Join host Martha Williams as she talks with Dr. Baz Dreisinger, author, activist, professor at John Jay College, and founder of Incarceration Nations Network, about the role of prison in serving justice and the greater society.
Martha Williams:
Dear Culture Shifters, I'm Martha Williams, your host today. Thank you for joining us on the Culture Shift Podcast, where we work to shift the conversation to inspire a more balanced, peaceful, compassionate, and collaborative world. We believe culture shifts come from really a profound change in how we relate to self, others, and our planet. Today's conversation is about prison. But what does prison have to do with culture? Nelson Mandela said "No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but rather, its lowest ones." One window into culture is to consider how we think about justice and those who've broken the law. Who gets punished and who doesn't and is punishment, even the goal? Is there any room for redemption and forgiveness and what about reconciliation and reparations?
Martha Williams:
Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Baz Dreisinger to help us unpack our society's relationship to prison and justice and how prison is both a creation by and a reflection of our society. Dr. Dreisinger is a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the author of the critically acclaimed book Incarceration Nations. She founded John Jay's groundbreaking prison to college pipeline program and is the executive director of Incarceration Nations Network. She states her desire as wanting to unseat people's comfortable notions about prison. She challenges us to question our beliefs and assumptions about justice, punishment, and formerly incarcerated citizens in our prison system. Welcome, Dr. Baz Dreisinger.
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
Thank you for having me.
Martha Williams:
Let's start by talking about you. You're a student and professor of the humanities, but how did you arrive here and why prison?
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
So, um, I often tell people that I got involved in prison through hip hop. I've always written about American culture broadly speaking. Um, my doctorate is in English or in literature and my dissertation, which became my first book was about racial passing in American culture. And I dealt with all kinds of things from jazz history to, uh, slave narratives, um, to film, to hip hop culture. And I have spent, uh, quite a bit of time as a journalist doing a whole lot of writing about hip hop culture and race in America in the early two thousands as I was finishing my doctorate and then, um, afterward and I was writing for the LA Times and the New York Times, for Vibe Magazine and various others, and really writing about the intersection of race, culture, music, and arts, and sort of crime kind of came into that picture. And I got involved in the making of two documentaries that I ended up being a producer and writer on both about hip hop and criminal justice. It was a moment where there were a lot of rappers releasing records from prison, including shine, shine, probably being the most prominent of them. And I was also writing about a particular Jamaican artist who I was really passionate about. I still am this incredible artist who was incarcerated and all of those forces kind of converged such that I was getting a lot of letters from people in prison who had read my work. And by that time I was situated at John Jay. So again also surrounded in this culture of the conversation about mass incarceration, there was a recognition that we were in crisis.
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
And so I started going into prisons in that respect, uh, around the same time a friend became incarcerated. And so I was visiting him and all these things came together to ultimately have me start the Prison to College Pipeline. I was first an educational volunteer. So that just meant I was going in and doing classes. And, uh, that led to my starting an official program through John Jay, which is the Prison to College Pipeline. So I think it was a lot of things coming together that led me there. And I think pretty much, it's impossible to care about race in America to think about race in America, to be involved in issues that deal with race in America and sadly not come upon incarceration because of the nature of, as we'll talk about the way that race has played out in this country has, you know, led directly to mass incarceration.
Martha Williams:
I'm kind of curious at what moment did you know that this would be a big focus for you?
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
The first time I knew it would really be my life's work was when I became an official educational volunteer and gave the first class. And I remember I was teaching a class on, uh, it was a talk on, on James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison and race in America kind of broadly speaking. And there were about a hundred men. It was in a maximum-security prison, upstate. It was an absolutely incredible class. I was blown away by the level of genius that our country was warehousing away. And I remember leaving that day and just saying, this is absolutely outrageous because I think you can know these things intellectually, but until you know them on a visceral level, it doesn't impact you to quite the same degree. And I walked out of there feeling enormous pity, not for the men per se, but for this nation that we were losing out on our best and brightest of humanity by warehousing them away. And so I think it was at that moment, I knew something had shifted in my life.
Martha Williams:
You know, when you say that, I imagine some and maybe a lot of people thinking, what do you mean these people are criminals? They're the worst of the worst? And I say that because I think that's what society is saying. That there's a reason why we have these ways of thinking about crime and criminality, right? And we're in this kind of dark place with it. I'd love you to speak to this stereotypical concept of prison specifically with regard to our prison industrial complex.
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think, um, it is important to say it in that crass way that if they don't say it, they're thinking it. So it's important to point out for one, you know, I, I don't talk about criminals. Um, I talk about people who've committed crime and there's a really big difference there, you know, a criminal is defined only and solely by their criminal acts and the great masses of people incarcerated are people who have committed crimes. And it's important to point out number one, as for the comment about the brilliance behind bars, there's no correlation between lack of brilliance and committing crimes. So talent and brilliance has nothing to do with, um, having committed crimes or criminality. But I think it's also so critical that we turn our attention to the structures and systems that produced these criminal acts. Uh, the context from which the great majority of our prison population comes.
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
And these are scenarios of systemic racism and systemic inequality that essentially pack our prison cells. And so when you ask, how did we get here? It's, there's kind of two routes to that question one, depending on how we define here. So I'm the one hand there's the here of the United States where the world's largest jailer. We have incarcerated more people in the US right now than in any other country in the history of the world. And there's lots more statistics around that. And of course the racial disparities of our system, there are more African-Americans under criminal supervision today than there were slaves at the height of slavery in 1850. And I could go on and on with shocking and awful statistics. And how we got there is in essence racism and the white supremacy upon which this country is founded. And it's really a kind of simple trajectory from slavery to segregation, right?
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
These are all forms of systemic, uh, racial and social control of designated others in this instance African-Americans, and then later African-Americans and Latinos. So you have this move from slavery into segregation, and you then had a society that was hungry to continue to oppress and criminalize people, both in order to keep them oppressed and maintain white supremacy, but also in order to create a labor force. And so you had the enactment of laws that in essence criminalized, blackness, and made things like they were called the black codes, right? So made things like, uh, loitering a crime, essentially breathing while black became a crime and therefore produced mass incarceration, um, outlining in a very brief sense, the argument that's made most extensively by Michelle Alexander, in The New Jim Crow, and of course, Ava DuVernay's 13th. And you had this officializing of these laws in order to keep certain groups subjugated.
Martha Williams:
And if I understand it correctly, the stigma of having been in prison just further perpetuates the cycle of oppression?
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
Correct. And so it became far more acceptable to discriminate against a person who had been in prison or who was in prison than it was to discriminate against a black person, but you're really doing the same thing. So it was a way of maintaining the white supremacy through mass incarceration in a way that became more socially acceptable. It's okay to discriminate against a criminal quote-unquote. But of course, we're not discriminating against African-Americans or Latin X people, right? So it's then important. And I think that sometimes gets left out of the story, which is why I wrote Incarceration Nations, it's important to recognize how the US was not alone in using that mechanism. And the US is heavily responsible for mass incarceration, not just in the US but around the globe because what happened is that the US built the world's first modern prisons.
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
It built them in the early 19th century. There was one in Pennsylvania called Eastern, and one in New York called Auburn. Uh, Eastern was built kind of modeled after a, uh, monastery on this idea of solitary confinement, penitentiary, penitence, the idea being, if you throw someone in a cell with a Bible, he or she will repent and all will be well. And then Auburn was built on the capitalist model. Auburn actually produced many things among them, it produced the uniforms for the Civil War. So these were the two first modern prisons. And then you had the world's leaders, or the colonizing leaders come and see these and replicate them in their own countries. And following that, and again, this is a big theme of my book. I write about this, uh, happening all around the world first through colonialism, then through globalization, what you keep seeing again and again, in the history of prison in the world is the US kind of innovating in this space and then the rest of the world copycatting and the US goading them on in order to do so in various places and the same way that we have mass incarcerated, criminalized and mass incarcerated our "other" in this country, that has been the case as well, all around the world.
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
So whether it's the Māori or Aboriginal people in New Zealand and Australia and Canada, other ethnic groups, the, in Thailand, uh, poor people throughout the post-colonial global South, everyone has kind of designated their other to oppress and has used mass incarceration to do so, uh, while also producing a labor force. So it's this kind of deadly cocktail of racism, of white supremacy, of inequality, and of capitalism.
Martha Williams:
It sounds like the people who created those prisons thought they were doing something good and innovative, but really over time, the weeds of white supremacy and the unconscious bias took over and eventually over time became a tool of ill intent. And I'm always struck by the way, all these things, racism, inequality, uh, white supremacy, and I'll add patriarchy are so linked to capitalism. And we can speak to capitalism soon, but I'm, I'm curious, you said that the first modern prisons were built at the beginning of the 19th century, what were they like before then?
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
Well, it depends on the part of the world, but for the most part, prisons were seen as the path to justice, not justice itself. So they were holding cells. There were places where people would be held until the path to justice was determined or what justice would be in a particular case. And that varied from place to place, nor was it wonderfully enlightened necessarily. I mean, think about the guillotine in France. Um, banishment was a huge response to crime. Australia was, was a colony born of that. Uh, and so many parts of the world were penal colonies. They were, people were just cast out. Um, there were other kinds of forms of punishment, but there were also places in the world where restorative practices happened. And so somebody might be held for a time during a kind of cooling-off period, but then returned to the community in order to make amends, make reparations and, and repair the harm that they've caused. So, but that's such a massive difference, right? Because it's only in the enlightenment that you see the prison itself, the amount of time served as becoming the answer to crime and the kind of be-all and end-all when it comes to justice, that was never the case prior to the development of these modern prisons.
Martha Williams:
And that makes so much sense to me, especially in relationship to how we think about time and the commodification of time.
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
And it was also a way of making things like simpler, you know, per enlightenment ideas about everything being rational. And, you know, we could have mathematical sentences and it made justice and harm, which are both very messy, complicated things. It transformed them into a nice, simple, neat equation.
Martha Williams:
Isn't crime, messy? It's not like you can just put it into like a spreadsheet and have it be done.
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
Not at all. You know, that's sort of everyone's fantasy, um, that we can do that. And there is no easy answer. Human beings are messy and justice is, is a human thing. And so it's inevitably going to be messy and complicated, and there's not going to be, uh, easy answers and nothing is going to be foolproof either. And that's the premise that I always operate from.
Martha Williams:
Yeah. Right. So it is extremely complicated and messy, and we're in a crisis, which is why you wrote your book and why you started INN. So let's talk about this quote-unquote crisis. Tell us a little bit more about that and some of the ins and outs of it.
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
So I think there's sort of the immediate crisis, which is that we have locked up 2.3 million people. We have deprived an estimated 7 to 9 million people of rights when they come home from prison in terms of voting rights and other kinds of discriminations this just in the US alone. But broadly speaking, the crisis is we have lazily come to rely on this very bereft, very harmful system of justice. We have trapped ourselves in it as a society. And we have refused to kind of think about what really actually builds safer communities. And that I think is so important to recognize, because this is not just a matter of feeling a certain way about even if you aren't bothered by the racist history and the racist present of this system. Even if you don't have a level of empathy for those in this situation, as a society, we're not building safer communities. Prisons do not make us safer.
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
And in fact, multiple studies have shown that they make us as a society, less safe, that they actually produce crime, uh, because they reproduce cycles of harm. They reproduce cycles of inequality. They reproduce cycles of racism. And so all of those things make us a less equitable society, less equitable societies have more crime. There are a lot of kind of no-brainers in prison work, things that, you know, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out. And one of them is that the most unequal places have the highest levels of crime. So the US, South Africa, Brazil, you know, places of rabid inequality. And so the crisis is how do we get to a place where we're actually building safer communities and actually building equity in terms of both class and race.
Martha Williams:
Right. And that's the question in the center of our society right now.
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
And it's, and it's a global question. I say it's so important to say that this is again, it's like this same old, same old uninnovative, harmful, ineffective system that is morally bereft, economically bereft. And doesn't do what it allegedly intends to do. I mean, many people will say, well, the system isn't broken, it was designed to do exactly this right, oppress certain peoples and keep certain people subjugated. But if our alleged purpose is to build safer communities and to promote peace, then we have to radically rethink this.
Martha Williams:
So why haven't we done anything?
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
I think that there is a strong movement here in the US and, and in some places globally, that is deeply questioning it, but nothing's been done because this is what the system was intended to do. It acts under the guise of building safer communities. But in fact, it's designed to oppress certain peoples. Um, there is a tremendous movement happening around moving towards abolition, getting rid of prisons, thinking about crime differently, recognizing the enormous racial disparities that our system is grounded in and other global systems are grounded in. And I think we're definitely in a moment where we're moving closer towards that than ever before, but capitalism, the big C that's another massive factor. There is money in this system. There are companies embedded in it. We have allowed capitalism to enter our justice system in all kinds of ways. And so when you consider all those factors, you know, you're talking about moving mountains.
Martha Williams:
Yeah, I think we're talking about the very nature of justice and how we define it and how it's intertwined with issues like racism, white supremacy, poverty, capitalism. This is really a moral imperative. How do you get underneath something so enormous?
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
Yeah. Well, I think it comes down to the question, you know, very profound, philosophical questions about punishment and revenge and the morality of those things. Ultimately prison is saying you did harm to somebody. So we're going to respond to that and teach you to not do harm by doing harm to you. So in a very basic way, there's a hypocrisy to it. I don't believe that punishment is moral. Punishment is saying you do harm, we do harm back to you. It is ultimately an eye for an eye and it's hypocrisy personified, and it's revenge. I don't actually think there's a difference between punishment and revenge. I don't think there's a difference between prison and revenge. And that right there is where the problem lies. We have what are called departments of corrections in this country. Actually everywhere in the world, they're called some version, the department of corrections, um, not departments of punishment or departments of revenge.
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
So we allegedly think that we're engaging in an act of corrections. Corrections is very different from punishment. Correction says I'm going to correct the piece in you that committed this act. I'm also going to correct the inequity that's caused when a harmful act takes place. I'm going to hopefully correct the society that made it so likely for you as opposed to others to commit these harmful acts. Uh, so corrections is not saying I'm going to harm you. There may be some pain involved in corrections, but that's not the intention of what corrections is about. It is a, maybe a by-product because being corrected or correcting things is not always easy and can involve some level of pain. But it's very different from saying punishment, which is you cause harm, you get harmed. All that brings us is a cycle of harm that is both hypocritical and therefore immoral, but also not effective because as we know, you know, to cite the cliche hurt people, hurt people, and the cycle goes on and on, and we are not made safer and peace is not attained.
Martha Williams:
And these deliberations of perspective and belief define the direction of the system, right? And at the heart of change is the need to have greater awareness, consciousness, and ultimately choice around these perspectives. And that's of course, definitely up our alley at Culture Shift Agency, getting to those ways of thinking, which is partially why we love what you're doing. But in your book specifically, you talk about how public consciousness creates policy.
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
When you impact, um, people's mindsets via reaching them through culture. Then they're going to push for policy change and politicians are in essence, pawns of the people. So if the culture is pushing for something different for, for radical change, then that inevitably has to follow in policy.
Martha Williams:
I'm kind of curious, you know, I want to talk about the alternatives for the US you're pressing for innovation and humanity. What might that look like?
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
I define myself as an abolitionist, many of us who do this work do, and an abolitionist is someone who wants to see the abolition of prisons and is on a day-to-day basis, working toward creating a world where that is possible. It is not something that we expect to happen tomorrow or next week, or even in our own lifetimes, but it means that we are consistently doing the work in ways that push us to that world. So we work backwards from that world and you think what's needed in order to abolish prisons? Well, we need equity. We need access to opportunity for all. We need to take on white supremacy at its root. And so that means creating access to education, access to jobs, access to community healthcare. Really, rethinking societies and communities, and how we've structured them in, you know, the white supremacist United States and globally speaking as well. So it means working towards equity overall in ways that have nothing to do with directly to do with justice, but rather thinking about how do we build communities? How do we invest in communities? How do we ensure that all communities have the resources that have been, uh, thus far devoted, almost exclusively to white and or wealthy communities?
Martha Williams:
Sounds very, very human.
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
Yeah. I mean, I always say, uh, I write about Norway people in my book and people talk often about Scandinavia's this perfect, you know, this utopian place when it comes to justice. And while there is no utopia, when it comes to justice, there are a lot of things Norway and other countries in that region have. Right. But the most basic among them is social services, strong social services, which creates less crime to begin with. So it's always important to talk about this issue against that backdrop. And beyond that, I think all of us who do this work, think about a system that is grounded in restorative justice.
Martha Williams:
Yeah. I just want to pause a minute because some of our listeners might not know what restorative justice is, what that entails. Can you just tell us what is restorative justice?
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
So restorative justice is not about punishment, but rather a system that is grounded in restoration, repair, reparations, and healing. So that means really, really developing robust restorative justice programs. And restorative justice means that when a harm is committed, we look and say, okay, what are the needs of the person who was harmed? How do we go about meeting those needs? And then how do we facilitate that?
Martha Williams:
So what are the powers that be saying about your approach?
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
There are lots of places in the world. The overwhelming majority of countries in the world do not want to hear this at all and are very much grounded in punitive ideas and are very much grounded in copycatting. The U S's carceral model. I do think though that I've been privileged to do this work all over the world. And there are like-minded people everywhere who are pushing this in ways that are really exciting. I think in the US we've had a strong contingent of folks who see this and are changing. I mean, I'm heartened by the fact that there are national restorative justice programs in several countries, including Costa Rica and Peru, and now increasingly, uh, government-funded ones cropping up around the US uh, one prominent one being in Washington, DC. that's located in the Attorney General's office attorney general races now involve hefty discussion of restorative justice often, far more often than used to be the case.
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
So I think that there is an overwhelming movement and recognition towards progress in this space. And I think we're also moving towards progress in recognizing that many things that we have criminalized should not be criminalized. You know, thinking about misdemeanors, thinking about drug offenses. That's not all, you know, a lot of people say, "oh, just fix the drug laws and that will decarcerate us". We could actually release, uh, those in for drug offenses tomorrow and we would still have the largest prison population in the world. So it's hardly that simple, but we do need to address the ways that through misdemeanors, through our drug offenses, we have criminalized issues that are mental health issues. We have criminalized poverty, we have criminalized substance abuse issues. We just respond to everything, uh, through the lens of criminal justice. And that's a quite depressing thing.
Martha Williams:
Can you give us an example of a place or program? That's looking at it through this different lens.
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
I was on the phone with, uh, a partner and colleague in Finland this morning, uh, learning about their robust mediation program, uh, which was really inspiring. And, uh, the overwhelming majority of cases that are sent to mediation in Finland are violent crimes. So not necessarily, you know, minor offenses, but potentially quite serious ones. And they're able to deal with them through mediation. And one of the most inspiring things was to hear that that program is not housed under criminal justice, The Ministry of Criminal Justice, it's housed under the Ministry of Health. I thought how refreshing that is for people to recognize that when we talk about these matters, we're talking about health matters,
Martha Williams:
Right. And in America, it's the complete opposite. There are all too many cases of those who are suffering from mental health issues that are dealt with by the police and our Department of Corrections, as opposed to our Department of Health. But I was also struck in your book by the idea of reconciliation as an approach. And wondering if you're working with that at all, or how that's informed or how you've moved forward with that in your own activism.
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
Well, reconciliation is at the heart of restorative justice. Along with agency responsibility, repair, uh, reconciliation is a kind of natural by-product of those things. I mean, it's important to recognize that our system, that, you know, the punitive system prison-based system of justice, in essence, almost absolves people of responsibility, because they are thrust into a prison setting where ultimately there's no opportunity to really grapple with your life in any kind of healthy way, it's anything but a therapeutic environment. It's a further damaging environment. And whatever trauma you've come from is now going to be multiplied tenfold in restorative justice proceedings, where people who have done harm and people have experienced harm come together and engage with each other. That is an opportunity to truly take agency and then work towards reconciliation. And it's a quite different, much healthier, and in many ways, much, much harder process.
Martha Williams:
South Africa and Rwanda come to mind as having been at the center of reconciliation. What did that look like? And what does it look like now?
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
In my book, I write about Rwanda's practice of the gacaca courts following the genocide. And I write about South Africa's truth and reconciliation commission. I also write about a kind of individual restorative justice program in South Africa. Those are two countries that are under the watch of the world, engaged in mass acts, or attempted to engage in mass acts of reconciliation. And in Rwanda, for instance, I was, I was in a village that was really at the, in the heart of the genocide. They were killing each other in mass numbers, and now they're living in peace. And I watched as a group, uh, who had committed acts of genocide, stood up and sat down to represent that they had been reaccepted into society officially that they'd paid their dues, that they had been working in whatever capacity to repair the harm that they've caused.
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
And as a result of that were taken back into society. So, you know, it was enormously impactful. South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission is while highly touted generally thought of as less successful because there were no opportunities really for reparations and it was a lot of talk, but no action. And so, I mean, through the time that I spent in both South Africa and Rwanda, I thought a lot about what it meant to create national reconciliation and also individual reconciliation. And think about how do we say, I'm sorry, what does a proper apology consist of? And how can an apology be turned into action? How can a nation reckon with its own traumas and tragedies in a very public way? What does that look like again, on both a national level and an individual level? And I think it's something neither of those countries did so perfectly at all. And again, South Africa is widely considered to be a failure in that respect, and it's still one of the most unequal societies in the world and, and, you know, still in many ways operates under apartheid. Rwanda's example is thought of as much more successful, but again, not perfect. And I think that's coming back to our point earlier, justice is messy. Justice is complex, and you're not going to find the perfect system.
Martha Williams:
Right. And you even talk about that, even with Norway, that even though it was a system where people were successfully released back into society, I remember you, you said one of the prison workers said, you know, this guy is going to be my neighbor in five years, and I don't want to be afraid of him when we accept him back into society. And anyway, that just struck me as so different than the very disconnected fear-based perspective of othering that's more dominant here.
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
Although I should point out that, you know, that argument itself is still a selfish one. And still to me, doesn't represent the pinnacle of kind of the way to talk about justice. Because when you say he's going to be my neighbor one day, it still comes back to me and my safety, as opposed to we, as opposed to saying the reason I should care about how this person is treated, uh, whether this person gets treatment or doesn't for issues or whether this harm is repaired or not. The reason I should care is because we are in this together. And he is me and I am he or she that's the ultimate place we want to get to. It's not only about me.
Martha Williams:
Yeah. We hear that from every deep thinker, we speak to this idea that if we understood and lived in a deeper experience of our interconnectedness life would be so different. And I hear you when you're saying that we need a real shift in the way we see ourselves in others, more selflessness, but at the same time we live in such a me-me society.
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
Well, it's capitalism. I mean, to be honest, there's no way to have a society that is this grounded in capitalism, without it being a me-me-me society. That is why, I mean, there are lots of reasons why I think why I and others have theorized about why mass incarceration took such root here. Of course, the primary, one being racism and slavery and white supremacy, but America as the great capitalist capital of the world, you know, and the, the original sort of grand experiment in rampant capitalism produces the me-me-me society and that allows for mass incarceration because it creates the illusion that people are just, you know, everyone has equal access to things. Everyone has opportunity. I picked myself up by the bootstraps and all these other absurdities. And so why can't this person? And that's what allows me to stomach this person being warehoused away for decades or put to death, you know, in the context of the death penalty. Um, we are one of the few nations that has not only life imprisonment as an option, but the death penalty as well. So all of that is because of the fact that we are such a profoundly capitalist society. And we imagine that our life is governed by individual choices, as opposed to systems and structures that were devised to benefit some and not others.
Martha Williams:
Yeah. I mean, that's a really powerful indictment of capitalism that I tend to agree with. And yet I know from your work, you have hope, uh, you stated it at the end of your book, you talk about how you have hope for change. And I wonder where you are with that hope right now in the light of recent events.
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
Yeah, that's a good question because I think I really would answer this very differently a year ago and I will confess to going through right now, a serious crisis of hope. That is because the pandemic created the phrase that was being thrown around quite a bit as this idea of the pandemic as a portal. I initially felt that to the core and as I'm watching the world's response to the pandemic in the justice space, but also in the education space, in the healthcare space, all of these arenas, I'm watching this push toward just going back to the old ways. There is such a desperation for normalcy right now, quote-unquote, that people are sort of willing to take anything. And it's painful. It's painful to watch. That said, the latest reckoning, the racial reckoning that's happening in this country, the uprisings, all of that has definitely moved the needle in the conversation. Has pushed the stakes further. Has broadened the conversation to more comrades and allies and that is certainly exciting. Friends and I joke that if we had talked about being an abolitionist even a year ago in a mainstream setting, we'd get laughed at, and that's not really the case anymore. Talking about abolition has, has moved much more toward the mainstream, doing the work that I do and being able to collaborate with and amplify the work of those, doing this work all over the world. And progressive ways is deeply inspiring because people are doing the work day-to-day in the trenches.
Martha Williams:
So yeah, you published your book in 2016, likely just before Trump got elected. Would you have done anything differently if you had published it a year later?
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
Sure. No, definitely not. Well for one, I think people need to recognize that incarceration and mass incarceration and crises of justice run way deeper than any single figure. And that includes presidents of countries. And in this country, to speak specifically, the bulk of our crisis lies in the state, not in the federal. The federal system has about 200,000 people in it. That's a lot of people, but that's a drop in the bucket when you think about the larger 2.3 million. And in addition to that, the reality is that the president has very little control over things beyond the federal system. The bulk of the work has to happen locally on a state level and on a city level, this is a system that is so entrenched in a larger, bigger ornate system. So I would never reduce it to one person
Martha Williams:
I'd love to circle back so we can understand the root of your hope, even more. Tell us about restorative justice that's working,
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
Uh, as far as my work globally with the Incarceration Nations Network, which is now my current baby, which I spend my time busy with, I am often not currently traveling, but I was traveling all over the world to places where this issue is just so enormously unpopular and there are all kinds of fears about crime, anxieties about crime and punitive attitudes that run rampant and racisms and forms of discrimination and classism that are running rampant. But yet even in the face of that, I will go to these countries and find this incredible group of people, however, big or small who think differently and who are pushing the envelope. I think about the youth justice system of New Zealand, which is grounded in Māori practices and is for almost all crimes grounded in restorative justice and operates very, very differently from our own. So they have something called family group conferences where they'll bring a social worker, an educator, a thoughtful judge together with the person who committed a certain act and they will come up with a solution for addressing this, an act of harm that doesn't involve incarceration. And that does involve strong Māori traditions and involvement of local elders. That is an incredible system to witness. I was there a year before last and had the privilege of sitting in on that. I think about other smart re-entry programs, reintegration programs that are bringing people out of prison and directly into holistic care. Uh, certainly saw this in the Netherlands small houses that are giving people, um, superb quality housing, but also housing that involves access to trauma-informed care access to jobs, all kinds of things that are needed for somebody to successfully reenter and be supported in that process.
Martha Williams:
That's so interesting, right? Yet we live in a society where the prison system is geared towards punishment. And I'd imagine that there are people who would argue to those out of prison that we don't owe you anything, and you especially don't deserve anything. Right?
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
Well, people who have not encountered these people might think that you know, and so a tremendous amount. I mean, some of it is just logically speaking. Do you want people to come out of prison and commit crime again, and then get reincarcerated and further damage communities, and further cost taxpayer money? So I think that's the sort of basest way to respond to something like that. And if you don't want that to be the case, then you can't just simply throw people out after two decades and say, okay, go ahead, find your way.
Martha Williams:
Right. Like good luck with that. But also in your book, you said $80,000 a year is spent on each prisoner. Seems like a lot of money for not having actually addressed or solved any of the root problems.
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
Well, it's, it's more than that now. And again, it depends on the context, but I mean, there are plenty of, uh, States and local municipalities where it costs $200,000 a year at this point. So again, that's the base way to respond to that sort of thing. But it's also really easy to de-humanize something that you've never encountered. And for the many, many white privileged people in this country, who've had the privilege of never encountering anyone who's lived through the criminal justice system, it's pretty easy to make a statement like those criminals don't deserve this. Although when we're talking about re-entry again, supposedly this person has already "done the time", right? Served the debt to society. So further discrimination is even illogical in that respect,
Martha Williams:
It seems like the popular American notion of the self-made man, you know, who pulls himself or herself up by the bootstraps is reflected in what you're saying.
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
Without a doubt. Yes. I mean the bootstraps mentality does not recognize that some peoples were not given bootstraps to begin with. It's a very cushy fantasy, especially for, for white immigrant groups who like to imagine that their success was built on hard work. When in fact their success was built on the idea that they were allowed into whiteness. And there are books about this. I mean, how the Irish became white, how the Jews became white, really, really interesting stuff. And I'm not saying that they didn't work hard, but they were given access and they were not redlined out of communities, right? through structural inequalities and structural racisms. So that had nothing to do with your valiant efforts and your bootstraps.
Martha Williams:
Baz, it's been really wonderful to have this conversation with you, and we want to acknowledge for our listeners that we've only really scratched the surface and that there are so many of course interrelated issues that we barely mentioned, and we never got into. So as a start, I encourage all of, to buy Baz's book, Incarceration Nations, and with that, so we want to start to wrap up, but before we do, we haven't touched on the Prison to College Pipeline you started. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
So Prison to College Pipeline is a college program inside prison that also acts as a re-entry program because it guarantees people a place in college when they come out of prison as well. And so the idea being the name comes from the, what is talked about as the "school to prison pipeline", the way that our inequitable school system and the criminalization, particularly of young black folks in this country funnels them directly into the criminal justice system. Well, the idea of the Prison to College Pipeline is to reverse the flow. And so the Prison to College Pipeline offers college classes on the inside. Students begin their education on the inside, and then they're guaranteed a place in college when they come out where they complete their degree. So it's kind of a best of both worlds approach in that it's allowing people to make use of the, some of their time while they're in prison, but also allowing them to benefit from all of the things that come with college on the outside, the networks, the community, um, the different kinds of services that are available on campuses and so on.
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
And also as part of the prison to college pipeline. And this speaks to the importance of culture shift, right? Um, students from the outside, from the campus come into prison once a month to take class alongside their incarcerated peers. And that's enormously impactful on both sets of students, for students who are incarcerated, it's a chance to build community, to have as much of a "normal" college experience as possible. And for students on the outside, they can radically rethink their preconceptions about who these people are in prison and, and it changes their entire conception of the criminal justice system. Even for students who may have been exposed themselves, who aren't necessarily, you know, sheltered and unaware, it's still quite an eye-opening and powerful experience.
Martha Williams:
And it speaks to the power of relationship and community.
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
Very much. So it speaks to the power of networks and, uh, community building and moving past these borders and boundaries that serve to prop the system up.
Martha Williams:
Yeah, it does seem like there's a lot of work that goes into propping up that system. Or, you know, you could also say a lot of complacency.
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
I've been involved in a global movement of the Prison to College Pipeline in various countries. We launched in South Africa, we're continuing to expand actually one of the, um, silver linings of the pandemic when it comes to justice is the sudden catapulting of systems into the 21st century. And so there's more technology in prisons now internationally than there ever was and nationally, uh, so through Zoom and other platforms, we're now looking to expand the program in ways that weren't thought possible in the past. So I work in South Africa, also, I'm working in Jamaica and Trinidad and St. Lucia and The Bahamas, all kinds of interesting conversations and possibilities.
Martha Williams:
And is there anything you want to say about Incarceration Nations Network?
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
Incarceration Nations Network grew directly out of my book when my book was released in other countries and, and, or read in other countries, um, my work traveling around and talking about it and doing this work globally, it just increased. And I was just building this network of innovative justice workers all around the globe. And so INN was a way to just officialize that and create a global network in order to build coalition across national borders. And in order to promote innovative justice thinking as a network, we are all about amplifying each other's efforts and really being a cheerleader for innovative work. Especially as I've mentioned in countries where it's enormously unpopular, we have a number of different projects, all of which are focused on amplifying the work of our partners. So we have a docu-series and process. We have an art installation that we use to galvanize the community and to elevate, and again, amplify the innovative work that's happening. And I think it's also struck me as quite amazing that even in this globalized world, there was still so much lack of awareness about good work that was happening elsewhere. And so creating this network in order to connect people in this way became really important.
Martha Williams:
Right. And when you can really connect deeply in those networks, even bigger change can happen. So, okay. We have a really fun question for you. Um, since you got your start in music and we have a feeling you're a musical genius, you have all the good inside info, um, in relationship to this work around prisons and justice, what musical artists would you recommend that we listen to?
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
Um, I'm a reggae music fanatic and reggae is like the music. I mean, Caribbean music more broadly, but reggae music is the music of, of consciousness, um, is the music of justice. And I think that because I listen to it every day, it's like having a certain kind of consciousness piped into my spirit and energy every single day. So I would highly recommend that.
Martha Williams:
Ooh, I love that. What a nice gift for us. Uh, we will be of course, having a reggae dance party immediately after we press end on record today.
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
Nice! Nice.
Martha Williams:
So, um, let's just end with, uh, letting people know what your websites are so people can find you on the web or your Twitter handle or whatever handle you have.
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
@bazdreisinger on Instagram and Twitter and incarcerationnationsnetwork.com is the website. And I definitely encourage people to check it out 'cause there's tons of information about global mass incarceration there on the platform. You can learn more about our global partners. You can search it by, you know, you can learn who's doing what by geography by kind of work. You can pull up every restorative justice program around the world. It's pretty thorough. And @incarcerationnations is our Instagram, which is also chock full of good stuff about the work in the US and globally.
Martha Williams:
Yes. So, so I thank you so much Baz for joining us today.
Dr. Baz Dreisinger:
Oh, well, thank you so much.
Martha Williams:
Thank you so much for joining us today on the Culture Shift Podcast, where we dig into critical conversation with those we're shifting culture by defying the status quo. The transcripts and links related to this podcast, as well as other episodes are available at cultureshiftagency.com. With that, we invite you to rate, comment, and share the Culture Shift Podcast with your community. Thank you again, Baz, and all of our listeners for your engagement in the inquiry of how to shift towards a more balanced and equitable culture.
© 2020 Culture Shift Agency, Inc.