And to moderate todays conversation before i introduce our guest thank you for the organizer and sponsor. The publisher of a new series of the abolitionist papers and i am proud doctor gilmores forthcoming book change everything, racial capitalism and a case for abolition. Haymarket has three more important events lined up this week on sunday. And on thursday one week from today and conversation with the money perry. Was so many people joining the call we need your patience with technical issues you may want to try reduce your image quality video will be recorded and we are reserving time for q a please post your questions on the live video feed wherever you are watching it. The pandemic is a portal to imagine the world. Some responses to covid19 that doubles down on criminalization on national and subnational borders now serves us with a message of total surveillance of good medicine. As we try to imagine a different world and fight for our future there is no one i would rather hear from. The cofounder of Many Organizations including california moratorium project and Environmental Justice network and part of the Graduate Center and doctor gilmore is the author of purpose in opposition and brilliant study that locates prisons at the foundation of the new prison space where we met the idea that government can or should guarantee social wellbeing to be featured in dozens of journals and books and the new book change everything the case for abolition is forthcoming in february 2021. Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. With covid19 many are pointing out so can you start off the Bigger Picture between prison and inequality . I would be happy to. My dear friend catherine who i think is listening from somewhere in toronto, recently cited the fantastic poet and lawyer and said if we were truly all in this together, we would not all be in this together and this is the message i think we can use as a starting point tonight to talk about covid19 mass incarceration and the struggle for abolition. Mass incarceration and the related detention that connects to what is a feature of places that have the deepest inequalit inequality. We have one slide to show you tonight, that shows a list of the founding nations this was created by the franklin policy initiative with Data Collection and visualization and spreading organization and one of the great ones of the world, shows us that even in the context the United States is off the chart. Quite literally. And what holds to gather is the possibility of mass incarceration is a combination of organized abandonment and organized violence which is to say present attention and importation. We can take the slides down if people are satisfied with this image. We could, but tonight we would also look at images from brazil, russia, india and south africa and we would see a similar pattern emerging where no one, no country is remotely close to the United States. But as russia and other countries follow increasing neoliberal policies to say that abandonment and austerity we see the number of people rise and rise. But as i said the United States is off the charts. That said, it is not for catastrophe or a culture of complaint the catastrophe and complaint if that is how we do our the kinds of practices for the many people who are listening what my friend and historian calls pity and that is not looking for contempt or pit pity. What we are doing rather is trying in every possible way , to find a way to politics , rather than the distinguished by or by style but looking for politics that are grounded in the struggle of life and death. So a young french writer he wrote a fantastic book that is called who killed my father and in this book he makes this distinction. So what does that mean for abolition . Abolition his presence and is already happening in so many ways around the world and many of the people listening and watching tonight are already doing the work and as stumped as we are because they are under some subversion of house arrest. So revolutions happen because people are so conservative. Conservative. They wait and try every little thing until one day people come out in the street and clear up in a matter of years the disorder of centuries so to say that covid19 is a portal to which people who do all kinds of Little Things of various kinds around the world to come out and clear up the disorder of centuries. My friend and conrad listed what i made the other night was the selfdefense model and she thought in the discussion from abolition radio the other day that we could think of what we did as survival pending abolition so that means the work behind and the work ahead is very long. I will give you an example. In l. A. County, decades ago, the aclu brought conditions of consignment case against the county for their horrendous conditions in the jails. Over the years the aclu was in charge of taking care and keeping an eye on what the county did to remedy the horrific conditions. About 18 years ago the aclu invited a few abolitionists to talk to them about something they had never imagined which was the way to remedy the problem with the l. A. County jails was not have a jail at all but build a better one. Slowly but surely this way of understanding is central to the struggle in Los Angeles County over those jails. Sixteen years later, abolitionists who joined forces with those of reform, managed to persuade l. A. County board of supervisors, one of the biggest governments by number of people in the United States , not to build a new jail but rather put the billions of dollars that wouldve gone into that, into housing and healthcare and other lifeaffirming projects. So abolition is present and how we connect with growth from and to multiply those that have the capacity to risk the movement i learned many years ago us who are talking heads on skype is to live on live the moment and to show how anti Domestic Violence people is essential to the formation of abolition that Mutual Aid Organization that now flourishes everywhere because of covid19 nurses, all of these organizations become in one way or another and some movement of abolition its about abolishing the condition under which prison became the solution to problems rather than the buildings we call prison. There are neighborhood organizations and prisoner organizations and Environmental Justice and legal aid, rights advocates , Public Health advocates, you name it, large and small are coming together in various configurations around the world to relieve the stress of this abandonment and the realization by changing the world in which we live so thats the big picture that connects inequality with abolition and mass incarceration. So here we are decades deep in organized violence and abandonment and now the covid19 pandemic what are the possibilities now and what does it mean for the future . The pandemic is focusing on everybodys mind nothing like fear to focus the mind there are many aspects and therefore the responses that people put together in many ways are quite astonishing. And one very pointed case at the university of law school put together for all of the state jurisdiction and federal bureau of prisons to show who has the authority so people who are organizing on the ground can focus using the power map to make the decision to release people. What we know about mass incarceration it is class war and it is tied to the vulnerabilities that the types of organizations i listed a few minutes ago and the organizing that they do they try to relieve these vulnerabilities as our prisoner rights advocates and people who are incarcerated advocating on their own behalf. We could spend some time perhaps thinking about the fact that in the United States the. That mass incarceration has become a catchall solution for social and economic behavior and other problems and the number of prison beds has gone up as hospital beds have gone down. The movement in the opposite direction is quite startling to me. And as many people have figured out, those who are against door for the configuration of hospital and healthcare in the United States today, we still see the fact that many areas of the us are underserved, if served at all and those that have the capacity to take care of people are overwhelmed because of cuts to health care and the workers who are working in hospitals and transportation and all of the venues of the system to try to keep people whose lives are in danger from becoming sick and dying, are struggling with an adequate resources when they could be there. What could we think about in terms of organizing now . Certainly a lot of the work that people have done and vulnerabilities should and could be lifted up now. Weather talking about brazil or the workers who have been organizing for years, are supposed to have access to produce food and wellbeing and have shelter, but also built an enormous Educational Program for themselves and others that has very Strong International connections for this hemisphere and around the world. And the Highlander Center in tennessee since the 19 twenties has been an essential place for organization and pro workingclass and to have a program right after we log off tonight and thinking about housing a fantastic story of a young abolitionist based in new orleans. After katrina destroyed a good dale one deal of everyday life and then the United States came through and destroyed what had been destroyed by the flood floods, shana and her comrades said we will create a Housing Trust so that a few one if you households could have a safe and secure and Pleasant Place to live. And raise the money and then when they were finished with they had to say about it was we did do this and this tells me the state that we needed we actually need that state that belongs to us rather than think we can do this for ourselves for each other. Other possibilities with respect to covid19 connect with the various kinds of things that people are doing immediately to set people out of prison and jail or those that have gotten out that are vulnerable because they need shelter or food or other kinds of sustenance. So those that have sprung up around the United States they are new with covid19 but they are more urgently of course raising money and we know in cook county in chicago and the comrades that she had been working with over the years was getting people out of cook county jail. This is a good thing to do but yet we also know in the last four weeks, 22 Million People in the United States lost their jobs. That means the need could not be greater for people to have the wherewithal to buy food and so forth and there is less discretionary cash available to help out and therefore in discovering the work from new orleans, we have to make demands on the social wage which is our right and requirement of ourselves. From around the world there are examples from Rio De Janeiro and the Detroit Justice Center and working on behalf of undocumented people all over the United States those disability organizers it had been so beautifully pull together and people for chicago many people have been working to extend protection and opportunity to see in this emergency is not to say they are deserving and they are not but to say 22 Million People in the United States lost their job that means many of us to be precariously employed or steadily employed or unemployed would risk joining forces together rather than imagine we can prevail to break ourselves up into smaller and smaller groups. I want to turn to some certain calls to caution against using conventional dividing lines nonviolent versus violent and short and sympathetic and can you explain why its problematic using these categories . First and foremost, we should plan and then we should say what happens next in the event the victory . So that the people who have been released are those that could ever be released do i say everybody inside . Of course not. But i do say most people who go to prison, leave prison most people are not doing life sentences. There should not be any life sentences and most parts of the world there are not. Most people do leave prison so to imagine there is a magical line of less guilty or more guilty or less or more innocent or less or more deserving or violent and nonviolent, why not take seriously the fact most people need prison, do a little analysis to see that we could closing prisons already and jails already if we just cut by two, three, four weeks, much less years the kinds of sentences people are serving and then go on to the work on abandonment. This is not an impossible challenge. It did take a long time in los angeles it didnt take as long for what we learned and of that model behavior and revolutionaries and leaders of my consciousness and cautions us and that is absolutely right. We should gather all of the victories and stop and think about them and what will this make possible . Why do these victories matter . Who do we abandon or use our own capacity whether or not to include them in victory . So new york city plans to build to spend 11 million for a new jail. This is the close rikers project the mayor yesterday or today announced the city budget as ravaged as it is by the effects of covid19 will shrink by 2 billion. 11billion for prisons and 2 billion left for everything the city needs. The mayor can learn from l. A. County, do not build the new jail, close rikers, use the resources, the money from Human Resources that would have gone into those institutions that people would be organizing to close rikers which was open because people organize to close the institution that preceded i it, the mayor and the city council use the money for the wellbeing that indeed has been ravaged by unemployment from covid19. How can that be . Design of the relationship with the transportation, health , the justice system, securit system, security, gender, ag system, security, gender, age,. That this definition of what people start to think systematically so that its possible to see how they come into being. And naturally available to organizing and struggle. That is what that definition is for. Let me give you some examples. The design of the Public Health system this is true with the overdeveloped world with the resource extraction went to several rounds of Governmental Organization the 2h century that put into place largescale government to extract value from labor. So that was a project of the 20h century. So that design put out a framework of care and disregard that has amplified for you over time certain people are to have underlying conditions that make them vulnerable to covid19. The issue is not if its pathological about a person or group of people but how has the design of a Public Health system have the wherewithal to bring people in and push them out over time. So tomorrow at 2 30 p. M. Eastern time in the us, a long time organizer and aid activist for critical resistance will be in conversation with the visionary sociologist who was thinking of data and the visualization for the purpose to strengthen people and movements. That conversation will happen tomorrow. And i want to Say Something else. That to be aware of the statistics and to tell us over and over again we have to be aware of bad statistics and at the same time be aware of the presumption that vulnerability is somehow persuasive 50 percent that somehow that will persuade people to action. And in my experience especially years ago doing some outreach work with young people in high school trying to bring into the early days and then to talk to a group of mostly brown and black young people in one of the teachers said young one out of three young black women are one men will go to prison. What young person sitting in the auditorium in 1998 would be encouraged to listen and act if the older people said you are doomed . You are doomed. So to go back to the purpose of my definition of racism is to enable people to think of activity the vulnerability would lead to joining forces to overcome that folder ability and do something else. Example is water. Everywhere around the planet people are struggling over water. So the Navajo Nation is a hot spot because of the scarcity of water because people cannot wash their hands. So those who were organized at standing rock, pipeline people but those anti pipeline has everything to do with protecting water. So then with michigan and detroit and the Justice Center especially after the fires of last year with adequate nutrition is enormous. Cape town south africa is on the verge of running out of water for some time now. So all of these concerns about water go through my definition of racism give a sense to join forces to fight racism against water, prison, housing, peoples attitudes. I dont care what anybody thinks of me as long as they stay out of my way. Now we will bring in audience questions. Radical imagu are in the position to make a donation no matter how small and today bookstop and to consider giving to the groups of critical resistance. We will give you a couple of questions and you can select a. Caring asks does abolition fight the war and i thought you could elaborate also the militaryindustrial complex and how you are thinking about the Prison Industrial Complex. That is one for the taking. Theres also a few good questions that are asking for the breaking down of the incarceration and if there is a meaningful contrast. A i will take that question. Ten years, maybe. The war, absolutely. Its interesting that weve gotten this far in the discussion. So, some of us inspired by an article in the nation in 1994 i think, maybe five, started to think