- 2 days ago
Part 2 of the series taking a look at how Covid-19 has impacted Mass Incarceration and the call for Abolition
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00:00The United States is 5% of the global population, but has nearly 25% of the world's prison population,
00:09making this nation the largest jailer in the world.
00:13Where there is poverty, there are prisons.
00:16And that's not a coincidence.
00:18It's a continuum of the criminalization of the most harmed and targeted communities in this country.
00:23Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, if there were ever a time to put pressure on elected officials and judges to uncage our people, it is now.
00:48The criminal justice system in America operates in the dark.
00:53We actually don't know how many people have died.
00:58Equal Justice Initiative reports 345 at the beginning of May, but we actually don't know.
01:07The inhumanity of being in prison, being in sardine camps, and not being able to go anywhere.
01:14We can reduce our prison population significantly.
01:17We can reduce by releasing nonviolent prisoners on house arrest.
01:21We can reduce the prison population by releasing people who can't afford cash bail.
01:27We can stop putting people in jail for fines and fees.
01:30We know people have no money right now.
01:32We know people aren't working.
01:33Don't put them in jail for that.
01:35We can release medically vulnerable people right now.
01:37And there are people with days left on their sentence, months left on their sentence, or people who serve 15, 20 years who just have six months to a year left on their sentence.
01:48And they're being left to die days away from their release from COVID-19.
01:54And it is inhumane, and it's something that we can remedy right now if only we cared about people who have been labeled inmates.
02:03There are so many things that we could do that would disrupt the possibility of harm coming to not only the people who are incarcerated in jails, but the people who work in jails, the people they go home to.
02:21You have people double and triple bunked in some of these overcrowded prisons.
02:25The numbers coming out of Chicago's Cook County Jail, which is one of the largest jails in the country after L.A., it's horrific.
02:33The explosion of the prison system, it just didn't happen today.
02:40It's happened through all these different parties, be it Republican, be it Democrat.
02:48You know, every administration has grown the prison industrial complex to where it is today.
02:58Number one, we live in the, not only the largest prison population in the world, but the largest prison population in the world history.
03:07We know that this system of mass incarceration, the modern American prison industrial complex, is actually a recent invention in the last 40 to 50 years.
03:17It's what what immediately comes to mind is the young man who was in New York in and, you know, he was in there for a crime that he didn't commit.
03:31They said that he stole someone's book bag.
03:33Then, of course, time went by, not just a day, not two days, not a week, not months.
03:38Three years went by before they finally said, hey, we're going to drop the charges and let you go.
03:44Throughout those three years, that person could not turn off the trauma.
03:48And that's indicative of a lot of people who will find themselves in the prison industrial complex.
03:56I know people that's been in a holding cell for two, three years.
04:01They have not seen a judge at all.
04:05That's.
04:08That is an unbalanced system.
04:10That is an unjust system.
04:11People are out there really, really struggling and suffering.
04:17And as a result of the people challenging this system in the way of theft or whatever, their solution, the system solution is to put them in a put them in a jail.
04:29Jails are overcrowded.
04:31Greater for prison where my father came from.
04:33That prison was built to hold like 2000.
04:37And I think it had more than 3000 people in there.
04:40And then they built another prison called Phoenix right across the street, less than a mile away.
04:45That's holding more than that.
04:47And it's smaller.
04:48So this isn't a a partisan.
04:53I mean, the numbers of people we have in prison is like a phenomenon.
04:58How do we get there?
04:59That happened as a direct result of the so-called war on drugs, which was always really a war on black and brown communities.
05:08Our government has been at war with black and brown people criminalizing poverty, criminalizing sickness and criminalizing blackness itself.
05:17And as a result, the black community is being impacted more strongly than anybody by the vulnerabilities of COVID-19.
05:27So we know that this is a money-making scheme.
05:31We know that it's putting profit over our people.
05:34And we know that now with the additional crisis that was already a crisis.
05:38But with the additional crisis of COVID-19, that we're literally trapping people in cells and cages with each other with no plan for how to take care of what is there in a human rights.
05:50My five-year-old son was killed by an LAPD detective.
06:02And after his death, I just could no longer cope with the pain, the grief, the loss and the hardships of my life.
06:12And at that point, I began to drink.
06:15I began to drink, to drown the disappointment, the pain and the grief.
06:21It escalated to drug use.
06:25And for the drug use, I was criminalized.
06:29And the drug use sent me to prison.
06:33And I remember asking the court to help me that I needed help and sort of throwing my life and my loss on the on the judge's desk.
06:47And he still just remanded me to prison.
06:51And they chained me and locked me up.
06:55And I'm like, I thought, what is the use?
07:00You know, how could a world be so harsh, be so, so cruel?
07:10There are hundreds of thousands of women right now locked up that have had difficult journeys in their life and just need a hand up.
07:19Just need not to be criminalized, but to be supported and helped.
07:23And they're locked up during a pandemic.
07:34Incarcerated people awaiting trial in jail have nearly twice the mortality rate of people who have been convicted and are serving their sentence.
07:42Nearly a third, 30 percent of incarcerated people in prisons and more than a quarter, 26 percent of incarcerated people in jail, reported high blood pressure.
07:51Asthma was reported for 15 to 20 percent of incarcerated people.
07:55These are all comorbid conditions for COVID-19.
07:58With the powers that be refusing in some cases to release our people from cages, it exposes this nation's commitment to a politics of disposability.
08:06With judges and politicians deciding with the wave of a hand who deserves to live and who they allow to die.
08:12These scenes of a chain gang were filmed on January 21st and 22nd, 1938.
08:17In the state system, Angola is the largest prison and is known for its brutality, regards on horseback like it's 1850, forcing people to work in the hot sun and do all manner of hard labor.
08:36And we think, well, that must be because the person who's doing that did the worst crime imaginable.
08:45And so I want to talk to you about somebody named Fate Winslow, a black man.
08:51He was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.
08:58His offense was that he sold $20 worth of cannabis, marijuana, to an undercover police.
09:09So white men are literally sitting there getting wealthier and wealthier and wealthier off of the marijuana industry.
09:21While a black man, like Fate, is being sent to places that were deemed dungeons.
09:31You know, when the spy boys of justice run over you, you're seen as guilty and having to prove yourself innocent and not innocent until proven guilty.
09:41And so the whole fullness of the law, the weight of the law is not only pushed on you, but on your families.
09:48It's a strain.
09:49We know that racism is America's original sin.
09:53It is as American as apple pie.
09:56And so it isn't that we took some left turn somewhere.
09:59From the very foundation of this nation, we've been infected with this disease.
10:03For this pandemic to be all across the world, and that America had invested in our medical system,
10:12like it invested in the prison system, we'd have been much more ready, much more able to respond and contain the effects.
10:24We wouldn't have 100,000 people dead right now.
10:29Two million locked up in places that it's going to run rapid through and infect them also.
10:36As we look at, you know, the conditions in prisons and how they have been affected by COVID-19 in service, hotbeds for the spread of this virus.
10:46It's consistent with everything else we've talked about today.
10:50The lack of value of human life, the exploitation of black and brown bodies.
10:55You know, I can draw a very close connection.
10:59Not only do we see that there is a lack of resources being committed to individuals who are incarcerated because of how we perceive them as a society.
11:08And so that is a further exposure of just how disproportionate our access to health care is.
11:19But as we look at issues like George Floyd, as we look at issues pertaining to civil unrest based on our criminal justice system,
11:27I believe what is absent in the discussion is the recognition of our over-reliance on our criminal justice system as a nation.
11:35I don't think that we are prepared for criminal justice reform in any serious way until we recognize the economic exploitation that this nation profits from based on the structure of our criminal justice system.
11:49I'm not only talking about the prison industrial complex.
11:53I'm not only talking about the underground economy that takes place from crime.
11:59I'm talking about the very upfront economy that we depend on.
12:04You know, I look at the numbers and the reports, how disproportionately black people are affected and how our death rates are amongst the highest.
12:16This plays over and over and over again throughout our history that we don't get the level of service,
12:25the level of health care, the level of resources that are available in white communities.
12:33We teach our children that crime doesn't pay, but actually crime pays very well.
12:38It pays the lawyers, such as myself.
12:41It pays the judges, the law enforcement.
12:44And we have more police today than we've ever had in history.
12:47We have our city police.
12:49We have our county police.
12:50We have our state police.
12:52We have our federal police.
12:53We have our secret police.
12:55We have our secret police who watch the secret police.
12:57We have our probation and parole guard.
13:00We have the prison guards.
13:02We have the companies that sell goods and services to the prisons.
13:06We have the items that are exported from the prisons.
13:09And all of that, all of that depends on an over-incarceration of our society.
13:14The whole notion and question between whether we legalize marijuana or not is less about a moral
13:21issue and more about the fact that so many people are incarcerated based on these minimal
13:27drug offenses, right?
13:29And the loss that would be incurred to the job market, the loss that would be incurred to
13:35our country's economic structure if we begin to start releasing people.
13:39That is why it is such a conflict when we see dangers like COVID-19 and the notion that we
13:46should be releasing people that don't register as the largest threat to our society and should
13:52be released because it all becomes dollars and cents at the end of the day.
13:55The so-called war on drugs has always been a storefront operation created for the sole purpose
14:01of laundering the institutional, systemic, and coordinated assaults on Black and brown
14:07communities in the United States of America.
14:09Though the Just Say No campaign is a thing of the past, this country is still just saying
14:14no to dismantling a racist system that funneled drugs and guns into Black communities.
14:19It's still just saying no to food and health benefits for affected families who have been
14:25forced into cycles of poverty and violence.
14:28It's still just saying no to then treating the inevitable rise in addiction as a health issue.
14:33And it's still just saying no to decriminalizing Black, low-level drug offenders and reinstating
14:40their basic rights to citizenship after their incarceration.
14:44This system is not broken, and it never has been.
14:47It is killing, incarcerating, and criminalizing all people it was intended to oppress and destroy.
14:54It's past time to dismantle mass incarceration and the purposeful mass criminalization that fuels it.
15:00It should not have come to this.
15:01The COVID-19 is amplifying abolitionist movements that have existed in this country since Harriet
15:07Tubman's successful Kumbahi River Raid and the expansion of the Underground Railroad.
15:12When most people talk about abolition, prison abolition, they think, oh, all of a sudden
15:17these prison doors are going to fly open and dangerous people are going to begin to populate
15:22our neighborhood.
15:24But abolition is an evolution.
15:26It's a theory of change.
15:28It's the idea that says that we're going to lean our culture more into that which makes
15:33it healthy and away from that which is punishment.
15:38And so when we think about abolition, we should think less about the absence of prisons and more
15:43about the presence of institutions that are life-giving.
15:46Prisons occur at the end of harm.
15:50How do we disrupt harm before it begins?
15:52If you think about us spending a minimum of $200 billion a year in incarcerating people, often
16:01for very petty offenses, and I'm talking about everyone from the people who work in night court
16:06to fines and fees that are paid to the actual running of various facilities, how could that
16:12money be better spent on ensuring that people had work?
16:16How could that money be better spent on education?
16:20How could it be better spent on green spaces, on health care, on all that we know that actually
16:27makes a society strong and healthy and frankly crime-free?
16:32When people ask me why I believe in abolition, it's because I see abolition happen when, you
16:38know, wealthy white college dudes, you know, are harming other people in their campus community
16:45and the response isn't lock them up, the response is, what do we need to give this young man
16:50to make sure that he learns his lesson and doesn't do it again, right?
16:53That's kind of like on the path towards abolition, you know, that people who are killing black people
17:00with impunity, the answer to their harm isn't like lock them up by the state or by, you know,
17:07the criminal injustice system.
17:08The response is, well, you know, if we just like got them the mental health services that
17:12they needed, right?
17:13So what happens when we extend that to everybody, to black people, to poor people, to folks without
17:19papers to be in this country, et cetera?
17:23I'm certainly an abolitionist.
17:24I rarely find an instance in American culture where a prolonged period of incarceration is
17:29the proper remedy for whatever issue that they're facing.
17:32And we are guilty of this ourselves.
17:34We have other, the prison population, but we did that so much so that we joined our politicians,
17:40our communities, voted for bills that made sentences longer for black communities, that
17:46targeted black children, that targeted black women and losing and exposing the women in prison,
17:52almost a 900% increase in the past two decades.
17:56So, and it's all about how we define these people.
18:00We don't realize and we don't appreciate that our best and brightest are actually in prison.
18:10We don't have to think about this.
18:12We don't have to think about this.
18:13We don't know.
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