#beyond prisons

I think that for me, understanding that is really helpful in my practice around organizing, which is that, I believe that there’s always a potential for transformation and for change. And that is in any direction, good or bad. The idea of hope being a discipline is something I heard from a nun many years ago who was talking about it in conjunction with making sure we were of the world and in the world. Living in the afterlife already in the present was kind of a form of escape, but that actually it was really, really important for us to live in the world and be of the world. The hope that she was talking about was this grounded hope that was practiced every day, that people actually practiced it all the time.

And so, I bowed down to that. I heard that many years ago and then I felt the sense of, Oh my god. That speaks to me as a philosophy of living, that hope is a discipline and that we have to practice it every single day. Because in the world which we live in, it’s easy to feel a sense of hopelessness, that everything is all bad all the time, that there is nothing going to change ever, that people are evil and bad at the bottom. It feels sometimes that it’s being proven in various, different ways, so I get that, so I really get that. I understand why people feel that way. I just choose differently. I choose to think a different way and I choose to act in a different way. I choose to trust people until they prove themselves untrustworthy.

Jim Wallace, who people know as a liberal Evangelical, who thinks about faith a lot and talks about faith a lot and he always talks about the fact that hope is really believing in spite of the evidence and watching the evidence change. And that, to me, makes total sense. I believe ultimately that we’re going to win, because I believe there are more people who want justice, real justice, than there are those who are working against that.

And I don’t also take a short-time view, I take a long view, understanding full well that I’m just a tiny, little part of a story that already has a huge antecedent and has something that is going to come after that, that I’m definitely not going to be even close to around for seeing the end of. So, that also puts me in the right frame of mind, that my little friggin’ thing I’m doing, is actually pretty insignificant in world history, but [if] it’s significant to one or two people, I feel good about that.

If I’m making my stand in the world and that benefits my particular community of people, the people I designate as my community, and I see them benefiting by my labor, I feel good about that. That actually is enough for me.

So, maybe I just have a different perspective and I talk to a lot of young organizers - people reach out to me a lot because I’ve been organizing for a long time - I’m always telling them, “Your timeline is not the timeline on which movements occur. Your timeline is incidental. Your timeline is only for yourself to mark your growth and your living.” But that’s a fraction of the living that’s going to be done by the universe and that has already been done by the universe. So, when you understand that you’re really insignificant in the grand scheme of things, you just are, then it’s a freedom, in my opinion, to actually be able to do the work that’s necessary as you see it and to contribute in the ways that you can see fit. So, I think that’s my answer to that.

And self-care is really tricky for me, because I don’t believe in the self in the way that people determine it here in this capitalist society that we live in. I don’t believe in self-care, I believe in collective care, collectivizing our care, and thinking more about how we can help each other. How can we collectivize the care of children so that more people can feel like they can actually have their kids but also live in the world and contribute and participate in various different kinds of ways? How do we do that?

How do we collectivize care so that when we’re sick and we’re not feeling ourselves, we’ve got a crew of people that are not just our prayer warriors, but our action warriors who are thinking through with us? Like, I’m not just going to be able to cook this week, and you have a whole bunch of folks there, who are just putting a list together for you and bringing the food every day that week and you’re doing the same for your community, too.

I want that as the focus of how I do things and that really comes from the fact that I grew up the daughter of returned migrants, African-returned migrants. I don’t see the world the way that people do here, I just don’t. I don’t agree with it, I think capitalism is actually continuously alienating us from each other, but also even from ourselves and I just don’t subscribe. And for me, it’s too much with, “Yeah I’m going to go do yoga and then, I’m going to go and do some sit-ups and maybe I’ll like, you know, go to…” You don’t have to go anywhere to care for yourself.

Brian: [chuckles] Right.

Mariame: You can just care for yourself and your community in tandem and that can actually be much more healthy for you, by the way. Because all this internalized, internal reflection is not good for people. You have to be able to have... Yes, think about yourself, reflect on your practice, okay, but then you need to test it in the world, you’ve got to be with people. So, that’s important. And I hate people! So, I say that as somebody who actually is really anti-social...

[Brian and Kim laugh]

Mariame: … and I say, “I hate people.” I don’t want to socialize in that kind of way but I do want to be social with other folks as it relates to collectivizing care.

Kim: It’s something I say quite often, so…

Brian: Yeah, I deeply identify with that.

Kim: …the way you say it, like “Oh my gosh, I hate people,“ but yeah, I totally hear you, I mean I get it, I get it. Brian?

Mariame: First, I understand, why people ask the question because society has done a really good job inculcating a bunch of fear in people. I don’t know if people know who’s actually in prison and who’s not, so there’s just a lot of misinformation. “Law and Order” really has done a real job on people, a real kind of brainwashing job about who gets incarcerated, who those folks are, what that means. There’s also a huge conflation I think that people have around connecting crime and connecting incarceration, and so those things have connections to each other when even the most conservative criminologists and theorists and researchers have found that “crime” and incarceration, the correlation between them is very faint and not as statistically significant as people think.

So, I understand that. I guess for me, if people think about sexual assault or murder, that usually happens between people who know each other really well. It’s very rare that you have actual “serial rapists” in the world that are portrayed on TV. That’s not what most sexual assault actually is. Most sexual assault is actually not reported, most people who engage in it are not actually in prison. This idea that if you don’t have prison that’s going to flood the universe with all these sexual predators is completely not borne out by the actual empirical facts that we have going on right now. And it’s a great moment to think about that when more and more people are being either outed as sexual harassers and assaulters in the media through these revelations, ever since the Weinstein article in the [New York] Times. Can you imagine incarcerating all those men? They’re mostly men, as sexual predators. What would the system need to look like for that to be the solution to a problem that is actually about systemic, structural inequities in power?

I just think people have this idea that the 5% of the people who are actually in prison for murder and rape are everybody who’s in prison. And so, the ending of prisons doesn’t actually do the thing that you’re thinking  in your head would happen. In fact, the prison itself is such a perpetrator of sexual violence that if you are somebody who cares about ending sexual violence, you have to end the prison, too. These things are not separate from each other. If you are somebody who’s concerned with murder, the prison is a murderer. You have to end that, too. It’s its own form of violence.

That’s really a way of thinking about that. Prisons don’t stop murder because we have murder, you know? So, you have to ask yourself the question about, “What are you trying to do?” and if it’s to increase actual safety, “What would lead to that? What would actually get us safe?”

We know that strong relationships with each other that are based on healthy accountability is the way to go, so, the question is how do we get to that? My interest has been in trying to figure that part of the equation out and I don’t feel in any way defensive when people kind of point the finger at the abolitionist and say, [mock yelling] “Well what are we going to do about all the…?” and it’s usually like that, it’s not ever like a calm-

Brian: [laughing] Right.

Mariame: …[mock yelling] “But what about all the rapists and murderers?” I always say to people, “Ask yourself what’s happening to you right now. Why are you so agitated?” You know what I mean? “What’s going on?” Because the prison and the police are so in your head and your heart, you’re feeling personally affronted, because you think, these institutions matter to you quite a bit and the question is, “Why do they matter so much to you? Are they doing what they say they’re doing? Are they keeping the world safe?” I’m just asking you to think about that, to answer that question yourself. If you feel like these institutions are working well and doing exactly what it is that you’d hope they do, then you shouldn’t be mad at people who are trying to... then you’re fine, you’re just living in the world that exists. But if you’re somebody that thinks these things are actually damaging and you think them “working” is actually working to further oppress and cause more violence, then you’re interested in something else and then, you and I can have this conversation about that. We can talk.

I also want to say that abolition is a collective project, it isn’t an individual project. Even though we individually are doing abolitionist acts on a daily basis whether we know it or not, it is a collective project, which means that one person is not responsible for coming up with “the solution.”

Kim: Absolutely.

Mariame: We have to come up with a solution based on our cultures and our communities and it’s again, based on our needs, our desires, our wants. So, me standing up there and making a big speech to you about abolition as a lofty… means zero. What does that mean in your life, in your world, in your context, in your community, with your people? How are you practicing abolition and how are you getting your ultimate goal if your ultimate goal is more safety?

So, when people say, “What about the rapists and the murderers?” I really want to say, “Well what about them?” because they’re pretty much already not in prison.

Kim: Exactly.

Mariame: We’re already living, if you want to call that abolition, we’re already living that kind of abolition, so that’s why abolition for me is not mainly about the destruction or dismantling of the prison and the police and surveillance, though that’s critically important, it’s creating the conditions necessary so that those things don’t need to exist. That’s a very different project and that’s a very different angle. That’s something that allows for a freedom to do a whole bunch of things that aren’t even only and mainly about trying to end prisons or policing or surveillance. That’s about making sure people have living wages, that’s about making sure people have actual housing, making sure people have good educations, making sure people have environmental health and not environmental racism, making sure we don’t all die on the planet. All these things are abolitionist projects.

That’s the thing that most people that aren’t abolitionists in terms of, people who’ve studied, who have practiced, who’ve organized under an abolitionist set of framework and ideology… I think most people think about it in an analytic exercise. But for me, it’s always been actual practice. I’m an organizer and an educator first and that’s where I learned about abolition, through practice. And yes, I’ve read a lot and I’ve read people that I’ve come to become friends with and respect, but that’s not the gist of how I came to that. I came through action and looking for something that would change the circumstances that I was encountering that were super frustrating to me when I was working with survivors of violence.