Many abolitionists talk about the moment they were “radicalized.” Maybe it was the first time they saw the inhumane nature of prison after visiting an incarcerated loved one, like Isa. Maybe the viral videos of unarmed Black men being gunned down by police officers started the ball rolling. Angela Davis has said she believes she was born radicalized.
Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1944, Angela told attendees of a 2021 symposium that she “came out of the womb demanding change.” Her mother was active in the Southern Negro Youth Congress, an organization founded by the children of National Negro Congress members with the mission of defending the civil rights of Black people in the South. Angela’s childhood included neighborhood bombings by the Ku Klux Klan. Black fathers in her community worked as miners and steelworkers, jobs they had inherited from Black convicts forced to do such work under the leasing system of the late nineteenth century. The Birmingham Angela grew up in was the most segregated city in the country, and her mother raised the children to view this as abnormal, rather than allow them to find comfort in the status quo.
“She had this profound impact on us,” Angela said at the symposium. “She demanded we imagine a different world.”5
The first time I met Angela was at the inauguration of former San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin. She was easy to pick out of the crowd. She stood above most of the attendees at five-foot-eight—almost six feet in her heels. Under the house lights of the Herbst Theatre, her iconic silhouette, her Afro now a brilliant blend of white and gray, emanated an ethereal glow that highlighted the soft features of her face. Her eyes, behind thin, frameless glasses, showed the weariness of years of struggle yet the ferocity for a fight that still lay ahead. Her brow naturally furrowed when conversing, and she spoke with a low, drawn-out cadence. Angela conquered the dramatic pause long before Barack Obama made it cool.
Our paths began to cross more often after that, as I left the DA’s office to join All of Us or None, one of many grassroots organizations that emerged from a conference Critical Resistance hosted in 1998.
Over 3,500 activists attended that event, billed as “Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex: A National Conference and Strategy Session.” The event attracted academics, former prisoners, labor leaders, religious organizations, feminists, LGBTQ activists, and policymakers from every US state and several foreign countries. Over three days, these attendees participated in 200 different panels and workshops and were treated to several cultural events, including a film festival.6
The gathering led to anti-carceral individuals and organizations forming a foundational coalition. Together, the coalition launched a counteroffensive to California’s “build them and fill them” era between 1977 and 2007, defined by the development of twenty prisons and a prison population that increased by 900 percent, from 19,623 to 174,282.7 The movement spurred by the 1998 conference would celebrate many progressive victories in the following decades, including the passages of significant, decarceration-focused ballot measures, such as Proposition 47, which recategorized some nonviolent felony offenses as misdemeanors, and Prop 57, which allowed parole consideration for nonviolent felons and authorized sentence credits for good behavior and participation in educational programs. To date, these propositions, along with similar reforms, contributed to a 30 percent reduction in the prison population over the course of a decade (2006–2017) and an incarceration rate—the number of adults incarcerated by the state for every 100,000 residents—lower than any year since the 1980s.8
Through this work, Critical Resistance has fine-tuned its three-prong strategy for campaigns: grassroots outreach, legislative advocacy, and media campaigns. In fighting on all three fronts simultaneously, organizers have been able to accomplish several first-of-their-kind victories.
Its first big win was against then-city attorney John Russo’s gang injunctions. In 2010 Russo sought to combat crime in Oakland by flooding certain areas with uniformed officers—a tactic known as hot-spot policing—and designated the neighborhoods of North Oakland and Fruitvale to be not only hotspots but “gang zones.” Individuals who encountered law enforcement in these designated zones would be subjected to arrest for minor violations, like breaking curfew, as well as sentence enhancements and longer stays in prison.
“Anti-gang civil injunctions promise to perpetuate racial stigma and oppression,” writes Gary Stewart in the Yale Law Journal. “Although justified in less overtly racist terms, anti-gang injunctions share with postbellum vagrancy ordinances a repressive effect that stamps minority communities with badges of inferiority.”9
Stewart found that gang injunctions are no more than police-induced gentrification dressed up as crime fighting. Data at the time of Russo’s injunctions would seem to validate this theory: In 2010, Oakland police records indicate that 72 percent of Oakland’s homicides occurred in West Oakland’s District 3 and East Oakland’s Districts 6 and 7—all outside the area covered by the two injunctions. North Oakland and Fruitvale do, however, border a trendy shopping district called Temescal. Peppered with boutique shops, microbreweries, and fine dining, Temescal had quickly gone from one of Oakland’s oldest neighborhoods to one of its trendiest, rendering it ripe for an influx of wealthy and white newcomers. Within a year of Russo’s gang injunction initiation, the Black population of Oakland had decreased by 25 percent, with North Oakland being the most impacted neighborhood.10 An Oakland police officer at the time likened the department’s enforcement of injunctions to an “invading army.”11
While the American Civil Liberties Union took Russo to court—and lost—Critical Resistance formed a coalition of community organizations to deploy its three-prong strategy. The Stop the Injunctions Coalition (STIC) hosted political education events in schools and community spaces to open a dialogue about policing, safety, and gentrification. Attendees received talking points, fact sheets, and a Know Your Rights pocket guide. The media team trained individuals who had been impacted by the injunctions to serve as spokespeople and filled city council meetings with hundreds of constituents.
“We just have unfortunate skin color, and I hate to say it that way because I have pride in who I am,” said Jessica Hollie, a grassroots activist, at a 2013 Oakland City Council meeting.12
That meeting, which lasted nine hours, ultimately did not go the coalition’s way; the council approved the hiring of police chief Bill Bratton, who supported the injunctions. But Critical Resistance kept up the pressure: In addition to returning to City Hall several times, organizers held a block party where they filmed testimonies of neighborhood residents impacted by the injunctions. The STIC grassroots and media outreach teams proliferated those videos on social channels and sent clips directly to several media outlets.
Finally, in 2015, STIC became the first grassroots campaign in history to defeat gang injunctions. The city not only ended the injunctions in Fruitvale and North Oakland but committed to not pursue future injunctions.
“Our work together inspired people targeted by the injunctions to become powerful organizers,” read a coalition statement announcing its victory. “It unified Black and Brown communities across the entire city in a common struggle, and drew us together to forge stronger bonds.”13
For the first decade of its existence, Critical Resistance mainly focused on bringing together various abolitionist organizers for strategy sessions. It hosted numerous conferences after its successful 1998 gathering, each one growing in attendance and solidifying relationships with similarly missioned organizations. The coalition to Close California Prisons is largely a result of longtime relationships that began during those years. The victory against gang injunctions took Critical Resistance into a new evolution of campaign work as it entered its second decade.
“When I arrived in 2010, we were relatively new in practicing a few things and our campaign against gang injunctions solidified our three-pronged strategy as a way of winning an abolitionist campaign,” CR’s Woods Ervin said. “Legislative, grassroots, and media outreach became the pistons that drove the work forward.”
Personal Revolution
Woods, who identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, grew up a Black, queer kid in the South, which meant their familiarity with law enforcement came early and often. They remember cousins and classmates “disappearing” for significant lengths of time, their female relatives troubleshooting how to maintain a semi-normal family life with the family constantly in flux.
Woods describes their radicalization as simply the logical outcome for someone growing up during the early 2000s. In the summer of 2005, they watched what they term the “rapid dispossession and gentrification” of poor Black communities in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, as the federal government’s revitalization plans and relief efforts deprioritized or omitted Black-majority areas like the Lower Ninth Ward. A year later, Chicago, where Woods had relocated to attend Northwestern, joined the national boycott known as a Day Without an Immigrant, also called the Great American Boycott. The boycott, which took place in nearly every major US city thanks to the proliferation of the idea on social media, intended to demonstrate the important role immigrants played in the economy—by having thousands of them in the streets rather than at work—and, in Chicago, galvanized crowds as large as 400,000 people, including Woods.14
Around the same time, Woods underwent a personal revolution as they began to identify as a nonbinary trans person. They began to seek out other Black trans youth in Chicago, many of whom were homeless and heavily policed.
“I was seeing Black and poor people in the South being dispossessed by the federal government, thinking about that dispossession on an international scale, and trying to support young people who are just like me and having them constantly be imprisoned because they couldn’t be folded into the mainstream,” Woods said. “These things starkly led me into an understanding of the relationship between the economy, policing, imprisonment, and poor people.”
Woods joined Critical Resistance in 2010 to assist in the campaign to end gang injunctions. They remained active in the Oakland chapter, doing research and outreach for subsequent campaigns like No New SF Jails, which successfully defeated plans to build a new jail in 2015 and forced the closure of County Jail 4 in 2020. That year, CR hired Woods as the director of programs, a position that has made them a media spokesperson for several campaigns including Close California Prisons.
Somewhere in all that, Woods found time to collaborate with some of the most established leaders of the abolitionist movement today: From 2014 to 2018 they helped rebuild Miss Major Griffin-Gracy’s Transgender Gender Variant Intersex Justice Project, and recently became a research assistant at Interrupting Criminalization, a data-driven abolitionist think tank led by Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie.
It sounds exhausting, but Woods has found ways to maintain sanity and stamina. Like many people I’ve met in this space, Woods has a sense of humor and finds ways to laugh at some of the more frustrating elements of progressive movements, elements emanating from both within and outside leftist circles. Woods sets off humor bombs in the face of misinformed—and usually offensive, or racist, or a combination of the two—opponents of decriminalization, and establishment politicians who claim to be leftist but hedge and balk as they reach for more moderate voters.
Woods laughs with their whole body, starting with the deepening of their dimples and ending with a bowl over, their eyes squinting behind black-rimmed glasses that nearly take a tumble as their head rebounds back into place. Their words begin to elevate to a higher octave than their more poised responses, and their Southern roots begin to breach the surface in the form of the occasional “y’all.”
In one of our conversations, I asked Woods about their personal collaborations, including the work they did with Interrupting Criminalization. The group had just released a report highlighting some of the major flaws in how law enforcement handles sexual assault. The report was entitled What about the Rapists?, a title I pause to give necessary deference to when I mention it to Woods.15 They begin to rear back with closed eyes and pursed lips. They’re trying not to break.
I push a little: “I mean, I think I’ve been asked this question by literally every member of the California legislature at this point . . .”
“It’s like they’re robots!” They break. They’re howling laughing and now so am I. “I look at them and I’m like, ‘How do y’all have the same question?!’”
From an abolitionist standpoint, the idea that sexual assault victims somehow get justice from the current system is almost laughable. According to a 2015 National Domestic Violence Hotline survey, 80 percent of sexual assault survivors are afraid to call the police, 30 percent felt less safe after calling the police, and 24 percent of survivors who called the police were arrested or threatened with arrest. Only 5 percent of the rapes that were reported to the police led to the perpetrator being arrested and even fewer—3 percent—led to a conviction. Seventy percent choose not to report their sexual assault to authorities at all.16
“As police and prison abolitionists, we’re saying that the 70 percent of people who are already outside of the system deserve more and better options,” the cleverly named report states. “For many survivors, relying on police to keep us safe from rapists is like fighting fire with gasoline.”
Woods continues with their near-delirious reaction to the absurdity that searching for an alternative to the current system is somehow less justice for victims.
“What are y’all doing about the rapists?” they say. “Like that should be our question: What about them?!”
Shutdowns
After I met with CR’s Isa and Viju, I was invited to sit in on a virtual meeting the coalition was having to see how the engine gears up in real time. Some weeks later, I signed on to the video conferencing application as a diverse group of individuals began to populate the mosaic interface. After some casual chatter about note-taking and scheduling conflicts as well as a brief introduction about my presence and intent, the meeting got underway with the moderator screen-sharing a document outlining the agenda. The main focus of this particular meeting would be decision-makers. Elizabeth from Show Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) reported back on a recent call she had with Natasha Minsker, a strategic consultant who had access to the governor’s office.
“She said the three biggest barriers to Newsom taking more action [on closing prisons] were the California Correctional Peace Officers Association [and its associated union], legislators representing towns where prisons are being closed, and the threat of possible future disasters like pandemics and wildfires,” Elizabeth said. “Her note says, ‘Newsom is also sensitive about what we saw with the pandemic—unexpected events happen, and if you have fewer prisons open you have less flexibility to move folks around in the event of an emergency.’”
A brief pause followed Elizabeth’s presentation to allow for everyone’s eyeballs to finish their circles. Of course, for abolitionists, the idea of people burning alive in a cage from wildfires—something that nearly happened in Susanville that very summer—or being trapped in a superspreader of a deadly virus is a humanitarian crisis and a good reason to close prisons, not keep them open.
The meeting continued with a power-mapping activity, where coalition members identified allies, neutrals, opponents, and their respective levels of power and influence. For example, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA) holds a tremendous amount of power both in numbers (approximately 30,000 dues-paying individuals) and influence: In 2016, for example, the association established a PAC with $8.2 million in member contributions.17 To combat this, the coalition needs to identify equally powerful allies. They do so by placing Jennifer Kim and Chris Francis, two of the governor’s budget consultants, on the equal but opposite side of the map as the CCPOA. Kim, who serves on the legislature’s public safety committee, has been outspoken about the need to reform the state’s juvenile detention policies, and Francis was the lead budget advisor for criminal justice reform and judiciary issues between 2018 and 2021. While neither of them has the financial backing of the CCPOA, they certainly hold the keys to an even larger sum: the state’s $306.5 billion in total state funds.18
Having identified the individuals and groups who are most likely to influence the governor’s decisions on prison closure, the coalition started to refine the three prongs of its campaign: The legislative outreach team opts to set up meetings with Kim and Francis and to apply pressure to the Senate’s Subcommittee on Corrections, Public Safety, Judiciary, Labor and Transportation by attending and speaking out at regular hearings. The media outreach team, noting the governor’s “unexpected events” apprehension, decided to put together a plan to flip the narrative about public safety—to uplift the stories of incarcerated individuals who were, for example, threatened by the pandemic or nearby wildfires. The grassroots team agreed to design a campaign to collect stories from people in prison as well as their loved ones. They also pledged to mobilize public comment for both local events and the subcommittee hearings.
