Rev Left Radio - Prison Abolitionism: Abolitionist Feminism and the Anarchist Black Cross

Episode Date: January 26, 2018

 Victoria Law, who is familiarly known as Vikki, is an anarchist activist, writer, freelance editor, photographer and mother. Law is of Chinese descent and was born and raised in Queens NY where she had her first brush with the law as an armed robber while still in high school. Her exposure to incarcerated people at Rikers Island prompted her to get involved with prison support. She has continued fighting for prison abolition, co-founding Books Through Bars NYC as a joint project between Blackout Books & Nightcrawlers Anarchist Black Cross in 1996 at the age of nineteen.    Nestor is a member of the Anarchist Black Cross and founder of the Omaha Freedom Fund. He organizes around many issues, but with a focus on prison abolition and antifascism.  Both guests join Brett in a two-part episode on different aspects of the prison abolitionist movment.    Find, Support, and contact Victoria Law through her website here: https://victorialaw.net follow her on twitter @LVikkiml Learn more about, and support, the Anarchist Black Cross Federation here: http://www.abcf.net Follow the Omaha Freedom Fund on Twitter @Omahabail Link to support and engage in prison abolitionist work with “Black and Pink” here:http://www.blackandpink.org   Transition Music by Church Fire - on my tongue Outro Music: Bob Dylan All Along the Watchtower   follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio  Follow us on FB at "Revolutionary Left Radio" Intro Music by The String-Bo String Duo. You can listen and support their music here: https://tsbsd.bandcamp.com/track/red-black This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, and the Omaha GDC. Check out Nebraska IWW's new website here: https://www.nebraskaiww.org

Hey everyone, before we start the show, I just wanted to let you guys know that we're doing something a little different this episode. We're doing two interviews in one. So our first interview is going to be with Victoria Law, and she's going to approach the prison abolition issue from a more feminist and LGBTQ-oriented position. And then the second half is going to be an interview with a member of the Anarchist Black Cross, Nestor, and he's going to approach the same question of prison abolition from a more class-oriented position. and he also makes some really interesting points about how fascism uses the prison system as a model for their ethno state. So don't be confused when after the interview with Victoria Law we have transition music. The transition music is by church fire, a band out of Denver. But after that little transition music, it will go into our second interview. So stay for both parts.

So yeah, let's get to the show. Please support my daddy's show by donating a couple bucks to patreon.com forward slash rest. Rev. Left Radio. Please follow us on Twitter at Rev. Left Radio. And don't forget to rate and review the Revolutionary Left Radio on iTunes to increase our reach. Workers of the World! Unite! Revolutionary left the radio now oppose the system any way you know how. Unite the left against the capitalist lies

and liberate the proletariat's mind. Fight for all the working class. Fight for equality. Fight I guess the right free. Fascist ideology took it in and turn it up loud. Revolutionary left the radio. Welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio.

I'm your host, Ann Comrade, Brett O'Shea, and today we have on Victoria Law to talk about the intersections of the carcernal state, prison abolitionism, and feminism. Victoria, would you like to introduce yourself and say a little bit about your background? Hi there, thanks for having me. So my name is Victoria Law, as you just said.

I am a freelance writer that looked at the intersections of incarceration gender and resistance. I wrote a book about women's prison organizing and resistance in the United States, and I edit a zine called Tenacious Art and Writings by Women in Prison. Awesome, yeah, and I've been reading a lot of your work lately in preparation for this episode, and I find it fascinating. I think it's really important.

This is an interesting issue, and it's a very essential issue, especially these days. So before we get into the talks of feminism and issues surrounding, trans folks in prison, maybe just start with a more general question. What does prison abolition mean to you, and why is it important for revolutionaries to work towards that goal? Well, if we look at the ways in which incarceration has skyrocketed and exploded over the past several decades, we can see it like there are several schools of plot as to why this is. And for revolutionaries and people with politics, we can see it as a direct response to the

organizing that's been happening as marginalized communities, communities of color, other folks were beginning to organize and demand their rights on a wider spread and wider basis than before. So while there has been organizing pretty much since the beginning of, um, of the founding of this country, so not to say that there wasn't, we can see that things like the Civil Rights Movement, the rise of the Black Power Movement, the rise of the, you know, of the Gay Liberation Movement, the rise of all these other people who previously might not have had that same organized presence spurred also this fear of organizing and with the dismantling of institutions like slavery,

Jim Crow segregation, prisons emerged as another form of social control. So we can see this as a way in which the power structure then decided to start surveilling and imprisoning people even before they could get organized. So we should see this as this explosion of mass incarceration and there being between 2.2 and 2.3 million people behind bars as a direct response. to organizing, to political resistance, and ways in which the system continues to capture and box in people. So when we talk about prisons, we can't think of them as systems that we could tinker with

here and there to make them more humane and more palatable. We have to look at them as systems that are doing exactly what they're designed to do, which is to cage mostly black and brown people but other marginalized people and to keep people from organizing to gain power. And we can absolutely see in this new political climate with the rise of Trump and the fascist right how prisons or the threat of prisons are used against all forms of left-wing protests to try to disincentivize and dissuade us from hitting the streets, whether it's J20 or Black Lives Matter.

there's been a real pressure from the state to kind of scare us into getting off the street by ratcheting up the charges and tossing us in prison and doing mass arrests at protest even if you didn't commit a crime. So on every level all throughout American history, the prison is sort of this focal point that the state uses to get rid of its problems, whether it's poverty, whether it's mental health issues or whether it's left-wing protest of any sort. and so there's no sense of reforming such a thoroughly corrupt institution. Yes, and we have to also remember that in the 1970s, as the war on drugs and the war on crime began, politicians, including Nixon, you know, or particularly Nixon, were using images of black and brown people fighting for basic equality, fighting for the right to sit at a lunch counter. you know, fighting for the right to be able to go to schools that were not awful, you know, substandard segregated schools as the rules of law breaks, and I'm paraphrasing here, but basically it's like the rules of law and order and society break down when certain people decide which laws they want to follow and which laws they do not.

And he was not talking about rises of violent crime, the quote-unquote laws that people were not following where the law is like segregation, like, you know, like poll taxes and barriers to voting and all sorts of basic civil rights that black people were fighting for. And this is what he was conflating with this idea that there was a rise in crime. There was a rise in disorder. There was a rise in lawbreaking. And people should be really scared of this. And this is why we needed to have more policing, more prisons, and this war on crime was because of that. So we can see this as a trajectory, you know, from the days in which the politicians were trying to use policing and prisons to control social movements.

Yeah, absolutely. Now, you call yourself an abolitionist feminist. What is this form of feminism? What does that mean? And what other types of feminism does it set itself in opposition to? Abolitionist feminism is, you know, for me, at least, there's a combination of, you know, like I am a prison abolitionist, I believe that you cannot actually tinker around with the system and reform it in a way that, you know, will ever not be a punitive model of controlling and restricting people's civil and human rights. Like, there's not a way to do so. But I also believe that there need to be. ways to address violence and harm and trauma to keep people safe, but prisons do not do this. I mean, we've had prisons since the inception of, since even before the inception of this country,

and they did not, they have not stopped rape from happening, they have not stopped murder from happening, they have not stopped harm from happening. Abolitionist feminism looks at this combination and says, well, we need mechanisms to keep people safe, And those mechanisms are not calling the police. It is not, you know, criminalizing more behaviors and demanding longer prison sentences for people who commit harm, but rather it is looking at the root causes of these problems and saying, how do we either eradicate these root causes

that cause people to commit violence towards one another and commit harm? Like, how do we address the fact that we live in a rape culture? Like we have a gigantic prison population and still people are coming out and saying, you know, this person in this position of power is this to be the whole Me Too movement, you know, prisons did not stop Harvey Weinstein from exercising his power to sexually abused countless numbers of women who did not have that kind of power. It does not stop the sexual abuse of farm workers or janitorial. staff or anybody else in a position of less power. So we can see ways in which calling the police and relying on prisons continues to not work for certain populations.

So abolitionist feminism understands that prisons do not work to keep people safe, do not work to address these kinds of issues, but also we do need to address that. We can't just say, throw open the prisons and let people out and let us live in a madman type of world where if you are strong you can survive and if you are disabled or you are smaller or you are older or something else like too bad so sad for you but looking at root causes and saying like what do we need in order to have a world in which we don't need to think that we rely on policing in prisons in order to feel safe and this is in contrast to this idea of carciful feminism which is an idea that more policing, more prisons, more criminalization, and more punitive laws will keep people safe.

And this stems from the 1960s, the 1950s, 60s, and early 70s when police were not taking crimes against women and violence against women seriously. So a woman would call the police to her house because of domestic violence, and the cops would maybe tell the guy to take a walk around, you know, take a walk around the block. rule off, but we would not take these kinds of violence seriously. So as a response, some feminists said, well, what if we mandated the police to arrest to arrest people when they got called in for domestic violence dispute? What if we made it so that the courts had no choice but to impose these kinds of penalties on people who committed these acts of violence against women? So abolitionist feminism stands in contrast to carceral feminism, which believes if only we made the police and the criminals and the core systems respond to these kinds of violence against women with more penalties, we would eradicate violence against women.

Yeah, that makes sense. I know you touched on it a little bit. I mean, in order to understand the present, we have to understand history. So can you talk a little bit about the history surrounding protests and riots and prisons conducted by women in opposition to horrible conditions and maybe what gains have been made through that long struggle so far? Yes. So women have always resisted and organized while in prison. In New York State, when the first separate women's prison opened sometime in, I'm going to say the 1700s, the conditions there were so atrocious that the women were. rioted because they were like these are awful and remember that before separate women's prisons

were built women were often held in men's prisons and men's jail so they would be held like maybe in an attic or a basement or maybe even in an adjoining cell to the men who were imprisoned and they were subjected to all kinds of sexual abuse um sexual harassment sexual assault and then because maybe there would be like one to maybe five women in a men's prisoner, men's jail, they often weren't afforded any of the few opportunities that men were afforded. So they weren't able to say go to church. They weren't able to go out to the yard. They weren't able to do a handful of things that men were able to do while in prison because there were so few of them and because they needed to be kept separate

from the incarcerated men. So keep in mind that these were the conditions. that they were in before separate women's prisons came up and still when they got to their separate women's prison they said these conditions are so awful that they rioted and they actually chased prison officials out of the prison and tried to come in to quell the riot and try to like restore order and I bring that up just as something to keep in mind that women have rioted, women have resisted, women have revolted, in many of the same ways that men have as well, maybe not as often, definitely not as headline-grabbing because there are a few people know about this, but they also resist and organize in quieter ways that have made differences

from organizing in the law library to work with women who might be losing custody of their children. So at least two-thirds, if not 80 to 90% of women in prison during their incarceration or when they begin their incarceration are mothers to children under the age of 18. And so we can kind of look at the ways in which prisons gender parenting in very similar ways to the ways that the outside world gender is parenting. And that when a father goes to prison, oftentimes there is somebody in his family or somebody in his life, usually female. family member, wife, ex-wife, mother, sister, ex-girlfriend, cousin, somebody steps up and takes care of his children. And when a mother goes to prison, her children are five times more likely to end up in the foster care system than if a father goes to prison because she often is a single head of household. She does not have the same kind of familiar support or partner support

where somebody's going to step up and say, I will take care of your children, why you were incarcerated and at the very least you don't have to worry about them going to foster care or she might come from a family situation that is not safe at least 75% of women in jails and prisons have reported past histories of violence and abuse at the hands of family members or loved ones so a woman in prison might say you know I would rather my children go to foster care than to go be raised by my abusive partner or be raised by my abusive parents or family. So their children are five times more likely to end up in the foster care system, which means that they are much more likely to have their parental rights terminated

because in 1997, Congress and then President Clinton signed the Adoption and Safe Families Act, which states that if a child has been in foster care for 15 of their past 22 months, social workers in the state have to start proceedings to terminate parental rights. And this means not just your parental rights while you're in prison, it means forever and ever and ever. So you could get out of prison the next week or the next month or the next year and you have no more legal right to that child than a stranger in the grocery store does. You don't have the right to know where they are.

You don't have the right to contact them. You don't have the right to be in their lives. if you show up, a foster family or adoptive parents can call the police on you. So you don't have that ability to be in their lives anymore. And this hits incarcerated mothers much more than it hits incarcerated fathers. So women have done, have organized and resisted these kinds of policies both in small groups in which maybe women who understand the legal process more than other women, might say, like, hey, I'll be in the law library, or let's get together here, and I will hope

you figure out this paperwork, or I will hope you figure out how to navigate this. You know, like, you should have gotten a summons for a family court date. You did not. Like, who do you talk to in the prison to find out whether you have a family court date? When is your family court date? Can you get to the family court date as opposed to being seen as a no-show? because maybe the judge, the family court judge doesn't realize that you are incarcerated and that's why you haven't shown up to your court date about your parental rights and they might just think

this mom doesn't care about her children. Women have helped each other file paperwork and in some cases they've contacted outside legal organizations to come in and do workshops around know your rights and know your parental rights and how to file things And in a couple of states in New York State and in Washington State, they've actually organized to get the law is changed so that being incarcerated for longer periods of time doesn't mean that you automatically lose custody of your children. So it's a quieter way of organizing that is not having a riot, chasing prison officials out, setting a fire, taking over a yard, taking hostages, but these are still ways in which women have organized to. change policy and to change what happens to themselves and their families.

Yeah, and so because these laws and these structures fall disproportionately heavy on women and mothers, prison abolition can clearly be seen, especially through what you just said, as a deeply feminist issue, that you cannot engage with feminism as an entire movement without addressing these very real concerns because they hit so disproportionately on women and on especially mothers with children. So that's fascinating and it's heartbreaking and it's inspiring to hear that women have always been and continue to organize inside and outside of prisons to address some of these issues. So another topic that you write a lot about, and it's a topic that I've had personal experience with

because although I am a straight, white, cisgendered male, I've been at protest where we've been mass arrested and I've been arrested with trans and non-binary comrades and we've been put into the prison system together, for me it's it sucks but you know it's i'm okay because of who i am but i saw firsthand i saw firsthand how a lot of my trans and non-binary friends were treated in the prison system and it was heartbreaking and it was eye-opening so can you talk about those issues and the specific hardships that these folks face in the prison system yes so for people who are trans trans or gender non-conforming or non-binary. So first of all, we don't know how many transgender non-conforming non-binary people

there are in the jails and prison system because no system actually keeps track of this. So, and a lot of times people are placed in the prisons based on their, the gender or the sex that they were assigned in their birth or on their genital status. So if you are a trans woman, your birth certificate says that you are male or um you have male janetelia the prison will say like well we're going to put you into the men's unit or the men's prison system we're not honoring the fact that you are or we're not recognizing the fact that you actually identify as a woman and so first of all this causes a whole host of dangers of sexual abuse sexual assault sexual harassment um for dangers for trans women who are in men's prisons and it also causes dangers to transmit trans men

who are placed in women's facilities although perhaps not to the same extent the trans women face when they're thrown into a men's jail or a men's prison so the very first thing is the physical and sexual safety of folks because prisons and jails do not recognize trans people. Very few places actually have policies or practices even if they have policies to keep trans and gender non-conforming people safe while they are inside jail, and prisons, again, with this understanding that you can never actually be safe inside a place of jails and prisons. They're inherently violent. They were designed to be spaces of violence, but you cannot, so you cannot keep anybody safe, but you can keep.

people even less safe by not acknowledging their vulnerabilities to violence. So there's, first off, that danger. And then there are things like medical care. Like nobody gets Sterling wonderful medical care in the prison system. So this is not to say that cis men are, you know, being well taken care of. But if you think of prison health care as sort of a downward spiral or a race to the bottom, you think of men's prison health care or general prison health care as abysmal, female specific prison health care like pregnancy, reproductive health care,

you know, like menopause, you know, women's aging in prison as even worse than abysmal. And then if you think of trans health care, that goes even further down in this race to the bottom as either non-existent or super, super abysmal. So people who are on hormones often aren't able to get access to hormones while they are in the jail or the prison, which has really severe effects on their bodies and their well-being as well as their mental health, depending on how long they are kept from having hormones, different prisons and different jails have different policies around who can get hormones for a lot of place a lot of places say that if you did not have a formal prescription from a doctor before you entered the jail or prison system they're under no obligation to continue these hormones and for many trans and gender non-conforming people who often are the people with the least amount of resources they often were getting hormones not through the formal medical system, but they might be getting black market hormones or hormones prescribed

to them in other ways other than going to a doctor and getting your prescription taken to the local pharmacy so they don't have that trail of paperwork. And even in prisons and jails that do, even for people who do have formal prescriptions, they may still not get access to their hormones again. So these are a couple of the like huge issues that face transgender, non-conforming, and non-binary people in jail and prison prisons in addition to the whole host of other problems within the prison system. Yeah, and I really encourage anybody that cares about any of these issues to go deeper in this direction because there's so much here and it's happening, it's happening all over this country and I've seen it firsthand and Victoria, you

write about it very movingly and very powerfully. You not only talk about it in the abstract, but you actually focus on individual people who have been through this system and have dealt with these issues firsthand. So you do a really important work on this front. So I want to thank you for that. But yeah, absolutely.

But moving on, on this podcast, we talk a lot about pop culture, television, and films as ways of analyzing the broader society and sort of understanding some of these issues through the lens of popular culture. And you wrote a really interesting essay on Orange is the New Black, the well-known Netflix show

that depicts life inside a woman's prison. Now, in that essay, you criticized the show in some really important ways. Can you please summarize your argument from that article and tell us how Orange is the New Black fails to highlight the real history of resistance in prison?

Yes. So for people who have seen the latest episode of Orange is the New Black or heard about it or, you know, might know something about it, The last episode focused on an uprising in the women's prison where they took over a portion of, they took over the prison, held several staff members hostage, and were issuing a series of demands. And the prison administrators weren't able to get into the prison for a couple of days.

They like engaged in a series of negotiations with the women around their demands. And what Orange is the New Black did, and granted, it's a comedy. It is a Netflix TV show. It is not a documentary. It is not serious. It is not a furious show that is meant to make you really, really think about the issues. It's a, I don't know. It's a silly comedy, but what it does is it also trivializes the very real issues that women in prison face.

And it also trivializes and distort the ways in which women have actually come together and resisted and rebelled and sometimes rioted to improve prison conditions and so the show what the show actually did was you know like it focused on like little things like you know like women deciding that they were going to like fight over

you know like fight over snacks or you know do all sorts of other things that kind of make it seem like look at these women they you know like when they have a chance to come together, they end up instead doing all sorts of, like, ridiculous, trivial things, and they're not focusing on the fact that the reason why they're coming together is because there was increasing violence at the hands of guards that resulted in somebody's death. And so it became a more trivial look at what happens in women's prisons.

So in contrast, if we go back to, well, we can go back, you know, to many different instances. But to go back to 1954 in North Carolina, there was a young black woman named Eleanor Rush. She was in and out of jail, in and out of prison. It was not her first prison sentence. And I say this to say that she did not fit the quote unquote, you know, oh, this poor, respectable woman ended up in prison and ended up dying. She was somebody who might have been seen as a more troublesome person and would not have been held up as, you know, somebody who was you know, who fit this model of respectability and the paragon of virtue. Anyhow, she was in the prison and she was placed in solitary confinement.

I forget for what. But she was in the prison, in solitary confinement, which for listeners who don't know, is being placed in a really small room, maybe something the size of a New York City back in. So a very small room with virtually nothing. They have your bed, you have a toilet sink combination. You are not allowed out of yourself for at least 23 hours a day. By law, you're supposed to be allowed out of yourself one hour a day to go to recreation or to go to a shower. Oftentimes you're not even allowed that.

You don't have any human contact. In many jails and prisons, you don't even have a window, so you can't see outside. You are relying on the guards to bring you your food at meal time. So basically, you're just locked in a tiny little box. So Eleanor Rush was in solitary confinement for six days, and on the seventh day, for some reason, the guards did not bring her her meal. And so she started yelling that she was hungry, and she wanted her food. And after 16 hours of not feeding her, instead of coming and bringing her food, and they were like, oh, sorry, we forgot your breakfast. And lunch and dinner, they came, and they bound and they gagged her.

because they wanted her to be quiet and in the process of doing so killed her and this happened and in prisons in many prisons people can see outside their little like cell food slots or their cell windows

so women in that unit saw the guards go into bounding jaggar they heard that Eleanor Rush suddenly stopped yelling and then they saw them later on carry her body out and they were like what is happening and so the next morning the women who were not in solitary confinement

go out to the yard and they're enjoying the sunshine getting to be outside for a little bit and a woman from the solitary confinement unit yells down to them that Eleanor Rush is dead the guards killed her and you know like they don't know what else happened but they took her

body away. And so the women in the yard get very upset, and they surround the staff members that are supposed to be supervising them. And they said, what happens? You know, like, wide on on rush dead, who is responsible? You know, we want answers. They were very upset. Keep in mind, this is 1954. This is North Carolina. North Carolina was a very segregated state at the time. It was 1954. Every place was segregated in the United States at the time. And it was black women and white women. It wasn't just the black women that were upset about this. All of the women and we're upset about this. And when the staff members were not able to give them answers,

they riot. They took people hostage. They refused to go back to themselves. And they did what they could to take over the prison and wreck the place. And it wasn't until other state troopers and guards came in to quell the riot that prison administrators were able to take back the prison. But what happened as a result of the riot is that there was an outside investigation. opened into Eleanor Rush's death because the prison was saying that somehow Eleanor Rush, while bound and gagged, had committed suicide and that was their official explanation for her death.

And so there was an outside investigation and some of the women were called in to testify and what they said before this investigatory committee was we didn't want them to sweep Eleanor Rush's death after the rug. we knew they were going to cover it up and we also knew that we had to do something about it so what they did was they rioted and they did so expressly for the purpose of wrong attention to Eleanor Rush's death and to this practice of binding and gagging women and other inhumane practices in the prison

and they got before this committee and this is what they said and what ended up happening was the prison was no longer allowed to use to gag people. There's nothing in the prison

rules that said you could not do that. Therefore, if it is not expressly prohibited, you know,

if the guard wants to gag you, the guard can gag you. So they actually had to put in rules that said you should not

gag the people in your custody and you cannot use these other types of restraints called the iron claw, which are handcuffs

that are meant to squeeze really tightly and cut off your circulation. That warden of the prison was replaced

by another woman who had a social services background. The prison was required to pay $3,000 in damages to Eleanor Rush's mother. Keep in mind, this is 1954, North Carolina, and that was the equivalent of a half-year salary of the prison warden. So it was a way to say, okay, it doesn't bring Eleanor Rush back to her mother,

but it does say, like, okay, we understand, we should not have done that. We should not have let this, you know, get to this extent, you know here is something and one of the few ways you can make systems like policing police and prisons accountable is to say like we're going to sue you for money you know like you need to open up your wallet and pay for these egregious practices that you have allowed to continue um so they managed to get some of these changes implemented and again this was because they rioted and they weren't rioting so that they could run around and like steal snacks from the commissary you know they weren't rioting and then like deciding that they were going to like have some sort of like dysfunctional you know dysfunctional TV show type of thing you know like they very much

were like we are outraged that this happened that the guards killed this woman even if it was a woman that maybe some women didn't like maybe some women didn't know you know they came together to do this and that's something that Orange is the New Black totally kind of trivializes

with the way that it focuses on petty squabbles and weird scenarios you know that kind of might work if you were like, I don't know, watching like the real house flies of somebody or another or, you know, weird shows about like people being lost on a deserted island, not something set in a prison where the supposed instigation is the death of somebody at the hands of a prison guard. And that's the thing. Even shows that are ostensibly, you know, funny or humorous shows or lighthearted shows, when you're dealing with these issues, you actually end up painting what prison life is like for millions of Americans who never been to prison.

So regardless of the sort of responsibility they think they have. In reality, you have a much bigger responsibility because you're very much painting the scenario and inculcating in people's minds how they should think about those issues. So it is important. And that story you talked, you just told about, you know, using direct action to not bring back a lost life, but to bring some justice to the situation that otherwise would have never have been there is extremely powerful and you know this whole notion of suicide being used as the excuse for why somebody died in police custody is something we still deal with today it made me think of 28 year old sandra bland who was very famously a few years ago you know pulled over for the

taillight the cop was an asshole to her and then she died in prison a couple days later and the official story coming out was that she committed suicide and you know Nobody believed it and mass upheaval because of it. But even to this day, that same sort of pattern is playing out. And it's just tragic. But wherever there's injustice, there are people willing to stand up and organize and fight back against it. And that's always been the case. Yes.

Yes. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Before I let you go, can you maybe let us know of some organizations or websites or movements that you would point people toward that are happening right now for people who want to get more involved with these issues? Yes. So there are a few. So there is for people who want to reach out and connect with a person in prison, which is hugely important. We have 2.3 million people in prison. A lot of them don't have family or outside support.

And in prisons, prison staff pay attention to who never gets mail, who never gets visits, who doesn't seem to have outside support. And these are people who are more vulnerable to systemic and staff violence because they don't have somebody they can call or you know like or who will call the prison and demand justice for them or demand better medical care or demand that they stop doing certain things for this person so there's an organization called black and pink which works with LGBTQ people in prison and one of the things that they do is a pen pal hookup where basically like you can just like choose to write to somebody and it can make a huge difference in somebody's life to be able to get like you know a card or a

postcard or you know even just like you know like a letter once a month where and it sends a message that says somebody on the outside is looking out for this person um there's also just detention international which works with survivors of sexual assault in prisons as well and at least once a year they do a call for we just missed it but because it's i think it's a christmas call for people to send messages of hope to survivors of sexual assault in prison and they compile all of these messages and they send them to the folks that they work with. Again, understanding that people who are in prison are often isolated and then people who have been sexually assaulted whether in prison or outside of prison often feel a sense of stigma and shame and isolation.

So getting these kinds of messages of support is really important. There are books to bars or books to prisoners, organizations around the country for folks who want to get involved in something a little more direct. They send books some other literature to people in jails and prisons nationwide. And then there are two awesome networks of mostly formerly incarcerated and currently incarcerated women. There is the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, which is an amazing network of women who have been in juvenile detention, centers, jails, and prisons

who are organizing around issues both on the federal level and on their local level. So people in New Orleans, you know, are organizing around the issues that affect them there. People in New York are organizing against the issues that are happening here. And then there's also a network called Survived and Punished, which just started, which works around the criminalization. incarceration of abuse survivors who are incarcerated because of their abuse. So this includes domestic violence survivors, who are incarcerated because they fought back against their abuse, or because they were coerced by abusive partners into committing

a crime and then got arrested and incarcerated. So looking at the intersections of ways in which, again, personal feminism did not work for them, not calling, you know, calling the police and relying on prison. did not actually keep them safe. Instead, it landed them in prisons looking at an intersection from an abolitionist and the three points. And we'll provide the links and the show notes for all of those organizations. And I really encourage listeners.

Like, I know a lot of people don't have a lot of time to engage fully, but even writing a letter once a month through some of these programs to prisoners who have nobody on the outside who cares about them or thinks about them can make all the difference. And it's such an important, easy thing for people to do. do. But again, before I let you go, can you let listeners know where they can find you in your work? Yes. So they can find my work at victoria law.net. I'm also on Twitter at L-V-I-K-K-I-M-L or just look up Victoria Law. I'm not for the person that's always treating about prison stuff. Yeah. And then my work has been published in a variety of different

places, but rather than list them all, I would just say go to VictoriaLaw.net. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for coming on. You do amazing, important, essential work. I'm honored to be able to give you a platform and amplify your voice around these extremely important issues. So, yeah, thank you very much for coming on. We really appreciate it. Thanks for having me, and thanks for covering this. Okay, we are here we are here with Nestor to talk about Prison Abolition through the lens of the anarchist Black Cross and touch on issues of bail and bond. Nestor, would you like to introduce yourself and say a bit about your background? Yeah, so this is Nestor. I'm with the

Omaha Anarchist Black Cross. I'm also a member of the Omaha Freedom Fund. It's a new project that we're trying to get going locally, and we're here to talk about gulags and shut them down. That's right. So maybe to start off, you know, what is the Anarchist Black Cross Federation, and what is it some of its history? All right, so the anarchist black cross federation is groups of anarchist black cross chapters across the country that started in 1995, and the purpose was to kind of consolidate their work, streamline it, kind of get more of a platform to continue the work of the anarchist black cross chapters across the country, so they're not just so running around where their heads chopped off, which the anarchist black cross has. an even longer history than from 1995. It goes back before the Russian Revolution to actually there's three dates that no one can settle on. It's either 1900, 1906, or 1907. There's also three cities that they can't really pin down either London, New York, or outside Moscow. And the time frame,

nobody can really pin down to win at the time. It was called Anarchist Red Cross and kind of works on anarchist time because they can't decide on which day actually it started. So that's interesting. So what are some of the main maybe goals or objectives of the Anarchist Black Cross? The Anarchist Black Cross main goal is long-term support of anarchist prisoners and that's extended to political prisoners and prisoners of war, which would be social wars, drug war, etc. That's extremely important and interesting in living in the middle of the police state as we do with more people in prison in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world. This sort of activism, this sort of revolutionary activity around prisons and prison abolition

is extremely important. So let's go ahead and ask you what does prison abolition mean to you and what are the real world steps that we can take to work toward that ultimate goal? Abolition of prisons would be, it's many different ways to do it, just like there's many different tendencies of anarchism. You could go insurrectionary where prisons are burning from the inside. The inmates have risen up. They're taking over. They're burning the place down. There's also just supporting the inmates as workers, such as the incarcerated workers committee has done an absolutely amazing job, just recently organizing prisoners along worker lines, solidifying that base there. So they have just the solidarity amongst themselves. They create a working class within the

prison. And sometimes there's more reform, which seems like it would be more of a liberal strain, but a little reform like ending the death penalty seems like something that could be brought back, which here in Nebraska, it wasn't brought back because we have a billionaire governor. And that's the problem with reforms. They can always be repealed. So you go from one extreme to another. And prison abolition is a long, long term project because it is so deeply ingrained in the U.S. Yeah, so in some sense, it's attacking the prison system on all fronts, whether through reforms that prevent people from being, you know, murdered by the state, all the way up to actually insurrections and prison riots and protests and supporting them, but also writing campaigns, writing to prisoners who are so cut off from the rest of the world and can be isolated and lonely within the prison state, you know, I think, is it correct to say that the anarchist Black Cross has a segment of people that kind of write and connect with political prisoners via, you know, pen pals, basically? Absolutely, yeah.

And mostly because prisoners are not allowed to write each other. If you're in a different facility, you can't write to another inmate. So getting messages that way works really well. And just reminding prisoners that they still have their humanity, even though it's been taken from them, they're still human. They're still remember their struggle is still valid and we remember it. So, yeah, writing to inmates is a huge chunk of Antichus Black Cross work. Yeah, I was talking to Victoria Law earlier about some of these same issues.

She was coming from like a women, a feminist perspective. And she talked about how prisoners who don't have writings and interactions from people outside, like they don't have people that care about them on the outside that don't write to them. Prison guards and sort of more of the criminals inside the prison system, the guards themselves, they identify those people as easier to take advantage of, easier to do things to with little to no recourse. because they don't have those outside lines. So by writing to prisoners, you were kind of connecting them to the outside world

in a way that might make a guard or the system itself think twice about abusing that prisoner or taking advantage of them in various ways. Absolutely. If the guards know that somebody on the outside knows what's going on, they're sometimes less likely to do it, but a lot of times that they can stop mail. People get put in communication management units where they receive no mail.

They can't make any calls. They're completely locked out from the entire world. That's one way that they try to stop people that are just reaffirming their humanity. It's kind of the extension of the solitary confinement mindset of trying to cut a social animal, a human being, which is a social animal, off from interaction with other humans. And that in and of itself is sort of a mental torture, an emotional torture that the prison state inflicts on people. But let's talk about, or can you talk about mass incarceration? and specifically it's federal genesis and what social structures that mass incarceration ultimately supports. Mass incarceration, which it's so ingrained now that we think that it's something that we just can't attack at all.

But I learned through reading other researchers' books that there was a time right before mass incarceration took place in Nixon's cabinet where he was contacted by, like, Quakers and by different, prison abolitionist at that time, which very few people in there at 33,000 in the federal prison, I think, at that time. And they're saying, please don't increase this, don't make it worse. And what was ironic is that Nixon himself was a Quaker. Wow, I didn't know that. Yeah, he was an evangelical Quaker. So he was a bit more of the fire and brimstone. Yeah, it was amazing that he comes from that background of peace and of pacifism and then turned out to be just one of the 20th century's biggest monsters in the U.S. Right.

Yeah, and, you know, there's that, it's well documented at this point, but one of the Nixon aides recently came out and said that the reason that Nixon, the Nixon administration began the drug war was precisely to target black communities and to target leftists who were acting up in the 60s. And so the drug war and the mass incarceration

that followed from that drug war was a political attack. And so you can view victims of the drug war as political prisoners because that's, That's precisely the genesis from which that whole system kind of took off. And it was, of course, intensified by Reagan and Clinton, et cetera. Yeah, and the war on drugs is the longest-running war in the Western Hemisphere. It may not have the idea of war, but yeah, it's a full-on, full-scale militarized war. Absolutely, with casualties, the hyper-militarization of the police, the focus on communities of color and poor communities.

it's an iteration of the class war, etc. In what ways, because I think this is interesting and this is something that you talk about, in what ways do fascist movements specifically who want an ethno state use the social structures of prison as a model? This could even go back all the way to Nixon where his models of getting more federal prisons

and filling them, they were watching the growth patterns of African-American communities and then they would set up models of how many per capita youth would be possibly criminalized or become criminal. And they set these models to show demographic growth in the prisons. They would buy, I think, it was like 1980 that they predicted that the black and Hispanic populations in prisons would outgrow the white population.

And that's an inverse of the fear that white nationalists have, that they're being economically and demographically displaced and that fear that brings them in to the white nationalist idea that they're being replaced like in charlottesville we saw them chanting you will not replace it she will not replaces yeah it's that fear that they're going to disappear somehow and it's where the idea of white genocide gets its roots actually in california for a long time they had forced segregation so if you went into a california prison you and you were white You've got a white cellmate. If you're black, you've got a black cellmate.

In the reception areas, which operate as like holding cells before you go into general population, they would separate you among your ethnic or racial divide lines. And in 2004, the Supreme Court said, hey, that's unconstitutional. You can't. 2004. Supreme Court said, hey, you can't do that. That's unconstitutional. You can't separate among race.

And it took them until 2014 to actually figure out. how they're going to rework their entire racist structure because you can't just build an ethno state in the prison and say, okay, well, the ethno state didn't work. The Supreme Court says we have to desegregate. And they couldn't figure it out. They couldn't figure out how all of the violence that they had created. Right. Because they made prison gangs. They created area nations. They created multiple subsections within the prison and they would fight each other. And now they couldn't figure out how to fix that. Jesus.

Yeah, so those people come out into society, they've been, you know, especially with regards to fascism, they've been inculcated with Aryan Brotherhood, which is almost, because of the segregation of the prisons, it's almost a natural effect and a consequence of that segregation is to group by your own race. So it actually is a breeding ground for fascism, and a lot of those fascists come out and they start organizing on the outside, and we see that pattern happen over and over again. Right. And it seems like a semantic point to make, but there are slight differences between white supremacists and white nationalists.

White supremacists are the brunt. They're just there to be the hate and the force of hatred. The white nationalists are a bit more pragmatic, even though they still operate on the same violent tendencies. They say, oh, well, people will self-segregate like they do in prisons. But the prison itself is a violent force. You have no agency in prison to do or say anything that you could possibly claim as your own. So saying that somebody's going to self-segregate, that doesn't make any sense in any logical way to say, oh, well, we'll just follow the prison model because you see the Latinos go over here, the blacks go over here, the whites go over here, and that's how we're going to separate. That's how we're going to balkanize the USA.

and it just doesn't actually work out. And people like Richard Spencer will say, oh, yeah, I want a white ethno state. And then somebody questions him on that. Well, how do you accomplish that? He says, oh, we're going to have to work that out. We can't really go into the details here because then it'll be destroyed by them with the echoes around it. Right, right, right.

And he says that because he doesn't have an answer that doesn't involve violence. Exactly right. Yeah. I was about to say, because he's hiding the fact that it's going to take brutal amounts of unfettered violence to incorporate that idea. There's an inmate that we write to quite often that a lot of anarchist black crosses write to Eric King. He's a Kansas City anarchist, anti-racist.

He recently wrote, I think it was in October, he wrote how to be an anti-fascist in prison. He's in federal prison right now, or it will be for the next eight years of his term. And he wrote, actually I'm just going to quote him here, in his letter he wrote if you put yourself out there verbally be prepared to stand on it and fight

because you will be challenged by the forces if you're lucky it'll be one on one and small things that happen instinctively can get you in a jam so it's so smart to be mindful and he says I've been in jams for laughing at a

sunken military ship for watching a soccer game with Mexicans for letting a gay black man into his yoga class that he teaches and those things that he would do by nature, just extending human kindness to, like, hey, come into my class, it gets him kind of pinned up with the white supremacists they're in there. And he says, well, you can't just go in swinging it every swastika that you see

because that's going to get you killed really fast. So he falls back on what the core of anti-fascist work is and it's just treating people like human beings. talk to people without being concerned of what race or what creed they are. And the traditionalist workers party actually jumped on that letter. It was published on It's Going Down, so they kind of watch that. But one of the main propagandizers on the TWP website, I think his name's Matt Parrott, but it really doesn't matter.

He's a scumbag. He doesn't deserve a name. He jumped on that to say, see, this is what Antifa is all about when you get them into a real situation, they just fall back and hide in their cells and talk about how anti-fascists they are with not even understanding that he's being threatened with his life for just being a human. Yeah, exactly. Just saying, hey, let's be friends.

Let's strike up a bond here. Is there solidarity created between him and folks of other race inside the prison because of his just humanness? Yeah. And he actually, it's not something that he can hide. either because he has the word antifa tattooed on his face. So it's there. It's a bad act.

When you look at him. I love that. All right, well, let's get into sort of the class dynamics of the prison system, which manifests often in the forms of bail and bond. So what is bail specifically? And how is it different from bond? Bail and bond are somewhat interchangeable, but not really. it's, there's two different categories of bond, unsecured and secured. A cash bond is what we call bail. You give either the full or partial amount of your bond, depending on what the local laws are.

Here in Nebraska, it's 10% of your bond schedule. So say it's $50,000 bond. You pay $5,000 to get out to jail. Luckily, we don't have bail bonding companies here because they're predatory, they're terrible people, dog the bounty hunter. Yeah. Kind of people. It's capitalism concentrated in this area. And the bell bonding people, that's considered a surety bond. So it's backed by something that they're backed by an insurance company.

And it's presented as like, hey, you can go to this three-day class and become a bell bondsman. And then you can go be a bounty hunter, catch people, catch skips, as they call them. but they're backed by insurance companies. They're backed by hedge funds. They're backed by Goldman Sachs. It's not like go down the street. Hey, there's a bell bonds person. And there's dog the bounty hunter.

He pulled himself up by his bootstraps. No, he's backed by global capitalism. Jesus. And he hunts people down. So the cash bond and security bond, that's two types. Property bond, which is pretty rare, but it actually has its historical basis in the bond system. So giving up a piece of property.

as collateral. That's where the bond structure comes from where before people were not able to move around as often, like thinking even back to like the 14th century where not everybody had a court system set up in the village or their town or their feudal whatever they had. So you'd give up a piece of property. You give up a piece of livestock or put up your measly little home that would tie you to the land somehow. That's where property bond would come into play. That's kind of, I think there's

still some southern states that allow putting up like your house loan or putting up a car, something like that to get you out of prison or excuse me, get you out of jail. And the whole purpose is to tie you financially to a physical place. So giving up cash, giving up property, something. It's all the idea that you're going to show up to your court date, but study after study after studies show that people that are released on their own recognizance actually have a higher rate of going to court than people that were bailed out by multiple different ways, which is how the push to end cash bond, in surety bond, how that came about. Yeah, can you talk about the efforts to get rid of that system and what the underlying

premise and principles of attacking that system are? Yeah, so the Omaha Freedom Fund that we just launched a week ago the day of this recording, it is a community fund that will pay bonds of people that hopefully it's under $50,000 because based on the bond schedule, that's just the bottom rung of felonies and then all misdemeanors and nonviolent offenses. So it would keep people out of pretrial detention and people that are out of jail during pre-trial or during their trial have a better case. They get better judgments if they're out and they're able to seek legal counsel. They're able to be with their families instead of being

locked away for 30, 60, 90 days before the trial and jail itself being as violent as it is. A lot of people don't even survive before they get to their trial before they get a judgment. They're dead in limbo, which happened three times in Omaha last year, three different people and the county jail died before they went to trial. Yeah, in my own experience of entering the jail system, I was being released along with a prisoner or somebody that was in jail for a period of time, and their bail was like 6,000,

and they just couldn't afford it. And so they had been in there for weeks, and I don't know exactly the situations that occurred, but eventually they got out. But, you know, for something that they hadn't even been convicted of, they were sitting in a jail for three, four, five weeks, waiting for people on the outside to come up with that money. Now, if you're extremely rich, that's not an issue. You can commit any sort of crime, and we've seen that happen, even all the

way up to murder, and you can get out because you have the resources to get out. So it's a very classist system, which is not surprising to anyone listening to this, but it's worth repeating. Yeah, they call that affluenza. You're too rich to no consequences. Yeah, exactly. So what are bail bondsmen? I know you might have touched on it a little bit, but what are bail bondsmen? What do they do? And why are they almost exclusively found in the United States? So the bail bonding profession is a bounty hunter. It's someone who when you get arrested and you get your bond set and you live in a state that has bonding companies, they will take 10% of your bond to get you out and then they will take on that surety bond of the higher amount, say it's $50,000. They'll take on

that full $50,000 because they're, again, backed by global capital. them, they can absorb that. And if you jump bail or miss your trial, they will issue not really a warrant, but they have the legal capacity to go hunt you down and retrieve their investment, basically. And that hunting down, that point of conflict is often a point of violence? Yeah, I'm not entirely sure of like every state's in law, but I know that most states will allow physical confrontation to take you down to stake out your home, find out where you work, and then physically take you into jail by whatever means possible. And that's a really macaw.

You know, it makes me think, you talk about Dog the Bounty Hunter. It also relates to the show Cops, which is not only is all this unethical shit taking place, all this class war taking place, but then other corporations find a way to profit off it in the form of making into a television show and having ad revenue from sponsors come on so capitalists the vampires and parasites they are are finding every way in to make money off of the most vulnerable and marginalized people in our society so from every angle these people are being ripped off and being made a spectacle and also i think cops reinforces not only classism but racism if you watch a show of cops it is white cops going into poor often communities of

color and acting violently towards those people and mocking them a lot of these people People have mental illness and on the show, it's a point of mockery. You laugh at this person. How crazy is this person? Blah, blah, blah. How insane is this person? Look at all those funny things they're doing. Look how crazy their hair is.

Their clothes aren't clean. And it becomes a spectacle. So it's very dehumanizing the entire process. And, of course, capitalism only adds to that dehumanization. You touched a little bit about the historical roots of this whole system, but maybe you can go a little deeper into what are the historical roots of the bail and cash bond systems? The entire system is to keep people tied to the system that's keeping them either in prison or the threat of prison. With the Omaha Freedom Fund, it would be getting people out that are most marginalized,

that are most at risk through the violence of staying in jail. The historical aspects of getting bail removed or getting cash bond ended is it's actually, a not incredibly old concept because I think in Chicago it's just recently they got a court order to get judges to stop setting bond, stop setting cash bond and getting a personal recognizance release. So the dynamic of cash bond is just still moving quite rapidly. You said personal recognizance. Can you elaborate on what that means? Yeah, that is the unsecured type of bond. So that would be the first type. And it's more rare. The two types of unsecured bonds, actually a ticket, like if you get a speeding ticket and you sign the ticket and says you'll show up to court

this day, that's a release on citation ticket or a bond. And then released on personal recognizance is just you don't have to pay anything to get out. You don't have to put up any property. But a lot of times it's not used because the judge will say, oh, you're a flight risk or your crime is outrageous, you shoplifted for your family, you're a terrible, horrible person. Right, right. As long as we're talking about reforming the system as of right now, what would a concrete reform be that would take away the class dynamic of getting out before you're convicted of a crime, you know, instead of paying cash bail or any other form of that property, etc., what would an abolitionist

like to see as a meaningful reform on that specific area? It's not necessarily a reform. The purpose of community bond funds is to abolish themselves, to abolish the cash bond itself. So some of the more reform issues would be, like some communities have, instead of a cash bond, it would be like community service. You like show up and check in to wherever you're at,

like a food show. or something, a homeless shelter, food kitchen, that would function as keeping you in the community because you show up, you do some civil service, and then you go to your court date. That's one of the more reform-based ways of doing it and reducing jail populations before heading to prison. So last question, because I think the Omaha Freedom Fund is interesting and important and can be used by activists and revolutionaries who are listening to this episode. So what is the Omaha Freedom Fund and how does it operate? I know you've touched on it a little bit, but maybe go a little bit more

in depth. Yeah, it's easily replicated just in Omaha. It's all volunteer-based. Right now, we're still in the funding stages. Like I said, it just started January 15th. And once we get a certain funding level that we can start bailing people out, it's a rotating fund. So when we bail somebody out, and they go through their court case. The court costs come out of the bail, which is 10%. And then they get a check cut to them, and that would go back into the fund, and they would release more people.

So the money keeps going back in. We can get a 10% loss each time, so we would have to make that up. Yeah, we'd have to continue doing fundraising. But a 10% loss in keeping people out of jail is a great return. Yeah, yeah. And here in Omaha, I know other places, there has been a lot of success with fundraising.

You can tap into local DIY culture. You can tap into the music scene, the art scene, and find creative ways to bring in funding for organizations and for things like this. You could have a concert where you say, this is the Omaha Freedom Fund. We're trying to earn money to help this program. People will come and support that.

So I urge activists and revolutionaries out in the broader population listening to try to think about some of those things, and think about ways that you can fundraise and be creative with it because fundraising is beyond just this program. Fundraising is essential to organizing generally. So yeah, that's extremely interesting.

Where can listeners go to learn more about and support the anarchist Black Cross Federation specifically and as well as the Omaha Freedom Fund? Yeah, the Omaha Freedom Fund is Omaha Freedom Fund. WordPress.org. The Omaha Anarchist Black Cross is Omaha ABC. Wordpress.com.

And then the anarchist black cross federation is, I believe it's anarchist black cross federation. But I don't have that in front of me, sorry. Yeah, that's all right. What we're going to do is put all of that in the show notes. So anybody that's interested can look in the episode summary and find all that information and go help it out. This is an extremely important issue. This is an issue that cuts the core of intersectional politics, of class.

politics and of the police state in general. So get involved, try to find ways to enter this realm of activity. And thank you, Nestor, for coming on. It's been an honor to have you on and I wish you luck and thank you for all the good work you do in the community. Thank you.

And you can follow the work on Twitter. The Omaha Freedom Fund is Omaha Bale and the anarchist Black Cross is Omaha ABC. All right, brother. Thank you. Have a good night. Thank you. There must be some way out of here Say the Joker to the thief

There's too much confusion I can't get no relief Businessmen they drink my wine clowning dig mouths None of them are long the line Know what any of it is worth No reason to get excited the thief he kindly spoke

there are many among us who feel that life is but a joke but you and I we've been through that and this is not our fate so let us not talk falsely now the hour is getting late All along the watchtower, princes kept the view

while all the women came and went Barefoot servants too Outside in the distance A wild cat did grow Two riders were approaching The wind began to howl