Toward What Justice?

Describing Diverse Dreams of Justice in Education

Eve Tuck, K. Wayne Yang, Eve Tuck, K. Wayne Yang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351240918
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Toward What Justice? brings together compelling ideas from a wide range of intellectual traditions in education to discuss corresponding and sometimes competing definitions of justice. Leading scholars articulate new ideas and challenge entrenched views of what justice means when considered from the perspectives of diverse communities. Their chapters, written boldly and pressing directly into the difficult and even strained questions of justice, reflect on the contingencies and incongruences at work when considering what justice wants and requires. At its heart, Toward What Justice? is a book about justice projects, and the incommensurable investments that social justice projects can make. It is a must-have volume for scholars and students working at the intersection of education and Indigenous studies, critical disability studies, climate change research, queer studies, and more.

1

Against Prisons and the Pipeline to Them

Crystal T. Laura

I

FRIEND:So, how do you think you’ve changed since high school?

ME:Well, I’ve become more aware of oppressive power structures—especially jails, prisons, and the whole business of corrections—and now seek to abolish them.

FRIEND:…

I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why it is sometimes easier for us to see an impending end to the world itself than it is to see a world without prisons. Here I am, with stacks of books and articles all around me that spell out the difficult past and present of prisons, and how hopeful a prisonless future would be; and I have no doubt that what I’m reading is only a taste of the knowledge that writers have dropped on us recently.

Truth: While global competitiveness is a lingering concern for many Americans, since 2002, the United States has drawn strong criticism for leading the world in the rate of incarceration.

Truth: Approximately 2.3 million adults and 69,000 kids—overwhelmingly poor people of color—are currently locked up in the nation’s prisons and jails (Pew Charitable Trusts, 2010).

Truth: The sheer numbers have prompted scholars and activists to point out and explain why the incarcerated population is so predictably drawn along lines of race, class, and gender (Alexander, 2012; Gilmore, 2007; Gottschalk, 2006; Parenti, 2008); to identify viable alternatives to incarceration (Davis, 2003, 2005); to document the exorbitant financial costs of mass imprisonment (Braman, 2009; Chesney-Lind & Mauer, 2003; Western, 2006); to highlight atrocious penal conditions (Abramsky, 2007; Rhodes, 2004); to demonstrate the obstacles faced by people convicted of crimes when reentering communities and attempting to find a job paying living wages, secure housing, get healthcare, or go back to school (Manza & Uggen, 2006; Pager, 2007); and to tell us what supports can be leveraged for those who have done time or are locked up so as to reduce the chance that they will be arrested and confined again.

So, there is no shortage of well-reasoned and researched publications about anti-prison politics, which is why I am having real trouble making sense of hesitance about the concept of prison abolition.

I have already considered the possibility that many people haven’t read what I’ve read. Fair enough. If I’m being honest, as a professor, I know full well that scholarly work often doesn’t reach beyond the walls of academic settings. But I don’t think access is the problem here—not in this day and age, when a number of abolitionist professors are taking to social media and circling the globe to share their views of the subject with international news outlets, religious groups, community-based organizations, schools, and anywhere else the public may be. I think something else is up. In an introduction to her classic book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, Angela Davis (2003) argues that the real source of the quandary is the assumed permanence of prisons as a feature in our social scenes and in our minds. According to Davis, “prison is considered so ‘natural’ that it is extremely hard to imagine life without it” (p. 10). In other words, we don’t lack information about abolition; we lack imagination about abolition. I suppose we have to see it to believe it.

II

In the summer of 2016, organizers pitched seven small tents in a vacant lot across the street from Chicago Police Department’s Homan Square facility. Considered a “Black site,” where more than 7,000 people—nearly 6,000 of them Black folks—were “disappeared” by the police, Homan Square operates as an off-the-books interrogation warehouse for the city’s most vulnerable. On July 20, 2016, it became a site of protest and a tool for testing the real-world practicalities of abolition.

That day, members of the racial justice-seeking #LetUsBreathe Collective led a march through the predominantly Black community of North Lawndale to Homan Square. Along the way, #LetUsBreathe drew attention to police killings of Black people in and beyond Chicago; juxtaposed the abundance of resources doled out for policing alongside the lack of commitment to support the services needed to develop Black futures; protested a proposed “Blue Lives Matter” ordinance; and called for the immediate closure of the Black site. The march commenced at Homan Square, the entrance to which another group of activists, Black Youth Project 100, had obstructed by chaining themselves together. Combining civil disobedience with block party, #LetUsBreathe took over the vacant lot opposite Homan Square, launching an encampment they called “Freedom Square” as a daylong display of what everyday life might be like outside of the current logic and institution of policing.

Freedom Square included a store—filled with free books, clothing, and toiletries—and a canvas for community art projects. Each of the seven tents represented the resource areas to which organizers believe police funding ought to be diverted: restorative justice, education, mental health, employment, housing, arts, and nutrition. In a Truthout op-ed published two weeks later, #LetUsBreathe Collective co-director, Kristiana Colon (2016), described how the one-day action turned into an extended commitment:

At the end of the night, the North Lawndale youth who had come out to enjoy the event hoped the tents meant we were staying overnight and excitedly asked if they could camp with us. We weren’t prepared to stay that night, but felt deeply compelled by the longing for continued engagement. The move to relaunch Freedom Square as an occupation that Friday was a spontaneous decision to deploy an extreme political tactic, largely informed by the positive feedback from the North Lawndale community, especially the children.

Word of Freedom Square as an all-volunteer run and donations-based laboratory for abolitionist politics quickly spread across activist circles and news outlets far and wide.

When I came through the tent city, I was immediately struck by the presence of Black joy—kids dancing freely, neighbors breaking bread, passersby stopping to converse and sometimes stay, talk of art and love, and the radical potential of the relationships being built. There was also the Brave Space Agreements—a code of conduct posted on a placard meant to guide how people treated the camp and each other in it, and also to help sort through conflicts. Colon wrote about one such experience of violent conflict, too:

After a beautiful day including free bike repair workshops and craft projects, free food for the community, and ongoing political engagement, the occupation site devolved into chaos when adults intervened in a disagreement between kids about sharing bikes. Folks felt disrespected, and misunderstandings and continued transgressions raised tensions, even as Freedom Square organizers made their best efforts to de-escalate the situation. One woman emerged from the fight with a black eye, and several others nursed scrapes and bruises once the scuffle was finally calmed. Freedom Square’s medic bandaged folks up in the First Aid tent as I began to gather the 30 or so people at the camp into a circle to debrief about the conflict. We shared collective space with each other, discussing the harms that had occurred within our community. We talked through accountability steps (steps that could be taken to address those harms). Nobody called the police.

There were other incidents and conflicts to which the Agreements, rather than police intervention, were applied—from stealing to bullying, and more. According to Colon, while Freedom Square was overwhelmingly beautiful in its aspiration, it certainly was not perfect. She wrote:

It’s messy, it’s tiring, and in waves of oppressive heat, it takes a lot of self-awareness and patience to keep moment-to-moment frustrations in check. The ideology of imagining a world without police powerfully resounds in media clips, on protest signs, and in the air-conditioned comfort of organizing meetings; but at Freedom Square, activists and North Lawndale neighbors live, sleep, and labor side by side in 24-hour service to a community healing from decades of generational trauma, social divestment, and internalized violence. We don’t have it all figured out, but with each passing day of the occupation, our hearts evolve as dramatically as our infrastructure. We come to the work with a deep will to be personally transformed and the courage to face down whatever violence, danger, or harm we encounter or create along the way.

The occupation lasted 41 days.

My brother, Chris, wasn’t around to see Freedom Square. At 24, Chris has been locked up for nearly a half-decade in a rural Illinois prison, a six-hour drive from my home in the Windy City that I’ve taken a couple dozen times. Before that, he was held in Cook County Jail, where my most vivid memories of experiencing incarceration vicariously were made.

In the middle of 2002, I was nine months pregnant and, as is typical for a woman in that condition, I was hot and bothered, in and out of hormonal fits. I was also too wary of going into labor inside the jail to show up alone. So there we were, my husband, Jelani, and I, sitting behind a glass partition (after we’d been X-rayed, searched, and IDed by a gaggle of guards two or three times over) waiting for Chris to toddle in. Jelani checked his watch. He’d gotten in the habit of keeping tabs on the length of our visits, which were supposed to last a measly half an hour (a few minutes more, if we were lucky), but often we got much less. It was 5:00pm. By now, I thought, Chris’s friends who had visited earlier should be midway home and my sister should be climbing into her car to make the schlep down here. We were spread out exactly as planned.

It was a hard lesson learning to coordinate visiting days. The year before, when Chris picked up his first case, my sister, my mother, and I went to the County to see about him. All the way up the Bishop Ford and Dan Ryan freeways, we said no more than a few words—we were all probably fantasizing about wringing his scrawny neck, as piping mad as we were. But when we arrived, taken aback by the whole situation, we agreed on the spot to stagger repeated visits in a constant rotation, to hang around the place all day long, if it meant we could keep him with us and out of his cell. I can recall Mom sharing our arrangement with the set of guards who took our registration. “It doesn’t work like that,” the big one chuckled. As soon as he said this, I realized that we were making a rookie mistake, proposing accommodations as if we were checking in at some highfalutin hotel. He dismissed it outright: “You came together; you’ll see him together.” My sister smacked her lips, my belly flopped, and my mother instantly turned red in the face. She tried explaining that we were new to the County, pleading—quietly, cautiously—for an exception. The little guard was nicer. He said, “I’m sorry, Miss, but there’s nothing we can do.” Annoyed, we huddled up and sketched the logistics of returning again the very next day. “Um,” he butted in, “unfortunately, you can’t come back for another week.”

There is no dignity in jailhouse visits, and the first one is the worst. All that fear and frustration you’ve been harboring does not well up at the time of the arrest. No, not until you are trying to work the system—to navigate the impersonal, impenetrable gulag—does it take every fiber of you to prevent yourself from going off. But I doubt that’s what I was thinking about at that moment. I was almost certainly picturing Chris, scared witless. He was 18 then—nine years younger than me. Lanky, with wide eyes like saucers. Funny, artistic, and sweet as pie. Easy pickings, for sure. When his name was called, we hurried toward the line forming outside the visiting room and filed in, cooperatively.

Somewhere between my introduction to County and the last time that I waddled into it, I discovered a couple more unstated givens: One, the term “visiting room” is a euphemism. The room—a congested hallway, really—seems to narrow with reckless determination that makes it hard to breathe. Whenever I’m inside, I instantly feel myself losing a sense of proportion, squeezed between the expanse of cement walls and stools bolted to the floor. Two, the stools tucked in the see-through cubicles on either end of the hallway are prime real estate, desirable because of their relative privacy, which, given the context, is obviously a valued comfort. Regulars know to rush for them, snag one, and stay put. That’s just what Jelani and I did.

After five or six minutes, in shuffled a crush of banana yellow jumpsuits. The color is important. Had they been dressed in khaki, there would have been nothing remarkable to set them apart from the hundreds of other men under maximum security in my brother’s division. But yellow is special, reserved for those in “PC” or protective custody; it screams for undue notice. For safety, Chris had asked to be separated from the general population, then changed his mind when he crossed paths with a guy in khaki who called him a snitch, and changed it again when someone on his deck was stabbed to death. PC was perhaps the lesser of two evils, but besides having a questionable reputation, the label brought with it a mixed bag. The “perk,” for lack of a better word, was extra time bunkered in a cell.

This is not to be confused with “seg,” or disciplinary segregation, colloquially known as “the hole”. Apparently, that’s a whole other situation. Chris once wrote me:

I don’t know if you came to see me but im in the hole. I can’t get any phone calls, i don’t know bout visits. I gotta be here for 10 days. It ain’t no joke down here crys. I can’t leave the cell for showers or nothin and its drivin me crazy!!!”

And toward the end of the note, “I’m surrounded by killers and rapists… I don’t fit in here.”

There were eight brothers in yellow, all of them Black, and most around Chris’s age. Chris, as always, took forever to appear. I bobbed from side to side—peeking over and through the crowd, waving my hands wildly—to make sure he knew he had company. Was I over the top? Sure, but as far as I am concerned, it was a necessary distraction. I have seen people—both inmates and visitors—come and go without connecting with one another. Blame those unfortunate occurrences on processing errors or maybe poor timing, but every now and then, somebody’s son was left standing idly by, sick, scanning the room for his absent lifeline to the engaged world, while the rest of us chummed it up.

It was loud, understandably, with so many full-blown conversations happening all at once, and everybody trying to outdo everybody else. In the movies, there is a phone—an icky, worn-out phone, but a phone nonetheless. Here, we have a tiny, metal-grated opening in Plexiglas a good distance from a stool, which means that unless you’re 6 feet tall and rail thin, like Chris (and quite unlike me), then sitting and chatting is nearly impossible. When Chris settled down, I stood and, folding over a ballooning midsection, brought my lips close enough to the speaker to kiss it. The rest was largely routine. I drew him out, asking him how he was doing, about the latest in the County, whether he had thought of a slick name for the baby, if he needed any books or money in his account. And when I ran out of steam, ...