What is a Moral Budget?

all people. As always, you can hear those full conversations right now on my Patreon for just five dollars at patreon dot com slash woke AF. But if you've ever had questions about how activists are processing the loud calls to abolish prisons, take a listen to Daniel Fokio explaining what represent Justice is doing to adjust the fat that the prison system is directly descended from the institution of slavery.

You know, one of the things that I often say, and you hear people saying, is that our criminal justice system is broken. Right, our criminal justice system is broken and it needs to be fixed. And what I have started to say is that the criminal justice system isn't broken. It's actually working exactly the way it was intended to work.

Right that you, following the abolition of slavery, that we have as a society created various mechanisms to in prison right and essentially put back into slavery black and brown people. We use the criminal justice system as a way for us to say that this particular group of people needs to be over surveillance, needs to be over policed, right, and so we are going to put law enforcement embedded

in these communities, right. And what we know to be true is that the more police that you have, the more likely you are to be picked up foreign fraction.

And then this cyclical way of being happened. So when we look at this and we have these communities, we have the white community saying, well, you know, of course they commit all of the crimes right like the you know, we see they're in prison for a reason, and so we treat them like animals because they are animals, and it's a reinforcing this sense of being and then justifies white violence. So talk to me about how this is

such a grave lie. When we talk about the big lie right now, we talk about the big lie in politics in terms of lying about who won the twenty twenty election, but I think the biggest lie in all honesty is how we have continued on with the system that we know is purposefully made based on racism and injustice. And so how do you unpack that lie? What does it look like to have these real, deep conversations and stories about why our justice some misset up in the

way that it is. That is such a great and observation and question, Danielle. I think one thing I would say for people that don't know is that between nineteen ninety and two thousand and five, if you can imagine this, a prison was built once every ten days in the US. Those prisons were filled, particularly even in states like California, like where people believe that we're very progressive right on

with black and brown individuals, including the youth. The super Predator narrative which popped up at the same time, feel that type of investment, state level of incarceration. And so when you look at and it feels, ultimately Danielle, a narrative of good versus evil instead of opportunity versus oppression, which is really the conversation that we should be having.

And so it's important for people to understand that when you spend, for example, in California, fifty billion dollars a year on your justice system, you are making a philisop optical statement that this is what you believe. It's not a matter of safety. There's a million different types of interventions and alternate models besides locking up individuals, and besides all of the many atrocities that sort of happened to

our youth and to incarcerated women in the system. So you're making a decision that this is how your resources should be sent. And so I think there's a couple of things versus reframing it to opportunity versus oppression, and also to naysayers around changing the justice system. It usually comes from a really myoptic view of what the justice system is. It comes from a view that it's a person's worst act that they've ever committed and what the

retribution for that act is at the systemic level. And so we need to broaden people's view of the system. We need to broaden people's view of who is incarcerated, why are they incarcerated? You know, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, victims of prime, survivors of crime, survivors of abuse, survivors of discrimination and prejudice, violence of all kinds. That really, those stories and that understanding is ultimately will fuel the

empathy and the demand for change. I think if people understood how we've invested ourselves emotionally and really in our identity as a country around the justice system, it would do more to change it. You know. The last question for you, Daniel and I you know, I just want to once again like commend you and the work that represents justice has been doing over the past couple of years since your launch, because I think you know, as a storyteller, right, as somebody who works to share information

and tell stories, I think that it's incredibly important. I want to ask you, you know, when we are having these conversations that are readily in the press right now about abolition, right the abolition of the police, the abolition of this very injust system, they understanding that throwing people in jail and throwing away the key has not made

our society any better. That looking at people as obstacles other than opportunities for change or possibility is where we actually need to lead and need to put our investment. Do you think that we need to change the conversation or change the language that we use in terms of abolition. Do you think that that has been a hindrance to people getting on the side of how we reform this system or is it just we need to talk more

about it and we need to familiarize people more. I think we just need a more detailed understanding around what it means. I think that there's some misunderstanding around abolition that is completely willful, and then there's some just general misunderstanding around what it means, I think, or that converts it to kind of this zero it's either going to be no public safety or the current system that we have.

And so what I would do is I would reframe kind of the context of it to say that we know, and we all, every single one of us desires to live in a safe community, a well invested community. We desire to feel protected. We desire that when you know, people stumble or commit mistakes, they not be defined by those mistakes, but rather given a chance to grow redeem themselves in a way that doesn't harm anyone, so storing the harm that they've caused and also repairing the harm

that has been caused often to them. But take a look at our prison system and does it do that? And I think that if you give that deeper understanding around the narratives that people's stories, you will lead to a very logical conclusion that the prison system does not do that. The prison system does not rehabilitate you. It is not just a predictive it is a predictable consequence. In fact, it's validated by by the stigma that people who are returning citizens have that we don't feel like

the prison system is doing anything good. And so you have to really kind of give that additional context and narrative to share that this system is not working. The system it is working, as you said, the way that it's been intended to safety. It's not bettering people, it's

not bettering the communities. And if we can really communicate that clearly with people's voices who've been impacted by the system at the center of it, everyone everyone will understand what it means when we say abolish, abolish prisons, or whatever the case might be. It's abolishing the trauma and the trauma factory, the prisons that have become That was as I mentioned earlier written into the constitutional amendments. I mean, we could have foreseen that mass incarceration would be the

evolution of slavery, of racism, and everything else. So it's not meant to be at odds with the values that we all share, but it's meant to point out that this system is not accomplishing those values at all for anyone, and there's a better way to do things, and it's time for our philosophy as a country to completely change.

While Daniel and I agree that the prison system is not actually intended for rehabilitation, there is still work to be done to help people understand the prison industrial complex so that we can work together as a people to end private prisons and create a system that works better for everyone. One small thing you can do is to help share these conversations with your friends and family, equip them with the knowledge they can use to expand wokeness

in their own communities. Activist calls to abolish prisons and defund the police might be confusing to people until they understand what they actually mean in practice. So I asked Maya Wiley, who is running from mayor of New York City, how she interprets these calls to defund the police in a city where there is endemic police violence against everyday citizens. When we talk about this term of defund the police right and of creating investment in community, we see that

there is incredible pushback from the police. We see incredible pushback from police unions. I want to know, how do you both create a city that is equitable in terms of the fact that my tax dollars go to funding them police, just like my white neighbors tax dollars go to funding the police. Except I would be fearful to call the police if I needed them because I don't

want to end up as a hashtag. And so how do we look at the readjustment in terms of the relationship that police have with the communities that they are policing, the excess violence that we have seen over the course of decades with too many black lives lost, and then also recognizing that we are not putting money in the right place. But when we talk about defund that spins off into something else. So how does your campaign, would your administration deal with this balancing act that we've seen

play out across the country. Yeah, look, I start with it from the perspective of a moral budget. A moral budget, and a moral budget requires us one to look at how we build revenue effectively, but in ways that solve problems, not create them. Right, So revenue generation means thinking about as I said, you know, we're going to take ten billion dollars, actually didn't say this part the caring economy is one piece of that. Right, We're actually putting money

back in people's pockets. They can care for themselves, they can care for their communities. They can put money back into the economy when we help them get those jobs, when we help them work because or deal with emergencies, because they have a safe place to leave family members. We also, by giving them those grants, are ensuring that they can put money back into the economy. That's good for everyone and that actually brings revenue back into the city. Coffers.

It's also looking at it from what our resources are that we control. That creates more of those opportunities. So I'm going to spend ten billion dollars capital construction budget that is separate from the expense budget. We're often talking about budgeting. Is if we don't have two different budgets, but we do the capital budget, that just means money we borrow to build things we need built and fix

things we need fixed. And what do we need? We need affordable housing that's deeply affordable for so many of our workers who work hard but can't afford the rent. We need, you know, to make sure that they're creating. We're solving the problem with nitscha. So we'll put two billion dollars into renovation and rehabilitation. As I said, my god son lives in public housing. This ain't theoretical for me. People are unsafe and unsanitary conditions and they deserve better

green economy, green jobs. You know how we're thinking about building resiliency when you know two thirds of our people who are in flood zones or low income people of color. So these are all ways where we're fixing problems we have as a city. But we're doing it by creating a hundred thousand jobs. We're going to do local target and hiring. We're going to think about local procurement, buying

the things we need for those projects. We're going to be thinking about how that creates jobs for artists and creatives as well, so that while while we're spending and borrowing to spend in a way that is stimulative that we know from the Great Recession to the Great Depression

has helped us come back in the past. We're also going to focus it on art what I call communities of concern, which were the communities that were worse off before COVID, and we're worse off during COVID, and we'll have a long trajectory to recovery and deserve investments post COVID. And so that's really looking at our budget differently, and

we've already talked about it on the police side. It means that when we make cuts, and we will, that we're making choices that are about investing in our future, because that's what a moral bud is. It is investment in the kind of city I think we all want to live in. When I talk about it in that way, when I talk about what is just good common sense, like nobody thinks that police officer's job is responding to

a mental health crisis. Everyone agrees that it's a mental health professional that should be responding to a mental health crisis with the ability to ask her police backup if the expert thinks he or she needs it, But that should be a call by a mental health expert not by the police who don't sign up for the force to become mental health experts. That's not why they're signing up for the job. And there's so much that we can focus policing on that's appropriate and that we know

our communities want police focused on. I use the legal guns because that's such an obvious example, and it's such an example that police officers also want to work on. But putting more police officers on a street corner doesn't stop the shooting it, Oh, it just moves it over a block. Why would we keep doing it that way? It is often said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting

a different result. We have seen what the prison system and police departments due to Black Americans across this country. We cannot keep doing things the same way. There needs to be deep systemic change, and folks like Daniel Fokio and Maya Wiley are leading the charge to make this a better nation for all Americans, but especially black folks and people of color who suffer disproportionately. To hear more of these conversations every single week, you know what to do.

Head over to patreon dot com, slash woke f and subscribe. Five dollars a month gets you five shows a week full of in depth discussions just like these until next time. Power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.