Dispatches from the Carceral Apparatus: I don't belong here.

Yeah, so the past few weeks have been crazy. Like, good crazy. Classes have started, and my freshmen are busy formulating ideas for 3,500-word research-based essays, which many of them innocently think will be the hardest thing they ever do. My Fridays at Rikers are settling down as we acclimate to the wonderful but unpredictable new reality that, with the bail reform, there are a lot fewer people being housed there. The Tuesday night reentry workshop at Restoration Plaza has been really positive and fun, with a solid handful of talented regulars contributing and my amazing godsister, a sophomore at St. John’s, helping out as part of a documentary project for one of her classes. The partnership between my college the Youth Shelter of Westchester is going strong, and a long-term project has finally come to fruition, as this week my college sent a cohort of seven students to the Westchester County Jail for the first time as part of a semester-long pilot project providing tutoring support for incarcerated people in their high school equivalency training program. In my roughly 20 years of teaching, I don’t think I’ve ever felt more like a teacher.

This has had me thinking this week about how much my thinking has evolved about what it means to be a teacher since teaching within and around the carceral apparatus. Paulo Freire, in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed—perhaps the most transformational educational text I’ve ever ingested—posits the teacher not as a giver of knowledge but as a co-creator:

“A revolutionary leadership must accordingly practice co-intentional education. Teachers and students (leadership and people), co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating that knowledge. As they attain that knowledge of reality through common reflection and action, they discover themselves as its permanent re-creators.”

I guess what I’m saying is that, the further I get along in my life as a teacher and advocate, the more I realize myself as a student of the world. In my conversations with my godsister after our Tuesday workshop, she recently said something that stuck with me: “Some people just know how to do school.” She was talking about herself in comparison to some of the people she’s worked with on the inside, people whose intelligence she sensed but who just couldn’t sublimate themselves to the imposed structure of the educational system. I think it stuck with me particularly because I’ve never felt like I understood how to do school—not in grade school, when my primary concern was my own safety in my low-income public school; not in junior high, when I was bussed to the higher-income school district as part of the city council’s short-lived social equity program; not in high school when I desperately tried to find a way of avoiding what seemed like my destiny at the plastic factory while retaining a pronounced laziness that I justified as anti-intellectualism; not for much of college, which I thought of primarily as a way of having some fun running in circles (literally, on a track scholarship) and avoiding my destiny at the factory for a couple of years until I flunked out. Only I didn’t flunk out, and somewhere between my junior and senior year I figured out the great gift of an education I’d been given, without even consciously knowing it. Even after that, when I finally started doing the work that is generally the difference between an A and a C, I felt like an interloper.

Looking back at this trajectory, through a move to a strange city that has become my home, a low-residency MFA that has given me the educational flag signifying my worth as a teacher, a teaching life in two college departments that have been characterized by struggles for legitimacy within their respective colleges, and now a compulsion to lead workshops with people who have been deemed unfit for common society, I’m coming to terms with a basic fact about myself: I’m most comfortable teaching in situations and environments that are indifferent or even hostile to my presence as a teacher. I’m comfortable in these situations precisely because they remind me that my primary directive as a teacher is to co-learn with my students, to create a world together in an uncomforting space. I hope this doesn’t sound too self-righteous, but I think this is a calling for which I’m particularly suited: Intellectual co-creation as social revolution.

This past Thursday, while we were having the Youth Shelter boys and men on our campus, their counselor, a native Bahamian, told me, “In my country, teachers are right up there with judges.” Perhaps I don’t hold up many of our American judges in particular esteem, but I will indulge myself here in this: The best of our teachers, the ones using the shared space between our minds to co-create a renewed social reality, are the ones who might reinvent justice, and eventually remake this broken world.

I also want to acknowledge those students at my college who are beginning their own journeys into our carceral apparatus through our partnership with the Westchester County Jail. I want to respect both their privacy and the sanctity of their own stories so I won’t go into specifics about them, but I do know that some of them, as part of their internships with the college, are required to read this newsletter, so I’ll end with this bit of advice for them: Always be a teacher second and a learner first, and always go where you don’t belong.

Because that’s where we’re needed most.

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Dispatches from the Carceral Apparatus: How to see Alice Marie Johnson instead of Willie Horton

Just now, as I was marking Corey Robin’s masterful The Reactionary Mind as read in my GoodReads after finishing it this morning, I noticed a recommendation for a book called Pleasure Activism that gave a bit of shape to some thoughts going through my head in the past couple of days. (Disclaimer: I haven’t read the book and don’t pretend to have read it. It looks like a good read and I understand why an algorithm recommended it, but I’m only responding to the title here.)

When talking about justice reform and what it entails, it’s easy to shift the conversation only to what makes us feel better, like the system might auto-correct if we just sit back, perhaps retweet something with a snarky comment, and let it work itself out. This part of us looks for easy answers to difficult questions, and quixotically hopes our elected leaders, appointed officials, law enforcement officers will notice their own acts of oppression, feel bad, and stop that mess.

This is what might lead an average American who vaguely thinks we incarcerate too many people to see Donald Trump’s Super Bowl ad using Alice Marie Johnson’s sentence commutation to proclaim himself a criminal justice reformer and believe him at his word. After all, there is no denying that Alice Marie Johnson, who was arrested, tried, and convicted for a drug violation during the crack epidemic, perhaps the most punitive period in world history, would still be rotting in prison on a sentence that most of us agree is egregiously incongruous with the crime of which she was convicted, if not for the intervention of President Donald J. Trump on behalf of fellow reality TV celebrity Kim Kardashian. We see Johnson now as a criminal justice advocate aligned with Trump, Koch Industries, and Right on Crime and tell ourselves, depending on our political leanings that either 1) she represents the success of the conservative criminal justice reform movement, or 2) she is a tokenized black woman who paid for her freedom in subservience to celebrity and corporate power.

There is undoubtedly some truth to both of these conclusions, but both lead us away from movement forward on the road to recovery from our addiction to incarceration. They also lead us to make a contentious dialectic out of one of the most urgent cross-partisan issues of our time. To illustrate this point, I’d like to juxtapose Trump’s tokenism with the current backlash to bail reform in New York City among conservative politicians, corporate for-profit media, and moderate citizens who really want to trust our elected and appointed officials to do the right thing.

First, as long as Donald Trump is president, the conservative vision for justice reform will be the only one on the table at the national level. It makes sense, then, to start with what conservatives mean by justice reform. Put simply, conservatives only seek reform that will least disrupt the carceral apparatus itself, in ways that are mostly cosmetic. Alice Marie Johnson’s freedom, while immensely and intensely important to herself and her family, is merely a token of similarly unjust cases of state-sanctioned confinement like hers. Conservatives’ primary aim in justice reform is not to eliminate these practices but to make them, in the language of the market, “incentive-based” and “proportional” while skirting the issue of whether incarceration is even the proper response to crime in the name of rehabilitation and community safety. Or, more pointedly, whether rehabilitation and community safety actually are the goals of law enforcement as currently practiced, especially in urban communities.

Which leads us to bail reform in New York City, which after a month officially in effect has seen hundreds of people released from Rikers Island, the Tombs, and other city jails who were awaiting trial on non-violent offenses, many of which, like Alice Johnson’s, are drug-related. Conservative politicians upstate are going full-on Willie Horton with every case of perceived recidivism they can locate, the Post and the Daily News parrot racist claims by the NYPD that New York is now a less safe place with all these black and brown folks waiting for the due process promised them by our constitution at home rather than in jail, and some people who saw the need for this legislation if we mean to hold our courts accountable to the precepts of justice they swore to uphold are now getting scared of having all these Alice Johnsons back in the communities instead of behind bars. This is the difference between real justice reform and Super Bowl ad justice reform.

I should point out here that Alice Marie Johnson is herself a bail reform advocate, having recently met with Texas Governor Bill Lee about reforming cash bail there. Those same Bronx drug dealers local media have directed public outrage toward are but younger versions of her. She undoubtedly understands how cash bail inevitably sets up two sets of legal systems: one in which people of means pay their way to pre-trial freedom and lawyers who care about their cases, and people who don’t have these means and are imprisoned from the moment of suspicion.

So, this is what you can do: Check yourself if you feel threatened by the freedom of someone accused, or even convicted, of a crime. Ask yourself why you feel threatened, what your own prejudices might be. We all have them. Maybe someone close to you is addicted to fentanyl. Maybe you or someone close to you was a victim of a violent crime. Maybe you have a friend or relative in law enforcement. (I admit, have a prejudice toward white-collar crime in the public and private sector, particularly corruption and abuse of power, probably borne of my many experiences with arrogant people who work in the top floors of tall buildings. But almost all people accused of white-collar crime at the level I’m prejudiced toward are safe from my prejudice, as they can buy their ways out of pre-trial detention and into plea deals that favor them.) Ask yourself what your prejudices might be, and how they might be influencing your fears. Talk them out with at least one person you trust, in private.

Finally, ask yourself if your fears are founded on lived experience or on something you read, watched, or listened to. Ask yourself what the prejudices of the outlets you consume are, keeping in mind that the need to keep people agitated enough to continue clicking is perhaps the most pressing prejudice of modern American media.

After you’ve done this work, go back and rewatch the Alice Marie Johnson Super Bowl ad. While watching, imagine if someone had given her the consideration at the front end of her experience with the American criminal justice system. All accounts I’ve seen of her point to a strong moral foundation and a relentless positivity in the face of a system that until recently refused to acknowledge her personhood. Then consider granting that personhood to the people who are now being granted the basic right to a fair trial that most of us take for granted. Go back and watch Lee Atwater’s Willie Horton ads. Finally, ask yourself: when I think about the faces of bail reform, do I see the Alice Marie Johnsons, or the Willie Hortons?

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