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I’m really struggling right now with a very first-world problem. As I define and execute my workdays from home in the middle of a pandemic, I’m having a hard time defining what it means to act. I’ve spent hours and hours adjusting and readjusting my to-do list to readjust myself into a bias primarily toward action and secondarily toward reflection, but I’m finding, as a writer especially, that I sometimes have a hard time defining which is which. Perhaps more pressingly as a teacher and storyteller, I’m starting to question my own suppositions about which is which.

Most days (today included) I find myself (only partially) dividing my time between “service work” and “creative work.” Here are a few examples from today’s to-do list, fitted into this dichotomy:

Service:

Plan for second semester - finalize syllabi & texts

Re/Creation writing workshop tonight

Organize shared folder, esp Antonio Battle stuff for Rekha

Put together group meeting between our students and Cornell around parole prep

Creative:

Read from and annotate Best American Essays 2017

Edit reflective piece for Joni’s pub 

Archive journal, pulling pieces for Goodman project and I Love You reliquary

Make master list-narrative of threads for Goodman

The struggle I encounter daily is perhaps reflected in the order I put these “halves” in above. In the past four years, I have de-prioritized my own creative work. This has been a conscious choice, a decision to prioritize the voices of my people over my own. The problem I’m running into now is that I need to create, perhaps not as much as I need to breathe, but in a way so pressing that I start resenting the world and myself when I don’t feel that space is given to me. I see this impulse, in my work with my people in opening these pathways to creative expression, as a need that is pretty close to universal. 

And yet, the stuff on my to-do list that I define as “creative” always gets shoved to the bottom of my list at the start of the day, and I all-too-often feel a pang of guilt when I dive into them, like time is passing that could be better spent in service. And then, when I’m doing the work I define as “service,” I find myself guiltily looking forward to my time alone with words. Worse, when I do get to the creative work, my mind is spent and all I want to do is read instead of writing. I find that, like now actually, I’m only writing when the need to create with words overcomes me. I think I’ve perhaps written some viscerally appealing pieces out of this desperation in the past four years, but only intermittently. I wish I could find a way to write that’s more regular but no less immediate, desperate even.

I don’t know how to get past this, to achieve balance in my life between these elements of myself and my work, but I’m really trying. I’m going to ask as many people as I can in the days moving forward how they do this.

How about you?

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AuthorJohn Proctor

As a handful of you might know, our Tuesday night reentry workshop has been incorporating elements of Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way into our weekly practice. Particular useful to me in this chaotic time have been "the morning pages," essentially a pact the writer makes to write everyday, no matter what. It's essentially a journal, but one element of the practice that's been enriching to my own practice is Cameron's emphasis in Week 3 of the program on using this writing time "to rest on the page." Something I sometimes lose sight of as I write more on issues outside myself - issues of communal social justice - is allowing myself to indulge in the simple artistic joy of producing words.

Ironically, I've found myself making some discoveries in my morning pages recently that I wouldn't have made without them. In the past few days, as I've talked to a lot of people on the inside and their families, participated in many Zoom hearings and focus groups, and done the work of starting up Re/Creation, I've found myself retreating into my morning pages simply to be in my own head for a bit. And in that space, I've found some answers, or at least some bigger questions, to many questions I'd barely asked yet.

With this in mind, I wanted to share a couple of excerpts from my morning pages over the past few days, both of which are giving me a framework for thinking and writing specifically on the relationship between sentencing and race. I'll present them without further comment, as seeds for further conversation.

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5/18/20
 
I just got off the phone with the wife of a 53-year-old man at Green Haven Correctional Facility who has asthma and has served 14 of an 18-year sentence for attempted first-degree robbery. I’m talking to a lot of guys inside right now, developing narrative profiles to submit to our governor for clemency consideration, and at one point I asked her if he has any children. One, she said, 14 years old. Doing the math, I mentioned to her that he’s the same age as his sentence. Yeah, she said, he went to prison the week his son was born. I thought to myself, My dad started a 20-year prison term the week I was born.
 
Only I didn’t think it to myself—I’d just said it out loud. There was a little uncomfortable silence, then she said, Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. We talked for another half hour, not as an advocate getting information from her but as two people whose families started with the incarceration of the father for a petty crime. I didn’t tell her that my dad got out after a year, but I should have, because that’s the difference between committing a petty crime in 1973 and committing a petty crime in 2006. And that’s the reason my dad still gets a little pensive, when people ask him how he got out after a year for a 20-year sentence, acknowledging the random luck he had to be born white.

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5/19/20
 
I’m thinking on the letters OJ and the number 25.
 
In workshop tonight, we got to talking about the number 25, i.e., 25 to Life, the default sentence for so many black men convicted of violent (and even some non-violent) offenses from the Nineties on. I brought it up because every guy I’ve talked to this week at Green Haven, all of whom are old men who are highly susceptible to Covid-19, are in the later years of 25-to-Life sentences, and not one of them has gone up for parole, undoubtedly a result of the mandatory minimums craze.
 
Marvin, who is now out about nine months after serving a 25-to-Life sentence from 1994, had an interesting observation. He remembered, while awaiting trial at Rikers Island in 1994 with a broken jaw, seeing the verdict on the OJ trial on the TV and screaming in triumph, despite the pain in his jaw, along with all the young Black men in the overcrowded city jail. He then remembers going to trial and the judge admonishing him, “This ain’t no OJ trial.” He asked his lawyer if that constituted a judicial bias, but quickly discovered that this was what many judges were saying. The translations were obvious: That Black man got away with something, but you’re not. That Black man had the resources, but you don’t. We’re closing the loopholes that allowed even one Black man to escape white justice. Marvin was handed his sentence, 25 to Life, in 1995, shortly after the OJ verdict.
 
There are many ways of contextualizing the horrific turn we made in the Nineties toward handing out 25-to-Life sentences to Black men with impunity: mandatory minimums, the Willie Horton effect, our race-based drug war, moderate Democrats using punitive racism as a legislative team-building exercise with congressional Republicans. But Marvin pointed out a narrative that somehow unified all of these: No more OJ’s.
 

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Just a reminder as well that you still have some left on the Re/Creation t-shirt fundraiser! Buy a shirt designed by our own Channing Smith, and support our short-term goals of providing some emergency support for workshop members, getting the website up, and maybe even having a bit of a working budget. You can always buy multiple shirts if you like or make an additional donation when buying the shirt. The fundraiser runs until 5/31. Or, if you'd like to just make a straight-up tax-deductible donation, you can always do that here.


This post comes from my newsletter, Dispatches from the Carceral Apparatus. If you want to subscribe, you can here:

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AuthorJohn Proctor

I realize it's been a couple of weeks since I've posted anything - I have much to tell about some developing projects around both the workshops and the newsletter, but will have to wait a few more days as we work out the logistics.

In the meantime, I wanted to share with you a composite of some words I strung together in the middle of a discussion on social media with an old friend of mine who is now a conservative lobbyist. After seeing video evidence surface concerning the horrific lynching of Ahmaud Arbery by two or maybe three white men while he was out jogging, my friend was calling for spiritual renewal among Christian Americans. Following here is a verbal collage of my responses in conversation with him, written in anger but also in hope and desire for a better, more empathic country.

We need more than renewing. We need some scorched-earth reconsideration of our history and its relationship to our present. People say slavery ended after the Civil War, but years of convict leasing, Jim Crow, and now mass incarceration have led us to a place where these two men, the elder of whom is a retired investigator for the DA's office who spent 7 years on the police force, in 2020 saw the stalking and murder of a young black man they'd racially profiled as their civic duty.

I don't think spiritual renewal and communal self-reflection need be in separate chambers. Christianity has been both a tool of and against oppression since the dawning of American democracy. I think it's important for Christians in particular to be sure they're on the right side of that fence.

There are the easy examples of crosses burning and "they killed Jesus" excuses for anti-semitism. But more times than not, when someone says this is a Christian nation, they are using Christianity as a tool for oppression - saying, in other words, that a majority (if practicing Christians are even a majority anymore) has a moral imperative to dictate beliefs, morals, and laws to a minority.

I'm not trying to attack Christianity - I used to be a Christian, and many of my friends, colleagues, and allies are Christian. But I don't believe Christianity (or American exceptionalism) is immune to being used as a tool of oppression by totalitarians. Honestly, we're witnessing it daily: a hateful President with totalitarian instincts using professions of Christian faith against obvious evidence (just ask the 2 Corinthians) and white American identity politics to get people to abide his oppression of immigrants, muslims, and any individual or group he decides he doesn't like.

Nowadays Christians (or Jews like Stephen Miller, or capitalist grifters like our current president) with totalitarian instincts use fear and hatred of black and brown people, immigrants, Muslims, socialists, and other non-dominant American cultural groups to similar ends. I'm not saying you or even anyone you know fits into this group, but in this cultural moment you're supporting these totalitarian practices by abiding them. We've (perhaps) gotten to the point where we see a lynching like this and are appalled, but I'm still surprised that so many Americans abide the gross double standard that allows them to judge this act but not the automatic tendency to assume violence in Black men that governs our criminal justice system. And honestly, I believe what we abide to be a much more valid standard for judgment than what we believe.

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AuthorJohn Proctor

I’m connected to many of you outside of my website so this may feel like old news, but Junior Wilson is now home! After getting his notification Thursday that he would be released from his bogus incarceration on a parole violation after a mistaken arrest, he spent most of yesterday getting processed, then was sent to Bellevue for some reason on his release. But he called me at 2am this morning to let me know he was home and would be sleeping in his own bed for the first time since last August!

Many of you have kept up with Junior’s story since I met him inside last October. The story of his incarceration is one of overpolicing, inept parole personnel, and non-responsive judicial bureaucracy.

It’s also a story of hope and heroism. During the past week, both fellow inmates and corrections officers have stopped him to thank him for speaking for them to the media, telling their stories with his, speaking from the front lines of this public health crisis.

I’ll be having lots of conversation with Junior in the coming days, as I’m completely free to write and talk about him now that’s he’s no longer held in city custody. He told me last week that he just wants to lie down on a couch and talk about everything. I’ll be helping shape and tell his full story, which is representative of so many of the ineptitudes of our criminal justice system, in the weeks and months ahead. I’ll also continue advocating for the many people still in the hellish crux of our carceral apparatus and this global pandemic. In the meantime, let’s just sit back in our respective solitudes and enjoy this victory.

Have a great weekend, fam.

This post comes from my newsletter, Dispatches from the Carceral Apparatus. If you want to subscribe, you can here:

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AuthorJohn Proctor

During this COVID-19 outbreak I’ve developed a habit I haven’t had since my mid-twenties: staying up until 3am. As with many people, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and worrying. As with many people, I’ve drawn inspiration and influence from social media, and gotten in my share of arguments online. I’ve gone hard for my people this past week, and by Sunday I admit I was just too tired and depressed to write or battle or do anything active. Instead, I just sat and listened to John Prine (whose wife reports he’s now recovering from his bout with COVID-19!) early into Monday morning and allowed the hopelessness, just for this one night, to wash over me.

As I sat with myself and the world, I thought about Junior Wilson, who has now been moved to solitary confinement after the DOC discovered all the news stories about him from last week, and Michael Goodman, the 72-year-old artist whose 53-year-old daughter is one of 80,000 children of people currently incarcerated in New York State alone. I thought about Iran, which last week released 88,000 prisoners to contain this outbreak and keep down deaths. I thought about this and more, and one conclusion crystallized for me.

The United States is addicted to incarceration.

Like many Americans, I come from a family in which addiction is rampant. I’m an Alateen kid myself, and I know the 12 Steps as well as I know the Serenity Prayer. My father, a good man, was incarcerated for the earliest years of my life for distribution, and many of my aunts and uncles have struggled with addiction for much of their lives. My favorite uncle, the man who was as much a father to me as anyone, died in 2005 on this very day fifteen years ago, when his heart gave out after his addictions had shifted from cocaine to OxyContin. I know the marks of addiction. And this nation is collectively addicted to incarcerating our own.

One mark of addiction, perhaps the primary marker, is valuing the addiction over everything else. I see this most plainly now as we see and hear reports from New York to Chicago to California of our incarcerated people, most if not all of whom are among the most vulnerable to COVID-19 due to the effects of months, years, even decades of systemic degradation of their bodies, and I look for a response from our public institutions—the mayor’s office, the governor, the federal government—and mostly what I see is excuses and obfuscations. And I know that they are responding to what they think the public wants, terrified of even one person to whom they show mercy and compassion going out on release and committing a crime that our for-profit media institutions are just waiting to publish a story on and continue the national myth that we are safer by keeping millions of people locked up, even if that means sacrificing their lives to a pandemic.

I read one particularly horrible comment to the Buzzfeed article on Junior Wilson that said, “And the Great Cleansing continues.” This comes from someone, judging from his Facebook page, who loves guns, particularly pointing his gun at the camera and posting that as his profile pic. The less obviously hypocritical but no less disturbing response which is invoked much more frequently is some variation on, “Well, they’re in there for a reason so they deserve what they get.” This response is one of the addict’s most obvious defenses when an intervention is attempted into their addiction: justification.

Addicts defend their addictions at the steep price of everything else. We’re seeing that at an institutional level with the governor’s office, the mayor’s office, and the DOC just refusing to even interface with the idea of simply letting old and immunocompromised people go from prison. If ever there were a time to practice mercy and grant clemency to save thousands of lives, it’s now. And our “compassionate” governor—America’s Governor—has not issued even one. If ever there were a time to suspend technical parole violations to make the jail population—including inmates, officers, and staff—safer, it’s now. The governor has issued a demand to release 1,100 of these cases—a small fraction of the total statewide—but it’s gone thus far unenforced. We as a society are sacrificing family, friends, work, relationships, even our own humanity, just so we can keep locking up our own at historically unprecedented rates, all at the altar of our national addiction.

Like many of our most addictive substances, the addiction many times begins as treatment for a malady. Our addiction to incarceration becomes doubly ironic when we consider that we began increasing our incarceration rates exponentially largely in response to the drug trade. Much as the drug trade morphed in the time since the War on Drugs was declared, assuming a legality and a whiteness with the rise of prescription opioids and crystal methamphetamine, our addiction to incarceration has been naturalized as our body politic has become inured to its effects. We no longer sufficiently ponder the decision to subject people to the horrors of our carceral state; on the contrary, we wring our hands at the idea of freeing them, even in the face of a deadly pandemic sweeping through the apparatus.

I think perhaps this has to do with another national obsession: purity. To speak of a pandemic as a cleansing, one has to think of one’s fellow people as a sickness to be scoured away. To justify leaving people to die when we could easily save them through an act of mercy, we have to think that their lives have no meaning or value. Every life has meaning, and every life has value, even if we don’t see it. And that’s the true evil of incarceration: It hides people from us, so we don’t see their value. We only see their crimes. Especially in a country that induces pleas in over 90% of criminal cases, our crimes should never define us. And neither should our addictions.

This post comes from my newsletter, Dispatches from the Carceral Apparatus. If you want to subscribe, you can here:

Posted
AuthorJohn Proctor

Hello everyone, just a quick update on Junior Wilson and others at my facility on Rikers Island—since Tuesday’s Just Leadership virtual rally, Junior Wilson has become a de facto spokesman our most vulnerable people who are eligible for COVID-19 release, all while waiting for the Mayor’s Office and DOC to comply with the Board of Correction’s very specific memo calling for the release of all detainees from city jails fitting any of the following criteria:

·      People who are over 50

·      People who have underlying health conditions, including lung disease, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, or a weakened immune system

·      People detained for administrative reasons (including failure to appear and parole violations)

·      People serving “City Sentences” (sentences of one year or less)

Junior fits as many of the criteria as humanly possible (the last two are mutually exclusive). Many of you know his case by now, but to summarize: He’s been detained for more than half a year on an administrative oversight, after being picked up on a false charge based on racial profiling, even after his family paid his bail. He has every reason to be bitter.

But he isn’t.

Instead, he and his wife have used all of their energy for the past two weeks in gathering the names and booking/case numbers of every person in his wing who qualifies for early release, doing a bit of the legwork for the Board of Corrections to get the most vulnerable people out of death’s way as this virus rips through the island.

And he still hasn’t been released. His wife let me know this morning that the DOC let three people from his wing out at 1am this morning, a cruel and insulting way of complying with this order. She hopes that the DOC simply hasn’t yet gotten to his name alphabetically.

One thing I tell my students in my Friday workshops at Rikers Island is that their stories always work on two levels: 1) The individual level, in which their stories are uniquely theirs, and 2) the level of the universal, in which their stories represent larger stories of the world, current, past, and future. Junior Wilson’s story is both individual and universal. He is one person currently experiencing danger and injustice, and he is many experiencing danger and injustice.

I encourage every one of you to tell Junior’s story to everyone you know, so that the Mantra “FREE JUNIOR WILSON” resounds the world over, advocating both for him and for every other person held at death’s door on a parole violation, every person of color who’s been a target of discrimination, every person pulled from their home and family by our addiction to incarceration.

Feel free to share this, put it in your own words, hashtag it, put it on social media, tell it to the people you’re currently sharing your social isolation with. You can also read more in the Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, and NY1, and listen to Junior speak here.

Junior Wilson at home in 2019.

Junior Wilson at home in 2019.

This post comes from my newsletter, Dispatches from the Carceral Apparatus. If you want to subscribe, you can here:

Posted
AuthorJohn Proctor

With our first couple of weeks of social distancing and isolation on the outside in the books, COVID-19 has hit Rikers Island. An investigator working on the island died a couple days ago of COVID-19 complications, and I think about 20 inmates and/or staff have now contracted the virus. The DOC is now trying, about two weeks late, to institute its own social isolation policy, but in order to do so they have to do the thing they’ve been resisting for months and years now: decarcerate.

Two days ago, NYC Board of Correction released a memo announcing the following:

DOC and CHS, along with City partners, must work with the Chief Judge of New York State, Governor Cuomo, District Attorneys, and the Defense Bar to begin identifying and releasing people this week, prioritizing:
• People who are over 50;
• People who have underlying health conditions, including lung disease, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, or a weakened immune system
• People detained for administrative reasons (including failure to appear and parole violations); and
• People serving “City Sentences” (sentences of one year or less).

This will further decimate the population I serve in my Friday workshops, and I couldn’t be happier. Every single person I serve at my facility fits at least one, if not most, of these criteria. As I’ve said in the previous couple of weeks, I made the difficult decision with my co-facilitators to suspend programming two weeks ago not for my own well-being, but for theirs. Keeping a whole bunch of people who are particularly vulnerable to the effects of the coronavirus in close proximity to each other is cruel and inhumane, if not unusual in our current criminal justice system. It took, in fact, a freak pandemic to get the carceral apparatus to loosen the reins.

The announcement from the Board of Correction is truly one of the most rewarding documents I’ve read for anyone concerned about the relationship between public health and pre-trial detention, and the two-page document deserves a full read. I’ve included it below.

But, in a time when speed could be the difference between life and death, the DOC is dragging their heels. Yesterday I spoke with the wife of Junior Wilson, whose plight I’ve detailed in previous dispatches and who fits the first three bullet points above, and she told me that some officials came into Junior’s wing last night, told everybody the criteria for coronavirus-related release, then seemingly chose three guys at random while leaving a plethora of men fitting the criteria without explanation. I asked her, the next time he called, to have him write down the names of every person in his wing who fits any of the criteria in the document. I then called a colleague at Just Leadership USA, an advocacy and accountability group working with the Mayor’s Office on Criminal Justice (MOCJ) and the Board of Correction to hold both agencies accountable, and asked if she would like those names, with Junior’s at the top of the list.

Junior did his part, and now Just Leadership is doing theirs. Hopefully, any hour now, Junior and everyone else who fits these criteria will be released and given the social support necessary to get shelter and care during this pandemic. In any case, what a strange, unexpected turn in this COVID-19 world event.

This post comes from my newsletter, Dispatches from the Carceral Apparatus. If you want to subscribe, you can here:

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Posted
AuthorJohn Proctor

What a strange couple of weeks, with more to come. If I’ve learned anything from the past few days, it’s how vulnerable a controlled, incarcerated population is to the risk of contagion. On the advice of numerous authorities whose opinions I trust, we decided to cancel both the Rikers workshops and the budding Westchester-Manhattanville partnership last Friday, and though I was disappointed I totally get the reasoning.

This week, as most if not all of us know by now, the country has started to fall in line with the fact that we are on the front end of a global pandemic. My college, like many around the country, moved to an online teaching model for at least the next two weeks. The Westchester DOC notified the college this week that they are suspending our partnership until further notice. The NYC DOC issued a blanket statement about programming saying to exercise our best judgment, and my onsite program coordinator deferred to our judgment.

In a difficult decision, we decided not to go in today. Perhaps I’m writing this dispatch as a form of penitence, because I honestly feel awful about it. One of my longest-running workshop members, a 72-year-old visual artist who has spent two years awaiting trial because the complainant has never shown up, was given a protracted trial this week and found guilty—his daughter let me know earlier this week, and said he was asking if I would be there this Friday. We’ve been in an up cycle recently as we’ve begun to adjust to the shifting population due to bail reform. Fellow facilitators upstate have reported widespread misinformation being distributed to the people they work with about what’s happening on the outside, which they have tried to counter in their visits. As volunteer facilitators, we are needed probably more than ever.

My program coordinator has been completely understanding when my co-facilitators and I have told her our decision, saying we should “protect yourselves and your families during these trying times.” But—and this is important—I’m actually not thinking about myself or my family when I decide not to go right now. I operate on the absolute determination not to be Patient Zero for an outbreak in an enclosed facility with people whose health and immune systems have been compromised by our criminal justice system.

We now, in our limited body of knowledge about the COVID-19, know with relative certainty that this virus is relatively harmless to the young and the healthy, but potentially deadly to the old and the infirm. Almost all, if not all, of the COVID-19 deaths in the US have been concentrated in a nursing home in Washington state. My guy who was convicted this week—the 72-year-old artist—once called the facility where he’s housed on Rikers Island a Five-in-One Facility, functioning as a jail, homeless shelter, old folks home, mental health center, and hospital. I will not to be the one to bring contagion into the de facto infirmary of the nation’s most notorious jail. And I feel horribly about it.

Now, as my family and many of yours go into self-quarantine for at least the next couple of weeks, the only thing I can do is research, write, and communicate. I’ve been developing a longform piece about my 72-year-old artist with his family and working on a book proposal on what we talk about when we talk about criminal justice reform, and I’m giving myself permission, in this brief historical moment of social isolation, to reflect without action for the next two weeks. And I hope to share the bounty of that labor with you on the flipside of this national emergency.

Be well, friends.

This post comes from my newsletter, Dispatches from the Carceral Apparatus. If you want to subscribe, you can here:

Posted
AuthorJohn Proctor

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.

This post comes from my newsletter, Dispatches from the Carceral Apparatus. If you want to subscribe, you can here:

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.)

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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?


This post comes from my newsletter, Dispatches from the Carceral Apparatus. If you want to subscribe, you can here:

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AuthorJohn Proctor

On Tuesday I attended a rally at the municipal court on 100 Centre Street in Manhattan organized by Court Watch NYC and VOCAL-NY in favor of the bail reforms that are now a week into effect. It was a powerful event, with Jumaane Williams, Tiffany Cabán, Akeem Browder, and many of my other heroes giving powerful advocacy for this groundbreaking legislation that represents a major step toward fixing our racist and classist court system. Here’s a photo I took, and also a tweet—look hard and you can see me on the periphery!

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But I also want to give you a little peek into what you don’t see here. I arrived a bit early, and I noticed that there was a really intense media presence—two cordoned-off areas housed a wide array of local and national media organizations, and many reporters were actively recording. At first I was like, Well, they’re finally paying attention! Then I listened to them speaking and realized they were all there because Harvey Weinstein was due in court on his multiple sexual abuse charges.

As the camera people milled and reporters fixed their appearances in their separate spaces, my eyes wandered to the courthouse steps and I noticed something that hasn’t left my mind in the two days since: People walking out of the courtroom, obviously just set free from pre-trial detention by the new bail law. The first thing I noticed was that they were all people of color, every single person I saw. Then I noticed that they all had people with them who obviously cared about them and were glad to have them back. One group in particular is burned into my memory: a young Black man, flanked on both sides by an older man and woman, possibly his parents, both of whom had a hand firmly in the crook of each of the young man’s elbows guiding him along, smiling and talking to him while scanning the area warily, seeming to be looking out for some unseen force that would spring from the bushes or the media area and take this young man away from them.  

Later, when Jumaane spoke of the differences between the treatment of Harvey Weinstein, walking in and out of court as a free man on multiple charges of rape and other sexual abuse, and poor people of color, who sit in jail for years on misdemeanors, I was still thinking about that young man, and the hundreds like him who are going home relieved but damaged from a judicial system that can only be understood through the lens of fear and apprehension. I didn’t see Harvey Weinstein come in or out of the court that day, and I wasn’t really interested to. I only wish all those journalists were a little more interested in the people walking out right in front of their noses, free from an unearned detention by a legal system that just may be starting to bend toward justice.

Because that’s the real story.

This post comes from my newsletter, Dispatches from the Carceral Apparatus. If you want to subscribe, you can here:





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AuthorJohn Proctor

This is not the time to choose your candidate, but to choose who we are as a party. It's never been more important. Listen to Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders talk about educational and economic inequity. Listen to Jay Inslee talk about climate change. Listen to all of them talk about a progressive vision for ending the horrors of mass incarceration and our Trump-inflicted immigration crisis. Then decide what you believe, and vote accordingly. But more importantly - hold whoever we choose accountable to our standards.

Republicans also had more candidates than they knew what to do with before that last election, and they chose the vision of a madman. They chose to tolerate and in many cases enjoy his abhorrent behavior either because they sincerely shared in his misanthropy or because it provided a smokescreen for passing equally abhorrent laws that reflect not the collective will of the people but top-down corporate directives that make the rich even richer while punishing the most vulnerable.

We're better than that. Make your list of the major issues discussed and argued over Wednesday and Thursday evening, and prioritize. We have a lot to do. Trump and American Conservatives have brought us to the brink of self-annihilation. Let's lead the way to a better future, for all of us. This will not be a return to normalcy - we Americans have had a skewed version of "normal" for some time time now. It's time to reposition ourselves, as citizens and as a country, toward justice and equity rather than efficiency and greed. It’s time to claim our positive as a global leader, not as a global plunderer. It’s time to look at the global world with empathy and joy, rather than power and fear.

Conservatives can thank us later, or claim in twenty years that our ideas were theirs all along. But we'll know, and we’ll be able to face our children and grandchildren knowing we’ve envisioned the world we want for them, rather than letting someone else’s warped vision guide us.

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AuthorJohn Proctor
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I’m so excited to announce my first chapter publication in a Routledge anthology, “Notes Toward a Working Definition of Mopecore” in Beyond the Rhetoric of Pain! This is both a critical and a personal essay/chapter, which developed first out of a conversation with some colleagues, and then out of a year of intense personal and professional pain. I think it might be my best work, but maybe I always think that about the latest thing I publish. Anyway, from editor Berenike Jung’s introduction:

"John Proctor's contribution begins with a touching story narrating the anguish of his small daughter about the death of a fictional cat...Her grief taps into a deeper truth, which Proctor connects to both a historical and a very contemporary pain...Proctor consults an array of late-twentieth century thinkers and theorists as well as representations in literature, film, and television, to demonstrate the proximity of laughter and tears, but he also opens up an intensely personal and deeply touching witnessing of this moment."

You can buy it here! (Yes, I know, it’s expensive.)

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AuthorJohn Proctor

Last night I was in the kitchen when my wife yelled from the bedroom. Went back there, and water was pouring down from our ceiling fan onto our bed. Grabbed buckets, called our super, ran upstairs and pounded on the door of the empty apartment (our upstairs neighbors had just moved out). I could hear the sound of running water, and it was starting to come out the bottom of the door onto the stairs. Our super, a spry, energetic, and frankly amazing Puerto Rican man in his 80s, ran up the stairs and slipped a credit card into the door. We went in and heard hissing beneath the sink. The windows had all been left open, so it was probably 15-20 degrees in the apartment. Under the sink , the cold water pipe had (predictably) burst, and by the time we found it, water had already been seeping through the floorboards into the ceiling above our bedroom. I grabbed a mop and started mopping while the super went to turn off the water and perform emergency surgery the water pipes.

By the time I got downstairs, my wife had moved our mattress into the living room. By the morning, both girls and the dog had joined us. Our new upstairs neighbor is supposed to move in today, with a floor that sinks a bit when you walk on it from the saturation.

So, how was your night?

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AuthorJohn Proctor

There are unsaid others, but the theme of this year for me is simplicity so I’ll keep it to three here:

1) De-clutter my space and my mind. My personal inbox currently has 59,078 unread messages. I’m spending my spare time in January deleting messages, starring the ones that need a reply, spamming the repeat stuff that I never open, and using my device to communicate, not procrastinate. And I’ma keep my desk clear as much as I can make myself—I spent the week after classes ended cleaning up the space around my desk, and 1) I can see my floor again, and 2) I think my wife loves me a bit more with the additional 6-8 square feet in our bedroom/office. I’m imposing austerity measures on my to-do list, cutting off the tasks I know I’ll never do, and giving myself more doable long-term weekly tasks that I have a reasonable chance of actually doing. This resolution, most importantly, is led by an acknowledgement of perhaps my greatest weakness: My need to have a well-stocked stack of material unsorted and things undone.

2) Fully inhabit my spaces in my communities. This includes my family, my Manhattanville College community, my fellow educators and activists in justice reform, my elected space in the lowest-ranked body of Brooklyn Democratic politics, and any additional spaces I find for myself in advancing empathic progressive values.

3) And most important: 60,000 WORDS, MOTHERFUCKERS.

3b) Oh, and get rid of this gut.

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AuthorJohn Proctor

Just now at the South Slope YMCA, I waited in line behind the commuters and parents for my turn on an elliptical. One opened, and I pounced. I was setting up when someone started tapping hard on my machine. I looked back and a middle-aged guy was waving a bleach pad at me.

HIM: <irritated> Don’t you see I haven’t cleaned the handles yet?

ME: <steps aside> By all means.

HIM: <mumbles as he wipes off the handles>

ME: What’s that?

HIM: Unless you don’t want me to leave.

ME: I wouldn’t say that.

HIM: <puts on his headphones, slows and accentuates his motions wiping the handles, and finally makes to go>

ME: <loudly> Try not to let this ruin your day!

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AuthorJohn Proctor

So I’m not doing another “12 ______ Days of Christmas” entry this season - just can’t find the time and inspiration - but in absence of a new set of ditties I’ve made a little space wherein to collect previous incarnations, a tab I creatively dub Holiday Stuff. I’ll keep it up to the end of the year, ‘kay?

Enjoy it, friends, and if you can think of a smaller-scale holiday thingie you’d like me to write about, just let me know.

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AuthorJohn Proctor