to the bottom of what community is in a practical sense, but also, thinking critically and practically about the relationships that we have in our lives and the practice of relationship and thinking about the people that are or are not around us and the roles that they play in our lives. It’s not something that I think that in a sort of atomized, capitalist society, we are ever encouraged to think about, at least not beyond the abstract, so I’m looking forward to this conversation. What about you?
Kim: Same and just before we dive into that, the reason we’re doing this conversation or starting off with a conversation for the New Year around pods is because I’ve been doing a lot of work around transformative justice since last year. I’ve been part of a group in California that has been a group of practitioners and we’ve been looking at and thinking about and practicing transformative justice in different contexts and thinking through the actual problems that we have.
So, this is something that you’ve heard me talk about a lot outside of the context of the podcast and we’ve been looking forward to doing this so I’m excited to do this today and just because we’re talking about pods on a podcast…
[Kim and Brian laugh]
Kim: We can get kind of lost in terms of the language. But I think very simply it’s useful to share the definition that the Bay Area Transformative Justice Committee came up with. Do you want to read that, Brian, or do you want me to read it?
Brian: Yeah, I think I have it right here. And we’ll have the link for this in the description so that people can read this over outside of our conversation, but basically, the way that they describe it is:
Your pod is made up of people that you call on if violence, harm, or abuse happened to you or the people that you would call on if you wanted support in taking accountability for violence, harm, or abuse that you’ve done or if you’ve witnessed violence or someone you care about was being violent or being abused.
It goes on to say that:
People can have multiple pods. The people that you may call on when you are being harmed may not be the same people that you call on when you’ve done harm and vice versa.
I think we can sort of dive in there.
Kim: This notion of pods really emerged from the idea that community is a very vague term for a lot of people. We talk about the community or we talk about things happening in community or you’re part of a community and that can seem very distant to a lot of people. I know it has for me many times throughout my life and as someone who’s written about communities, never quite sure what community we’re talking about or we’re referring to. So, the Bay Area Transformative Justice Committee came up with this notion collectively of using pods, which seems to have stuck. And I’ve found it to be a really useful way to try to understand our relationships, the kinds of support that we need if we are harmed, and who you might call on to hold you accountable if you are the person causing harm or abuse. And that’s, I think, a radically different way of thinking about accountability than the way that we tend to approach it.
And for this and other reasons, I think that pods becomes a very useful tool for us to think through. And there’s a worksheet - we’ll provide the link in the description as well - you have this pod-mapping worksheet and basically it’s a series of circles that are drawn on a piece of paper. In the middle you have yourself and the circles are immediately around that. The circles are individual circles, not concentric circles, for folks trying to visualize this. So, there are a series of circles outside of that, that have a heavy border and those are the people that are closest to you. Those are not necessarily your friends or family members. And this is key to thinking about because there are emergency situations that I can think of in my own life where the person that I contacted was not necessarily a family member, where it was someone that I had already had some kind of relationship with, friendship with, and a connection with and that understood the problems in my life, and I knew I could rely on that person to come through and to give me the support that I would need in that moment without me having to explain from beginning to end everything that led up to that incident, which is draining. And I think that’s a lot of why sometimes people don’t want to reach out. I mean, there are a lot of reasons that people don’t want to reach out and talk to someone.
So, that’s the first layer of circles immediately surrounding you and in each of those you would put someone’s name in there and you would think of scenarios. Would you call this person in X scenario? Part of what that does is it allows you to recognize who is closest to you that you know that you can rely on. But it’s also part of the “deal,” if you will. And I hate using that terminology for this, but part of what you come to recognize through this or part of what you do is you ask the people that you’ve put in those circles closest to you if they consent to being the person that you can call on in an emergency.
Especially marginalized folks, folks that are living at the intersections of many different oppressions, we are around other folks that are similarly positioned. And if everyone is stretched to their limit, asking someone to give when they’re probably going through something is also adding a burden. So, in order to not put too much on someone else’s plate or to expect someone to do something. So, this raises this notion of consent as well and brings it into the conversation. You’re asking people and being very deliberate about those relationships, those pods.
Further out, as you move further out, you’re looking at things in the community, community members, and other people that you might need to do some work with. So, you may have your mom or a sister or a friend or someone else that you’ve known forever who you put in those other circles outside of that. But those are folks that you may need to do some relationship work with to get them up to speed about where you are and what this whole thing is and what you would need from them in this situation. So, there would be some work that needs to happen with the folks in those circles and those are depicted by the broken line circle.
The largest circles, those on the perimeter of the page, those are the circles in terms of community resources and other things in your city, your neighborhood that you would need that don’t currently exist. So, if we’re looking at this as the way to respond to not just… I’m not going to use the word, “violence”, but as a way to respond to harm outside of calling the police, then what resources would you need in your community or in your city to support you if you experience harm or if you’ve done harm? What are those resources there? It really reveals the glaring omissions that we have in services. So it’s a simple model but it’s super complex in terms of the many layers and the various things that emerge as a result.
Brian: There’s so much the first time that I looked at this. And after doing subsequent reading that came to mind, I thought was really thought-provoking. To backtrack to the first round of circles, thinking of my own life and the lives of people that I’m close with, I know that a lot of times we might have something going on that we need assistance with and maybe we feel like we are calling on someone too many times and being a burden to them. And I like that it’s not just, this is your one go-to person, but this is a community, like a group of people to disperse that weight onto a group of other people so that you’re surrounded by people that can help you. Instead of feeling like, I need help right now with XYZ but I’ve already called on this person and I’m going to burn them out, maybe they don’t have time, maybe there is something going on in their own lives. So, I liked how it’s not just your one emergency contact sort of thing, you know what I mean?
Kim: It moves you from operating in crisis mode to really developing and building relationships and that’s really what it is. We’re calling it pods but it’s a relationship analysis or a relationship model here and it’s like, What are those relationships? There are a lot of people that don’t have anyone in their pods. And that says something about what’s happening and what needs to happen. So, it’s not like I have ten pod people, I have maybe four pod people that I would call on, reliably call on and ask for support, or ask to hold me accountable. So, in workshops that I’ve facilitated, I’ve asked folks to do a support pod worksheet and an accountability pod worksheet.
And support folks are folks that you call on when you need support and the accountability folks would be the people that you would call on, again, if you’ve harmed someone, if you’ve been abusive. And that really helps you think about your relationships in a different way. At least, it helped me tremendously, when I came across this model, it revealed a lot of things for me. And every time I’ve done it, the feedback I’ve gotten is, Oh wow, I didn’t realize that I needed to do this, or I had this person that I would normally call X, but now that I think about it more deliberately, I’m not sure X would be the person to call.
Brian: That part of it is something that jumped out to me. At first glance, it might seem obvious, like maybe the first time that you look at this sheet, Oh, I know exactly who I’d write down. Not everybody, but in some cases you might feel that way if you look at this. And then the more you think about it and the more you meditate on it, the more you realize that there are certain people that I would call on in those situations based on the situation, based on what the harm is. There are certain people I can go to for certain things. There also might be people who I consider friends and who I spend time around a lot, but who I wouldn’t necessarily be emotionally intimate with about things that are going on in my life.
I know people in my life, and talking to other friends, who spend a lot of time with someone but wouldn’t divulge something personal about their life to them for not being able to trust that person, for fear that that person might not be able to understand. Just being close and spending time with someone is different than having the relationship that this is talking about. And I thought that was very interesting.
Kim: Absolutely! And that touches on the first point. Again, I’m going to reference folks or ask them to go and check out the BATJC’s page on this. And the first point that they make on the page about pods was that most people have few solid, dependable relationships in their lives and it goes onto say:
Much of this is from the breaking of relationships, isolation, fear, and criminalization that capitalism requires. We found that for many people mapping their pod was a sobering process as many thought their pod would be larger than it actually was. It is not uncommon for most people to have one or two people in their pod. We reassure people that this is not a popularity contest, but rather a chance to reflect on why we have so few relationships with the kind of deep trust, reliability, and groundedness that we need to respond well to violence.
And that, basically, it says a lot about the kind of work that we need to do.
In a lot of ways when we get asked these questions, you and I get this question all the time, when we’re asked to speak, “What do we do with these people, these bad people over here? You’re not really asking for all of them to be let out of prison?”
It’s a recognition of the fact that we don’t have a really good sense for what else could be. And that in this capitalist system, in this society, our notions of relationships are transactional in a way that is harmful. And that part about asking people if they would mind being your accountability person or one of your accountability people or support person, helps not just you but also them to think about notions of consent and what it means. You want to be somebody’s support person but if you’re maxed out in your own life, you may just want to say, “You know, I probably won’t be able to come through for you. Maybe at another time, I’d be happy to.” But, again, having that conversation, it’s not that you’re forcing people into conversation, but you’re being deliberate about this process and you are trying to build something that gets you to a different place so that you have these support systems in place.
That’s another important component of this model, is that you put these systems in place before you get to crisis mode. So, before you have an issue, where, again, for folks that have done transformative justice or are familiar with the transformative justice process, one of the tools that practitioners use is a circle. So, we tend to demand a lot of a circle and there’s a lot of stuff that needs to happen outside of the circle. There’s a lot of stuff that needs to happen interpersonally and at the level of just three, four people, if you want to call that your “community”, then there’s a lot of work that can happen there before you need to call on it. You’ve thought through, maybe not thought through everything that you need to do, but you’ve had a conversation in terms of the “what if” and that’s a difficult conversation to have.
There’s not many people in my personal life that I would have those conversations with and the people that I have had those conversations with, they know who they are, they’re okay being my support people, my accountability people, and what have you. But it’s also made me work differently. It’s also made me think about my own actions, my own behaviors, my own attitudes around pretty much everything. Because if I’m behaving in a way that does not cohere with my values, I need to sit down and have a conversation with someone that I trust. And at least for me, I don’t want to have to review everything that has ever happened in my life with someone. Maybe it’s because I just turned 50 recently, but there’s a lot of shit that’s happened! I don’t want to unpack all of that stuff with someone.
Brian: Well, it can be retraumatizing in a lot of ways.
Kim: Exactly. It’s like, “You already know me, you know where I’m coming from, you know what my values are, I did this thing and this thing does not,” - And I don’t even have to say, “This thing does not cohere with my values.” They will just say, “That’s really not you.” It’s like, how do you respond to that? How do you deal with that? They would help you develop a process and a way to try to repair that harm. So, for me, I’ve found it extremely helpful, extremely useful.
I also want to say that for folks that are listening to this, that it’s not the end-all, be-all; don’t look at them like pods are going to save us from everything. It’s a great place to start, it’s a tool, it’s a way to think through a lot of different problems that are happening and to brainstorm, not just individually, but also with other people that are thinking about these issues and around harm, so that you are building those systems within your pods, large or small as you want them to be.
Brian: I think that last point and connecting back to your original example of, “Oh, you’re going to let everyone out of prison?” and, “What do we do with people who murder?” I think that this is an important entry point and organizational tool. I think it’s also helpful… I don’t know what it is, maybe it’s something about the human brain that makes us want to look for things that are not complex or not complicate our thinking on things. And I think it’s important to look at all of this as… I guess maybe for people, especially for people who are not involved in the justice system, it’s comforting to know that that institution or those institutions are there and there’s a system there. And they can take solace in the fact that there’s something there and it’s harder to step back and to look at something else like this and see it as a long process, as a development of skills, as complicated and messy work that people have been doing for centuries. Developing these ways of dealing with harm, and, like you were saying earlier, intervening with harm.
This is one of the major points about all of this is not letting things get to the point where harms that are being endured or committed are so absurdly obvious and intense, but instead recognizing and being able to develop a skill set to recognize when they are starting, intervening, and not only stopping them, but coming up with ways to stop them from happening again. Like recognizing patterns and figuring out how to transform situations and stop those patterns from repeating.
So, maybe that was a bunch of tangled mess of thoughts there but just responding to everything you were just saying. I think one of the things that was - and this came up in another reading we did - that’s frightening and also comforting, but just to sit with the fact that this stuff is messy and it’s not predetermined. And we have a lot of work to do but we have to start somewhere and we have to start developing these skills and we can’t wait for someone to plop down a foolproof system to replace what we have.
Kim: I think when we think about things like, “Why don’t women come forward?” That’s a refrain we hear all the time. “Well why didn’t they come forward before?” And a lot of it is because when people do come forward, they are retraumatized, they are treated like they’re suspect. So, why would someone want to reopen those things? But also, the system that we have for dealing with victims of harm removes their agency. It takes away. It’s not about self-determination. Because there’s many reasons why someone may want to or need to stay in their community or even in the home that they share with someone that has committed harm. The cultural work that we’ve done with movies and music videos and talk shows and what have you, rom-coms and all this stuff, really has worked very well to convince us that you should always want to leave. You should always want to leave. And that’s not the case, that’s not the case for many people for a lot of different reasons.
Brian: Way more complicated than that.
Kim: It’s a lot more complicated, a lot more layered, a lot more nuanced, and those are not conversations that we tend to have anywhere. We don’t have them at home, at church, in our schools, in organizations. And the spaces that we are having those conversations, those are great, but they’re also not enough, because even if we get 30 people out once a week to talk about this, there are a lot more people, who are suffering, who can’t make it there once a week to have that conversation. And there are a lot of other people who don’t have access to these kinds of tools or ideas, or easily have access to these tools and ideas. Being able to spread this out into the universe and to disperse it in ways that are not pinned to someone having to be an expert or professional or have a certification in this whole thing also, I think is also very helpful.
Brian: I think that last point, especially, the idea that we look at addressing harm. I think as a society, especially in American culture at large, when there’s harm you turn toward an agency or a professional or something like that. Going back to the pods and what you just said, basically just reiterating what you just said, being able to locate that stuff within, build those skills within the people closest to us. I think it came up in some of the other readings, and I’m sure it’s something we are gonna touch on again, is that we’ve talked a lot about how for a lot of people, for various reasons, calling the police can bring more harm. Or it’s something that’s not even on the table. In a lot of cases we turn to the people closest to us first and that as a group, we also need to take responsibility for failing to intervene early on. Basically being accountable for ignoring people early on...
I think that recognizing that is part of moving past this idea that the only people that can address and redress this stuff are professionals, government officials…
Kim: The police.
Brian: Yea, the police. That “class” of people, outside of being able to do it in our pods.
Kim: Also in terms of intervention, reframing what we think of as intervention. It’s not to sit the person down that has done the harm and force them into a situation and the person that’s been harmed. It’s not to bring these two parties together and force them into conversations and reconciling and things like that. That’s not at all what we’re suggesting or asking for. Or at least, it’s not what I’m asking for; I don’t know what other folks are doing. But it is in terms of putting those systems in place.
The example that I used earlier about women coming forward. So, that if it’s a child that has been the victim of abuse, that child can say without being dismissed. And it’s like, we’re not putting the burden, we’re not asking put the burden on children, but we often give messages that silence children.
I know when I was child and I was victim of sexual abuse as a child, the messages that I got from adults was that was not something that they wanted to hear about or talk about. And I didn’t talk about it for a very, very long time. A very long time. I was well into adulthood before I actually started to unlearn those patterns. And I feel like these kinds of conversations put systems in place. And these are not foolproof systems, these are not guarantees. These are suggestions for different ways of building relationships with people that don’t rely on the police or on government agencies to monitor or mediate our lives.
In my case, and I will speak about myself, in my case, it was a family member. I’m not sure that I even had an understanding of prisons at six, seven years old or that’s something that you would do. I just wanted it to stop. What do you do when you’re a child in that situation and the adults that you are talking to are dismissive or ignoring you? What messages are those adults getting that puts them in a place that says it’s okay to be dismissive of a child saying that this thing is happening? Because that’s really the crux of the situation. I’m talking about it from my own personal experience and now with 30 plus years or 40 plus years of wisdom, if you will, that I’ve accumulated over that time in terms of how I see this and understand this. But by no means are we saying that children should bear the responsibility. They don’t! Children are the ones that are being victimized and exploited and if we don’t do something differently in terms of discussing… Because we don’t discuss power dynamics in this country either. We don’t talk about power in relationships that way.
Pods is an entry point to having these other conversations. It helps reveal the many different layers of things that are going on. I imagine in terms of when you’re developing your support pod or if you’re doing this in the context of workshops, inevitably, these things will come up and someone will say, “This thing has happened to me and I’ve called X and this is what happened.” If we’re talking about sexual violence and sexual abuse, that’s a really, really tough conversation to have. But it’s also not a conversation where you need an expert to help you get to safety. And if that’s the first step is getting the person being harmed to safety, that can be anybody, that can be anybody in your life that is willing to help you, willing to assist you. And who are those people? Identifying those people is important.
Brian: Absolutely. When we talk about the silence and if a child is abused, ignoring them or it’s not something that we want to talk about, what we are doing is teaching a lesson that is going to be passed along through that child’s life. Maybe when that child grows up and has relationships with other people or has children themselves, those lessons manifest. And I think what, for me, one of the biggest differences between our traditional “justice system” that we have and when we talk about transformative justice is breaking those cycles, those generational, or even within someone’s lifetime cycles of behavior, of abuse, of trauma and recognizing all the different ways that it manifests.
Also, thinking back on what you were saying, it’s also important to point out that your pod isn’t going to be permanent, it’s not just situational. But as you grow, as your life changes, as you move around, as you have different experiences, or you gain wisdom or things like that, that your pod will probably change. From my reaction to looking over this worksheet, this is something that is very fluid. It’s not something that I’m going to fill it out once, put it on the wall, and that’s going to be my pod for my life. I think that’s an important way to think about our relationships as well. Because there are people we’ve had in our lives for a very long time that we might immediately gravitate towards or not, and I think it’s important to think about it that way, too. I don’t know what you think.
Kim: I think that’s a really good point. It’s not just, at least in my thinking, it’s fluid, but it’s also dynamic. You’re not necessarily just discarding people, but what you’re doing is saying, okay, well, I’ve had a conversation with Susie over here and Susie agreed to be one of my support people and I have in my support pod, but now, Susie has a new job and children and what have you or is going through something herself that she needs a different kind of support and she might not be able… It’s not like we stay in crisis, right? These things can be drawn out and they can happen over many years unfortunately, but we do move, we move. We’re human beings. We’re not going to stay static and I think that the notion of pods also allows us re-conceptualize who we are turning to at different points in time in our life.
The notion for this was developed because the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective (I kept saying committee and I meant to say collective) started this because they do their work on child sexual assault. If we think about the kind of relationship work that we need to do if we’re doing this, if we do this worksheet and it shows, oh, we have one or two people. There are people that have no one, there are people who have no one.
I keep thinking about how this works in other contexts. So, if I’m using this where I live and with other people that have agreed to come together to talk about transformative justice, how do we think about this in the context of prisons, for example? Who’s in your pod if you’re in prison? That’s something that I haven’t done that work yet. I haven’t talked to anyone that’s in prison who has that experience that can share that with either me or with both of us and the rest of the folks out there. But I think it’s an interesting question because when I think of places where having a good sense of who you can rely on for support, I mean, prison definitely is in my mind all the time. I know that that may not be easy for folks to hear as we’re having this conversation, particularly if we’re talking about people that, or victims of violence, or people that have been harmed in various ways, but this model also takes into account, or at least the transformative justice model of which pods is a tool within the broader umbrella term of transformative justice.
Brian: The example of prisons, we’ve talked many times on this podcast and just in conversation with each other about the way that prisons are set up explicitly to destroy people’s relationships and connections with one another. It’s a place where those relationships are probably more important than ever. And I think that makes it even more imperative and urgent to do this kind of thinking with that community of people.
The other thing that we’ve talked about many times is that this system that we have has really nothing to do with accountability. And I think an important part of the pods, and something I want to underscore, is that it’s not just for people who have had harm done to them but it’s also thinking about who can call you in or you can turn to for your accountability.
Kim: Exactly. Exactly.
Brian: And the last thing I want to say, and your comments were really great. I think the last thing I want to say, too, that we sort of touch on multiple times in this conversation is that we have to complicate our thinking. People who do harm are also people who have been subject to harm. You don’t go into one category and then spend the rest of your time there. It’s all very dynamic and I think that’s an important part.
Kim: And it’s possible to occupy both of those roles at the same time. So, it’s not an either/or, it’s a both/and. However, it’s not as if transformative justice practitioners or transformative justice as a field, if you want to call it a field, it’s not as if transformative justice practitioners are advocating for letting people who have caused harm off the hook. That’s not what we are saying. What we’re saying is that we need to think through what we mean by accountability. Because accountability is not throwing someone in a cage for decades and decades and decades or their entire life and forgetting about them and saying that, Now we have accomplished this thing that we call “justice”!
Instead what we’re saying is that, once the person that has been harmed, and we’re including the worst kinds of harm in there as well, murder is included in there… And obviously there’s no way to bring someone back and we understand that and we recognize that and we are deeply, deeply empathetic towards the people that have lost loved ones. So, what we are saying is that we need to have alternatives. Not just alternatives, we need a different way, we need to build in different ways in our communities for how we address violence and harm that does not mean, does not include putting people in cages and calling the police. Or forcibly removing children from a home because there’s been some kind of domestic violence thing that’s happened between the adults in the house.
We need to think through the consequences, the long-term consequences of forcibly removing people from their homes, from their neighborhoods, from their broader community, and what that does to those places. We have plenty of evidence to show that it’s harmful, not just to individuals themselves, but to the communities at large.
It’s a difficult thing. It’s not going to be an easy conversation. Pods are not, again as I said earlier, pods are not going to save us. Pods are a place to begin, an entry point perhaps, it’s a conversation to have. And as we think through these models and we get more experience and information and listen to other people, we can refine these models as well. In that way the model remains like a living thing. It’s not like, Well, 30 years ago, we were doing this thing called pods and let’s revive this now. It’s like, no! How does this help us in this context today? What is happening? What has changed? What do we know? What have we learned over time that has us thinking through the issues that are at stake here?
I think that’s in part why I wanted to have this conversation first as a segue to hopefully many more conversations this year talking about accountability. And I think that that word accountability is something that we could do a whole episode on and we could exhaust it.
Brian: I was going to say, I think accountability is definitely something that we have to open up. This kind of conversation gets me so riled up and I could go on for another five hours talking to you. I’m tempted to… Should we just call it there and just start with pods?
I do think that accountability is absolutely a concept that we need to pick apart and dive into in a subsequent episode about this because especially from the reading, and the reading that I did was very surface level and obviously there’s been so much thought put into this stuff, but I write about this stuff all the time and I haven’t thought… And I talk about accountability all the time and I just realized that I don’t know jack shit about accountability. I think there’s so much to talk about there and I personally think that should be the next thing that we talk about.
Kim: Absolutely. I’m with you on that one. Like you, I have gotten very quiet over the past year around… In part because I needed to do my own meditation around these different things but also deepen my practice and read a lot more around this stuff. Because it is a question that we get all the time about, What do we do? What do we do with people that have committed violence and horrible acts of harm? I wanted a better response to that than whatever it was that I have been saying in interviews and talks and what have you. I wanted to have a better way to respond to legit concerns about safety. That’s really what people are asking about. How are we going to be safe? How are we going to be safe? Thinking through that is not easy, it’s not easy.
I’ve read a lot in the past year and I thought I’d done a lot of reading before then. For folks really interested in this I would definitely recommend the US Prison Culture blog. I try to read as much, if not everything that Mariame Kaba posts on there because I think it was probably one of the earliest introductions that I’ve had to the idea of transformative justice as opposed to restorative justice. Also the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective’s blog. Those are my top two recommendations in terms of reading materials for folks that want to deepen their practice or just learn a little bit more about how they can do this in their own lives.
Brian: Absolutely. And I will make sure that we link to that, those resources and as we go forward, we will make sure to continue to link and probably basically build a resource collection of our own for folks to dive deeper into this. I think it’s really important. Not to go too much further with this, but just even the way that we talk about safety and even the words of, “holding someone accountable.” These are things that we really need to think deeply about and I’m appreciative of the work that you’ve done on this and Mariame and a lot of people and I’m eager to learn much more and to share it with everyone.
Kim: Fantastic, I’m here for it.
Brian: Same. All right everyone. I think that maybe we will call it there. We will talk again very soon. It’s always enjoyable talking to you.
Kim: You too, Brian. Happy New Year everybody.
Brian: Happy New Year everybody. Bye.
