112523 Rethinking the Carceral System (Part 2)

long overdue. It sounds like, yeah, yeah, and you know what, To be honest with you, I have known people who are somewhere on the spectrum going from prisons are absolutely necessary for the rehabilitation of criminal behavior, to abolish prisons outright. And it wasn't until I had this rethink that we're going to get into a little bit later in the show that I started to really understand just how much our current way of thinking holds us back. So stay tuned.

First and foremost, though, we are going to discuss BA BA becoming a Better ally ab BA. Today's BABA sponsored by Friends of the Movie. You can sign up for the free voter wallet from Fotmglobal dot com to support black businesses and allied businesses, as well as make an impact with your spending. Again, that's Fotmglobal dot Com and today's baba. This is an ally in the truest sense. This behavior is worthy of applause. This comes from NPR.

Pink is joining the fight against book banning. Thank you Pink. In collaboration with PEN America and Florida Best Sorry, Florida Bookseller, Books and Books, the Grammy winning pop musician is giving away two thousand challenged books at our concerts in Miami and Sunrise, Florida. The books which have appeared in pen America's index of banned books include Beloved by Tony Morrison, Amanda Gorman's The Hill We Climb, Gross Who Code by

Regma Sojani, and Todd Parr's The Family Book. It's confusing, it's infuriating, its censorship, Pink said in an Instagram video announcing her action. The video, which also featured PEN America's president Suzanne Nozel, has been linked to more than has been linked more than thirty three thousand times liked sorry,

don't have my glasses on all right quote. Books have held a special joy for me from the time I was a child and That's why I am unwilling to stand by and watch while books are banned by schools, Pink said in a PEN statement about the giveaway. She goes on to say, it's especially hateful to see authorities take aim at books about race and racism against LGBTQ authors and those of color. We have made so many strides toward equality in this country, and no one should

want to see this progress reversed. This is why I am supporting PEN America in its work and why I agree with them no more banned books. And we always do our best to applaud folks who are becoming better allies by using their platforms and really taking on uncomfortablet answers, and I'd imagine that's true with Pink. Okay, so we're going to talk about the car s rules system, and this is one piece of the entire criminal justice system. We spent the first half of the show talking about police,

law enforcement, law enforcement. Yeah, and you know, we we have problems there with police. We have problems with sentencing, and we have problems with how we think about the car rules system. And it's always interesting to do these readings that we do because we learn so much from these great thinkers who allow us to step outside of our own way of thinking, our own framework, mental framework,

to re examine critically what holds our society. Yet, well, this happens because it's always happened that way, and it's too difficult to undo it. And these brilliant minds cause us to rethink even that position because the fact of the matter is that these rethinks aren't tall orders. It doesn't require any people being any different, And in this instance, it was very easy for me. I've shared this on the show before and I'll share it again. I have an older brother who went to prison for a very

very very long time. Not quite football numbers, but a long time.

in his vehicle to protect himself. There was some people that were messing with his girlfriend now wife. They were being they were harassing her, and my brother was outnumbered. But he knew that, hey, if I get this gun fire in the air, might scare these guys off and then we can get out of here. It's exactly what he did. Now we thought everything was going to be okay. We his family because fortunately where he was, it was on video. It's clearly shooting in the air. Guys run away,

they get out of there. Everything's fine. My brother went to jail prison for attempted murder fifteen years. They took my brother from me, and it's on video. He wasn't trying to murder anyone. Story checks out, you know, he's obviously his now wife was there. Tell our version of the story. And this is the car soule system in the United States of America. This is my brother. This is not like the homie. This is my father's son

that I'm talking about. So when I came across this, which I want to shout out, we are pushblack on Instagram. Give them a once sober and give them a follow if you're into this type of content, I believe that this is really some profound content for thought experiments and rethinking just the world looks and feels to you if you're black, if you are not black. You know, it's just important that we share this information and we understand a little bit more about each other's walks. But this

comes or this starts off three ways. Garceral logic limits our imaginations and restricts our futures. Okay, so I'll read a bit. Carcerol logic is the way of thinking that made prisons and policing or carceral systems possible. Because we've normalized those systems, we still use this logic even outside context of incarceration. Here's three examples. So this is a very easy thought experiment to follow. We're going to go through these examples one by one. Okay, Number one, are

you innocent or are you guilty? Now you're just listening to me ask That sounds simple enough, right. Turns out, realistically, most real people and real conflicts are more complex than that. Carciologic, however, tells us there's a terrible few the guilty people who do the wrong things because they have something wrong with them, But that establishes a dangerous inaccurate binary, especially for marginalized people.

And funnily enough, on this show, and I want you to jump in here, Q, because I know that this has been one of the things that you've been certainly even more passionate about than me. But for folks who have a traditional mindset, innocent, guilty, do the crime, do the time. That's sort of thinking that when it lacks humanity, when it lacks empathy, when it lacks context, overlooks people's circumstances.

And if we agree that human beings deserve how about if there's a stray dog, it looks very thin, and it's outside of your house, and say you live on a house and the dog knocks over your trash can and takes some food and runs off, that would make sense, Okay, the dog is trying to survive. Indeed, if it was a dog, most people might actually say, Wow, that dog

is hungry, Let me feed the dog. Okay. If that is a person, not a dog, and the person is black, people, funnily enough, treat that human being worse in many instances, because we've seen many videos of police kicking black men and They're like, Yo, what did I do? I was just walking down wooded what's going on? The police are kicking, no, stop resisting all that sort of stuff, and people are like, yeah, well,

clearly he did something. And then the thought experiment that we have often is excuse me, swap out that black man for a dog. Do you still feel the same way? And then most people are like, of course not. And so this is where I want you to dear been guilty or innocent. If I'm poor, I come from impoverished circumstances and I need to eat, or I need to figure out a way to get some money together so that I can pay for where I live or whatever, does that make me a bad person or does that

make me a poor person? And I get that there's a lot of nuance here, but it's a good question to ask, because I could show you bad people who are wealthy people and then they do bad things to gain more wealth. But it's very hard for me with proper contact to look at poor people and feel that they should be held to the same standard, or indeed a worse or a more harsh standard than people who are just greedy for the sake of being greedy. All right, go ahead.

the bad guy. There is no space for nuances and decisions being made for reasons outside of that person's just bad.

a decision made because of circumstance. And we'd rather not have those complex conversations about circumstances because it makes upholding a specific system and making very black and white linear. You know, in some cases bad logic decisions hard to make if you interject these complexities and nuance and context and color.

know I'm a DJ. I don't know how I forgot that one. You're a DJ, though, thank you for remembering profile messages. But I know it came from the same album or same time brain, you know. But anyway, that statement, I think kind of really encompasses the way that the government or the powers that be, or the societal framework under which we live is just comfortab with things being

the way that they are. It overwhelmingly upholds people who have privileged that could be wealth, that could be their racial composition, that could be opportunities, that could be, you know, where their dad went to school or who their mom knew or whatever, and it disproportionately negatively affects people like us, especially if when you're looking at a carceral system that disproportionately sentences black people to sorry sentences, black people to

disproportionately long sentences. I think that's what I'm trying to say. You start to realize that the data shows that it's a much tougher go for us based on this binary system where there's no room for nuance. And this this is true. I've been I've been to court before and they have, you know, a judge. You'd be like, I got a ticket once, How about this, I got a ticket once. Judge is like, well, the ticket was for like tag. I had a paper tag. I bought a

new car, right, and the paper tag expired. But the dealership was supposed to send me the new tag. You know, that's what you paid for when you get the car, and the dealership never sent it to me. So I'm driving, get pulled over, I get a ticket, right, and then I go to court for this ticket, and I was trying to let them know, hey, I've done everything that

I could possibly do. This is not my crime. This is indeed the crime of the dealership because had I received everything, it would have been there I still have to go to work. This is my only car. I bought it. You know, this is what I was thinking. There's all the nuance for you. The judge wasn't trying to hear a nuance. The judge was like, were you driving with a expired paper tag? Yes? Or no? And

under those circumstances, I have to say yes. And I don't have any money if I at the time, I was going to school and I had to pay for my own school, you know what I mean, So certainly didn't have money to fight a ticket. And now you see how it goes. So anyway, the point here is that nuance helps where currently we have a binary system. Let's go to step two. Defining punishment is complex too. You might consider blocking someone's number, punching someone, or killing

someone who hurt you. Hurt also exists on a spectrum. In other words, there are mandatory minimums, there are three strikes laws. There are things like this, where how about three strikes? Brian Stevenson, who we're a big fan of on this show. He is the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative. Please look him up to He's a very profound speaker in a brilliant mind. Brian Stevenson said on a Ted Talk Once upon a Time. He says, you know, the three strikes laws in California have people who've lived

rough lives. Just how no one wakes up in the morning's like, oh my gosh, you can't wait to do crime. People are like, I need to get the opportunity wherever I can. Some people, I'll interject again, some people people exist. Yeah, right, But the people that we know that end up in these stories that we end up coming across lots of these stories, that's not the It's hard to imagine that way like that because Rams just pointed out earlier and in our covers today that there are people who are

well off that still wake up. That's exactly what he thank you for. Thank you for making sure that I'm all the way right. But what you have is people that have lived rough lives that you know, maybe they're they see a bicycle, they think there, that's the bike that was taken from them, so they take it back and now they have to go to prison forever. Right. So again, rethinking punishment is another part of this, and I want to make sure we get this. This last

one here is number three. Punishment in this context, along with surveillance and violating human rights, is more so an abusive power. Yes, prisons, but also actions like parents beating children. State enforced carco logic leaves us little room to question punishments or approach individual harms as part of a collective, like eliminating the actual causes of systemic sexual or racial violence.

We're expected to trade our agency for how the state response to our conflicts, leaving many violent survivors dissatisfied or criminalized themselves. Carcologic is ingrained in our world, but it's still a system of opinions. We can choose to believe something else. We can imagine and create more empowering logics and a safer world. Now, I don't want to leave us right there, so I'm going to share some good news,

which is rare on this show. But I came across the statistic, and funnily enough, it was Ben Crump that first posted it, and then I went and researched it to make sure that it was true. But as it turns out, the imprisonment rates for black women are in decline. They've declined seventy percent from two thousand to twenty twenty one. She's going. And then for black males rates declined forty eight percent during the same time frame, and obviously this

is a major step forward. Still disproportionately affects us. We still get the disproportionate sentences, but over the you know, two decade plus, you know time frame, you can see that you know, either we are you know, figuring a way to avoid this or something is working. I would I think that I probably should do some more research into what might be causing these these rates. But this

is very special. The truth of the matter is that one in five black mails born in two thousand and one it is likely to experience imprisonment in their lifetimes. It sounds like a lot, and it is. But that's down from one in three black males born when we were born, born in nineteen eighty one. And you're free to verify this. Go to Entensingproject dot org and check

that out. But yeah, as it turns out, incarceration rates for black people are dropping, and I'd imagine that's why in the past couple of years there's been this big push to make us at for the stakeholders of the prisons in their country to try to keep them filled and they've renegotiated their deals with different cities and criminal justice you know, uh departments and so forth. But but yeah, rethinking that system in its entirety is something that we

want you to do. Obviously, if you're an elected official, shoot put that on your platform. But if you're just a person who is like us, and.