librarypunk - 076 - Prison Information Access feat. Jessica Sylvia

Episode Date: December 8, 2022

This week we’re joined by Jessica Sylvia to talk about prisons as places of censorship, parole boards, and archival priorities for stories from the inside.  https://twitter.com/Abolition_Jess Media Mentioned https://pen.org/prison-book-bans-protect-mass-incarceration/ https://scalawagmagazine.org/press-in-prison/  https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=16574  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_Litigation_Reform_Act https://daily.jstor.org/far-from-folsom-prison-more-to-music-inside/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_Rape_Elimination_Act_of_2003 https://www.studyandstruggle.com/critical-conversations https://www.empowermentave.com/ 

All right, nerdy white boy, you can have an hour and 30 minutes of my time. Hello, I'm Justin. I'm a scholar communications librarian. My pronouns are he and him. I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library. My pronouns are they then? Hello, I'm Jay. I am a music library director, and my pronouns are he, him. And we have a guest. Would you like to introduce yourself? Ah, I suppose so. My name is Jessica Phoenix. Sylvia. Please call me Jess. my pronouns are she and her, although I'll accept anything said with love. Welcome.

So nice to have you here. We've been talking over email, and I've been looking forward to this episode. Thank you. It's so nice to be here. I like to be anywhere where I'm welcome. Yeah, so I heard your episode with Death Panel, and we had Beatrice on not that long ago. We've kind of been doing a health and disability and accommodation streak, and we're going to keep that up. But we also, in the past, tried to talk to people who have worked in prisons as prison librarians.

And we have also touched on, like, information needs and incarcerated people. A couple of us have been active with the abolitionist library association, which is more or less just an email list at this time. It's not super active, but a lot of good stuff gets shared between them. So I'm glad it's still around. I'm glad you can just find like-minded people because it's useful. But the problem we kind of had with doing library episodes about librarians who've worked in prisons is they get more or less indoctrinated into being guards as part of their job because I don't know if you're familiar with it, but in the library world, there is a book called Running the Stacks, which is kind of famous, infamous. This guy gets a job in a prison library. He's not really qualified to be a librarian.

And he talks about his experiences. is, but one of the things that always stuck in my mind from that book was one time, like, a lockdown happens or something. And he realizes, oh, I'm on a particular side in this scenario. Like, no matter how much I want to help people here, no matter all the people who rely on me, trust me, work with me. Like, he had like an assistant who ran the law library. Once that happened, he realized, oh, this is a very stark situation.

And this is what I'm actually doing here. Yeah. It's, I know, it's something I wanted to. to pursue talking about more, but I just really didn't know how to do it. So we've got so much talk about. Do you mind if I interject real quick? And I'll just say, I don't know. What you're here for is to interrupt me. I don't care if you're talking about the university or the library or a non-profit organization, a prison, whatever. But anytime we're talking about institutions, it's common for folks to just sort of be absorbed into the culture of the institution. And if you're not, then you tend to

be just excluded and sort of ejected from it. So that's just sort of the name of the game. And that's the problem with structures. That's the problem with institutions is that generally people just get absorbed into the culture. And that's just how it goes. Yeah, 1,000% on that. Yeah. Yeah. So I did want to ask, Jess, what have you been working on? you've been doing? Just how are things going for you? I also saw you have a cat. I don't know if they're going to make an appearance, but we have many guest cats who show up. So what's going on with you? Anything you want to have people check out from the top? Well, I do love my cat, and I know that my cat loves me. And I was working on the sayings of Chairman Mao. And Chairman Mao is actually a

nickname for my cat. And the sayings of Chairman Mao are quite wise, although most people don't quite understand them explicitly. But I try to pay as much attention as I can to the saying as Chairman Mal, because I do believe that there's definitely a lot of knowledge there, if we could quite understand it correctly. But no, thank you for asking me what I've been up to recently. Quite frankly, after 222 months living in a cage, really, I've been trying to figure out how to adjust to technology. And that's like been a main theme in my life. And then, of course, there's the issue of underdeveloped or eroded life skills that I'm trying to figure out at this point. But more explicitly, you know, I've been working on community organizing around censorship and censorship in prisons.

But now I'm starting to move towards campaigning around parole boards. And quite frankly, there's a lot we don't know about parole boards, including what are the requirements to actually be on a parole board and making these decisions. which basically is a death panel, right? Deciding whether a person should die in prison or get out. And what are the requirements of actually serving on a parole board and what are people on a parole board actually looking for to let a person out of prison? And then there's the idea of folks who are actually living in prison and looking to parole boards whether or not they can go home to their families.

And there's folks like Loretta Pierre in Mississippi who has been denied parole a record 15 times. And Loretta has never known her son outside of prison who is now 35 years old. And the thing is there are a lot of people like Loretta. And this is not like some, you know, case that is absolutely, you know, unique. There are plenty of people like Loretta. So I'm really trying to organize around researching parole boards and hopefully making some changes there. Yeah, honestly, I, until you just said it right now, I would have said, oh, I assume parole boards are made up of, like, prison officials and local government. Well, do you know, in Washington State, we actually don't have parole. And what had happened, I believe it was 1984, we went to mandatory minimums. And there is something called a clemency board where prisoners can actually petition due to extraordinary circumstances to get out of prison.

And the only requirement, according to this report that I have from, I believe, 2013 to 2019, the only requirement to actually serve on this clemency board is that you are a registered voter. And in this six-year period, apparently, according to this report, eight women actually were eligible to be be seen by this clemency board. yet only three women actually received clemency. So what that actually means is that every Thanksgiving, the Washington state governor actually pardoned more turkeys than he did women that year. Because over 80% of the people who got seen by a clemency board were actually men.

So that's just a sort of demonstration of sort of like the sexist sort of situation of clemency in Washington state, which I don't think is really unique to any state in this country, whether you've got parole or clemency. This is basically the climate. This is what we're looking at. You've been, oh gosh, where to start. You talked about censorship and control of information. And since we're just diving right in, you made a comment about commodification of bodies in the prison industrial complex that goes along with this crisis around parole. Do you want to talk about more about like the relationship of censorship and bodies? Absolutely. Thank you for asking me that question.

And, you know, one of the things that I have sort of failed to get into in some of my recent appearances is the fact that when we're looking at prison and prison slave labor, actually, the 13th Amendment makes slave labor legal actually through prison. So if a person commits a felony and goes to prison, slave labor is actually legal through that 13th Amendment. However, what we're actually looking at really in today's age is more than anything. We're not looking at slave labor. What we're looking at is the commodification of bodies. And we'll see that in other places, too, with labor surpluses. Such as, for example, if you look at people once they retire and they are no longer fit to have their bodies extracts, for labor, they'll go to, say, a retirement home where their bodies are used for commodification

and value is extracted from them because they need care now, right? So they can't work. However, guess what? There's plenty of money to be made by caring for these bodies. Well, in the same way that if we're looking at folks who are not doing capitalism right, and that may be, say, a criminal as that label goes, and we're looking at folks in prison, there's this commodification of bodies that happens. It's the same way with this sort of surplus population. And what I can show you with the commodification of bodies is anything from say, well, you've got to be in communication with your family. So now we've got these phone contracts and there are these huge gains to be made. It might cost, say, $3 a phone call to talk to your family. Or it could be something like

care where, yeah, now you need substance abuse counseling or something else will say for you to be fit to reenter society. And there are all these different ways to provide programs as quote unquote care so that you can be made safe to reenter society. And so what we're seeing is not only slave labor anymore is now it's more like the commodification of bodies to extract value from surplus populations. And quite frankly, people don't give a shit because they think, well, you're a fucking criminal so you deserve it and we don't care anyway. Yeah, it was, I've brought it up before, but this was what I wanted to, this is kind of my last stab at doing a PhD. There was a program in the UK that was funded by the EU, which was studying human trafficking.

And so my whole thing was, give me money to do research on the U.S. prison system as human trafficking, which is this is a system that incarcerates people on purpose to move them to other parts of the country in order to extract value from their bodies. this is a pervasive sort of state-sponsored. The economics of it are wonky because it's like, you know, it's the government. It's a community that would otherwise not exist because the prison provides wages for the community. But it's also the physical separation of the person from their family and their original community. That means that they're also more likely to be roped back into the prison system. And they, of course, told me, oh, this is a really great topic. We were more worried about, like, you know, white women getting kidnapped by scary brown people, so this is not what we're going to fund, which is most modern human trafficking kind of initiatives.

There's a really good book about this. Don't remember I'll throw it in the notes about, like, the whole modern human trafficking industry is based on, like, early 20th century concerns about Eastern European women, becoming white first and then becoming the subject of fear campaigns for trafficking. So anyway. No, Justin, and what you're touching on is the fact that white women are actually respectable and valued as property where maybe black or brown women are not, right? So we're looking at these white women, not as human beings, really, but we're looking at in terms of gender and patriarchy, women as property. And they are worthy of respect and protection where black or brown women are not and certainly trans women are not as well. right? And so that's really the problem that we're talking about here more than anything. And I'm so glad that you brought up the fact that prisons really are human trafficking. And the way that I see it is more than anything, prisons are a form of extreme censorship where body snatchers, quite frankly, are kidnapping people from communities and censoring them from spaces. And you see that these folks that are actually taken from communities and put in prisons. And what happens is not only is a person's ability to

do harm taken away, but ability to actually do good and to provide for their families and to do good in communities is taken away as well, as is any type of ability to produce offspring or to reproduce. And so in this censorship, or what I would call more than anything is the age of incapacitation, where it's not about punishment or rehabilitation so much as it is about incapacitation and then the commodification of bodies. And it really is, I would call it, state-sanctioned human trafficking and really the largest human trafficking network that we know of. It's being an exact argument. Yeah, and like also with body commodification and censorship, it also brings this conversation of like what is being censored because there's a lot of discussion

and librarianship around especially when like banned books weeks happens where it's like all these challenged and banned books but you know and some of us are you know trying to have this conversation but a lot of the times the fact that like the censorship that happens to materials in prisons is often largely ignored it's like that's where the real censorship largely happens but even like that information like materials like people are information too. People have information to share. Their bodies themselves, like, you know, I'm, I'm transgender. My body is a catalog. My body is information of a thing that I've done to it, right? And by trafficking people into prison, that is also a censoring of people and not just like the books that

aren't are or aren't allowed into those libraries, right? Like, you're also censoring people and their ideas and the stories that their physical bodies tell as well. Right. And it seems like more than anything, what makes that possible is respectability politics where a person is labeled as dangerous, right? And it could be an event or something where an accusation is made and now this person is labeled as dangerous. And because this person is labeled as dangerous, now there's no longer a First Amendment right and there's no longer a right to have access to information. or books because the person is labeled as dangerous now because of some fault or some wrong that they allegedly committed. So, you know, they just don't have the same rights as others. And that's

really where this starts is it's with that respectability politics. Yeah. And I saw quite a bit of that in public libraries. I work kind of behind the scenes in IT now, but I spent a number of years working front desk. And some of the, some of my favorite patron were our patrons were our unhoused patrons. Like they were the patrons I saw every day. Patrons I had multiple conversations with, you know, that would ask for recommendations of books and stuff. And then to have, yeah, like, you know, these unhoused patrons who have this stigma against them and then have that turned around right on me in some cases from other patrons who just, the simple existence, of unhoused people and the fact that they could have been criminalized, not even knowing anything

about their histories, just that they could have been criminalized, was like then thrown back in our face. Like, I very narrowly, very narrowly avoided an argument with a patron once who, quite frankly, asked me point blank, why we even allowed unhoused people in our library. And at that point, I had been living without a car, so I took a lot of public transportation, and I saw these same people, you know, walking the same way I went every day, riding the same buses every day. You know, I saw people who are out on work release all of the time on buses or other transportation things. And like, to me, and I'm trying to connect here just the fact that unhoused people are often assumed to be part of the prison industrial complex just by their very existence. you know, people assume an unhoused person has done a crime or, you know, has an addiction or something like that.

And, uh, yeah, Sadie, do you, do you know why that is so personal to me? And I will say that the reason that that is a personal subject to me is that I was actually kicked out of the house when I was a child because I was a transgender girl. And the only place that I could find out anything about myself as being transgender in the 90s was by going to the library actually and reading. And I had no idea what was the difference of a drag queen or a transsexual or transvestite. Back in the 90s where I lived in sort of a suburban urban sprawl area, I didn't know anyone who is trans. I did know some gay people.

I had a friend who was a lesbian in high school, but I didn't know anyone who was trans. So the only experience I actually knew of was at the library. and I actually happened to be homeless because I was trans. And I know that a lot of folks feel like one of the main problems with crime is that homeless people are committing crimes. And incarceration and homelessness are often conflated. And quite frankly, I remember feeling abandoned and betrayed by society as a child because I was a child, literally, living on the streets. And I was trying to get a job even, yet I was homeless. And I had no address.

so it made it even more difficult to get a job. And I remember panhandling on the streets even one day when I was hungry. And I saw a woman that was probably my grandmother's age. And I asked her, could you spare something? I'm hungry. I haven't had anything to eat in three days. And she looked at me and said, get a job. And I told her, lady, I'm trying to.

I'm just a kid. And so what I would say more than anything is that I had felt abandoned and betrayed by society as a child. And I had done no harm to anyone. Yet, people weren't caring for me, yet I'm expected to mind my manners and do everything right. And I'm expected to not steal, even though I'm hungry, I'm tired. I have nowhere to lay my head. And so is it society's failure or mine as a transgender child who's done no harm? Yeah, and you did send me today a project that you were a part of,

the reimagining home in the crisis of the prison fix where you talk about basically your young adult life, well, adolescence into adult life. and it's really all laid out there the whole process that you went through being trans, being homeless, suppressing that, trying to find places to be. And yeah, it's really heavy stuff. It will be in the notes. You can definitely go read it. And I think I'll circle back to it at the end because I currently am, it's very funny.

It's written in a press books instance, which is funny because that's a software that I use a lot in my job and have had people reach out to me recently about wanting to write something about people locally in the valley who are queer and dealing with mental health issues and want to write about their stories and stuff like that. So I'm going to circle back to that at the very end. But I want to go over the basics since obviously there's a big wall between people on the outside and people on the inside. And we've talked about before some of the issues people have with information access. But when you were incarcerated, what were the main ways you would get information right now? I know there's things with Securus tablets, and I know there's issues with physical libraries going away,

and also all kind of COVID restrictions had limited physical access. So what's kind of the landscape right now in prisons for getting access to any kind of information? Yeah, thank you for asking me that question. And more than anything, I will say that whether you're talking at the federal level or you're talking at the state level, rather, excuse me. All the systems are different, and from state to state, they're going to be different. Now, I remember when I was in prison, and I went from the county jail to prison after I was convicted in 2005. I've seen more than anything through the years.

Once we got into the Trump administration, the political climate changed, and I saw more than anything, there was an increase in the way that literature and particularly left, or black feminist literature was monitored and rejected. Part of the reason, and I'll just speculate, and I'll say why, I remember there was a point where staff were told to no longer wear Trump masks. And I remember at that point that the staff seemed to be increasingly agitated, since they couldn't wear their Trump masks to work, they didn't want people to have leftist literature. And although I understand their frustration, there's a difference. they're at work. We have to live there, and this is the only literature we get. However,

this is the point is that sort of there's this censorship that happens, and then the staff are frustrated, they pass it down to inmates or, you know, incarcerated people. And so that's one of the things that happen. For me, I remember, if I had to, I would even ask people to actually smuggle books into the prison for me. And it's something that had happened on a few occasions, or folks made sure that I could get access to a book. And for some people, it was real because, say, if someone is Samoan, I've seen people who did not have family members who could speak English and they were writing in a foreign language,

they couldn't even get mail from their family because the prison staff couldn't read the mail so they wouldn't allow them to have it. So they literally could not communicate with their family. And that's awful. Now what we're seeing, there are a lot of different changes, and some of them are really awful because I've seen in some states where mail actually goes to a centralized location where it is processed, and then after it is processed, it is actually copied and then sent to the prisons.

So the prisoners do not actually get the original mail. They actually get a copy of that mail after it is processed if it is deemed that they can have it. So that's one of the things that's happening. In Washington State, there's a transition happening right now where folks are actually getting state tablets where some of the mail and other things actually are on that tablet, including law library access. Yeah, I think we talked about the mail scanning before, or if we didn't, it was something I had to read about in prep for an episode. But with the law library access, I mean, where you were in your experience, because I know it's going to be different everywhere,

but were you able to access a physical law library? And if you weren't, how was the experience of using the digital ones? Because obviously they're not easy to use. So what was happening for you? Yeah. In Washington State, basically what we were offered was access potentially to a legal library, legal library where we could sign up. And sometimes it was just an hour a week.

However, by the time you actually get there, it's about 50 minutes. and then you get to the computer. And it's probably even less. And you have to handwrite everything. You know, there's no getting copies of anything. So it really was quite difficult. Right now, there's a transition, actually. There's this company called Securus.

And what's happening in Washington State is that on these tablets, prisoners will have access to Nexus Lexus, which helps them look up their case and research and potentially, you know, do the work that's going to help them as we call that the term is legal beagle to actually be a jailhouse lawyer and try to work on their own case because a lot of people cannot afford actually hiring attorneys to help them through these endless appeals. However, there's actually a family from what I hear in the Washington State Department of Corrections Family Council who is protesting the nexus Lexus actually being on these tablets on the grounds that they're are afraid that folks might actually look up other prisoners cases and maybe find out something

about them, which is actually quite ridiculous because there's no actual added access to anything. It's the same access that would be in the legal libraries. And besides that point, the actual problem is that if people want to know anything about other incarcerated individuals, what they generally do is call home and ask someone to either Google them or look up their case in the courts. It has nothing to do with Lexus Nexus. LexusNexis normally only has actual appellate cases anyway. So it's not even really an issue. Yet there are actual families trying to make sure that no one has access to Lexis Nexus on these tablets. And I'm hoping they don't succeed. Yeah, we had Sarah Lambdon on, who is a law librarian and

and legal professor. And she was also saying one of the concerns with the Lexus terminals is they allow prison staff to monitor what people use because all of this is recorded. All of this is, all of your data is tracked whenever you're using these products. And then they use that data to then sell another product, probably to the prison staff, which will be what are people in your prison looking up or who is a particular person looking up, depending on how granular the data is. And so there's also a loss,

there's an additional level of surveillance that comes with digitizing of legal information. Plus, there's less context because these are really designed for legal scholars and academics, not for people researching their own cases. No, absolutely. And one of the things that I'll say is that particularly during COVID, legal library access was completely restricted,

and there wasn't much. access at all. And I am hoping that at least folks can have this access to Lexus Nexus on these tablets because it does at least provide folks the ability to sort of research cases. And unfortunately, you know, it does mean that a person really has to turn into their own attorney. They really have to become an attorney overnight just to try to research their own case and try to figure out some type of grounds on how to go back to court. Why? It's really just a case of folks not being able to afford an attorney. So what does that mean?

It means that you have to become your own attorney. In the same way that trans folks, quite honestly, have to, and this is just how it is, have to almost become a doctor just to advocate for themselves to get health care, because we have to be able to understand how to navigate the system and convince sometimes awful gatekeepers that we deserve health care. And so, yeah, for incarcerated people, it means almost learning how to become a lawyer overnight to advocate for yourself. And like that's hard enough to do when you have access to things too, because like,

I can't imagine trying to do that now when I have free internet access and all of that. And then, you know, being in a place where everything is so restricted and you don't have, you know, people that you can ask reliably, you know, your communications are slowed down because they're surveilled, all of that stuff. like it like triples the challenge, I'd imagine, of trying to advocate for yourself, both legally and in any sort of way, really. And like, I remember when I was in library school, like in my reference class, we had like a whole week just trying to learn how the hell you search LexisNexis

to like help patrons who had asked questions. So like even when like we had to get special training for it and there's a reason we have like law librarians. So like, you know, without the training, that's like some like arcane tone that this shit's hard to use. No, it's extremely difficult. Are you kidding me? I never really used it effectively.

And, you know, quite frankly, I think that the folks who do actually learn to navigate that are probably actually pretty gifted. And, you know, more than anything, I would say that that's, and the reason it's so difficult is it's a function of the PLRA and what had happened under the Clinton administration. I think it was 1992 under the PLRA where there were a lot of restrictions put into place for prisoners, you know, filing appeals. And there were these time bars and other restrictions that were done under the Clinton administration that made it so difficult for folks to really appeal and advocate for themselves.

And it hasn't gotten any better. And I don't see it getting any better, quite frankly. Right. And for anyone, it's a prison litigation reform act. I'll put a link in the notes. You do have a story. I know all good interviews have to have a good story. So you have a story about getting Maryam Kaba, as we do this to we free us, getting access to it.

Would you mind telling us that story? I know you've probably told it a dozen times. No, thank you for asking me that question. It's actually a great story. And one of the things that, you know, going to prison and experiencing that type of brutality, that type of state sanctioned brutality is one of the things that turned me into a prison abolitionist and understanding that prisons don't actually serve any good function.

All they do is extract a measure of misery from people. They don't actually help survivors, right? They don't help victims in any way. They just extract a measure of misery from folks who are branded as guilty. And one of the things that I had done while I was in prison is decide that I was going to do what I could to affect change in my own life and to try to succeed through education. And I expanded my consciousness through education. And where that had led me, quite frankly, was to a lot of black feminist literature and then abolitionist literature.

And I remember I was very excited for a book called We Do This Till We Free Us by Miriam Caba. I think it was a 2021 book. And I had a friend order it for me. And what I received in instead was a male rejection, saying that this book violated penological objectives and was being referred for a statewide ban in Washington state prisons. And I couldn't believe it. And there were 15 pages, I believe, listed. One of those pages actually was about Derek Chauvin being criticized for murdering George Floyd, which is bad enough. And then another page I remember, which angered me was page 117, which I'll never forget in life, which is basically a page which advocates for survivors of criminalized survivors of domestic violence. And I am a criminalized survivor of

domestic violence. And ways to campaign for those criminalized survivors. And that violates penological objectives, which to me just means that no matter what, you can't try to get people out of prison, right? That's against penological objectives. So it really upset me that basically any criticism against mass incarceration is against penological objectives and they don't want people thinking that they shouldn't be in prison. They don't want people thinking that maybe there are ways to get out of prison or that, you know, folks should help them. So, you know, I appealed that ruling and what had actually happened is seven months. months later, I was told that the book would not be banned. And fortunately, because of vaccine mandates,

the employee who had originally referred the book for a ban no longer worked there. So she couldn't appeal my ruling that I could have the book. Yeah, they quit rather than get the vaccine, right? So that's a barrier removed. I think more than anything, that's just sort of a, you know, understanding what the political climate was and that, you know, the same folks who don't want people to have leftist literature are the same ones who are anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers. And it's just all very political. And I know that, you know, these systems of incarceration are generally rightest anyway. And like I said, there are a lot of rightest folks who were angry because they couldn't wear their Trump masks at work anymore. So they would take their frustrations out on

incarcerated people and try to deny leftist literature as a result, since they can't wear their rightest mask. I know there's another connection here, because when we talked with one person who had been a previous prison librarian, we had a really hard time nailing down why our books rejected. And so it was immediately clear that it was extremely arbitrary and obviously the decentralized nature of prisons means also that it's going to vary from prison to prison where you are. And also in terms of like what resources you can get in any particular place. And if you're looking for logic in the system, I guess, the answer is it's not there. I think it's why like, like Jay mentioned, the ALA really should stop. I know. Can I still say pussy footing? Is it like just, well, whatever it is

they're doing. They should stop doing it. Yeah, I think you could find better terminology, but, I hear what you're saying. You know, the interesting thing about libraries in prison is, you know, I've seen a lot of changes in the last several years before COVID. What had happened is one of the things that really upset me too. And this has happened a lot in public schools is that music is no longer seen as educational. And I remember music used to be seen as something that was educational and we used to be able to get, you know, maybe it would be sheet music or guitar tablature through.

libraries where we can't get it anymore. But even more so, like, there were things like we would call it an inter-library loan where prison libraries are usually these little shacks that don't have much more than Clive Custler books and maybe some, what do you call it, Lewis-Lamore books, some old westerns. And generally, you can't find a lot of really good educational material. And the only way that we could find those things is through inter-library loans. And we could make these requests in previous years. It's just not happening anymore. And one of the reasons for that is there's this sort of divestment from libraries where we used to have maybe a library worker at each prison, where in Washington State, I know in the last few years, there would be one library worker now for

several prisons. And they would travel from prison to prison throughout the week, providing services. So, you know, where they used to have one for every prison, there might be one librarian for every three or four prisons just traveling from prison to prison and no longer offering interlibrary loans. So you're looking at, hey, if I were to go to a library, all I can basically find is Clive Custler books, Dean Kuntz books, and maybe a couple other things, and that's about it. I had a friend who was incarcerated in Washington State 10 years ago and now. I don't remember which prison he was in, but I remember him talking about how his only access to books was through the chaplain. they didn't even have like a proper library with a library worker.

It was the library was pretty much just run by the prison chaplain. So if, so there's that connection there too where there's a religious figure tied into your access. But yeah, like even even being able to have interlibrary loan at that point would have so, so good for him because yeah, it was the same five Clive Lusler books and Louis Lomor and that kind of thing. So no, right, Sadie. And even more so, say if a person ends up in segregation, right, or solitary confinement, and generally a lot of people who are more marginalized or vulnerable

will end up in solitary more often, such as trans women, those with mental illnesses. And generally what will happen is there is no longer library access. What will happen is there might be a little book cart that is pushed around once or twice a week. And it will just have, you know, there might be 20 to 50 different books on this cart. And that's what you have to choose from. And generally, most of the books on there are not anything that anyone would want to read. And even if there are any books that anyone would want to read, once you're in solitary confinement for a while, you've already read them. So guess what? Yeah, you might just find that the services from the chaplain are the only thing that are really widely available.

And I found that in one Washington state men's prison, once you get to solitary confinement, the only book that is actually in the cell when you get there is a Bible. And I remember getting to this prison and this solitary confinement and seeing this book in there, and I immediately threw it out because I'm an atheist and I don't want to be indoctrinated. I just don't want to. And it's quite common, actually. And the problem is, look, and this is in men's prisons. And quite frankly, in women's prisons, we have far less resources than what is generally in men's prisons.

For instance, generally in women's prisons, the visiting room will be about a quarter of the size. In men's prisons, there will usually be several programs. In women's prisons, you might find one or two. There's just not the same level of investment. there is not the same level of programming in women's prisons. So it's even worse there. And there was, did you notice there was a particular change in your ability to access things during COVID? I mean, obviously there must have been.

But was there an ebb and flow to how your ability to interact with information, whether just visitation, male, you know, I don't know if you were using the securest tablets or anything, but what changed during that time and what were the excuses given? Yeah, more than anything, you know, once COVID hit, of course, the world changed and everyone is scrambling to adapt. In prisons, more than anything, what I had saw was, generally, you know, the idea that people are being protected or there were safety precautions meant that folks were just locked in their cell, and that was for their own safety. And there were really no services. Eventually,

what had happened, I remember over several months is there may have been the same type of access that there was in segregation, where there might have been a book cart or an extra rack of books available in the institution where folks, you know, had access to that extra rack of books. Generally, there are books that most people don't want to read anyway. And so for me, It always came down to hoping that I had folks in my life that would help me to get a book that I wanted to read. And generally, that was even more difficult because I didn't want to have my books purchased at a certain large vendor that I'm not going to mention. I don't want to mention by name, but I didn't want my books being purchased there. I would rather have books purchased at a smaller vendor.

and that can be very difficult to achieve. And generally, books always have to come from a publisher or a vendor that is approved. Yeah, and so it was very difficult. And more than anything, I think that what generally most prisoners that I knew incarcerated folks were relying on each other to sort of trade books and sort of depend on mutual aid to, here we are trading literature, trading things and trying to circulate them so that we can help take care of each other. Yeah, I just remembered that.

That just brought back a discussion we had about, yeah, the pre-approved vendors, something has to come exactly from the vendor if you want to buy it. It has to go straight from the vendor to the prison because otherwise they're worried about kites or anything like in the book itself somehow. Like it's a James Bond kind of situation where you're going to smuggle in like a like a killdozer in the spines of a thousand books that get sent to you by your friends. Yeah. Yeah, which is actually, I mean, honestly, it may happen in one out of a million instances,

but quite honestly, there are probably more drugs in our kids' schools than there are in prisons. So I don't know why it is that, you know, law enforcement tries to convince the public that we must get rid of every stick of weed from every prison and that it's so serious that we have to eliminate mail and books. But that's, I mean, quite honestly, it's a little ridiculous, right? I'm sure I could find a lot more drugs in our kids schools than I could in our prisons. And we don't seem to be too concerned about that. But yeah, more than anything, it's just an excuse to weaponize rules and to limit access to whatever. And quite honestly, law enforcement and prison staff are pretty good at using those excuses to just limit access.

and to gain control over these institutions in any way that they feel like. It's really getting hard not to bring up Foucault in this episode, especially when you were talking about how there's only one librarian who goes from prison to prison. That's the exact same model that school librarians work on now, which is there's one librarian for a district, and they will jump from school to school on different days, and whatever you have in that library is just what you have. Yeah, we're really digging into some Foucault mode.

But actually, there was a thing that came out just the other day, and it caught my eye because I was looking forward to this conversation. And it was a J-Store Daily. They have like a blog, has all these deep dives into things. And one of it was about the history of music in prisons and how that changed. And you just brought that up how music was seen as educational. What did you see change about the access to music, the attitudes that changed your own music? I mean, I'm just really curious about that. No, thank you for asking me that.

And, you know, I'm a guitar player, and I remember as a teenager, I was inspired by punk rock because, quite frankly, in punk rock, anyone can play guitar. You don't have to be good. You just have to feel what you're doing. And so I started playing guitar. Being good hurts your case. Yeah, and I got better. I remember in prison, I actually had the ability to get a guitar. And having access to the library, there was a time when seeing music as educational, we might be able to request. having some copies of music, whether it's, you know, rhythm charts or a guitar tab or whatever and having that music and the ability to, you know, help facilitate that learning and playing music. And then there came to be a day when I remember going to the library and I made a request in the librarian said, I'm sorry, this is not educational material. And I said, well, what? Well, this used to be considered educational material. What happened? And she just, there came to be. be a point she didn't respect it and she did not consider it to be educational material. And I remember there was no point after that that it was considered to be educational. And that was a point where I think it was about

2013. And it just seemed to be ridiculous to me. And I know that there has been a divestment from music programs in public schools going back several years. And it just seems to be, I guess it's a theme institutionally. And we're seeing that, like you said, with the sort of Foucault, we're seeing these themes of librarians and only having a certain amount traveling from school to school or from prison to prison. And we're seeing this divestment of music from schools and also prison libraries. And there are all these themes that are sort of similar here. There must be another connection with like educational trends, like teaching prisoners to code so that you can export their labor for call centers and tech support. I mean, I'm sure it already happens because I do keep a Google alert for prison labor

and universities just to see, because right now it's mostly just buying furniture, buying stuff, like the normal kind of government acquisitions from prison labor, but I'm waiting for someone to be like, no, our IT is run through Compu Secure, Incorporated, and that's where the 24-7 support team comes from. I'm sure it's, Someone's tried it. Quite frankly, I don't think that that's going to happen. And the reason is, once again, I'm going to bring this up, respectability politics, and that there are folks who are going to say they took our jobs and I don't want to get South Park on you, but that's what it would be. And quite frankly, it's more now, more than anything, I'll just say this.

The 13th Amendment allows slave labor. However, prisons now are more about the commodification of bodies than they are about. about slave labor, meaning that we have to provide these different services as care, and therefore there's a lot of money in it. And beyond that, you know, it's just change. Everything has changed where policing was based on three things originally. It was based on number one, slave patrol, number two, putting down Indian rebellions. And the third reason was with labor disputes, where generally wealthy plant owners would hire

police to put the laborers back to work. And that meant beating them or killing them. Sometimes including their families and their children, including Ludlow, Colorado in I believe 1914. But beyond that, so the police now don't look as much like slave patrol as they actually do like a occupying military force. If you look at them, they're increasingly militarized. They have these bulletproof vests, assault rifles and all of this military gear, sometimes tanks. And they even do these sometimes exchanges of training and equipment with like the Israeli army, like the Seattle, a deadly exchange with Israel, which I've campaigned against. And beyond that, you know, we're looking at prisons once again have evolved from, you know, just like policing has evolved from slave patrols

to, you know, occupying army. Now it's evolved from slave labor of prisoners to, just the commodification of their bodies where value is extracted from their bodies as surplus population. So there's no longer the, you know, that having to deal with the idea of, well, we're hiring prisoners and we're putting other people out of work because that's a political problem. So it's just the extracting value from their bodies. Yeah, like it's not just like, it's not just like a capitalist. I mean, this will obviously be part of capital, but it's also like a form of colonialism as well as like colonizing the body because you've run out of land. Exactly.

I was going to say. Yeah, you've run out of land so you're colonizing the bodies of people more so than you would, you know, like, because you also colonize bodies with land. But yeah, you've run out of places to go. Yeah, you've run out of places to go. Yeah, and even beyond that, you know, if you were to use prisoners as, say, slave labor and then put other people out of work, politically you'd have to answer. for that. However, if you're doing a good deed by saying, well, we have to put prisoners through

chemical dependency and other programs. Now, guess what? That's care. And now we need funding. And what is the deed that we're doing? It's a good deed because they'll be safe for society by the time we're done, right? So there's nothing to answer for. It's that this is for safety. And if you don't do it, then you're against safety. So this is, and sorry if I'm, derailing us from our notes here, but like, you keep like saying, like, you know, they're framing it. This now is like, oh, it's care, you know, like all of the stuff. And you keep saying. And whereas, like, in academia and stuff right now, especially in, like, librarianship, there's like these, like, ethics of care lightly. And, like, things are being framed through, like, a care framework. We're caring and

whatnot. And it's always rubbed me a little bit the wrong way. And I, like, could never fucking pin it down. But this, like, framing things as care now has this, like, sinister feel to it. And you, you demonstrated exactly where care is being used to obfuscate other things that are happening. And there's no good care in a cage. And quite frankly, one of the things I've seen, you know, what's funny is something like chemical dependency. There's a lot of, say, petitioning for funding for that and saying, oh, well, there are so many prisoners who have chemical dependency and that's why they committed their crimes. And they'll never be safe to reenter society until they get this programming and this care. Well, I've recently known a couple of prisoners who were put into chemical dependency

classes who have never used drugs and their crimes had nothing to do with drugs. Do you know why they were put into the class? The reason is why is because, quite frankly, they have this funding and if they don't fill all of those beds, if they don't fill all of those spots in these classes, then they will lose their funding. And it's this biennium bullshit. So they have to put people in there or they'll lose their funding. And if they don't have enough people with drug problems, they'll just put other people into the class who don't have drug problems so that they don't lose their funding. And that's kind of where the predictive policing and everything we talked about with Sarah Lambden comes in saying, you can say this person is at risk or you're putting them

in a scared straight program or something like that. Yeah. And Justin, you're getting into like these racist algorithms and these other predictors, right, that quantifies. where the risk is. And quite frankly, there's not a lot of accountability. And when we get into epistemology and we get into who's actually doing the researching, who are these foundations that are funding the research? And what is the research that gets funded? And generally, the research that gets funded is whatever supports the agenda that folks want to see.

And if you're not supporting that agenda, you're not getting your funding. And you might even get kicked out of university. So that's quite frankly what's happening. Or you might get told, you know, this is this is a great proposal, but we're more interested in protecting white ladies than we are. Everyone's reading my mind tonight. And that's where Priya comes from, too, is quite frankly, there's, I don't know if folks are familiar. Let me just familiarize you if you're not. Priya stands for Prison, Rape, Enforcement Act.

And so Priya is this idea that it came in the 90s that basically that, you know, young white men generally, young white boys were being raped by. you know, big, scary black men. But quite frankly, most of the time when there were these, you know, instances of rape or sexual assault, it was actually because of custodial violations, people who were in charge of other people who were committing acts. And that's why Priio was actually needed. And generally, it doesn't actually do much anyway. And it's usually weaponized. But yeah, politically, it's generally always been used as this sort of racialized idea of sexual violence, this racialized and gendered sexual violence, and generally it's bullshit. Yeah.

There was a story that was making the rounds the other day about the modern slavery laws in the UK and how it's been applied to a lot of basically low-level drug offenders because they were basically 19-year-olds who were selling drugs with 17-year-olds, and therefore they are now modern slavers. So they're throwing these slavery charges at low-level drug dealers for it. for having basically runners who were underage. And it's been, as you can imagine, extremely racially balanced in its applications. Yeah, I mean, it pretty much is the theme here.

And more than anything, what we're talking about, you know, generally when people are selling drugs from what I've seen in my embodied and lived experience, it's just folks who quite honestly are trying to afford their own habit. And so they get other people involved, too, to try to afford their own addictions. And these low-level drug dealers are then, you know, charged as like their kingpins or something, right? And it just goes on and on. We were talking, and I want to use this to get to our action-oriented kind of aspect that we always try and wrap up with. I was bringing up archives, because I know you mentioned it before in the Death Panel episode, and I wanted to think about archival priorities, like letters, memoirs, diaries from incarcerated people,

things. We have to knowingly build collections. Like, we were talking the other day about how no one's going to preserve your Twitter data dump. Like, you have to be John D. Fuxmith or someone who has his wealth, and then people will preserve your personal effects, right? Then they'll care about taking all your junk because they want your money. So there's sort of a short-sided collection development and special collections. But how can archives support prison publishing, which is something you're very involved with, so that firsthand experiences of people in prison can be known. Both now, like, people use

new collections all the time. You don't have to wait 100 years. But how can people support prison publishing now and in the future? I thought maybe it's working with writing programs, but what do you think? Yeah, thank you for asking that question, and that's definitely going to be politically charged. You know, I can tell you that I've worked with some folks. I know that Professor Gillian Harkins really inspired me to actually get my story out there and to actually have my voice and to have that preserve so that it's available for the next generation of people, particularly as a transgender incarcerated woman. And we just don't have enough of that information available for folks who want to study that. And really, that's primarily at this point

the responsibility of universities, and that can be quite political. I know that Dan Berger, as a historian at the University of Washington, has been an advocate, and he's been doing a lot of great work to try to find those voices and to try to preserve that. I know the other folks, maybe like Garrett Felber, who was at University of Mississippi or Ole Miss, actually it was kicked out of academia. Why? Because he was trying to do some research around incarceration, and there were actually people involved in the university who were investing in private prisons. And so they didn't want to see that research. And again, we're going back to epistemology. And who gets to produce knowledge and who is researching what and who's funding what and why

and who's not funding what and why, right? So a lot of that is political. It's around these universities who are really corporate institutions who aren't that much different from prisons anyway. And some of the universities are doing a better job than others. However, that's basically what it's coming down to. And folks who are dedicated to that and the institutions who are actually supporting

folks who are trying to do that work. Yeah. Are there any programs that you in particular are interested in in terms of people getting support to or people like copying what they're doing so that if we have anyone who can actually start a similar program listening, that they have something to point to? You know, more than anything, I want to point, you know, a light at study and struggle.com under Haymarket Books.

Some of what Garrett Felber has done with study and struggle has been very important. And a lot of that has been centralized in the state of Mississippi, you know, and I'm a big believer in everything that Garrett's doing. I'm a big believer in study and struggle.com. And, you know, and I'm a big believer in just publishing voices from prisons. And I know that there's an organization I've been involved with that really got me started publishing, particularly with some big publications, which I'm, I don't know. I don't necessarily feel strongly about, but I know that it at least gets my voice out there and it gets the message out. But Empowermentavineu.com. And just having

journalists and editors actually help incarcerated people to get their own voices out there. And unfortunately, I've constantly seen folks who've worked really hard to become journalists who are incarcerated, constantly being relegated to the op-ed section, even after they've done a lot of really good work. And the thing that upsets me as an incarcerated journalist, I've seen folks put in an awful lot of work to detail, even more so than most journalists, and still being relegated to op-ed. But, at EmpowermentAvenue.com, and there are some other organizations that are helping incarcerated people publish.

Again, there are folks like Dan Berger, professor at University of Washington historian who are doing a great job at archiving prison information, and I would copy that. And study and struggle.com is definitely an organization, I think, is great A. and I just believe in all the work they're doing. Yeah, and as has come up in a lot of these discussions, be prepared to use up a lot of of your political capital to keep this going because there's going to be a lot of walls thrown up in your way. So I think that the reason I wanted to do this is an action-oriented segment is

you only have like so much tolerance and so much like time to spend fighting something you're going to push through. Because I think probably most people who listen to this are not senior admins at their university or library. So you're going to have to like kick this up and keep pushing at it. And there's only so many things. you can deal with all the bullshit for that for. So I think this is a really good thing to,

if this is going to be a project you want to get going, realize it's going to use up a lot of your energy, but just plan for that because there are tons of projects where I've seen people take really bold stances for like really not important projects. Like there's a journal that a colleague of mine is working on, and I know that they are planning to be sued, but the whole premise of the journal

is to review academic journals because they know they could be litigious journals that they go after. And so they're ready for like lawsuits just for the privilege of reviewing academic journals, which everyone knows is like a scam industry, more or less. And so if you're going to be using up your energy,

use it for something that might actually help people live their lives more fully, I guess. That's absolutely amazing. And I don't know. I'll just say, And I really believe in the leadership of Dean Spade. And more than anything, I think that we need solidarity and more solidarity and less heroes. And what that means more than anything is we just need everyone to get involved.

We need more folks to be involved. And whether or not folks feel like they're talented or they have a lot to offer, everyone has something to offer. And the more people that are standing together, we see with a union or anything, the better off we are. because, you know, when we're trying to depend on heroes, I'm sorry, but that's just not going to cut it. And then folks are going to get burned out, too. So we just need solidarity. We need more folks to care and to get involved.

Yeah, you spend most of your time at work, a lot of your life at work. And so I think doing these work-oriented questions, it's like, okay, you've got your bullshit meter. Maybe we can do it for something that's going to, you know, make us feel like we're doing something meaningful because that's quite honestly sometimes in academic spaces. you start to question what you're doing. I do it about, I have time blocked out on my calendar about like 2 p.m. on Fridays. You can join me in the Discord for the collective yelling session. I definitely don't want to take up any more of your time. Is there anything like really that you want people, particularly we have a lot of library science students and a lot of library workers.

Is there anything you really want them to know where we head out? Oh, more than anything. You know, I'm just so happy to be on your show, Justin. Sadie, Joy, thank you for having me. I appreciate a smart and important show like this, and I'd much rather be doing this than write some bullshit or be involved with some major publication that is focusing on the train wreck of being trans

without actually providing any justice for anyone in the end. So thank you so much for having me. And more than anything, I'm just asking folks to get involved, whether it's something like prison censorship or finding out about parole boards or how you can be involved in unions, anything, any type of way that folks can get involved in something, even if it's 20 minutes, three times a week, whatever. If folks can be involved, we're going to get somewhere.

It is very funny. You call J. Joy, though. I am going to keep calling him Joy for like a good week now. I'm sorry. It's the glare on my screen. No, I can totally see why. I'm sorry, Jay. It's because Jay is a joy. I'm looking up at my screen and I'm seeing the glare. I'm sorry. No, I was just saying like, you know, look how big my smile is. Of course, I'm full of joy.

Okay. Forgive me. Great. No, it's fine. It's very funny. Good night.