Prisons, Prose & Protest - #20

Rants, Musings & More

This is my birthday month and I usually celebrate all month. This year, I am feeling weighed down that Israel’s genocide against Palestinians is one year old. It’s absolutely awful. I’ve run out of ways to express my disgust and anger. Please consider offering direct support to Palestinians if you can afford to contribute. It’s so important. Operation Olive Branch vets GoFundMes. I’m giving to this fundraiser and I hope others will join me.

Artist: Tiril Valeur

The last time I taught a college course was in 2016 at Columbia University. It was an upper-level class about race, gender and criminalization. I had a great time because I enjoy teaching and the students were great. I’ve missed teaching so I’ll be back in the classroom for the first time in nearly a decade in fall 2025. I’ll be teaching a class about transformative justice (TJ). I’m excited to experiment with the syllabus and to be in conversation with students. I wish I had time to teach more regularly. 

I’ve been asked how/why I maintain my commitment to TJ and the answer is that I believe that relationships are the most important currency we have. Relationships are the foundation of living. This means that I am willing to put in the often tiring and fraught work of tending and sustaining relationships that I value in my communities. I’ve never volunteered to facilitate TJ processes. I’ve been called in by my communities to support people who have been harmed and those who have caused harm. Sometimes I’ve been able to answer the call and other times I haven’t. We need more people to answer their own calls from their communities. I hope that the students I get to engage with might be among those people. 

In this month’s edition of Prisons, Prose & Protest, I share some thoughts about TJ. I recommend a podcast series about the history of police in NYC, several good recent articles, and much more…. 

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Prisons/Policing

When I was younger, I read every African and African American folktale I could find. For one year, I worked as an information specialist at the New York Public Library (at the Countee Cullen branch library, which is next to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. I made the most of the opportunity to discover and read many books. It was then that I came upon Arna Bontemps, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes. Sterling Brown, a poet and folklorist, quickly became a favorite of mine. Brown would often recount the story of Old Sis Goose. He presented the narrative in several ways depending on the audience, but the essence of the folktale is this:

Brer Fox (who in some versions of the tale is described as a sheriff) captured Sis Goose while she was swimming across a pond. Sis becomes enraged because she believes she has an absolute right to swim in the pond. She sues Brer Fox. However, when the matter arrives in court, Sis Goose notices that, besides the sheriff who is a fox, the judge, the prosecution and defense attorneys, and the jury are all foxes too. Sis Goose does not like her odds. The court convicts and executes Sis Goose immediately at the conclusion of the trial. Soon, the jury, judge, sheriff, and attorneys will pick at her bones. The lesson to be learned is: “When all the folks in the courthouse are foxes and you are just a common goose, there ain’t gonna be much justice for you.”

Folktales like Old Sis Goose were told to teach young Black people about their place in the world and the necessity of not breaking the rules in the white world or they would end up like Old Sis Goose. Some may see these folktales negatively since they appear to discourage young people from rejecting their situation. After all, Old Sis Goose died because she believed she had a right to swim in the pond.

However, when viewed in historical context, these stories were imbued with love and a wish to protect young people from the real dangers that they faced daily from a hostile, racist, and violent dominant society. These stories of systemic injustice were intended to be cautionary tales.

Art created by Rachel Marie Crane Willians (2024)

In a TJ version of the Old Sis Goose fable, when she is prevented from freely swimming in the pond, her community intervenes and contacts Brer Fox directly, asking generative questions about the incident including: What happened? Where’s the harm? Where is the possibility of repair? There would be no threats of lawsuits, and Sis Goose’s community would encourage her and Brer Fox to pursue their respective healing processes. Along the way, community members would organize to keep the pond safe and accessible to anyone who wished to swim in it.

Transformative justice is a process and it is not a one-size-fits-all approach. It is a strategy available to those who would like to use it. It must engage a broader community and it has to be guided by an ethos of nonpunitive accountability. It doesn’t rely on cops and sometimes it doesn’t involve social services either. At bottom, TJ provides us with one pathway to creatively prevent, intervene in, and transform harm. People have lots of critiques of TJ, some warranted and some ridiculous. No one is forced to participate in TJ processes; the parties must choose TJ.

Wounds demand acknowledgement. TJ takes it for granted that we as humans will harm each other precisely because we are human. Its promise is to be there to shine a light on the harm, to acknowledge it, to interrupt injustice without mirroring it, to create an opportunity for each of us to make new mistakes rather than repeating the old ones, and to collectively organize to uproot oppression. 

I’ve been part of dozens of TJ processes over the years. I’ve learned many lessons in that time. An important one is that we do not control others; all we can do is to provide an opportunity for them to choose to take responsibility for the harm they have caused and to work to transform themselves (a lifetime process). 

A good friend of mine once said in a workshop that TJ practitioners are the rare people who choose to directly address interpersonal and community violence/harm on a regular basis. I agree. I only wish more people would do the same. 

In the meantime, I’d like to highlight this new evaluation report about the Collective Healing and Transformation (CHAT) Project. CHAT is a non–law enforcement restorative justice project in Contra Costa County, California, that is specifically designed to address domestic and sexual violence.

My friend Dr. Mimi Kim is the principal investigator and author of the new report. According to her, it “offers insights into guiding principles, process highlights, participant perceptions, and organizational developments—increasing public knowledge of a still emergent field of restorative justice.” 

Note: I have some postcard versions of my friend Rachel’s art featured above, if anyone would like a set of 5, feel free to complete this form [I can only mail to US addresses unfortunately]. I’ll send a set of postcards to the first 25 people.

New Publication

In 2023, Interrupting Criminalization (with Project NIA, Just Practice, and Spring Up) cohosted “Practicing for an Abolitionist World,” a virtual gathering for transformative justice, restorative justice, and community accountability practitioners from around the world. We learned a lot through planning and also at the convening itself. A brand new report, Transformative Justice Knows No Borders, written by Dr. Melanie Brazzell of the What Really Makes Us Safe? Project, shares learnings from the convening including case studies from Kurdistan, India, the Philippines, and Argentina.

This report looks at the different languages and lineages people draw on in each of these places to root transformative justice practices in their local soil. Under each response to interpersonal violence lies a vast network of care infrastructures that enable such responses—solidarity economies, self-governance systems, and new relationships to law and to each other. Built by movements, these are like the root systems and mycelial networks of fungi under the soil that enable plants and trees aboveground to thrive.

Prose

Christina Sharpe reflects on writing, art, and meaning in a time of world-shattering violence. 

This Chicago Tribune article does a good job of articulating the promise of direct violence-intervention programs in Chicago, even in the face of a deadly summer in which five community “peacemakers” were shot, three fatally, in the course of their violence-prevention work. 

Read about changing attitudes toward safety and policing among some Oakland Chinatown residents. 

Some excellent student journalism about a Massachusetts organizing campaign against the proposed construction of a $50-million women’s prison.

This is a beautiful essay by Briana Herman-Brand about the radical possibilities of repair work. I found this passage especially moving and important:

Facing the irreconcilable is part of repair. It is the part where we get really honest about the things and the people that we cannot change—at least in this lifetime. It requires the vulnerability to surrender into the limits of our agency, to know that we tried as hard as we could and still did not get what we wanted, what we needed, what we deserved. When we cannot face the irreconcilable, we often try to destroy each other instead. Our grief and rage get directed at each other, as we cannot tolerate the contradictions we live within—and which live within us.

Astra Taylor writes in the latest issue of Lux about solidarity and the state’s explicit attempts to criminalize it in the context of the Stop Cop City movement.

I appreciate how Matthew Guariglia places Atlanta’s Cop City and similar modern projects in a long historical tradition of massive US military and militaristic architecture projects meant to symbolize the strength of violent state repression.

Lewis Raven Wallace, Interrupting Criminalization’s abolition journalism fellow & my good friend, has written a practical and powerful treatise against nihilism.  

You won’t be surprised that not everyone gets to invoke self-defense.

Read this excerpt from my friend Sarah Jaffe’s wonderful new book, From the Ashes, and then buy the book or request it from your local library.

This is a wonderful profile of the American Prison Writing Archive, which is housed at Johns Hopkins University. 

Podcast

Empire City is an ongoing eight-part history of the New York City Police Department (NYPD). Chenjerai Kumanyika hosts, interweaving his own family history with what he uncovers about the racism and corruption that seeded the NYPD and undergirded its rapid expansion into a uniquely powerful institution. You’ll hear yours truly waxing poetic about David Ruggles and others in this excellent podcast series. 

Poem

Prayer for Both/And

For the days when it seems like there can only be one way

For the days when it seems there is no answer

May we live into our questions

Knowing that perceived contradiction can at times offer a solution more beautiful than we could have imagined

That either/or can cause harm

When we are not aligned with our values

And both/and can provide a different way forward

That invites abundance

Transforms individuals

And moves us toward collective visions of liberation

-- Rev. Elizabeth Nguyen - Standing on the Side of Love

Potpourri

This is my birthday month and as is my tradition I would love it if folks would contribute to the work of an organization doing good work. BX Rebirth is focused on maternal health and reproductive justice in the Bronx. They make free and low-cost abortion doula services available to marginalized people. I am honored that they named their Birth Liberation Fund after me. So far, the fund has supported over 50 people. Will you please make a contribution to sustain the fund in honor of my birthday? [Please specific the Birth Liberation Fund in the note area]

Also I have a few slots available for the abortion doula training facilitated by Ash Williams that I am organizing in Brooklyn on October 11 and 12. Apply by October 5. 

When my comrades at Booklyn proposed a limited-edition collection of some of my zines, I thought that it would be a good way to retire the hard copies of several of my zines. They created a wonderful box that includes 38 zines and some ephemera. There are only 3 boxes left for purchase. My proceeds after costs will be donated. 

Our last Life Stories of Anti-Slavery Abolitionists book discussion is October 27—you can register here. We’ve read so many great books and had wonderful discussions since January 2023. I’ll miss this space.

Preorder We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition and read an interview with the editors of the anthology, my friends Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson, here.

A recent report from the Stanford Criminal Justice Center takes a deep look at the relationship between intimate partner violence and the criminalization of women incarcerated in California. Some of my Survived & Punished comrades & friends were involved in this. Read about the report here and download it in full here. 

I discovered this artist through my friend Sarah Jaffe and I immediately ordered several prints.

I loved listening to Kara Walker talk about her new installation at the San Francisco MOMA, Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine).  

On repeat.

Cool Library Thing of the Month

I love this project from the Nashville Public Library.

Why buy when you can borrow? The Library of Things features an array of useful items—including activities and games, health and fitness equipment, tools and electronics, food and party items, crafts and hobbies, and musical instruments—that you can borrow for free for up to 3 weeks.” Nashville Public Library -