I sat on a bench with my mentor Ken Oliver, watching a typical protest unfold in a typical fashion. People chanted, impassioned speeches were made, and a few lawmakers emerged from the building to issue some generic support.
“This ain’t gonna do it,” Ken said passively.
A Search for Answers
Ken was right, and I hated that, especially when I’d been working overtime, spending my days and evenings reading about different ways people have been murdered by police. But while my knowledge of politics and criminality comes from learned experience—higher education, two decades in journalism, hundreds of interviews, countless books and papers—Ken’s comes from learned and lived experience. As such, when it comes to the fight for liberation—a fight he’s had to personally take on in his own life—he’s often right.
Ken and I became friends after discovering our mutual passion for understanding how things work. We quickly disregarded the glaring differences that often cause passersby to double-take when a Black man and a white woman meet up for coffee or drinks. Although he’s not wildly tall, Ken does cast a shadow on most acquaintances. His frame is broad, his dark eyes heavy with severity, and his voice deep and stoic. When we first met, he had been out of prison for almost a year and still had his “prison body,” a bulky upper torso from a routine dictated by spatial limitations. In a full plank, he’d probably have a couple of feet between his extremities and the walls of his cell. This hardened physical appearance, remnants of a past life where it was required for survival, is juxtaposed with a generous heart, a love of learning, and a dedication to justice and self-discovery.
While my pursuit of answers got me into college, Ken’s got him entangled with the state. For example, in 1997 he wanted to understand how a guilty plea in the criminal case against him would save him from a life behind bars should he exercise his 6th Amendment right to trial. Los Angeles County Judge Stephen E. O’Neil had agreed to remove a prior “strike” offense and sentence Ken to fourteen years, but Ken had to plead guilty right then and there.
“When you’re talking 14 years versus the rest of your life, how long do you need, Mr. Oliver?” the judge said, per the court transcript. “You take it today or we go to trial.”
Ken wanted to check in with his family, sleep on it, and weigh the pros and cons, as anyone would have done when making a decision that would change the course of his life. He was denied that opportunity, so he decided to take his chances with a jury. After a four-day trial, the judge sentenced Ken to two life sentences under California’s new Three Strikes law, his penalty for inconveniencing the court.
While he was inside, Ken did what a lot of people in his position do: He started reading. He read books about criminal law and the mechanics of the criminal justice system. He studied the writings of Black revolutionary authors like James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, and George Jackson. Again, his pursuit of knowledge was met with punishment: His possession of Jackson’s work landed him in solitary confinement—guards insisted his interest in Jackson linked him to a prison gang and threw Ken into the security housing unit. He spent eight and a half years buried in a container beneath Pelican Bay State Prison, eventually joining others in a hunger strike to protest the cruelty of solitary. The strike helped settle litigation that ended indeterminate solitary confinement in the state. Ken was put back into the population, transferred, and, ultimately, released in 2019 under Proposition 57, which required parole consideration for “nonviolent felons” serving life sentences under the Three Strikes law.2
After spending twenty-three years and eight months inside, Ken walked out of prison and into the offices of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, the fiscal sponsor of All of Us or None Oakland. A year later, when I met him, he had climbed the ranks to become the organization’s policy director.
Between his experience and the carceral curriculum he designed for himself, Ken is the perfect sounding board for someone like me, someone with a little knowledge and a lot of questions. When I first started writing this book, I sent a draft proposal to some former colleagues for input. The draft included a statement that racial injustices and violations of civil liberties “are more prevalent today than at any other point in US history.” When some white reviewers had responded with “You can’t say that,” I called Ken.
“Yeah, you can absolutely say that,” he said matter-of-factly.
“But the images of American slavery, they’re just horrific,” I said, regurgitating the feedback I’d gotten. “Bodies covered in scar tissue from being whipped? People dying, malnourished in the fields?”
“I see those lashings in every Black man that’s been shot in the back by the police. I see guys out there in Angola [State Prison in Louisiana], pickin’ the same plantations as their ancestors.”
As he usually does, Ken pointed me to a revolutionary writer to get educated. This time it was Frantz Fanon, a political philosopher born in colonial Martinique. In his book Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon wrote, “For the Black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.”3 In other words, the experience of Black people may look different at various points in time, but the oppression remains the same for those who do not assimilate into white culture. We can keep making changes to the current system, but as long as it fundamentally remains intact, there is only one outcome for the systematically oppressed: Accept the status quo. Otherwise, the consequences can be dire, even deadly.
The lesson from Ken and Fannon stuck with me, as did the dismal results of the Stop Killing Us protest in Sacramento, and the mirror images of past and present demonstrations. I began to rethink how we could move the needle, how we could redirect our path to progress, how we could reimagine the revolution.
Thus started the process of identifying the people with lived experiences who are not just trying to move differently, but aim differently. Rather than targeting areas of the current system for reform, they’re focused on replacing the current system entirely. Their movements are wholly dependent on creative, outside-the-box thinking, informed by personal experiences. Their revolutions take on the way we develop communities, the prison system, the economy, and the infrastructure that dictates how our society functions. Together, we’ll visit their base commands where conversations are being had about not just how to tear down these systems, but what to replace them with.
But Enough about Me
When I first wrote this book, I omitted myself completely. In workshopping some sample chapters, however, there was a natural curiosity about who I was and how I came to cross paths with the people in this book. To that end, there are some stories about my journey to and around the modern civil rights movement early on. But as we enter the heart of the book—the chapters profiling the movement architects—these personal anecdotes fade away. My voice appears as a guide throughout, but my goal is to amplify the voices of others, not speak for them or over them.
Consider me an access point, a conduit into worlds you may otherwise not be aware of or exposed to. I will be your eyes and ears in the rooms of revolution—but I do not presume to own the messages that emanate from them. The ideas, plans, and theories contained in this volume are presented through the lens of those most directly impacted by systems of oppression. All the conversations detailed here regarding those ideas were consensually held, and each person represented has agreed to be portrayed. It is their up-close and personal encounters with the systems they are in conflict with that have informed their solutions. It is their willingness to have their stories told that allowed this book to happen.
Glenn Martin, a formerly incarcerated activist you will meet in the chapter “Reimagining Communities,” has a saying: “Those closest to the problem are closest to the solution and furthest from power and resources.” My intention with this book is to amplify the stories of system-impacted individuals, so they may be heard and considered in places of power they may not otherwise have reached.
Ivan Kilgore, whose organization is profiled in the aforementioned chapter on community building, is currently serving a life sentence. During his twenty-plus years of incarceration, he has self-published four books: a social commentary on incarceration (Domestic Genocide: The Institutionalization of Society), a memoir (Mayhem, Murder & Magnificence: A Memoir), an urban novel (King: The Early Years), and an anthology (My Comrades’ Thoughts on Black Lives Matter: A Collection of Essays and Poems). There’s a reason why you’re learning about him and his life from this book, not from one of the autobiographical writings he’s penned himself. Oppressive systems deny voice to the oppressed, whether by voter disenfranchisement or by denial of access—access to publishers, to computers, and, by design, access to mainstream society.
Even self-proclaimed advocates struggle with the existing barriers to authentically amplify incarcerated voices. Marc Mauer, for example, spent thirty-three years compiling data on sentencing discrepancies and voter disenfranchisement. As the executive director of the Sentencing Project, Marc used this data to campaign for criminal justice reforms. He is also the author of Race to Incarcerate, which traces the rise of mass incarceration and the racial dynamics that accompany it. The book, which was first published in 1999, won widespread acclaim, and a second edition was printed in 2006. Through a grant program, the publisher, the New Press, was able to send several copies to prisoners around the country.
About a year later, Marc received a package in the mail postmarked from a supermax prison in Connecticut. A recipient of the book had created a graphic novel version of the first chapter. Marc took the illustrations to his editor and struck a deal to create a full-length graphic novel version of Race to Incarcerate. But when accessibility to the original artist proved too difficult to maintain, rather than pressing on or scrapping the idea entirely, Marc hired another, established illustrator. This is what we in the movement call co-opting.
“We spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how we could work with Carnell [Hunnicutt] to produce the book, and ultimately, and sadly, it became clear that getting stuff in and out of the prison over and over again just wasn’t going to work,” Marc said at a recent conference hosted by Stony Brook University. “He was already disfavored by the administration, so with his permission we contracted with an outside illustrator.”
Carnell, who spent twenty-nine years inside a high-security prison in Connecticut and was released in 2023, received a one-sentence acknowledgment in the resulting book, Race to Incarcerate: A Graphic Retelling. He receives no royalties. And unlike Sabrina Jones, the illustrator who was contracted by the New Press, Carnell has not secured an additional book deal, although now that he is free he is hoping to create a book from his artwork.
“It kind of hurt that he went with someone else,” Carnell told me. “I would have done a better job because I was inside looking out. I could have added some things [Jones] couldn’t bring to the table.”
The profile chapters of this book are bookended by organizations that are run by incarcerated activists Ivan Kilgore and Heshima Denham. This is done intentionally to highlight the importance of placing the most impacted members of oppression at the forefront of this fight. You will hear from them directly, and I encourage you to seek out their independent works. Here, they are speaking through me in hopes that their voices will echo in the halls of power that have denied them visibility.
At the root of all oppressive systems is America’s unwillingness to grapple with its history as a nation of colonizers and slaveowners. The prisoners you hear from in this book are enslaved human beings: They work for the state involuntarily for little to no pay. Their experiences are crucial to understanding the uphill battle that lies before us and for attaining a clear picture of the systems we are up against.
A Word about Words
Many of the people you meet in this book will be identified by their first name after the first mention. With the awareness that I am your access point to these individuals, I use this technique to shorten the distance between you and people I’ve met.
There is one exception, though: I revert to my journalism training when it comes to authors and researchers I have not met, simply because I cannot claim to access them with the familiarity I can with the people I’ve profiled.
Some insufferably long terms lie ahead. While avoiding jargon to the best of my ability, I want to distinguish some words that are intentionally left . . . well . . . wordy, to avoid further dehumanization. If we are to speak to one another with new awareness and compassion, these jargon-curious words and phrases are necessary.
I often use the descriptor incarcerated individual, or something like it, to avoid the term inmate—a word barked by correctional officers in an attempt to spare themselves the internal torment that spawns from acknowledging the humanity of a person they’re tasked with treating like an animal.
All the revolutionary paths discussed in this book have a common theme: They begin and end with the humanity of the systemically oppressed. Removing subjugating nouns from the lexicon is one of many beginnings any personal or communal revolution must include.
Additionally, it will seem, at times, that racial justice and criminal justice are used interchangeably. I’ve come to understand the relationship between these terms to be the same as rectangles and squares: All squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares.
Systemic racism exists within a plethora of systems. It saturates economics, education, and politics. The criminal legal system is just one system among several that requires an overhaul. But the racism embedded in our criminal justice system is foundational and, therefore, cannot be removed through a process of incremental reforms. In other words, the system cannot void itself of racism because the system is built upon the intentional subjugation of African Americans. The criminal legal system is the square.
Criminalization, the act of making certain behaviors illegal and punishable by law, was used by post-Emancipation Southern states, still reeling from the economic damage of losing the Civil War, to ensure the continuation of cheap labor and a voting majority. Southern landowners lobbied to criminalize various aspects of Black life in a slew of new laws known as Black Codes. In doing so, whites could convict freedmen of things like felony vagrancy, rent them out to plantation owners in a new system called “convict leasing,” and disenfranchise them from the voter rolls because of their criminal history.4
The modern criminal justice system likewise provides a significant boost to states’ budgets through a sprawling network of factories and surveillance apparatuses, known collectively as the prison-industrial complex. The prison-industrial complex “employs” prisoners for pennies on the dollar to manufacture furniture, sew garments for retail stores, and cultivate agriculture. At the Angola State Prison in Louisiana, as Ken noted, prisoners work the same fields once harvested by slaves and indentured servants. Modern criminalization laws continue the legacy of voter disenfranchisement as well: 4.6 million Americans were barred from voting in 2022 due to a felony conviction.5
Similarly, jails and prisons are linked but not synonymous. Whereas prisons incarcerate individuals convicted of a crime, jails serve several functions within the criminal legal system. Jails primarily contain individuals awaiting trial—those who cannot afford bail, or who are remanded to the state for the risk they allegedly pose to the public—but may also be used for prisoners with short sentences or those who are due to appear in court.
