The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Perils Prison Reform, and the Vision of a Visually Impaired Artist

Episode Date: July 21, 2020

In the past few years, there has been a growing bipartisan demand to reduce the extraordinarily high rate of incarceration in the United States, on both moral and fiscal grounds. But some of the key reforms, according to some prison abolitionists, are actually expanding the “carceral web”—the means by which people are subjected to control by the corrections system. “Reform operates according to a logic of replacement,” the journalist Maya Schenwar tells Sarah Stillman. Drug courts and electronic monitoring are widely popular reforms that, Schenwar argues, only funnel people back into physical prisons, and may cause addicts further harm. Stillman spoke with Schenwar and Victoria Law, the authors of “Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms.” Plus, Rodney Evans discusses his documentary film “Vision Portraits,” which has been streaming on PBS. It examines the creative processes of a writer, a dancer, and a photographer who are—like the filmmaker—visually impaired.  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Sarah Stillman is a staff writer who's covered immigration, mass incarceration, and other issues of social justice. Here's Sarah Stillman. Over the last few years, there's been a lot of coverage, including on our program, about ending mass incarceration, a conversation that some communities have been pushing for decades. This momentum for change is really encouraging for people. who believe the U.S. puts way too many people in prisons and jails and for way too long. But a lot of mainstream reforms are more complicated than they look. I recently spoke with two

journalists and prison abolitionists, Victoria Law and Maya Chenoir. And they argue that many of the ideas being sold to us as alternatives to incarceration actually expand what they call the carcoral web, the various ways that communities, and especially communities of color, get surveilled, and criminalized and controlled. And in particular, they call out reforms like private probation, things like sex offender registries, and the use of electronic monitoring. And they both have personal experiences with incarceration. Shenhua's sister spent much of her life in the system.

She was incarcerated for the first time in juvenile detention 15 years ago and was just in and out of jails and prisons ever since then. And during the time periods that she wasn't incarcerated, she was still being confined and controlled and surveilled. And there were always these very, very harsh conditions placed on her to the extent that she'd end up back in prison, back in jail. It just was this never-ending cycle. Victoria Law found herself sentenced to probation when she was a teenager. When I was in high school, many of my friends joined gangs because when you are 14, 15, 16, 17, and looking at the prospect of spending all your time in classrooms that are overcrowded and somebody comes along and offers you the opportunity to make several hundred dollars any night, many teenagers might look at that as the better choice. So they joined gangs, dropped out, got arrested. And at one point, I got swept up into some of this nonsense and I got arrested for armed robbery.

Maya Shenwar and Victoria Law just published a book called Prison by Any Other Name, the harmful consequences of popular reforms. I'm curious, you know, over the last decade, we're told that there's this growing bipartisan consensus that mass incarceration is costing us way too much, both financially and morally. And you even titled the book's introduction, Everybody Loves Prison, Reformation. I think somewhat sarcastically. I'm wondering, Maya, if you could talk us through one or two of the reforms that you think are taking us in the wrong direction or some of the reasons that we need to think more critically about what's framed as prison reform. Yeah. Many of the reforms that liberals and conservatives have been calling for as a group shift money away from prisons maybe a little bit, but they're shifting it toward things like. mandated treatment, predictive in community policing, is popular data-driven surveillance,

including electronic monitoring. And these changes aren't challenging the undergirdings of prison or of policing. And they're not fundamentally challenging, obviously, white supremacy and anti-blackness. They're not challenging criminalization. And we talk a lot in the book about the ways in which reform operates according to a logic of replacement. So you can't just have people not go to prison. You can't just not police people. There has to be a somewhere else, in the words of Merriam Kaba, who we interviewed for the book. The go-to somewhere else right now is electronic monitoring. For example, during the COVID era, when they're released, people from jails, electronic monitoring is the first thing that gets proposed. And this alternative

has expanded very, very quickly. There's now estimated to be about 200,000 people on electronic monitoring, which in the book we discuss are really electronic shackles. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit more about the electronic monitoring industry. Victoria, I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit more about some of the forces behind the massive growth of electronic monitoring. And I'm curious if you can also walk us through why is it becoming such a popular supposed alternative to incarceration? Well, what we're seeing is local officials and state officials are looking at what they can do to reduce the numbers of people in physical jails and prisons, where you have to not only pay for their food, their clothing, you pay for. You pay for.

the electricity and the overhead associated with running a physical jail and prison, you're also paying for people to guard them and their benefits and their overtime. So we're seeing them look at electronic monitoring as a less costly alternative. Yeah, I thought it was quite fascinating in the book that you mentioned, one of the largest private prison companies, Geo Group, bought up one of the big electronic monitoring companies, B.I. And that there's increasingly this relationship between the people making money off of prisons and the people making money off of these supposed alternatives. But I'm wondering, I suppose many people who haven't had the experience of electronic monitoring might assume, oh, that would be a way better option than being in prison.

In my personal observation, when my sister was on electronic monitoring, it became an issue for the entire family. There were situations where she had to go to the emergency room, and we were afraid of taking her because we were afraid that that was going to mean she'd be incarcerated again because she didn't get prior approval. This type of punishment not only is ineffective, doesn't work for quote unquote rehabilitating people, but it also perpetuates the cycle. It also feeds back into prison, feeds back into jail. ultimately expands the system because so many people are placed on electronic monitors who wouldn't otherwise be incarcerated in prisons and jails. It's powerful to hear how your own

family went through kind of seeing how that system was sort of set up for people to fail. Sure. Victoria, Victoria, I'd love to turn towards you. The movement to defund the police is suddenly a big part of mainstream conversation. And I walked out of my apartment in Brooklyn than just a few days ago and saw there was two young women wheat pasting. Mary McAaba quotes about prison abolition on a bunch of telephone polls. Yeah, so it feels like things are really changing in terms of the general public mainstream conversation. So I'm wondering both, you know, do you think we're moving closer towards an abolitionist vision? And also I wonder kind of how you would respond to the many people who work in corrections or within the prison industrial complex.

might worry about their future and their jobs and what their place is in this in this conversation. So I think that we are very excitingly moving towards abolition being on the horizon. We're seeing people taking more seriously the idea that we don't need police and prisons to keep us safe, that we can envision other means of building our own safety and support. So we're seeing a moment in which people are saying, like, how can we defund the police, reinvest those resources that we have into education, into housing, into summer youth jobs, into, you know, medical care and mental health care? How do we build a society in which we are building our own safety, but we're also building a society in which even the more marginalized among us can survive and thrive? Yeah, Maya, maybe we can turn to another one of those pathways that seems like an alternative but often leads people back to prison, which is drug courts. In the book, you talk about some of the issues that have come up with drug courts.

I'm curious if you can talk us through kind of what makes it so hard to comply and what some of your thoughts on the drug court promise might be. Yeah, so drug courts are an interesting story. The idea is you go and into this separate court and usually you're sentenced to some form of treatment. So a lot of people think this is perfect, right? What people who are addicted to drugs need is treatment, not jail. And I think we can look at this from a couple of directions. Now we have more than 3,100 drug courts operating in the United States. They appear in a community and then police. know that these things are an option. So they actually arrest more people for these small time offenses that then drive people into drug court. And of course, that disproportionately impacts

black and brown communities who are targeted by the police anyway. This is pretty sinister, I think. Drug courts are often abstinence only. And that is generally not the best strategy when it comes to addiction. This is, for me, very personal because my sister actually died in February while she was in drug court and on probation. She was in an abstinence-only program. Basically, she did start using again. She left this mandatory treatment program, and because mandatory treatment,

is generally abstinence only, it lowers your tolerance to whatever drug you happen to be dependent on. It's much easier to overdose if you've been off the drug for a very long time. And so when we talk about these systems, sometimes there's this idea that, well, this is better than nothing. It's better than prison. And yes, I think in many cases it is. it's also a deadly system. It's a system that's killing people. I feel looking back at this, you know, my sister died after we finished writing the book. We had already turned in the final manuscript. And I was actually hoping that when our book came out, she would be able to come do

talks with us and talk about the ways in which drug court was just destroying lives. And I feel like it's almost a surreal situation that instead I'm sitting here and talking about how it participated in killing her. But here we are. Yeah. If you're comfortable sharing, I wonder what you would want us to know about your sister and what you think she might want people to take away from the book that you've written. Yeah. Well, first I'll talk. about Keely. I think that one of the things that she always said, she said to me, Maya, the one thing that I want right now is to be out of an institution. I want to be able

to take a shower when I want to take a shower. I want to be able to go to the movies. I want to be able to wake up when I want to wake up. And I want to be able to be able to to care for my children. And she was separated from her child who is six, and she also was pregnant at the time that she died. And she knew that because she was a drug user, despite all of the medical evidence that shows us that this is not necessary, she knew that when her child was born, that child would be taken away from her. And that was just, and that was just a child. And that was just weighing on her every second of every day. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. That's really heartbreaking about your sister. I hope you don't mind if I ask a follow-up about that, which is that I'm really

curious, like, what do you wish society could have had in place for your sister or for other people who are struggling with addictions? You have a really beautiful discussion in the book about some of the other ways we could be thinking about support structures and what social safety nets really look like. And I'm wondering if you could just share a little bit about your thoughts on that. Absolutely. One of the things we talk about in the book is harm reduction. And to me, this is so basic that when someone is using drugs, you want to create conditions for them in which they are more likely to survive. One thing that we've seen in a number of countries that's been astoundingly effective is safe consumption sites, which are also called safe injection sites. And in these places,

people can also be given information, seek out information about treatment, but it's not mandated. It's a choice. Another thing that we talk about in the book we interviewed Susan Sarah, who's a researcher at Suffolk University. And she talks about how in her experiences with women who use drugs, the women who were most likely to recover were those who were given opportunities to foster a stable life for themselves, opportunities for good, decent housing, opportunities for finding things to do that made them feel useful, opportunities for recreation,

pursuing jobs, all of these things that help people build a meaningful life. Yeah, it seems like your book is really a call to have a bigger imagination around the ways we respond to crisis, to violence, to mental health. Well, thank you so much, Victoria. and Maya for having this conversation today. Thank you. Thank you so much for having us on. Staff writer Sarah Stillman.

Victoria Law and Maya Shenwar are the authors of prison by any other name. It's just out. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. At the age of 26, filmmaker Rodney Evans was diagnosed

with a rare genetic eye condition. When he set out to direct a feature called Brother to Brother, he shared the news with the crew. I am a low-vision filmmaker, and I have no peripheral vision. So sometimes if you are handing me a call sheet for the next day, I might not see it. Evans' new documentary is called Vision Portraits, and it takes a close look at the lives and creative processes of three other visually impaired artists.

The film has been streaming on PBS to mark the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Now, the ADA was a landmark of civil rights law, and even though it didn't have the kind of cultural impact to say gay marriage, it affected an enormous number of people, more than a quarter of all Americans, have some form or another of disability. Rodney Evans talked to our producer Kalalia about what it means to make art with limited vision. You don't know when something's going to deteriorate to the point where, you know, you're unable to compose a shot from the monitor and, you know, you're unable to see the emotion clearly on an actor's face. I think I'm trying to figure out what it means to work as a filmmaker where vision

seems so central, you know, knowing that mind will eventually go away. Can you explain what happened? Like, how did you find out you were losing your eyesight? I found out that I was losing my eyesight through just a kind of, I would say, like an accretion of like different experiences that I was having. Like one noticeable thing that was happening was that I would be, you know, like traveling in the train station during rush hour and someone would just appear literally like right now. in front of me and I just wouldn't have seen them cross my path and I'd just be like, just like really kind of shocked that this person like suddenly appeared. So that was one thing that started to happen. Another thing that that would happen was that, like, I would be introduced to someone and

they would extend their hand to shake my hand and I wouldn't see that they had extended their hand. And this led you to go see an eye doctor? Yeah, and they immediately, you know, diagnosed it. And they could tell just from looking at my retinas. In a lot of ways, I feel like I'm just looking for guidance in how to be a blind artist. So in the film, you talked to three artists, a writer named Ryan, Kayla, a dancer, and a photographer named John Dougdale.

And when you think about John's story, which was really moving to me, I love the scene where he says, you know, his family is gathered around his bedside. And, you know, they were like, we were so proud of your career as a photographer speaking in the past tense. And he immediately responded, word, I'm still going to shoot. I'm definitely going to shoot. I'm going to shoot photos a lot more. I think one of the things that is most impressive about John is, you know, the fact that he lived through the height of the AIDS epidemic. People were dying all around him.

There were several times where he had massive strokes and was very close to dying, losing his vision. due to AIDS and specifically a condition called CMV retinitis, which tends to be one of the side effects of the AIDS virus. And for John, it happened quite early in his diagnosis. And he came out of it, I think, very aware of the finite nature of time and very aware of the healing, capabilities of photography and how he was going to photograph his community and these people that he loved and, you know, sometimes blindness was going to be part of the subject matter,

sometimes it wasn't, but that he was going to use photography as an autobiography. I got to St. Vincent's. There were so many people. It was like a war zone. You had a way sometimes two days to get in bed. By that time, I was paralyzed on my left side, and I couldn't hear out of one ear. And I thought, oh, man, I thought this must be the sound of the universe. I could hear everything that was happening inside of my body. That was the beginning of my change.

So at the beginning of the film, you stated that you wanted to learn how to be a blind artist. What did you learn in the process of making this film? I mean, I guess, you know, from the other artists, I learned that vision is more than just, you know, an ocular process that, you know, what John says, there's so much, so many other venues that you have in your mind and your heart to draw from. And John letting go of his ego, working with assistants, not being. so attached to the end result, because he can't see the end result. And so for me, it just gave me permission to, like, find my own unique personal voice within filmmaking, not to be so hung up on quote-unquote rules, and to expand the boundaries of cinematic form, whether that's, you know, shooting through a cracker,

piece of glass to mirror Kayla's limited vision or using macro lenses over a book to mirror Ryan trying to pass as a sighted person, but the words just being a complete jumble to him. Just really having the audience sit in that perspective and not being afraid of. of them being slightly confused or having the image be ambiguous to actually put the audience deeper into each character's experience. And in this very moment, many people are feeling pretty isolated. You know, we're not able to go to work, many of us. Right. Many people are concerned about what the future holds for them, for their families, and even for the country.

And by watching your film, I guess it occurred to me that some people with disabilities have had to manage these type of feelings of isolation, of loneliness, of overcoming certain obstacles for most of their lives, you know? Yes. Is this like an accurate or fair comparison to make? Yes. I think that that's really true. I think that COVID-19 has made the general population. feel in a more visceral way what it's like to be disabled.

Having to be much more conscious of potential danger in the world and how to navigate that danger. Like we all set our own boundaries of what we feel comfortable doing based on you know, our own definitions, right? So do I feel comfortable walking to the grocery store without a mask? Absolutely not. Do other people? Apparently so, because I would say about 30% of the people on my block walk around without masks. You know, so. So, yeah, I think it's trying to keep yourself safe in an environment.

that has become more high risk in the ways that environments might be more, quote unquote, high risk for a person with disabilities. Like I or someone with a wheelchair, you know, might have to call around attend different restaurants to make sure that their restaurant is accessible, right? or that public transportation, do you feel comfortable using public transportation? You know, just all of those definitions of what used to be safe, I think, are all up in the air now in a way that with a disability, it's constantly changing and shifting.

And then your perception of what's safe for you changes a long way. that. I think more people are attuned to their own fragility and that nothing's guaranteed, right? I think, and I think disabled people probably know that more than anything. Filmmaker Rodney Evans, his documentary Vision Portraits is streaming on PBS.org. He spoke with Kalalia, one of our producers. That's all for now, and I hope you enjoyed the program, and I hope you'll join us next time. Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garvis of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado.

This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon, Riann & Corby, Calilea, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Morgan Flannery, Meng Faye Chen, and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Trurina Endowment Fund.