“As a father, I want to provide some guidance and direction for my child, but because of my incarceration, my influence in her life is limited to letters, short phone calls, and such,” Ivan said. “I’ll try to teach her some of the lessons I’ve learned and she’ll be like, ‘You’ve been gone my whole life. How are you gonna start showing me something now?’”
Ivan’s fraught relationship with his only descendant complicated his thoughts on legacy when we first started talking. He recalled a writing workshop at New Folsom prison that offered a prompt about how each man would want to be remembered. It forced Ivan to look back on his past and reconcile it with his present, not as a prisoner but as a man with ambitions of bettering the society that had perceived him as a threat.
“People who focus on legacy, they’re not consumed with the world and life as it is, but more so how they’re going to leave it and the impression that they leave on it,” Ivan said. “I don’t want people to remember me for being a young drug dealer, someone who was, you know, quick to enforce violence when it came to defending mine. That just doesn’t sit right with me.
“I’m a convicted felon, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have value in this society. I have more value in society because of my experiences in prison.”
The idea of legacy also prompted him to start thinking outside the box—and beyond prison walls—in terms of ways he could exert influence, not only on his daughter but on the greater community of Black men. He does this both through the programs he designs around neighborhood revitalization and by mentoring young men with whom he crosses paths inside prison. He is now the elder teaching revolutionary lessons about Black Power movements, focusing on programs like the Black Panther food banks that exemplified the power of investing in the community.
He also relays life lessons he learned as a child working on his grandfather’s farm.
“When you cultivate the soil and you plant the seeds and you nourish those seeds, you produce what you need to sustain life,” he said. “When we think about our youth in these communities, what we’re not doing is cultivating the soil. The soil is stagnated with blood and bullets. We gotta make sure that kids at those key points in their lives have those stable environments and mentors to keep them on the right track.”
As he’s worked to redefine his life, his daughter has pivoted as well and now works alongside him as an administrator for UBFSF. The idea of running a “family business” tickles Ivan, grateful that he has made progress in how he’ll be remembered and stunned at the improbability of the turn his life has taken.
America has never made good on its promises of life, liberty, and happiness to people like Ivan. Rejected by banks, and shut out of revitalized neighborhoods, the country’s economic and political systems have consistently denied him access, mobility, and choice. The criminal legal system has served to isolate him from society, label him as an unacceptable other, and cast him into a life of solitude. Still, he reaches back, developing research papers to better cities where he’ll probably never live—or even set foot in—educating students who will likely never shake his hand or thank him in person, and building relationships with professors in whose classrooms he will likely never sit.
“When you’re in the middle of the storm and it’s really dark, it’s easy to forget that there’s light up ahead,” said Glenn. “It feels like Ivan wakes up every day and walks towards that light, light that he can’t even see.”
Sister by Gerald Morgan
4
Reimagining Justice:
Critical Resistance
On the corner of 44th and Telegraph is the bright blue brick-and-mortar offices of Critical Resistance, a modern abolitionist organization founded by feminist icon Angela Davis, carceral geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and environmental and human liberation activist Rose Braz in the late 1990s. It’s a relatively new property for the organization, which was previously headquartered closer to downtown Oakland. When I visited in the fall of 2021, wood support beams were still stabilizing the hollowed-out interior. The building previously housed a baby store, a seemingly perfect fit for an organization dedicated to outfitting the next generation of freedom fighters with tools for success.
On approach, the first thing to catch your eye is a mantra above the front entrance: “Building People Power.” “People” is written in yellow, embossed letters, the other two words in white; “power” being italicized emphasizes the different ways the phrase can be read. The windows facing Telegraph Avenue serve as frames for large posters displaying photographs of volunteers and pamphlets devoted to the organization’s various campaigns. Along the 44th Street side of the building are murals, not necessarily unique to this part of town where young artists frequently fill the night air with spray paint to leave their mark on the city. Street art is prolific here, as it is in many major cities, and after George Floyd was killed by police in 2020, portraits of him and other victims of police homicide blanketed the boarded-up retail shops along Broadway from the Bay to Lake Merritt. The downtown area became an outside exhibition of art, culture, and resistance.
The Critical Resistance building captures this juxtaposition of beauty and pain on its façade by surrounding revolutionary quotes with elegant imagery. Bold orange flowers and butterflies frame a four-panel window containing summaries of the organization’s successful battles against gang injunctions, the Urban Shield weapons exposition, and the construction of what would have been the state’s thirty-fourth prison, Delano II. The silhouettes of two birds stretch out a banner spelling out the organization’s three-part theory of change: “Dismantle, Change, Build.” Next to the window is the figure of an African American woman, the crown of her head breaching the concrete line where the wall meets the sidewalk like a sunrise. Her eyes gaze upward at a white dove she’s just released from her hands, outstretched from the ground. The dove flies up and seemingly aims to arrive at the word “Libertad,” spelled out in golden block letters. It stretches over a metal roll-up gate featuring a quote from Frantz Fanon: “When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.” A woman, painted in a purple hue, blows into a conch shell, inflating the D in “Libertad.” Orange and yellow rings radiate from her skyward-facing forehead, a long braid sweeping her profile and resting along the bottom edge of the wall.
On the day of my visit, Critical Resistance (CR) was holding its monthly Freedom Friday, a free outdoor event, open to the public, featuring music, food, and activities. Mohamed Shehk, the group’s national campaigns and programs director, said CR launched Freedom Fridays back in the fall of 2020, shortly after purchasing the new property. The idea was to build community by breaking bread and having conversations with neighborhood residents. Central to CR’s modus operandi, according to all the staffers I spoke to, is the organization’s maintenance of its role as a facilitator of change, not a prescriber. Every plan for change starts with a conversation. New systems are defined by building relationships and learning from members of the community where CR is operating. At the front lines of all the organization does are the people who will be most directly impacted by whatever change it is trying to bring about.
“We never helicopter in solutions,” said one staff member.
Freedom Fridays are also an opportunity to highlight some of the many organizations CR works with. As part of its mission to “build people power,” CR participates in several coalitions of similarly missioned nonprofits and advocacy groups. Because CR is one of the oldest grassroots organizations in the area, it uses its notoriety to uplift lesser-known local groups. On this particular Friday in September, with children recently returning to school from summer break, members of the Education for Liberation Coalition were promoting a textbook-size compendium designed to help educators and parents draw connections between educational practices and the growing abolition movement. Lessons in Liberation: An Abolitionist Toolkit for Educators is the result of a partnership between CR’s editorial collective and Quetzal Education Consulting, a nonprofit working to integrate abolitionist and anti-racist philosophies into education policy.
“Part of the reason why we prioritize coalition work is anchored in our orientation towards movement building,” said Woods Ervin, a longtime CR member who joined the staff as the national media and communications director in 2022. “Our priority is to shift power towards communities, so that means working with several organizations with members who are directly impacted by a particular aspect of the prison industrial complex that we’ve decided to fight.”
The prison-industrial complex, or PIC, is the Final Boss in CR’s quest to dismantle oppressive systems. One of Critical Resistance’s most prominent campaigns, and the reason for my visit, is its involvement in the Close California Prisons coalition. The group includes staffers from Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB), Californians for Safety and Justice, Showing Up for Racial Justice, California Coalition for Women Prisoners, and Dignity and Power Now. Their goal is for the governor to account for ten prison closures—either complete or forthcoming—in the state’s 2025 budget.
The coalition has been together since CURB released The People’s Plan for Prison Closure in 2021. The People’s Plan outlines several problems associated with the prison system, including environmental dangers like water toxicity, the economic strain on both the state and the cities where the prisons are located, and threats to public health. Based on these parameters, the CURB report suggested ten prisons that should be closed immediately: California Rehabilitation Center, Kern Valley State Prison, Pleasant Valley State Prison, California Correctional Institution, North Kern State Prison, California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility, California State Prison Los Angeles County, California Medical Facility, Avenal State Prison, and California Men’s Colony. Deuel Vocational Institution has already been shuttered, and two more are slated for closure before 2025: the California Correctional Center and Chuckawalla Valley State Prison.1
One might wonder why organizations fighting for the rights of incarcerated individuals would list a “rehabilitation center,” a “substance abuse treatment facility,” and a “medical facility,” but note that these misnomers are attempts to portray the prison department as an empathetic party. This stands in stark contrast to reality, being that prison’s central purpose, as we examined in chapter 2, is to punish and incapacitate. It should be noted that the California Rehabilitation Center can’t even seem to rehabilitate itself—its infrastructure and medical facilities are in such disarray even after millions of taxpayer dollars had been poured into it that it was slated for closure several times between 2010 and 2020. Many of these facilities provide insufficient medical care and are mere fronts the prison department can use to shuffle prisoners around rather than lower the population through releases.
Connected Liberation
A few days after the Freedom Friday event, CR staffers Viju Mathew and Isa Borgeson walked me through how they campaign for shutdowns in prison towns. By chance, we met on the same day the Deuel Vocational Institution, a state prison located in unincorporated San Joaquin County, began a so-called warm shutdown. The prison was slated for closure, but having presented no plan for safely shutting down, CDCR negotiated to have the prisoners transferred (not released) to other facilities and for the prison to remain operating at 50 percent, which keeps about half the staff employed for the purposes of overseeing basic plumbing, electrical, and water treatment operations.2 It was far from ideal, but spirits were still high among the three of us.
While Deuel was not part of CURB’s initial assessment of highly problematic complexes, the facility was an easy choice for the governor: The prison had an annual operating cost of $182 million and needed a reported $800 million in repairs. Additionally, toxic water from the prison had been poisoning the streams that feed into the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta.3 For purely economic and environmental reasons, the prison had become more of a liability than the state had bargained for.
“I think when we understand prisons as a public health crisis, as an environmental crisis, when you think about the fires that are happening just miles out of reach of people potentially being burned alive, the conversation shifts,” Isa said. “Between that and the prison population being lower than it has been in many years, the opportunity is being presented to act now to close these prisons.”
Having grown up in an activist family—both of her parents were involved in the protests in the Philippines following Ferdinand Marcos’s declaration of martial law and the human rights abuses that followed—Isa was politicized early on in her life, but her radicalization toward abolition came in 2007 when a close family member was sent to prison. The family member, who had been involved with Critical Resistance before his incarceration, started teaching Isa about organizing and abolition work. She formed relationships with other people who had a loved one in prison, people she had plenty of time to get to know as they endured the lengthy process of just getting into the visitation room together.
“My politicization very much grew out of that commitment to the person next to me in line,” Isa said. “I think it’s really important that the work that we’re doing is not just theoretical, but it also has an accountability that’s grounded in people that you meet and the understanding that our liberation is connected.”
Isa, who joined Critical Resistance in the summer of 2020 as an intern, is petite in stature, sports a buzz cut, and has a face that made her seem much younger than I assumed she was based on her recollections from childhood. On the day of our interview, she was wearing drawstring slacks with a white t-shirt and a gold chain. She took a moment to measure her response to each one of my questions, speaking articulately and with poise. As she dove deeper into the layers of the work that motivates her, however, her speech became rapid, seemingly driven by equal parts nervousness, frustration, and passion.
For example, I mentioned a recent New York Times article that had profiled Susanville locals who feared their lives would be upended should either or both of the local prisons close,4 but Isa quickly and poignantly countered with an explanation that exemplifies how the coalition is working to change that narrative.
“I think a lot of times the argument is made that if you were to remove a prison from a prison town, that local economy would be destroyed. But when you look at the actual numbers of it, for Susanville, 18 percent of the people living in that town are living below the poverty line with a per capita income of $13,800. And so we can clearly see that having a prison did not support the local economy. Susanville’s a town that has not just one but two California state prisons: CCC [California Correctional Center] and High Desert State Prison. So the prison system has this economic chokehold on the town where nothing else can be built—no schools, no colleges, no other types of tourism—because there’s a prison in that town, so no one wants to go into that town or build or invest.”
Isa gasped for air.
“Plus, if a town’s economic survivability is dependent on systemic racism and institutions that emotionally, physically, and psychologically harm other human beings in cages, then we need to rethink our economics.”
At the end of her explanation, she wrung her hands together, and Viju brought her back to center with a calm, “That was really good.”
She breathed, finally.
“Oh God, I’m dying out here,” she said with a slight rouge tinting her freckled cheeks. I was reminded that most organizers in this space have the experience of being one in a crowd, one in a community, not the one behind the microphone.
The OG
