Policing and prison abolition policy questions have been minimized in the lead-up to the 2024 November election, despite their significance in the last election cycle. Yet these ideas have finally pierced into mainstream debate, and committed prison abolitionists are tirelessly organizing to free incarcerated people, improve conditions within the prison system, and close or prevent the opening of new correctional facilities.Ā Rattling the BarsĀ looks back on the past year of discussions with abolitionists on the stakes and political lessons leading up to Novemberās presidential election.
Transcript
Mansa Musa: On Tuesday, this country will be holding elections for the presidency as well as other national, state, and local elections. Nationwide the cry is that the election for presidency is the most important election this nation will be having.
Rattling the Bars and The Real News have been focusing on the impact the elections will have on the prison-industrial complex. More importantly, how does the abolition movement look at the electoral system? What role does it play in the abolishment of the prison-industrial complex? You can hear the views of abolitionists from previously recorded interviews.
Back in May, we covered the Free Her March, where formerly incarcerated women were calling for clemency for 100 women:
Mansa Musa: Okay. We got the Bronx with us today. Why are you here today?
Star: Because weāre here to petition the President, and everybody else on his team, to grant clemency to Michelle West and all the other women who deserve it.
Speaker 8: He told us when we was here four years ago that he was going to free 100 women within 100 days of him being in office. And he has not done any of what he said he was going to do. So weāre here today asking for him to free our women, and free them now.
Star: We are tired of giving the Democrats what they want, and they donāt give us what we need.
Speaker 3: So what do we want?
Star: We want freedom for all women and girls. We want rehabilitation, and alternatives to incarceration.
Speaker 9: We want Michelle West Free!
Miquelle West: Iām Miquelle West, Michelle Westās daughter. My mom was incarcerated when I was ten years old for a drug conspiracy case. Sheās serving two life sentences and 15 years.
Speaker 9: I represent the women that want to be free. Let our women be free. Let our women out of [inaudible].
Group: Cut it down!
Speaker 10: [Inaudible].
Group: Cut it down!
Speaker 10: [Inaudible]
Speaker 11: Stop criminalizing us for poverty, stop criminalizing us for how we cope from this trauma that has been put on us historically and continues into this present day. Free my sisters.
Speaker 12: The women get treated badly. The women get raped in jail. All kinds of things. I served federal time, and I know what itās like to be in there. And I say free women today.
Andrea James: We told them to free those women, and they didnāt do it. Theyāre sending them to other prisons that, guess what, also are raping our sisters inside of the federal system. So weāve got a lot of work to do, people.
Laura Whitehorn: The response is to move all the women at once, all of a sudden to just throw them out into places all over the country with no preparation, no bathroom facilities. Theyāre being, as one of them said, the men who raped them, should, and are, going to prison. And the women are being punished now because theyāre saying that the BOP, which canāt control their own staff, has to close the prison because they canāt manage it. And they take the women.
Iāve been walking with different friends of mine who were in Dublin with me. It was not a low-security place at that point. And weāre all having flashbacks of what it was to be transferred in that way, where youāre treated like a sack of laundry, except that youāre chained up. Youāre chained at the waist. You canāt use the bathroom for hours, you get no food. They sat on a bus for five hours in the parking lot of the prison.
And then at the end of five hours, they were taken back into the prison. They said, oh, we donāt know where to take you. So the way that theyāre being treated and then their familiesā¦ Some people have children and their families are in the Bay Area. So the children were able to visit their moms in the prison, and now the moms have been sent across the country.
Mansa Musa: All this is the remedy for their abusive behavior. The remedy for their abusive behavior becomes more abusive.
Mansa Musa: Hear Andrea James, founder and executive director of the National Council for incarcerated Women and Girls and Families for Justice as Healing:
Andrea James: We were incarcerated in the federal system. We were in prison with sisters who are never coming home unless their sentences are commuted. So itās kind of different when you determine what space youāre going to work out of when you havenāt had the full experience of what weāre talking about here.
But if you were like us, if you were women that were incarcerated in the federal system, who were mothers, who were wives, who were aunties, and grandmothers, and sisters, and moms in particular, we have been separated from our children. But some of us had the opportunity to go to prison and come home. So weāre fighting for sisters that, unless we get clemency for them, theyāll never come home.
And weāve got to really understand that. Weāre talking about the liberation of our people, and we want to bring attention to the intentionality of incarceration of our people and the policies that led up to that.
Now, we started our work after, we started organizing in the federal prison for women in Danbury, Connecticut, in 2010, and brought the work-out with us starting in 2011. And then other sisters inside Justine Moore, Virginia Douglas, Big Shay, they started to come home. So it wasnāt rocket science for us, but in the federal prison, you would see this from all over the country, sometimes from different Black communities around the world. And so it wasnāt rocket science for us to stop this work.
But we started in the prison realizing not really totally clear about what clemency was as a tool. But after coming home in 2011, that became crystal clear to us. We met Amy Povah at CAN-DO Clemency. She taught us a lot about clemency as a tool.
And then of course, President Obama, who we got in front of and who centered women and brought us to the White House. But also we should not be going backwards from what President Obama did with clemency.
Mansa Musa: Okay, letās pick up on right there becauseā¦ Now, for the benefit of our audience, clemency is a federal mandate, and itās top heavy in its bureaucracy. Honest you know ā
Andrea James: Itās a tool, itās a privilege bestowed upon. Itās not a mandate, itās a tool. Itās bestowed upon the president of the United States to grant relief to people from their sentences. And that takes many forms. It could be freedom, immediate freedom, commuting your sentence, meaning it only stops the sentence that you are serving from within a carceral place, a prison.
We decided at some point you can only go so far with whatās happening in Congress right now, whoās controlling Congress, what theyāre paying attention to. We fought so hard against the passage of the First Step Act, the way it was presented, because itās been a big smoke screen.
And we knew when Congress passed First Step that it really wasnāt what we needed. It didnāt address the people who needed to get out. It called out the very people that needed the most relief, and so how could we ever support a bill like that? And we never crossed over in support of it, even though we fought valiantly to try and add retroactivity and other things to the first step.
And then it was put into the hands of the most vile regime, a think tank called the Heritage Foundation, also responsible now for Project 2025, to implement the First Step Act.
And itās just, we are one of the few, I donāt know if any other organizations have done it, but our legal division, led by our senior council, Catherine Sevcenko, has followed the implementation of the First Step Act. And itās been just a sham. Itās been a [inaudible], but the PR on it would make anybody think that everybody whoās come, like 30,000 people got released because of the First Step Act. Thatās not true. But I digress.
So when we talk about the FIX [Clemency] Act, at some point, yes, we have to weigh in. We need legislators who are directly affected, like Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, to carry these bills forward for us and to at least put them into existence, knowing that we got a big struggle to get them to go anywhere because the members of Congress were satisfied with the First Step Act.
As abysmal as it is, they werenāt going to center criminal justice reform in any significant way following that for years, we knew that. Thatās the path of how things go. We havenāt heard a peep about criminal justice reform other than Trump wanting to bring the death penalty back for drug dealers. We havenāt even heard. Itās not even on the current candidatesā platforms.
And so we had to shift our energy to, and itās not really a shift, itās just, what are we picking up now to be present and to make sure that the concept of liberation of our people isnāt left to hope somebodyās going to keep it at the forefront? Thatās our job. Nobodyās coming to save us. If nobody gives a shit about our issue, if youāre going to do this work, you have to be consistent in finding ways of staying in the public eye, of showing up, of taking up space, of getting in the street.
And so thatās what we did with the 10th anniversary. We did this 10 years ago in 2014, and thatās how we got the attention, because of the work of Civil Rights lawyer Nkechi Taifa, who brought the National Council and the sisterhood to the attention of President Obama and Valerie Jarrett to say, yo, Prez, we see you. We see you equating. We see you connecting clemency to racial justice. That clemency is racial justice. We see you going into the federal prisons. How could it be that he was the first president of the United States to go to visit a federal prison? How could that be?
Mansa Musa: In August, The Real Newsās editor-in-chief Maximillian Alvarez and I talked to David Schultz, a criminal reform and social justice advocate, about how poor and working-class voters navigate an electoral system that doesnāt serve them:
Maximillian Alvarez: So I wanted to ask, as two guys on the front lines of that struggle, what do you think the pundit class covering the elections in mainstream media should learn about the conversations that yāall are having and that folks in these communities are having about the election right now?
David Schultz: Okay, yeah. So Iāll start with that one. So I would say itās important for individuals. I think being in Washington DC obviously puts us in a unique position because weāre obviously a very political city. I guess itās different when I go to different areas, different cities. I was just traveling recently, I was in Chicago, and of course it was very political there because weāre getting ready to have the Democratic and national convention. But usually itās not.
So that puts us in a unique perspective to see how politics really affect our everyday lives. I think youāre a hundred percent correct. I think that individuals that are from smaller, more rural areas really want to see and are more concerned with that direct impact. And so elections for them seem like this far away thing. Itās like they drop something in a box, and if theyāre the person they like personality wise really, or who agrees with them on more things than the other, then thatās who they go for.
But they donāt really do their research on the candidates as well as they should to see, really, are they living up to what theyāre saying? Are they voting this way even though theyāre saying they might be voting this way?
And so I think that itās important for the pundits, so to speak, to really listen to grassroots individuals because we are the ones that matter. We are the people that they say in the Constitution. We are the ones that make everything one. Weāre the working class. So at the end of the day, our vote matters, and they want our vote. So I think itās imperative that they listen to what our needs and specific asks are.
Mansa Musa: I think on the grassroots, when youāre dealing with a grassroots level, itās imperative that we educate the people thatās affected because, like you say, people want jobs. People want quality education. People want a safe living environment. People want food quality, cheap food, as far as food prices being so high. People want rent control. They donāt want to be living in squalor and then paying astronomical fees to live there.
So itās important that we educateā¦ When youāre dealing with the grassroots, itās important that you educate the population to understand that you have to find a candidate thatās going to represent your interest.
When the Black Panther Party bring Bobby Seale for mayor, they wasnāt running Bobby Seale for mayor to try to get Bobby Seale to be the mayor. They was educating people about how, like Dave said earlier, where the monies come from, how the monies are allocated, and how you can have a voice in monies being allocated to your neighborhood, to clean up your neighborhood, to have the trash collected. How monies could be allocated towards medical or universal healthcare for everyone.
So when I look at it from the grassroots level, Iām always in my mindā¦ My mind is always in this area, educating the people about the electoral process, educating the people about, okay, if you get involved with this process, then make sure you have a candidate thatās going to represent your interest because the candidate is going to come and say what they think you want to hear. Theyāre going to put on all kinds of activities to motivate your interest.
But when it does settle and they leave, trash hasnāt been collected. Itās high unemployment rate in your neighborhood, housing, you live in squalor. Youāre not safe, and your children being targeted because youāre not safe.
So when I look at it from the perspective, I look at it from a perspective that it is incoming from me and people thatās in that space to educate the people on the budget, educate the people on the electoral process, educate the people on how to go about vetting accounts.
Like you say, candidates have listening sessions. So when a candidate have a listening session, then itās coming from people like myself and Dave to get people to come down there and educate the electorate, ask questions about, OK. Because if you donāt do what we say you supposed to do, same way we elected you in, we can get the recall and get you out.
David Schultz: Can I just add one quick thing? Can I just say, from a grassroots level, to answer your other question is what the individuals are saying is the basic needs is what theyāre struggling with when it comes to housing and especially affordable housing, it doesnāt matter if youāre a returning citizen, if youāre just a working-class individual, that basic need is a struggle that, basically, grassroots individuals are really looking to have fixed this election cycle, and the basic necessity of being able to keep food on their table and be able to feed their kids.
So I know it sounds basic, but thatās what Iāve been hearing a lot of in the community and what they are really focusing on this election cycle.
Mansa Musa: And we recently sat down with Jeronimo Aguilar and John Cannon to talk about Prop. 6 initiative to have removed from California State Constitution its version of the 13th Amendment legalizing slavery:
Mansa Musa: I want you to give us a history lesson on how the code that came to exist thatās legalized slavery in California. Because you made an interesting observation before, and we was talking about it again, how we got this perception of California as being the big Hollywood, Rolls Royce.
Jeronimo Aguilar: Yeah, thank you, Mansa. Yeah, no, youāre right, man. We got this idea of what California is. Not only the palm trees and the Rolls Royce, and itās always sunny, but also that weāre soft on crime, and that criminals are out able to just do whatever they want out here, and thereās no law and order, and all that kind of stuff.
The reality is, the prison-industrial complex out here is as crooked and oppressive as it is in any state of the union. And so, when you talk about especially this exception clause, and specifically here in California, itās the exception to involuntary servitude. But like we say, as you can see on my background there, one of our main messaging points is that involuntary servitude is slavery.
Mansa Musa: Thatās right.
Jeronimo Aguilar: So, they try to lessen it or give it a fancy name, but the reality is the practice is the same thing, of subjugating human beings to work against their will.
So, when you talk about involuntary servitude in California, the history, like you mentioned, it goes all the way back to when California became a state. So, back in 1849. Remember, this territory here was territory of Mexico up until then. You had the expansionist, I wouldnāt even really call it a war, but an assault on Mexico in 1848, which ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
That treaty was not honored. Or like most of the treaties that the US [inaudible] with folks of Indigenous ancestry, them treaties were nothing but opportunities for the forked tongue, as they say, to get what they want.
And so, what happened is the land was taken, and Indigenous folks, Indigenous mixed with Spanish folks, became immigrants overnight. And with that said, what you started seeing was the first Constitution of California in 1849 has that exception clause that we see today. It says that involuntary servitude is prohibited except for punishment for a crime. Itās not that exact wording, but itās the same exact practice.
And so, that set things up. That set the stage for 1850, you started seeing this. So, this is the year right after it became a state and the constitution was introduced. You see the 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians.
And again, the forked tongue. The way that they named the act, you would think, oh, theyāre protecting Indians, when in fact, it was a vagrancy law that they used to criminalize Indigenous people, and subsequently enslave them under the exceptions to involuntary servitude.
And so, I want to add to that. Indigenous peoples were already being enslaved by the Spanish colonial powers. Weāll talk about the mission system. So, the Southwest and California, a lot of it was already built by the enslavement of Indigenous peoples.
When you talk about colonization, and once the Spanish came and that era of terror, and then Mexico getting its independence, and youāve seen Mexico actually outlaw slavery for a period of time while that practice of servitude was brought back once the US took the land from Mexico.
And so, like I said, from 1849 on, up until now, youāve seen the consistent criminalization of Indigenous, Brown folks, later, obviously, our African brothers and sisters that were enslaved and brought to this continent, and also that ended up migrating, trying to find free states, trying to find places where they can actually be free from the subjugation of slavery, only to find the same kind of practices happening over here in the Southwest.
And so, following that 1850 Act of Government and Protection of Indians, which actually turned whatās now the LA Federal Courthouse, was a vibrant slave auction. Based on that law, you saw acts like the Greaser Act, which passed in 1855. Itās another vagrancy law. If you look at the actual statute, the statute reads, āDealing with the issue of those of Spanish and Indian blood.ā And so really, youāre talking about folks like me. Chicanos, Mexicans, those that are of Spanish or Latino and Indigenous ancestry.
And I think the point, and the benefit for our audience, I think you well represented the case to how they codified laws ā
Jeronimo Aguilar: Thatās right.
Mansa Musa: ā¦To make sure that this exception clause could be enacted under any and all circumstances.
John, so now weāre at a place where in terms of yāall organized around the abolishment of slavery, the legal form of slavery as we know it now. Talk about yāall Proposition 6, John.
John Cannon: So, Proposition 6 would actually be reversing Article 1, Section 6 of the California Constitution, which is basically just like the 13th Amendment of the United States.
So, Proposition 6, what it would do right now is give a person autonomy over their own body, give a person choice whether they want to work or not. Because as it is now, you have no choice whether to work or not. So, Proposition 6, it would prioritize rehabilitation over forced labor.
So, what that will look like is, right now as it stands, if youāre inside and youāre working, they assign you a job automatically. And whether you want to do college courses or rehabilitative courses or anything else, youāre not able to, because youāre assigned a job. You donāt get to pick the job. You donāt get to choose if you want a job. If youāre assigned the job, you have to do it.
So, if you did want to, say, take an anger management course, or seek anything to rehabilitate yourself, and that aligns at the same time as your job, youāll have to go to that job or youāll be punished for refusing to work.
Whether you have a death in the family, you have to go to work, or youāll be punished for refusing. And all these cases happened to me while I was incarcerated, and youāre getting punished for refusing to work. Youāre losing days off your sentence, youāre losing phone time, youāre losing all type of things if you refuse to work. So, Prop 6 would actually give a person their own choice over their own body, over their own rehabilitation.
Mansa Musa: how do yāall address, or how will yāall addressā¦ We know Proposition 6 coming to effect, but we also know that prison has become privatized on multiple levels. The privatization of prison is the food service is private, the commissary is private, the industry is private, the way the clothes is being made. Everybody has got involved in terms of putting themselves in a space where they become a private entity.
How will Proposition 6 address that? Because whatās going to ultimately happen, the slave master aināt going to give up the slave freely. Theyāre going to create some type of narrative or create some kind of forceful situation where, oh, if you donāt work, you aināt going to get no days, and you can come over here and work, andā¦ You see where Iām going there with this?
Jeronimo Aguilar: Yep. Yep.
Mansa Musa: So, did yāall see that? Do yāall see it as a problem? Or have yāall looked at that and be prepared to address it?
Jeronimo Aguilar: No, no doubt, Mansa. I think that this is really the first step for us, because itās going to be a long road. And those of us that have been incarcerated or have fought against the carceral system, you know that every time you do something, theyāre going to figure out a way to retaliate, and to find a way to try to circumvent it, theyāre going to try to find a way to basically make whatever youāre doing obsolete so they can continue their practice.
And so on our end, it was a really long and tedious process with the language, but we wanted to make sure was that we werenāt just passing something that was symbolic, that ended up just being, oh, okay. Weāre removing some words out of the constitution, we all feel better about ourselves, and people that are incarcerated are going through the same conditions.
Mansa Musa: Yeah. Status quo. Go ahead.
Jeronimo Aguilar: Status quo. Exactly. So, the language in Proposition 6, and what was ACA 8 when we passed it in the legislature to get it on the ballot, actually says that any person thatās incarcerated cannot be punished for refusing a work assignment. Cannot be [crosstalk].
So what that does is, itās not going to stop CDCR from definitely trying to circumvent things. But what it does is it gives folks a pretty strong legal stance. So, if they do continue to be forced to work and disciplined for refusing to work, they can go to court. And we feel, with the language that we now have in the constitution, which is supposed to be the highest letter of the law, theyāre going to have a pretty strong legal stance to stand on when they get to court.
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
Donate