Why Imagine Otherwise?

In popular media. We have countless examples of more carceral futures.

Okay Jad, what's coming?

Double homicide: one male, one female. Killer's male. White. Forties.

Set up a perimeter and tell them we're en route. I'm placing you under arrest for the future murder of Sarah Marks. Give the man his hat.

The future can be seen.

If you're not familiar, Minority Report is a film from 2002 based on a book by Philip K. Dick. It envisions a world in which police can predict and intervene to prevent murders in Washington, D.C.

Another film that sells a more carceral feature is RoboCop. A 1987 film set in Detroit that posited a feature of law enforcement in which a corporately funded cyborg police officer traverses the city.

Old Detroit has a cancer. The cancer is crime.

Let the woman go, you are under arrest.

We get the best of both worlds. The fastest reflexes modern technology has to offer, onboard computer assisted memory and a lifetime of on the street law enforcement programing. It is my great pleasure to present to you. RoboCop.

This guy is really good.

He's not a guy. He's a machine.

Here's a clip from my conversation with P.G. Tawana and Curtis.

We do this all the time in film and we do it all the time, in— usually in service of imagining what I would consider to be a worse future, like these movies like Minority Report, RoboCop, etcetera, where we can like, really in great fidelity, see the possibilities of a more oppressive police force or more resourced police force. But we never do that— or not, not we— but like the world on a larger scale really never does that for a world without police or a world without prisons. Or the world that all of you have been describing and in your own work. But in the interest of like, how do we make it more impossible or less impossible? I think in a way, part of my like meager attempt to to contribute in this way is like through this work. So part of what motivated me to think about like, what if I make all these, like, boring, useless, mundane, quotidian objects in a house? So yeah, I was like: What if I make this junk that lies around our homes? Because when we touch things and hold things and look at objects that are familiar to us, it changes the ways we can believe them to be real or believe the conditions in which they exist to be real. Right? So...

The thing about writing the book. The thing about the TV shows and movies that you're mentioning to me, it's like we do have to create a different type of media that is going to paint a different type of picture because it's all— I don't know. I get it's about conspiracy back a little bit, but really I don't— they're never going to show us. And this is what OC me being a conspiracy theorist. So that's why I'm speaking in extremes. I don't usually do that, but they're never going to show us willfully a future where we do not have to be dependent on the state or where we do not have to be subject to state violence. Right? Really, what they're trying to do is numb us and desensitize us to the possibility of the ways that we are going to continue to feel the impact of state violence. Right? So anyways, all of it's—.

That's not a conspiracy. This facts.

That's real.

You know what I mean? That's what I said! Okay, thank you for that. Thank you for the grounding is very real. But, you know, I think it's just like, that's why we have to write the books. That's why we have to make the movies. That's not everybody's bag necessarily, but it's necessary.

Bumper

Welcome to Carceral Fictions and Abolitionist Realities, a series of audio essays about making room for abolition. Making Room for abolition first appeared at Red Bull Arts in Detroit in October of 2021 as a month long installation of speculative artifacts set in a home and a future without police and prisons. This series reflects on conversations from that space with Detroit based organizers and futurists committed to food justice, water access, educational equity, restorative justice and Black liberation more broadly. When Black folks in Detroit manufactured a better life for ourselves, whether that means healthier food, safer neighborhoods, or new technologies for moving through conflict is usually described as an act of survival or desperation. Rather than being classified as an act of resistance or future-making or speculative design. But each and every one of them is practicing a future that especially poor Black Detroiters have been told is impossible. In each episode, we'll look closely at the kinds of fictions that shape our current attachments to policing, prisons and punishment to examine where they come from and how they affect us. At the same time, you'll hear us propose abolitionist realities that counter these fictions and open up other ways of being.

My name is Lauren Williams. I'm an artist and designer based in Detroit, Michigan, and I work with visual and interactive media to understand, critique and reimagine the ways social and economic systems distribute and exercise power.

About This Episode

In today's episode, we'll explore the role of imagination in abolitionist movements. We'll look at the features of our experiences in our world and emotions that enable and inhibit our capacities to imagine. And we'll explore the ways abolitionists are practicing their imagined prefigure creations today. We'll close with an invitation to imagine together.

On Imagination, Imaginaries and Fictions

We've touched on imagination throughout this series in a few different places. We've talked about how "geographic imaginaries," a concept explored by Edward Said, have informed colonial beliefs about who gets to enjoy rights to land. We've examined racial imaginaries, for example, when we talked about how Blackness has been constructed or imagined as expansive and Indigeneity imagined as diminishing over time. We've looked at the ways new classes of investors and the neighborhoods they'll eventually populate are imagined and brought into being by real estate speculation, which presumes the likelihood of potential profit based on the imagined future value of an asset. We've talked about the ways Zionists are readily reimagining Palestine as a land without Palestinian inhabitants. And in each episode you've heard short fictional dispatches from the abolitionist storyline I was imagining when I first started making Room for Abolition.

Fiction vs. Fiction

Beyond this, the entire series has pitted carceral fictions against abolitionist realities, a framing that strives to remind us how thin a line exists between them both, if not for the violent enforcements carried out by policing, prisons and the many other systems into which carceral, colonial and capitalist logics have been inscribed. When I use the word fiction or imaginary to describe some logic underlying one of these systems, I'm not trying to imply that the thing I'm describing, whether it's about ownership of land or racial categories, is entirely fake or made up. I'm calling attention, instead, to the processes by which they're made real. The degree to which those processes are withheld from the people they are most likely to impact most negatively, and the degree to which those processes are enabled by state violence.

In the social sciences and humanities. You hear folks talk about social imaginaries all the time, the neoliberal imaginary, the capitalist imaginary, racial imaginaries. The list goes on. Each of these are sets of collective imagined ideas, practices, worldviews, beliefs, or, as we've been describing them, fictions that inform how people imagine, interpret and act in society. This is one way to understand what I mean when I talk about these carceral fictions: they're ways of imagining, interpreting and acting as a society that are rooted in carceral beliefs. And social imaginaries aren't new sociological theorists like Émile Durkheim have been writing about them since the late 1800s.

As an aside, you can't talk about Durkheim's work without acknowledging the time, context and approaches with which he was working. Durkheim was a French sociologist who rose to prominence in the late 18 and early 1900s. He's credited as a founder of modern sociology, but his work was all based on ethnographic research conducted by other researchers, much of which is founded on racist assumptions about primitivism and orientalism. Considering the source of his theories, you might be wondering why we're referencing them in the first place if they're so riddled with problematics. It's not about blindly relying on theory without questioning its origins, but because we're living in the aftermath of these theories, if we're looking for a different way to imagine, we have to look at how we got to where we are. And these kinds of theories that attempt to articulate how people form shared understandings of the world and of culture are part of that explanation. So it's helpful to return to them to interrogate how we might rethink carceral imaginaries too.

Another way theorists like Durkheim have talked about these images, stories and legends shared by large groups of people, if not whole societies, is as social facts. According to Charles Taylor, another prominent sociologist, social facts are "the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations." Point being, when enough humans get together and start operating based on a shared social fact or imaginary. Start constructing institutions based on them, it doesn't really matter how so-called factual or fictional those beliefs are. They come to shape our lives, our deaths, and everything in between. So troubling that thin line between them enough to help us question where they come from, why we believe them, why we adhere to them, why we hold on to them, and who the we is, is the goal of this series.

When Everyday is Fiction

One thing I can promise you this I will always tell you the truth.

Donald Trump lies like breathing. He doesn't know what the truth is.

Since we're on the topic of imagination and fiction and facts, it feels like it would be irresponsible not to mention the general climate of absurdity we're all swimming in amid this contemporary Trump era political landscape.

The crowd was massive. That was all the way back down to the Washington Monument. It looked like a million, million and a half people. We get this network and it showed an empty field and it said we drew 250,000 people. Now, that's not bad. But it's a lie.

This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration period.

Sean Spicer, our press secretary gave alternative facts to that.

It's the greatest economy in the history of the world. Best unemployment numbers. Best everything. These fact checkers. They'll check facts with me. And I'm like like 99%, right? And they'll say, and therefore, he lied. You got $28 billion from China that went to our farmers because they targeted you. We tariffed China a lot of money and they paid for it. You didn't pay. You know, the fake news likes to say you paid—you don't pay. They paid.

Trump isn't the first politician to lie. But when you live in a so-called post-truth era, when deepfakes proliferate; when generative AI is pumping out hyper-realistic images of cats as street vendors and professors and ballerinas; when every day is filled with some new, unbelievable unreal nonsense; when Trump nominates WWE wrestling CEOs to manage the Department of Education; when the news cycle is dominated by actual lies and hyperbolic bullshit from the guy who occupied and will once again occupy the White House, how are you supposed to make sense of the world?

There has never been ever before and administration that's been so open and transparent. I was the most transparent and am transparent president in history.

How does our environment being so deeply unbelievable and so absurd affect our capacity to imagine otherwise? Is it exhausting or can the climate of absurdity liberate us to imagine even more freely? And what about when we contemplate whose imaginary we're living in? How does inhabiting someone else's radically oppressive imagination influence your own? I don't plan to answer these questions in the course of this episode, and I think we'd each also probably respond to them uniquely. But it feels like an important contextual point to raise in this conversation that invokes fact, fiction, truth and imaginaries.

The carceral, colonial and capitalist imaginaries we've highlighted throughout this series are bad enough on their own, but they're further compounded by another fiction about who has the power and capacity to imagine and transform their imagined ideas into reality. Arjun Appadurai is an anthropologist who studies and writes about the future and future making. He writes about the uneven distribution of the capacity to aspire to one's imagination in his book The Future as Cultural Fact. "While an ethics of probability," he writes, "is controlled in large part by capitalist markets and logics, there's space, if we adopt a politics of hope to adopt an ethics of possibility instead," which he defines as "those ways of thinking, feeling and acting that increase the horizons of hope, that expand the field of the imagination, that produce greater equity and the capacity to aspire, and that widen the field of informed, creative and critical citizenship."

So possibility for me opens up agency, collaboration, participation, and let's call it empowerment for ordinary people. That is that's the sense that you can make your own future, that the future is not simply an objective fact that rushes at you and you have to just react or respond or protect yourself, but rather you can make— so for me, the relationship is that the question you asked: what is the relationship? Is that the— seeing that the future, that there are possible futures which are not exhausted or defined by probable futures is to be the space of politics where we actually elect to do things that we may wish, even if the probabilities are against us. I do indeed argue that it's unevenly distributed and that that uneven distribution is not a matter of mental capacity or intelligence. So it's not a cultural poverty kind of argument or a racist argument. It simply says that being poor means you have less opportunity to to practice that capacity, to use it and to have examples of it and to draw on that archive of experiences, to build new experiences. You just have less of that. That is the nature of poverty. So the question becomes...

It's the nature of poverty and it's the nature of unevenly distributed power. His point isn't that the poor or marginalized don't imagine, rather, that their capacity to transform their imaginations into reality is constrained by the forces of capitalism, impoverishment and oppression. This framing is what brings me to this work of imagining otherwise by making fictions tangible, believable and real, by translating them into artifacts that we can contest and hold on to, revise and throw away and experiment with until we find what works.

The Carceral Imagination is Thriving

In my experience, the folks working toward abolitionist transformations in whatever field rarely have the time and resources to imagine the worlds they're building. They're building the plane while flying it, as they say. And given the gravity of the systems we're talking about—food, housing, safety, education and care—sometimes it can feel frivolous to talk about imagining because as we've examined in our episode on time, this work is urgent. Who has the time to sit around dreaming? But so much creative energy is being poured into the carceral imaginary and into actual carceral implements right now that we can't afford not to dream differently.

Many of the worst carceral innovations are driven in large part by technological advancements that create new, more oppressive, more automated ways to punish, surveil and control people. In Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life, Ruha Benjamin examines the various ways in which technology gets leveraged to extend the reach of or perceived efficiency of policing and the wider prison industrial complex.

Technology captivates capturing bodies. Dashcams on the front of police vehicles recording traffic stops turned deadly. As with the arrest of Sandra Bland on a Texas highway, robot cranes reaching 30 feet in the air, monitoring images and heat signatures throughout cities like Camden, New Jersey, deepening police occupation of impoverished neighborhoods. Crime prediction algorithms labeling Black defendants higher risk than their white counterparts, reinforcing popular stereotypes of criminality and innocence behind a veneer of objectivity. Electronic ankle monitors wrapping around the limbs of thousands of people as they await trial or serve parole, an attractive alternative to cages, more humane and cost effective than jails, we are told. Tools in this way capture more than just people's bodies. They also capture the imagination, offering technological fixes for a wide range of social problems. Electronic tracking and location systems are part of a growing suite of interventions dubbed "techno corrections." Indeed, these interventions come bubble wrapped in rhetoric about correcting not just individuals, but social disorders such as poverty and crime. In the first ever report analyzing the impact of electronic monitoring of youth in California, we learned that e-monitoring entails a combination of onerous and arbitrary rules that end up forcing young people back into custody for technical violations. Attractive fixes, it turns out, produce new opportunities for youth to violate the law and thereby new grounds for penalizing them. But perhaps this is the point. Could it be that we don't need techno corrections to make us secure, that we need social insecurity to justify techno corrections?

Technology often promises quick fixes for complex social problems. But as Kyle Whyte has reminded us, in the offering of kinship time, as we explore the perils of urgency in our last episode, quick fixes are themselves a fiction. In other words, techno solution, so-called post-racial upgrades to social control, policing and surveillance really just upgrade historic forms of discrimination and inequality into forms that become more elusive, more entrenched, more streamlined, and just as harmful, if not more. As Benjamin reminds us in her newest book, Imagination: a Manifesto. Quote, "Collective imagination has been arrested and confined, making it difficult to think beyond the racist, class's sexist, ableist status quo," end quote. This isn't limited to implements of the prison industrial complex or technologically-enabled imaginaries either. It really concerns all aspects of our lives where carceral, colonial and capitalist logic seep in.

I see this all the time when I teach courses or host community workshops that invite speculation about more liberatory worlds. We struggle not to inscribe the tenets of the world we know and inhabit daily into our imagined visions of alternatives or futures, even if we know we're aiming to construct something more liberatory. And I'm not immune either. This happened in my own work, even as I tried to craft the worlds that became Making Room for Abolition. This confinement of our collective imaginations is happening alongside the expansive proliferation of imagination around how to implement a radically conservative future, one that celebrates, if not worships, carceral, colonial and capitalist possibilities. Take the range of policies advanced in Trump in the Republican Party's Project 2025, which promises a world where no one can have an abortion and pregnant people can't make decisions about their own health care; where gender and sexuality are heavily policed and trans people are denied an existence; where student debt continues to crush borrowers; where mass detentions and deportations place immigrants in constant fear; where Black and Indigenous communities are even more heavily policed than they are now; where climate change is denied and further climate change research is completely abandoned; where the death penalty becomes widely popularized; where children are encouraged to work; and where no one wears masks or takes vaccines in the time of a global pandemic. The imaginations of the folks who want a more carceral, colonial and capitalist future are working overtime.

As Claudia Rankine sums up in this short poem from Citizen, written shortly after visiting Ferguson in the wake of Michael Brown's death.

"Because white men

Can't police their imaginations

Black men are dying."

...talk about, well what actually fuels racist police? A racist imagination. When the man who killed Michael Brown said, "When I saw him standing there, he looked like a monster." I believe him! When— I do believe that that's what he saw, because that's how we are characterized. So we have to do something about the invisible stuff, that— the invisible hand that guides all of this carceral stuff that is explicitly racist.

You're hearing from Angel McKissic, who runs the Metro Detroit Restorative Justice Network.

That white police officer who shot and killed that black teenager, 18 year old Michael Brown. We begin with Officer Wilson in his own words. His exclusive interview with our George Stephanopoulos saying he feared for his life that August day.

I had reached out my window of my right hand to grab onto his forearm because I was going to try and move him back and get out of the car to where I'm no longer trapped. And when I felt I just felt the immense power that he had. I mean, the way I've described it is it was like a five year old whole on the hook. That's just how big this man was.

Hulk Hogan?

He was very large, very powerful man.

You're a pretty big guy.

Yeah, I'm above average. That moment before the second shot, you guys are staring at each other. And you said there was a look in his eye like something you'd never seen before. You described it as a demon.

It was a very, very intense, intense image he was presenting. I was so shocked by the whole interaction because this was escalated so quickly from a simple request to now a fight for survival.

And the thing that renders Wilson's imaginary real is his capacity to act on it with a weapon and a badge. This is not a drill. Imagining otherwise is an urgent task to be addressed with care, intention, responsibility, and through time, because behind black men and women is a long line of other racialized, marginalized people who will continue to become targets for homicidal cops and the myriad of oppressive, imagined realities to follow.

The Fiction of a One-Size-Fits-All Solution 

That prisons, police and jails continue to expand and receive funding belies the notion that we must prove that any other means of cultivating safety works before we apply it. When we talk about abolishing police and prisons, another common fiction is that one single thing must replace them all, or that there is no room for experimentation or failure in the course of developing abolitionist interventions.

In Octavia Butler's essay, "A Few Rules for Predicting the Future," she shares an anecdote about an exchange she had with a student:

So, do you really believe that in the future we're going to have the kind of trouble you write about in your books? A student asked me as I was signing books after a talk. The young man was referring to the troubles I described in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. Novels that take place in a near future of increasing drug addiction and illiteracy. Marked by the popularity of prisons and the unpopularity of public schools, the vast and growing gap between the rich and everyone else, and the whole nasty family of problems brought on by global warming. "I didn't make up the problems," I pointed out. "All I did was look around at the problems we're neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full fledged disasters." "Okay," the young man challenged, "So what's the answer?" "There isn't one," I told him. "No answer? You mean we're just doomed?" He smiled as though he thought this might be a joke. "No," I said. "I mean, there's no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There's no magic bullet. Instead, there are thousands of answers, at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be." Several days later, by mail, I received a copy of the young man's story in his college newspaper. He mentioned my talk, listed some of my books and the future problems they dealt with. Then he quoted his own question "What's the answer?" The article ended with the first three words of my reply. Wrongly left standing alone. "There isn't one." It's sadly easy to reverse meaning, in fact, to tell a lie by offering an accurate but incomplete quote. In this case, it was frustrating because the one thing that I and my main characters never do when contemplating the future is give up hope. In fact, the very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities and offer warnings is in itself an act of hope.

The students' lie is a carceral fiction we often internalize: that because there is no easy, singular answer, there is no other way. Until another way is so-called proven to work, even though the current way has only disproven its own capacity to produce safety and proven its own capacity to cause intergenerational harm. As Mariame Kaba has said:

Part of why we're in the situation we're in right now is because we offer kind of a one size fits all response to every single possible kind of harm in the world through this criminal punishment system, which we're told is actually synonymous with justice.

The reality here is we actually already have the tools to move differently, and we aren't starting from scratch.

Imaginative Limitations and Motivations

In our episode on time, I mentioned that my motivation for this work came from frustrations about the way urgency was driving and distorting our actions in the movement spaces I was part of. When I started out, my goal was to imagine otherwise and render those imagined worlds tangible, material and real through artifacts you can hold and turn over because I believe that constructing a shared belief in their plausibility might drive organizing strategy and goals. I'm operating on the hypothesis that doing so can help us get to those liberated worlds, convince us of its viability, and add depth and rigor to our strategy while shaping our action along the way.

It's worth noting that part of the reason we don't see as many imagined liberatory worlds in film and other popular media is at least partly because they're simply at odds with the prevailing social facts of our faith in both capitalism and carcerality. And as I can attest, imagining liberated futures is hard, especially amid this nonsense. There's times when it feels like my own imagination is stunted because of inertia, because there's no quick and easy answer. Because we're surrounded and exhausted by heartbreak. Because we're blinded by rage. But one thing that keeps me going is knowing that sometimes the same things that seem to constrain our imaginations can fuel them. And many of these things are already happening or have happened before.

Indoctrination, Uncertainty and Inertia

I have to imagine that imagining freedom amid slavery must have been pretty damn hard too, if not for all the obvious reasons that getting free would have been challenging, for the uncertainty of what was to come and for demanding we step into the unknown.

In Tera Hunter's account of Black women's lives and labor after the Civil War, a book called To 'Joy My Freedom, dshe opens the prologue with an anecdote about a formerly enslaved woman named Julie Tillery, who seeks out the Freedmen's Bureau in the spring of 1866 with her two young children in tow to find her husband.

When Tillery found the Freedmen's Bureau Office, she encountered Northern missionaries and union Army officials busily tending to the business of helping destitute families find shelter, food, clothing and work. Her eyes fixed on a missionary woman who was herself overwhelmed by the tasks before her and the gravity of her responsibilities. Apparently, in all of the seeming contradiction of destitution and determination surrounding her, the missionary pondered the state of affairs. She asked Tillery a question that had been burning in her mind ever since her arrival in the South, and her firsthand observation of the monumental changes brought about by Union victory. "Why would you want to leave the certainties and comforts of your master's plantation where subsistence was guaranteed for the uncertainties before you?" she asked. Without a moment's pause, Tillery replied "to 'joy my freedom." To enjoy the splendid fruits of freedom at last. Here was her opportunity to protect her dignity, to preserve the integrity of her family, and to secure fair terms for her labor. Tillery's resolve and endurance typified the spirit of ex-slaves determined to be truly free despite the absence of material comforts.

Mia Birdsong, who you heard talk about the etymological roots of the word freedom in episode two reflects on this passage in her own writing, noting the presumably white missionary's limited imagination, her shock that Tillery would abandon certainty in slavery for uncertainty in freedom. In Birdsong's words, the limiting viewpoint of the missionary quote "speaks to a broader relationship with uncertainty that impedes our ability to create changes and shifts that make liberatory futures possible," end quote. When I talk about abolition, most of the conversations I have and questions I receive revolve around the uncertainty of what it might mean in practice. Who would you call instead of the police? Or what about the rapists and the murderers? The carceral fictions we've talked about throughout this series, the ones we internalize, become so entrenched, familiar and comfortable that they slow our inertia to imagine and transform because the unknown is scary.

That principle. Since it's been here, most can still continue to be here. So, of course, I mean, we have we are replicating the same— qualitatively the same type of resistance that maybe folks who were enslaved felt of like "How, sis?! Like how are you going to undo all this—this is their livelihood! It's too much money at stake!" I mean, this is what we are saying now, except it's a different set of concerns in some ways. How? How we going to do this? What about the rapists and murderers and, you know, all of that stuff? Right. So it's right, but it's not because we have some innate limitation in our imagination, but it's because you have huge systems of power for generations telling us that this punishment that— this is a very strong logic. We parent carcerally; we school people carcerally; medical institutions, mental health are all operating on carceral logic they're all punitive. So it's a pervasive logic that really has to be, you know, we have to try to cut right through it. And there is data, but also we need to be on a more relational level.

Carceral logic is strong. It's all encompassing, it's enticing, it's easy and quick and clean. It disappears people, remember? It cleans up the perceived mess of harm with the one and done solution of hiding people who cause harm or disrupt capitalist order in cages. Carceral fearmongering about a world without police and prisons is strong too. It's also convincingly certain if someone causes harm, they're punished for it by the courts or by prison, right? But if we're honest, adhering to carceral solutions is only certain in the way that staying enslaved would have been certain in that it guarantees we stay unfree. And if we're being honest, the outcomes of carceral so-called justice aren't actually any more certain than the abolitionist possibilities for responding to harm.

Many harms today are never reported. The ones that are may not be taken seriously by police or prosecuted. And the punishments delivered by the carceral state may not actually deliver accountability or closure for those harmed. At the same time, there are unreasonable demands placed on proponents of abolition that they must produce a clean, all encompassing certain one stop shop solution to harm or it can't happen at all, which sits squarely in denial of the fact that the carceral state we have doesn't solve for anything that way presently. Our indoctrinated comfort with carceral logics leaves us to reinscribe carcerality into our abolitionist imaginaries and practices too, another reason it's such a grand undertaking to imagine otherwise. Here's Sirrita Darby, founder of Detroit Heals Detroit, a youth-led organization that uses healing-centered engagement to dismantle oppressive systems for marginalized Detroit youth. Here, Sarita describes how this plays out on an interpersonal level when teaching young people how to navigate conflict at school.

I mean, you have to be real everyone doesn't want abolition, everyone doesn't want this system to change! So then I'm like, okay, are we being real with ourselves? Like, do we actually want this? Or do we want the same punishment system? Because I always go back to like, Are you actually disciplining the student? Or are you punishing them? Because punishment and discipline are two different things. And I see a lot of punishment. And if we're constantly relying on punishment instead of discipline, where discipline actually changes behavior, then it's like, okay, because discipline includes the student like, okay, what do you want— what do you want your, you know, consequence to be? What do you think is appropriate? I always ask my students that they're just always like, "Well, I don't know"— .

I mean, they've never— they've never been asked, right?

Right. They're like really confused. Like, are you asking me? Just suspend me! Like, throw me out. Like, no! Like I'm bringing you into the conversation, and then I'll ask the class...

As an educator in Detroit public schools, Sirrita was practicing restorative justice in her classroom with her students. Restorative justice, as we discussed briefly in our episode on Time, focuses on non-punitive approaches to repairing harm through cooperative processes that include those both directly and indirectly impacted. This approach aims to reconcile the victim, the harm to her and the community, and can happen both within and without the legal system. The other very real impediments Sirrita points out here is the fact that people have to be on board, consentfully, in order for these kinds of abolitionist conflict resolution strategies to work. They're necessarily not coercive, meaning you can't force people into them the way you might compel someone to go to court or drag them into prison. Buy-in is required. And abandoning our carceral conditioning and embracing the unknown entities that lie beyond that is required.

Like, I'm bringing you inside a conversation and then I ask the class, like "Okay, we had a circle about this. What does the class think is appropriate disciplinary action for this situation that occurred? And then they're becoming accountable to their peers and not just me as a teacher. So I always try to go back to my students, like what do my students want? So, leaning into that. We all we all have to want it, it has to be buy in from all actors, everyone involved, for it to actually work, but everyone doesn't want that. And we have to be honest too. So, the people who do not want it. How can we get them on the other side and saying, look, this is what's needed? And if we go back to the research, this is what works.

Angel has seen the same pattern in her experience in schools, too.

That's exactly right. And that's exactly my take. From what I understand about what's happening currently in the schools with restorative justice. When I was in DP of the Henry Ford High School, it was extremely punitive and violent across all domains where violence can occur. And I think it really resonates with me when I hear Sirrita to talk about the students being like, just suspend me. It lets you, this is evidence for how much white supremacist systems, right, capitalist system say— structure us in this severe power imbalance. And we always we are conditioned to put our faith in power structures. And so whatever it is, if you say, you know, "police and prisons is right and that's the way to do it, I guess so" you know it because it sort of de— debases us as individuals and and and not just us as individuals, but what we bring our histories, our wisdom, our knowledge, our organic sort of relational traditions that sort of completely gets invisible eyes and erased and replaced with we're the experts. We know how to deal with this. You can't deal with this type of violence or whatever.

This is precisely what we talked about in episode one when we discussed the various ways that we either silo or segregate our needs for things like safety and conflict resolution, off into the hands of various institutions over which we have little to no control.

And we internalize that. Of course, you know, we but but it's there's such a long entrenched history of it, and we're so far away from our roots of how we used to deal with it that we have taken on the system's logic and and we think it's our own. So there's a lot of sort of like work that we have to do that slow and tedious and relational in nature. We help people recognize you— you actually know what you need. You know, it was one of my critiques of psychotherapy which is another reason why I stopped doing it. The focus is on individual and not actually the individual in their context. When you look at the individual in their context, their behavior makes sense. All behavior makes sense. If you actually listening and paying attention and fully appreciate the context in which the behavior comes out of. So I think that...

The approaches Sirota describes here and then Angel supports through the Metro Detroit Restorative Justice Network rely on trust. They aren't quick and they aren't guaranteed to be clean. They're inherently uncertain. And while it makes sense that uncertainty or the fear of the uncertain stunts inertia, as Sirrita demonstrated, it takes practice to manifest these abolitionist realities she's constructing with her young people as social facts, to occupy more social imaginaries. These practices rest on expectations and promises of responsibility for one another, much in the way that Kyle Whyte explained kinship time in earlier episodes.

When you have a responsible relationship with someone else or or a non-human, it means that you have an emotional connection to them, that you are going to be responsive over time and in different situations to the very needs that they might have. And so it's not like a contractual obligation or even something that is is written in stone, but it's a certain emotional connection of responsiveness that you have with that other being or that other entity or that other human or that other other system, which means that you're really plugged in to their to their well-being and you're willing to do what it takes to support them, whether it's their success, whether it's their health, whether it's their, you know, their rights. And when you have a responsibility and we have a responsibility for, you know, for someone else or some other being, that responsibility is most significant when there's also expectations of reciprocity, when there's also expectations of, you know, consensuality, of of trust. And so when you think about what it means, like to really be responsible and when two parties, regardless of whether they're human or non-human, have responsibilities to each other, those responsibilities are best and they're best for society overall, when there's high levels of reciprocity, high levels of, you know, consensuality, high levels of trust and a lot of other qualities as well. But these particular qualities are really important for the overall well-being of a society. For example, take...

These qualities might be important for the overall well-being of society. But again, this isn't easy, as Angel points out.

I'm like, how do we extend that sense of kinship and responsibility to one another outside of our families, to everybody in our communities? Right. And so it's hard it's hard work to do because we're there's generational divides and there's fear between generations and there's class divides and there's fear along class lines, too, even within the city. So it's that kind of shifting When people say narrative shifting, you know, like, what do you actually mean by that? It's not just storytelling. There's a lot of stuff implicated in that. And so, yeah, my focus is definitely on how can we. Regroup in a different way with each other so that restorative justice practices feel normal for us, feel natural. Right now, we've just been conditioned by the system that calling 911 and the police— we outsource our problem solving because that's what they tell us, they're better able to handle it and that's what justice should look like. And so that's another piece, too, is saying, "Well, actually we have what we need and those who need support, we can help support them so that they also have what they need." Like Sirrita was referring to, so that we don't feel like, "Oh, we can't handle this, we need somebody else to handle this."

It requires practicing a degree of vulnerability and trust in ourselves and in each other that we're all unaccustomed to.

Making Room for Abolition is a double entendre. It's about home, how we can see and construct abolitionist possibility through the artifacts we value, collect and use in our homes. And it's about exploring what we need to make room for in our movements. And as a starting point...

I, I make room for the realization that everyone is not going to make it. That one was difficult because I feel for a long time, like everyone had to make like all of us and not— or none. But everyone is not going to make it.

That's Monique Thompson, the program director at Feedom Freedom Growers, and Myrtle Thompson-Curtis's daughter. Angel and Sirrita agree and reflect here on the tension between this pressure to build critical mass and movements and bring everyone along and what feels like an uncomfortable realization that there will inevitably be folks who just don't want to face the discomfort, the uncertainty, or to take on the labor required to move forward a more liberatory abolitionist future.

I think I wrote some notes about what she was saying about buy in, and I've recently been having a really complicated relationship with that, you know, because yes, we do. We need a critical mass. And I look back on other movements and I think about apartheid. I think about the Civil Rights Movement. We didn't have everybody come with us. And, you know, and some—.

Had to pull people kicking and screaming.

Right, ask them to come with us:  "I don't want to go!"

This right. And I've recently— maybe I'm just tired. I mean, that could also be. But I'm just like, you know what? All right. Because at some point, I have to conserve my energy for the for my work and the people who are on board to do my work. And I'm over here arguing with you about why you think it's a better idea to have more police. And I'm like, I'm not doing that. Like, that's fine. We actually don't need everybody to come with us.

Okay, because Harriet didn't take everybody, now let's be clear.

She did not.

Look, she had stuff to do. You all want to go? Okay. God bless you. Moving on.

I got— But if you think about apartheid, half that country was against it and they was like, "Oh well, boo. Like, we still doing it!" Same with Civil Rights Movement.

Same with Civi— Yeah, I think about this a lot because, you know,  in studying the Civil Rights Movement, you find that— it's taught to us as a watershed moment, right? But then when you understand why the bill actually passed, you're like, it was just so some Southern senators...

That's right.

Could get reelected.

That's right.

And it literally like they needed the National Guard to like enforce this new social transformation so, I that I think about that a lot...

As Angel and Sirrita remind us, these other liberatory movements didn't have everybody on board. People got left behind and we might just need to make room for that in this movement, too.

These reflections raise a ton of questions. How should we spend our energy with respect to movement work? With respect to abolition, specifically? Should we be trying to convince holdouts and naysayers or simply build with those who are already somewhat on board?

As I say this, I'm also reminded of Cedric Johnson's arguments in his book, The Panthers Can't Save Us Now—a critique of contemporary anti-racist campaigns against police brutality and mass incarceration. Cedric is a friend and professor in African-American studies and political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His central critique of the Movement for Black Lives is that its insistence on focusing too narrowly on policing and incarceration as products of anti-Black racism amounts to, quote, "Black exceptionalism. A sense that black folks are noble, long-suffering victims of ontological racism rather than being subject to various political and economic processes." This, he says, leads to demands that don't address the fundamental neoliberal processes that have produced and benefit from mass incarceration and policing. Those fundamental processes, he argues, have more to do with class than race. In his view, the carceral state wasn't born of racism alone. Even though racism informs disproportionate disparities in profiling, brutality and sentencing against Black folks. In his view, policing and hyper-incarceration are tools for deploying neoliberalism's surplus population irrespective of their race.

Now, I've talked at length about the role of race in this series. We've discussed how race is used to render Detroit terra nullius. We've examined racialized disparities in public education funding in the state of Michigan. We heard about Brittney Cooper's notion that white people own time. That said, I've also talked at length about the role of neoliberal urban policy and the way it affects poor folks in Detroit, in this series: organized abandonment, water shutoffs, the land bank, the flooding and so on. As much as my initial reaction to the notion that "it's a class, not race" issue is rejection—reframing it is a class and race issue feels like a no-brainer. Of course, there are vastly more poor white people locked up and killed by police every year, so why wouldn't there be poor white folks who similarly stand to benefit from abolition? In dialogue with this question of who will come along to liberation. This is important because too often we accept a fiction that the Black identity alone is in and of itself a political position. But it's not. And assuming, though, is dangerous because as the saying goes, "not all skin folk are kinfolk or in other words, race just doesn't predict someone's political commitments.

In reality, the Black middle- and upper-class political interest is most often aligned with neoliberal urban policy and carceral politics and the Black poor are the ones disproportionately harmed by the carceral state. Recall, for example, our critique of buying back the block as a solution for dispossession in Detroit. Or take the example of the neighborhood park's demolition that I shared across a few episodes here. I found out after the fact that an older Black woman on the next block over had been one of the primary complainants who called the city to have the park demolished. Or consider the fact that every single city employee, from bulldozer operator to police officer who was on site for that demolition was a Black person. This is particularly salient, but probably unpopular to raise in Detroit, a majority Black city where the face and voice of funding endless policing and mass incarceration is often Black folks in positions of both city and community leadership.

Long story short, if it's as hard as it is for folks who are already so inclined to question our carceral conditioning, imagine the impediment it creates for those who are thoroughly bought into the wider neoliberal conditioning about wealth and worthiness and punishment. And even if we acknowledge as fiction the idea that everyone must come along on the way to abolition, we also must accept as fact the notion that as a starting point, that category of everyone needs to include a wide base of working class people, of working poor, far beyond just Black folks. There simply aren't enough of us to tip the scale politically on our own. And carcerality is not a Black issue alone. Racism explains a lot in this country, but not the entirety of the carceral state.

Knowledge and Heartbreak

At the same time that inertia and indoctrination keep our imaginations motionless, resistant to change. Sometimes heartbreak can block our capacity to imagine otherwise. Here's Nate Mullen, an educator, artist and founder of People in Education, on how the heartbreak catalyzed by carceral fictions made manifest—things like disinvestment, policing, the mismanagement of the pandemic—can wear you down and close off possibility, if you begin to internalize it.

I know for me personally, it's hard. I find it's hard to be with all the heartbreak. Right? Like, I think that like like Monica's talked about like we know too much and and you and and— Myrtle you talked about like activism as an act of caring. When you do care and you do know, the pain is— and the suffering that you witness is it's hard. It's crippling for me sometimes, and it's a lot to be with. And I think that, like in some ways that what we're looking at when we look at America nationally, like I think we're seeing like white folks not know how to deal with being with that suffering. And so they're freaking out and they're like taking that terrible, heartbreaking feeling that America promised all of us that if we just did enough work and made enough money, we would never have to feel. And as saying— and as and it's it's like the last– this moment, this pandemic, this this moral uprising, this reckoning has forced it on all of us. And I think that there are...

While that might sound like a downer, it's a kind of heartbreak—he points out—that's double sided.

I think white-bodied people in particular haven't had— you don't have to live with that stuff, right? Like, you don't have to like I mean, in education, I'll say this all the time, right? Like if you went to a well-funded school, you can live in the fantasy that, like, education is working, right? One of the gifts this gift is is— comes with so much responsibility... One of the gifts of this place of of what we call Detroit is that you can't really pretend that it's working. Right. Like I can take you to like my little school that sits vacant like like a Greek ruin. It's physically not working, right? Like, it's so clear. And that's a gift. But that is also a great weight to hold. Right? And I think it is powerful...

In other episodes we've talked about what disinvestment means and how it surrounds us.

...If you're in Detroit and you're open and to be with what's really present, I think it's present always in all spaces. But there's something I think unique about Detroit, where we get to look at it. We get to be with the heartbreak. In some ways. It's really real ways that in— in New York where like buildings get to be refurbished, you, you know, you don't have to think about it. And even just outside of Detroit, right? Like where all schools are funded and maybe not closing or they're turned into lofts. Like you don't have to sit with the realities that in Detroit we get to. And sometimes that is also overwhelming and it makes dreaming different.

There's a strange thin line between our capacity to see Detroit as something altogether different, to see the abolitionist possibility around us and the types of imagining that happens in and about a place like Detroit when folks have no attachment to it. For many outsiders, especially this present state that Nate talks about, is interpreted in the way settlers interpreted terra nullius, right? They see the city as a blank slate, awaiting claim and conquest, ready to be transformed into something orderly and consumable. We talked about this at length in part one of our episode on Nature. But if you're really present with what Detroit has to offer—massive architectural, geographic reminders of corporate collapse and organized abandonment—you couldn't possibly arrive at the conclusion that this place is empty, blank or ripe frontierland ready for the taking.

It's not, I mean, it's not a place for care for young people, it's not a place for care, like there...

For Mama Myrtle, what inspires Nate's heartbreak also inspires rage.

I remember being able to walk to school!

Yeah.

My primary school, my elementary school, my junior high school, and then my high school. You know, out of all those buildings, I can walk through that neighborhood and it's like, my goodness, it looks so devastated. And the only thing to come as far as some investment in that area is a factory that's producing fumes that are causing asthma and hurting people, harming people. And so, I don't know. I'm in a state of— we could— things could be done a lot differently.

Rage

Well I guess, yeah. What do you do with that anger? Like, does that anger help you imagine? Because, like, I mean, you are imagining in manifesting everyday like this work at the garden, right? But so I guess I'm curious, like: Does that anger or —righteous, righteous anger—does that anger like help you imagine these like possibilities or does it hamper it? Like how does it shape the ways you imagine?

It creates possibilities. I'm always thinking of how do we have these conversations that stir some action for movement, movement and memory? Yeah, how do we get those things going? Those what those things do? It makes me hold closer to those folks who are doing that work. How do we get this work done? How do we save ourselves? How do we create the alternative? So I guess it does push me in that way. But it also it's got me really— these young people! My young people, my youngins with more, more energy, you know, so grateful for those who are active and paying attention, you know, to helping me as we help each other create movement. So, yeah.

Yeah, I think. I think there's some, there's there's a lot to like, I think, to, to untangle. And I think one of the things that this is, it's just so true to me, like, I, like I, I grew up in Detroit, so I've actually just turned 35 this weekend.

Happy birthday!

I am the bringer of Scorpio season.

Oh Lord.

Yeah. You got two Libras in the room.

I mean, I am a...

No cheers for that one.

I am a Libra but I am the bringer of Scorpio season.

Oh, what?!

I was born earlier in the day.

A traitor.

Someone's got to bring it. But I think there's a real duality to it, right? It's a real. It's a real gift and responsibility. I do think that there is, you know, to be, to be frank, just like our environment as we know it. I think my, Mama Myrtle, you were talking about it with your body rebelling to food. I think Mama Monica was talking about when we talk about like the quality of water in this city: our environment is also toxic to our young people's imagination and to our people's imagination. Because if you grow up in a city— and I mean think about it: so my daughter's five years old and if we think about like, let's say if we lived, we don't, but let's say we lived around the corner from my middle school then for all of her life—and actually my middle school has been closed for at this point, if it's 2021, probably closed for close to let's say 15 years, right?—so every person in the city of Detroit under the age of 15, that is the world that they have always known, right? And there's also something very real about the city that and this is, this goes into and this is why like abolition is all over everything, right? Like our young people also are not free and safe to move freely throughout this city. So most of them only see what's immediately around them. So if you live in a world where everything around you is just invested in where like people don't provide you with fresh, healthy options for food, water, air, then there is a moment where there's a little bit of a moment where in which like you start to internalize that, that you think that that is what you deserve and that is what the world is. And so it is it is a and that's where the activism part is— If you if you are a young person in the city and you get lucky enough to have someone in your life that helps you understand that that is the world around you is not your fault. It is not because there's something inherently wrong with you, which what else are you supposed to believe when that is your entire life? When literally the water inside your school is not safe to drink? Like, like what are you supposed to believe? But if you have—and this is again, that's where relationship comes in—if you have relationships that help you understand that that is not because there's something wrong with you, then you have the opportunity to dream. You have the opportunity to to to think differently. But our dreaming, I think—and I will speak for myself—my dreaming is sometimes stunted by my anger and my ability to to deal with the amount of heartbreak I hold. And that's why I actually like what is helpful for me in that...

This tension between rage as fuel or impediment has stuck with me. Nick Buckingham, the co-founder of Michigan Liberation, talked about anger as a source of passion.

The anger, right? One: where I get my passion from. Where I get the like the anger from is that I'm impacted right? Like, I'm directly impacted. And it's not just prison. It took for me to get a degree in social work to realize all of these social factors that as a young Black boy, I was forced into—all of these different scenarios of the world. You know how we how I'm going to say we how I grew into, you know, homophobic, disrespect for women. There was a time where like, yeah, I carried a gun. Black people, Black guys? Like, come on, now I'm not about to rock with you— you look at me wrong, right? Like I'm looking for a reason to put one in you and to peel it all back. It's like these are the social factors that have brainwashed us, that have put the veil over our eyes. It has forced us into this way of thinking.

It's one thing to pull back your own veil, but the real challenge is how do we get others to come along?

RJ has been co-opted by institutions and gatekeeping now is into play. You need a certificate, you gotta go to school, you gotta do all that shit or whatever and, you don't! But it also took a very myopic approach to to its scope and that this is just this procedure that we do when harm occurs, right? Instead of pulling back and saying, actually those circle processes are a symptom of a larger transformation that we make from being afraid of each other to trusting each other. And that's hard, it's hard because like, all these systems are set up for us to mistrust each other, right? On purpose. And so I understand restorative justice. And the way we're trying to advance it in Detroit specifically is that it's not, "Here's a new set of tools to use when someone gets into a fight," but all the requisite work you have to do before that, if you aren't in community with one another, what is circle going to be? I mean, how effective is that going to be if this is not a norm for us that we're in community, that I'm invested in, your integration back into the community, that I see that as valuable? You can't just import these procedures without having like this community sort of foundation.

There's another fiction at work that tells us the skills we need to navigate conflict differently and cultivate safety are too specialized or too complicated for us to practice ourselves. We have to leave them to professionals. In reality, however, police do not have a specialized set of skills or a track record for navigating conflict, de-escalating conflict or addressing harm. Siloing off the production of safety to a few isolated people is problematic to folks who envision an abolitionist reality.

I think it's going to take like again, a new system that is getting buy in from everyone involved. I tell— I always tell educators like when they're talking about their school, like does your school have equity officer? And they're like, "Yeah, we have like a diversity officer." Okay, that's a problem! Because either everyone's a diversity officer or no one is— like the fact that you have one is like problematic to me. So the fact that there's one restorative justice person like Angel said, and they're the one with the certificate, like anyone can can hold a circle like this isn't— this isn't something that someone has to be certified to do. Like I don't need letters behind my name to hold a restorative justice circle. Like, that's ridiculous. So, so yeah, but it has to have buy-in from everyone and we need to know the why behind it. But you have to...

That's Sirrita Darby again, Executive Director of Detroit Heals Detroit. In other words, we can't silo safety. Navigating and healing from conflict are skills we all have to learn and practice. They belong to all of us. And so too does carceral conditioning, our predisposition to punish rather than repair. This is why Sirrita developed Detroit Heals Detroit with her high school students in 2018: to create space where they can practice learning, unlearning and guiding one another toward healing from trauma. In large part, the challenge Sirrita offered her students and that abolitionists to bring to us all is about taking responsibility for one another's collective well-being, for cultivating safety, for navigating conflict, and simultaneously, for our roles in perpetuating cycles of violence and harm.

Thinking about certain types of violence and how we're all complicit as a community. That's a thing I really I really want to move into in that it's not just about you did something bad to this person. My my interpretation of restorative justice is that it leaves the space open for us to fully realize everyone who's implicated here. And because otherwise we're just replicating a system that again, is saying, this is your problem, you did this, you're responsible and not understanding who else was there and knew the violence was happening and didn't say anything or who did like a survivor or a victim speak to and wasn't believed. You are all implicated in this! But also thinking about, specifically, I was working with a lot of Black women who are trans, who were doing— these were women doing survival sex work and— many of them experienced violence at the hands of cisgender Black men. And we were all hush hush about it because it doesn't affect us if we're not in that group. But also we just—like we do with anyone who commits harm— "They're crazy. They're some deviant!" And we don't necessarily see the person who is doing harm to a Black trans woman has internalized some very problematic things about their gender expression, their sexual attraction. And that comes from us. That comes from us as a culture.

So are you having— your your young man has an interest in something and you're shaming him. People need to see the connection between that, the community and the cultural and the parenting influences and how this violence manifests against other women in our community. We're implicated in that violence. If people come to us and they want to live their truth and we shame them and we enact violence on them, we need to see how that violence recycles in our own communities and maybe not so easy for people to track, but that that is a direct implication— that violence against women in our own community is— we are responsible for that. And so that's sort of my broader approach is to help us see how like none of, it's not just there's this one off person who can lost their mind and is harming the community. We all have a part in it. And and that's going to be hard because people don't want to do that. I mean, straight up, they're just like like Sirrita was saying, "This ain't none of my business. Like, I didn't do this, so I don't want to be a part of this." So it's the hard work. I don't have an easy answer about how to transform our sense of like, community and trust. It's going to take a whole bunch of work from literally everybody and every space. You know.

Angel's point here is foundational: Drawing from our episodes on safety and interdependence, one of the primary carceral and capitalist fictions we have to dismantle is the belief that we don't need anyone else to thrive, that we can segregate ourselves and our needs off into separate silos and get to an abolitionist reality. Many abolitionist practices, including restorative and transformative justice, demand a kind of relationality and responsibility for one another that runs completely counter to our conditioning. A kind of relationality that requires us to step out of our echo chambers.

Echo Chambers‍

That sense of growing awareness and knowledge of our present conditions that Nate, Nick and Myrtle have all referenced, and the degree to which we understand them as shaped by oppressive forces can sometimes morph into another impediment for abolitionist imagining if we let it: we end up working and talking in self-affirming echo chambers.

We end up getting really dogmatic about our ideology. And it is an ideology and we create an echo chamber where, you know, because I'm getting— I'm putting out this questionnaire where I'm asking trying to ask Detroiters about what might accountability look like without police and prisons for you? What does it mean to be safe and think across all lines, psychologically, spiritually? Those sort of things, right? And in trying to figure out how to get people to this questionnaire, I had to I mean, I just finished up probably 50 organization outreach from FOCUS Hope to, you know, Team Wellness because we put it out through our stuff and we gonna get the people that already buy in. That's our problem is we're not actually engaging with people who disagree with us. So we we're working in these echo chambers that are self-affirming. And what that does is that really limits our creativity, our imagination, which I think is a part of your question.

So what do we need to make room for, in Angel's words?

We need to make room for a diversity of ideas and approaches. This also means that when we come in to engagement with folks who don't agree, we can't effectively strategize then, right? Because we can't anticipate what people are going to say, what their resistance is, what their real actual concerns are that are valid. If we're effectively keeping that out of the echo chamber, how can we actually attend to that? Because we don't we're not making room for that to come in to the space. So we're strategizing— our strategy is just being informed by the echo chamber, not actually informed by what people are saying. "I don't know about all that. Defund the police? Okay. I mean, it's been, you know, four break ins, my my son was shot. They still ain't caught the person who did it, bla bla bla." We, we don't even listen to try to see here: What's the concern? What's the fear? And how can our movement say validate that and say and also point out. But the current systems ain't doing it either, sis— so what else, right?

I think we need and I've tried to make room for that in the organizing space that I've set up, but also in my encounters with folks in the community where I'm meeting with block clubs and people are saying they want more police, they want more money for police. You have to put that aside. We get allergic to that in social justice movements, right? We like freak out and just think these people just ain't there yet. Let me help bring them there. You know, like get self-righteous and we have to say no, people have real concerns about safety and that's real. And we can accept that and bring that into the space and also say, "So how are the police— how they doing for you? If your concern is this or this, how are they showing up?" And when we talk about abolition and we say "defund the police," I say especially in certain neighborhoods I live across from the twelfth precint, they don't even come! So I tell people: abolitionist future is not that far. If if they defunded the police, you wouldn't even feel it because they don't even come here no way! And provide any services, no way. So— but we can't do that and we can't say that if we don't listen. So we do, we need to not be— we gatekeep around our ideas and we're self-righteous about our ideas and we think we've got the formula and we've got it figured out and that people who aren't bought in are on board, just are sort of less evolved in a way, or have some archaic ideas rather than say, what is the concern that's at the root? How can we make sure that our movements are inclusive of those concerns? You miss that completely. If you don't let it into the space. I would definitely, totally in agreement with the idea that the disagreement is healthy and it also helps propel our movements forward. We're going to stagnate if we're just only working with this set of ideas, you know.

Folks who are skeptical of abolition have valid concerns. And while it's worth questioning the extent to which the current system presently addresses those concerns, it doesn't mean we should dismiss them in the conversation about the abolitionist world we're constructing.

Excerpt from "Unraveling Harm, Cultivating Safety: Learnings on Healing, Justice, and Accountability from Metro Detroiters"

Over the last couple of years, I worked with Angel and the Metro Detroit Restorative Justice Network on a study about how Metro Detroit residents experience safety, accountability and harm. This study was composed of roughly 70 survey responses and qualitative analysis of five, two-hour interviews. Ask me about interpretative phenomenological analysis sometime if you want to hear more.

In our findings, I was most struck by the incongruous ness of some respondents trust in policing when compared to their actual experiences of police or the wider carceral system. But this ambivalence, I think, and my own reflections while attempting to reconcile people's trust with their skepticism or fear, parallels this double standard about people's expectations for an immediate abolitionist solution to replace policing and incarceration. Here's an excerpt from our report to be released in the spring of 2025 entitled Unraveling Harm Cultivating Safety: Learnings on Healing, Justice and Accountability from Metro Detroiters.

In this excerpt, you'll hear about four of the five interviewees. Sharon is a longtime elder Detroiter in her 80s, a mother, grandmother and widow who now lives alone in her family home. Throughout her life, she worked various jobs in factories and hospitals. She feels somewhat isolated since her husband's death and since some of her adult children live in other states. She's deeply faithful, and has close ties with her church. Denise is a Black entrepreneur, artist, block club member and single mother of adult children. She's in her 60s and has lived in Detroit her entire life. Denise's role as a mother who prioritizes protecting and caring for her family, especially her kids, colored her reflections and informed many of the decisions she made surrounding her experiences of harm. Bianca is a 30-year old trans woman and former sex worker. She now works for a grassroots organization that provides social services. In her time there, she has grown to take on more responsibility and expand programs in a way that she's really proud of. She has strong familial support and a deep bench of support from her chosen family as well: her trans sisters. Jonathan is a Black creative worker and administrator in his 50s who came to Detroit as a child after losing his mother. He spent over 30 years incarcerated in Michigan.

Sharon and Denise both hold a deep, enduring trust in police that is seemingly undisturbed by the knowledge of police brutality, prejudice or the reality that police have never resolved any of the harm they've experienced. Sharon, for example, explained that she would always call the police if she experienced or witnessed harm.

No. No matter! If it's something wrong, I'm going call the police. No matter what it is. Well, if it's a family member, would it? It, it is— something wrong that they need, I need to call somebody! I would call the police. I trust them. All I can say is I trust them.

Here, Sharon doubles down on her unequivocal trust in police.

No matter what it is.

She will call the police. And this is, quote, "All she can say," seems to operate as a placeholder for a more substantial rationale. She can't explain it, but she knows it to be true that she trusts them without reservation. Most interview participants, including Bianca, Denise and Sharon, believe police are absolutely necessary in spite of their acknowledgment of the ways in which they fail to meet their material needs in the wake of harm. Sharon, for example, called police in a few situations that she shared with us: once after her home was burglarized, another time when her car was stolen and the last time when her home alarm system was triggered. In all three cases, they arrived and their presence helped her feel safer. But they did not resolve the harm she had experienced, locate the people who had harmed her or return her stolen property. In the case of the home burglary, she called them after she had called her own daughter first for accompaniment and comfort. When asked to articulate why or what the police did to make her feel safer, she didn't identify an action, but reiterated that simply seeing them was reassuring.

Their presence. They have weapons and it's their presence that that's why.

What Sharon describes here is textbook security theater: measures designed to make people feel safer without functionally enhancing safety. In the end, however, Sharon reveals that her trust in police is predicated on the sheer expectation that they are supposed to fulfill a particular role. Whether they do fulfill that role or not is immaterial. The expectation alone is enough to lead her to rely on them always.

It's just that. The society we live in and that— that is the role that they supposed to be fulfilling, that they are— the position that they have.

Similarly, when asked whether he would call the police if he witnessed violence, Jonathan noted that he would, if only because responding to harm is their duty.

Well, we identified that as a job. Do your job. I'm out here doing mine, do yours! That's what I'm paying all these high taxes for.

Here, Jonathan's willingness to call on police in situations of harm comes across as more of a resignation to the presumed function of a public service to which we're bound because we pay for it than Sharon's vehement declaration of trust in police. In essence, Sharon's trust in police is derived from the belief that we are supposed to be able to rely on them. They are supposed to fulfill a role in which they protect and serve, and we are.

Supposed to call them for protection.

She trusts them because she is supposed to. Not because they're trustworthy or because they've helped her address harm in the past.

Even though there have been some times that I can see what happens, that I think they were wrong at times. But but I have to trust them! I don't have nothing else— but God, and I know He is above all them. But I still trust the police. I have to trust them!

When Sharon says:

I have to trust them.

She suggests that her trust emerges not from a demonstration of trustworthiness, but from a lack of options. In essence, she is forced to rely on police simply because she's not aware of any other strategies for addressing harm. Having mentioned the significance of her faith many times throughout the interview, she also implies here that she essentially places police second only to God, as authority, quote "above all of them," end quote, a belief that corresponds with the unwavering faith she places in them in spite of their inability to address most of her needs and her experiences of harm. Later, after sharing a revelation that her son had been the survivor of racist police profiling since his teen years and throughout his adult life, she reiterated the sense and the phrase:

I have to trust them.

That trusting the police is essentially a forced non choice.

Don't have nothing else to trust. I don't have nowhere else to go. I have to trust them and... What else am I going— I have to trust them because when things happen, who else to call? You ain't got nobody else to call.

At this point in the conversation, Sharon was almost exasperated by the thought exercise around alternatives to policing and wondering, quote, "What if?" Or "Who else?" as if it's so far beyond the realm of possibility that it's an absurd line of questioning to follow. The fact of her and our reality is that there is no other centralized, reliable responder to call on or go to in case of emergency, when in need of support, when your safety is threatened. Right now, police are a catchall for every possible kind of harm we encounter, even though they cannot remedy most of the harm we experience. Sharon, Denise and Bianca all acknowledged an awareness of patterns of police misbehavior, prejudice or brutality. When Denise says that calling the police:

Makes sense on paper.

She reinforces the idea that relying on police is something she does because she expects to be able to rely on police based on how they've been purported to operate in theory, not in practice. She then goes on to explain the many ways in which police might fail to address people's needs. Her insistence that we need some kind of entity to...

Help make things right.

...is a clear plea to meet a need that we expect police to meet, but is not substantiated by her own experiences with police and the instances of harm she shared during the interview. In the cases she shared with us, police have never actually.

Helped to make things right.

In fact, in one situation they were the harm doers themselves. When Denise says:.

We need some type of law enforcement entity.

She expresses a sense of inevitability that policing is the only way forward, reiterated by both Bianca and Sharon. Both Bianca and Sharon hold a belief that a world without police would be one full of chaos and disorder, informed again by a set of expectations that police exist to create and enforce order and safety. Every interviewee acknowledged several problems or misgivings about the current state of policing. Some commented on the wider legal system and prisons, too. But they all arrived at different conclusions about why those problems exist or whether those problems necessitate a different system altogether. Some had survived police harm themselves. Denise, for example, had her home raided by police with a warrant for the wrong address. Others had witnessed people being harmed by police themselves. Others simply see the ways the system has failed people around them repeatedly. Some spelled out the ways in which police failed to meet their needs, but still didn't conclude that alternatives were needed. Sharon, Bianca and Denise, all conveyed a belief that bad behavior like racist profiling, police brutality or excessive force is an aberration—a few bad apples—rather than a fundamental issue with the premise and nature of policing as a system, they all seem to attribute it to the bad behavior of a few bad officers, because in Sharon's words:

In my heart, they gon' do what's right.

Pointing once again to a deep belief in the true purpose of policing being to protect and serve, and an enduring faith in their capacity to do so.

There are a few takeaways here that I'll try to disentangle. To Angel's point from earlier, we can't dismiss the folks who hold on to carcerality. We have to get out of our echo chambers long enough to hear and understand people's needs and fears and respond earnestly to those. In typical abolitionist style, we have to hold a lot in tension here. It's not simple. We can't hang the possibility of abolition on the notion that we might bring everybody along. Speaking to Sirrita, Angel and Monique's points about the ways major transformations have happened in the past. But the idea that people's expectations—their imaginations—based on every social and cultural cue we're taught, are what direct them to rely on police, in spite of how rarely police fulfill their needs, reinforces the notion that we desperately need something different. But the abolitionist response, I think, is that we simply can't and shouldn't expect a singular, massive, one size fits all solution to enter the gap. That is precisely what's wrong with the prison industrial complex. What we need, instead of imagining that police meet our needs, is to flex our imaginations around the kinds of multidimensional responses to harm and abolitionist practice that groups like the Metro Detroit Restorative Justice Network, Michigan Liberation, Feedom Freedom, the Detroit Safety Team, Detroit Heals Detroit, 313 Liberation Zones and others are building today.

Practicing our Prefigurations: Making Room for Abolition

To that end, part of what we need to make room for is practicing our abolitionist prefigurations.

And I also think what Sirrita was saying about just making it a practice, we see that a lot. I don't think we really appreciate the implications of that word. We use it in medicine and law and in therapy. We say I'm going to have a practice and because we are practicing and we don't have it figured out. And that's the important thing to keep in mind in abolition, because capitalist systems tell us we've got to get it right the first time. And if we fail, then conceptually it's a failure and you need to start over. And again, that's— there's a double standard because we know that police and prisons and all that shit fails all the time, right?

In our episode on Time, we pointed out the many overlapping realities at play at any given point in time. Every time folks implement abolitionist practices, they're prefiguring the abolitionist relations and worlds we're told are impossible. They're manifesting abolitionist realities in a context we're told can't contain them. In spite of that denial. In the summer of 2020, P.G. Watkins helped organize 313 Liberation Zones, temporary autonomous zones that took over public space in Detroit. You heard us introduce these in our episode on time. But here, P.G. expands on their original description by exploring their intentions further.

In the concept of it is this idea that in order to actualize the world that we want, we have to be in practice around it. When we are practicing it, we need to create the kind of boundaries of like, okay, here is where— we're going to be doing this: in this space, this is how we treat each other in this space. This is what we're practicing and doing. And it is usually trying to figure out how to develop these types of resilience-based actions that are outside of the systems that already exist. And this idea that we have to change our dependence and reliance on those systems, create our own systems. So, I mean...

In a direct way, these zones offered spaces to practice and perform and see and experience liberated space.

...was can we demonstrate to people through these occupations, through these direct actions a little bit, just a little bit of what it could be like to be in community without police. To handle conflict without police, to provide food, without having to rely on the state to provide other care products. You know, we were doing those actions in the midst of the pandemic. So it's like, what does it mean to provide care for each other in this time, in this way? So it was a, I think a abolitionist practice or like the liberatory practice around can we create these territories? And then I mean, the larger history of liberated zones, right? I mean, something I was studying recently was about a Amilcar Cabral and Guinea-Bissau's revolution and the importance of liberated territories in the armed struggle that they were in and around, like, okay, we know here that we are safeguarded. You know, like we know in this space we have defenses set up against these external forces that are going to try to mess us up, harm us, kill us, make us give up our land and our freedom. And so let's, like fortify ourselves in this contained space or many contained spaces over the country, really. But yeah, I think we're trying to, learn from that type of practice. And like, what does that mean?

You don't just arrive at a different reality. It has to be practiced‚ put into practice to move from social imaginary to social fact.

How do you sustain something like this? You know, so for us, the 313 of the occupations were never longer than a day. You know, we were out there for 17 hours, one day, three hours, one day, you know, 4 or 5 hours, one day. It wasn't like, we're here and we're occupying the space for days on end, for weeks on end, right— which was an ultimate dream, it's something that we had talked about, right? It was something we had considered and wanted to do. But the sustainability of it was just like, this feels completely out of reach. So I think the biggest lesson was the impact that you can have in these kind of temporary moments. And just the the conversations that we got into with people on Juneteenth last year, we're like, my gosh, you know, I'm just like, I'm so happy that we did this at this time in this place. And we got to talk to so many people about defunding the police and about abolition. And people really heard us because they saw us try to be in practice around it. And the need for like that to happen consistently. Like we know that in order for us to realize that it needs to happen consistently, but in order for it to happen consistently, we have to figure out how to not exhaust ourselves, exhaust our resources, you know, diminish the impact because we are tired and overworked and overwhelmed by the process of holding it.

Sirrita's class again demonstrates how new social norms are produced through practice.

It made me think of like every time someone would, like, get in trouble or like on the verge of suspension. We always have circles. And like in the beginning, my young people are like, "This ain't got nothing to do with me! Like, what he doing—" you know how young people are.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I mean Black people in general are like, "What he's got nothing to do with me," right? It was like, no, but— but it does. And here's why and explained that to them and so then it became like such a thing so that when somebody would like about to get in trouble, they're like, "Now, you know, we gon' have to have a circle. So, you need to— I'm trying to get to the lesson so you need to get it together!" And it's like, right, accountability.

That's right.

You see how she got you together now because we trying to get to like like they will always be like, okay, we know you've got to have a circle because there was a norm. Some people are like, "I don't want to have a circle today. Like, you really just need to act right," And I'm just like, look, that's how we're accountable...

I love that.

...Of each other, cause we are our brother and sister's keeper.

That's right.

Like, we do not need anyone else. Like we, like you said, being proactive and having circles before to harm.

Nick Buckingham and Michigan liberations work during the pandemic and uprisings in 2020 also demonstrated this kind of mutual responsibility and care.

When we got involved in the uprisings in Detroit, it gave us it gave us like a blank canvas to really take the ideas of, you know, when we asked people what it's like, you know, like to really, like, throw a lot of this onto the blank canvas and step into it. We were able to create, like, these small hubs that— these hubs that would like, I don't want to say like protect the movement, but there were hubs to where, you know, if there was conflict that happened within them. We had hubs of expertise that can address it, right? I don't think we ever had an instance where we got the police involved. We didn't we didn't have to rely on the EMS anymore because we had our own medic team. And then our medic team came out and trained hundreds of people on a like— just medical care, right.

During the daily marches that were taking place in Detroit in 2020, Michigan Liberation developed systems of care and conflict mediation that rested on their own capacity to intervene and get people out of the carceral system.

We have hubs that, you know, took care of folks that, you know, they needed Narcan. And it became like this— it almost like, the community. This thing that we threw on this blank canvas it, it just popped up. So now, like fast forward we're here in 2021 and those hubs, they still exist. And now it's like the to keep the container, the containment of the street marchers safe has now grown into like, how do we keep communities safe? Right. We've had some situations at Michigan Liberation of course, like always dealing with folks that spent lots of time in prison, you know, to— we had one situation where we honestly feel if it was not in the hands of Liberation— in Michigan Liberation, this person would end up back in prison, right. And we didn't we didn't want to get there. We didn't want to throw a person away, we don't want to get the police involved. So we got our community involved. And the way folks have come to support this individual around suicidal ideation and mental health, to support this person around, you know, the the proper way to kind of like reentry, reenter back into a society; to make sure that this person is getting the resources that's needed and then like a hub that's connecting with this person on like a human level, right? "Hey, what up? Are you good? What do you need? How do we show up?" So we're starting it, we're seeing, you know, how we can take these different things that we've been able to create during the uprisings and start to like really put some um— like just make it more solid in the community. Having funders...

It's important to name that this work often emerged from sites of protest or direct actions. While these conversations with Nick and P.G. Are referencing the Movement for Black Lives that emerged amid the 2020 uprisings. We're witnessing similar phenomena in the wake of the genocide in Palestine in 2024. We've heard students protesting in encampments talk about the ways in which their needs have never been more cared for than by the encampments. Encampments have not only been sites to demonstrate political solidarity with Palestinians, but students meals are taken care of, their belongings are protected, they're receiving free educational experiences and have access to free libraries and art materials, they're surrounded by people demonstrating care in various ways.

While protests can act as a prototype, in these ways, moving away from carcerality also demands that we find everyday ways to practice these other ways of being responsible to and for one another: in the classroom, at home, in our neighborhoods, in our friendships, at work, at the grocery store and beyond.

Closing + Acknowledgments

All right. So to sum things up, throughout this series, we've invited listeners to question what they've been taught is true. We've called people into relation with each other. And we've called folks to imagine differently. In this episode, we've pinpointed some of the hang ups that might impede our imaginations, the ways we've been indoctrinated, the fear of uncertainty, the strength of inertia, the weight of heartbreak and rage, the limitations of our echo chambers. We've highlighted a few carceral fictions about imagination as it relates to abolition, like the notion that the power to imagine should remain limited to those with power and wealth, or that our abolitionist imaginations must produce a totalizing solution to replace the all encompassing carceral apparatus. Or the idea that because there's no singular abolitionist solution, that means there's no way forward at all.

We've explored the spaces where we need to make more room naming that we need to let go of a desire to bring everyone along, that expanding our definition of everyone is necessary to get there, that we need to get out of our echo chambers, that we can and should abandon the carceral obsession with one size fits all solutions, and that we have to practice our prefigurations in the midst of this hostile, absurd, seemingly fictional environment.

Thanks for joining us for this limited six episode season of carceral fictions and abolitionist realities. This time, instead of offering a dispatch, we invite you to imagine.

It's a Monday morning, July 8th, 2047. As you roll over and rub the sleep out of your eyes, you groan thinking to yourself that you can't tolerate another 100 degree day. As you brush your teeth, you see a news headline that mentioned something about all those police statues being vandalized and torn down overnight, the ones that were erected in the wake of the last major wave of police layoffs. You had wondered how long they would last. How do you react to that news? Do you chuckle to yourself? Send it to a friend? Are you worried? Where did you even see it? Was it on a TV, a smartwatch, or some new device we haven't heard of yet? What sounds do you hear as the world wakes up around you? What is your neighborhood look like from your window? What lies ahead of you this week? What kind of work do you do? What's happening in your home life? And who is there with you? What are your family responsibilities? Who are your friends? And lastly, what else is going on in this world without police? How did we get here?

Someday, eventually, after I've recovered from this project, I'm looking to bring together a writer's room to keep imagining otherwise. If you are interested in collaboratively writing speculative abolitionist fictions dispatches from worlds without police and prisons, please hit me up. Visit making room [dot] online. Click on "View," select "Dispatches" and leave me a note.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for listening. And thank you to the many people who've made this show and the wider body of work possible over the last three years. If you've listened to the whole series, I am so grateful that you stuck with us for this long. Thank you to all the futurists featured in this episode who participated in this project three long years ago. That includes Angel McKissic, P.G. Watkins, Monique Thompson, Myrtle Thompson-Curtis, Nate Mullen, Sirrita Darby, Curtis Rene and Nick Buckingham. And thank you to Kyle Whyte, who participated in an interview last fall. Thank you especially to PG for helping me facilitate these conversations.

This limited series was dreamed up, written and produced by me, Lauren Williams. Essays were co-edited by my dear friend Ayinde Jean-Baptiste, and the audio was engineered by Conor Anderson. Excerpts from several references were read by voice actor Joy Vandervoort-Cobb. In the excerpt from Unraveling Harm, Cultivating Safety, Denise and Sharon were both voiced by Lorinda Hawkins-Smith. Jonathan was voiced by Erron Allen. Thank you, also, to the actual interviewees whose names were changed to protect their identities and to the Metro Detroit Restorative Justice Network for allowing me to share this preview of the study. Our theme music is the instrumentals from a song called Detroit Summer by Invincible and Waajeed, courtesy of Emergence Media.

This project is presented in partnership with Respair Production and Media.