This volume explores several ways antebellum policies have evolved to remain steadfast over centuries. Slavery in America has been fortified with steel bars and brick walls. It has been protected with barbed wire and clever legalese. For this reason, the criminal legal system stands apart from other systems of oppression, but it does not stand alone.
Rethink Your Definition of “Criminal”
Imagine being remembered for your worst day, being tethered to your biggest mistake, with no clear path toward redemption. What we did does not need to define who we are or what we are capable of becoming.
What is “criminal” anyway? The definition varies from era to era, from country to country, and from country to state. Villainous in one jurisdiction may be mundane in another. But imagine if our history books read:
Arrestee Gloria Steinem . . .
Recidivist Martin Luther King Jr. . . .
Federal convict Susan B. Anthony . . .
Prisoner 22843 Malcolm X . . .
FBI “national threat” Yuri Kochiyama . . .
Former lifer Nelson Mandela . . .
Ex-con Mohandas Gandhi . . .
Few people are remembered for their interactions with the law. So why define them this way while they’re still alive? Why is our capacity to see value in an individual nullified by a single moment from their past?
When I talk to people who have been incarcerated—or who are still incarcerated—we rarely discuss their criminal history. Too often, the branding on their state-issued uniforms allows the system to define them. This denies us great humanitarian discoveries. Ask yourself, At what point do we let go of what someone did, and start to see who they have become?
If you find yourself wanting to know more about prison life, about the crimes committed by people in prison, and so on, a multitude of books, TV shows, and films are at your disposal. Your curiosity is welcomed, and I will include additional resources where appropriate. This book is a reflection of my encounters with the people in the fight for social justice—people I’ve worked alongside and journalistically observed from afar. My impression of them is rarely influenced by the quarters that confine them or the details of their rap sheet.
This is a book about justice: racial, social, and economic. But it is also an exploration of humanity. How can we decree that killing another person is the most heinous act and then respond by sentencing them to death? When did we espouse the notion that to be free we must cage others? When did “justice” and “vengeance” devolve into synonyms? I hope that this book both changes your views of others’ humanity and perhaps provokes an examination of your own.
Anticipation by Gerald Morgan
1
The Way We Move
I first met Ali Birts in the spring of 2020. We had just started working together, and between a rare March heat wave, the detailing he was doing on his car, and his daily deliveries of resources to local halfway houses, he was struggling to keep cool. He draped a wet towel around his neck, buzzed his hair, and wore a black t-shirt with a gold fist in the center nearly every day. He took smoke breaks in the shade, standing in front of a fan positioned at the edge of the retractable garage door that served as a window for the office’s common area.
But as we rolled into summer, it felt like the world was burning. News about the police shooting an unarmed man—a man who looked like Ali—seemed to be breaking daily. Images of demonstrators, bloodied and blinded from encounters with riot squads, blared across our television sets. We had all been working remotely at that point, connecting virtually for daily all-hands meetings. One morning, a very different Ali popped onto the screen.
“Ali! I like your hair picked out like that, man,” said one of my colleagues.
“It’s time for a revolution, brotha,” Ali replied.
It was a physical manifestation of Ali’s radicalization. There was too much work to do for him to focus on his coif; too much rage to channel into a methodical strategy for dismantling the system that leads, according to Ali, to one of two outcomes for people like him: prison or death. All of this collided for Ali in the summer of 2020, and his Afro began to bloom.
Ali spent nearly forty years either in a cell or on the streets. His back often hunches as it loses the fight against years of trudging uphill with a ten-pound sledgehammer and a steel wheelbarrow to mine the rock quarry at Old Folsom prison. He takes marijuana smoke breaks to ease his physical pains. It makes his eyelids heavy, draping over brown irises like protective shields. His voice cracks and his eyes often water when he tells you about his weekend, years of mental anguish flowing through him from extended lockdowns spent inside a stuffy cell, torturing himself over mistakes he made as a kid that would rob him of his young adult years.
Ali was born in Menlo Park, California, and moved to the predominantly white suburbs of nearby Mountain View as a teenager. He was the only Black person at his high school and was constantly abused by racist classmates. He began to cope by fighting back and indulging in drugs. Between the violence and the drug use, he built a substantial conviction history. After decades of cycling in and out of jail, Ali was arrested with a gun in his possession—his “Third Strike” offense. California started counting felony convictions as strikes in the late 1990s, with each new offense allowing judges and prosecutors to inflate the number of years someone had to serve in prison: doubling after the second strike, and extending to twenty-five-to-life after the “strikeout.”
Ali languished in state prison until 2000, when a state voter initiative introduced a probationary sentence in lieu of incarceration for people serving life sentences under the Three Strikes law. In the new law’s understanding of what is “just” and what is just excessive, Ali deserved thirteen years in prison for the crime he’d been sent there for twenty years ago, so he was released on probation.
As a condition of that probation, Ali had to wear a GPS ankle monitor. He had to pay approximately $840 a month for the monitor, an expense that forced him to live in his car. At sunset, you could find him watching the horizon from a bench in Oakland, tethered to a wall with a spare outlet so the device could recharge. He knew going back to the old neighborhood, where he might be able to crash on someone’s couch, would mean going back to his old life, so he made the extremely difficult—and therefore extremely rare—decision to remain unhoused until he could afford a place of his own.
One afternoon, he met up with an old friend, Dorsey Nunn. Dorsey had taken a similar detour through California’s cellblocks, but he had been out for several years and was working at an advocacy nonprofit. He took Ali under his wing and walked him through the door of the new civil rights movement.
It turns out, the revolution was closer than Ali may have previously believed. The door he walked through with Dorsey belonged to the headquarters of All of Us or None, an organization advocating for the restoration of civil and human rights for currently and formerly incarcerated people. From chairs arranged in a semicircle, he listened to staff members talk about legislative strategies for a campaign eventually known as Ban the Box, a California statute that removed the “criminal record” indicator from job applications. He heard moving speeches about people “coming home,” struggling as he was to adjust to life in the free world while still trapped in the ever-expanding grip of the carceral system.
For the first time since coming home, Ali felt at home, felt welcomed and accepted, even with all his cards out on the table. His newfound support system connected him with Project ReMADE, an entrepreneurship training program for formerly incarcerated people run by Stanford Law School. He opened a car detailing business out of his garage and started earning a livable wage. In time, Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, the fiscal sponsor of All of Us or None Oakland, hired him as an organizer.
Ali met me a few years later when I was hired to develop a newspaper for All of Us or None. I was receiving a tutorial on the office’s US postage meter as Ali came back from a car rally. He was on fire about the demonstration, relaying to the rest of the staff that participants had stopped traffic in front of the Santa Rita Jail, a facility that has reported sixty-six detainee deaths since 2014. Drivers at the rally held signs, honked their horns, and demanded the release of people inside.
“Blowing the horn and all, that felt good,” Ali said. “Whenever I go somewhere it makes me feel good that I’m on the other side of the fence now. No one was out there honking to let Ali out when I was locked up.”
I had come to the revolution through the same door as Ali. I remember listening to Dorsey, who had become the executive director of LSPC, give an impassioned speech about this moment in history. He implored the crowd not to think about what they would have done if they had been alive for the 1960s civil rights movement, but rather, “Ask yourselves, ‘What am I doing in this movement?’ What are you doing right now to free the oppressed, to make sure our civil rights are restored?”
In rooms like this across the country, people have been sharing their experiences, strategizing ways to shift policies, and preparing for their own moment in history. These are the plotters and planners, the architects of a new movement. This movement looks and feels different from its predecessors, offering new methods of engagement and new paths toward progress.
Modern Abolitionism
Hearing about “abolition” may surface mental images of a stoic Frederick Douglass or an indomitable Harriet Tubman. But members of today’s civil rights movement talk about abolition with the same modern currency as they do social media and pop culture.
So why do some people think of abolition as a historical movement and others as a modern one? Simply, some people think slavery is a part of the past, and others think it is part of our present.
Today, more Black people are under correctional control—either in jail or prison, or under supervision by parole or probation departments—than were enslaved in the 1800s.1 Prison labor, in the manner of its predecessor, convict leasing, generates $11 billion a year in goods and services; workers make, on average, between $0.13 and $0.52 an hour.2 And despite a cacophony of voices calling for strengthening democracy, 6 million Americans, overwhelmingly non-white citizens, were denied a political voice in the 2020 general election due to disenfranchisement laws and modern-day poll taxes in the form of fluctuating ID requirements, transportation to polling stations placed strategically beyond the bounds of certain neighborhoods, and lack of paid time off to vote.3 For all these reasons, plus the ongoing violence against Black people, few individuals who examine modern criminal, economic, and political systems believe America has reconciled with its antebellum past. It’s a hard argument to deny when a legal exemption for slavery, as noted in the preface, still exists in the country’s foundational legal document.
Abolition—the act of abolishing a system, practice, or institution—is a loaded word. We’ve been ingrained with the belief that our society cannot exist in the absence of certain systems, particularly those concerning law enforcement and punishment. But systems like the American carceral one are unique in their fervor. In 2021 the US incarcerated its citizens at a rate of 664 per 100,000 people. For comparison, in the same year, Russia had a rate of 329 per 100,000, Norway had a rate of 54, and Japan had a rate of 38.4 The space for exploring alternatives to incarceration is vast, with plenty of examples from developed countries with similar economies and social problems.
