Radical Acts of Justice: Jocelyn Simonson
October 5th, 2023
”It shouldn't be obvious that justice equals cages.”
Jocelyn Simonson is Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, a former public defender, and the author of Radical Acts of Justice: How Ordinary People Are Dismantling Mass Incarceration. We discuss how certain radical acts of justice challenge the legitimacy of the criminal system and form the underpinning of a new collective legal thought.
The four pillars of this work comprise of court watching, community bail funds, participatory defense, and people’s budgets. Bail funds are pulling the rug out from the system's justification for what it's doing. Defunding the system in this way shows that the combination of carceral and economic forces that we currently use to “do justice” is not inevitable. A big part of the power of these acts of justice is that they’re done collectively. Abolition has two sides: breaking down and building up. Jocelyn shared that “we need to simultaneously decarcerate, stop spending our resources, and start building it out.”
Follow Jocelyn on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/j_simonson
Follow Mila on Twitter:
Follow Future Hindsight on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/futurehindsightpod/
Love Future Hindsight? Take our Listener Survey!
http://survey.podtrac.com/start-survey.aspx?pubid=6tI0Zi1e78vq&ver=standard
Take the Democracy Group’s Listener Survey!
https://www.democracygroup.org/survey
Want to support the show and get it early?
https://patreon.com/futurehindsight
Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Jocelyn Simonson
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producer: Zack Travis
-
Jocelyn Simonson Transcript
Mila Atmos: [00:00:04] Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action items for you and me. I'm Mila Atmos.
In a world where justice is elusive, the carceral system is deeply entrenched in our society, and public safety is a mirage, I've been wondering whether democracy has the power to fundamentally reform the system. Or better yet, imagine criminal justice anew. What would it take? As it turns out, ordinary people all over the United States are already coming together to challenge the legitimacy of the criminal system and doing so, surprisingly, by working within the rules of that system. This work is not only changing some outcomes, but perhaps most importantly, forming the underpinning of collective legal thought, or demosprudence.
To help us guide our thinking of what's possible, we're joined by Jocelyn Simonson. She's a professor of law at Brooklyn Law School, a former public defender and the author of Radical Acts of Justice: How Ordinary People Are Dismantling Mass Incarceration.
Welcome, Jocelyn. Thank you for joining us.
Jocelyn Simonson: [00:01:23] Thank you so much for having me. Good morning.
Mila Atmos: [00:01:25] Good morning. So on the show, we just had a conversation about the systemic, immensely cruel and yet strangely casual injustice meted out by the criminal system. And my overriding thought was that justice will be perpetually out of reach, that the interwoven protections offered to prosecutors, judges, law enforcement will doom the accused forever, whether they're guilty or not. So I was so excited to read your book about the work to dismantle the system. And you start with how the state refers to itself as the people. And I found this quite unexpected. Why did you start there?
Jocelyn Simonson: [00:02:04] I started there because the genesis of a lot of my thinking and research and activism comes from my years as a public defender in the
Bronx. I worked there for five years before switching into academia and in New York State, as in quite a few states, the prosecutors refer to themselves as the People, and this idea would be familiar to anyone who watches "Law and Order," where in the beginning they say that the People are represented by the police and the prosecutors. You could also be familiar if you've heard of the idea of the People of the state of New York versus Jocelyn Simonson in a case. So it's this idea that because prosecutors are elected, they represent the People. But when I practiced in criminal courtrooms in the Bronx, this idea took on a life of its own. So prosecutors would literally be called the people. Like they'd say, are the People in the courtroom? Has anyone seen the People today? Good morning. How are you, People? They would literally embody the idea of the people and it comes to seem natural. So I would sometimes refer to them as the People, until I stopped and said, What am I doing? And if you think of the implication of that, the idea that you have a crowded courtroom like the Bronx Criminal Court. The audience is packed with people, largely poor people of color, waiting for their cases to be called or waiting for the cases of their loved ones. And then people who are accused of crimes are standing in front of the judge. And the implication of saying the prosecutor is the People is that none of those human beings are the People. The implication is also that should there be a jury trial -- there are very few jury trials, but sometimes we have jurors. They're not the People, either. And it starts to feel not just absurd, but harmful, especially if, as we're doing here, we're thinking about democracy and the idea that this system is supposed to embody some form of democratic justice in some way. And yet here we have prosecutors saying that they are the People and enacting the violence of putting someone in handcuffs or trying to put someone in jail in the name of the People. And in contrast to the will of the actual literal people sitting in the courtroom. And on the one hand, it might sound rhetorical, but when you're watching the everyday violence of people churning through the system, being sent to cages, often for very low-level offenses, then it actually starts to seem like an ideological problem. It showcases the way that the court, as you're sitting there, is actually an anti-democratic institution, and so to use that name of the People gives it a legitimacy that on the one hand starts to see legitimate. But if you start to poke holes in, it kind of reveals the system for what it is.
Mila Atmos: [00:04:57] Well, I thought it was an apt way to set the frame for the power of collective action that challenges the legitimacy of the system. And I was most surprised by the impact of court watching. First of all, I did not know that the First
Amendment affords us the freedom to listen, so the public can check on judicial behavior, prosecutors and police officers. So the idea here is that the simple act of observing changes behavior, and sometimes outcomes. Of course, changing outcomes is not actually common. So how is court watching a radical act of justice?
Jocelyn Simonson: [00:05:35] Yeah, so court watching in the way that I am thinking about it, and studying it, and writing about it, involves groups of people who get together and often in matching t-shirts, often holding clipboards to write down what they're seeing and what's being said. And they're doing it not to watch one individual case, but to watch the entire day or the entire session of cases and to observe what's happening in their name. And on the one hand, that seems kind of ordinary to go and watch. Courtrooms are open, and as you say, they are protected by the First Amendment. Are there some exceptions? Sure. But the general idea that the public can come into the courtroom is a constitutional idea. In addition to the person who's accused having a Sixth Amendment right to a public trial, which actually means to a public case, to a public adjudication. So I've sat in courtrooms along with court watchers. And what happens is if they walk in with, for example, in New York City yellow t-shirts that say "Court Watch NYC" and the O is in the shape of an eye, like an eye from someone's face that you can see through. And they sit there, and you can feel the energy in that room change. Because even though courtrooms are crowded, being watched and observed by people who are there for their own cases is very different from members of the public coming in and sitting there and saying, we are writing down what you're saying. We're writing it down individually. We're looking at who the prosecutor's names are and what they're saying. And we're also aggregating what we see. We're entering what we see into computers and we're generating reports and our reports are going to tell stories of what we're seeing and they're going to show the numbers of what you're doing. So it might be that in Manhattan, for instance, the elected prosecutor says, I am no longer going to prosecute turnstile jumping cases. Instead, I'm going to try to give treatment to people. Here come court watchers to sit down and watch case by case and see that that's not actually happening, because these low-level cases are not the kind of cases that newspaper reporters are going to come in and report about. And so here come court watchers and they're tweeting what they say. And we have seen in real time the system bristle. And just people coming in and watching what's happening in a public courtroom. So court officers have tried to remove people from the courtroom, unaware at first that there's a right to be there. Prosecutors have asked that they not be allowed
to say the name of the prosecutor on Twitter, even though they are public officials or representing a public official, saying what they want. You can see the frustration from all of the systemic actors when people are coming to observe and report on what's happening. Part of the power of what they're doing is also that they're doing it collectively. So again, to go back to this concept of the People, and I do think it's an important ideological concept. Literally a group of people are coming in and sometimes they will say things like, "what are you doing in our name?" Or a report will say, "not in our name." And so they're coming in and they're saying, where are the public, regular people, that you say you're doing justice for? And they're coming in with a critical stance. Prosecutors know that they're coming in to see whether so-called justice is actually happening. And court watching organizations have really proliferated around the United States in the last 8 to 10 years. And it's not that all of them are radical or abolitionists, although many of them are. But increasingly, they are taking a critical stance toward what's happening, saying "we have too much incarceration, we have too many prosecutions. We want to try to understand what justice is." And then they're writing reports and holding press conferences, educating the public as to things that we wouldn't ordinarily know. And then there's this other power that I try to document in the book and that is really palpable when you are with court watchers or talk to them about what they're doing, which is that to know intellectually about the system and how it works is really not the same as to sit there physically and watch what's happening. Anyone who's worked in a courtroom knows this. Anyone who's been prosecuted knows this. But to sit there and watch in the aggregate, case after case after case, a woman is prosecuted for stealing baby formula-- allegedly. A child is prosecuted for jumping a turnstile-- allegedly. Person after person after person is prosecuted for drug related offenses. And to see that happen over and over and to hear the testimony or excuses on the record, however you think about what's happening. And to see person after person plead guilty and plead guilty and plead guilty and plead guilty, because that's what happens in most cases, can actually have a profound emotional impact on you. And now imagine you're doing it with a collective of people and you're able to talk together about what you're seeing and you're able to engage with the public or with each other. And notice how what you're doing actually is participating in the system. The public is supposed to be a check on elected officials. The public is supposed to be a check on justice. And yet, for so long, we've had a criminal system that processes millions of people through it every year. That puts 7 million people at any one time just in jail. Right? 400 to 500,000 in jail pre-trial without having been found guilty of anything.
And so we're doing this in these vast numbers without any accounting for what we're doing in a nuanced or specific way, especially when it comes to the word set on the record in the courtroom.
Mila Atmos: [00:11:24] Yeah, I thought it was really, really powerful on all the counts you just mentioned. And to take it a step further, I was also really heartened by the fact that another pillar of this work is participatory defense. And we know, of course, that there's a severe shortage of good legal representation for the accused. That's one of the reasons so many people plead guilty because they really don't have a good lawyer. And you point to the fact that even though one might even have a good public defender, the problem is that these defenders are still part of the system. And so here is a perfect place for participatory defense. What exactly is participatory defense and how does it work?
Jocelyn Simonson: [00:12:08] Participatory defense is another democratic collective act within the system that has really expanded exponentially over the last couple of decades. It went from about 15 years ago having 2 or 3 groups around the country doing this. And now you can find dozens in the National Participatory Defense Network. And what it is they call themselves hubs, participatory defense hubs is a group of people that meets regularly to assess and help out people who have ongoing criminal cases or other cases in the legal system somewhere. It sounds kind of basic, but it actually can be profoundly powerful. So, for example, I follow the story of a participatory defense hub in Knoxville, Tennessee. It's Community Defense of East Tennessee. And they started around, I believe, 2018 or so, meeting weekly in the basement of a church. And at first there was just a handful of people trying to understand. They had been to a training what the idea of participatory defense could be. There are no lawyers in the room by design, and people come in and they say, "Here's a case that I have; here's the police paperwork. I have a public defender." Again, they might actually be a wonderful lawyer, although often they might not be as well. Or maybe they're a terrific, talented lawyer with too many cases to be able to really take the time and concentrate on one person. But when a group of non-lawyers gets together and starts to look at a case, they see things that the system doesn't see. They say to themselves, "Wait a minute, shouldn't there be a security camera on that corner?" They say to themselves, "Wait a minute, you're being accused of being a drug dealer who terrorized the neighborhood. But we know you, Joe, and we know that you help stop cars on the corner every day to
keep kids safe." Or "we know that you take care of your daughter and pack her lunches every morning." And so they're able to both bring out the humanity of individuals by doing things like making videos and preparing sentencing memos in court and analyze the cases and figure out what's going on. And they do this in the aggregate. And this is one of the themes in the book. It's not a group of people getting together around one individual case, although that can be powerful, too. And I talk about that as well. If you look at Community Defense of East Tennessee, they have met on Monday evening for years, week in and week out, looking at case after case after case. And one meeting might look at three different pending cases. If the case is going to go to trial, they are sitting in the courtroom, and court watching at what they're doing. If bail is set in a case, they're helping raise money to pay somebody's bail. But most of all, they are collectively building power and coming into a courtroom not -- again, it's not somebody's cousin or mom coming in to say "they're a real person. Let me tell you about them." -- It's a community group coming in and saying, "we live in the community and we want to say to the court that this is a person, a human being." And if we take account of their humanity, inevitably the sentence is lower again and again and again. A well-meaning public defender might say this is not the kind of case where you can not get jail time. I'm sorry to say you're going to have to do some jail time. And then the participatory defense hub will meet week in and week out to analyze a case, write a memo or make a video for a court, and then somebody will be released without going to jail. They make things that the system tells them is impossible, possible. And so as they do that, they start to feel the power of what they're doing, both physically in the courthouse, and then more broadly. So participatory defense hubs, and this is true of court watching organizations as well, engage in broader advocacy. They have campaigns to change the laws in their towns and their cities and states. And those laws have been changed. They get together and they join broad coalitions in their states or even across the country to try to make public defense better. They're not against public defenders. They join campaigns to try to get rid of bail in their state. And California would be a strong example of this. And so they become powerful political forces while not stopping the week in and week out work of helping individuals who are caught in the system.
Mila Atmos: [00:16:37] Well, I thought what was really powerful about these stories of participatory defense was that they just kept going anyway, even though to your point, they were told it was not going to work. This person is going to serve some time. And I think it's so, I don't know... I think it's so life affirming in a way. Right. That people say,
"okay, I hear you, but we're going to do this anyway because this is important." So of course, a core part of the work to dismantle mass incarceration is to eliminate money bail. And we've had several conversations on the show about bail. One with Robin Steinberg a while back when she was the CEO of The Bail Project and most recently with Alana Sivin, at Forward.US about bail reform in New York State. And there's some big news from Illinois in mid-September where the Pretrial Fairness Act took effect eliminating cash bail. Now most states have not eliminated bail, and bail funds have stepped in to pay the ransom to free people before trial. When we're thinking about the system, how does bailing people out upset the apple cart?
Jocelyn Simonson: [00:17:43] Illinois is a terrific example to answer this question, because just within the last month, the Pretrial Fairness Act is now being enforced. So we literally, for the first time, don't have money bond in the state of Illinois. And so that means that you can't put somebody in jail, in a cage, while they're still presumed innocent just because they can't pay the amount of money that a judge has said they have to pay. How did that happen? The only reason we have that law is because a large statewide coalition of groups got together and they went to their state legislators and they went to rallies and they went to the public and they demonstrated that money bond was actually not keeping communities safer. And so what a group like the Chicago Community Bond Fund does is they have a pool of money and they pay bail or bond for strangers, for people who they don't know in the community, out of a broader sense of the injustice of holding someone in a cage because of their poverty. But here's the power of what they're doing. It's not just materially helping people. It is doing profound political, democratic and really ideological work. Because the legal reason that judges are allowed to set money bail or bond at all is to protect the community, is to do it to protect the safety of the community. This is kind of like the idea of the People. Now imagine a group comes in and says, "we are part of the community and we think that our community, our neighborhood, our county, our city is actually safer if people are not sitting in cages, and are home. They're not losing their jobs. They're able to keep watching their kids." And studies show that they're less likely to do conduct that leads to a re-arrest in the future. So it's this idea of community and an idea of public safety that contrasts directly with what the system is saying. If you walk into a criminal courtroom and someone says, "today, I'm going to protect the community," what a judge means is "I'm going to put somebody in jail. I'm going to punish somebody. That's justice." When a community bail fund or a community bond fund or a group of people come together
and they pay bail or bond for a stranger, they are showing the system that it cannot declare that the entire community wants somebody in jail. It cannot declare that it represents the people when it's doing that work. Might it represent some parts of the community and some parts of the people? Sure. But community bail funds are actually pulling the rug out of the system's justification for what it's doing. You're not doing it to protect the community. You're doing it because that's your idea of justice. Not necessarily the community's idea of justice. And because of that profound political and democratic work, system actors hate community bail funds. So I have seen judges absolutely livid when they see somebody walk into a courtroom for whom they had set bail beyond the amount that they knew they could afford. So imagine a person who's been freed by a bail fund walking into a courtroom. They haven't been rearrested. There's no allegation they've done anything wrong in the interim and they're walking in without having missed their court date. Why would a judge be angry? Why would a judge scream out? I've seen it. "Who has set bail for that man?" The reason they do that is because it didn't work the way it was supposed to. This person was supposed to be in a cage. This person was supposed to plead guilty because they needed to go home because they couldn't afford the amount that the bail was set. So it's actually disrupting the working of the system and shifting the ideological ground that the system uses to justify itself.
Mila Atmos: [00:21:34] We are taking a short break to share about a podcast called Democracy Decoded, and we'll continue with Jocelyn when we come back. Democracy faces a wide range of challenges from citizen participation in decision-making, and divisive hyper partisan politics to misinformation, war and civil unrest. Many people do not trust their democratic institutions and increasingly distrust each other. But our democracy matters, and we need to find space to solve common problems and issues across these divides. On the Democracy Matters podcast, you'll hear conversations with a wide range of scholars, experts and practitioners who are dedicated to exploring ways to make our democracy more resilient for the common good. Join the conversation by subscribing to Democracy Matters wherever you get your podcasts.
And now let's return to my conversation with Jocelyn Simonson.
Mila Atmos: [00:22:40] Well, you mentioned something really interesting just now about the judge being very upset that somebody set bail. And in a way, I think that was the
other surprising thing about your book was that it also gave us the humanity of the people on on the prosecution and the judges, and reveal them for the humans that they are. Right. Like not just these, "impartial actors" who are part of the system. And since we were talking about this judge being upset, I wanted to add this story that is in the book about a judge setting a $5 bail in Denver or go to jail, which would cost taxpayers $100 per night. And this, in my mind, actually sums up the insanity of the system and also points to the fact that this is about economics. There are a lot of people who are invested in keeping this system the way that it is. So what are we up against here?
Jocelyn Simonson: [00:23:37] What are we up against? We're up against both material and ideological forces, so it's really important to name the economy. And bail can sort of epitomize the situation. Right. The system is asking members of the public, impoverished members of the public, to give the system money in order to release somebody. People who are poor cannot even pay that money. Right. Can't pay what bail funds call ransom. And so then it's taxpayers who pay for people to stay in jail. And what happens when we put people in jail, They are subjected to the torture of living in a cage, of being surrounded by other people who are going through the trauma, and they are more likely to engage in conduct that will lead to re-arrest in the future. The system depends on bail and fees and fines in order to exist. And then it depends on using state resources. So the pool of money that the city has to use on governing, the pool of money that the state uses to govern; it requires that we start to govern through the criminal system. It becomes this self-reinforcing way of using the resources of the state to, again, so-called protect the community or enact justice. And it becomes so dependent on itself that it's really hard to undo. And it's really hard to reveal because again, in any individual case, you can logically declare that it's justice. You can rationalize it. I teach criminal law to first year law students, and we do this every day. We say, what's the justification for this particular prosecution? Maybe it's a houseless person in a tent. Maybe it's someone who stabbed somebody. Whatever it is, we can always come up with something. And so part of the power of the collective democratic advocacy that I talk about in the book is that people are actually living out other understandings of justice and safety and revealing that it's actually not inevitable. That we have this combination of carceral and economic forces that we use to keep people safe, that we use to say we're doing justice. It doesn't have to be that way. There are other things we can do. So bail funds are helping connect people to services and showing that actually you might not need a court to say you have to do treatment.
Maybe there just has to be affordable treatment in your neighborhood to help you stay safe and be safe within your community. But these things cost money. And so to go back to the economics of it, another thing that these groups are starting to do is get together and make people's budgets, make visions of where could state resources go to help keep us safe? And because they've been in courtrooms day in and day out, standing next to people who are caught up in the system and trying to understand what are the resources that we could be spending on our money on. Maybe it's housing, maybe it's support for new parents to understand how to be safe around their kids, whatever it might be. They're helping live out these alternative understandings of justice and safety, and they're doing it collectively, in contrast to the systems claim that what it's doing is the only and inevitable way to keep people safe.
Mila Atmos: [00:27:08] Yeah, I can see where the system would resist this kind of work, right? Like that makes perfect sense. And so I think this explains why there is so much backlash. I feel like this is a good point in our conversation to ask about the indictment of bail fund activists in Atlanta under RICO charges. So what is the end goal in charging the activists in this way?
Jocelyn Simonson: [00:27:31] Yeah, so what's happened in Atlanta is unprecedented, actually, in terms of the level of backlash against bail funds and bond funds in Atlanta. There is a movement locally to stop the city from leasing to the Atlanta Police Foundation. Acres and acres of forest land and spending tens of millions of dollars on building a new police facility that they're calling Cop City, because actually there are parts of it where they're going to build a mock city to act out, I don't know, terrorist scenarios or something like that. So there's this movement to stop Cop City and people are trying to do it in all forms of democratic participation. They're gathering signatures to get a referendum on the ballot. They're testifying in city council. But some people are also occupying the forest or having rallies and protests or whatever it might be. Part of this collection of groups is the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, which, among other things, has been paying bail and bond for people who are arrested in relation to protests to stop Cop City. Now, just to go back to where we started, when a bail fund pays bail for a person, they are literally using the existing rules of criminal procedure write. The law in Georgia says when bail is set, a person can pay bail and here are the procedures that you can do. What did the Atlanta Solidarity Fund activists do? They literally collected money and paid bail for people who were arrested. And what did the city of Atlanta and
the also the attorney general of the state of Georgia do? They prosecuted these activists for money laundering -- for money laundering! --claiming that just because you're paying bail for groups that are part of a collective of people trying to have a political objective, suddenly it becomes criminal. I find it very doubtful that these charges are going to hold up, but that's not really the point. The point is that for the first time in recent history, the actual act of being a communal bail fund is being criminalized. People are being charged now under a Rico indictment that takes 61 different activists and claims that there's some kind of criminal enterprise that's all working together instead of what they are, which is collectives of people protesting something that they don't politically agree with in lots of different ways. Just like we might say in New York City, a lot of people don't think our current mayor should be the mayor. It doesn't mean that everybody is part of a criminal enterprise. It means that some people are protesting. Some people are going door to door to register voters, whatever the thing you might do to gain your political objective. So now we have just, toward the end of August, actually indicted by the very same jury that had a RICO indictment against Trump and his alleged co-conspirators. That same jury was asked to indict 61 people, which is way more than the Trump indictment, call them a criminal enterprise for having a political objective. And then if you look at the acts that the indictment names as what's called an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy: Paying food and giving it to people in the forest. Buying supplies to cook with; and again and again, paying bail for people. So here we have the act of just taking care of each other as a collective suddenly called criminal. And on the one hand, it reveals the absurdity of the system. On the other hand, it's very scary because in the United States system, it's actually not that hard sometimes to prove conspiracy in RICO charges, even if intellectually we know that this doesn't feel like something criminal is happening. And so the defense of these 61 people is going to be intense. And I don't know how it's going to end up. But what I do know is that indictments like this can have a chilling effect on collectives of people with a political objective, especially historically, if they're coming from the left and they're challenging the way the system works at its heart rather than some extreme version of the system. The system does not like these forms of political protest and opposition. These RICO indictments show how the criminal system, because it is so expansive, can be used as a real tool of political repression and oppression. What I will say is the indictment is not the end of the political story. What we've seen since that indictment is that the Stop Cop City movement has gathered more than 100,000 signatures. So more people than voted in the last election in Atlanta. They've collected more signatures than that to demand
that on the ballot at the next election, there be a popular referendum as to whether the city should spend that money on Cop City. And so that's kind of a classic Democratic action being used by the movement. And yet here is the state attorney general claiming that this entire movement is somehow a criminal enterprise when really they're trying to do this democratic work. And, you know, what's fueling the democratic energy? Things like this RICO indictment. So it's playing both ways.
Mila Atmos: [00:32:51] Mm hmm. Speaking about these activists, you write that a lot of them are abolitionists, even if they may not have started that way. And I can totally see why. And in your words, you say that there is basically no progressive way to cage people. I agree. And so I wanted to consider a prison-free world for a moment because there's a feeling that I had when I was reading your book that we were also like Utopia chasing. And I don't really know what that looks like because there will still be crime, right? Like that's not going to end. Even if people are housed and fed, somebody is still going to kill somebody. So after deconstructing the punitive criminal system, how would you reconstruct justice?
Jocelyn Simonson: [00:33:37] It's a great question. And from an abolitionist point of view... And to be clear, I -- just like a lot of the people I write about the book -- have actually been transformed through my involvement with and writing about these collective acts to reimagine justice and safety. So I do believe that an ideal world is one without prisons and in fact one where we don't call when people harm each other crimes, and think that justice is punishing individuals. Instead, we take a more collective approach in dealing with harm, which we absolutely need to deal with, whether it's preventing it through state resources that help keep people safe or addressing it when it happens, because it's always going to happen. That's what it means to be people in the world. There's conflict, there is emotional harm, there's economic harm and there's physical harm. And so abolitionist thinking says that abolition has two sides to it, the breaking down and the building up. And so what does it mean to build up a world without prisons in which we can keep each other safe? And if you think we need a state, and I do think we need a state, the state facilitates the ability of people to keep each other safe by providing the resources and legal apparatus that people need to do that. What does it look like? You know, I think you could call it utopian in a sense, not utopian as a critique like that could never exist, but it's utopian in a practical way as kind of a praxis, which is that we are using our imaginations to try to envision a perfect world that
will never exist in which there isn't harm because we're taking care of each other. And then if you are trying to achieve that world, all the perfectionists out there know what this is like. If you're trying to be a perfectionist, it's not because you actually are trying to achieve perfection. It's because from that mental standpoint, you're going to do better and get closer than you can. So the building up of abolition means in small ways living out other ways that we can keep each other safe. And the kinds of tactics I talk about in the book are ways of doing this. When a community bail fund meets somebody they bailed out with flowers, and gives them resources to help them get housing, they are living out a kind of community and advocacy and another way of imagining safety and justice. So if we take these small moments, we can start to imagine and build something out. And some people think that this answer is not specific enough to say like, "No, actually, what does it look like when we don't have prisons?" And we don't have that answer yet because we haven't yet done the simultaneous breaking down. In order to imagine, think of the incredible amount of money and resources and labor that we spend on our carceral system that we enact on our carceral system. We haven't yet had the capacity to build those beautiful systems and ways of dealing with harm that we would want to see. Some groups are living it out in small experiments. They're engaging in what's called transformative justice, which actually starts with a person who's harmed and tries to make sure that they're made whole, might involve elements of restorative justice, but also thinks more broadly about the community and how the community could actually take more responsibility in helping prevent and address harm. So there are ways that we're starting to live it out, but we need to simultaneously decarcerate stop spending our resources and start building it out. You know, I have a child at home. She's ten years old, and for her whole lifetime I've been talking with her about policing and whether it makes sense and things like that. And she at one point come home kind of bothered because there are police officers in her public school in New York City and they're lovely. Right. They greet her in the morning. She likes them a lot. And so she said, "Mom, if you don't think that we should have police, are they not good people?" And so, you know, an abolitionist approach would not be to say that all cops are not nice people. It would be to stop and ask a different question. Imagine these two women who are actually very caring people in lots of ways, and it turns out like children. And now let's imagine what could we do with that love? What could we do with that labor? What kind of a career could we envision that gives people a really good pension and great training and helps them keep kids safe without being armed police officers whose trained response when things go wrong is to arrest people and send them to jail. So it's
not about eliminating any people. It's not about any people being bad people. In fact, the abolitionist vision would be not to cast anybody out from society, but to envision entirely other forms of working and living and educating and keeping people safe without using the carceral apparatus.
Mila Atmos: [00:38:49] Thank you. You mentioned earlier about a people's budget, and I feel like this is a great follow up to what you just discussed about not discarding people. So a concrete way to change policy, to make this kind of thing possible, is to decide where the money goes. I was really taken by the story about Seattle's Solidarity Budget. Can you tell us about the journey of this budget and why it was important?
Jocelyn Simonson: [00:39:16] Yes. So the Seattle Solidarity Budget is a document that gets revised every year made by a coalition of more than 100 organizations in the city of Seattle. And these are not just groups that work in criminal court, although some of them do. This ranges from the Duwamish tribe of Seattle to groups who advocate for houseless people, to people who think about the environment, to people who think about transportation. And they aren't on city council. Instead, what they do is collectively, every year for the last 4 or 5 years, they have generated a really intricate budget proposal that doesn't take anything about the Seattle City budget for granted, but instead makes a proposal that reimagines how the city of Seattle could be spending its money. And each year has imagined that money is not spent on policing but instead spent in other ways. And I encourage people to go look at the Seattle Solidarity budget. The one this year has a series of guarantees. We guarantee people security, and when they say security, they don't mean armed police officers. They mean having a safe place to live without fear of harm in that place where they live. So they have a series of guarantees in which they reimagine the way that the money can be spent. And because they have such an extensive coalition of people, they're actually bringing pretty profound expertise when they say, here is a specific program for people who are addicted to drugs that we think you should spend money on rather than an abstract money for drug treatment, something like that. And what's really notable about the Seattle Solidarity budget is that the first one they put together was in 2020. It was a document that they were able to present to city council and they were able to do that with a united front. Actually, one of the reasons that word solidarity is in there is because there was this sense that city council people would come to organizations and say, "listen, let's make a deal. We have, you know, just say $10,000 to spend. We're going to give you $8,000 of
that money if you support our budget." But these groups are coming together and they're saying, "wait a minute, you can't pit us against each other. You can't make us fight over money." Instead, we're going to come to you with a unified vision and point out through our unified vision that one of the big problems is the incredible amount -- right, most cities, it's like 50% of the budget is being spent on policing and corrections. And so if we reimagine where that money can go, just imagine how we can work together in solidarity to make our city safer, more equitable, better for the environment in ways there's a synergy between those policies. And in 2020 and then 2021 again, Seattle is the only major city in which the City Council reduced its spending substantially on policing. Again, it's not that the Solidarity budget was on the City council, it's that they collectively outside the system presented a budget that ideologically could not be meshed with the existing budget in order to agree with the solidarity budget. You have to actually disagree with the city's budget. It's not tinkering. It's an entirely different vision of what it means to represent the people and what it means for a city to keep people safe.
Mila Atmos: [00:42:42] So as an everyday person, what are two things I can do to participate in the dismantling of mass incarceration?
Jocelyn Simonson: [00:42:50] Yeah. So one of the big lessons of the book and of my years of studying and being a part of some of this advocacy is that we can't do any of this alone. We can only do it together. And a lot of the criminal system does happen locally. So if you're living in the US, one thing that you can do is look around in your town or city or county or state. Maybe you're in a rural area and see what groups are going into criminal courthouses to try to change what's happening there. You can Google "court watching" or you can go to, there's a national court watching organization. You can see if there's a participatory defense hub. You can see if there's a bail fund. And if there's not, you can talk to your neighbors about starting that kind of thing. Another thing you can do is start to learn about how your city's budget or your county's budget or your state's budget works. Because chances are there are groups that are at least asking for money for what they're doing right. Maybe they have supportive housing and they're asking for money. And in a lot of places, especially since 2020, groups are getting together to collectively analyze the budgets and analyzing budgets can actually be really tricky work. Maybe you're good with an Excel spreadsheet. Maybe you're good at reading documents, or maybe you're good at meeting with people collectively to try to
sit together and understand what's happening. But a lot of the work in this book, whether it's court watching or people's budget work, involves taking some time to be in community with people who are your neighbors and learn together about what's happening. And it turns out just even learning together about what's happening can actually be really disruptive.
Mila Atmos: [00:44:30] All good advice. So as we're rounding out our conversation, looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?
Jocelyn Simonson: [00:44:38] I am very hopeful about the potential for change in how we collectively understand justice and safety and that because when I see around us a disagreement over the meanings of justice and public safety, even in a place like Atlanta where really scary things are happening, if we take a step back, it's kind of incredible what's happening in Atlanta. We are connecting deforestation to the building up of policing, right? There's a movement that is making these connections and the city is opposing what they're doing because they're making those connections. So what I'm hopeful about are the ways that people are helping each other. And by doing that, actually revealing to everybody that we can't assume any one meaning of justice. So to me, it makes me hopeful that we're arguing over the meaning of justice. It shouldn't be obvious that justice equals cages. It shouldn't be obvious that public safety equals policing. For too long that's been obvious. And now we're starting to have those debates and conversations. And I think conflict like that is productive and good, and gives me hope.
Mila Atmos: [00:45:47] Yeah, that's exciting and hopeful. Well, Jocelyn, thank you very much for joining us on Future Hindsight. It was really a pleasure to have you on the show.
Jocelyn Simonson: [00:45:55] Thank you so much for having me.
Mila Atmos: [00:45:58] Jocelyn Simonson is a professor of law at Brooklyn Law School and author of Radical Acts of Justice: How Ordinary People Are Dismantling Mass Incarceration.
Next week on Future Hindsight, we're joined by Steven Levitsky, professor of government at Harvard University. Together with Daniel Ziblatt, he's co-author of How Democracies Die and has just published Tyranny of the Minority. They argue that reforming American institutions to become more democratic will help us achieve a full, multiracial democracy -- and in the process, save democracy itself.
Steven Levitsky: [00:46:39] Well, if there's one core element to modern democracy, by which we mean not direct democracy, but modern representative democracy, it's that majorities should prevail. Those who win the most votes should govern. And so counter- majoritarian institutions are invariably undemocratic because they limit the power of majorities.
Mila Atmos: [00:47:03] That's next time on Future Hindsight. Have you checked us out on Instagram yet? We've got a bunch more tips to help you build your Civic Action toolkit. Follow us on Instagram @FutureHindsightPod to get special updates, episode clips, and everything in between.
This episode was produced by Zack Travis and me. Until next time, stay engaged. Democracy Group: [00:47:36] This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.