When it comes to locking people up, the United States is a world leader. The U.S. has less than 5 percent of the world’s population, yet accounts for 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.
African-American people are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of white people.
A number of terms have been coined to describe systems that promote mass incarceration: Institutional racism, school-to-prison pipeline.
Now, there’s a word for how we might end it: Decarceration.
In her new book, “Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t Work and How We Can Do Better” (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, $18.95), Maya Schenwar makes the case that the harm done by prisons in America can only be remedied by abolishing them.
That’s right: No prisons. Period.
Lest you think that’s an impossibility, consider the story that Schenwar tells of Tamms Correctional Center, an Illinois super-max prison that became notorious for its use of solitary confinement. In 2013, Gov. Pat Quinn halted public dollars for Tamms, and it shut down.
Working to free prisoners, preventing new prisons from being built and creating alternative systems of justice are some of the ways that prison abolitionists are working to make prisons a thing of the past, Schenwar writes.
But Schenwar, editor-in-chief of the journalism site truth-out.org, doesn’t cover prisons from a distance. Her sister, Kayla, has been in and out of prison, and Schenwar describes in personal terms the toll that incarceration takes on the families of those behind bars.
In a phone interview with Equal Voice News, Schenwar talked about having a prison pen pal, questioning objectivity and the dangers of reforming prisons.
Could you start by talking about how you first got involved in writing about prisons?
It was a couple of different things. One was nine years ago, my sister went to juvenile detention and since then she’s been in and out of prison and jail. Around the time she first went, I was doing a little dabbling in reporting on prisons. It became, I think, a more important issue to me as soon as she was incarcerated.
People have the idea with juvenile detention that it’s a school, only stricter and you have to live there, but really, it’s jail.
I started doing some reporting on a few different things, but one of them was activism on death row. One strange development that I didn’t expect to happen is that I developed a pen-pal friendship with a death row prisoner. This person was happy that I was reaching out about his activism but he also had very, very little human connection. Immediately when I wrote to him, he said thanks for writing to me, but I want to be your pen pal.
On that level, I also began corresponding to people in prison. I realized pretty quickly that as a journalist, when I wrote to people in prison to interview them, I didn’t want to just abandon them after interviewing them.
You’ve said you think everybody should have a pen pal who is in prison. Can you elaborate?
Maybe I would revise that: Most people. People who want to have a pen pal in prison should have one. I think that, like, it’s a two-way street. It’s definitely an experience that can be humanizing on both sides. I encourage people to do it, especially if they’re activists or people who consider themselves progressive or left-leaning or whatever. There tends to be a level of advocacy that’s totally disconnected from human beings.
I think on a lot of levels it’s important. On a basic harm-reduction level, it’s important. There’s so much that happens in prison because it’s hidden from view. The way that guards act toward prisoners, that’s influenced by whether they think someone is watching. If it’s demonstrated by a person in prison that they have someone on the outside who is connected to them, they have a great chance of standing up to that treatment or avoiding it.
Prisoners, in some cases, don’t have much of a constituency, I’ve found.
Over the past couple of years, there’s been a growing level of interest in this topic. Whereas before, you’d write about this topic, and it wouldn’t get a lot of traffic. People wouldn’t click on this story, like, ‘That’s a lost cause because no one cares’ — not realizing they were participating in the not caring. Because there’s such a pervasive mentality — ‘Well, they’re there for a reason’— they wouldn’t touch that issue.
How did that change?
I think “The New Jim Crow” [Michelle Alexander’s 2010 book on mass incarceration] did a lot for the issue. People started recognizing the system wasn’t just unbalanced, that these laws are [just] being implemented in a racist way, but really the [criminal justice] system is grounded in racism and built on racism, and particularly, anti-blackness drove the rise in incarceration. I think “The New Jim Crow” really hit people that way — even people who felt like [the criminal justice system] functioned badly, but still felt like it was founded on the right premises.
I think probably the largest factor shifting the debate is that prison has been really, really bad for state budgets. Governors and [legislators] were looking for places to cut. Spending $50,000, $80,000 per person in prison — that is a place that you should look, maybe slashing budgets there.
A lot of people have been watching [the Netflix prison drama] “Orange is the New Black.” I do think anytime there’s something in pop culture that touches on an issue that the dominant culture isn’t talking about, that can shift the terms of the conversation or at least influence the conversation. The only trouble is that people start thinking that the pop culture representation is the heart of the issue, [that it] represents the reality.
In interviews you’ve talked a little bit about the relationship you had with death row inmates and how they didn’t understand that you were playing the role of journalist, not friend.
My perspective on journalism has changed so much over the past 10 years. I think definitely what’s drilled into people when they learn traditional journalism is this idea of objectivity, that it’s possible to separate yourself from a situation and then kind of record the facts. The way you record the fact is by talking to people on different sides of the issue. You paint this kind of detached picture of a complicated situation. I think that model is one that really doesn’t work for me and for painting an accurate picture of what’s going on in most situations, especially in issues of social justice and injustice. In order to interview the different sides, then you have [to] define what a side is. In all of those steps, there are choices you are making.
If it’s someone in prison, the way that journalism operates, everything is in doubt. You have to get court records for everything to back up what they’re saying, and sometimes there aren’t records for what they are saying. The mentality that journalism has often approached prison with is, once you are behind the bars, the burden of proof, to demonstrate your humanity, is really, really high. I just couldn’t do that kind of reporting anymore.
You’ve said that incarceration doesn’t solve problems, it buries them. Let’s talk about the problems with incarceration.
Why doesn’t it work? There’s a number of levels. One, we’re incarcerating people often for things that didn’t harm anyone. ... One way is locking people up for being black or brown or disabled or transgender or other things.
Beyond that, prison is traumatizing. It harms people just by virtue of existing, [the] physical violence that takes place in prison. Also, the actually caging of people is violent. In order to carry out incarceration, you have to do harm. Causing trauma is not something that is taken seriously enough. When people are harmed, very often they do harm. People don’t often do harm out of nowhere. [With incarceration] you are actually putting people in a position where they are more likely to do harm.
Another thing, when people are out [of prison] they are often left with nothing. They are in a worse place than they were in when they went in. So whatever they were doing to survive, it’s not going to be solved when they get out. What direction that takes them in, who knows, but it’s probably not going to be positive.
One more thing I’d mention is that prison breaks down connections between people. Connections between people are first of all what motivates people to change. If you are doing things that are harmful or unhelpful to yourself, the thing that is going to motivate you to change are positive things and a positive community. Prison actually puts forth a much bleaker reality. People are not only less motivated to change, they also have less support. Supporting people in living a good life is also about allowing them to live in a community: That’s the opposite of what prison is doing.
Any bit of connection that you are allowed in prison is so mediated, and so brief, that it doesn’t allow for the establishment of strong bonds. It’s also expensive. Most people in prison are poor. But in order to make human connection, it’s always something that involves money.
Visits are expensive. The prison is never next door, it always involves travel, and that requires money; that requires work. So people are going to have to stay in a town that they’re visiting, and if their loved one is in a federal prison, that could mean traveling across the country.
The whole time you are there, you’re never allowed to be alone with your loved one. Phone calls from prison just rack up for family members. Now the [Federal Communications Commission] is taking some action on that. Even writing a letter, a stamp costs money.
Letters are always surveilled, too, right?
There’s always a third party on your conversation.
Do you think that’s necessary?
Well, no. People ask how could those policies be changed, and my answer is always, well, if you don’t have prison… [laughs] But in the whole worldview that includes prison, surveillance is a huge part of it. Every movement is surveilled, and that’s just normal. In prison, it’s just part of every single part of your life.
I’ve lived in some places where prisons are presented to the community as jobs.
I’ve been really struck by the way prison is equating as jobs in rural Illinois. It’s just sad that there’s the idea that if the prison closes down, then the town is out of jobs. When the prison closed in Tamms, the town was up in arms, and they’re still trying to get that prison back.
It was jobs. Though to me, the answer to that would be, OK, what could the state do that would actually create jobs in this community that weren’t dependent on the suffering of human beings? Because obviously, that’s necessary…
The [prison] system is genocide. It’s really just killing large groups of people. We have this system that’s killing people, but… there’s jobs!
What is prison abolition?
I think it’s tough to define because we don’t know what the world is going to look like beyond prison. But first of all, [the prison abolition movement] is an acknowledgement that prison is an inherently violent system. It can’t be fixed.
What abolition does is say, no, you can’t make prison better because it’s founded on principals that are inherently violent. It’s founded on racism. It’s founded on an idea that you can torture people and make them better.
It also acknowledges that it doesn’t have to be this way. Prison has not been around forever. There’s no reason to think that it will continue to be around. We need to hasten its departure and think about, what do we need to do about harm and violence that will actually address harm and violence?
If prisons haven’t been around forever, what other things have served the role?
A lot of them are bad. People who founded the idea of modern prison called themselves reformers because they were trying to get away from corporal punishment, capital punishment, physical punishment. That was one of the ways the prison came to be. The idea was that instead of flogging people or publicly shaming them — that seems to us viscerally wrong — you would be confining them. They would be doing penance, getting in touch with God. Penitentiary comes from the idea of penitence. Or they would be working, establishing a new way of being through physical work.
Obviously, it didn’t work out that way. Some of the Christian groups that were advocating for prisons, like Quakers, many of them are now abolitionists. They said, that didn’t work out and are calling for something different.
A lot of indigenous cultures have used practices that now some people are advocating for. There are ways to get outside the mindset that when you have done something wrong the state needs to brutally punish you.
One of the ideas that has come out is restorative justice. Someone does something wrong, the community gets involved, and the victim comes together with the person who has done something wrong, and that would facilitate healing. That’s not ideal in all situations. That kind of process could be really healing and can strengthen communities.
One of the things I talk about in the book — there are projects going on and strategies that are happening that could help solve problems without prison. People making laws are not on that level.
It seems like there’s a danger that reform efforts could end up validating incarceration.
Yeah, that’s an issue, and even something like Prop. 47 in California [a voter initiative to reduce penalties for drug possession and nonviolent crimes], which just passed. Which is really great in many ways; it makes certain crimes that have been felonies, misdemeanors. So drug possession, and thefts under $950, those are misdemeanors and they don’t lead to incarceration. That to me is a really encouraging step. But some abolitionist organizations have come out against it, and I understand why, because it really entrenches this idea that there are some people who deserve to be in prison. Like we want prison to be for the wrongdoers as opposed to the people who just messed up. There are a lot of dangers in further affirming that certain people, we don’t care about them.
How do you get away from that sort of drawing the line?
We’re not going to be eliminating prison for people who’ve killed people for a long time. By the time that happens, we’ll have moved so much in that direction we’ll figure it out. It is going to require creativity but there are examples of ways that that has been dealt with.
At a certain level of crime, it’s decided that the person isn’t human and therefore they are incapable of change. I don’t think people are defined by their worst act.
[For] many of the people who are incarcerated for murder, it has happened in a particular situation. There’s a myth that there are people who are murderers and that’s just the way they are made, and you just have to lock them up or they will murder.
Prison makes it really easy: ‘Oh, someone murdered someone, we’ll send them to prison.’ As opposed to, this is something that really hurt people deeply, how are we going to help them heal?
When it comes to abolishing prisons, where do victims of crimes fit in?
The current system is so unsupportive of victims. Victims are the last priority. The person who is harmed doesn’t get any support; all of the resources are being funneled to the person who did it. You’re put in a position of total helplessness, often you are asked to participate in a trial that traumatizes you further.
We could be sending all this money [that’s going to prisons] to counseling, to restitution, medical help. Think of all the ways that we could be spending our resources that would be good for people. Those are rights [that] victims don’t have that they should.
Tell me about this idea of not calling the police.
The person who introduced me to that idea is this amazing activist, Miriame Kaba. The idea is when you call the police, prison is an inherently racist environment and policing is the first step of that. If you go out and call police, if they’re going to arrest people, the first people they are going to arrest are black and brown people.
The idea is like, you have a choice in whether you activate that cycle or not... It’s not about shaming people who call the police, it’s about taking a step back. There’s so many situations in which we call the police in which we don’t have to. I talk about my laptop being stolen, this is a situation where I called the police and I didn’t have to. I was really upset and this is the thing you’re supposed to do.
There’s a website called Creative Interventions. I think the way to think about things differently, it has to happen collectively. How does the community respond when they’re not relying on a violent state force?