Redemption, Change, and the Importance of Building Community Capacity with Dr. Nikki Jones

Dr. Nikki Jones is a professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of two books, Between Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner-City Violence and The Chosen Ones: Black Men and the Politics of Redemption.  In this episode, we speak about the differences between internal and external motivations and expectations for redemption, particularly for those who have served time in prison. We speak about the need for opportunities to "do good" in the community to demonstrate personal growth, and explore how Black men with criminal records navigate the difficulties often faced when attempting to distance themselves from the criminal label. The episode concludes with a discussion on how many of those who have contributed to racial inequality in America are now attempting to seek their own redemption and what a redeemed society might look like.

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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 was 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, um, 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 see true change beginning. Hey everyone. Thank you so much for joining me in this critical conversation with Dr. Nikki Jones professor in the department of African-American studies at UC Berkeley. Her research centers on the impact of violence policing and the criminal legal system on black men and women in America.

She is the author of Between Good and Ghetto: African-American Girls and Inner-city Violence and The Chosen Ones: Black Men and the Politics of Redemption. Links to these books can be found in the episode description. Together, we discuss the concept of redemption, particularly for black men with criminal records in America.

And how to move away from conceptualizing change solely as a solitary process, acknowledging the power and influences of relationships and interactions. I hope that you enjoy this episode, feeling engaged and pleased as always continue the conversation once the episode is up. 

My name is Nikki Jones. I'm a professor in the department of African-American studies at UC Berkeley. I joined the department in January of 2014 after spending nine years in a department of sociology at UC Santa Barbara. And before that, uh, I was at the University of Pennsylvania where I earned a degree in sociology in criminology. And so I've been, um, Doing this work for, for a bit of time now and over the course of that time.

Interrogating intersections of race, gender, and justice, and how they're lived in neighborhoods and black neighborhoods and black neighborhoods that have been marginalized and are, uh, overpoliced uh, and under-resourced, uh, in some ways, and at the same time have, have, uh, a good deal of capacity, um, that is often, uh, underlooked, um, been doing that, um, you know, for some time now, uh, and that work is.

Is represented in two books, um, between good and ghetto African-American girls and inner city violence, which is based on field work. I did, uh, in Philadelphia, uh, in between, uh, and the chosen ones, uh, black men and the politics of redemption, which is based on field work. I did, uh, and in San Francisco, uh, uh, over a 2005 to 2010, um, And in both of those books, I'm interrogating black gender ideologies, uh, thinking about how people, um, meet the conditions.

You know, the, uh, as my mentor would say, meet the exigencies of of every day and understanding that in the communities that, you know, I've spent time and, and have studied everyday life is deeply impacted by the criminal legal system. And so the yeah. Routine things that we do in our daily lives, Both thinking about violence in the criminal legal system is something that the respondents in my work have, have had to contend with, um, on a regular basis.

And part of my work is figuring out how they do that. And what are the strategies they use and what are the consequences of those strategies in your book? The chosen ones? Um, it's all about the politics of redemption. The conversations around what it means to be redeemed. Is it ever possible to be redeemed and how, what does that process look like?

And so I think one of the more salient points that you state is that it is an interactive process. So we often speak on how individuals change. And I think that this is problematic within the criminology field completely where we just solely focus. Are narrow lens on individuals rather than broadening to the community, the context, the policies that are impacting action and impacting, uh, cognitive landscapes.

And so I think I would love for you to speak a bit about how you came to that conclusion of it being an interactive process and what that means and what it looks like. Sure. You know, and sometimes I think about the key findings that I lay out in the chosen ones. And I think it, it is so simple, right.

But not, not simplistic. Um, that change takes time. Uh, it is a group process, uh, that it's characterized by setbacks and successes, uh, and that relationships are transformative. Um, now there's a good body of research outside of criminology that supports all of those things, right? All of those findings, how important social relationships are to us.

For example, we could think about this moment that we're in, where people are experiencing a good deal of isolation and, and we crave those relationships. We create new ways to have rituals together. To, you know, to perform these fundamental human processes together, because that is who we are. Uh, and, and it's really only in criminology and it has a lot to do with, with the origins of the discipline, uh, where it is imagined as an individual failing, uh, to, uh, be was categorized as a criminal.

Uh, and that in order to, to move out of that category, Is something that one person does on their own. Uh, and it really goes against the whole body of knowledge that exists outside of that discipline. And so. You know, I saw that in the work as an ethnographer, really interested in interaction. Uh, it became quite clear to me in the field.

Uh, when I was asking this question that you ask as an ethnography for what are people doing together? Uh, it became clear to me that they were doing this work of redemption with one another, that they were pulling other people in, um, into that, that project. And it wasn't always successful. Uh, but that it is a project.

Um, that occurs with, or without the intervention of the criminal legal system or some threat of punishment to me was a particularly important finding, uh, to, to share, uh, and to eliminate in network. Yeah. I think a question that we have to ask when we are discussing redemption is what are they being redeemed from?

And I think that often what we find is that we're just asking them to redeem themselves from simply their race and gender. Right. So a lot of times, yes. Maybe there's something about a criminal label or a criminal background that they have to redeem themselves for, but more often than not, you know, if someone sees you, they don't, you don't necessarily wear the Scarlet letter of a criminal record.

You have to do some digging, but there's an assumption because of race and gender, that that is there. And so. I'm curious in your work, if you ever kind of dug into that, what they felt they were trying to redeem themselves for. Yeah. Uh, and, and so if I think about my, my key respondent, he would talk about.

Uh, you know, being part of the destruction that came to the neighborhood, uh, and, and, you know, you identify these two levels, the institutional level and the interpersonal level. And so institutions and the people institutions we want, we call on people to redeem themselves, right. And, and to move out of a category, that's recognizable to the people in institutions, right.

As, as someone who deserves, for example, to be there, um, uh, and. That is work. That's different from the work that individuals feel that they are doing. I found that work to be much more personal. And, you know, as I write in the first chapter, much more informed by the relationships that were impacted in this case, um, By, you know, his partner Eric's participation in selling drugs that, you know, he can look back on in his neighborhood and see that, you know, it contributed to what he would think of it as some of the, you know, the, the real harm that was done to the neighborhood.

So there's a practice of redeeming oneself from, from. Those acts, that one was involved in at other, in an earlier period of time and acknowledging that you were part of the harm and that you want to be part of building up your community now. And that is, I think again, to say that quite apart from what is demanded.

From people who, you know, for people who have a criminalized identity, the amount of work that they are required to do to quote unquote, prove themselves as new people to others, um, is, is, you know, it's, it's remarkable, uh, how much work has to go into how much is demanded of them. Um, and I think it is because of what you say about, it's not just about moving from on, from a mistake.

It is about. Disproving all that goes along with this, the category, the racialized category and the, you know, anti-blackness is deeply rooted in ideas of race and how people perceive people. Um, you know, uh, who, uh, who are black and who are black and then are marked by the criminal justice system. So I think that that redemption operates on two levels and operates differently in those domains.

Totally. I think the internal redemption in the actual. Redemption. Aren't always aligned and aren't always visible to one another. And I think that's where the problems lie too, is that even if someone's on this personal path to redemption, and I heard this in the interviews that I did for my dissertation, where men were speaking on how they want it to do good for their community.

Now that they've returned home and they recognized the harms that they had caused their community as well. There was. Limited opportunities for them to externalize their internal redemption process. And I think that what's difficult is that as you said to make good, you have to do good, but there also have to be opportunities to do good.

And it's, it's, uh, ironic, I guess. I don't know the term that would be appropriate here, but when we have institutions and, uh, Structures asking for, um, visual cues on redemption and pressuring for that. And yet it's the same institutions and structures, disallowing that display. How does one then prove that they have been working on this internal process?

Just right. Yeah. And that was one of the dilemmas in the, the kind of problems I was trying to unpack, uh, in the work, uh, and to get people to understand, you know, in, in kind of laying it out and it changes a group process is that, you know, People are doing something right. And in order to, to change their lives.

But that requires that we see people in a certain way, right. It requires work on whoever's on the other side of that relationship. And I see that in, in, you know, in, in, in this context, but in other domains as well, we don't understand the degree to which what we do is consequential for what other people.

Do and the possibilities and the opportunities that exist for them. If we don't provide those opportunities, to the extent that we're in positions of power and we can provide those opportunities and that can look different in different settings. Uh, if we don't provide those opportunities and people don't have the opportunity right.

To, to continue to move forward in that process of change and redemption, if we require perfection, Right. Or some, um, alignment with the particular I, you know, kind of, uh, raced in class identity, then that is going to exclude people from, you know, from the start. Uh, and, um, you know, and, and so in, in my work and it, you know, try to do some between good-to-go and ghetto as well, is that even though it centers on a, you know, a population, a small group of people.

It is much it's as much about what other people are doing, what we're doing outside of that group and kind of shining a light on how that matters too. Right, right. Yeah, I think when, so, so when do you think, or so both, when do you personally think as an expert in this topic and an observer of community, and then.

If you've heard from those inside the community, what they think is achievement of redemption. Like at what point have you been redeemed? Yeah, I think it's an ongoing process and I think it's a really personal process as well. Um, and to the extent, you know, what I was saying earlier about, you know, people carry the harm that they've done with them.

I don't know that they ever feel fully. Redeemed, um, for that, but they understand that, you know, uh, a commitment to doing good is part of that process. And also, you know, so my key respondent was a pastor and I imagine that he would think that he's not in the place to evaluate. That final redemption, that, that, that evaluation belongs to our higher power.

Right. And so his responsibility is, is to do the work now, um, you know, based on, on what he knows and how he's trying to orient his life. Um, so I don't, I don't think at, you know, I think it it's, it's hard to evaluate at a personal level. When that process is, is fully, um, accomplished my, yeah. My experience shows me that, you know, if you know, I see folks.

Who are are in this work. Um, and, and think of it as a kind of a life long process. Um, and again, which is much different from that kind of institutionalized process, um, and set of, um, uh, even gatekeeping that occurs and how it might be evaluated on that end. Can you expand on that? Right. And so what does it mean for someone to be six, you know, successful at desisting right.

If we use the criminological terms, right? What is it? Does sister. Um, and so if you have an expectation that someone, um, is not going to fail again, especially a young person. Um, I think that, um, you know, and I, I say this in the book, someone who can look like a success today can fail tomorrow. Right. Uh, and, and the other side of that is true as well.

Uh, and so I think that too often, institutions and funders expect some. Some measure some static measure or, or measurable outcome when it comes to uh desistence. Um, that is, um, um, you know, that is not aligned with how people actually live their lives. Both people who are going through this process and, and, and just people generally, like, that's just not how change happens.

Right. Um, yeah. Yeah. I think it's important to acknowledge behavior as. Temporary and transient in a way that we know, you know, it's funny how, uh, just on a human level. People who are making policy, people who are in power are also people who get in fights with their partners and who have tiffs with friends and who are having things that they're working on personally.

And yet we don't give that human humanization to others. And so I think it's, I really struggle with the concept of desistence. Which to our listeners to assistance is the idea that you stop engaging in crime and, um, The assistance is such a personal responsibility narrative, right? This idea that you fail because you personally engaged in crime, but that doesn't take into consideration the contexts.

And for my dissertation, I just wrote this paper speaking about how many of the men that I interviewed. They wanted to even coming home, even if they had like with a criminal record, they wanted to engage in mainstream work. They wanted a legitimate job, but their race, the intersection of their race, gender, and criminal record.

Uh, brought on employer discrimination and made it incredibly hard. And so rather than take a passive sip back, they took a agentic action and they went out and hustled either by just cutting the lawn of their neighbors or by selling drugs. And so they wanted to desist, but, or structures in place to allow them to desist.

And I think this is the same thing of that. Proving of redemption when there aren't opportunities to desist or to prove change, then we can't necessarily point a finger and say you're a success or your failure because the finger would have to be, you know, circular, we'd have to kind of spread it around and point the fingers at all of the systems that are contributing to this individual's action.

That's right. Uh, and so the listeners can't see me nodding my head in affirmation. Um, and a point I make late in the book is that we talk about, uh, the assistant and in the work, you know, I try to use the language that people use when they're talking about their experiences. And so they're trying to break free from the street, um, and you know, they are trying to get out of the game and things like that, um, which is different from how it's imagined and framed in, in conversations.

Um, around assistance. And in the last thing is the conclusion of the book. You know, I I'm, I make the point that we talk about desistence and we demand assistance, um, from individuals, but we've never held cities accountable right. For it. They have not yet. Desisted from the harm they have done and are doing to black communities.

Right. And, and, and. And that is the context in which people engage in the activities that are punished far more harshly for. Right. And that then determines the trajectories of their lives. It is, it is that they are, you know, black people in a certain space in a particular moment in time, uh, that has as much to do with their involvement and what we've described as criminal behavior, which has changed over the last 10 years.

Right. Uh, and, and, and the consequences of that. And I also want to, you know, to affirm what you said, um, earlier about how we think about. Our respondents in our, in our work. Uh, and, and to not think about people as somehow fundamentally different from ourselves. And so when I started doing this field work, I just finished up as a graduate student.

I had taken a new position. And so I was going through what sociologists would describe as a status transition. Right. And I understood what that felt like for myself. Right. And so that helped me to tune into the fact that part of what people are trying to do when they're breaking away from the street is they're trying to change their status position.

Right. They're trying to change their position in the neighborhood. Uh, and so that was a way of, of understanding their experience. Although in different settings, I expected that some of that. Uh, you know, just human response to that would also appear in the lives of my respondents. And I, you know, I did that in, in between good and ghetto as well.

Um, you know, when I was finishing that book and I was on faculty and I'd been in faculty meetings and they could get heated. Right. And so no one's hitting anybody. Um, but it's conflict. Right. And the girls that I was writing about, they were negotiating conflict, you know, and it, it was looked different at some points because of the setting in which they were in.

Um, but I think it's such a useful point for, for research researchers to remember. Yeah, that, um, those that we are spending time with are, are not so different from, you know, uh, urban golf may, may golf and made the point that much of we much of what we do. Uh, we do because we are human beings, right.

Criminal behavior is human behavior. We're trying to lessen pains and increase pleasure and that, right. Like that's. So, um, something that I was just thinking about. And it's something that you mentioned in the book is. We keep talking about, and you've mentioned this several times of changing identity within while, still in the neighborhood.

And I think, you know, there's often this conversation about how someone makes it and they make it out of the hood, right? Like they've made it, they're making money. And so they move away and there's this idea of leaving the neighborhood behind. But I think there's also something not just in, uh, making it and.

So you want to get a better house and being in a better school district, but I think there's also a need to move away from the loyalties and the person that you were known as within this community, if you are on this path of redemption. And I think, you know, I think about. When I went to college and I'm changing and I'm evolving and I'm learning and my character is growing and then I would go home and I would kind of almost feel a reverting back to who I was with my parents as a child.

You know, it was this strange time when I'm I'm changing and I'm evolving. And then I slipped back when I'm with certain people who know me in a certain way. That's different than who I'm changing into. And so I think it's really difficult that we expect people to go back to the neighborhood. You know, they get out of prison, they go back to a neighborhood that they were known in a certain way, and we expect them to be able to enact a new personality, a new way of living while trying to manage.

Connections and support systems that were there for them before that even if they weren't, uh, what we would necessarily call pro-social, they were still social in a way that allowed someone to feel supported. And so I think that again, in terms of creating opportunities for change, we have to think about what is required in the community to allow someone to stay.

And change. I don't know if it's possible. What do you, yeah. And that was, you know, one of the kind of core sociological problems that I found really interesting about this work is how do you change who you are in a setting where everyone knows who you used to be. Right, right. Um, and again, that's, you know, part of how you get to in order for that to happen in that setting.

Other people have to do something. They have to accept this new identity that you're crafting. And the, and the case that, that, you know, you, in the example you shared, you know, people go off to college and because nobody knows them, people experiment with identities, right. They can play with ID. And that is the expectation, right.

That's you know, development, um, that's the trajectory. But for the folks that I was writing about, and for many young people, particularly in, in, in, you know, late adolescence and into early adulthood, they're in a setting where they also are there in a, in a space where they also want to, uh, establish a new identity.

Um, but don't have the same kinds of resources to do so. Right. And because they are in a place where people know who they used to be, they don't, they may not have access to those other legitimate, um, opportunities in which they could craft a new identity, or if they do, they have economic pressures. And so they know they have to be what, what my respondent, Eric described as half and half.

Right. So they have to move in between these, these two identities. Um, but you know, that is something that I think is, is unique. Uh, and distinctive about this process of change for so many who are not only in the neighborhood, you know, for it, maybe for economic reasons. Yeah. Also they are in love their neighborhood.

Right. And it loved their boys. Right. And love the, you know, the, the family, the street family, um, and at the same time, want to remove themselves from the sight lines of police and peer violence. Uh, and so, you know, that is a dilemma that I don't think that we have spent enough time. Thinking about when it, when it comes to thinking about how we can help people along this, this path help them do the thing that they want to do.

And that there's actually a lot of, um, kind of momentum that will, you know, just through the developmental process, right towards that, because we all want our worlds to get bigger. As we get older, we all want to have these new identities, uh, emerge, and we just don't spend enough time thinking about how we can meet people, where they are to do that.

In part, because people are focused on punishment and retribution and displays of redemption that are acceptable right. To them. Right. And I think, I think too, we, because of research and our need to kind of frame findings in a pretty picture, we're so apt to create. Uh, dual, uh, polarities in beliefs in action when really there's such nuance and complexity.

And dualisms that, co-exist like the guys that I interviewed just as you were saying, they, uh, characterize their neighborhood as both good and bad, safe, and dangerous. They saw cops as good and bad. There were, there were these very complex. Belief systems that they held. And, but we don't necessarily allow that to exist in our research because we want to paint this as black and white.

We want to paint this as legal and not legal, illegal. We want to paint this as a redemptive and. Persistent. We, we, we want these counter narratives to exist because it's easier for us to slip some, you know, data under it, rather than really show the full story that people do. They change and they revert.

But just because they're reverting doesn't mean they're actively not changing it's um, I think, you know, we have to think of the redemptive process as. Uh, like oscillating and, um, so, and I think institutions need to recognize that as well. And think about what is ha like, if we're thinking about it as oscillating, then what.

What are the supports needed on that downswing and what is present in the upswing that allows that and funnel funds into both supporting where there's a need at the downswing. And also, I think we need to focus on what's happening at the upswing, because so often when it's on the upswing, we just accepted and turn away from it like, Oh, there there's no problem here.

We're good. Rather than thinking, Oh, this is something that is. Uh, allowing success. So let's put some resources there rather than viewing everything as a problem. Yeah. I think that's a really good point. I could think about, you know, a couple of young men that I met in the neighborhood who had gone through programs and graduated from these programs.

Right. But now there is a gap because in order to move from that program to, to work, they needed fees to pay, you know, money to pay their union fees, or they needed some other. Thing, some other measure of support to make that leap. Right. Uh, and I do think that, you know, what, you know, just what you said about, um, how we think about our, our, you know, when is our, um, investment, you know, complete, um, when is the program complete?

When does the process complete not understanding that there need to be, you know, support structures that are stable, um, and you know, often institutions react. And we've seen this for example, around probation. And there's been some, you know, obviously obviously, you know, moves to get away from that mindset and probation, not just looking, uh, for failure and punishing people for, you know, technical violation after, um, technical violation in a way that ties them to the system.

But as an institution and as a society, we have to be able to hold people's failures. You know, and I can't underscore how important this is for young people, because any of us, you know, we have young people in our lives or we were young people. We know how often we failed and often they fail and they do things and we've done things that just don't make sense right.

To, to ourselves, um, or don't make sense now. And why wouldn't we just built that in build that into the system? All right. Instead, you know, I think people take it personally when people fail again, there's anger, there's retribution, uh, there. Um, but that doesn't, that doesn't, um, you know, serve young people.

I can think about a panel. I was just on with, with someone, um, who was 15 or 16 when he got to, you know, a harsh sentence for his involvement in a carjacking. And one of the things he said is that, you know, you know, I made a stupid mistake. Um, which is how he sees it. Right. And he's, he's out now and he's quite successful.

Um, and you know, he said, I made a stupid, stupid mistake. And the point I raised then is, but what about everyone around you? Right. What about the response of everyone around you to this young person who made a stupid mistake? Right. Um, some might describe as a stupid mistake. How do we respond? And I think in my work, and especially the chosen ones, what I want to put to push people to think about that response, the response of the criminal legal system, responsive people and what are we doing?

And certainly in between good and ghetto, you know, people were really concerned about girls fighting, but I w what are the grownups doing? Right. In response to these challenges that young people are facing, how are we helping? How are we standing out? You know, are we standing alongside young people? Are we standing in between the violence?

That's coming at a young people, right. Uh  them and, and, you know, so my hope is that this, the work helps people to see that more clearly. Yeah. Well, so I think, you know, in child development, we know that it's not effective to. Uh, a kid does something wrong and then you just throw them in timeout and then that's it.

We know there's all this developmental psychology that says you have to explain and ask, what did you do wrong? And what did you learn from it? And how will you act differently in the future? Right? Like in child terms, um, You know, our criminal justice system is very much set up in a way that we, someone does something, what we perceive as wrong or what the system perceives as wrong.

And then we just throw them away and then expect them to act differently or to learn a lesson in just by being removed. Um, and many people find that the lessons that they learn in prison are through reading are through mentorship are through. Being educated, um, which is just kind of comes with prison is not the purpose of prison.

Um, and so I think when we think about what you've been terming as failures, we also know that it's. It's mistakes that lead us to greatness. Like we need to go, we need to, and you know, maybe not killing someone, but there are certain things that need to happen in order to change. And so I think embracing the quote, unquote failures, as well as learning lessons, as opportunities to grow would be a great framing because nothing is inherently.

Bad or needs inherent redemption. Maybe if we're talking about like, you know, the, the big, you know, the big are of rape or the big M of murder, like these big, like overarching, we know these are wrong, but there's a lot in between that. We it's, it's just about our framing that makes it. Something that needs to be redeemed from.

And so I just, I think we need to really think about, as you're saying, how do we respond to these quote-on-quote failures and how can we use them to our advantage to make stronger and a more successful individ and that, you know, that, that, that, um,

Impulse to punish can not, you know, in young people in, in black youth cannot be, you know, disconnected or severed from the history of seeing black people as disposable. Right. Right. Um, and in American history. Uh, and so certainly that. Is there a reason why the idea and the kind of more nuanced discussion that we're having now was not part of the discussion has not been part of discussion since the origins of the juvenile justice system.

If you read the work of someone like Jeff Ward and black child savers, right? Young black youth were positioned as outside of, of redeem ability. Uh, and you know, this conversation, you know, about the potential and how we ought to respond to young. To bike youth and to young people, um, who come into contact with the criminal justice system is much more recent.

Uh, and you know, these in order to truly respond differently, we would have to interrogate, interrogate the depth of anti-blackness in social institutions. Um, and to understand the ways in which black people and black youth. Are placed outside of imagine it's outside it to borrow an article, uh, written by Sylvia Wynter, uh, outside the universe of moral obligation.

So what happens when we bring black youth into the universe of moral obligation, then how do we orient? How do we respond? And that's some deep work that perhaps because of summer 20, 20 and all that's happened, um, that maybe, you know, some institutions, uh, and certainly people are, are, are interested, um, in that work now, um, But that is, that is the work, you know, you know, to, to, to move away from what individuals are doing.

That is the work as a society we need to do to not, you know, to, to bring people closer into community. Yeah, I think, um, so moving into ideas. From stemming from summer 2020. We see. And this is actually really interesting for me. I remember being at ASC, which is the American society of criminology. It's a conference that's really big in criminology and everyone goes, and I remember being there last year and I was sitting in your talk and a girl raised her hand and I, this was, I had never.

Even conceptualized or heard someone say abolish the police. And I remember a student raised her hand and asked you about abolishing the police, because you had been speaking about research, you had done with police and there was. I think he was a police chief sitting in the front row. And so you very, uh, diplomatically answered the question, but it was the first time I had ever heard someone say abolish the police.

And I'm a prison abolitionist. I've, I've been on that wave for a long, many years. And this was the first time applying that. Thought to this other realm. And so, you know, besides that we see summer 20, 20, this move towards defunding the police and this idea of justice reinvestment, and, um, the idea of moving funds away from policing into communities or just into services that could serve communities.

And so something that you discuss in the book is the difference. And tensions between internal and external caregivers. And you speak about internal caregivers as neighbors and peers, um, and caretakers within, um, the community block captains, things like that versus external caregivers, which are caretakers, which would be social services, welfare programs, things like that.

So I'm curious in your work, whether you think. One would be better to fund the meet other, uh, what would it look like to invest in internal caretakers? Um, and. You know, the, one of the other things you speak about as investing in capacity building rather than simply crime fighting. And so, um, what would it look like to build capacity?

And when we're talking about crime fighting, we mean those individuals from the community who are, who have been in the streets, Before and who have the credibility to be mediators. So who are brought in to fight crime by interjecting themselves in potentially violent situations. This was huge. Um, you know, in both books, we have to meet young people where they are and then walk alongside them as they are moving.

Right. And, and trying to build up a life that is affirming for them. Right. And that is safe for them. Right. And, um, you know, is what they imagine to be a, a good life. So when I talk about building up the capacity it's to understand that there, that we can't funnel money through. You know, uh, a small group of people who are, uh, safe for the city, small group of organizations that are, are safe investments for the city, right.

We have to think of ways to get, you know, funding and support to people who are outside of that. The focus is still on these very reactionary. Uh, instances rather than more on the prevention side of creating opportunity, because we know like in a conversation that I had with my colleague, Juan. He was speaking with his barber and his barber had previously been in the drug game and he was talking to her and he was like, you know, all these drugs in the neighborhood they're causing all this crime.

And she was like, honestly, when there's a plethora of drugs in the neighborhood, things are pretty chill. It's when people are struggling or there, the supply is low that you will see conflict because drugs. Equate to opportunity. And we know that when people have opportunity, they it's unlikely that they're going to engage in crime.

And so I think that when we think about where to invest, it's about creating opportunity. Um, it's not like none of the guys that I interviewed wanted. To sell drugs. They knew they were putting their family in harm by doing that, but they also wanted money, you know, and there were very limited opportunities for them.

And I think, you know, something that, um, I spoke with another gentleman named John Pace, who I was telling you about before this who, um, came home and was. Uh, has started a support group for, uh, men and women coming home from having a juvenile life sentence. And when I asked what he felt was the most successful, uh, resource to provide and could be then applied on the prevention end prior to any kind of getting caught up in the system.

He said, cultivating agency. And the idea of asking someone, what do they want to do, and then providing an opportunity for that. And we think about privileged communities where, you know, you ask a child, what do you want to do? And they say, you know, uh, they want to do a L uh, gymnastics, or they want to do.

Fencing or whatever. And in a privileged community, you can easily find that, but in these other communities that are marginalized and underfunded, there aren't that many opportunities even. And because of that, even if you asked someone may not even know that that's an option to say. And so I think again, in that capacity building, it's, it's building a capacity.

Not only cause I think sometimes when we think about what to fund, we're just solely thinking about these basics. Like we're just thinking, give them housing and some quality education and some jobs and there'll be good, but we need to think beyond that because it's not just the bare minimum that allows thriving communities to thrive.

It's all of these opportunities. Yeah, I think, yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. And, um, you know, I'm thinking about, you know, one of the things that was interesting about the work I was doing in San Francisco is that St. San Francisco's a wealthy city, it's a global city. Um, there was a, you know, a number of resources exist, a wealth of resources.

Non-profit organizations exist in, in San Francisco ready to, to, to provide support and services. And yet this small block right. Of, of the neighborhood called the Western edition. But what people refer to as the Fillmore, you know, this is small geographic space, right? So isolated from all of the resources.

And this is, you know, a neighbor that's right. Smack in the middle of the city. Right. And it felt so isolated, socially isolated, economically isolated from the rest of the city. And then the programs that existed often. Had an idea of what young people should be doing, right. Uh, that required young people to meet a set of expectations either to get into the program or very early in the program.

Right. And so again, you know, this idea of meeting young people where they are, and I, I love what, you know, your guests said about agency, uh, engaging with them. Um, you know, so often the engagement that, that young people were having in these more formal settings was, you know, quite frankly terrifying.

Right. So it's adults telling them that they are at risk of dying or being incarcerated. What I saw young people's eyes was terror, right. That they were terrified and that could, you know, uh, and gender kind of paralysis. Like what does someone do? I mean, I would often think how to be a young person coming of age and coming to the realization that this world is against you.

For what? For what. And that is not an experience that's shared right. In the way that you're, you know, you said it, uh, you know, across, across settings. Uh, and so understanding that then that should orient us differently and T should help us to understand what the problem is, which is not it kind of immutable characteristics of young people that are.

Yeah, I have some proclivity imagine for  for core criminal activity, but the context in which that has been created in this setting that's, that's been created. And I try to show that in the kind of bookends of the book, right in the kind of life history of Eric and the life history of, of Jay, who, you know, both smart people, trying to figure out this setting and the changing conditions over time, make that much more difficult.

For young people. Um, and that was 10 years ago. Right. And so imagine, you know, what things are like now, especially given where we are. And the pandemic, um, to the point that you made, you know, right now we see spikes of, of gun violence. And what is the kind of common framing? Well, it's because the police aren't there, but actually it's it's because the, the social supports that existed for people, the sociability that existed for people, the economic resources that existed for people, the stability, right.

That existed for people, even the underground economy exists. And all of that is gone. All right. Uh, and so what do we, what should we expect under those conditions? Right. More conflict. And when there are guns available, more of those conflicts are going to be resolved with guns, right. Uh, but that's not the narrative that people go to quickly, right.

They go to, um, you know, a need for the, you know, these people, as they would, would imagine them to be contained and surveilled and punished. I love the point that you just said that it's terrifying because we almost. And in another episode with when Dr. Whitney Hollins, she she's speaking about how her father was incarcerated for 25 plus years of her life.

And she did really well in school, and that was her positive trauma response. And. People viewed her as exceptional because she didn't go down what we would perceive as the traditional path of a child of incarcerated parents, where you get incarcerated yourself. And so thinking about how we. We then view these children who we've labeled as at risk as then exceptional, if they live past 21 or if they do well.

And yes, there are certain things that need to be celebrated, but success within those communities also needs to be normalized so that there's not this, uh, Heavily racialized conversation on exceptionalism. Yeah. I was going to say, you see that in the, in the kind of coverage of homicides as well. And I had a student, um, I know Keller who was doing some work on this, uh, Two is that, you know who, but we see this all the time.

Like who's lives are a value, right? Yeah. How are the victims of gun violence or police violence I had, how were they framed? How were they talked about? And on some level there's always this thread of, of deservedness right. Well, did they deserve what happened to them? Because they were involved in, in certain kinds of activity.

Um, and then somehow if they weren't involved in that activity, then they, you know, are more exceptional, right. And more deserving of it, of, of grief or, um, you know, uh, or leniency. Um, and so, you know, I think that that is certainly, um, That kind of framing. And that way of understand, it's extremely talking about black people, understanding blackness of, of, of having to understand black people as either, you know, to borrow from the first book good or, or ghetto.

Right. Uh, you know, and that's, you know, the, the language that folks use, um, That can happen internally. Right? So certainly black folks participate in that, but you know, that is also part of a, you know, a larger history of seeing black people, um, you know, framing black people as criminal, as dangerous as threatening.

Right. And then imagining exceptions to that categorization. Right. And I think, I think the deservedness that we provide in terms of, uh, Remorse grief. All of that. When it comes to a police shooting very much reflects the underlying belief system of our criminal justice system as a whole, right? The fact that we have the death penalty, we have life without parole.

We have prisons where we so, uh, Obviously throw someone's life away because they've simply engaged in crime. Um, and, or, and or what we deemed criminal right now, which as we've seen in the last 10 years is fluid. Um, and so I think our criminal justice system perpetuates and cycles this narrative of a lack of concern for those who.

Have acted in what we define as a criminal way. Um, and so I think when we think about change in terms of narratives, it's not only like there are bigger structural, uh, issues that are. Filtering into our worldviews and filtering into how we perceive certain people. Yeah. And you know, this is why I'm excited about the conversation around, uh, abolition and where it is in this moment.

And certainly over the course of the last, um, 10 plus years in the work that I've done on both sides of the, of the dividing line. So my body greater body of work, um, alongside and with black. Black communities. Uh, and the work that I did in collaboration, um, with policing to get interviews with officers and to get access to, uh, video recordings of officers, all of that.

But, you know, by the time. You know, before this summer, by the time I've moved through all of that work, it is clear to me how limited, you know, ideas for reform are how limited they are in really addressing the root problems that we are we're thinking about here. Um, and that, you know, it, you know, there's part of my work that I had to move through in order to, to see that.

So clearly, but certainly by the time I was done with, with. This book, you know, that was, was clear. And then, so then the question is, is what is next or what do we do? And so this conversation about abolition is about building up. Institutions it's about building capacity. It's about shrinking the possibility of institutions to criminalize black people, to criminalize people and to bring them into that system and to lock them into that system.

It's about pushing back on the legitimacy and the monopoly that that system has on categorizing people. Right. And claiming people claiming people's bodies and containing people, uh, and, and their lives, right. And their whole trajectory of their lives, pushing back on that. And that's part of what I see in this moment is other institutions who had really, you know, seated responsibility of their responsibility to law enforcement now imagining a different role from them, for themselves in that work in this moment.

And all of this goes back to the unfinished work, you know, post emancipation. Whereas the boys rights, you know, the unfinished project, uh, is that, you know, we had emancipation, but we did not have the building up of the S the social institutions that would actually deliver racial equality. Right. And because we didn't have that, what we had is institutions take up space to do reclaim.

Black bodies who had been at black people who had been freed. Right. And, and those institutions, we saw this idea Hartman, you know, describes this as a spatial organization of, of racial control, right. Morphs over time. Right. Sally Hayden writes about that in her books, late patrols as well. And so that these institutions existed in a space.

Um, and, and we're able to dominate a space and in turn to continue the project of racial domination in part, because those other institutions didn't exist. Right. And every moment in which they might have done that work right from the new deal, right. And from Postmates patient, the new deal, right. And throughout each moment, there's always been a retrenchment retrenchment.

There's always been a pushback. There's always been some, uh, you know, exclusion, structural exclusion that prevents that. That, you know, uh, equality, uh, from being accomplished. And, you know, so the hope in this moment is returning to this conversation. Maybe perhaps the trajectory can be shifted a bit away from where it's been historically.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I definitely feel hopeful in this moment because I think something that we're seeing a bit differently. And I'm curious if you share this opinion, um, I feel like. In previous movements, the critique has laid on government and policy makers. Um, and you know, the quote unquote man and, and asking for change from the top down.

And I, I feel like in this current moment, The critical gaze is being asked to be turned inward on every single person. And I think more people are coming to understand their personal contribution to inequality. Um, and I think that this is different because people aren't just then putting the onus on the government and policy makers to make change.

But, um, Igniting in personal change as well. Um, and so I think if anything, those with any level of privilege are now having to journey on their own path of redemption and like, what does that mean in terms of trying to redeem. Themselves from contributing to racism in America. And I think, you know, in the beginning, when we, when I asked, what does it look like to be redeemed?

I think, you know, in this conversation it would be abolition. It would be. Creating opportunities for capacity building in marginalized communities. It would be to no longer categorize communities as marginalized. You know, it would be to create equal opportunity even beyond equal because there has to be an acknowledgement of the, you know, decades, centuries of inequality.

So I definitely think. You know, to come full circle. It's not just those who have explicitly acted for criminal that need to seek redemption or who want to seek redemption, but all those who have contributed to the structures we have in place today, that sounds right. Thank you so much for participating in my critical conversation with Dr.

Nikki Jones. Next episode, I'll be speaking with John Pace. At the age of 17, John Pace was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole or what is considered death by incarceration in 2017. After a Supreme court decision in 2012, that deemed mandatory sentencing of children to life without parole is unconstitutional.

And another decision in 2016 that permitted the re sentencing of all those who had been previously sentenced to death by incarceration as children, John pastes was released. In our conversation, we speak about what it's like to grow up in prison. What's necessary for a successful re-entry back into the community and how cultivating opportunities for individuals to enact their agency is the key to enhancing public safety and health.

I hope that you'll tune in, expect new episodes every other Monday. And don't forget to subscribe. I'm Abbie Henson, and this was Critical Conversations.