Ep. 256: are prisons obsolete? (w/ Sheryl Weikal)

[00:00:04] Speaker A: On this week's episode of the Joag Fan Cave, while discussing the movie Get Out, I told Kristen about the concept of Afro pessimism. [00:00:12] Speaker B: All right, before you do, how. How did she. How did she get on with the movie, by the way? Did she enjoy it? [00:00:17] Speaker A: She loved it. [00:00:18] Speaker B: Yeah, fine. [00:00:19] Speaker A: That's the most important thing for me. And then, of course, you can go on our Kofi and listen to it if you want to know more about that. But, yes, she loved it. [00:00:26] Speaker B: Great. [00:00:27] Speaker A: Are either of you familiar with the term Afro pessimism? [00:00:31] Speaker C: I am, not, actually. [00:00:32] Speaker B: Nope. Likewise. Not one of his. [00:00:35] Speaker A: All right. Well, at its core, the idea of Afropessimism, which was coined by Saidiya Hartman, is that the United States, having been completely conceived and built on slavery, is still a slave society. It shapes every element of our culture to this day in ways both visible and invisible. And there's no way of sort of reforming our way out out of that. As Ryan Pohl put it, quote, according to Afro pessimism, the modern world was created by black slavery. The world of white masters and black slaves is the world we have inherited and the world we live in today. [00:01:12] Speaker C: I would agree with that. [00:01:13] Speaker A: Yeah, right. I mean, it's. I think this is a thing that, you know, maybe 20 years ago when this kind of thing was first being put out there, people might have pushed back a bit more on. But I do think as there's more sort of leftists on the Internet and whatnot, it's a little hard to argue with. [00:01:31] Speaker B: Yeah, it's. Again, once again, it's. It's. It was one of the biggest takeaways for me from Naomi Klein that so fucking much of what you have built your nation on is reformed versions of statutes that were put in place to control people. [00:01:53] Speaker A: Right. [00:01:54] Speaker C: The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein is a phenomenal look at exactly this. And if you look at the early Supreme Court decisions on the 13th and 14th amendments, they talk about removing the badges and incidences of slavery, which is still language on the books today. So I don't think it's even a controversial statement. [00:02:18] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Although living in a fascist society, it is somehow a controversial statement. So, you know, there is that. But I do think this concept is actually really instructive for everything we're going to talk about today, because you don't get to the prison industrial complex, mass incarceration, and calls to defund, dismantle, and abolish the whole damn thing without slavery for first. And there's a reason that every country on earth doesn't have the exact same fucked up system that we do. And that reason isn't simply things like, oh, well, they have a smaller population or they have a social safety net or things that we like to say to excuse why we can't do certain things. There's not. That's not to say that there are western countries that have eradicated racism from their systems and therefore their carceral states are totally cool and fine. Not what I'm saying. However, it's important to recognize that the size of our prison complex and the demographics of those trapped inside of it are very much the results of living in a country that is still shaped in its entirety by slavery. And probably the first time that I really fully understood this was when I read a little book in my master's program called Steel Driving Man. John the Untold Story of an American Legend. Have you guys ever heard of the story of John Henry? [00:03:43] Speaker C: A long time ago. Oh, I think I read that in college. So you are taking me back? Yeah. 25 years, right? [00:03:51] Speaker A: Yeah, Mark, I'm assuming probably not. [00:03:53] Speaker B: Or like 98 of all American cultural references points. I've only ever heard of it through the Simpsons. [00:04:01] Speaker A: Ah, okay. [00:04:02] Speaker B: Yeah, that's fair for a British kid growing up. That feeds. And so many people of my age range are in exactly the same boat. Most of what we know of your land comes from the Simpsons. [00:04:17] Speaker A: Comes through the Simpsons, Yes. Is there a John Henry reference in the Simpsons? [00:04:20] Speaker B: I would not be surprised very, very early on. [00:04:23] Speaker C: What is. [00:04:23] Speaker A: Do you remember it specifically? [00:04:24] Speaker B: Bart sings a song called John Henry was a Steel Driving Man. [00:04:28] Speaker A: Incredible. Love that. [00:04:30] Speaker B: And thus is the beginning and end of my knowledge on this topic. [00:04:33] Speaker A: That's great though. I love hearing like just the weird ways that something like this ends up translated cross culturally. The basic gist of John Henry is that there was a man named John Henry who worked on a railroad. In most modern versions of the story, John Henry is huge and strong and powerful, able to work harder and faster than anyone else out there. This is, there's like legitimately a Disney cartoon of this. Like, this is a big, big legend. This guy is just supernaturally huge and, you know, good at his railroad and job. And in this story, it's a man versus machine battle to show that man would always win out against technology that tries to replace him. So in the story, he races a steam drill with a 10 pound hammer in each hand and he's able to drill 14ft into the rock while the drill is only able to drill nine. He then dies from exertion while asking for a cool drink of water as he goes. Now there are more than 50 different versions of the song telling of Henry's battle against the machine with. With varying details throughout its verses. It's just been that circulated throughout American history, particularly in, like the early 20th century, late 19th, early 20th century. This was big, but like, literally, like there's videos of Bruce Springsteen performing this song. Like it's a. It's a huge part of kind of American lore. So it became this huge folk symbol in America, largely constructed as representing the power and dignity of the working man. So when you listen to Bruce Springsteen sing his rock and roll version of the song, it makes you sort of want to run through a wall or indeed beat a steam engine yourself. It's been taken up largely by. By black folks and labor unions as a way of showing that human labor is valuable. And honestly, I'm surprised we don't see more of this legend popping up in light of AI allegedly, you know, coming for our jobs. That's kind of a big part of how the story has been taken up, this idea that, like, technology will come in, but we're always better than it is. So it's interesting that that hasn't really. I haven't seen it come around anyway, but the idea is, you know, no new technology can fully replace the human. Nelson, though the author, partially by happenstance, found that this isn't really what the song or the legend meant. Originally, he was working on a presentation about folk music, and like every academic, he was coming down to the wire without really having a thesis for the talk. While researching, though, he came across a postcard, a picture of the Virginia Penitentiary, which seems like a weird thing to put on a postcard, but it existed. And something stood out to him about this. There was a small white building on the penitentiary grounds, and in several versions of the John Henry song, it mentioned that he is buried in the sand next to a white house. And while some folklorists have thought that was a reference to the actual White House used as a means to imagine that he was so uplifted by this act, he was buried at the most symbolic building the US Has. Nelson points out that no one actually really called it that till around 1901, the song is a relic of the late 1800s. It's very unlikely that it is referring to. To where the President lives. He also remembered that in 1992, archaeologist Catherine Beidelman had been allowed to conduct a dig at the penitentiary after a renovation accidentally excavated a mass grave site filled with what were Found to be the bones of black people. The bones are found in boxes of varying sizes, separated from each other by a layer of sand. When Nelson got in touch with her about it, he found out that the grave had indeed been located next to the white house on penitentiary grounds. So all of a sudden he's like, now hold on, is this song about a real guy? Most people accept it as folklore, not as something that actually happened. Especially given the way that we, like, picture John Henry as this, like, supernaturally huge man. Like, you know, this is just something people made up to represent a struggle for the working man. But he suddenly realizes this might mean that that's not the case at all. In that rabbit hole, he found out that not only was it likely John Henry was real, the story of his death was not heroic and wouldn't have been told as such. It was instead a cautionary tale used to remind prisoners engaged in modern day slavery to slow down, lest they end up buried in an unmarked mass grave too. You see, in the wake of the civil war, white folks in the south were not like, well, guess blacks are equal now and we'll all adjust. They were pissed that they were supposed to allow them to integrate into society. And the federal government was being run by a guy who was real into states rights, despite having been loyal to the union during the war. That guy, of course, was president Andrew Johnson. And he had just three main stipulations for the south during reconstruction, which is that period where basically they're supposed to kind of make amends for what the fuck they did trying to separate from the United States. So those three stipulations were that they had to uphold the abolition of slavery, they had to swear loyalty to the union, and they had to pay off war debt. Beyond those three things, it was pretty much up to the states to figure out what to do with their newly freed black population. And this might shock you, but they weren't super cool about it when left to their own devices. With this more or less free reign, Limits to black freedom were imposed on pretty much every level under what were known as black codes. These things limited things like the jobs black people could get, usually to being a farmer or a servant of some kind, how much money they were allowed to make, and what kind of property they were allowed to own, while also criminalizing things like unemployment or vagrancy, which essentially made being poor illegal. Oh, go ahead. No, feel free. [00:11:11] Speaker C: A bunch of them are still on the books. Yes, today, in ways people don't realize. One thing I tell people all the Time, and it blows their minds. The first modern eviction statute in the United States was passed in 1866 in the state of Oregon, and it became the model for the nation. It's still on the books. So is the one in Illinois that is almost a carbon copy. And the reason that they were. They started getting passed is after the Civil War, black people were more likely to rent. White people were more likely to own. And that is why to this day, eviction statutes in the United States provide redemption periods that are so much shorter. And the security deposit was. This modern security deposit started getting taken in 1866 with the passage of that law. And until 1866, rent was paid at the end of the month. But moving the rent to the beginning of the month and shortening notice and providing a security deposit was all passed for the purpose of making it almost impossible for black people to rent land. Because of that. That's where we got. [00:12:18] Speaker B: Incredible. [00:12:20] Speaker A: Wow. Wow, that is. Yeah, that is wild. Oh, this is exactly the context I'm talking about, about how you understand everything as being in the frame of slavery and the reaction to the end of it. Like that. 1866. If you don't know, if you're one of our British listeners, Civil war ends in 1865. So all these kinds of things happen pretty much immediately afterwards. It's incredible. So, yeah, along with these, like, so vagrancy essentially makes poor being illegal, so you can only get certain jobs and only make so much money. But if you couldn't get one of those few available jobs, or if you didn't have any money, you could be thrown in jail, largely by white law enforcement officers made up of former Confederate soldiers. So it's. It's honestly diabolical, like, paired with what you're saying about these eviction laws and things like that and moving rent. It's so calculated, I think, is one of the really fascinating things. Because, you know, when we talk about things, you know, there's no, like, shadowy cabals or things like that that come together to make shit happen. But there are guys sitting in rooms going, well, how do we. How do we stop these people from. [00:13:37] Speaker B: This isn't. Like you said right at the start, this isn't even controversial because there is not a hint of conspiracy about any of this. It is traceable and as you said, Cheryl, still actively on statutes today. And there's a completely. It's not even a dotted line. It's a. It's a complete thick black line, no pun intended, to crimes that are still prosecutable in 2026, that have their. Their roots in slavery abolition. And I, I remember expressing shock at vagrancy being a crime car. [00:14:11] Speaker C: Right. [00:14:11] Speaker B: Way back in the early days. Well, how can it be illegal just to stand around? Right, but it's. It isn't really. It was illegal to stand around while black. [00:14:20] Speaker A: Right, Exactly. That not having something to do during the day, you know, is illegal if you're black. And you can see who these things are enforced upon, which obviously we'll get into when we talk about Angela Davis and whatnot. But who represents criminal class and who can have nothing to do during the day is obviously very coded. So all of this is obviously really convenient because there's a cool little caveat in the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery. And that cool little caveat is, of course it didn't. The 13th Amendment says you can't be enslaved or subject to involuntary labor except as punishment for a crime. So you can be forced into involuntary labor if you are a criminal. And basically everything black people do is considered a crime. Bam. We have reinvented slavery. So when Reconstruction ended in 1877, the Black Codes had ensured that on the whole, blacks had made little to no economic, social, or political progress in the south, and white supremacy remained the dominant culture. And now we have a cool little roadmap for keeping blacks enslaved that will echo into our present. So let's get back to John Henry, and I'll veer off again, but we'll get back to him here, who our boy, Scott Reynolds Nelson was actually able to find in the prison records. He was just 19 years old. And get ready for this. Five foot one and one quarter inches tall when imprisoned at the Virginia Penitentiary. Nothing like Disney's huge hulking man or the guy that we've been talking about all this time. And he was actually a Northerner born not too far from where I live now in Elizabeth, New Jersey. It's unclear how he ended up in the south, but one thing it's important to note about post Civil War America is that Northerners didn't like black people any more than Southerners did just because they didn't think they should be enslaved. You see this comes up. You see this come up in the twins backstory in Sinners. Have you seen Sinners, Cheryl? [00:16:41] Speaker C: Oh, yes. [00:16:41] Speaker A: Okay, good. Yes, yes. When I think I met eight times, having watched and watched it now. But in the movie, of course, they go to Chicago to escape Jim Crow and just find that they've rebranded Jim Crow in the north. We call this difference de facto versus de jure segregation, of course. So de jure segregation means it's imposed legally by the government, like Jim Crow laws. Those are actually laws on the books that you go to prison for breaking and things like that. De facto segregation, on the other hand, refers to more subtle and insidious structures. What the Oxford Handbook of US Education Law refers to as unintentional or fortuitous actions by state and private entities. For example, restrictive covenants and housing allowed for neighborhood homeowners associations to restrict the ownership of land in certain neighborhoods to white families. [00:17:41] Speaker C: You know, I might push back on that definition a little bit. [00:17:44] Speaker A: Go ahead. Please do. [00:17:45] Speaker C: I don't mean. I don't mean to interrupt, but. [00:17:47] Speaker A: No, no, no. We want you. [00:17:48] Speaker C: In my experience, and I've litigated this difference and multiple times, de facto discrimination is rarely unintentional, I think. [00:17:56] Speaker A: Oh, right, yes. [00:17:57] Speaker C: The major difference between de jure and de facto discrimination is that de facto discrimination is discrimination as a result of a disproportionate. What we call a disparate impact on a targeted group. Whereas du jour segregation or du jour discrimination is discrimination with an explicit intent. In other words, treatment. But I. But I cringe a little bit whenever. Because I hear this a lot. [00:18:28] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:18:29] Speaker C: Never I hear a professor or a law textbook use the term unintentional. I cringe a little bit because disparate impact litigation is very much de facto discrimination. [00:18:42] Speaker A: Right. [00:18:43] Speaker C: Or de facto segregation. [00:18:44] Speaker B: And. [00:18:45] Speaker C: And very much intentional, intense human law. And there's actually a case in Illinois called Zyarco that I've cited it many, many times, and it says that intent is not simply. I am intending to have this particular outcome. Intent is also. I am intentionally doing this action with reasonable certainty that something will result. [00:19:10] Speaker A: Right. The outcome. They know that in advance. Right. [00:19:14] Speaker C: Correct. Yeah. [00:19:14] Speaker A: I actually really like you pushing back on that, because when I was reading it, like, that was kind of, you know, why I sort of scare quotes. It is that, like, obviously it is intentional. Right. Like, you know, there's. There's, like, as I was talking about, this idea of restrictive covenants only allowing white people into a neighborhood. There's no arguing that that's not intentional. Right. Like, that's certainly. [00:19:39] Speaker C: There's a case called Shelley vs Kramer from, I think, in 1958 that specifically finds restrictive covenants to be intentional discrimination. [00:19:47] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:19:47] Speaker C: And the reason that they were made illegal was the Warren court said that state enforcement of restrictive covenants would be intentional discrimination by the state, even without the passage of a statute effectuating them so it is not surprising that certain legal texts are writing the word unintentional. But, and I am sorry for interrupting. I just. [00:20:11] Speaker A: No, this is great. [00:20:13] Speaker C: Because my, you know, a couple of my mentors always used to say intent means that it has an effect that is reasonably foreseeable at the time you do it. It doesn't necessarily mean I subjectively hate the person that I am doing this to. [00:20:30] Speaker A: Right, yes, yes. No, I thank you for that because I looked up the definition specifically because I was like, I don't want to give my definition of what this would be. And I was surprised that that was how it was phrased in this law textbook because I was like, that's not really my understanding of it. So you're right. I'm very happy with your correction on this. And please continue to correct anything, because that's what we want here. So that is beautiful. And speaks to what I was saying. Like, so homeowners, homeowners associations saying these places can only be sold to white people. Right? So you end up with racially segregated neighborhoods. And then because you have racially segregated neighborhoods, you have racially segregated schools and so on, everything ends up sort of fanning out from that one sort of policy and ends up sort of continuing this segregation. So, you know, technically, and will obviously changes by those laws you mentioned, the government has no role in this and thus they see it as having no legal responsibility to do anything about it. But by 1948, the Supreme Court did step in and say these covenants could not be enforced. And then the 1968 Fair Housing act outlawed them completely. So that is where that sort sort of happens. That idea that, you know, by allowing this to exist, we are sort of, we are enforcing this. So exactly what you were talking about right there. But the thing about de facto segregation is that it doesn't undo the historical damage. So while there were moves towards things like busing, bringing black kids to white schools to integrate them, a thing that happened to my own mother, the root problem still remained. Black people had missed out on the opportunity to live in these well funded suburbs with well funded schools and well funded institutions, and then were discriminated, discriminated against in workplaces, limiting the possibility of. [00:22:38] Speaker B: Upward mobility, or even learning to swim. [00:22:42] Speaker A: Or learning to swim, as we discussed in. In one episode. [00:22:46] Speaker B: Does go in. I do, yes. [00:22:47] Speaker A: And that one really shocked people. That was one of the ones that we got the most feedback. And people being like, the fuck? So yeah, has huge impacts everywhere. I mean, why do we have ghettos in inner cities? Because of the north, de facto segregation. That meant you didn't need black codes and Jim Crow to keep black people down. But all that is to say that in the 1870s, teenage John Henry likely came to the south hoping he could at least find some sort of work, which he couldn't upset north, as the south had far more use for, you know, so called unskilled labor than the north did. The north was famously industrializing, and a lot of that sort of went along, like factories full of people working along ethnic lines and things like that. There wasn't necessarily a lot of room for black people in those factories. You could go down south, get a rural job, things like that. And New Jersey in particular was a rough place to be black. We were, after all, the last state in the north to abolish slavery. So you can see why folks would want to fuck off out of here. Whatever his reasons, Henry ended up running afoul of the law. His crime was burglary of a store called Wiseman's Grocery. And his sentence, 10 years. Now, again, to your point, before Cheryl, this would not have been the case in 1864. In 1864, theft would have been a misdemeanor. But in 1865, in the wake of the Civil War, it became a felony, inventing a crime wave, as Naylor put it. And this was one that he also said the juries felt they needed to stop, they were responsible for. So we have no record of exactly what Henry was alleged to have taken, but it was a daylight crime and one that hardly warranted 10 years, especially since 10 years in the Virginia Penitentiary, according to Naylor, was a death sentence. It very much was for Henry. [00:24:49] Speaker C: Some states still is. [00:24:51] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Sorry, pardon me, but, yeah. A thing I found fascinating in Angela Davis's book Our Prisons Obsolete, which Marco and I read in prep for this episode, was the part that she talked about prison reform and how often folks came in to fix things and then just made shit worse in various ways. I've actually been to Eastern State Penitentiary a couple times, which is a place that she talks about in the book. And reformers at that point thought that you could rehabilitate prisoners through solitary confinement. They were like, give them time to sit and contemplate alone, and they're gonna go through, like, a spiritual awakening and change their ways. So they built a prison that kept people apart and gave them very little time outside or in places where they might encounter one another. And what we now know is that solitary confinement is one of the worst kinds of torture that you can inflict upon someone. It doesn't rehabilitate them, it makes them go insane, essentially. [00:25:52] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:25:54] Speaker A: So this is amongst the problems with trying to reform the system. Right. Even people who think they're doing a good thing buy into the system itself. So at best, they can try to make it slightly less miserable, and at worst, they actually end up implementing a very influential system of torture that. That get spread around the country. Not ideal. And this very thing happened in Virginia when the penitentiary was put under the control of one Burnham Wardwell, a reformer from a background of folks who had seen the insides of prisons many times due to being religious dissenters. Wardwell's family were Quakers from Massachusetts, a colony that did not like Quakers. One of his ancestors was hanged as a wizard in Salem, which is wild. Yeah, right. Dang. [00:26:45] Speaker B: I don't see that coming. [00:26:46] Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's a big swerve. But Burnham Wardwell had come to Virginia in the 1840s, but supported the Union during the war, which, again, in keeping with family tradition, unpopular and dangerous, he ended up imprisoned himself in one of the absolute worst Confederate prisons, Castle Godwin, which was nicknamed Castle Thunder. Military investigators said that the. I don't know if there's. It's gonna say this like, commandant. Commandant, is it? I'm like. Is that how we say it here? [00:27:21] Speaker C: Yes. [00:27:21] Speaker A: I was like, why are we calling them a commandant? But it said commandant and not warden. So the commandant of this Confederate prison was considered, quote, a place called Castle. [00:27:35] Speaker B: Thunder would have a commandant for sure. [00:27:36] Speaker A: You know what? You're right. You're absolutely right. I'll accept that. But, yeah, the commandant was harsh, inhuman, tyrannical, and dishonest, which is definitely what you want from someone in charge of a whole bunch of prisoners. Still, even as a man who'd been one of the most depraved wartime prisons in existence, he was shocked by the conditions at Virginia Penitentiary when he was installed as warden. He wrote that the cells were in bad condition, generally very dirty, not to say, in every case, absolutely filthy, many of them being badly ventilated. Blankets were torn and lice infested. There were metal nails and files scattered all over the place that he worried might be used for escape or for violence. And the guards. Oh, the guards, they would seal prisoners in a hole in the floor as punishment. They had an array of torture equipment, including the lash whipping post, gagging irons, and so on. They would use punishments Wardwell saw as outdated, like shaving prisoners heads, gagging them, and something called ducking, which, from what I can gather, Involved tying someone to a chair and plunging them underwater repeatedly. [00:28:50] Speaker B: Yeah, that was a test for witchery. [00:28:55] Speaker A: Yeah, it comes from British prisons. I found this on the, the Smithsonian website. Talked about it. [00:29:02] Speaker B: I'm sure that's one of ours. You're welcome. [00:29:03] Speaker A: Yes, it was specifically, not just witches, but it was specifically visited upon women and in public. So it was sort of meant to be both a very literal and humiliating way of being like, hey, why don't you cool off, you dumb broad? You know, like that was kind of the idea. And for some reason they were doing this in this Virginia prison. When Warble took over the prison, it was also in dire financial straits at the time. Prisoners were leased out for seasonal work like mining, canal digging and track laying. But he thought, well, what if we did this year round? This would be beneficial in two ways. One, it would solve the financial problems the prison was facing if they had year round income. And two, it would provide better conditions for the prisoners than they were currently being subjected connected to. In May of 1868, he went out to the Covington and Ohio or CNO Railroad where there were already some prisoners working. And he wrote, quote, I visited the quarters of the prisoners. These were comfortable as well as secure, being well provided with bunks, straw and blankets. He also noted that the food was, quote, not only plentiful, but good and well cooked. So over the course of four months, world Wardwell, le It's kind of a hard name to say. Wardwell leased out 225 men to the C and O railroad. John Henry was one of them, leaving the prison on December 1, 1868. And like I said, this is the thing with prison reform. Wardwell was a guy who knew intimately what it was like to be a prisoner. So he tried to make it better. Problem is, you can't really do that. The system is bad, especially when it's being used primarily against black people. But he didn't see the institution of prison as problematic, just how it was treating the people on the inside. So by sending them out where they had regular socialization exercise, clean accommodations and good food, he thought he was doing good things. [00:31:02] Speaker B: Yep. [00:31:04] Speaker A: However, John M. Scofield, the architect of military reconstruction, had become a member of Johnson's cabinet as Secretary of War. But his priority was privatizing Virginia's public railroads. And that's exactly what he did. And so, my friends, while the prison itself was still run by the state, they're leasing out their prisoners to a private entity, essentially establishing private prisons just on the rails, slave agencies. [00:31:35] Speaker C: Right. [00:31:36] Speaker A: Slave Agencies. That's exactly what it is. Yeah. Meanwhile, technological advancements like nitroglycerin were making railwork even more dangerous than it had always been, which meant they had trouble coercing Irish and Chinese immigrants to work anywhere near the stuff. As blasting split up through the use of nitroglycerin, and railway cars quickly carried away the blasted rock, they needed a faster process than hand drilling the blast holes where they'd insert the dynamite to keep the process moving. So they introduced steam drills, which could work much faster, allegedly, than human hands still chained up. Prisoners worked alongside the steam drills because they regularly failed. Apparently, engineers today refer to such devices as steam drills as clujes, which Naylor describes as fiendishly complex devices designed to solve a basic problem. [00:32:31] Speaker B: Can I get a spelling on that? [00:32:33] Speaker A: K L, U G E, S. Thank you. I don't know where it comes from. I didn't figure it was important. I called Rube Goldberg, but, you know, we'll go with the cluj. As these teams of men did their work, they sang songs quote all rhythm and meter and intonation, but without an obvious melody. The songs would change daily based on the conditions around them, observing and incorporating life on the tracks. The point was not the words, but that rhythm, which helped them to coordinate the hammering and the drilling. It was in these work camps that the phrase rock and roll came into existence, describing the motions carried out by the drill. The man in the shaker position on the line would either rock or roll between blows of the hammer as they sang. So the language of the prison work camps would become the language of black music and poetry. And then the language of American music and poetry, the Ballad of John Henry would become. Right, the Ballad of John Henry become just such a song. So it's no wonder that we still sing it now, despite what Wardwell thought of the work out there on the railroads, it was dangerous, and prisoners died regularly. It wasn't just the nitroglycerin, rock slides, and other such things you imagine as being deadly on a work site, but also bad air. While they didn't know exactly what made it so bad at the time, turns out the air was filled with deadly clouds of tiny silica particles. And again, paid laborers knew this, not why, but they knew that the air was doing something to them and killing them, so they wouldn't go near it. But the prisoners didn't have a choice. This would end up killing some 700 mostly black Union carbide workers in West Virginia in the 1930s, considered as America's worst industrial disaster. And Marco, do you remember the name Union Carbide? [00:34:26] Speaker B: Crumb Rubber. [00:34:28] Speaker A: No, not Crumb Rubber. This comes from one of your opens. They're also responsible for the world's deadliest industrial disaster, the Bhopal disaster. [00:34:38] Speaker B: Yeah, sure, sure. [00:34:39] Speaker A: In India. So very cool. They've been doing this for a very long time. [00:34:43] Speaker B: Nice. [00:34:44] Speaker A: The governor put a law. Yes, the governor put a law into place saying that anyone who contracted out prisoners needed to return them safely to the prison with a fine of $100. If they're not return, returned. This was to discourage letting prisoners escape. $100 was a shit ton of money back then, so you wanted to make sure you kept a close eye on the prisoners and didn't just go, ah, well, if someone managed to get away, the state was worried that prisoners would escape and the railroad would just go, oops, they died. So the fine meant if someone did die, they had to return the corpse, which I guess counts a safe return. They just wanted them to prove it. Thus you end up with the mass grave outside of the White House. The railroad would send the body back and they'd just toss them in that grave, burying them in the sand. According to Naylor, in 1870 alone, more than 2,000 black men had come to the Virginia Penitentiary to serve long sentences for small crimes. So many that the state could not house them. Wardwell had left the prison, replaced by George F. Strother, who was eager to continue his program, but without any of the noble ideas about improving conditions. He was just like, let's go. Let's send all these guys out there and reap the benefits. Anyone who was still at the prison he considered to be lounging idly, and he couldn't have that. So off they went to work alongside the steam drills. And as the steam drills continued to fail, the prisoners had to work harder and faster to make up for it. Three years after this change in 1873, John Henry disappears from the prison records, likely because after five years he died out there on the railroad. Naylor points out that while his name became a legend, his fate wasn't anything special. Virginia Penitentiary workers died at a rate of 10% per year throughout the 1870s. Those that didn't work in the most immediately physically dangerous site still met their end via silica dust. And this is why a 10 year sentence was a death sentence. Regardless, once you were sent to the railroad, one thing or another would get you. The vast majority of the convicts who ever worked those tunnels died before they finished their sentences. It was largely only the free workers who had some control over where they worked, who lived to tell the tale of John Henry and others like him? Naylor believes it was a black cook named Cal Evans who first started spreading the story of John Henry as he cooked for workers on the Big Ben Tunnel in 1875. Having transferred from the Lewis Tunnel where Henry had died, his stories passed on legend that the prison records deny us. The prison recorded those who died in the prison, but only recorded the number of men who died on the railroad, not their names or causes of death. Next to Henry's name and some hundred others, the word transferred was written in pencil, a euphemism for their deaths. Those prisoners regularly beat the steam drill, which was so notoriously inconsistent and prone to breakdowns. But at what cost? America benefited from the railroads they built while they were unceremoniously tossed in a hole on the prison grounds. As Naylor points out, many of those early songs about John Henry actually had a dark supernatural element, rooted in Igbo stories from West Africa about restless spirits who had died in terrible circumstances. These songs didn't warn you to be like. Didn't tell you to be like John Henry. They warned you not to be possessed by the spirit of John Henry who worked himself to death. So, as I said in the beginning, this is what Afropessimism addresses. This relationship between a master class and a slave class that has never actually ended. It has just shifted shape. This kind of segregation, unequal access to opportunity, and a criminal justice system that disproportionately throws marginalized people in jail for crimes that aren't crimes when white middle class people do them and then profits off their presence. There are all signs that we need more than just reform, but an entirely different system. [00:38:44] Speaker C: And in 2022, forced prison laborers generated $11 billion worth of goods and services, according to the ACLU. [00:38:53] Speaker A: Amazing. [00:38:54] Speaker C: 11 billion with a B. I hate it. [00:38:58] Speaker A: I hate it so much. [00:39:01] Speaker B: Let me quote directly from my notes, if I may. [00:39:03] Speaker A: Yes, please do. [00:39:05] Speaker B: Fucking look at these nerds. Oh, mise en scene. [00:39:08] Speaker A: I don't think anyone has ever said mise en scene in such a horny way before. [00:39:12] Speaker B: The way I whispered the word sex. [00:39:13] Speaker A: Cannibal received worst comes to worst. Mark, I'm willing to guillotine you for science. [00:39:18] Speaker B: Thank you. That's really, really sweet. It's cold outside, but my pancreas is talking to me. [00:39:23] Speaker C: I'm fucking. [00:39:24] Speaker B: I'm gonna leg it. [00:39:25] Speaker A: You know how I feel about that, Mark? [00:39:27] Speaker B: I think you feel great about it. [00:39:32] Speaker A: So I'm very excited that today we have on the show. The person whose voice you've been hearing this whole time. Cheryl Weichel, a fair housing and consumer rights attorney practicing in Illinois with a pay what you can practice which allows folks who normally wouldn't have access to a lawyer to be able to have a chance in court in cases like eviction, debt collection, domestic violence. She also represents protesters fighting for trans rights and racial justice, including anti ice demonstrators for free. Cheryl, you've got a mountain of accomplishments, not the least of which is authoring the book I was an Abomination about your experiences growing up trans in a conservative family and coming out in a pretty transphobic and hostile profession, not to mention country. You sued the state of Illinois for the right to not be dead named and subjected to other transphobic bullshit while practicing law. And somehow amidst a full time practice, writing, activism and married life, you managed to be all over the place with appearances everywhere from the Young Turks to ESPN radio and now here with us while recovering from a medical procedure as you battle Crohn's disease. Huge thanks. You've got enough on your plate without our shenanigans, but we are very glad to have you here. [00:40:48] Speaker C: I am very delighted to be here. Thank you for having me. But oh my God, I can never live up to that introduction. [00:40:55] Speaker A: That's not even the half of it. [00:40:57] Speaker C: You make me sound so much cooler than I really am. I promise. [00:41:01] Speaker A: Nonsense. Absolutely not. I've been following you for a few years now on the blue skies and whatnot. And, you know, as far as I can tell, living up to all of this. Like I said, that's not the half of it. So we are very lucky to have you here to chat through a topic that, you know, as we were telling you beforehand, we've been, you know, kind of grappling with for years. We've been, you know, the idea of prison abolition and what else can we do besides this and whatnot comes up time after time after time as we talk about our many dark topics on this podcast. So we're stoked to get into that. But also, can you tell us a little bit more about kind of what you do? Because I do find this fascinating, this idea of a pay what you can practice and, you know, all of that stuff. [00:41:47] Speaker C: Absolutely. So in order to understand exactly what I do, I first need to explain a couple of things about the American legal system. The American legal system follows what we call the American rule. What does that mean? In most countries around the world, the loser pays the winner's attorney fees. In the United States, with very few Exceptions. Each side pays their own attorney fees. Now, one other thing. If you've ever watched any kind of legal show, Law and Order, most specifically, you will hear the cop say, you have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you by the state. There's a big asterisk to that. 42 states, including Illinois, charge for and means test the public defender. [00:42:37] Speaker A: Wait, what? [00:42:38] Speaker C: I am serious. There was a great article in the Nation about this a few years ago called, you have the right to an attorney, but it can cost you. So, for example, in Illinois, in several large counties, when you are first arraigned, you have to fill out an affidavit with all of your finances to determine if you are eligible for the public defender. And the judge has the discretion to say no. If you do not qualify for the public defender, and the judge can do one of three things, the judge can say, number one, you don't qualify for the public defender. Hire your own lawyer. Number two, you do qualify for the public defender, but subject to reallocation, meaning you're going to get a bill or three, you qualify for the public defender, and I'm appointing them. So in Illinois, a lot of people fall into this doughnut hole even in criminal cases where they are not poor enough to qualify for the public defender, but still cannot afford a traditional attorney. So I do criminal defense for those people. I do eviction defense because there is no right to counsel of any kind in Illinois outside of a very small pilot program in Chicago. I do foreclosure defense for the same reason, and debt collection defense for the same reason. And my whole practice is name your own price. People tell me what they can afford to pay, and that's the price. [00:43:57] Speaker A: And if people doubt you've blown my mind. [00:44:00] Speaker C: Right. You are always welcome to come to court with me. You can see this for yourself. I am, pardon my language, not bullshitting, but it is the result of a lot of this. Once you realize that our entire carceral system and our legal system are both for profit apparatuses, a lot of this starts to make more sense. [00:44:21] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, 42 states, you said. [00:44:25] Speaker C: Charge for and means test the public defender. [00:44:27] Speaker A: That's ultimately just completely not what we understand about this. I think those of us who do watch television, which I think is most people, I have always had the assumption. [00:44:40] Speaker B: That certainly isn't the case here in the uk you'll, you'll get air quotes. The duty solicitor, you know what I mean? If, if you get arrested. If you get. Get brought up in the middle of the night, you'll get the duty solicitor. That. That is not means tested. That is not charged. That's fucking mad that you say that. [00:44:57] Speaker C: Yeah, it is. It has been a source of a great deal of consternation in the legal community for a very long time. And a lot pushback we get is, well, what about legal aid agencies? Well, there's a few problems with that. Number one, legal aid is the waitlist for. And I worked in legal aid for years. Legal aid is amazing. The wait lists are years long in some instances. And the court is not going to just stop and wait for you to get to the top of the list. Second, the Legal Services Corporation, which is the government agency that funds legal aid in the United States states prohibits its grantees from representing undocumented immigrants. What that means is that undocumented immigrants end up having no access to legal aid lawyers of any kind, even for things like evictions or foreclosures. Right. So there is a huge amount of. There's a huge amount of people even in blue, quote, unquote, blue states like Illinois, who in criminal cases cannot afford representation. In civil cases like eviction, family foreclosure cases, have no access to representation because most lawyers charge hourly. And then another question I get a lot is, well, why don't attorneys just charge contingency? Like the lawyers on the side of the highway with the big billboard? And those who aren't aware contingency means you don't pay unless we win. There's a big misconception with that. Contingency attorneys are usually for personal injury. [00:46:28] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:46:29] Speaker C: And that means they take a cut of what you get. Right. [00:46:32] Speaker A: We have the, the Morgan and Morgan people on the TV here. [00:46:35] Speaker C: Exactly. So they sue whoever hit you with a car. You get a million dollars, they get half. Problem is, if I'm defending somebody in an eviction and I win, there's no money to win. I can't get half their apartments. [00:46:48] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:46:51] Speaker C: So you can't even take those cases. Contingency. And in some instances, it's illegal to take cases contingency. In many states, it is illegal to take criminal defense and eviction defense cases. Contingency. So what I do is I go all over the state of Illinois, all 102 counties, and I represent people who cannot afford traditional attorneys and either do not qualify for or have been wait listed by the public defender or legal aid. [00:47:19] Speaker A: Wow, that's. I have just learned so much in three minutes about. [00:47:25] Speaker C: And also, you are starting to see why I'm an abolitionist. Yes. [00:47:29] Speaker B: I'm curious how. How rare is the service that you offer in the usa? How. Are there any others like you doing what you do? [00:47:38] Speaker C: Yes. It's not as rare as you might think. There are attorneys in other states who do something very similar. Similar. Other attorneys call it something else. Some call it sliding scale, some call it low bono, meaning, you know, I charge way below standard rates. The biggest reason why it. It's not common, certainly. But one of the things that makes it so difficult is that it is actually really expensive to be a lawyer. There's this idea that, you know, you become a lawyer and the money just floods in. Right. [00:48:12] Speaker A: But the. [00:48:12] Speaker C: So, for example, I pay several hundred dollars a year for my dues to be a lawyer, just keep my license. Then I have to pay several hundred dollars for my professional memberships. State Bar Association, national association of Consumer Advocates. If you want malpractice insurance, that's a couple grand a month. If you. If you want legal research software. Lexis and Westlaw are like two grand a month each. I found. I was very lucky. I found a better alternative, if you want. And that's before you get to things like office rent or do you want a secretary? Do you want case management software? I have case management software. A couple hundred dollars a month right there. And then you get into court costs every time you file something. In many cases, it costs money. So when I file an appearance, let's say I want to. Somebody's getting evicted, I want to represent them. Even if I'm representing them pro bono, I still have to pay depending on the amount of rent. That is, they are alleged to be behind between three and six hundred dollars to the clerk of the court in order to represent them. [00:49:16] Speaker A: Right. [00:49:17] Speaker C: The idea behind court fees is it's supposed to make it. It's supposed to fund the circuit clerks, the court clerks, and the analogy is to toll roads. The problem is what you find with court fees is that most people who can't afford the court fees just don't contest the cases. [00:49:40] Speaker A: Sure. [00:49:40] Speaker C: Or don't bring the cases in the first place. So a lot of the legal system is designed to price certain people out of access. A study by the Lawyers Committee for Better Housing several years ago before the pandemic found that landlords who file evictions against tenants who do not have an attorney win 98.9% of the time. And most people are like, oh, well, that's just because the tenants are. They deserved. No. [00:50:11] Speaker A: Right. [00:50:11] Speaker C: The reason they're winning 98.9% of the time is that when tenants don't get an attorney, they just don't show up. [00:50:19] Speaker A: Right? [00:50:20] Speaker C: Yeah, analogous. [00:50:22] Speaker B: I mean, again, I'm already picking up pieces of my fucking brain here, right? In the early days of this podcast, and Cheryl, we've been going for like five and a half years now. And in the early days of this podcast, Corrigan walked me gently and tenderly through the American health care system. Right? And one of my more kind of aghast questions, what if I can't afford it? You simply die. Yes, but this seems analogous in that if you can't afford the court fees, you simply don't get your case hid. You simply. It's like a de facto guilty plea. [00:50:57] Speaker C: I would argue that this is worse. And let me explain why. The Medicare for All has increasingly become a rallying cry on the left, which I think is awesome. Don't get me wrong, I am fully on board of Medicare for All. I love Medicare for All. We should have Medicare for All. The problem is when I go and I say, representation is like health care. We need universal representation. Even a lot of people on the left, because this problem is not getting the same level of attention, say, oh, so you want to give away to trial lawyers, because people don't necessarily understand until they're in it that the legal system is very much like health care. You can get dragged into it without having done anything besides being black, being trans, being disabled. [00:51:46] Speaker A: Right. [00:51:47] Speaker C: Now, here's the bigger problem. There's this to a lesser extent in health care, but over the past 40 or 50 years, there has been a concerted propaganda effort to penalize those people who end up in the legal system. We in the business call it copaganda shows like Law and Order, CSI and the like, and they depict brave, valiant cops and their struggle with the strident prosecutors against the evil defense attorneys and their criminal clients. And I know I'm biased. It's easy for me. [00:52:27] Speaker A: 911 is not a court show. Let's not slander 911. [00:52:32] Speaker C: The reason I say that is it has actually done damage. And an example of that is a few years ago, Joe Kennedy was running for a Senate seat in a primary. And I had my differences with him, I still have my differences with him. But one of the things that he was advocating for was what we call a civil gideon. Part of it, which would be fantastic. And one of the things he was saying is in debt collection and bankruptcy cases, every other kind of case, you should have an automatic free lawyer. And he got roasted for that by the left who accused him of doing a giveaway to trial lawyers. And I knew at that point we had a problem because that was a really good idea. Would I have. And granted, I could not have voted for either him or Senator Markey in the primary. I probably would have voted for Senator Markey anyway if I could. But the way he was villainized for that idea told me that we have a very big problem. And I think this is an even bigger problem among white leftists in particular, who have never spent any time in the legal system and without even realizing it, have been propagandized to the point where they believe that you really only end up in the legal system if you did something to deserve it. Whereas in reality, the over. And I know this is hard for people to understand, but the overwhelming majority of people who end up in the legal system end up there through no fault of their own. And I'll give you one other example, because I see, Mark, your brain is broken. But there is in the United States, something called crime free ordinances. They've been spreading across the country since the 1970s. They were invented by the New York Police Department. And every time you hear something that's. [00:54:25] Speaker A: Never a good sign. [00:54:26] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. Whenever you hear something was invented by the nypd, the lapd, or the Chicago pd, you know it's the. It's bad. You don't even have to know what it is. You can just say, I'm opposed to this and be right. Yeah. So they said, okay. This was in response to the first time that Stop and Frisk was declared a constitution. So they said, okay, we're going to pass a law that says we can evict you if you commit a crime on the premises. And it was so successful that it got incorporated into section 8 housing. And now it's something you have to sign every time that you get a Section 8 housing voucher, or if you're in a public housing project, or if you receive any kind of government assistance, or in many municipalities, hundreds of them across Illinois, Minnesota, and until 2022, California in particular, all of which are blue states. And crime free ordinances are something like this. If you commit a crime on the premises, the landlord either has the right or the obligation to evict you, or the local police department can require your landlord to evict you. Most people who hear this say, this is fine. No one wants crime nearby. Right. And it sounds great because. And I know people who have voted for it not knowing what they're voting for until they end up coming to me because it's being targeted against them. Why? [00:55:48] Speaker B: Sure. [00:55:49] Speaker C: Because. Let's talk about how crime is defined in the ordinance. Crime is defined as, among other things, changing the character of the neighborhood, making another person feel unsafe or my personal. I swear to God, these are actual definitions. [00:56:08] Speaker A: I have seen this. Yeah. [00:56:10] Speaker C: From California, repeated use of emergency resources. So here are some actual examples from cases I have personally had. [00:56:20] Speaker A: Oh, boy. [00:56:22] Speaker C: I had a client who was racialized who was evicted for being the victim of a domestic violence attack by their romantic partner. And the argument was you allowed a crime to occur on the premises in violation of the crime free ordinance. [00:56:41] Speaker A: Oh, my God. [00:56:42] Speaker C: I had a client whose house was. Whose apartment was broken into and was evicted for allowing the burglary to take place on the premises. And my personal favorite was the client I had who was evicted for being sexually assaulted in their own apartment. [00:57:05] Speaker A: That is wild. [00:57:07] Speaker C: I have also represented people who made their neighbors feel unsafe by being transferred. Right. By being black and by being immigrants. [00:57:17] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:57:18] Speaker C: And each time when you interpose your fair housing defense because you respond with section 3617 of the Fair Housing act as an affirmative defense, each time, the response you get from both the municipality and the landlord is this is not discrimination. This is contractual. [00:57:38] Speaker A: Right. You signed a thing that said that if you broke this. [00:57:41] Speaker C: Yes, exactly. [00:57:42] Speaker A: Evicted. [00:57:43] Speaker C: Now, I am very lucky. I have not lost one of those cases yet. But I'm also not stupid enough to think I'm not going to. I'm going to win every single one of these forever. And also, for every case of these that I win, there's 20 where people are getting evicted and either don't know to call a lawyer or they don't call me because they call somebody else who says, I don't do this or they can't board one. And people get evicted like this all the time. Sergeant Shriver, Poverty Law center and the ACLU have done some fantastic work litigating the constitutionality of these, but their record has been pretty mixed because some courts have actually come back and said if you sign a bad contract, that's on you. [00:58:25] Speaker A: Right? Yeah. Not that you have a choice, but. [00:58:28] Speaker C: And the worst thing about this being labeled a crime free ordinance is that once you're evicted for violating a crime free ordinance, it goes on your record as a for cause eviction because you committed a crime. And so you are giving somebody a criminal record by another means without ever finding them guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of doing anything at all. [00:58:52] Speaker B: Sheryl, can I ask what does in one of those cases, what does a successful outcome look like? So if, even if you win that case is the outcome for me, there's your claim. Do I then walk back to the same apartment or the same house? [00:59:04] Speaker C: Oftentimes the successful outcome is the landlord pays the relocation costs for the clients and their record is sealed, so it is as though it never happened. [00:59:17] Speaker A: It's to your point before, though. Like, I feel like, in general, I think of myself as pretty savvy to Copaganda. Right. Like, you know, I generally don't watch these court shows anymore, but, you know, I feel like I understand what's going on in them. I listened to the, you know, Running After Cops podcast. I've, you know, read our friend Michael Molsher's book I Am the Law. Like, I feel like I'm in tune with this. But then you're telling me these things that I think you wouldn't even question. Right. So one of the things that you see on a lot of. A lot of these shows would be, like, in the case of your client who was, you know, sexually assaulted, that it's like, oh, well, that's like the responsibility of the. The landlord or whatever, Right. Like that on tv, that person actually has a claim against the people who had an unsafe apartment for them to live in. And the idea that. That it can be completely reversed just feels like, what the fuck, man? [01:00:18] Speaker C: And honestly. But that is why I became an abolitionist for. When I first became a lawyer, I had this extremely naive idea because I just wanted to help people. [01:00:26] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:00:27] Speaker C: And I had this extremely naive idea. I'm just going to come in and sue a bunch of slumlords and defend a bunch of innocent people, and everything will be great. But one of the things that I realized fairly early on was that the system is not designed to be reformable. And let me explain what I mean by that. [01:00:45] Speaker A: Yeah, please. [01:00:46] Speaker C: There's an old saying that comes that I've sort of borrowed from the IT world. The purpose of a system is what it does. And what I mean by that is you can say that the purpose of the legal system is retribution or deterrence or rehabilitation, which are the three most common citations. But you look at the studies on each of them, you look at the studies on deterrence, and you find there is, when it comes to the carceral system, weak or no relationship between the harshness of a sentence or the harshness of a prison and recidivism. And some studies have actually found an inverse relationship. In other words, the worse you make prisons, the more Likely a person is to reoffend. Then you look at rehabilitation and you find that we have the worst rehabilitation rate in the developed world. And every time we get tougher on crime, the rehabilitation rate goes down. And then use. And then you come up with retribution, which is essentially, we should be punishing people. But if you actually look at the statistics, Rainn, the, the anti sexual assault organization did a study about five years ago where they found that for every 1,000 forcible sexual assaults in the United States, there are 11 prosecutions. So one question I get a lot is what do you do with the rapists? And my response is, we don't do anything with them now. [01:02:14] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:02:15] Speaker C: So we don't. There's no retribution in the current system because 989 of every thousand sexual rapists is not prosecuted. Not even. Not convicted, not even prosecuted, because it is simply not a priority for the current legal system. We don't deter anything because the harsher and worse we make the prisons, the more likely people are to reoffend because it turns out that's not how the system works. And we don't actually rehabilitate anyone because the data again shows people get out and then are not allowed to reintegrate into society because of things like criminal records and job applications, housing and things like that. So then what does the system do? Well, it generates $11 billion in free labor every year. [01:03:10] Speaker A: Right. [01:03:10] Speaker C: And it keeps entire generations of marginalized and racialized people out of positions of power. And it is a massive wealth transfer from black America to white America. So I look at the system and I'm saying, okay, we know what it does. We know that it's done this for decades, if not longer. We know it does not do any of its stated goals. So either the system was started out with good intentions and got sidetracked. And we just all decided, well, it's fine that it does this instead. [01:03:51] Speaker A: Right. [01:03:52] Speaker C: At which point we know it doesn't work and we need to replace it with something that does. Or the system was never designed to do anything but this, and we've just all been lying about it. There is no third option. It either does this by design or it does this by effect. And we've decided that's better. [01:04:10] Speaker A: Right? Yeah. [01:04:11] Speaker B: So you've, you've brought us beautifully onto the topic. Right. And any listener who's been with us on this journey for more than, you know, a few months will know that this is something of a landmark episode for us because it's something that Corrigan and I have Skirted around the edges of for year after year and never quite had a real conversation about. Right. So when. When we both say how delighted we are to have you on, really, we're not. We're not blowing smoke. We genuinely appreciate the opportunity. The book that Corrigan and I kind of did our homework on, Is Prison Obsolete? One of the. One of the first. One of the first kind of questions that asks is, are we so beholden to this idea of prison simply because we can't imagine anything else? There are plenty of other institutions that we've done away with since they've become anachronistic. You know, I mean, slavery gone, there's rising sentiment against capital punishment. To think of things from a United Kingdom point of view, the. The kind of sentiment towards even something as ingrained in our cultural identity as royalty is plummeting because we can imagine alternatives. I can easily imagine a world where we don't own people. I can easily imagine a world where we don't kill people for doing crimes. I can easily imagine a world without a fucking dickhead on a golden chair. I can't envision an alternative to prison, and that's maybe a conceptual problem on my part, but I simply can't see what the alternative looks like in a pragmatic sort of sense. [01:05:49] Speaker C: That's a great question. And let me start by saying I am not Angela Davis. I'm nowhere near as smart as Angela Davis. So I encourage everyone who is watching or listening to go read Angela Davis for yourself. She's written some fantastic books on abolition. Also read literally everything that Mariame Kaba has written on this subject. She's on Blue sky also under the handle prison culture. She has forgotten more about this subject than I have ever known. But here is where I would come into this as somebody who is inside the system every day. Upton Sinclair once said that it is difficult to understand something when your salary depends on not understanding it. And I am not saying that your salary depends on not understanding prison. [01:06:33] Speaker B: It's a great point. [01:06:34] Speaker C: But I do think we as a society have been incentivized to not think beyond prison. That $11 billion in prison labor benefits us, and the most common thing people think about is license plates. But I'll give you another example. I went to a prison to see a client late last year, and everybody there was building stuff for Amazon. Wow. [01:07:00] Speaker A: Jesus Christ. I mean, you do hear this like, yeah, you know, McDonald's uses prison labor and things. I'm like, what? For? Like, what? It seems so intertwined in so many different Industries and corporations that I can't even really fathom how that can be, to be honest. [01:07:20] Speaker C: Exactly. And so the point is, we don't think about a world beyond prisons because so much of our current world depends upon prison. And it's pernicious because it actually seeps into every aspect of our world. And I'll give you a couple of examples. There was a study a few years ago, and I forget the name of it, but it found that the most common first arrest for a young black boy is a crime committed to pay his mother's rent. There's a great book by Matthew Desmond called Evicted. And in that book he talks about how 1 in 5 black women will be evicted during her lifetime. And there are more black women evicted than black men incarcerated every year. But if you look at eviction statutes, who benefits from pushing back against tenants rights ordinances? If you look at open secrets, you can go and look at this for yourself. For profit prison companies benefit from keeping eviction levels high because homeless people commit more crimes. [01:08:26] Speaker A: Right. [01:08:27] Speaker C: So this actually feeds into all aspects of our society in that the people who go to prison are rarely the people who commit the most crimes. Studies have shown that the person most likely to commit a violent crime in the United States is white, CIS and male, and the most likely victim of his violent crime is his wife or other romantic partner. But those are not people who are most often arrested or convicted of those violent crimes. So when we are talking about a world without prisons, the first thing we need to imagine is a world without the need for prisons. Because most crimes that we think of that land people in places like the prisons we currently have are not the violent crimes that we think of with respect to prison, If I may, there's. [01:09:21] Speaker A: Just to your point from this, and I'll let you finish this, but one of the quotes from the book that relates to what you were saying here that I thought was really important, I bolded it, you know that. She says, an attempt to create a new conceptual terrain for imagining alternatives to imprisonment involves the ideological work of questioning why criminals have been constituted as a class and indeed a class of human being undeserving of the civil and human rights according to others. Radical criminologists have long pointed out that the category of lawbreakers is far greater than the category of individuals who are deemed criminals, since many point out, almost all of us have broken the law at one point or another. So I really think that speaks to exactly what you're saying here. There are a lot of lawbreakers out there. Some of them very serious lawbreakers. But they are not necessarily in the class of criminals. [01:10:12] Speaker C: Yes, no, that is it exactly. Because most of the people who end up in prison are not there because they did something violent or something hugely immoral. Violent crime in the United States is actually at all time lows, yet our prison population keeps increasing. And most people don't realize that is. [01:10:30] Speaker B: Exactly mirrored over here, by the way. Crime is at its lowest, yet the prison population is the highest it's ever been since the 1900s. [01:10:36] Speaker C: In the United States we have 4% of the world's population. We have, depending on the year, between 20 and 22% of the world's prisoners. And to put that in perspective, we have more prisoners per capita than Stalin's gulags. Jesus Christ. I am not joking. That is not hyperbole. That is the truth. And our sentences are longer. So the question is, not at least to me, why do we, like how, what do we do if we don't have prisons? The question, I think that we need to reframe it as what is the current system system actually doing that we need to keep it because a lot of people say, what do we do with the murderers, what do we do with the rapists? If the Jeffrey Epstein files have proved nothing else, they should, they should show we don't do anything with them now. [01:11:30] Speaker A: Yes. [01:11:30] Speaker C: And so the question that we should be asking then is if the current legal system does not exist to prosecute violent offenders, then why do we have it? Because I assure you, it does not exist for the purpose of punishing violent offenders. Some violent offenders may end up there as part of the larger net. But let's look at how the prison system is structured in the United States at the sheer number of crimes that we talk about. Most crimes, we're talking drug crimes, petty theft, sex work, things like that, so called victimless crimes. I assure you possession. And study after study has shown this possession of narcotics is not a crime that reduces the incidence of addiction in society. It just forces it underground. It actually makes addiction rates higher. And again, you talk about Big Pharma, which got millions of people around the world hooked on narcotics. Not one of them went to prison, right? [01:12:43] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:12:44] Speaker C: So again, we're looking at a system where who are we targeting and what is the purpose of that targeting? Most of the people who end up in prisons are there to do work. And who does that work benefit? The rest of us and what are the effects of that? Well, if you end up in prison, when you get out, you're going to Be less likely to get a job, you're going to be less likely to buy a home, which means your kids are going to be less likely to have generational wealth and they will be more likely to repeat the cycle. And in a society where our schools are funded by property taxes, keeping entire generations of people out of homeownership is essentially ensuring that we will have a never ending supply of slave labor. Or to put it a different way, if you were to take every person who has ever been in a prison in the United States, we. That would be a state larger than Wisconsin. [01:13:41] Speaker A: It's bananas. [01:13:42] Speaker C: That is. [01:13:43] Speaker A: It's hard to fathom what that is. [01:13:46] Speaker B: It is, it feels to me as though there are certain things that we can all kind of agree as, as being true as a basis for the conversation. That prison, you know, does next to nothing to prevent reoffending. It's something like 80 of all crime over here is reoffending. That social and economic groups and racial groups are woefully, woefully misrepresented in prison populations. You know, there are certain kind of bases that we all agree on. Are these, are these necessarily problems with prison or these social and economic issues? How does removing prison change any of this? [01:14:34] Speaker C: That's also a great question. And I would argue that they're inseparable. Let me put it a different way. If I create a system of cages, which is what a prison is, I create a system of cages, those cages will be filled. There has never been a time in the history of the world where a government built a bunch of prisons and then didn't put anyone in them. [01:14:58] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:14:58] Speaker C: So what we've seen is as our prison, as our prison capacity grows, the number of illegal people grows to meet it. It's almost like say's law. As an economist. Economist would say supply creates its own demand. [01:15:17] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:15:18] Speaker C: Take immigration. Immigration is a great example of this. Before the Immigration Nationality act was passed, there was no such thing as illegal immigration unless you were Chinese. [01:15:28] Speaker A: Right. [01:15:29] Speaker C: The. Aside from the Chinese Exclusion act, like my ancestors, my grandfather faced a lot of anti Semitism when he came here. He, they called his race Hebrew on his national Naturalization certificate. But he didn't have to go through any kind of particular process. [01:15:46] Speaker A: Right. [01:15:47] Speaker C: Illegal immigration is entirely a construct we invented. And now we are building cages to put those people in. So when you criminalize something, when you make something illegal, you are essentially creating the supply of cages. And then you are saying, okay, the people will be there to put it there. And in a capitalist society, there will Always be a profit incentive to fill those cages, particularly where you have an ability to make money off the people in those cages. Give you a great example. There is an idea in the United States that you are innocent until proven guilty. It is the. I. I would say it is the single most important tenet of the United States. A lot of this country is garbage, honestly. But the innocent until proven guilty, the due process part, is hugely important. Here's the problem. At any given time in the United States, between 4 and 800,000 people are incarcerated without having been convicted of any crime. And that's not including detained immigrants. That is not including people in facilities like Guantanamo Bay. That is simply people, places like Rikers island or the Los Angeles County Jail or the Cook County Jail who have not been convicted of a crime and are awaiting trial. [01:17:14] Speaker A: That was my brother for, like, two years sitting in a jail before he went to trial. Crazy. [01:17:20] Speaker C: But those people still are often made to work. Those people are st. Without pay. Those people are still often monetized against their will. Those are still people who are treated as less than human despite never having been convicted of a crime. Hence the saying, you can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride. [01:17:41] Speaker A: Right. [01:17:42] Speaker C: And the problem is people who say, well, we need to be tough on crime, even violent crime, they end up supporting policies like that. When Illinois abolished cash bail, which has been a, a half measure, we need to go much farther, and b, hugely successful in making the state safer and more equitable, a bunch of people were up in arms saying, oh, my God, there's going to be massive crime waves. And what we saw was that people appearing for their hearings actually went up. [01:18:14] Speaker A: Right? What that's like literally the same principle of getting rid of fines at the library. That's like people return their books if you don't find them. Yeah. [01:18:24] Speaker C: And what, what freaked people out was there were more not guilty verdicts. Why? Because when you are in. When you are not in a cage, you are more likely to con. To fight your charges. You're better able to help your lawyer get evidence that she needs. You're better able to. To say, okay, I do not want to simply take a plea deal. And that's what scared people. So I think one of the issues is that we view abolishing prisons without doing anything else and saying, oh, my God, everything is going to be terrible. But what I would argue is that abolition is not just about eliminating prisons. It is also about eliminating the factors in society that give rise to what we consider to be crime in the first place. So disconnecting property taxes from the schools because making sure that everybody has access to an equal education has been proven to reduce the incidence of crime. Kids are not stupid. They know that if they have a better shot at a good future, there's no need. There's no point. Point in them dropping out of high school. There's no point in them joining a gang. People do that because they are forced to. It's what we call crimes of poverty. Not because they're like, you know, I'm gonna throw my future away because I woke up this morning and decided I wanted to be a career criminal. That's not what happens. And yes, I have represented a lot of people and there have been a handful who I have definitely needed to take a shower in bleach after representing. But the overwhelming majority of people were not like that. Emma Goldman, who is a personal hero of mine, had a saying. Every society has the criminals it deserves. I think she was almost right. Every society has the criminals it creates because you have a legal system that is based on the socioeconomic factors that you put in place that incentivize people towards that crime. And if you had a system where people were not so easily able to become homeless, where there were safety nets for people who were housing insecure and food insecure, where there were. Where there was a fair shot at every. For every kid in school, I'm telling you, and studies have shown this, the amount of crime would plummet. Every municipality that has done a basic, universal, basic income piling has found crime and homelessness have essentially disappeared. Do I think there will still be a couple of people who are potentially problematic? Sure. But I think the question is not what do we do with the murderers without the prisons. It's more if the only way to control murderers and rapists. Even conceding that the current system did that, which it doesn't. But even if I were to concede, let's say every single murderer and rapist is locked up by the current system, does it justify having more people incarcerated than any country in the history of the world to do it? I would argue the price is just too high. That they're. The moral cost is just too high. Because now you're not keeping your people safe. You're essentially doing the minority report. We're just going to lock up vast swaths of people on the off chance some of them are violent criminals. And that is the most charitable interpretation of the system we currently have. The less charitable interpretation of the system we currently have is we target black Brown and trans people put them in cages, and a few rapists and murderers happen to get locked up along the way, who we then use as an excuse. Does that make sense? So my argument is, yes, there are socioeconomic factors that underpin the problems with prisons, but those are a feature, not a bug. And the reason I am an abolitionist is not because I think we're just going to open up all the prisons, let everyone out, and everything will be fine. Of course, I'm an abolitionist because I say the prisons are part of a larger problem where we have decided that entire generations of people are to be used as commodities for the benefit of the wealthy classes. And we simply use a few people who are caught up in that kind of vast swath, that vast net as a fig leaf to hide what we're actually doing. The purpose of a system is what it does. [01:23:11] Speaker A: That is really. That's such an interesting way of putting it, just this idea. Because that is. I mean, as we've talked about it, that's kind of been the thing, right, Mark? Like the. But what about the rapists and murderers and thinking of that as kind of like it's the COVID right? It's the. How can we get rid of someone? [01:23:28] Speaker B: Think of the children. [01:23:30] Speaker A: Won't someone think of the children? Right? When this is, as you have made clear and as, like, you've said, the Epstein files, things like that. We know that these things are common, that, you know, sexual assault, rape, all those things are extremely common. We know this is always an interesting thing, I think, when you talk to people about, like, oh, why we need police or why we need prisons, or who are you going to call when this happens to you? But if you really talk to people and they're not trying to make a point about it, they know the cops don't do anything, right? Like, you can talk to anyone, no matter where they are in the political spectrum and say, like, you know, what would happen if someone broke into your car and they know the cops won't help? What would happen if the. If someone broke into your house? You know, the cops don't help, right? Like, it's a thing you have to do to get your insurance to pay out. We know that there's rape kits backed up for years and years. We know that most sexual assaults are never prosecuted. This is not, you know, you saying this, this element of it. I think everyone knows that. Even if you are watching the copaganda, we know that. We've seen Mariska Hargitay talk about it a million times on Law and Order svu. Right? Like, we know that this is a thing and yet there's this part of us that can't let go of that as like the justification, right? That we know the vast majority of the people that are actually doing the worst crimes towards humanity, towards society, will never see the insides of those prison cells. But the people who will are the ones who are doing this out of survival, are the ones who are stealing small things that are trying to, you know, prevent themselves from eviction, that are trying to prevent family members from eviction, that are joining gangs because that's their last possible choice, that are stuck in places that are education deserts because of property tax being the main driver of education. So it's a fascinating take that I don't even remember that really being in particular this Angela Davis book talking about that. But this sort of sense of like using a shield that we know doesn't even really exist, that we know that murderers and rapists are not the people in there. And yet that is our first go to of like, why can't we imagine a different world? [01:25:47] Speaker C: Because I think there's a comforting fiction that comes along with it. You know, one thing, and this is particularly true, I find of people who have not had personal experience with the legal system, people of my complexion, so they tend to have this quest. I get this question all the time, how can they do that? That's illegal question I get all the time. And if you follow me on Blue sky, you know, I often say illegal does not mean impossible. But propaganda plays directly into this, and this discussion plays directly into this. Because as long as we think the prisons are full of rapists and murderers, it allows us to indulge in the idea that we are in control, that there is somebody out there punishing the only the bad people and all the good people get are let off and we only punish the guilty. Because once you start realizing people can do illegal things and get away with it, you also necessarily have to acknowledge there are people who do illegal things like locking innocent people up and getting away with it, which means our entire conception of the prisons as being for our benefit starts to collapse. Once you accept it is entirely possible to break the law with no consequences, then you realize what is the carceral state for? Who is it for? What is that benefit? It's an interesting. It's an interesting juxtaposition because a lot of the people who say, Cheryl, we have to have some place to put people are the same people who, like me, love that saying better. 10 guilty men go free than one innocent person get punished. [01:27:32] Speaker B: Right. [01:27:32] Speaker C: But I, and I often use this thought experiment when I'm talking with people. Let's say that it was possible to prevent anyone from ever doing any violent crime by putting everyone in prison from the time they're born. No one would sign up for that, Right? No one would. Now, let's say that we only put black people in prison from the time they're born. And you say, well, this is going to get rid of all crime. We pinky swear. That's. Some people are like, well, yes, I'm good with that. And then I know to stay away from them. But some people then start to understand what the problem is. [01:28:09] Speaker A: Right? [01:28:09] Speaker C: Because we are only one step removed from that, really. We over police certain neighborhoods on purpose, under police others on purpose. And that is the logical extension of the system we currently have. And once you realize that, you realize the prison system was never designed for this. It's. I do a lot of legal training for protesters, and I can always tell new groups from experienced groups because the new groups, there's always someone who asks me, why do we need to have a lawyer? They can't arrest us for protesting peacefully. And the answer is, nobody's going to stop the police from arresting you if they want to arrest you. Yeah. And the police exist as a means of control. If the United States Municipal Police Department, the new departments, plural, were a military, they'd be the third largest standing army in the world by manpower and by money. They're literally larger than the Russian military, several times larger than ICE at this point, even now, our police department is twice as large as the Russian and Ukrainian militaries combined. So what we have created is a massive militarized force that primarily targets racialized people. And that's what we consider safety. And so when you realize that, you start wondering, okay, when I'm saying, what do we do with the rapists and murderers? Who are we thinking about when we say rapists and murderers? And what are we really doing to put those rapists and murderers in cages? And who else are we getting caught up in that big dragnet? And at the end of the day, it goes back to my first question. If it takes putting everyone in a cage to do that, what is the moral cost of that? And what are we as a society losing by saying, yeah, this is how we've decided we're going to be safe? So even if you put aside the fact that we let the most heinous people off the Epstein's of the world, because the System is not designed to target them. What have we lost? What is the cost of we are going to mass arrest entire generations of people just on the off chance that a couple of them are bad seeds? What does that say about us? And if you were a space alien coming to the United States and looking at that system, would you be able to say, yeah, this is a system that we should keep? And I think at a certain point you have to say, even if it was possible to have a prison system that was equitable, it cannot be built on this prison system because this system is simply too rotten. If as long as you have a for profit system of cages, there will always be companies that are filling them and always be lobbyists paying politicians to criminalize things for the corporations and always disenfranchised and marginalized groups who will be the first targeted. So it's. The supply will always create its own demand. As long as you have a supply of cages, there will be a demand for human bodies to put in them. And that's why I can never get away from the idea of even if we had some kind of proof that the worst of the worst were making it into prisons, and I'd argue we now have categorical proof they are not, they become president and by islands, the reality is that the collateral damage is simply too high. Collective punishment is a war crime. And I'd argue that any reasonable reading of the American carceral system is it's collective punishment. [01:32:14] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's really interesting looking at that too, as kind of, you know, if there were some sort of system, you know, that we could do, that was an equitable prison. [01:32:25] Speaker C: Right. [01:32:25] Speaker A: You know, it couldn't be related to what we have now. And you know, in terms of sort of what the Davis book talks about is kind of, for one thing, I think it's really interesting that she says like for one, afford poor people the same opportunities, people of color, things like that, that white people have to rehabilitate, which is one of the things that we don't do. Right. I think, you know, a lot of the stuff that like Zoran Mandani is trying to do in New York saying, like do when there's like a mental health crisis. You sent a mental health team. You don't send the cops, right. You don't throw those people in jail, which is right now there's a big case going on with a schizophrenic kid whose parents called the cops to try to get help. And he grabbed a knife and they shot him five times. And he survived, thankfully. But now they're trying to prosecute him, which Siran Mamdani is like, don't. That you can't. That's not. He was not. Well, he was called because he is schizophrenic. And this idea of, you know, rich people get the Betty Ford Clinic, right? Like, rich people get ways to treat their mental illnesses, they get ways to treat their drug problems. They get access to these kinds of things that would create a society, a society that has less crime, right? Even on these smaller scales compared to your Epstein's and things like that, and that ultimately crime, I mean, prison is not a rehabilitative place. That's just simply not a thing you can argue. And thus, you know, what other systems can we put into place that would replace the need for this? [01:34:03] Speaker B: Cheryl, what you've really helped me there with is notions of reform, right? Something that I, something that I struggle with is. So if, if what you're talking about is just huge social rethink, but from an incarceration point of view, is your position then that it is beyond reform because it's built in a fucked place to begin with, and anything that you reform will just be built on those foundations. [01:34:37] Speaker C: Partly, I. I think there's two reasons why I am an abolitionist. The first is I have spent 14 years now in courtrooms. And my personal experience, combined with what, speaking with abolitionists, speaking with reformers, and reading really brilliant things by Angela Davis and Mariame Kaba, has convinced me that the system is not reformable, that it is. Sometimes you can take things that are built on rotten foundations and fix the foundations. I don't think that's possible here because we now have, I would argue, 170 years of evidence that this system is working exactly as designed and that if we try to force it to do something else, it is just going to default back to this at some point. The second reason is I also have increasingly come to believe that criminalization is, at least in the United States of America, in the year of our Lord 2026, more A for profit enterprise than anything else. And I'll explain what I mean by that. If I were to ex. If I were to ask you, why have you never killed anyone? I guarantee you it's illegal. Will not be of your first five reasons, right? It's wrong because I. I don't want to go to hell or whatever your religious belief is. I believe in the value of human life. I have asked that question to lots of people. The only people I'm ever concerned about Are the ones who answer, because it's illegal. If I were to say to you, why have you never raped anyone? You're not going to say because it's illegal. You're going to say, because I respect people's bodily autonomy or because I don't believe it is correct to force myself on someone, or because I believe in enthusiastic consent. You're not going to say, well, I don't want to go to prison. [01:36:43] Speaker B: Don't get caught. [01:36:44] Speaker C: Exactly. So I think a lot of what we think about in terms of the function that prisons serve as, you know, oh my God, we have to hang prison over people's heads. Most people, and granted, I admit there are always exceptions, but most people do not refrain from being disgusting, awful shitheels because they don't want to go to prison. And a lot like mo, the overwhelming majority of people in the United States will never commit violent crimes. And there. And that is because it will. They. And it has nothing to do with them being afraid of getting caught. It has everything to do with the fact that they just think it's wrong. [01:37:27] Speaker A: Right. Because don't want to. [01:37:29] Speaker C: Yeah, no, but because most people don't wake up in the morning saying, you know what would be cool? Just shooting someone for no reason. Yeah, right. [01:37:38] Speaker B: I've already killed all the people I want to. Thanks. [01:37:41] Speaker C: Yeah. So, yeah. And I think once you understand that, then you say, okay, is there a different way to organize society than the criminal law? Because what the criminal law is, it's words on paper. It is an expression of values. Right. And the problem is that law only has value insofar as it is enforced and how it is enforced. So if we are going to come at the prison abolition question from the perspective of why can we not reform what we have, I think it is also worth examining why we think we need that kind of prescriptive law in the first place, or whether we can express those values in a positive way instead of a negative prohibition. If we believe that there is a value on human life, instead of saying, we are going to put you in a cage if you kill someone, maybe that's we give every person the resources they need so they never have to take anything from anyone else. Maybe if we believe that bodily autonomy is the highest good a society can protect, then instead of saying we are going to put you in a cage for sexual assault, we try to eliminate rape culture. And in schools we start teaching consent young and we start talking about the benefits of abortion and reproductive health care and gender affirming care and saying These should be free and available to everyone. And I think once you start looking at formatting society along positive lines instead of negative prescriptions, it starts to reframe how you're coming at this question. Instead of saying our values are based in things we will put you in a cage for doing, we start saying these are things we will protect because of those same values. Does that make sense? [01:39:35] Speaker B: It makes perfect sense. And it is analogous again to a kind of a similar journey that we went on on the podcast while spending what felt like months talking about the trajectory that we're on globally in terms of climate. And it's very tough for me to not feel defeatist. It's very tough for me to think of abolitionism out of the realms of a thought experiment and into something practical, into something, into a kind of a. A pathway. Then I worry that things are too fucked to extricate ourselves from. That's something that I, I really struggle with, particularly with climate, particularly with what we're. We all are fooling ourselves is democracy. And I. This conversation has kind of led me to worry the same things about air quotes, justice. Is it too fucking broken to. To. [01:40:31] Speaker C: For. [01:40:31] Speaker B: For reform and for abolition and for a new beginning. Something better to be anything tangible. I don't know how. How it becomes real. [01:40:41] Speaker C: You know, I will be honest, I have moments like that myself because it is a big problem, it's a hard problem. And I have never once and my journey to abolition been like, this is so easy. I'm going to snap my fingers and then all the prisons will be gone and it'll be great. But I think it is a solvable one. And I am not so naive as to think that we're just going to pass the abolition act of 2030 and it'll be fine. It's going to take a while. But I think the best way to support abolition is to start by eliminating the need for prisons in the first place. In other words, you start at the bottom and you build up. A lot of people hear abolition and think we are starting by opening all the prisons and letting everybody, of course, would I love to free everyone? Yes. But I think what we start with is we start by creating the society that will not have them at all. We start by making sure everyone's needs are met. We start by making sure the crimes of poverty no longer happen. We start by saying that inequality is not allowed to happen because if everyone has the same opportunity, then 99% of crime suddenly goes the way of the dinosaurs, that you don't need to steal food if you can afford to get all the food you need. And people look at me and they say, but what about felons? I'll give you a great example. I have a client who was charged with felony burglary for stealing a rotisserie chicken because, well, this is your fourth time stealing food. There's. If you actually look at what a lot of these, even these violent felonies are, burglary, a lot of them are stealing food and clothes, possession with intent to distribute. I was sharing this substance with my friend. There's a lot of these people are not history's greatest monsters. And people are like, well, you're a drug dealer. Are you a drug dealer? Or is this somebody who was passing around a bong with a bunch of people who, with a bunch of family members are you. There's a lot of gradations to this. And if you want to. Like one of the interesting things about going off on a tangent and I'm sorry, but I am going somewhere with this, I promise. If you look at how the war on drugs started and how it was accelerated in the 1970s, the Nixon administration was very open about the fact that, that they were targeting black people in particular. Yes. The Reagan administration was very open about the fact they were targeting black people in particular. And if you create a society where you are going to have people with housing insecurity, with food insecurity, they're going to get stress relief wherever they can, whether it's legal or not. A lot of these so called career criminals are people that recreated the problems that they are trying to address. So the first step to abolition is not throwing open all the prisons and saying, well, we don't punish crime anymore. The first step on the journey to abolition is saying we are ending the practices that create that crime in the first place. So that there is going to be a generation that has the same opportunities that this is going to be the last generation we are taking opportunity away from. [01:44:35] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that like what you kind of said before in terms of that really kind of struck me is the kind of negative frame that we tend to put things on is this sort of a comfortable fiction of what we're being saved from, what we're being protected from. And this idea of the worst first that we think of the worst case scenario first. Well, what if, you know, the serial killer or whatever, you know, gets away? Which is not a common situation. But you know, to think of like what are those things that we need mentally to think that these are protecting us from. And I think in terms of. And this is often where Mark and I differ a lot in terms of. Of like thinking about climate and stuff like that, is that I tend to sort of. I don't know if optimistic is the right word, but tend to sort of look at it from a frame that is a little more positive. And I think that is something here, that we tend to look at this as very pie in the sky. Like, oh, yeah, it'd be nice to. For us to get rid of, like, all the structures that keep people down, but that's not gonna fucking happen. Whereas I think, like, when we do see more politicians like Zoran and people who are kind of coming up now, now that he has succeeded, you see even people like Kathy Hochul, like, shifting her policies because she saw how well Zoran did that. Like, we're seeing these shifts already begin to happen of reframing things to make this possible, that people sort of see these instances in which these things work and see that I'm not the only one who wants this. And it becomes less of something that feels pie in the sky and something that's more like, we just need to show people it works. You know, if we can get this to work in New York City, can we get this to work on a larger stage, you know, bit by bit? And I think that that's one of the really important things. Kind of taking from everything that you've said here is, you know, the idea like, we're not special because we have the mindset that, you know, we don't need to criminalize every fucking thing. A lot of people feel that way. You know, probably most people feel that way. But we have a comfortable fiction in our mind that these things protect us somehow. And we do come at it from a negative frame of worst case scenario. But what if we didn't? Like, why is that? Why do we think the pessimism is more valuable than going. I do see changes occurring and mindsets swaying, and maybe that can move this needle in some way to creating a society that doesn't need this. [01:47:10] Speaker C: The, the one, one thought experiment I encourage people to try is if you are struggling with this U relative pronoun. If you're hearing this and struggling with this, and I get it, I did myself for a long time. I want you to imagine the average person in a prison who. What they look like to you. And then I want you to imagine the average rapist or murderer and see if those people are the same. If you're informed by data, they're not Going to look alike. Right? And if you're not informed by data, if it's just you're putting this person in your head, why is that the first idea that came to mind? And what factors in that person's background and in your background led you to picture that person first? And what does that say about the societal indoctrination that we go through? That. That is the first thing that comes to mind. Why are you being taught to be afraid of the. That kind of idea in the first place? Because once you see that, you see the propaganda everywhere, you see who we are all, as a society trained to be afraid of and why. And I really like the idea of looking at prison abolition not just as a, this is how we can, you know, this is how we can end prisons, but more, this is how we can move past the idea of white supremacy as a construct. Because at the end of the day, the whole idea of putting people in cages is very much a white supremacist thing, going back to transatlantic slave trade. And I think once you say, okay, I do not believe that putting human beings in cages makes me safer. I believe making sure that the people around me have everything they need to thrive makes me safer. Then it's amazing what you can accomplish. And a lot of people I know who have come to abolition have come to it actually through, of all things, Palestine. Because one of the things that people who have looked at Palestine have realized is you cannot oppress people to make yourself safer. It does not work. Even if you eliminate all other moral, moral qualms about it, you cannot oppress yourself into safety. [01:49:39] Speaker A: Right? [01:49:40] Speaker C: And that is what the prison system does. You are oppressing people and saying, well, this is how I am safe. No, if you want to be safe, you have to make sure that the people around you are safe, too. You have to make sure they have the same opportunities that you do and the same dreams that you can have and the same life that you can have. That is how you make yourself safer. But that is something that is fundamentally anathema to white supremacy and fundamentally anathema to capitalism. So, like you were saying, I really think it comes with reframing this as, what can we affirmatively do as a society? How can we positively reflect our values instead of what can we prescribe instead of proscribe? So if you are skeptical about abolition, if you are sitting here saying, this is pie in the sky, this will never happen. The road to abolition begins with making sure every kid in school gets lunch. It begins with making sure every school has the Same level of funding. It begins with making sure that every person in every neighborhood has the chance to go to the same quality of school. It comes from not having food deserts. It comes from making sure that people can all go to the same colleges. It comes from eliminating the racial pay gap and the gender pay gap. And it comes from making sure that we have health care for everybody. And people say, well, what does that have to do with anything? If you don't have health care debt, then you don't need to go and rob a bank. There are literally people who have robbed banks because of their health care debt. I am not making that up. [01:51:21] Speaker A: There's a whole last show about a guy cooking meth. [01:51:24] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:51:24] Speaker A: Make sure that he can. This is. [01:51:26] Speaker C: There is. Yeah. This is all. It is all connected. And if you are a person who says we need Medicare for all, because I don't believe that people should have to be in debt needlessly, you are on the first step to abolition. And if you are a person who says that, I believe that every kid should have the same school meals and should get those three meals a day for free and should go to a school with the same equipment and should not go to a lesser school because their neighborhood is a block away from where the rich people live. Congratulations. You are becoming an abolitionist. You just don't know it yet. [01:52:02] Speaker A: I love that. I love that. [01:52:04] Speaker B: I really do. I really. [01:52:06] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I love this frame. I love everything you've told us. You've blown our minds several times here. And I think that's just a great way to sort of put a point on it, you know, is to say, you don't have to, after having listened to this, be like, I'm fully on board with this concept so much as what it really is, is getting down to those, those base things. [01:52:28] Speaker C: Right. [01:52:29] Speaker A: You're already on your way to abolition once you are for changing the structures that lead to the carceral state that we have. And I think that's just, ah, that's so valuable and important to think about. So thank you. [01:52:43] Speaker C: Thank you. This has been absolutely wonderful and I, I am sorry I talked your ears off, but. [01:52:49] Speaker A: No, that's what I wanted. [01:52:50] Speaker C: I love abolition and I love talking about it because I genuinely believe that we are better than this world. I refuse to believe this is the best we can do. And kind of to your point, Mark, I know it is easy to look around at all the fascism and say, you know, this sucks because it does. [01:53:08] Speaker A: Right. [01:53:09] Speaker C: But as long as we can dream of a better world, we can build a better world. And I. I truly believe it's possible. It's not going to be easy and it's not going to be overnight, but you know, one day our descendants are going to look back on us and say, wow, they were so cool because they helped build the world we live in now. [01:53:30] Speaker A: Yes, please. [01:53:32] Speaker B: I think that considering the topic, it is so strange to think that that is probably the most optimistic note we have ever ended an episode on. [01:53:41] Speaker C: Ever. [01:53:41] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:53:43] Speaker B: 100% fucking insane. [01:53:45] Speaker A: Oh, beautiful. Well, thank you again so much, Cheryl. Where can people find you on the Interwebs to hear more of your insights? [01:53:55] Speaker C: It has been wonderful. Thank you for having me. I am on Threads and Blue Sky. Same handle, the leftist lawyer. [01:54:00] Speaker A: Love it. [01:54:02] Speaker C: I should warn you, I am the purple haired commie with the nose ring that your mom warned you about. I also have a website, wol.com w e I k a l or leftistlawyer.com if you prefer. And I would love to hear from you, Cheryl. S H e r y lw.com I always love to talk about abolition. [01:54:23] Speaker A: Thank you so much. And I know probably our listeners, you know, might bug you. They're pretty inquisitive people, but they're going to be so stoked on this and we're so happy to have you. Anything else to add, Marco, before we get out of here? [01:54:37] Speaker B: Just to echo everything Corrigan has said, that was. That was everything that I hoped it would be. Thank you, Cheryl. We were very grateful. And to all of you, thank you very much indeed once again. We'll see you next week. Stay spooky. [01:54:48] Speaker A: You're here.