Abolition, the Purpose of Punishment, and Defining Justice in America with Juwan Bennett

In this episode, I am joined by co-creator of Whatsjust, co-founder of the Urban Youth Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, and Criminal Justice Ph.D. candidate, Juwan Bennett. Juwan and I attended graduate school together and were both mentored by a pioneering prison abolitionist, Kay Harris. Together, we unpack the concept of abolition and provide a brief history of police and prisons in America. Juwan and I challenge the purpose of punishment and what we deem criminal- acknowledging how the law is fluid and everchanging. In addition, we interrogate how we define justice and whether our means of achieving justice are outdated (spoiler: they are). This conversation should inspire critical thought and ultimately shift worldviews.

If you have any questions or comments that you would like addressed in the YouTube series Office Hours with Abbie and Juwan please email ccofficehours@gmail.com

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Transcript

Welcome to critical conversations. My name is Abbie Henson and I'll be the one conversing with our guests. And I also serve as an assistant professor in the school of criminology and criminal justice at Arizona state university. After the killing of George Floyd, my social media blew up. I kept seeing posts and reposts as stories, all about criminal and social justice issues.

However, much of what I was seeing were just. Flat words that lacked voice and depth and nuance. And so I wanted to create a space where those words could come alive. I wanted to engage in dialogues with people who had actually been impacted by the criminal justice system, whether through their own experience research or both.

I felt this was the moment to think critically to examine the complexities of our system in place today, and to figure out how to move forward in a way that allows for equity and true justice. So I started hosting live webinars. Both in an attempt to have the audience be active participants either by raising their hand and joining the conversation, or by contributing a question to the chat box and to also build a sense of community and togetherness in a time when we were.

So isolated through quarantine. So all of the episodes that you're about to hear on this podcast are converted from those live streets. And while it can be really overwhelming to think about how to change a massive system, that seems so ingrained in the fabric of our society by participating in these conversations.

And yes, You just listening to this podcast is participating. That is where we, I see. True change beginning. Thank you all so much for joining my critical conversation with Jawan Bennett. Joanne is a criminal justice PhD candidate at temple university and the co-founder of the urban youth leadership Academy in Philadelphia.

In this episode, we'll be unpacking the concept of abolition diving into the history of prisons and police and challenging the purpose of punishment and how we define justice in America. So I hope that you enjoy it and feel engaged and please as always continue the conversation. Once the episode is up.

Yeah, thank you for having me. I just want to say I'm just so I'd like to be in a space. You know, we think about this topic called critical conversations to really pick a topic and really kind of expand it and have maybe uncomfortable with difficult conversations, because I think we talk about policing.

It's so multifaceted and I think ideas are not a monolith, but there's a lot of diversity. Me, myself, Philadelphia native grew up in South Philadelphia, which I think is the best part of Philadelphia. I know some people might disagree, but I have to put that disclaimer is educated. I'm in the public school system.

So a lot of violence in my neighborhood. I was thinking about this question for, I don't know, I actually grew up in 26th and Tasker. Well, a lot of people didn't go to college, but so a lot of violence lost. Some friends to gun violence, saw people be abused by the police. And interestingly, I always in my head, I always wanted to study like, no, why, why does this happen?

I'm a PhD student. I'm in the department of criminal justice at temple university should be finishing a doctorate in the fall. So excited. Um, and I do research with inner city communities finishing a dissertation topic on juvenile lifers, but I'm really interested in the intersection between education and crime.

It was really interesting. Um, I have a brother who's a Philadelphia police officer dad. Who is a correctional officer. So we probably get into that. Interesting. And also a grandfather who was in law enforcement is as well, but more importantly, I'm a black man in America, and I have to know bouncy things, you know, all the time.

So that's just a little bit about me. Both John and I have kind of been raised under the great late Kay Harris who was at temple and she was a leader in the prison abolitionist movement. And he and I both identify as prison abolitionists. And I think what's important for. You know, as we begin to get into this conversation is to really define abolition.

And I think it brings a lot of fear and anxiety and people as we've been socialized so deeply to believe that these systems keep us safe because they are touted as institutions of public safety. And I think that it's important to get into the weeds about things and understand the cost benefit analysis of harm as abolitionists.

It's not necessarily just removing an institution. In order to then allow lawlessness to occur, but rather to remove an institution that's no longer working for the community and to create at the exact same time or even beforehand, a new set of systems that are actually going to not only, uh, provide public safety, but to also less than the harms caused by a systemic racism.

You know, abolishing a system, oftentimes you're talking about re-imagining what that system looks like. And when you talk about the potential harms, I think it's important to note that, you know, our society is set up on like a social contract system. And so a lot of times, you know, the state assumes. No responsibility in the matter.

So if me and you were in a dispute and you know, I harm you in a particular manner, I get shipped off to prison. You kind of stay where you at. And a lot of people say that the system, the way it's designed now, doesn't really address that particular harm. And when we talk about it, we're talking about prison abolition, not about people being void of punishment, but how do we make that punishment more relevant to today's time?

Um, in prison started out, you know, underpinnings, you know, prisoners, they were going to pray. They were going to read the Bible. They're going to be remorseful, but as you're going to do the overcrowding. You know, all that, all that changes. So we find ourselves here and I think it's always important to reevaluate systems businesses, do it, corporations do it.

Um, and I think the criminal justice system is the only system that doesn't, you know, reevaluate, you know, their particular systems from a critical lens going into that, like the idea, I think so often the narrative is reformed like re-imagine reform, but I think that that is problematic because it's just kind of circling around the same problems.

Within the systems. And so I think we have to take the re out of it and just say, we need to imagine a new system, because if we reform literally creating the same system over and over, like that's the whole issue is that. Criminal justice reform has been the narrative for over a decade, but we haven't really seen change because it's within the same belief system that this is the right thing.

It's just that we're executing it wrong. I think that it's important to kind of understand the trajectory of what police have been. So I think a lot of people are seeing in social media, this kind of narrative that. Police started as slave catchers. Yes. In the South, they did. They started as slave catchers in, and then in 1721, we saw that there was a move towards not only just patrolling slaves, but then trying to deter revolt.

So. These Watchmen were ordered to then deter any black congregations. So deter any black people from coming together, educating together, playing drums. There's a way to communicate and especially a lotta, lotta for black people in different, you know, African descendants. Yeah. And so it was in a way to create and maintain a social hierarchy and also.

In my opinion, a true display. And this is what I've said over and over about any kind of defensive action is just such a display of insecurity in the North. So in the South, there were slave catchers in the North. We had police as trying to maintain the dominant class. So they were patrolling overly patrolling immigrant, Irish and Italian communities, and these other working class communities, again, in an order of maintenance.

And I think it's also important to see how like, Interlinked everything is, I think a lot of times we talk about these issues that we're talking about, the criminal justice system. And even when I teach in my, you know, CJ one-on-one class, that encapsulates cops, courts and corrections, because when you look at the South, when they were trying to, you know, doing slave patrols and even in North, what happened was after the emancipation proclamation, And slaves were free.

You have all these free black people who they had to figure out how they want to integrate into the mainstream society. You know, you had mass bodies. And so during that time you get something called the convict lease system, which comes out of the correctional side, the prison side, where, you know, slave labor was, you know, illegal.

But what you can do is you can arrest someone, send them to prison. And in that same plantation, the state had control of their body and they would lease those slaves back to the plantation that they were in. And so a lot of was dictated by the criminal justice system. That was, that was kind of like the guiding light.

Then that was kind of the philosophical, you know, viewpoint from the system like, well, we have to do something with these black people. So if you were congregating the group, if you were homeless, if you didn't have a job, you know, you were going to get sent back to prison and kind of police are at the front line.

They're the gatekeepers, you know, to that. So I think a lot of times when we even talking about policing, as we move into the 21st century definition, We kind of see that the same mantra is still upheld. It's just in a different language. So we get a war on drugs, right. And we have to do certain things about it, but we know that a war on drugs was a warning, black people, a war on poverty, a war on cleaning things up, you know, issues and ills that we didn't see when the CNR community more, we address them with incarceration instead of other different forms of treatment.

Maroona talks about the reintegration ceremonies that need to occur for people coming home. So from prison, they've been labeled as a master status of criminal within this setting, and then coming home in order to remove that label, we need to embrace them. We need to have this ceremony kind of reinstating their civilian label and understanding that they've paid their debt.

And now they are like, Absolved of their sins. And I think that that kind of reintegration ceremony also never happened for released slaves, right? Like there wasn't this massive shift in perception of black people, right after slavery, it just was a label that was. Lawfully removed, but not socially and theoretically removed white people were perceiving them.

Didn't just change because the law changed re formation of police will not work just because you're defunding or changing the budget structure or giving training. There's not a. Total shift in culture. There's not a shift in understanding or defining what police are within that same structure. I think that's why we need this kind of total reconsent or.

Conception. And I'm so glad you pointed that out because I got a fire burning inside of me because if you look into literature, even for community members, all these things that police do, they never took a time out to be reflective on ourselves or often an apology. And I want to give one example, it's not related to policing, but I think it's germane.

I think a lot of people will catch onto this because I teach this in my class and I hope that people get this. We had the whole super-predator debate. Whole super-predator debate. We know it completely be false in that super predator. We get the central park five. Um, it was, you know, five black men. They raped this woman, Donald Trump put out a statement and was like, you know, this is what we're talking about.

They became the face of the super predator moment. We know that they were totally innocent. They actually were exonerated. The ironic thing was the, the man who came forth and actually did the raping, they got his DNA. He couldn't even be charged because it was a statue of limitations, but. When you think about that particular case in the super bait and all the politicians who said it?

I think it was Hillary Clinton, Joe, by all these policies that said it, there was a never we're wrong as criminal justice. We do things it's like we could have been right. We could have been right. It was interesting. They asked Donald Trump recently, would he take back his sentiments? You know, that he said, and he was like, uh, no, w and that's the problem.

We have to really reconcile with that. Every. Three strikes law, everything that has severe consequences, the criminal justice system never apologizes or, Oh, they never even take laws off the books. They just kind of keep them there and say, we're not going to, we're really not going to force them. We live in a superhero society, right?

Like the superhero is always the one who goes against crime. And so a lot of these politicians want to run on a superhero platform and that's what they think will get them votes. That's what's going to make them look good. Is if they. Can you run on a superhero platform they're going to be, but it's also easy because you can, you can incarcerate more people.

You can, you know, I don't want to cut you off, but it's also an easy platform. It's harder to show if you Institute programs and how that goes up. Because as soon as one case somebody gets raped or, you know, a horrific crime happens. Then it's like, okay, you know, people are there, their reputation is put on the line.

We have to be really careful in the ways that we speak about the criminal. Like, we need to stop saying justice system does this. The criminal justice system does this because that gives anonymity to the people who are actually the ones making the decisions for in, within the system. Like it doesn't hold them accountable because it's masked within this big system that.

You know, seemingly runs on its own, but really it's run by these people. And like, we have to acknowledge that this is a human driven system and not this robotic system that even in our data, even in like predictive policing or algorithms that can self-learn, they're programmed by humans who are bias.

There's a great book called algorithm comes up oppression. It talks about that particular issue. Right. So I think we have to stop allowing anonymity by just calling out systems and really start calling. Cause I think even me, who's like a PhD in criminal justice. I'm like, who is the one running the system?

It's the man, it's the man holding us down. And I, I totally agree with you because we always say the system, the system. And so it's like this machine that we can't control. I think the people, the fingers that we have, the point and the pressure that we have to put on, and I would like to say as the community stance, we have to put the fingers back on the politicians.

They have a lot of power. I mean, your city, Councilman, your mayors, your state representatives, your state senators. Yeah. Yeah. Governors and I was, you know, I grew up in Philadelphia. I was very ignorant into the political landscape, the judges that becomes elected and how that they control state senators and state reps control more criminal justice legislation.

Then the federal government, I think when we think about politicians too, we also, and this is a good segue. We have to think about who is putting pressure on the politicians as well. And in Philadelphia, in particular, our fraternal order of police. Our police union, huge sway in politics. I mean, we see that with Rizzo.

He went from being the police chief to being the mayor because he had that political power. It's kind of really hard to have this conversation because me as a black man, you know, Listen, I, I never, I never had handcuffs. I never been detained, but it's something when you ride with your music on and you see them in blue and red sirens and you know, your heart rates and you're like, let me call my mom, let me call my wife.

And you know, you haven't done anything wrong, but just given the circumstances. So it's really hard. You know, I know the sentiment when the community is like, listen, we're tired of it. Let's get rid of it, especially in criminal justice, this is a long time coming. So all this has been piled up. So we really don't have time to wait and we need action now.

But these things are really, really nuanced. And we have to be careful because they're these emotional responses can give us some unintended consequences. So as a black man, you know, I didn't grow up in the crack epidemic, you know, but you know, my parents were from a black community perspective, you know, it was kinda crazy, you know, there's new drugs on the street.

People wanting to feel safe. And so. It was community members who expressed public safety and that we had got all these really tough laws. And I was like, ah, that's not really what we kind of asked for. You know, there was, it was, people was felons, you know, in a neighborhood with like, Oh, we want three strikes and a person getting a third strike and, and going to jail for a lifetime, but still on the CD or bubble gum that start with one four.

And so I feel like, especially in the African-American men, we've been kind of getting the short end of the stick. So we have to really. Even though we need change there. I agree. We needed, we ended yesterday. We had to really get into the weeds. Right. Really be specific of what we're asking for and knowing that the defund movement is not just looking at police, but it's all these other entities and Al Sharpton in his eulogy and gave him Minneapolis.

I thought was so profound because he says the officer had his foot on George's neck. He said, but when, uh, the educational system, miseducated black kids, they had their foot on our neck. When the healthcare system, when black people are overly and disproportionately represented in negative health outcomes, the system had their foot on the neck.

So I want people to believe that we talk about systems. We're talking about a criminal justice system. We're talking about a police system, but there's a lot of other systems. We'll maintain that and I'll, and I'll leave. And I'll just leave with this fact, when you look at the category of black people still don't make up a large number of the population, but they're overly disproportionate and a lot of negative outcomes.

So even thinking about the Corona virus, statistics, if you think about incarceration, if you think about police arrest, police brutality, and when people are talking about black lives matter, it's not that. All lives don't matter. And I know that the all lives matter, we just stay in that this particular thing is to note that how could this group be a fraction of the whole us population, but in every negative outcome, you're overly proportionate in it.

And I think that's why people were saying black lives matter, and we need to have some critical concerns to address those things. I saw this post the other day. And he was like, if you believe that all lives matter, aren't you so upset, but this portion of the book

yeah. If all lives matter, then like, yeah, get on board. You know, like it just that argument, I mean, all lives matter, but I think, you know, especially for the African-American community, you know, all lives matter. When we, when we see things, having the LGBT community. We're there for the support, because we know, I know a lot of people from the African-American community who were outraged, but you know, a couple of months ago with everything that was going down with the immigration border, you know what I'm saying?

That was that wasn't the time to be like, Oh, you know, I know things are bad at the border, but you know, that, that wasn't black people was moment. Then, you know what I'm saying? That was the immigration moment. And we needed voice in that. And it just seems as though it's really interesting. When it's a black line, we have to dilute it and we have to talk about other things and we have to talk about all lives.

We know all our lives matter, but this is this particular moment of a black man, you know, died in police custody. And when that other moments come for those other groups, we should be allies and support those. So whether that's a Jewish member of our community, whether it's a white person, our community at the end of the day, take race out of it.

A human being lost his life. I mean, I watched the video before getting on the call. I haven't seen it all the way through. I saw the last part and the people were like, can you just check his pulse? You know, can you just check his pulse? And he continue and this, and this is the part I think when people was outraged, Um, not just with the police system and also some, he continued to have his knee on the man's neck and you can see the ambulance tap them.

Right. Yo, I need to, I need to get in here and do my job. And people are saying it's bad enough that you got your knee on my neck, but you won't even take it off. You know, it said like the last minute, like you, you don't even, you don't even take it off, you know, here it is, you know, it's, he's in handcuffs and I think that's why people are fed up.

It's like, when, when are you going to take the knee, the knee off my neck? What do I, what do I have to do? And I, and I, and I think it's interesting and we're talking about this, but it is going to be other incidents. And incidences that may not be the African community. And we're just saying, we want that same love and support as we will support any of the other movements.

And for me, it's, if I don't care, if the person was a human life was lost. And so we got to talk about it. If you don't care about humanity, they're not think we all, we all have to do a reality check within ourselves because I mean, the video was gruesome. I think that's what people are trying to say.

We're, we're a human race at the end of the day and we have to care about each other. You know, it's so funny because, um, People were talking about the writing, which I thought was interesting. And it was saying, Oh, you know, why, why would people, you know, smash windows and all of this? And it's funny now Dave's occurred.

Especially he said something interesting. I started to think, you know, isn't it interesting that people feel so strongly about animal abuse, that you have a fur coat, they will throw paint on it. But if there's a light that's lost that you can't smash a window. Or, you know, I think that's, so it, you know, I thought that was so interesting.

Like, yo, if you, if I go around today and go buy a real fur coat, there's an organization that would throw paint on my coat, they would destroy it because that's how strongly they feel about their belief. So how much strongly should we feel that a human life was lost? Well, I think it's also a display of capitalism, right?

It's like idea that becomes more important. And so I think that's where we see this like main focus on like preserving the business, thinking about how things are framed. And I think the point that you made about the knee being on the neck and the caring of humanity, I think that. That video and we, you and I spoke about this before, like that video was so effecting because it was so long and intimate.

And I think as a society, we become incredibly desensitized to gun violence. And so I think the reason that the Brianna Taylor shooting wasn't as effecting in hearing it or seeing a shooting isn't that affecting is because we see shootings all the time. Like in video games and movies in just, yeah.

Hyper violence. We we've almost become desensitized to that, but to actually see someone and because the loss of life is so fast with a bullet, I think we don't see that like true release of life that we saw in that video. And I think that's another problem. And we have to think about like, Something. I was thinking about before, this is like I was reading this book is called the new guardians and it's kind of this re-imagining of police a re-imagining it is a real imagining we're imagining we're not re-imagining the same system.

And the guy was saying how, you know, there are gonna be like, He was referencing the San Bernardino shooting and Las Vegas. And how there are these people with like an arsenal of weapons. And so we do need a weaponized group to handle those situations, but it becomes problematic. And he didn't say this in the book, but it becomes problematic when those same people who are.

Like basically counter terrorism within a local community are also the same people being called for a domestic issue or all the, for like anything. Like I, I remember, and I was talking to one of the guys I was interviewing and we were talking about our differences in experiences with police and my privilege.

And I was saying how, like I was driving down 95 and there was all this debris in the road and I called the cops. So that's like such a difference in experience. And I think that, but the fact that like, they're the people that you call for debris in the road, like, but they're also the people you call when there's like a mass shooting.

So right now, and you and I spoke to your brother last week, who's a Philly police officer. He basically informed us that the majority of the policing that he has experienced as a patrolman is not. Well, he was calling the cops and robbers, crabs and Roberts. Yeah. Cops and robbers. Yeah. Not necessarily enforcing the law, but the thing, the three things that he mentioned were.

Mental health crises. So when someone is a danger to themselves or others in that crisis moment, responding to domestic issues. So not necessarily between pilots. Yeah. Yeah. That was so random that I had was like responding to dead bodies in homes that have like died naturally. No, it's weird. Sometimes I'll be on the phone and he'd be like, Oh man, I just ate.

I got to go piracy about this dead body. And I'm going to be like, dude, it like three o'clock, you know? And cause cause the, one of the jobs of the police officer was her. They have to, uh, they go in and see if it was any suspicious behavior. That's that's their job to kind of do, um, to do that. So. Right.

Yeah. If the cops are the ones doing these social services, and that has kind of at this particular point in time, overpowered their role as law enforcement. What then if our conversation on divestment, if we're talking about investing in the community and taking away the. Roles that police are tasked with in terms of social services and those more nuanced experiences than what is the, like, we really have to think about what is the purpose of police.

And if we, and on the same note that it should be law enforcement, then that's when we enter into the conversation on what is law and what the law that needs to be enforced. And what can like in Cleveland, in 1870s sometime. Around then, or early 19 hundreds, Cleveland basically shifted their law to the golden rule where rather than arresting someone who was drunk, they would walk them home.

And they decreased the rest by literally 75%. But there wasn't an increase in victimization in that time. And so I think we have to think about why, like, If we're policing homelessness and vagrancy and loitering, those are direct reflections of those slaves patrolling. And it goes back to your earlier point, not to cut you off.

The problem we had with policing, especially in the 21st century, is it became profitable, right? Bodies became profitable. You got to think about this. You know, I'm not a stock fund hedge fund guy. So I had a conversation with a colleague. Um, I wasn't McNair scholar. I mean, there was the first black astronaut died, 1989 challenge exposing.

I wanted to go meet his brother in Atlanta. Awesome conversation. And you know, we're talking about criminal justice and he said, you know, I went to my financial advisor and says, anybody who's, you know, got business with private prisons, you know, get me out of those positions. And he was like, Carl, you're going to like every, he was like, you're going to Brett.

He was like, that will be everybody. And so it became profitable because. Tell me this, me and you. We put the capital to buy a private prison. It's a kind of zero fail mission because the way we incarcerate. So when, when it became profitable, that's the issue we have. We talk about, you know, overtime, uh, policing.

We talk about. Counties, rallying politicians, they get a prison built and their, you know, community what resources, if some, you know, these rural counties. And so when it became profitable and even, even this check this out. When we talk about felon, disenfranchisement, we talk about prison. Gerrymandering.

You can take a group of people. Who don't live in your County, incarcerate those individuals in your County. Those body be counted, so you get more representation, but those individuals can vote. And usually the politician in those counties is a Republican will always votes in there against their interest.

So it became very profitable. And so for example, police have discretion. So instead of. Walk into that drunk person home. And during the golden rule, if I didn't go put this guy, you know, incarcerated, even though he might get out six months or a year, you know, that's keeping that keeping the money in the system.

And so what happened when we had a war on drugs, he just kept wanting sucking and sucking. And so were prisons and policing became billion dollar industries. Billion dollar industries and something you said that's really important that we have to have context. And I always like to let people know that the educational landscape of criminal justice criminal justice is a made up degree before the 1980s.

You could not get a degree in criminal justice. It never existed. And so we get criminal justice, you have police departments, they wanted to be more professional. They got federal dollars to go to school and became so successful that universities decided to keep them. But when you think about a university structure, you need English for university to run.

You need chemistry, but you don't need criminal justice. And we talk about imaginary is, and I know a lot of people kind of like push back on the system, but we need more brilliant minds. In this spill, you talk about imagining the system, I'm a Disney buff. And one thing I always wanted to do when I grow up, uh, I always wanted to be a Disney, imaginary, Disney Imagineers were people who created the ride, but you had to be really brilliant to be a Disney imaginary.

And what I see us going in the future, we're going to need some criminal justice imaginary and we lose a lot of brilliant. People to other majors, we lose a lot of brilliant people. We don't have a lot of brilliant people in the profession, and I'm not saying that change was in the inside. That's the only way to make some, but we have to be bold enough.

Like Ilan must sit two astronauts on the first, you know, uh, commercial, non NASA thing to the space center. So you're telling me that we can, we can have those speeds in 2020, but we can't figure out this interaction between police and the community. So I think. I hopefully with this conversation with George Floyd's death is we can highlight that the issue.

And so we can get more minds to get people more, to get critically thinks. But what happens down in criminal justice? And I tell my students, they always ask me like, well, why, why can't you change it? What's going on? And people don't understand how political criminal justice is. We only make changes when it's safe to do so.

The pendulum always swings left to right. Left to right. And so if it's, if it's more conservative, everybody's going to say everything conservative and that's going to be the right thing to say, as things move on and things get a little bit liberal. Now everybody's saying defund, the city council is saying defund.

The commissioner is saying, but just a couple of months ago, none of these people would have ever echo those sentiments is so we have to get to a space where it's evidence-based and we can make some hard decisions to say, you know what. Even though somebody killed your loved one. I don't think we should have a death penalty because it's not really deterring crime.

These is the critical conversations or to say, even though I know you want to defund the police, we can't get rid of them today because we have to be intentional about thinking. We have to have these critical conversations, even though somebody may have done something very bad to harm your loved one. Is not good to incarcerate that person for 40 or 50 years because no other nation does that.

And we see the benefits that all prisoners, 95% of individuals who become incarcerated come back home in the cycle. And so from a community's perspective, even though we have a lot of emotion and not have a lots of it, we have to get back to having these critical conversation to say that. We want to abolish that sometimes change can be made from the inside in, in different things.

So these are the critical, this is the tension that we have to grasp because there's no silver bullet solutions here. We didn't get ourselves into this issue overnight. We're not going to get ourselves out of it as well. Couple things, one something I realized I was on the phone with someone yesterday, and I was realizing that like criminal justice scholars and abolitionists have been.

Within this work and this conversation for decades, the power of the people to get the topics in there. And then now the experts in the scholars need to be a part of the conversation. Like it takes the public too. Get the topic to the forefront, but then that's when we need all the people who've done the work to step in and say, okay, this is where we need to think more nuanced and it's not going to be the silver bullet.

And I think something that I've, I used to speak with Kay Harris about a lot as an abolitionist is it's that conflicting where you want to end prison. And so do you put your resources towards ending prison or do you also acknowledge that the end of prison, like they're not going to open the doors tomorrow and so you also care about the people inside the prison.

So do you then put your effort into making sure that those conditions for those people in there right now are just, yeah, so I think that what's important for all of us right now is to not be overwhelmed by being like. I have to do all the things like, Oh shit, like now I have to reform the education system and the system and reform the criminal justice.

Like just know that as this topic has come to the forefront, there are experts who have been passionate about this for years and decades, and they can step in and. I know that probably the public is skeptical because they're like, well, if we left it to you guys, then why hasn't anything been done yet?

But I think it is necessary to get the public on those platforms like that when we see. And what I think you're saying is so important as we talked about. Future directions. I don't know if we have any people in higher education is called faculty members, maybe provost, deans, whatever. I think a lot of scholars, first of all, the, the Academy is not set up to work with community members.

The incentive structures that I've published on myself and I, and I get senior and a lot of people have been calling for. We need to work with the community. We need to find ways for the Academy for higher education to allow researchers because as you so poignantly pointed out. We've been doing his work for so long, but it took more members of the community to really bring these, listen.

I could have done 10 amazing studies. Presented the commissioner Outlaws should have been like, uh, you know, we got to see the community said they want it and they get it. And so the problem is there's also a tension between the experts in the community members, because nobody like Dave Chappelle was like, you don't want to hear your favorite community, a universe, favorite comedians.

See that is that nobody wants to hear their favorite criminologist or any criminologists say, Hey, this will work. We should do. Because people are like, well, I'm going to fix that narrow. And so before these things reach a critical mass, it will be awesome to get more community. People involved in our research to get more, to make our research more accessible.

But I think a lot of community members don't know that the burden that research has had, because the burden is when you like narrow, you just graduated with your PhD. You're going to go to Arizona, Arizona state university, and you're on the clock. You got three to five years to produce journal articles that have a less than 30% acceptance rate.

For you to get tenure. And so you have to keep your head down. You have to be super focused. And so when George Floyd and all this, I'm in the middle of finishing a dissertation and I'm like, I want to go protest. I want to do this webinar. I mean, I'm lucky. I'm the person where I'm just going to do everything and I'm retired myself, but it was, it was hard because I'm like, all right, I got to just shut the TV off.

I can't answer. Put my phone on, do not the stuff. I need four hours so I can finish, you know, finish this section. You know, and do other things. So it's really hard for the researcher to work with the community. And the community has a disdain for us, which is the critical conversation right here. They have, but the same for us because Johnny come lately, you know, you got the numbers, but you can't change anything.

And we're like, listen, we just trying to warn you where you should go. And so we need to have that tension between researcher, expert and community needs to be better articulated as well. I think that's like one of the most important things, when we think about any kind of change coming forward out of this is that we need community members in those rooms, making policy decisions, because so often experts, even experts are left out of those conversations.

And it's just so the people who are in that room. That's where we see these unintended consequences or the implementation of policy and practice that are completely irrelevant to the needs of the community. Like I remember, and I was telling you this, like, I went to an urban or I participated in an urban bioethics class in the medical school.

Yeah, I remember that. There's a, there's a funny story behind him, but I remember that we were working, uh, my group was working particularly with Nicetown and so the goal was to address their like number one, public health need and. Try and address it with programming. And so as a group, because we were looking at their crime rates, we were thinking, okay, we're going to have a town hall, but like, we kind of know they're going to talk about gun violence.

So like, let's go in with that assumption. We sat down with a bunch of community members, not one person talked about gun violence. They all talked about illegal dumping and trash. And so that's why we do needs assessments of these communities so that we can actually address the needs that they want, rather than going off of assumptions that are often based in biased research.

Like when we talk about incarceration rates and the disproportionality of race, that is a direct display of disproportionate policing and that policing. Again, if we look at the history it's been disproportionately on black communities since its inception, the way that we frame things and how we ask different questions.

Cultivates a certain outcome. And so if we want to ask a certain question a certain way, we're going to get the data that we want to support our assumptions. If we go in interject for, I was gonna say, can I interject for a second? Because we're just saying it's so relevant and I want you to continue that thought.

But for the people that's listening, I always like to give a educational landscape. And what Abby's saying is so important about, you know, like the way they say junk in junk out with the calculator people. I don't think people realize how white. The academic discipline criminal justice is, and I'll give an example.

There's a study and I, and I can provide for somebody on the call, but I think at ranked institutions research one institution, there were like four full time professors, uh, probably, uh, like 15 associate in like 10 to 20, like assistants. It's 2020. Our department criminal justice has graduated one black man over 10 years ago.

And I'll be the second in history. I'll be the second black man to graduate from our department in history. And so all the people that get criminal justice degrees are learning about the system, all of the, all of your correctional officers, public defenders, it judges, your prosecutors, your police officers, and mostly they're white.

You have all white, mostly white policymakers. And then the professor is made up of all. Uh, white individuals. And so you can, you can use it. And that's not to say that just because you're white, you're going to do something damaging. That's the state that there's a lack of diversity there. Even for me, I grew up in South Philly.

I get my hair cut right in the hood and I'm having a conversation with my barber. And I'm like, you know, we got all this gun violence going to city. I'm like I said, it's because of drugs. Right. Drugs, people find out she's like, no, she was like, actually, she was like, you know, from a person, you know, who sold drugs, she was like, Actually when drugs are in a community, there's no violence pretty much.

Cause people don't want you to, she say, you might have like little things here and there, but people trying to, you know, get money. So I'm thinking, Oh, that makes sense. Because like in black communities where they're social economic disadvantage, if you have drugs, that's not almost like synonymous to opportunity.

It got me to thinking like, Oh, people are having violence. Cause they ain't got no opportunity and you know, drugs is that opportunity. You know what I mean? So I'm thinking like that. I feeling like, man, I'm a. Six year PhD, student I'm misinform. You know what I'm saying? And I think if I'm not into somebody who didn't come from Philadelphia, who didn't go to public schools, we don't have these conversations with people.

I mean, that's what you were just saying about the opportunity. Like that was, I just wrote an article on this for drawing from the conversations I had with the fathers in Southwest, where they were like, we buy into mainstream norms and values. We want jobs. We want to. Yeah. I've never met somebody from the hood.

That was like, I like here, everybody who's in the hood always talks about how they want to get out of the hood. Like I've never been a person like it's cool, everybody trampoline, basketball, rap, something, you know, it's everybody trying to get out to. Yeah. Even like the dudes who were selling drugs, they were like, this isn't going to get me rich.

Like I'm not going to get rich. Like, this is just a placeholder until I can get something better. And I think so many of the dudes that I interviewed, they were like, Just give us some business loans, like just give us some money, some opportunity, and we will apply it in a way that we no longer have to put our families in danger because we know we're putting our families in danger.

Like you don't want to be clueless. And so I think that that's a really important thing that we need to talk about when we're talking about disbanding, the police and where we're putting funds. Like we need to not only just invest in services, but also invest in community members because. You know, if we're talking about reparations, like we need to in communities that we have not provided those opportunities for, for centuries, this is the problem I have with the war on drugs.

And there was no apology. People hear of this pair, Rick Ross, the wrapper, but his character is based off a guy named freeway. Ricky Ross. Was a, uh, the largest crack cocaine dealer in the United States. There's a great book by Gary Webb called the dark Alliance. He was actually a journalist who talks about how the us government, who was supplying, correct to inner city communities to fund a war on communism that they couldn't get approved by the government.

Tom cruise is an awesome movie cause I saw it as a movie at first and the criminologist. I was like, Whoa, but basically Gary Webb was a reporter who broke the story. Kind of like a Colin Kaepernick about how the government, you know, was supplying this crack. And, um, he wound up his career was ruined. They actually found him dead, uh, with two bullet wounds in his, in his head.

And he said it was a suicide, which was mysterious. But I see all the, all I have to say is we still have a war on drugs currently, even though Gary Webb Freire, Wiki wash, you can, you can, you can YouTube him, even though we know the United States. Purposely was bringing in large amounts of cocaine to fund award that Congress wouldn't pass.

And so we look at these things. We talk about imagining and abolishing. This is what we're talking about. So the same system that will lock a black man up for some kilos of cocaine is the same governmental system. And this expect, this is not, this is not allegation. This is well documented. It's called the Iran Contra war.

They were fighting the war against communism and basically what happened. They were bringing cocaine and things from Nicaragua. And they were selling it in the United States. So they could supply guns to individuals to fight an illegal war. And so when that story broke, especially as a black person, you know, I grew up with uncles war on crack, and I kind of had a distinct, but I'm growing up, you know, like, how could you do this?

How could you, you know, sell out your community? Even you look at somebody like three were Ricky, wrong, sin, everything, and how he was set up. You know, we had a disdain and after learning that I had to have a whole nother framework of how I understood it. And that's where I think there's a lot of hopelessness in the black community.

And we talk about you having our knee on our neck. It's like, that's like the biggest setup and Tyrone Wertz, who was a lifer, got a sense. A commutative said these words to me. And it resonated when we think about punished. He said, sometimes people think you go to prison to be punished. You say either you can go to prison.

That's why we think people that we have to treat people bad in prison and give them bad condition. When he says. Prison is the punishment. We have a system that says you do something bad. You have a loss of freedom. That is the punishment. Not when you go to prison, you'll get punishment more. And so if people feel as though your loss of freedom is not good enough, this is what we're talking about.

When we, we re-imagined the system, maybe you feel as though this person going away for five years, it's not going to do it. And so that's why people talk about things about restorative justice, about bringing the victim and offender together to see what. Justice will really look right because people say it's not fair that you can harm our loved one.

You can go somewhere for five years and live your life and not have to deal. You got, you didn't have to see us. You know, you didn't have to, you didn't have that emotional. And some people say it would be better if you did your time in the community, that you can feel that shame. You know, somebody say, for example, you know, that rapes my sister.

She has to fill that emotional toil of being a rape victim with the person who does it go shipped off. And he has the ability to go somewhere else and not face that. And so. Can we talk about punishment? People don't go to prison to be punished. The loss will be freezing. Yeah. Freedom is the punishment. I think that that's such an important thing and to the comparative literature a little bit with life sentences and it's interesting.

The United States is unique and everything. So we were the only country in the world that actually sentence children. I mean, as young as 12 and 13 years old to spend a life full life incarcerated at the positive role, we're the only nation and Pennsylvania specifically has the most juvenile life was in the world and Philadelphia County, 500 plus and 300 plus from come from Philadelphia County.

But the problem is talking about a critical conversation. I had a conversation. Uh, when I was in a prison, Pennsylvania just started, uh, they have an office of victims services on the state level. And it's interesting because a lot of my research has dealt with lifers. And basically it is the critical conversation.

He was saying, the people who they murdered, or they're the murder victims, the families say they don't really have a problem with them coming home because of the inner city community. You know, it's a little bit more nuanced, but it's interesting that victim's offices, that, that, that, that represents victims.

Other counties like Lackawanna County and Dorothy and County who have no people in their County serving life sentences, or even people committed murder are the ones that are like saying we don't want murderers coming home. It's all social constructs. It's all how we are framing things. When you have that armor of a badge, it's so different and that is murder, like saying we don't want murders in our communities.

But then those same people are going to be the ones saying, but we want police in our communities. That's where we have to think about how we're framing different things. And I'm not saying that all police aren't murders, but I'm also not saying that all people in prison are going to come out and murder.

And I think that's. To understand that those are nuances important. And so I hope that you can walk away from this feeling hopeful and knowing that these kinds of conversations are happening, where people are trying to transform, imagine something else. And, and I, I think to echo those sentiments, I teach a class called criminal behavior and it fulfills the general education requirements, but human behavior for the university.

And to really, when you have these conversations, Try to humanize individuals to know that criminal behavior is just human behaviors. Individuals. We spend our life trying to maximize pleasures, right. And minimize pain. And so a lot of the things that can be understood is not because this person is a monster is not because this person is inherently criminal.

A lot of things are of human nature. Like humans are inherently selfish, selfish creatures. You know, and so, uh, and so that's what we have to things. And so even being intentional about your language, you know, person that experienced incarceration and stay in saying prisoner and Emmy and, you know, ex-con, and, and really trying to be intentional about, I was just talking to my friend last night about this too.

I think an important stance to acknowledge as well. And this is very much like within the wellness field and the psychology, but. I am a firm believer of this. And I think it really says something about the conditions of individuals is that I really believe that everyone is functioning at their best. If you're going to say this about the people in prison, you also have to say this about the people, the officers committing crimes, like.

If they are not provided the tools or the exposure to different people, and that is their best, that says something about the conditions that they're in. And so we need to really reflect on what is it about our society, our environment, our belief systems that are cultivating these actions as the best outcomes of an individual.

I know that that's controversial, but I think that it's something we need to think about because I think if someone could have done something different, they would have, and that's the critical conversation. We can't argue on one vein that individuals who, you know, become incarcerated, find themselves in particular situations because they didn't have.

The service they need. And that's, we also talk about police officers? Like, you know, I think when people I've, I've been talking to friends will analyze the video. They, like, I kind of feel for that Asian officer, they was like, it looked like you wanted to do something different, but given the circumstance that he was in, he decided not to do anything up and uphold the system.

And I had to question myself of like, there's some times I was silent. And so I think that's also another looking at unarmed killings of black men. That's like, It, it's hard to say that that person's not other, because you see such a graphic event. And if we're going to have the same. As to where people will come incarcerated.

We have to have the same sentiment because that's the only way, you know, we change. And I always like a saying that we always say from the prison I go to, they say proximity being proximate to issue brains for dialogue, change and growth in this. So I challenge you something you don't understand, just get proximate to it and be honest, be like, you know, I had students who said I've never had a black person in my County.

And the only time a black person came, my County did the crime and did something to my friend. So I have the issue going to a person I'm I'm beyond that. I don't know if this is going to work. And I see him uncomfortable the first day we go in and as they get approximate, they understand that things are not black and white.

There's a lot of gray area. And when you get proximate, you'll understand that a lot of there's a lot of gray area. Yeah. So I think it's important for all of us to sit in that gray area. Even I think the gray area is the most uncomfortable because it actually. I it's really easy to sit in the black and white and just stand on a stance, but then to have to think critically and kind of question things like that's where it gets really hard.

And so I think coming out of this, like really. Challenge yourself to sit in that Gregg, you know, difficult. It's really difficult.

Thank you so much for participating in my critical conversation with Joanne Bennett. Next episode, I'll be speaking with Dr. Nikki Jones professor in the department of African-American studies at UC Berkeley. We'll be speaking about the concept of redemption, particularly for black men, with criminal records in America, and how to move away from that conceptualizing change as solely a solitary process, acknowledging the power and influence of relationships and interactions.

I hope you'll tune in, expect new episodes every other Monday. And don't forget to subscribe. I'm Abby Hampson and this was critical conversations.