For some reason, we just can’t shake the need to prescribe subjugation as our sole purveyor of retribution. Locking someone away doesn’t bring us comfort: By a margin of three to one, victims of crime prefer holding people accountable through non-carceral options such as mental health treatment, drug treatment, restorative justice, or community service, as revealed in a 2022 survey.5 Incarceration also doesn’t fulfill its promise of rehabilitation or lower crime rates. It is simply what we know, a familiar default we’ve come to accept as justice.
This stagnancy in our way of thinking about justice and our unwillingness to explore alternative ways of achieving it impact not just America’s carceral system but also its political, economic, and social systems. Although each system differs in its impact, all of them marginalize, dehumanize, or deny people from underrepresented communities. However unhappy it makes us, though, we cling to it, willing to make changes here and there but never embracing the bold notion of abolishing it completely.
It seems like everyone took to the streets in the last decade—anti-maskers and neo-Nazis pounded the same pavement (more self-righteously than righteously, of course) as social justice demonstrators and women’s rights marchers. Whatever this system is, you have to seriously be reconsidering whether it’s working for anyone at this point. But that’s for another book. For our purposes, simply remain skeptical—in light of everything you’ve seen in the last decade especially—that we can continue to try to make the old way work. The barrier for entry into this book is abolitionist thought, because I have come to understand that no change to the current system can eradicate the inherent racism embedded in its foundation. Our society functions, by design, by working the many and benefitting the few. Going forward, let’s challenge the idea that racial equality can be attained through reforming a system that has, for the last 400 years, oppressed non-white individuals under its control.
An estimated 26 million people in the United States participated in demonstrations against police brutality in June 2020 alone, the largest showing of resistance in the history of the country.6 The following year, police killed more people than in any other year in a decade, only to outdo themselves again in 2022.7 This movement must be different from the ones before it.
Your dedicated trudging was not all for naught, nor is your feverish desire to hit the streets misguided. Showings of large-scale crowds protesting an injustice still signal to those vying for political power what they should consider in their platforms—and to those who are suffering under those injustices that they are not alone. This demonstration of solidarity is certainly meaningful, but this book will ask you to take additional steps, off the main drag. The strategies included here require an exercise not only in walking new paths but in finding new ways of thinking. For starters, consider this simple question:
At a point in history when we are being forced to reimagine everything from remote work to energy resources, why not take the whole thing back to the drawing board?
A Whole New World
When Disney+ came out in November 2019, my son was almost two years old, and my husband and I were eager to introduce him to the classics. We started with The Lion King, which prompted the following suggestions: The Lion King (live-action), The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride, The Lion King 1½, Around the World with Timon & Pumbaa, and two television series (The Lion Guard and The Lion King’s Timon & Pumbaa). We discovered there were endless sequels, prequels, and spin-offs of the movies we’d grown up with, as well as fourteen live-action remakes and a dozen more in the works.
I’m not sure which came first—the realization that studios could make money by dusting off old ideas, or the slowdown of generating new ones—and I’m not sure it matters. What does matter is how this creative void stalls our efforts to move forward when it counts.
During the pandemic, I remember seeing a photograph of a poker table in Las Vegas cut up with plexiglass dividers. Unable to come up with an alternative structure to address safety during a time of many unknowns, Vegas simply rebooted the old system with some minor tweaks. The result? In the five weeks after Las Vegas reopened, the number of daily COVID-19 cases rose tenfold.8
Meanwhile, one group decided to try an entirely new approach. Scientists, opting to inject messenger cells into the body rather than a dumbed-down version of the virus itself, trimmed decades off the process of bringing a new vaccine to market. The time it took Pfizer and Moderna to manufacture a first-of-its-kind vaccine and earn FDA approval was objectively a scientific feat. Could a similar diversion from the traditional way of doing things work for, say, civil rights work? Could an alternate path lead to an expedited arrival of a more equitable society?
Let’s first consider whether the current system can be “fixed.” Surely the solution would be drawn from the same source as the solution to most other modern-day problems: technology. However, our attempt to apply technology to the criminal justice system, in particular, has faltered at every turn, sometimes causing even more harm to Black and Latino communities. Centuries of over-policing inner cities, racial profiling, and policies like stop-and-frisk have generated a statistically biased—read: racist—control group. Consequently, any datasets governing technology for use in the criminal justice system are unreliable. The current system’s innovations, like pretrial risk assessment tools—algorithm-based software that purportedly predicts an arrestee’s risk of committing a new crime, being rearrested, or failing to appear in court—are not only dubious but, more likely, dangerous to vast swaths of marginalized communities.
I was a skeptical reporter when pretrial risk assessment tools were becoming popular about a decade ago, wary of previous evolutions that had only led to an expansion of prison. The advent of GPS monitors, as Ali’s experience exemplified, extended the reach and control of the prison system the wearer had supposedly been freed from. The promise of technology as a fix to almost anything, however, was making pretrial risk assessment tools the preferred method of determining pretrial detainment over cash bail by reformists. Chesa Boudin, who challenged the constitutionality of cash bail as San Francisco’s deputy public defender, was one such reformist. I called him for an article I was writing about what a post-bail system might look like.
A Rhodes scholar with a JD from Yale, Chesa was eloquent and convincing in explaining his crusade to end cash bail, although he didn’t have to be. The idea that you can be detained for long periods when you’re innocent and poor, but free to roam about when you’re guilty and rich, makes for a pretty strong argument against the practice. Chesa didn’t offer any thoughts on the use of pretrial risk assessment tools, but he gave fiery answers on monetary bail and launched into a broader conversation about the disadvantages poor people and communities of color face when they come up against the criminal legal system.
It was political rhetoric at its best—his seamless diversion from the algorithmic solution that, my investigation ultimately found, had designated 73 percent of pretrial defendants in Los Angeles as high risk, a number that should have been closer to 10 percent—and I shouldn’t have been surprised when Chesa ran for district attorney of San Francisco.9 To some it may have seemed odd, a man who’d served as a public defender now aiming for the top spot on the opposite side of the justice system, but Chesa’s campaign came on the heels of several similar ones. Larry Krasner, elected to run the Philadelphia DA’s office in 2017, was also a criminal defense attorney. Kim Foxx, who was elected Illinois state’s attorney in Cook County—which includes Chicago and is the second-largest prosecutorial office in the country—in 2016, ran on a platform of police accountability and overturning wrongful convictions. In fact, by the time Chesa announced his bid for DA in 2019, seven other prosecutors had already run and won on reform-based platforms.10
Chesa’s story and campaign were compelling. Both of his parents were sent to prison when he was a toddler, and he spoke passionately about the broader ecosystem of people harmed by crime—loved ones left with broken families, and communities devastated by the economic toll of endless criminalization. Between his moving speeches about his personal experiences and his keen intellect, he was a reporter’s dream. Often when I’d write articles about his campaign, this wonderful phenomenon in journalism would occur: An elegant and enticing opening paragraph formed almost effortlessly, the perfect sequence of words bubbling up from pages of notes. As we say in the biz, the lede—the opening line or paragraph of an article—wrote itself.
This intrigue also worked on the voting populace, with Chesa ultimately defeating a more moderate candidate, Suzy Loftus, who had been serving as the interim district attorney. I sent him a congratulatory message, then my resumé, and by Christmas I was heading up to San Francisco from LA to serve as his communications manager.
The movement of observers of the criminal legal system into advocacy jobs—such as my journey from criminal justice reporter to DA speechwriter—is not uncommon. In 2020 former Buzzfeed News legal editor Chris Geidner became the strategy director of the Justice Collaborative, a sort of consulting company for criminal justice nonprofits and progressive political candidates. CNN host Van Jones cofounded the nonprofit Dream Corps, an incubator for bipartisan criminal justice reform work. A year into his volunteer work inside prison, producer Scott Budnick abruptly left the film industry in 2013, using his profits from The Hangover movies to launch the nonprofit Anti-Recidivism Coalition. He returned to the silver screen in 2019 to produce Just Mercy, a very unfunny biopic about civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson. A need to immediately become more involved in addressing the problem of mass incarceration has been a natural response of those who simply look the system in the face.
A disclaimer: This relationship between Chesa and me does not end well. The day before the U-Haul arrived to pick up the last of the boxes in Los Angeles, Chesa sent me a late-night text saying we needed to discuss an exit strategy—my exit strategy—because of “messaging issues.” I still don’t fully understand his reasons. My messaging had seemed on point during his inaugural speech, which I drafted, but perhaps I was naive to believe those social justice–infused talking points would continue once he took office. We ultimately agreed to change my role to a “transitional” position, one designed to bridge the gap between his campaign comms team and the office comms team.
In all honesty, there is no lingering bitterness when it comes to my time with the DA. Fairly soon after I started, it became obvious that the idea of reforming the criminal justice system from within was a fantasy. You may think of so-called progressive prosecutors as the Vegas plexiglass of the criminal legal system. They run on promises to fix the problem from the inside out, and then do just enough to stem the bleeding without ever treating the hemorrhage. Their job, ultimately, is to prosecute, to send people into a confined setting that offers little in the form of rehabilitation or paths to redemption.
On the third day of Chesa’s tenure, he held an all-hands meeting in the office’s main conference room. I stood in the back, examining the body language of an edgy collection of suited attorneys. Lawyers tend to like clean lines, and the idea of having someone they used to go up against in court now calling the shots was less than ideal.
Some among the old guard had a different attitude, though. When Chesa approached the podium to make his address, their faces began to betray coy smiles. They looked at the thirty-nine-year-old attorney the way I look at my toddler son when he tries to eat Cheerios with a spoon and manages to get only one in his mouth. He was young compared to most of the staff, and his lanky body defeated any attempt to be intimidating, but the comparison here is more akin to the almost-adorable misconceived determination that Chesa shared with my cereal-fumbling child.
These deputies had already been through the tenure of progressive prosecutor George Gascón, Chesa’s predecessor. In his eight-year stint as DA, Gascón, who promised police accountability in his campaign, was never able to charge a fatal-force case against a police officer, including the highly publicized 2015 shooting of Mario Woods. This void in Gascón’s term, I would soon learn from my coworkers, tormented him. His administrative assistants said he would look physically ill during the months of protests when grieving families would occupy the steps of the courthouse, pleading for justice. The reality is that progressive prosecutors, hamstrung by legal protections for officers and staff resistant to change, make little headway when it comes to progress. Between 2013 and 2020, a timeframe that perfectly lines up with the rise in progressive prosecutors, only 142 of the 8,710 deaths caused by police led to criminal charges against the responsible officer or officers. Thirteen of those homicides led to the officer serving time in prison—13 out of over 8,000.11 That means less than 2 percent of police who kill are charged and less than 1 percent are imprisoned for their actions. This rate has held steady, as officers kill over 1,000 people each year.
At best, DAs like Chesa realize too late that the system is far more complex than they had believed, and their staff far less cooperative than they’d hoped. At worst, they are politicians knowing what they need to say to win an election.
Chesa was recalled by voters in 2021, unable to balance the implementation of progressive measures and a narrative that made the community feel safe. Ultimately, he was trying to slow a freight train powered partly by the old guard members of his own office. His strategy was always doomed, and it doesn’t matter whether he knew or not.
“Because It’s a Revolution!”
So now what? Where do we go from here? We find ourselves in the eye of a perfect storm. Civil unrest blares across our television sets in response to police violence, health care is in crisis, and environmental degradation is forcing us to reimagine every aspect of our lives. It is not enough to learn how we got here. We must start to imagine where we go from here.
The following pages detail the strategies of four modern abolitionist organizations. While movements require forceful interventions on multiple fronts, one particular focus is highlighted for each chapter to exemplify how an individual oppressive system can be targeted. I encourage you to look more deeply at any or all of these organizations, should their mission speak to you, and research the array of opportunities they offer for engagement.
The architects of change you meet here are reimagining communities, punishment, economics, and infrastructure. To understand these systems, we’ll first examine them individually, uncovering how they were conceived, how they operate, and the reasons they have failed the majority of residents in this country. With these discoveries in mind, we’ll examine the blueprints of organizations looking to dismantle current systems and rebuild more equitable ones. Some of these strategies redefine systems completely, while others borrow from existing systems to create new futures.
At the heart of each chapter is each visionary’s humanity. These are access points for you to see and understand their fight for liberation, in addition to their qualifications. They are driven and connected by their identity politics, a contemporary term for describing the coalescence of individuals of a specific marginalized constituency based on their shared desire for political freedom. This bond, strengthened like a diamond under pressure and constraint, has proven more infallible than those centered around belief systems, manifestos, or party affiliations. As such, they promise to triumph over and outlast outdated beliefs, corrupt rhetoric, and wavering political parties.
As this book’s title suggests, we’re going to be discussing revolution. It’s a word that’s popping up more and more with very little context and even less understanding. At the US Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, for example, a camera crew ran up on a woman sobbing and holding her face. “They maced me,” she said, shocked at the apparently new idea that actions have consequences. The reporter asked what she was doing when this happened, and she said she was attempting to (unlawfully) break into the Capitol building. When asked why she tried to break in, she responded, “Because it’s a revolution!”12
Girl.
Revolution, a political science term, is a fight for a fundamental change in political power that’s forced by the general masses organizing and overtaking an oppressive regime. The January 6 rioters were not fighting on behalf of the masses. They were fighting against the masses, attempting to overturn the results of a flawed but democratic election. Neither were they fighting to even the playing field, as exhibited by the “Camp Auschwitz” t-shirts and the Confederate flags being paraded through the Capitol. These are the vestiges of a political system that requires a revolution, not the values that power revolution.
“Elizabeth from Tennessee,” as the indignant rioter came to be named, was right about one thing: Revolution is necessary. As Michelle Alexander writes in her seminal book The New Jim Crow, “A civil war had to be waged to end slavery; a mass movement was necessary to bring a formal end to Jim Crow. Those who imagine that far less is required to dismantle mass incarceration and build a new, egalitarian racial consensus reflecting a compassionate rather than punitive impulse toward poor people of color fail to appreciate the distance between Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream and the ongoing racial nightmare for those locked up and locked out of American society.”13
This book details strategies on how to move toward a reimagined society. These movements are powered by people whose personal experiences have informed their paths. You are welcome to join them or find your own track. Just don’t turn away, because, like it or not, the revolution is here.
Race to Incarcerate: Introduction to Conclusion P. 1 by Carnell Hunnicutt Sr.
2
Systems of Oppression
Yes: make them aware of the possibilities they have denied themselves or the passiveness they have displayed in situations where it was really necessary to cling to the heart of the world, like a splinter—to force, if needed, the rhythm of the world’s heart; dislocate, if needed, the system of controls; but in any case, most certainly, face the world.
