Locked Down, Locked Out (23 page)

“Everyday Abolition”

In a truly free world—a world freed of prison in its every incarnation—all structures related to “justice” would look different. The maintenance of “safety” wouldn’t translate into brutal policing, surveillance, punishment, in-school suspension, imprisonment, isolation, chained birth, torn-up families, shattered communities.

But the fact that those structures still exist, and will likely continue to exist for generations as we work to transform them, doesn’t mean that we can’t resist perpetuating them ourselves. Chanelle Gallant, co-organizer of Everyday Abolition, a political art project focused on living prison abolition in daily existence, puts it like this: “I see abolition as something that isn’t sort of a dreamy, lofty goal, that we need to wait for the revolution, but it’s something that we actually need to create in our lives every day.”
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In an email to me, Chanelle and her co-organizer Lisa Marie Alatorre list a few of the basics for enacting a world beyond imprisonment: universal education, mental and physical health care,
housing, food, child care, trauma-informed therapy and healing programs, substance dependency treatment, recognition of treaty rights, and antiviolence and violence prevention programs, to name a few. The goal of abolition, Chanelle and Lisa tell me, is to “collectively approach life in a way that seeks safety, sustainability, and self-determination as necessary and possible for every single person.”

Appropriately, the prison slang term for the day a prisoner is released is “a wakeup”—as in, when issuing a countdown, “twenty-nine days and a wakeup!” So what would a permanent wakeup look like?

Café Anti-Prison

Susan Garcia Treischmann’s eyes are wide open. They have to be: She runs Curt’s Café, a coffee shop in northwest Evanston, Illinois, that serves up delicious breakfasts and lunches, all the while functioning as a healing and training space for youth bound up in the criminal punishment system, many of whom are just emerging from prison. When I visit Susan at the restaurant around closing time, there are seventeen things going on at once, and she responds energetically to my interview questions while shifting furniture for an upcoming event, checking in on the kitchen, hollering instructions for tallying the day’s revenue, and greeting kids who poke their heads in to say hi.

Susan comes to the movement from the high-end food service management world. “All I am is a restaurant person,” she says humbly, though she’s guiding hundreds of people in moving past their criminal records into healthier, more stable, more sustainable lives. Though Susan is trained in restorative justice, Curt’s Café is a different kind of space from a circle or a peace room. The place is a sort of anti-prison, a microcosm of a society based
on open eyes and human connectedness, on lifting that veil that allows us to ignore poverty, racism, homelessness, and illiteracy. Susan is responding to social problems with training, mentoring, and community linkages instead of surveillance and incarceration, striving toward the kind of world the Community Builders kids conjured up in their circle, a world in which people are active and feel whole and know their neighbors.

At Curt’s, “at-risk” youth—people aged fifteen to twenty-two who’ve been caught up in the system or seem to be headed that way, many of whom are poor youth of color—can come to learn both job skills and life skills, becoming part of a community that both cares for them and holds them accountable. (Susan doesn’t hesitate to chew them out if they slack.) They receive a stipend, and if they stick with it they may well be hired on staff.

Plenty of rehab centers have businesses attached, but Curt’s is not a “jobs program.” Joining the café community is intended to be transformational: Youth come in having gotten stuck on one or more “wrong paths,” and, ideally, come out heading in new, healthier, safer directions. When they start meandering down harmful roads again, they’re not punished or banished. Instead, they’re held accountable.

It’s not simple, by any contortion of the imagination.

“The first month, they don’t show up,” Susan says. “Last week, I had three kids come in very late because they were out partying the night before. So rather than firing them I sat them down and I’m like, ‘All right, so who was affected by this?’ They say, ‘Nobody!’ Then we went through the ripple effect. Three people walked out because I couldn’t get them coffee. People called on the phone and didn’t get an answer. And how about the next group of kids that want to come into the program? If those kids think we’re a bunch of losers, they’re not going to come in.”
Usually, she says, the kids start showing up—they don’t want to let their community down.

Meanwhile, volunteers are paired with each youth, and mentors and counselors are on hand. Curt’s has literacy tutors, math tutors, GED tutors. Formerly incarcerated youth are taught how to open a bank account. Mentors can help kids living in extreme poverty procure the basics, like medical care. Instead of sending people to a jumble of different support programs for job skills, life skills, and counseling, they get it all at Curt’s, in ways that are naturally linked, Susan explains:

We wash dishes with them and we talk about, “What’d you do last night?” or, “Wouldn’t there be a consequence to beating that guy up? If you end up back in jail then
he
actually wins that fight, right?” They don’t have to look at us, we’re all at the sink. When we’re doing barista training and teaching them how to make espressos, we’re really talking about, “Do your parents drink coffee at home? Oh, your dad just left home. That must be hard....”

I think of how advocates of restorative and transformative justice talk about how those practices need to be ways of life, not just responses to harm. Curt’s is an effort to cultivate that way of life while maintaining an awareness that kids are getting tripped up in the system for all kinds of reasons—that through pipelines of racism, poverty, and fractured communities, they’re tumbling toward a “futureless future.” The café is building an alternate way forward, not only by teaching skills and creating community, but by modeling the kind of society we
could
be.

“Hand-holding”

On the Everyday Abolition blog, performer and activist Micha Cárdenas writes that isolation can be a type of violence: “Sometimes violence looks like being disconnected from community, lacking a community structure of support, struggling alone, reaching out for help, trying to get somewhere safer, or watching others struggle and not feeling able to help.”
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Susan stresses the importance of “hand-holding” for people who are alone and struggling. “Hand-holding” has a negative connotation, akin to coddling. But holding hands is one of the most basic human gestures of connection. It calms anxious neurons, easing stress and diminishing that so-often-unhelpful emotion, fear.
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It conveys both closeness and vulnerability—if you’re using your hand to “hold,” you’re not using it to fight.

I ask Susan if she thinks that this metaphorical “hand-holding” could actually propel us toward a different approach to social problems, transforming prison-nation tactics of supposed harm prevention. She says yes: “If we were to make our system really about that, we would end the cycle. All that’s stopping us is ourselves.”

Of course, though Curt’s Café functions as a transformational community, it still exists within the clutches of a prison society. Right now, four of the program’s kids are homeless. “That’s a really hard thing for us to come at,” Susan says, adding that untreated drug and alcohol dependency are other common issues that often interfere with progress. Of the homeless youth, Susan says, “They can’t be here and feel safe. They’re falling asleep all the time, they’re not eating well. We’ve got one kid, we were able to get him to a dentist—his wisdom teeth are growing in badly. A volunteer is willing to pay to have them removed because he’s in so much pain. But where’s he gonna recupe? On a park bench?
Didn’t think about that end of the problem! So we’re learning as we go.”

#InsteadofPrisons

The question of the homeless wisdom tooth patient raises an inevitable quandary: Even as we struggle to cultivate more just systems of living together in the world, we’re inevitably also still living inside the prison nation. The wisdom tooth is fixed, but the structures that keep this kid and millions of others in destitute poverty and bound up in the criminal punishment system cannot be “solved” through the gift of that surgery. Places like Curt’s set a transformational example: cultivating a new community, one filled with support, education, delicious food, and possibilities for the future. But how can we bring Curt’s to the world? As the prison walls crumble, how do we concretely redirect the energy that has gone into powering prisons and funnel it into the things we need to grow a sustainably connected, just, safe, interesting, fun, pro-humanity society?

In November 2012, members of the group Decarcerate PA assembled a large model of a “little red schoolhouse” (complete with a chimney) and a row of school desks (complete with notebooks and apples) on the grounds of a construction site where the building of two new prisons had commenced. Then they sat at the desks and linked arms, chanting, “Tear down the jail-house, build up the schoolhouse.” When seven of them were arrested over an hour later, prison construction vehicles were forced to literally tear down the model schoolhouse and clear out the desks, notebooks, and even apples, in order to enter the site and resume building. The action, carried out “alongside a public tribunal where prisoner family members and formerly incarcerated people provided testimony in support of moratorium on
prisons,” may have been the first-ever nonviolent sit-in to block prison construction.
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Decarcerate PA is not focused
only
on halting prison expansion and reducing populations; members are also envisioning what a post-prison world would look like and live like. They draw a firm connection between increased prison funding and decreased education funding (Philadelphia has recently closed dozens of schools in poor, mostly black neighborhoods), and the need to reverse those trends. Member Layne Mullett emphasizes that the group rejects any talk of students being more important than prisoners and thus more deserving of funding; the goal is to get people out and shrink the budget, freeing up more money for education and other priorities that build community.

Decarcerate PA partners with teachers’ unions, student groups, labor groups, civil liberties groups, and immigrant rights groups. Incarcerated people and their loved ones form an integral part of the coalition. “We must understand we’re part of a larger movement,” Hakim Ali, a founding member of the organization, tells me over the phone.

In late spring 2013, Decarcerate PA organized a 113-mile march from Philadelphia to the state capital of Harrisburg, where they arrived just in time to hold a rally aimed at legislators returning to debate the annual budget. Along the way, members stopped off in towns large and small, holding community discussions and asking residents to make flags illustrating their answers to the question, “What would you build instead of prisons?” They posed the question to people in prisons, jails, and detention centers, too. Then they blasted the answers all over the Internet, creating a “100 Days of ‘Instead of Prisons’” brainstorm marathon, posting a flag photo on their website each day and using the hashtag #insteadofprisons to generate discussion via social media.
Most of the ideas are founded on principles of coming together: “Libraries!” “Youth orchestras!” “Healthy lunches, books, arts programs!” “Fully funded birth centers!” “Internet access!” “Mental health care!” “Swimming pools in every neighborhood!” And vitally: “Family dinners with
no one
at the table missing!”

SOS

Reginald Akkeem Berry, one of the formerly incarcerated activists who led the charge to close down Tamms, knows something about missing family dinners, having spent seventeen years behind bars—eight of them in the supermax prison where, every night, he ate alone. But, he says, his wife and sons stuck with him over the years, visiting and calling when permitted, writing when not. “As one year turned to five, five to ten, ten to fifteen, they helped me remain focused until I was emancipated,” Akkeem tells me over the phone. Akkeem is a former gang leader (ex-chief of the Four Corner Hustlers), and during much of his time behind bars he continued to occupy a position of authority in the gang. It was his sons, he says, who inspired him to break ties with the gang and shift to anti-violence organizing, not only with the Tamms campaign, but also within his own neighborhood. The motivation came to him in sleep, midway through his time in prison.

“I had a dream of a ship being tossed to and fro in the water, with someone standing at the edge, holding up a sign. It said ‘SOS,’” he says. “I woke up in a sweat. I interpreted this as my sons, my sons and the kids in my community—those kids were in turbulent waters. They needed help.”

That energy carried Akkeem forward when he was released, and he went on to create an “SOS” of his own: an organization called Saving Our Sons Ministries, geared toward helping youth avoid violence and creating opportunities for jobs, mentorship,
sports, arts, and a five-week summer enrichment program called Keep Kids Learning. He and his wife “adopted” Delano Elementary School, which they had both attended themselves. They cultivated programs to “change the school’s mentality,” including a playground renewal project, clothing and school supplies giveaways, and a yearly peace rally. Just having more adults maintain a visible presence in the school area makes violence less likely, Akkeem notes.

His observation circles back to that transformative logic: Connection and community accountability—
not
prison and policing—are the routes to a safe, just, compassionate, free society. Akkeem critiques the “Safe Passage” program, a city-sponsored, police-led program with a similar aim that stations adult monitors, subject to a rigorous criminal background check, along school routes. In theory, he says, it’s a great idea—but the adults involved aren’t actually people from the community. “You could send a Harvard PhD out on that corner, who never had a [criminal] case [against him], and let him try to tell the guys to keep it moving,” Berry told DNAInfo Chicago last year. “What’s gonna happen? They’re gonna run him off that corner.”
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