Locked Down, Locked Out (17 page)

They’re interconnected, of course—the communities and strategies and visions concocted while doing the “tearing down” provide a glimpse of that world beyond prisons. As the Pelican Bay prisoners demonstrated, strategies for connection and interrelation, for staving off harm and violence, can be forged mightily while straining against thick walls of injustice. But no matter how you swing it, decarceration comes with a healthy share of unpredictability. Without prescribed, violently enforced systems dictating how we move through the world, we’ll need to come together and pave our own roads forward. And they won’t always be smooth and clear.

Chapter 8
Telling Stories

“We need to trust people to be the experts on their own lives.”

—Domestic violence survivor interviewed by the StoryTelling & Organizing Project

Although Angelica’s entrance into the world undoubtedly ranks as my family’s most significant event of 2013, followed by Kayla’s reincarceration, the loss of a dearly loved inanimate object nears the top of my Big Deal list. On a sleepy late summer evening shortly before my sister gives birth, I’m ambling across the parking lot of a Seattle restaurant late in the evening with two old friends. We’re relishing the warm breeze and chatting about the possibility of ice cream.

But one of my companions stops short, two feet from my car.

“Oh my
God
,” she says, low. “The window.” The back window has been shattered through the middle, as if by a bowling ball. Glistening shards are still dropping lightly onto the back seat.

My heart thuds, pushes me forward. I plunge my hand through the hole. “Where is my laptop?” I say, patting the shard-covered seat, then pounding it. The sharp bits stick to my palm, which emerges wet and red-slitted. The laptop—along with the uncom
fortable shoulder bag in which it was kept, which also contained my only pair of glasses, an assortment of tampons, and a notepad filled with embarrassingly moonlike self-portraits sketched during a PowerPoint presentation at a recent conference—is nowhere. The back seat is empty.

One hundred thousand words of the book I’ve been researching and writing for the last eleven months, about prison and prisoners and, well, “crime,” are stored inside that computer. It also contains millions more cherished words—stories, articles, notes, humiliating diary entries from my early twenties, passwords “hidden” in the guise of other files—and all the music I’ve acquired since 2004. My many un-Facebooked photos. My book, my book.

“Do you have it backed up?” my friend’s voice floats into my ear, as if traveling down from the tree. No. I
have
an external hard drive—I’ve had it for seven months. I just haven’t yet removed it from its packaging.

You aren’t supposed to leave your laptop on the car seat. I have never left my laptop on the car seat, always stowing it away securely in a corner of the trunk. But tonight, I did.

I think fleetingly of the person who bashed in the window. I wonder what they must have been thinking in the act of bashing, whether they needed money, whether they were just teenagers trying to be badass, whether they had thought of me, whether they were thinking about me now. In the background, someone murmurs something about a police report. Calls are made on a cell phone, the name of the restaurant given, the make and model of the car.

“They’ve got your phone number,” I’m told. “We gave them the info about your case, so they’re on it.” In my head, a page from the book I’ve lost reads itself to me, slowly. One sentence asks, “Before you call the police, think, are they really going to
help—and who are they going to hurt?” Another reasonably points out, “The prison-industrial complex deals with ‘cases,’ instead of ‘problems’ and ‘human beings.’”

I grab for my phone. My palms are still wet, dotted with small red cuts. I stare at my phone, willing the police to call.

But over the next week, I wait and wait for the announcement of the triumphant return of my laptop. The police never locate it. My “case” is tucked into a bulging file with hundreds of other sorrowful, identical tales—dozens of stolen-laptop reports have already been filed in Seattle that summer. (“It’s kind of an epidemic!” one officer explains to me excitedly over the phone.) Arrests—probably of poor people and people of color—are undoubtedly made as a result of some of those stories. Some of those arrested are probably sent to prison, and some of them may not be guilty. When they get out of prison, it remains to be seen whether they’ll steal more laptops. Or rather, it remains to
not
be seen. I’ll certainly never know.

In fact, the process I bought into provided no support for me, beyond the false, momentary sense of security that came from filing a report. It was geared toward catching and punishing a person—or a bunch of people—rather than addressing the impact of my loss, or the causes of the “epidemic” in the first place. It’s just one component of a system obsessed not with solving problems or aiding victims, but with “crime.”

What’s Crime?

Under a framework based on “crime,” a person’s relationship to the
law
—not to other people—determines whether they have done something wrong. As soon as I pull out my notepad to interview Mariame Kaba of Project NIA, she tells me she’s not going to use the word “crime.” She clarifies, “We use the word ‘harm.’
The question is, ‘What have you done to someone else? How have you harmed another person?’”

The stealing of a laptop may violate a law, but the real reason it’s bad is because it hurt me. “Harm” is not always equivalent to the things the state considers crime.

It gets trickier. “Many things create harm that aren’t legally crimes,” Mariame says, and points to the kinds of business transactions that wreak havoc on the poor. From the genocide of Native peoples in the US and Canada to the rampant practice of wage theft against low-income workers to the construction of carcinogenic factories in poor people’s backyards to the profits reaped by the private prison industry at the expense of millions of lives, accountability-free forms of robbery and murder abound. Indeed, nonviolence activist Kathy Kelly writes in her post-incarceration memoir
Other Lands Have Dreams
: “What actions pose the greatest threats to US people and to the survival of our planet? Topping any rational list would be the development, storage, sale and threatened use of nuclear weapons, along with the stockpiling and use of chemical, biological and conventional weapons.” These are not classified as
crimes
under law, but they cause massive harm—the most massive harm.

Lacino Hamilton, who’s serving a life sentence in Michigan, writes to me about the hazy definition of crime. He questions why accepted models for measuring crime, such as the Department of Justice’s Uniform Crime Report, don’t include colonial, economic, political, international, and environmental violence, even when that violence kills vast numbers of people. “To pass these statistics off as anything other than a very narrow investigation of poor and oppressed people is a crime of sorts,” Lacino writes. Conversely, plenty of things that it would be tough to frame as
harm
are classified as crimes, punishable by law, especial
ly if you’re a person of color: undocumented immigration, drug possession, sex work, debt.

This issue of defining and assessing the value of the “crime” label is critical in the quest for “solutions.” If continuing to be black or brown or poor or gender-nonconforming results in future prison time, then no amount of “rehabilitation” is going to do the trick. As Angela Davis has written, “One has a greater chance of going to jail or prison if one is a young black man than if one is an actual law-breaker.”
¹
And as Glenn E. Martin tells me of the primarily black and brown population with which his organization works, “Some of our clients could get arrested for dropping their MetroCard in the subway, for looking at someone the wrong way.” In fact, a 2011 study by the Illinois Disproportionate Justice Impact Study Commission found that, for low-level drug possession charges, black people were almost five times more likely to be sentenced to prison as white people convicted of the same crime. For
all
crimes, black people were almost twice as likely to be prosecuted than white people, with Latinos 1.4 times as likely as white people to be prosecuted.
²
When we look at how the word “crime” is used to crush lives and hurt communities and worsen already painful situations, it ceases to be useful for talking about transformation.

Moving in a direction that drops prison as the go-to solution to pain or violence, I’ll use the word “harm” to refer to that pain or violence, unless I’m talking about a law-based situation that requires the use of “crime.” This is for accuracy’s sake, but it will also serve to put the focus on what’s happening to the people involved—and the victim or survivor’s right to heal—as opposed to the “breaking” of a law. A law can’t really get hurt, and it doesn’t feel pain when it breaks.

“Hurt People Hurt People”

“Crime” seems straightforward: It’s a violation of a law, which is spelled out on paper. “Harm” is more messy, more tangled because it is humanly, instead of legally, determined. People can’t be clearly split and categorized by “guilt” and “innocence,” by “bad” and “good,” or even, sometimes, by “perpetrator” and “victim.” People who do great damage have, usually, been profoundly injured themselves. The roots of harm-doing are knotted and deep. Mariame tells me, “Hurt people hurt people.”

My pen pal Lacino has been incarcerated for two decades, since the age of nineteen. Locked up for homicide, he has always contested his conviction (which is based on the testimony of one informant who was granted a reduced sentence after testifying against Lacino and others). Lacino reached out to me through a prominent activist who is pushing for a retrial of his case. He considers his incarceration a “crime,” but says it is not out of place in the progression of his life: a snarled sequence of received and inflicted harms.

Lacino’s mother gave birth to him at the age of fourteen while she was a ward of the state. Lacino was placed in foster care himself for three and a half years and then returned to his mother—but she abandoned him after a few days, leaving him stranded at a bake sale. She was poor, suffering from crack dependency, and, Lacino says, “barely surviving.” Lacino spent the next couple of years jumping from foster home to foster home. Soon after he turned five, he was placed with a long-term foster family—the people he’d live with for the next six years. While the Michigan Department of Human Services approved of the situation’s permanence and the family’s relative financial stability, Lacino describes those years as “slavery.” His foster parents put him to work on a near-constant regimen of household labor. They routinely
withheld meals and denied him new clothing as he grew, though they regularly bought new clothes for themselves. He tells of how, several times a week, they whipped him with a belt as he lay facedown on his bed, naked.

At the age of eleven, Lacino put his foot down. He left home and began living on the street, where he stole in order to eat and slept in stolen cars. There, theft and violence were not only normal, they were the prescription for staying alive. “My de facto family became the people I met in the streets—other black youth close to me in age, who, like myself, were fleeing dysfunctional living arrangements,” Lacino writes to me, going on to say that these relationships, adrift on constantly changing currents of circumstance, were not lasting ones. From the familial level to the community level to their relations with the larger world, “Our entire lives were modeled and based on alienation.” For these kids, stealing and fighting were justifiable not only because they were means of survival, but also because they were the ways of life they’d always known.

A Queensland, Australia, study showed that people who were physically abused as children were much more likely to offend later on.
³
(The study didn’t account for verbal and psychological harm, or the constant, sustained abuse of poverty, institutional racism, heterosexism, ableism, and other factors.) And according to the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, the number one indicator for whether teenagers engage in “criminal behavior” is whether or not they’ve been victims of crime themselves.
⁴
Glenn E. Martin tells me, “Most people who appear in court were themselves victims at some point. But no one in court would know it.”

Community Justice

One framework that aims to center human beings—to look at harms not as legal violations, but as problems that occur between people—is called restorative justice (RJ). Many of the restorative justice model’s principles have emerged from widespread indigenous practices that have been overwhelmingly dismissed by modern Western systems of power. Instead of exacting revenge, restorative justice’s goals are to build relationships, empower victims, support them in their healing processes, help them call out the behaviors of those who have harmed them, and bolster them in asking for the things they need to move on. Restorative justice strategies ideally also aim to guide people who have done harm in making reparations to victims (depending on the situation), making substantive changes that help prevent future harm, and staying accountable for keeping up those new behaviors.
⁵

A standard restorative justice response to harm is a “peace circle,” which brings together victims, the people who’ve done harm, families of each, and community members (or some combination of these), with the goal of working toward understanding, healing, and, in many cases, reconciliation and reparations. The circle—or the series of circles it may take to reach a resolution—may conclude with an “accountability agreement,” a consensus statement for moving forward. Often, these circles also help to forge new relationships and new understandings. In a peace circle, I could, theoretically, meet the person who stole my laptop and convey the long-lasting ways in which the theft hurt me.