 I was here before. Oh, you were here before. And then you got smart. Oh, I got a job. That's what I'm like, I guess. I'm smart. Where are you from? All right, we're going to jump this building movement dialogue off. Welcome. My name is RJ Makani. I'm the co-producer of Calvary Theater. This is part of a series called Devising Freedom, where we're looking at the prison industrial complex past, present, and hopefully something else that's in front of it that's actually leaves us safe, actually leaves us free. All of that. For this dialogue tonight our moderator is Michael Primo. Right here. No, what we're going to do is after I introduce Michael, we're going to play a short video then we'll bring these front lights up. It's all right. So Michael is a great moderator for us because he's both in the theater making world. He's currently the producer's chair with the Foundry Theater. Right now he's doing work called Sandy Storyline which is facilitating people telling their stories, their experiences and also something that can be applied across experiences. And then on the other half of it Michael's been very involved in different campaign work, movement building, and bridging the arts and social justice work. So thanks for being here with us, Michael. Yeah, it's good to be here. Can we jump the video off first? Yeah, sounds good. Believer. Yeah, we'll do. I want to first thank you all for coming to participate in this conversation. Hopefully we'll make as much of a dialogue and as conversation as possible so that we can really kind of dig in it. We have a wonderful audience of lots of familiar faces so I think we'll have ample opportunity to kind of dig in and go deep with it. To my left here is Gabriel Seia from the Drug Policy Alliance. Julian Kang who is currently the director of Communities United for Police Reform. And Rachel Hersey who is the campaign director of Critical Resistance. And once we get going I'll allow them to introduce themselves and talk more about the work that they do. And right now we'll have a video. You all know how this goes. Yeah, so we can start off introducing ourselves and the video comes down. We'll take a break for that. I think we're good. I've been stopped by police after we became a cop. Used to walk to Washington Heights with two other cops right now. Believe it or not, I've been stopped by police after we became a cop. Used to walk to Washington Heights with cops right in my mind. And we would get thrown against the wall just for walking down. I'm not saying don't stop the criminal. I say don't stop the innocent people. Police officers since 2004, I was 10 came from a third world country in the Dominican Republic. I grew up in Washington Heights those shootings almost every night. It was a daily thing. The 34th precinct used to have a cop come into a grade class. She used to come every Wednesday and I used to look up to her like oh my god, this is what I want to do. This is what I'm not talking about that I think I want to be a cop. For me, it was a dream. In 2009, the commanding officers required us to have a 120 and 5 quarter system. 120 and 5 means one arrest per month, 20 summons per month, and 5 stop questions for us. So basically they wanted to stop the person a day. But what happened the day you don't see the crime? What happened the day you don't see the violations? People started getting creative. We will stop a person in the street in the corner because the sergeant says stop him. Why you don't ask? You stop him, you fresco him, you feel it's possible you search him. And this case sometimes they just walk in home from school, they just walk into the store. They're not doing absolutely anything. It's a really humiliating feeling. When they go through your pockets, when they stop you, you don't have no freedom. If you stop and then tell the officer, I don't have to give you my ID, I don't have to give you my name, which is within the law, the law allows you to do that. You're going to get hurt. My turning point was with a bunch of kids in the corner stopped by the commanding officer. There was a 13 year old mix in the group, Polanco Coffin. You don't ask me questions. Coffin bring him back. His brother come to ask what's going on with my brother. He's walking home from school officer. Did he do anything stupid? The commanding officer looked at my partner and told him to bring him in. For what? Oh, we'll figure it out later. Just bring him in. And that was my turning point. That was the time I said, what should I do to a kid that's just walking home from school? That we know is not doing anything. This is not what I wanted to do. I live for my kids. And I think of them. I think of them one day being slapped by a cop like it happened so many times in the street. I'm thinking of them being handcuffed and screaming to the cop. I haven't done anything. I haven't done anything. Why are you arresting me? I haven't done anything. I don't want them to go through that. If you get violated by a cop, how are you going to trust that cop? How are you going to come up to him when you see something? If this is the same cop that threw me against the wall and this is the same cop that went through my private parts looking for crack that I didn't have, why should I help him? You should be working with the community. It's written like that. You should be getting community trust. There's a lot of things that can make the community safer. Stopping and harassing innocent people is not going to make the community safer. This particular issue is something that's also personal to me and I just want to frame that as well. As a brown body growing up getting knocked around by police last spring, I was on trial for my political activity and looking at seven years and the police straight lied every step of the way and was only acquitted in front of a jury. And my lawyer said her mentor had said to her that there may not be any justice in the justice system but you can occasionally find it in a jury. And that was after straight lies just down the line and it was only acquitted because of video evidence. So I think it's just a useful analogy or story to think about the amount of people that get locked up that don't have that privilege that I did or having pro bono legal support that was competent. So it's a pleasure to sit and build with these folks and you who came out here today to talk about this we have three people who kind of approaches issue from a variety of directions which I think presents a rich opportunity for us to really kind of think about how we build a movement within this space you know can variously be called punitive forms of justice that are really meant to keep us in check in a lot of ways. So I'm going to invite our guests here to introduce themselves and the work they do and then we can move into a discussion around how these particular issues that they work on intersect so we can collectively think together as we build together. My name is Gabriel and I work at the Drug Policy Alliance. It's one of my colleagues I'll say it louder. My name is Gabriel Say I work at the Drug Policy Alliance and I see some of my colleagues and former colleagues here which is nice. We're a national organization of people working to end the war on drugs we're based here in New York we have offices around the country the team that I work with here in New York focuses on changing policies and practices here in New York City in Albany for statewide action or activities policies and so forth but also in jurisdictions around the state so we're increasingly working in cities like the city of Albany not just the legislature thankfully and Buffalo and Ithaca and other places and so the work ranges from things like sentencing reform issues to syringe access and syringe exchange overdose prevention to effective youth drug education programs a lot of work around marijuana policy specifically which I can speak more about later but it runs the gamut and we work actually in coalition with groups where part of CPR which we'll talk about and we've worked with critical resistance and I'm really pleased to be here I'm Joo Hyun and I work with the U.S. National Police Reform and I see that some of my bosses are in the room the leadership of our campaign we're a multi-sector multi-strategy campaign around the city that includes a number of different types of organizations including grassroots community-based organizations legal shops for duplication policy advocacy groups, researchers but most importantly our leadership is really grassroots groups that are coming from effective communities and so I see some people at home with folks in the room and other people and one of the things that we really try to do is fill together a multi-strategy campaign that doesn't include not only community education and community organizing but also really some policy advocacy, litigation communication and some other stuff to bring it all together and I'll talk more. I'm Rachel Herzing I work with an organization called critical resistance and we have a chapter here in New York City but we work at a national scale chapter is also in Portland in Oakland in Los Angeles and in New Orleans the organization is dedicated to trying to figure out how to eliminate the prison industrial complex entirely and we do that through campaigns and projects on the ground that I'll talk about. That's great. I think a lot of times in this work there's a lot of jargon there's a lot of words that we use collectively and sometimes we know what they mean and sometimes we pretend like we know what they mean I'm curious if we could speak to this word movement a little bit and I'm curious how three of you in particular define movement and what a healthy movement looks like and then in that question I'm wondering if you could also sort of use as an opportunity to talk a little bit about your work and how that relates to strengthening the work you do by working with other folks in the sector or perhaps not in the sector? I think for these performance certainly folks in the audience should correct me but we think about movement in a few different ways and one of them being the coordination of different strategies in different sectors or areas so all around a common goal that we're trying to achieve together and for us that means that CBR is a campaign that's part of that trying to build a much broader movement so meaning that people ideally that it's mass enough and big enough so that people who are not parts of organizations feel like they're part of something broader and bigger and I think we saw some of that in the past year in 2013 in New York City one of the things that I think happened in the past year a number of different things happened one thing that I would name is that in the 2013 citywide elections you couldn't go to any kind of mayoral debate or citywide debate without hearing the word stop and frisk or hearing the word NYPD and that was not coming only from members of our member organizations that was coming from the general public because there was a groundswell of recognition that the NYPD was systemically discriminating and abusing people across the city and so in that way for me that's part of what part of a movement looked like another example I would point to in the last year is that there's been I would argue some cultural change in New York five years ago it was real hard to go anywhere in the city well let me put it more positively last year I think that when there were instances of police abuse on the streets so whether that was the killing of 16 year old Kimani Gray in Brooklyn you couldn't go anywhere and not have people come out of their stores with their phones in their hands taping the incident as it was happening and that's not something we saw in New York City streets five years ago so part of what we've tried to do is through multiple strategies build a real system and culture of accountability and love meaning that our jobs on the street is to create safety in part by looking out for each other so that if I see somebody on my block who's being hassled by the cops that I serve as witness there that if I don't feel safe to take out my phone as a camera that I'm still observing so I can be a witness for them later that they know that they're not alone in that moment when being in need and these are things that we can all do on a daily basis and I think more and more New Yorkers who have never been part of an organization are actually starting to do this and for me that's kind of the semblance of what a movement starts to look like or I think fairly profound and we probably won't be able to fully appreciate it for a while until we have some sort of historical perspective I mean some of us I think will appreciate it now but I think the the full weight of the significance of having this type of shift is something that may take us a while to really digest because if you think back 20 years ago or even 10 the national conversation around these issues to the extent that there even was one was largely defined by things like getting tough on crime by getting criminals or drugs off of our streets or out of our communities something that we will sometimes use in terminology like the war on drugs or a system of mass incarceration that's been decades in the making and so when Nixon launches President Nixon launches a war on drugs in 71 and Reagan builds upon that and there's this whole expansion of the use of prisons and jails in this country in a way that's unprecedented in humankind or human history to the extent that we have 2.3 million people in prison in jails which doesn't is a somewhat meaningless number because I don't think we really comprehend it it's like everybody in Manhattan on any given day the people that live here if you consider there's 10 million people roughly incarcerated in the world that 25% of that population is here in the US it's like I don't think we begin to digest what that really means and so to be in an environment where so much of what anything related to safety or justice the definitions of what that would look like often times related to cages and to police and badges and guns and penalization and criminalization to now be in a scenario where as Jukyung noted you have the election of the mayor of the largest city in the country and one of the largest cities in the world who wins because he runs on reforming the largest police force in the world is not something that just arose out of nowhere is an expression of a whole bunch of things that have happened that are small and large alike and that are beyond any one or two organizations alone it has to do with a whole range of things and I think to me the mic was your question about what does movement mean it's that thing that's really hard to replicate but we're always trying to get to like we want to get to a thing where we could say wow there's a shift happening culturally there's a shift happening in policy there's you know regardless of how limited the reforms may be at the federal level the fact that there's a president of the united states and an attorney general using the terms mass incarceration like it's that is the result of movement right you don't get a president to use that term they didn't just adopt that they did it because folks worked for years in isolation and obscurity and ignored and against great odds to popularize a term that's now being normalized and mainstream by the president they don't want to overstate what that means it doesn't mean we don't have a problem but we also shouldn't understate the value of that and what it reflects and I think that I want to get to those more of those things in political economic circumstances that I don't know a formula to do that other than doing the work in conjunction with a lot of other people in a lot of other places doing the same thing or doing their own thing but in a way where we say oh let's keep this thing moving along but that's what most inspires me right now about where we are whether we're a person who just came into this and said oh look at all these problems this is how do we get here we've been doing this for 20 years to help us get here I think it's an exciting moment because there are some opportunities that we hopefully will be able to realize but they probably won't come without sustained organizing let's start in a different place but sitting in this room actually is a good example of movement building to me because I'm seeing all kind of people that I worked with while I lived here 59 years ago and people who I have worked with since that time in a variety of sectors so some people on imprisonment some people on policing some people on like cultural work or putting out a periodical some people on anti-violence right so it's really really interesting to me to be sitting in this room because I think it's a reflection of also the ways in which the organization that I work for has this kind of big tent approach to doing our work right so I was on the way down here walking past I walked past the Quaker house I'm like 13th and 2nd friends the Friends building and I haven't been by that building in a very long time but that was the office for a conference that we held here called critical resistance each CREs back in 2001 and that was one of two kind of convenings that helped start our organization it was another one in 1998 in Berkeley and then this one here the office was here and we held it up town in Columbia and those were really to do a couple things the first one and the second one really to kind of take a temperature of the landscape of organizing activism but also what is the changing nature of the prison industrial complex 10 years on 20 years on since a lot of people had gotten together before and also to figure out okay in the room together what can we do to imagine what kind of taking this thing out at its knees might look like and require and out of those convenings we actually got enough push that we decided to form ourselves into an organization right so we had been kind of a collection of individuals working in different ways across the United States largely convening based and we understood that we were hearing from people inside of that work that they wanted a bit more infrastructure and a container that could sustain over time some of the ideas that had got raised there and a more concrete way to apply that to work on the ground so we have a value that people who started the organization we had a value on organization right so rather than a collective of individuals which sometimes can be really useful also the utility of organizations and then organizations joining forces and kind of scaling out that way and so we have been at that as an organization for the past 13 years and we have a very very broad vision of abolishing the prison industrial complex and I actually want to define how I use that because I feel like that's one of those ones that people use a lot and so I wrote down the one I like the best that I've been using recently so I don't get it wrong but when I'm talking about it what I normally mean is the symbiotic relationship between public and private. Public is important and that's not just private interests that employ imprisonment, policing surveillance, the courts and their attendant cultural apparatuses as a means of maintaining social, economic, political inequities. So I'm not talking about mass incarceration only. Large scale imprisonment is certainly a piece of the puzzle. I am not talking about private industries making a profit. That is certainly a piece of the puzzle but state entities are also benefiting substantially by the setup of this thing. I am talking about kind of the complex part of it. That's what I'm the most interested in is the kind of intersection and the symbiotic nature of all of that that gets employed to make us think we need cops to stay safe even if they're good cops. Or we need cages even for cages for the really, really bad people and that we can't think of anything else because our purview is so tight and so cramped that we forget to dream or we forget with the ability. And so the organization that I work for is really an organization of dreamers. And at some level that's our power to be able to think about the myriad ways that this monster attacks us and tries to kill us and that can be really, really daunting. It can be a challenge but it's also an incredible opportunity to connect in all of these different ways. Right? So it's really important to us that Picture the Homeless does the work that you all do because we understand the relationship between people being displaced and pushed out and gentrification and who winds up in cages. And it's really, really important that people at Drug Policy Alliance are trying to figure out how to mitigate the harm of the war on drugs or a really core part of the killing machine and to try to figure out how to keep those people out of the cage. Right? And it's really, really important that CPR does the work the campaign is doing because without kind of any kind of remedy between the hands of the cops and bodies on the streets we see what happens. Right? And so the whole kind of picture is important to us and it's really a unique opportunity for us to work with organizations that focus more on a specific thing so that we can maintain a broader focus. So we work nationally, like I said we have chapters in these different places but the idea is to also work locally. So the individual chapters identify and work on some of the articulations of the prison industrial complex that are the most particular where they are, the most acute or a good fight. They pick good fights that are local and it goes all together to see how are we sharing strategies how are we fighting the beast kind of all of these things. And so for me movement is a little bit of like the family that we have how we recognize each other from the places that we work but it's also our ability to kind of operate different scales and in different ways. That's great. That's beautiful. Thank you. And that's also a great segue to a question I was going to ask a little bit later but I think it's a perfect way to kind of frame it and building on what you're talking about in terms of looking forward the dreamer aspect. So and you touched on 1971, 72, early 70s being the beginning of the war on drugs around that time it was also when the Powell memo was written which is that document considered to be sort of the framing document to become neoliberal capitalism which definitely is the sort of economic sort of like foundation of many of these social problems, these approach to what would otherwise be health problems perhaps if we live in a different world. And so I'm curious if you could share with us as you look ahead so we'll use 40 since the Powell memo and the war on drugs was about 40 years ago now looking ahead to 40 years from now with an eye towards movement building what does winning look like? How is the world different because of a change in drug policy and a change in policing and a change in prisons? How does things look differently and I'm curious if you could relate that to your particular immediate struggles like how that sort of helps you focus the work that you do? It's easy questions. In a general way when I think about questions like this I tend to think about stuff like this where it's an absence of which I think is probably a problem there's an absence of social control there's an absence of poverty it's interesting More specifically with respect to drugs one of the things that interests me so much about drugs and drug policy aside from a lot of personal experiences that are probably familiar to many of us in many ways is our ability to control our own consciousness and transform or alter that consciousness at will and what role if any should the state have in mitigating anybody's ability or if you want to use a term right to change or alter their consciousness and that's a big question for me around drug policy issues I'm actually not interested in trying to get everybody who's got a problem with drugs into treatment most people who have a problem with drugs don't need treatment treatment is more of a problem for people and it is a help some people need it they should have it most people have a problem with drugs come out of it on their own including young people the bigger question is do we have the ability to have control over our own bodies put inside of our bodies what we want change our consciousness in a way that we want absent harm to other people and that you know is more of an interesting compelling thing for me I mean I certainly think about a place where everyone has the opportunity to achieve their full potential whatever that may be under conditions that are most advantageous to them in their community and you know basic things housing food you know stuff like that is of course a part of that but it's also about joy and pleasure and Kim do we I mean so 40 years from now I would like to live in a society where joy and pleasure are as much a part of something that we have as a fundamental piece of our humanity as is food and housing and and when I think about the organizing work that we do to try to change you know whether it's changing policies or changing laws or what not it's usually or if not always driven by are we increasing the number of people who feel compelled or who feel something compelled who feel situated in their own personal power to make decisions in conjunction with other people to pursue sort of righteous end with each other and if we end up doing whether it's a policy reform thing or a coalition thing or an organizing thing it's always something there's always something fundamental about that like are we building out are there more people who feel capable of engaging and organizing for justice and I think I think ultimately where I'd like to be in 40 years is in a place that's defined by a process like that where people can come together and say this is we are living in a place that we all help define and build together and I think maybe that's one reason why I tend to think about these things like in the absence of like as a starting point that's also just a limitation in my own thinking but like I like stuff like this like when we're getting together in places like this or going to events or working with folks in groups to try to change things I was at a thing recently where Jean sitting here from Picture of the Homeless was just breaking it down about how Picture of the Homeless came about and I was like man this is is like more of that stuff about how organizations build and grow together it's like where I'd like to be in 40 years is in a place where there's more people doing that and I don't know exactly what that looks like other than like an absence of certain things but certainly more of that right like more of those the histories of the pictures of the homelessness and the like I want more of that in 40 years I think what I want to start by saying is that I'm just really loving the conversation I kind of want to just ask both of you a bunch of questions but that's really selfish and so first I also actually want to ask two questions of you all of the audience just because we don't get to really know you during this as much so one question is how many of you are artists and how many of you believe in liberation well less liberation than art that's alright so I'm starting with that in part because I kind of want to go to answer the question I want to kind of go backwards and then forward so backwards if we go to the 70s I think the other thing that happens in the 70s in this country is really serious systematic disinvestment in public infrastructure what I mean by that is that the public schools get disinvested in we disinvest in health care so it becomes not only more privatized but really nobody can afford it we disinvest in actually public housing or any kind of housing that's affordable and we create basically the we dismantle anything that's looking like something like a social safety net and I feel like that's such an important backdrop for us in terms of understanding where we are now we have something called the Christian industrial complex that's so embedded in every part of the apparatus in this country the way that we describe then if we move forward a few decades to let's say the 90s mid 90s and I'll use policing as one entry point not to say it's the end all but just one window to look into in the mid 90s we were in a city where the NYPD was killing young men of color pretty regularly with impunity I never get those words right but basically without any kind of accountability and so we can name many of those names in this room I'm sure Anthony Baez Patrick Dorisman there's many many Anthony Rosario Hilton Vega, Yongqin Huang the list goes on and we go into the white 90s and it continues and then some of these names become more nationally recognized so the torture of the killing of Amadou Diallo with 41 shots and at that point in the late 90s early 2000s nationally there's a conversation that's happening where at the highest levels of government and in people's living rooms or what have you people are talking about racial profiling and how it's probably a bad idea and I say that sort of jokingly but not it's an incredibly serious issue but what we saw was that ironically in 2001 there was a world conference against racism that actually many organizations throughout the U.S. and also around the world participated in coming back from the world conference against racism in Durban is when 9-11 happened and after that it became pretty impossible for a period of time to publicly criticize law enforcement with any kind of credibility and I'm not saying that life should be mourned but the conversations that were possible at that time as surveillance just exploded changed our context for almost a decade probably so in New York City using this location as one example we shoot forward to the late 2000s and the killing of Sean Bell right before his wedding with 50 shots and at that point we're not even shocked by 50 shots anymore because the number of shots no longer mean anything to us and so that's in some ways some of the resurgence of the local police accountability movement in that period of recognizing that you know what enough is enough we really have to move past and try to attack what this monster is as Richard described it and we're moving forward to now and we're in a moment so today how many of you have heard of Sicily, McMillan? so Occupy Wall Street happened in New York with one of the places to happen she was an Occupy Wall Street protester who was basically sexually assaulted by an NYPD officer her right breast was broke she went to trial she was convicted of trial sentencing what today it could have been up to 7 years it ended up being 3 months and 5 years probation and we can debate what's wrong with that verdict etc etc but that in some ways I want to just suppose that instance of today and that injustice with Ramali Graham how many of you have heard of Ramali Graham? so young man in the Bronx he was killed when he was I guess 18 2 years ago he was walking home he actually got home went upstairs in his mother's house and he had been profiled by some cops on a corner who claimed that they thought he might have a gun or a weapon because he might have adjusted his waistband now I don't know about you but even when I'm wearing a belt I adjust my waistband but it's really unluckily that I'm getting profiled that way and so cops actually went into his home without a search warrant busted in killed him in front of his 6 year old brother and his grandmother they claimed they might have found a small amount of weed or something in the toilet but all to say there was no gun they claimed he ran in fact they planted evidence or planted a news story of a young black man running which wasn't Ramali claiming that he ran and so there's a series of injustices with this case which actually the Bronx district attorney convened a grand jury in this case the first grand jury voted to indict the officer involved that was thrown out on a technicality judge a second grand jury was convened which almost never happens but happened because of community pressure and that second grand jury did not vote to indict so at this point the family only has the department of justice to look at for a quote unquote criminal justice solution so anyway I'm raising that because there's a big petition drive to try to get the DOJ to do a full investigation but also because this is a case these are two different cases that are part of the same monster and there's actually pretty differential media coverage of this not surprisingly and I don't blame Sicily and we shouldn't I don't think blame Sicily for this but it shows what it means and you shared your story earlier of what it was that you were fortunate enough to have good counsel to be able to do to go to trial not everybody does and so part of the system we're in is one where we're still seeing young people basically being killed by police without any accountability without any system of accountability and so our work in terms of the local police accountability work is just begun we have a lot more to do but I guess in part I raised these because I think that when we move forward 40 years where we need to be I think is whatever we dream right now and that we need to actually not only have those dreams 40 years from now but we need to be dreaming today how we act today to enable that future in a really concrete way I mean organizations a lot of organizations talk about quote-unquote strategic plans or like three-year plans or five-year plans I feel like we need a movement plan like a multi-decade movement plan where we all actually carve out you know what these are some things we're going to do when we take it with that much seriousness the level of resources that many individual organizations put into strategic planning or whatever financial controls well I'm not saying that's not important but we need to actually put that level of intentionality into a multi-decade plan to build not only a movement but to win to really not only win certain reforms which you know the community tonight for police reform work with a number of organizations to support the council that has to do with legislation last year that's great not enough we've got way more to do and I just hope and part of my dream is that we not only dream about like being able to envision ourselves with joy and pleasure but also that we are so intentional that we can't lose I feel like that's the irresistibility factor that we have to I don't know about in fact or so but we have to make sure that everybody around us knows how irresistible it is that we're going to have a different future and we're going to create a new channel the freedom plan what winning looks like to me is self-determination that's an easy answer where we are in 40 years more complicated and I was so astounded to hear you like lay out the you know September 11th things changed because I tell that all the time about policing because it's true about policing in New York but it's also true about the prison system in general and about police forces across the United States so you know one thing that happened right after September 11th is that they locked down all the prisons in the country most every prison got locked out for some period of time and like no legal visits like nothing but the other thing that happened was a little piece of legislation called the Patriot Act that was a that was a left over right from the AEDPA the anti-terrorism effect anti-terrorism effective death penalty at the Oklahoma City right and so I think you know one of the one of the things that like that trajectory that you laid out but also kind of these lingering pieces makes me think about is exactly what you were talking about the end of what you were saying which is like acting on our dreams right now so one of the things that I think is really compelling for us is that we play in coalitions and we work almost exclusively in coalitions because nobody wants to work with abolitionists alone right you know is why not ask for what we want instead of what we think we can get or what we're told we're entitled right why not just ask for what we want and some of the stories we were hearing right before we started talking are like well now we want this thing right and I think that that is a part of what I would like to be seeing also when I look at the next 40 years is that I feel like there's been such a chill put on dissent for very obvious reasons and they're like your story is a good one right and you know the organization that I'm part of is founded in part by you know former Black Panthers former Black Liberation Army members and you know the kind of cautions against being cowed by the chill of the state and the repression of the state of dissent I think is a really really key and dissent can look a bunch of different ways right so there are a lot of ways to kind of move together and use different strategies and tactics to get there but the dreaming part the kind of continuing to push out and think longer I think is really really really important and when they continue to trade off to prioritize cops and to prioritize cages I think it really does curb our ability to manage what else but it also takes different alternatives off the table right so if all the resources I'm not just talking about financial resources but if all the resources are going toward caging and controlling it makes it impossible for resources in some cases to also be put toward joy and pleasure and liberation and self determination so for me yeah 40 years it's like let's start really acting on I'm on the plan but we know the plan because I'm there and I think it will take that long I think that's the other thing is to think in decades right so part of the professionalization of our movements has been to think in your increments and I think we know stuff doesn't happen in 12 months like that I like that it's like decades long and to kind of readjust our expectations away from those kind of what we can get in a legislative cycle or what we can get in a funding cycle or what we can get I think that's part of it I agree with you like these pieces of legislation matter and aggregate they matter a lot but that's a piece and what is underneath when your piece of legislation passes to make sure that something actually happens and that it wasn't just like a victory or you know a moment yeah nothing nothing builds movements like a plan like a vision 40 years ago I guess we called a manifesto I don't know what they called it 40 years from now it would be interesting to see before I turn it out to the audience and invite your questions in this conversation I want to also honor this space by asking a question about art and culture and stories and the role of that work in your work and I'm curious for situating this in how you're looking at your work moving forward like we've talked sort of where we've come from we've talked far ahead and I'm curious about the next the road ahead of you however you want to categorize that a decade a year a month a day a weekend personally however you want to think about that is cool but I'm curious of the role of stories the role of art the role of culture in your work I know Rachel you've worked a lot with stories we were talking a little about this earlier especially from the perspective of engaging with artists engaging with people who identify themselves as art makers but not necessarily art and culture in the widest stretch we communicate our values through culture we communicate our values through story and it's all around us so I'm curious if you could speak to work that you have coming up campaigns or broader movement work and the role of art and culture if it isn't engaged directly how would you like to see it engage potentially to a room full of folks who are art makers you saw that right not me I think first I would start by saying that we were actually talking a little bit about this question before so you would think that we would all have prepped the answers that's not true but where I would start I think is just recognizing that historically most of our community is the resistance movement that's art that's actually what has changed people's minds like if you look historically what changes people's hearts and minds is not somebody talking for 20 minutes but it's about connecting with people's hearts and that's actually it's not just a tactic it's a strategy and it's actually part of what movement building has to include and integrate having said that what I would say is for CPR at least we have a lot more to do on that front and I would say that that's probably one of our biggest challenges right now in terms of not doing more integration so pieces like this one that you just saw the film was produced by Firelight Media which some of you probably know they're this amazing filmmaker's organization and part of it was because we need to tell stories that even in doing things like passing legislation part of what we need to do is be able to tell stories of ourselves, of each other it's much more effective for this young member from Make the World New York whose name is Taekwondo to be able to tell his story in another clip that we have where he was stopped over 60 times and turned 18 to be able to talk about what that was like how that didn't make the community safer to hear his mother talking about that story and for all of us to be sharing some of those stories so I feel like the story telling is critically important some of the ways that we do use that we're able to include art within our work right now is actually I would say through some narratives so we do know your rights trainings many of our organizations do know your rights trainings and a number of groups have done murals know your rights murals in communities and Picture the Holens worked on one in Harlem and where it's not just the organization but it's whoever wants to in the community gets together to come help paint this mural that an artist has commissioned to work on and to develop and design and for us a lot of that is also about reclaiming public space to re-envision what safety would look like this is not exactly your question but I do want to make a plug for something called the joint remedies process which hopefully will come one day there was a stop and frisk trial of federal class action lawsuits last year some of you might have heard of it were basically the MIT stop and frisk program was deemed unconstitutional by the federal courts there was a series of remedies ordered by the court not one of those things is moved forward yet it's definitely going to work right now so even though the mayor has said that he has the intent to withdraw the court hasn't ruled on it and the police unions are battling it so once that state is lifted which I'm actually sure will happen we have the opportunity to actually dream about what community safety could look like in New York without this abuse and stop and frisk program and that's something that we would want everyone involved in that's going to require not only folks to think about policy and reform issues but also think about what it means to be safe in our communities with each other and what it means not have to rely on law enforcement as a primary way to maintain safety so I want to put that out because I feel like there's a lot of ways to be really creative with that and we really want to help do that a little bit of examples I'll try to do it briefly we do a lot of storytelling and story collecting inside of the organization looks a little bit different in different ways there are three projects that are going on right now that involve interviewing or story collecting one is happening here in New York City and the chapter here is talking to survivors of Attica prison to just talk about what conditions were like in Attica and to help build a case for the state of New York to close down a maximum security prison but also just to kind of add a body of evidence to like what conditions are like and what it is to survive those conditions and Brian is here if you want to talk to me in the chapter there actively won a campaign against gang injunctions in our coalition there which I could not be happier about very big deal but coming out of that campaign they really were like we don't want to keep fighting the cops we don't want to keep talking about how much we hate the cops we actually want to build what we want right as a way of helping make the cops obsolete by building things instead of no because we spend a lot of time saying no and so one of the things that they're doing now is some research for a campaign they want to launch and they're talking to residents across the city of Oakland about their interactions with cops but also about where they like to spend time in the city and why what's there, what's appealing to them and then also if they could put resources into making the city safer, more secure what would they build anything and then the idea is to start to develop some community projects based on the interviews that we did with people and then also we have a brand new chapter in Portland, Oregon and they're interviewing people across the city to learn more about the history of anti-PSC work in Portland so we use it a lot and it's a big part of the practice that I have in other areas too I also wanted to talk about murals, part of the fight against the gang injunction was a cultural fight it was a big big component of that campaign there are two people who were named on this injunction as blights as nuisances, public nuisances that's what a gang injunction does and names you as a public nuisance and these guys were called the worst things by city officials it was unbelievable they were called the worst of the worst the most in menaces and all of that but the city attorney called them bullet magnets to their faces in a public center so two of these guys the insult to injury on this one is that one of them actually had been shot the guy didn't know that they decided that they were tired of all of the kind of bad talking that they were hearing about themselves and they also were like we know our neighbors we want to do something in our neighborhood we're tired of fighting them but not getting any resources and so they decided that they wanted to collaborate with a local organization to do a series of mural projects in the neighborhood where they live and is this injunction film that they were policing and so they made plans to do these murals and they did I think ultimately a series of three or four of them and what they were were the cultural history of the neighborhood so there's stuff that is like racist stuff all over history of colonization of that part of California there's other stuff that's really more about the neighborhood and then people could come from the neighborhood and paint whatever and they held a block party every time that they did one of these and before they had the block party they knocked on every single neighbor's door and they're like hey we're gonna have free food we're gonna have music and this is like the worst of the worst the biggest menace right so mural in and of itself doesn't do anything and a party doesn't in and of itself do anything but the activity that they took in making a collective process and a collective project was able to shift who was understood as dangerous in the neighborhood and they became seen as community resources so that same guy recently came out he heard a gun go off in the neighborhood he came out he had gotten himself trained as a medic through some of the work we did in the coalition we met somebody there got his training as a community medic and was able to give first aid to this little kid some incident right so the part of the story of that is really just about the way that culture is also used as a bit of a centrifuge right to kind of bring people together and put them in motion and then the last thing that I'll just talk about is that we after after Oscar Grant was shot you might know there were all kinds of activities in the streets for many many nights there and a bunch of people right around 100 people actually got locked up for activities during those nights during those nights and there were lots of court dates obviously for people that many people and so as part of what was going on day after day after day in the streets but also to kind of generate attention for people's court dates so that the judge could see that there was community support for the people we would we made a series of things we made a big mural but we also made really really tall signs that are based on the signs from the mothers of the disappeared in Argentina that just have somebody's face who's been shot by the cops and their name and prison and these things were the most amazing tools there were I don't know there's like eight of them that we made and we would take them out and every time I had one walking in the streets in a protest or I was standing at court I would meet somebody who knew the person on my side and there were a couple times when people didn't know that they had been killed so they're like why is that person on your side and then you can have a different kind of conversation with people about that but it's the visual image that draws them in to the conversation and brings them into your force of gravity and that way and one of the things that's been really really important as an organization regardless of visual what the visual images are is to ship the language the visual language that we use in our work so in our stuff you're probably never going to see razor wire you're probably never going to see bars you're probably never going to see cuffs you know we try to have as often as possible when we have control over the images liberatory images or the language that we use to not be framed by our adversaries because it's due to reminding us earlier and that's visual language as well so if what we see are cages and cuffs and manacles how can we think outside of that but when we see people breaking out dreaming and working together I think it just ships them so that's part of our practice I appreciate that you talked about the mother because the question about art and reform the first thing that comes to my mind is my colleague Anthony Papa who is a painter and was sent to prison under the Rockefeller drug laws a 15 year to life sentence a first time charge you know the one of hundreds of thousands of stories of people who were incarcerated under those laws how many people in the room have heard of the Rockefeller drug laws so most of the folks in the room for those that haven't yes well for those that don't know these were laws in New York that were passed in 1973 that required a long long prison term 15 years to life prison for even the first time drug offenses and from 1973 to 2009 there were roughly 200,000 people incarcerated under these laws and the people who heard of those laws put your hands up again so all of us who have heard of those laws in part can like owe something back to a bunch of organizers and a bunch of people who worked but certainly to people like Anthony Papa who while he was incarcerated he learned to paint and when he got out well his story of getting out is an amazing thing unto itself because he a very small snippet of his story he was painting and he was determined to get out and he ended up writing news stories about himself under a pseudonym that ended up getting picked up in a paper and he wound up getting himself written about in these art journals in fact he is if you know Anthony Papa you know that he is a stubbornly focused dude especially about his own stuff and he got his painting into the Whitney Museum of Art a self-portrait of having been while he was incarcerated and he used that to leverage clemency from Governor Pataki in 1997 now when he got out into the streets he joined up with this other artist this guy by the name of Randy Kredeco who is a tough tough cookie to deal with there's no doubt about it but Randy had been a comedian doing during the Nicaraguan Revolution the Sandinista Revolution Randy was going down to Minagua and was doing essentially comedy to raise money for the Sandinistas he had a trajectory where he was supposed to be like a super hot star but he pissed off Johnny Carson and it killed his career because he went on the Johnny Carson show and had made leftist jokes and had joked about Reagan and Carson basically killed his career and so he started doing movement work so Randy and Papa they took a page from the madres in Argentina and they started to hold up signs of people who had been disappeared for these laws in a period of time where we weren't really as a society questioning whether or not it was right for having somebody behind bars if they were behind bars they must have done something wrong right and they used these tactics of direct action to confrontation storytelling borrowed from a South American movement in Argentina that was against a dictatorship to tell the stories of people who had been otherwise silenced and they used art and they used theater and they used direct action to tell those stories and simultaneously to them doing that there was a really robust student movement here in New York and in California against prisons and what not and students were using they were using direct action and art and really creative interventions to raise the profile of these issues to the point that terms like the Rockefeller drug laws became something that a lot more people knew about and then and then there was a whole bunch of other stuff of course that was going on there was all the data that was produced and the reports that showed that stuff didn't work and the court cases and all that stuff as well but my point is that art played a big role so when I moved to New York and started doing work around the Rockefeller drug laws you know these folks that have been doing that work helped lead to the point in 2003 when I moved here when Richard Simmons is that thank you I was like Russell I'm going to say that Richard Simmons had a role in that he was in shape Russell Simmons thank you I knew something was wrong it was not right when Russell Simmons did his countdown for fairness in 2003 in downtown New York City down at City Hall when he had all of these hip hop artists come out speaking out against the Rockefeller drug laws that had a profound impact on the political discourse in Albany and around the state now it didn't immediately lead to reform and unfortunately I think for some of the big time stars like Mr. Simmons who I respect that he did that a great deal because you didn't need to put out all his money to do that or put in those phone calls you know so I respect that I also think that sometimes those folks are such giants in the world that they can sometimes undervalue the role that organizing can play because it wasn't as he learned it wasn't just sufficient for him to speak out with 50 cent M&M and Jay-Z to change the laws it took that in combination with organizing my point is that particularly with this stuff particularly with stuff around prisons and mass incarceration and the drug laws the art has played a really essential role even if it's the most basic part of what I think an artistic experience can be which is about storytelling it's like no good advocate worth their salt or no good organizer worth their salt goes to a meeting to change a law without bringing somebody who's had an experience that can tell their story in their own voice because nobody cares I mean I don't want to overstate this but in essence it's like no law got changed because somebody issued a report I'd like that to be the case it would make everybody's lives easier to some extent but because we got all the data to show that what's working and not working but it really does take this very human this very fundamental thing and people telling their stories is such a powerful powerful part about that and nobody can tell someone's story better than themselves and when they do it in a fashion that can help illustrate all the stuff that the data is saying but in a human form and connect on that heart to heart level it makes things it makes a world of difference so I have a when RJ was talking about the how many people here saw the box so a lot of y'all saw the box I unfortunately missed it I remember RJ talking about that show like I don't know when that was RJ but it was a while ago it was on the train and he's like oh we're going to do this thing so that kind of stuff is so important to this mix of things you know because you need it to help us think and dream differently right I think it helps us dream like the art that the artistic engagement helps us dream differently so it's certainly been an important part of my trajectory and I have great debt to artists like Tony Popp or Randy Kredko or many many others right who helped both shape the world I work in but also giving me a lot to work with which is it also prevents invisibility like these systems are meant to make people socially dead and so I mean there's a way that the stories both the stories people tell about themselves right but also the ability for us then to generalize them across different experiences right so why it's really important that stories get translated into pieces of theater or into poetry or into film or you know whatever the case might be and that's what's really powerful about the work you all are doing with these you know profiles of people right is that you know it's designed to make us invisible and alienated and silent right and those stories I really appreciated the way that you told that because it's like you know it prevents us from being silent prevents us from being invisible I think I also want to add that it's a process moment for us too it's not just I feel like what's been so impactful of the stories you've told stories you've told any of the examples of inspirational art and culture within our movements is that it's not just what that one product is but it's the process of re-calling that story or it's the process of that mural being on the corner and people still going by that corner and talking about what just happened to them and it's the process of folks being transformed on a daily basis being able to have communication peace that we just don't often have so I feel like that's the longevity of the process of really good art is part of what actually helps us move movement Yeah I think that's really important to underscore that you can't underscore that enough that process piece and in a lot of ways that's the sort of exact opposite of this neoliberal capitalism where impugnative justice is you do something wrong and there's a response for that but there's no acknowledgement of process and there's a response for our movements that many of us have spoken to is not a deep enough recognition of the process of the evolution so I'd love to invite some questions from you all we're going to take about three questions and stack them up and point them to these folks and also I forgot to tell you all beforehand but I also want to invite if any of you all have questions for each other in our stack as we go along about y'all know but if there's any questions that any of y'all have is that a question? Yeah it's a question I just thought I don't want to take anybody else's I think we just Judith? I have a lot of work in business but I know Tony really well and do you see I'm impressed by all of your comments about the convergence of all the different things that help change language or change the law right the activism and do you see are you doing business also and I was just thinking about some corrections from the series that I have and being at Bedford Hills and what that's like in a maximum security women's prison and seeing the women that clearly on a weekly basis do the incredible art and teaching project you can't bring everybody into a prison but you can kind of bring the story out so that the people who haven't been in get a sense of that and I'm just curious if any of your organizations are doing things in collaboration with prisons and detention? I want to take two more we'll stack those up I'm not sure if everyone heard that question but correct me if I rephrased it right but it was a question about working inside if you do any work inside prison and the role of art in that work inside and that relationship between that inside work and the outside community is there any other questions? yes I guess everything you guys spoke about is something odd for a question about but the question is how do we use to be part of this conversation because a lot of the time the students that I find are interested in these topics end up being all very in one age or so to be either in political science or sociology and they want to concentrate but this is something that on my opinion affects so many facets so many different disciplines that and a lot of the time when we tell them for example on a chapter for students for sensible drug policies called campus and when I tell kids like okay these are the the history of the drug war this is what's going on these are the injustices happening they're scared and it kind of the chilling effect that you spoke about of the state they're scared to put their name on a piece of paper in support of something that's right and they themselves may be drug users they themselves may be along that line but they are afraid to put their name and rightfully sell them MSA revelations and whatnot but they're scared to I guess sign the dotted line to say you know I support changing this even if they may not be the self drug user may never encounter this system and they know what is going on they are afraid to stand up and speak up and you know it's important to give people like ourselves in this room talking about it but I think really making a national conversation that spans you know beyond just us is important as well yeah thank you I'd acknowledge that this is also beautiful at the multi-generational conversation alone in this room so I give thanks for that I actually have two questions one brief one and that is particularly I wonder if you could are you trying to shift you had said at the beginning of this whole thing that rehab and treatment isn't necessarily isn't what's useful and so are you trying to shift the frame in some way or how are you trying to shift the frame away from rehab and treatment as the quick fix or not so quick that's a brief question the longer question it has to do with this idea of 40 years or time or process just bear with me for one second because I have to say a couple of things to get to find my way to the question but suffice it to say that I think I was really excited to hear people define this movement and I and everybody talks about movement all of you talked about movement in terms of winning and losing or winning when I'm looking yes and and so to which is I mean why wouldn't we want to win certain things or abolish certain things or etc the thing that I puzzle with myself all the time is this idea of movement being attached to those goals versus some sort of ecological understanding of the work that we do that sort of never ends because to win something like I remember when the DW when they finally changed the domestic workers law there was just a whole ton of things to do after that it wasn't like we won hooray and so this idea of movement being attached to winning this idea even of art being stories and attached to movement building as opposed to something that also happens simultaneously in a sort of ecology that is not only a tool all this to ask do you ever struggle with the notion of movement we're not even struggled but wonder whether there's another way for us to think of ourselves and organize sorry that took so long thank you yes yes working with prisoners is very important we don't run a lot of programming inside of prisons because it's really difficult to do that everywhere the largest number of our people in california is just like not going to happen there's a media ban in california you know that you're not getting a new program in the same way even that you can in new york state with some exceptions like that being said you know we have worked with prisoner organizers since our beginning and we do that in a variety of ways we have a prisoner correspondence program that is not really a pen pal program but it's much more like resources helping support organizing on the inside by amplifying stuff outside or figuring out what we can do that won't wind up somebody in the hole and can support the work that they're doing inside we produce a publication called the abolitionist that is written is put together by prison people and non-emprisoned people and circulates to about 3,500 prison people across the united states for free so if you know somebody inside who wants one from california and you know that again is a tool in so many places communication is really really difficult getting political analysis inside is really really difficult the vast majority of what people have access to is pretty garbagey so trying to figure out how to do that and then there are specific campaign instances too and the most recent one is the work that we did on the outside to support the five demands of people that went on hunger strike in the california prison system so july of this year was the third round of hunger strikes to protest the use of solitary confinement and the conditions of solitary confinement 30,000 people in prison people went out on strike it's crazy to say 30,000 people that wasn't everybody in the california system but 30,000 people went on hunger strike work stoppage or program stoppage in california prison depending on who you ask the prison system itself says upwards of 100 or more people went on strike for 60 full days on hunger strike for 60 days so it's a bit of context for that those of you who know bobby sands he was on strike for 66 days it was a very very long time to go without eating and the spark for that work came actually in early 2010 early 2011 when a collective group of people in prison in the california prison was designed to be a solitary confinement prison put out a statement saying that they were going to go on hunger strike to a couple organizations to a paper in the bay area that publishes that kind of stuff and to some of their loved ones saying we're going to go out on strike if the conditions in here don't change we can't get some basic demands met and so organizations individuals across the state started talking to each other about how to do support on the outside and so this last round of strikes also won a couple things that were pretty key they won through organizing pressure inside and outside two hearings legislative hearings the public safety committees on conditions and pieces of legislation came out of those hearings meant to change conditions or I'm sorry in solitary confinement and that has been ongoing work that happens through visits through letters and just as like a piece of context these are organizers who are in like just severe isolation they are in 23 hour a day lockdown in a space that's roughly the size of your bathroom without human contact apart from guards so like if they get a legal visit they get moved into a cage that's a chair cage and they get to see their lawyer that way right or they get wide plexiglass and they managed to organize he inside not only to come up with these demands but with statements of political unity at the end of the strikes in 2011 they issued an agreement to end racial hostilities in the prison system that they circulated throughout the entire system that was about trying to figure out how to remedy differences across racial lands which just get stoked inside of prison systems like you didn't believe inside but also outside right so and your hostilities on the outside there are all different kinds of ways that we can do this resolution and these are organizers who are organizing under those conditions with support of their loved ones with support of organizations so that was very long then um I'm going to leave the student one for you while we talk about what was that other one oh well we said when because Michael asked us what is winning me no he asked what a movement was the first question was what a movement was but then you asked us directly what does winning look like I actually appreciated how you framed it because that is actually how we think about operating inside of movements and I actually think it's a very very I'm held up by the sense of movement I don't find it confining I think it's actually it helps us think that we're not alone but I really appreciate you describing it as an ecology because I think it really is we understand that different people, different organizations different issue areas have to play different roles and at different times and as an organization that has fairly radical politics that's actually really important for us to carve out what is a good role for us we want to operate in collaboration we don't want to have to compromise our politics but we also don't want to do that at the expense of everybody else around us because we're all in this together for the long haul and so sometimes the role that we play is to say the thing that nobody else can say because then they lose access to whatever and we both need those sides sometimes the role is for us to take a backseat and not being kind of the enemy and so I appreciate your framing it like that I don't think it's an either or I don't think it's a binary of when versus ecology I would guess that you don't think that either I think we're probably pretty unified in that and I think that for me part of it is that I would want us to be humble enough that even if we did afford that gay plan to assume that it's not comprehensive to assume that the conditions will change as we go there needs to be readjustments and hopefully there are things that we can't even imagine that's just beautiful and joyful to come out of that and that kind of humility I think in a movement where there's actually different actors working on different strategies on the level of coordination I feel like is what our power can be as large, large groups of people the other thing is I think that for I feel like every justice movement victory quote unquote always gets met by resistance and always gets there's always an attempt to roll back and I also think that sometimes on the left we don't like to claim that we're going to try to win sometimes so that doesn't mean win means just this small box it means like let's imagine what that looks like sometimes it means this piece today and this much broader piece tomorrow or vice versa but then we actually give ourselves permission to imagine that we actually have the power with our neighbors with our families to actually change conditions and for me that's actually what I mean by winning not necessarily what that final product looks like but I know that what it means is that all of us are moving forward together I'm going to let Gabriel answer just like Rachel did in terms of the first question because for communities night from police reform we're pretty focused on police accountability although a number of our individual member groups do work for example the Malcolm X grassroots movement does a lot of work with prisoners, families for freedom a lot of work with families with members in detention centers Center for Constitutional Rights did some litigation around some of the hunger strikes in prisons and so there's a lot of work that individual groups do but as a campaign we're pretty focused on NYPD accountability because you know that's not enough work I think I'm going to leave you with a student one too I don't know how I've not been a student in undergrad first for a while and so I don't know how to organize the students I have some experience in organizing campaigns and I think that there's some some fairly basic fundamental campaign practices that are about finding a good issue that cuts across different constituencies and figuring out how to develop the right kind of campaign that can bring in people and that can generate some fire and heat to grow the number of people who are involved and that kind of stuff some of those are just like fundamental building blocks that everyone who works on campaigns then takes and has to apply in their own context in their own political environment in their own social life so I wish that I had the here's what you do, I don't have that but I'd be happy to talk with you about if there's something that we could do around I guess for policy alliance or other ones we work with to support your efforts so there's that and just one thing about student organizing when I was a late I went to undergrad a very late later in my life, traditional, I was a non-traditional student I guess that's what they say and one of the ways I decided to go on what the school I went to was that the year before the students for their graduation speaker they organized to have Lumia as their graduation speaker and this was in Olympia Washington and they organized and so Lumia recorded something Lumia for those that don't know is a political prisoner held for, I mean she's over 35 years now I guess for an alleged murder of a police officer of which he's maintained his innocence and there's a great amount of evidence that suggests he was not the person who committed the crime and in fact the Philly PD wrote them into this thing and any of it they organized to get him as the speaker and I heard this and followed this on the radio and I was like I'm going where those folks are but they spent a lot of time organizing and they had actually the governor try to shut it down and all of this stuff and they some lessons in that for me were about issue selection and solidarity and all sorts of stuff that I'd love to talk about with you or other folks the point is that student organizing has had a big impact on me I have a great debt to my political development to it with respect to just briefly on the rehab and treatment question I think you know in a sign of a shifting political environment 14 years ago when California passed Proposition 36 it was a treatment instead of incarceration initiative it was like let's stop locking people up instead of putting them in prison and give them treatment and at that time that was a a progressive notion to say the least because it was not happening around the country and that claim of treatment instead of incarceration was a helpful way to pierce this notion that the solution for everything was just going to be to lock people up and that's what we were doing not everybody of course as you noted the social infrastructure wiped out you're homeless, you're locked up you're poor, you're going to lock you up that was the way to do it I think we're really past this time of treatment instead of incarceration and one of the things that is for me a signal of alarm is that this group right on crime which are the same excuse the French, assholes who the prison system we have today was a bipartisan effort through and through no doubt but a lot of the knuckleheads who helped establish the ideological framework that formed the basis the foundational basis for how it is that we got into this mess are now like proclaiming themselves to be the ones who are going to get us out of this which I think is the height of hypocrisy but those knuckleheads are saying oh we should have treatment instead of incarceration and that coupled with the fact that now treatment instead of incarceration is a far more appropriate thing for liberals to latch onto and liberals have been amongst the worst like talk about some knuckleheads and you know that is an alarming thing to me and the reason for that is what it suggests is that there's something appropriate about how people got into the criminal justice system and that now the only question is should we be putting them in a jail cell or into treatment and it doesn't question the notion that heck you know maybe the person doesn't have a problem maybe the problem is that they live in a community that's targeted by the police for like in stop and frisk practices like the number one arrest in New York City well now number two is for marijuana possession and 85% of the people arrested for marijuana possession in this city are black and Latino and the vast majority of them are young men of color even though it's young white men who are far more likely to be using marijuana and so the logical conclusion when you take out the rehab you know like treatment instead of incarceration it justifies the notion of the very arrest to begin with like what about no arrest for any drug offense at all how's that? or possession offenses we'll start there for those who might feel a little uncomfortable with the notion of sales keep in mind that if you pass a joint to somebody and state you're a drug dealer by definition of the penal code that's the law if you pass a joint and you share that's a sales offense the penal law defies you as a drug dealer but if you're uncomfortable with that notion let's just start with possession and use instead of saying treatment instead of incarceration we should say no arrest for the possession of any drug heroin, cocaine, LSD marijuana, no arrest at all why? it was like well why would you arrest him? what are we going to do? and it's like really what is the value, what is the public safety value? and in 40 years of doing this stuff there's almost nothing in the literature that suggests that these practices have any benefit for public safety it's hard to find something that's not a bunch of bs right? and so I that's why I think it's not that people don't need help trust me there's a lot of people who do need some form of treatment and help and I'm not going to those people that do at all we should take great care to make sure that for those folks that need some help they get it I mean I'm sure all of us probably either have someone in our family or maybe it was us ourselves or we know somebody who's like the uncle who drinks who you wish does not start drinking on Thanksgiving but they do anyways right? it's like the family member who's got some other problem like the person who's just their drug use is an issue for them we've been those people or we know and those folks should get the assistance that they need but the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of people who use drugs don't have a problem and until we start to be honest about that fact the notion of treatment instead of incarceration suggests that the mere use of a drug is a problem and then what we're going to debate is like what should we do we're going to mandate that that person goes to some treatment which by the way the vast majority of treatment programs are utterly bs there's very little evidence for their efficacy they tend to define success as whether or not someone is abstinent right? 6-12 months after the end of the treatment course it says nothing about how the person is in their life there's a lot of big people who can use drugs and take care of their kids and go to work and all kinds of things a more fundamental question is is the person stabilized enough where they can deal with their responsibilities effectively do they feel a sense of joy do they have connection with their self-worth whether they're using drugs or not shouldn't be a point so obviously there's a long answer because this is a big thing for me clearly and it's hard legislatively it's quite difficult because there's a certain Rachel's talking about what's possible within a legislative context what's possible I'll tell you it's not it is a challenge to try to advance a legislative agenda where we're saying how about we don't arrest anybody for any drug possession offense in an environment where we're still arguing with elected officials about the fact that these 50,000 marijuana possession or possession arrests are totally against the existing law that we have on the books we're just trying to fix the existing law with respect very briefly to the ecology I like that term a lot about movement stuff and winning what I like to think about with you a lot I want to win I do and anybody who's tried to change any policy knows that in the effort to do so the vast majority of your time if you're defining the victory as whether or not you change the law then most of your time is spent losing most of your time is spent losing I have become a fantastic loser we've spent more time losing under that definition than anything else we lose all the damn time if you need something lost come and talk to me it's why we have to be careful how we define the win there is a point where we want to pass the law we want to win the lawsuit those are important benchmarks I'm not knocking them at all but there is a whole range of other benchmarks you were sort of hitting on it earlier the professionalization of the movement to the extent that the funding apparatus to the extent that the funding apparatus begins to shape how we define victory did you get your bill passed no because it takes a long time to do that but I guess what we did all this other stuff that's actually really a part about that movement ecology and that infrastructure it's like why we work with grassroots organizations as DPA we don't only define it why did we get the bill passed are there more leaders at stake here are there more members involved there are more people talking about this thing there is a whole other set of metrics to use here to define whether or not we won that I think inform and shape and help build that ecology and we'll hopefully get us to the place of actually having bigger wins which I would very much like like to see I wish we had so much more time is there any other questions take like just because of the mentions that like a lot of us with mothers have disappeared for me it's really hard to I guess like wrap my whole heart around things like changes in policy or discussions about like national surveillance or the PIC and the context of the fact that like for me personally I believe that we are living inside the empire so like when 9-11 all the changes that might have happened within the U.S. are alive so found out that that's the people involved with that every day we are a society that refuses to hold our own military officers accountable for the sexual violence that could not only to each other but also to people around the world and you know in the military this is what happened right now with the expansion of the military and the Philippines friends like how can we reconcile that and from within the empire for people who are working on issues that are now producing in the state violence patients in the violence how can we think about the work that we do to the experiences of people and friends in the global power over which we have like imperial power yeah um I guess my primary question but it's distinguished panel is in the wake of in the interim while we are waiting for some closure in the Ramadi Graham case we're also approaching the time when our kids are going to get out of school um what can we do when we not only as audience here but as a group as picture owners what can we do to press or push the Justice Department the Department of Justice into giving us some clear kind of guidelines that we can kind of wrap ourselves around about how safe are our kids going to be coming from the corner stores um what is a federal judge just said there's a color there's a rampant denial a fourth amendment right there's a fourth amendment right attached to this case there's office of H.D. have the right to go into that house it's not like this kid was going down the subway he was in this house so what was that um is this question about a crime has been or is about to be committed to suspicion I mean this is a test case that the community don't push the Department of Justice to give us some clear some clear distinctions about what's right what's wrong and where the perimeter um we need this before our kids get out of school we really and I'm here I came here primarily to get what do we do to push the Justice Department to giving that family closure and to giving us clarity before our kids get out of school and we see so many more potential Romali Gray in each of your respective areas of work um what's been accomplished in the movement that you're part of is really significant like it's what you laid out in terms of where we moved around the rubble is huge I don't think it's hyperbole to say that um we wouldn't have a the Blasio administration actually if stopping Frisk having to become a public issue and the work we see for our recents into that which is potentially going to change the landscape of marriage here right I mean we have two two terms to Giuliani it's the first time somebody that's Romali progressive um and appointed Braden which interestingly enough in Oakland we work their racial department to push Braden out of school based on based on his prior behavior um in other places I say all that just to say that like this is this current kind of new context in New York City curious about how you relate to the Blasio, how you relate to Braden what your thoughts are racial about Braden um yeah that's my question I don't know I mean before we dig in that too I'm just going to encourage you you know in the interest of time you don't necessarily feel like we have to answer all those questions although there was one the global question some interest from all of you so but the other two you know but feel free to if you'd like I'll be maybe they don't want to answer yeah I will um the international question is a big one and I think I should probably just mention because of the role of the war on drugs so much uh or it has played such a uh and continued to play such a huge um role as a vehicle for militarization in the global south and around the around the world I don't know how to best make the connections between local work and international work I know that in I know that making those connections at times has proven to be very powerful in my own experience in some of the history that I'm aware of and I think that there's a lot to be said for creating um awareness at the very local level for people to understand how it is that extremely local um issues are connected to very global circumstances and that it's um so when I think about Stop and Frisk as an example it's we don't we it it may not be a polite we may not be able to say in polite company that it's a police state kind of activity it's easier to say that Iran has a police state to justify us rattling the sabers or that that Putin is you know a tyrant you know for seizing Crimea but I would submit that if we were to I mean that's done but people here have done but if we were to just go around and ask people who have been the subject of the practices of Stop and Frisk the responses that we got if we were to lay out for responses to people in other parts of the world we'd probably find to be pretty similar in states that we charge as being police states and I think it I find as an organizer that it's useful to get folks to connect with a local discussion about what's happening and to build out from there to understand the linkages to global factors so that people have a basis for an authentic solidarity and that um that I think coupled with doing the kind of solidarity work where folks are actually going to other countries and bearing witness and taking part in local struggles with at the invitation of folks from other parts of the world and bringing that back and sharing that has certainly had a profound impact on me and my own work and I think um continues to shape a lot of the different organizing struggles that I am either connected to or follow quite closely so I think there is a real responsibility to have that global context there in an increasingly global world. I personally think that we're going to find um as if particular efforts around the drug efforts that there's going to be an increasing global conversation around this upcoming UN meeting that's happening here in the US in 2016 called UNGAAS where questions around drug policy at the global level will really be a subject of discussion and an international discussion and the role of the United States in maintaining the system of drug prohibition at the global level which creates a system of justification for militarization for things that are happening everywhere from Afghanistan to Mexico. We have a really unique opportunity to engage that in a way that we don't well in terms of the UN only comes around once every 10 years so that's an opportunity we're certainly looking at and trying to brainstorm now about best ways to take global issues particularly on the UN which is not always the most exciting thing in this country we completely ignore everything to do with the UN because we're in violation of nearly every treaty that exists with it but I think it's an opportunity for us to engage and I'm hoping that we're able to do so in a way that builds stronger ties with organizers in other parts of the world and where our work can be informed at the local level by some of those struggles and that may not be as I wish I had a more succinct answer about it and maybe you have other people have ideas about this stuff but it's certainly something I feel very acutely aware of all the time and I think it's a one of a constant state of a dynamic tension. I think what I would add is two things to that question around the global peace one is that if we look at New York City there are a number of neighborhoods where community residents would say that they've been on the occupation and that hasn't changed even though stops are down significantly it's still more than double the first year we've worked with office the racial disparities are still pretty much exactly the same as they've been in the past dozen years and so we've had some important shifts and conditions because it's good that the number of stops are down that's not a bad thing but we've got to actually do better. So that's one piece and for me we have to connect the local to the global and the second piece of that for me this is like a two hour long conversation we're not going to do it right now but the second piece of that for me that I always keep in my heart is that a good friend of mine from El Salvador when she was asked by Americans what kind of solidarity work would be helpful what she used to say is hold your government accountable like that's your solidarity work don't think about helping us hold your government accountable and so for us I feel like our task is regardless of where you are the political spectrum regardless of whether or not you believe in electoral politics we have a task in this country to hold it more accountable than being held in whatever way that looks like and so to skip gears a little bit to the Remorley Graham question there's a campaign around this right now to make sure that we get the DOJ to convene a grand jury on federal civil rights charges and ideally move on that it's incredibly difficult because the DOJ almost never comes into New York or other places to do this kind of thing in fact the last time I can remember them doing it in New York were probably two times one was maybe around Moima and before that was Anthony Bias the good thing is the Anthony Bias case a lot of the organizing was led by the Justice Committee which at that point used to be called National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights they're also helping to leave this work around Remorley and so there's actually a number of activities coming up in the next few weeks that we should talk about separate from here and anybody who wants to have to talk about it I just don't want to do it on camera in a big room and then on the de Blasio Graham question I feel like that's a five hour conversation but what I will start by saying I think is that we're in a moment of opportunity challenge and contradiction meaning that it's kind of like the victory question right like some people saw it as a victory in terms of who was elected and others and many people saw it as that's a reflection of people's power that doesn't mean that we won and that doesn't mean that conditions permanently change it doesn't mean that there has been policy change yet on policing it's our job as a movement to hold an accountable the administration accountable to what they said that they would do so when the MTA and the NYPD said that they were going to do a sweep of homeless people off of the e-train picture the homeless organize people across the city work with some of us within Community Night for Police Reform to do an inside-outside strategy where some people pushed on the administration privately some people did and some of the same people also did stuff on the outside they canceled that e-line project in terms of their quote-unquote sweep of homeless people which doesn't mean that they're not going to continue to target homeless people but it means that we have to claim these victories as we get them because part of what we need to build movement is to make sure that there's something that we believe we can change and I don't mean false hope of change I mean we actually were able to change that we were able to stop it in its tracks because of the leadership of groups like Picture the Homeless and because people were looking out for each other so the other piece on Bratton I've got many many opinions but because I know I also remember Bratton here in the mid 90s and the families of Anthony Bias Nicholas Hayward Hilton Vega Anthony Rosario, Yongshin Huang they all remember Bratton from the mid 90s and what I want us to remember though is that the NYPD and the systematic discrimination and abuse of our communities is not about one person it's never about one position and in some ways some of that becomes a distraction from us actually looking at the system of practices that we actually have to address the system of practices regardless of who the commissioner is so we could have had somebody who was a commissioner that maybe lots and lots and lots more people would have I don't know but either way it's still the NYPD it's going to take up a very long time to change this meeting and we've got a lot of work to do that's a great way to put it and get out of it about that one time I completely agree with that and I think you know both and right and I'm going to talk about Bratton as a way of talking about the international stuff because I actually think it's like a perfect little nugget to do those things you know I guess from where I stand inside of my organization not only is it one person but that's what policing is that is the practice of policing is containment and control and suppression of the sun that's what it is so it doesn't matter if it's Bill Bratton or Kelly or me you know at some level if the practice is the practice of containment and control and suppression which is not to say we don't fight for change and we don't try to chip away and we don't take incremental steps it's not to say that at all don't get fooled by the face or the name that being said I think Bratton is a really really evil, evil man I mean in the sense of his impact around the world I don't know what he does in his personal life but his impact in the world has wrought havoc and misery on hundreds and millions of people at this point part of the reason that I think it's important to talk about him is that he is the architect and number one salesman of a very particular brand of policing right and so this kind of zero tolerance, so called quality of life hyper militarized policing that is becoming the standard of policing around the world has a lot to do with him I don't want to give him full credit anything but it has a lot to do with him and the fact of him moving from here using New York as a petri dish and perfecting that style of policing here and then taking it to Los Angeles and just like cranking it up and then saying hey I got this recipe book for how to really really push it under control and I'm going to sell it to Israel and I'm going to sell it to Colombia and I'm going to sell it to Brazil example a couple of years ago you know I was bad mouthing Breton somewhere I can't remember and people from Brazil came up and they're like oh we want to talk to you because we're prepping because they brought him in to clean up Rio before the Olympics and the World Cup and all these big mega events that are coming and he's already starting this was like two or three years ago he's already starting so they're putting sweeps at all the stuff he does sweeps stop and search different kind of comp stat training comp stat data collection and so his method is very very honed at this point and it is used internationally and so the kind of uniformity at some level that we're starting to see and how policing happens across different geographies and inside of different nation states is terrifying to me it's completely terrifying to me because it is so pernicious and it's really precise in large ways because human beings have to implement this stuff that we can poke holes and bite and stick in and we do resist and we do win so while we didn't push him out entirely we were able to in Oakland cast an undoubt on his expertise that the city said they wouldn't allow him contact with any residents of Oakland he was meant to do like a series of public events as part of his contract and they're like we're taking all of that stuff off the table and we never saw him once so he stayed on the contract right but the fact of public outcry around that shifted the terms of his contract and it also it created an environment in which it's not the word of God when Bill Bratton says something so the report they submitted the cops were like woefully inadequate this is a bad report tell you know this is just like consultant BS right and that is a very different thing from other you know situations in which I've encountered people talking about Bratton so yeah I mean I think he's pernicious but I also think he we can beat him you know and these wins when we tell ourselves that we win they also see that we win something and that we're not afraid to keep coming back and I think that's why it's incredibly important to to clean those wins thank you so we've been here for a little while and I think maybe it's time for us to break and you know talk more directly to ourselves here but um hahaha hahaha Michael said 17 questions hahaha before we do if there's any like one or two comments or none of those any questions but anything else that burning anyone wanted to just bring into the air or give thanks to her honor I wanted to allow that what are the term abolitionists which I just think is genius give it up especially to and also be remiss to not acknowledge that today is the birth of Malcolm X as well in this conversation about abolition so I want to just give thanks to that and give thanks to the work that you guys do thank you I appreciate you were taking the time to sit and build and I appreciate you all for coming here to continue to build with us I don't know if there's anything from the foundry about any upcoming events or anything you all want to speak to or plug or Wednesday Wednesday will be our final dialogue in the series and it's called Transforming Justice and we'll be meeting with Maryam Cabo from Chicago who's really at the center of the series