Moderating todays conversation could therefore introduce Ruth Wilson Gilmore i want to thank the organizer and the sponsor haymarket books. Haymarket is the publisher in a new series called the abolitionist papers and im proud to publish patient for this hearing is that the gilmores forthcoming book change every thing, haymarket has three more important events lined up this week. On sunday too much midnight and on wednesday had discussion of schools in the time of coronavirus and on thursday a week from today a conversation. A bit of housekeeping so many people have joined this call we may need your patience if we have technical issues. If it gets choppy at any point you might want to try reducing your image quality. It will be recorded onto Youtube Channel and we are reserving time for q a. Please post your questions on the live video feed wherever youre watching it. The Pandemic Forces us to break with the past and imagine the world anew. Some responses to covid19 is only doubling down the criminalization and National Borders and even more surveillance sold to us that the message that total surveillance is good medicine. As we try to imagine different worlds and as we fight for abolitionist future theres no one id rather hear from ben Ruth Wilson Gilmore. She is the cofounder of Many Organizations including california prison project, and the Central CaliforniaJustice Network to she is a professor of Environmental Sciences protected gilmore is the author of golden gulag prisons, surplus crisis and opposition in globalizing california. Its a study that locates persons as the foundation of a new kind of antistate state where we dismiss the idea that we can or should guarantee social wellbeing. She has written dozens of journals and books including police and the planet. And her new book, change everything racial capitalism and the case for is forthcoming to haymarket in february of 2021. Thanks so much. Thank you for having me. This covid19 many are pointing out the dead. Can you start us off by giving us the rigor picture on the relationship between prison and inequality . I would be happy to. My dear friend catherine mckitrick who live olivas listening somewhere in greater toronto recently cited the fantastic poet. He says if we were truly all in this together we would not all be in this together. And this is a message i think that we can use as our starting point when talking about covid19 mass incarceration and the struggle for abolition. Mass incarceration and the related forms of detention that connect to it is a feature of places that have the deepest inequality, the deepest inequality. We have one slight to show you tonight, a slide that shows a list of the founding nations of nato. This slide which was created by the prison policy initiative, perhaps the greatest data collection, visualization and spreading organization in the United States, shows us that even in the context of natos organization the United States is quite literally off the charts. But holds together the possibility of mass incarceration in the richest country in the history of the world is a combination of organized abandonment which is to say austerity and organized violence which is to say criminalization policing presence and deportation. Now we can take the slide down if people are satisfied with this image. We could but we arent going to. We will also look at images from brazil russia india china and south africa. 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 have followed increasingly real liberal policy which is to say that the policies of the organized abandonment, the policies of austerity we have seen a number of people locked up arise and rise and rise. The United States remains off the charts. With that said abolition actually is not a recitation of a catastrophe or a culture. If the catastrophe in the complaint, if thats all we do are the kinds of practices that induces many people who are listening but my friend the historian l. Scott calls contempt and. Abolition is not looking for contempt or. What we are doing rather is this. We are trying in every possible way to find a way to politics that rather than be distinguished by as a sociologist says politics distinguished by style we are looking for politics that really is grounded in the struggle over life and death. Edward lee is a french writer and he wrote a fantastic book that i recommend to everybody called who killed my father. Its in this book that he makes this distinction. What does politics and life and death mean for abolition . Abolition is presence. Its already happening in so many ways in so many places around the world and many of the people who are listening tonight in watching tonight are already doing the work and are stumped as many of us are because so many of us are under some version of shelter in place and yet the work continues. Revolutions happen because people are so conservative. Conservative. He says to wait and try every little thing until one day people come out in the streets and clear up in a matter of years the disorder of centuries. It said that covid19 is a portal. This might be a portal for people who are doing all kinds of Little Things of various kinds around the world to come out and clear up the disorder of centuries. My friend and comrade of rust belt evolution radio made mention the other night of the black their party with the mondo survival pending revolution and she thought during the discussion that i feel this had on abolition radio the other day that we could think of survival pending abolition. Survival pending abolition. That means that the work behind and the work ahead is very, very long. I will give you an example. In Los Angeles County decades ago the aclu brought conditions of confinement case against the county for the koran disc condition in jails. Over the years the aclu was in charge of taking care, keeping an eye on what the county did to remedy that her of the condition. About 18 years ago the aclu invited a few abolitionist to come to talk to them about something they had never imagined which was perhaps the way to remedy the problem with the l. A. County jail was not to have the jail at all rather than to build a better jail. Slowly but surely this way of understanding became central to the struggle in Los Angeles County over those jails. 16 years later abolitionists who joined forces with the forces of reform managed to persuade the Los Angeles County board of supervisors, one of the biggest government by a number of people in the United States, not to build a new jail but rather to put the billions of dollars that would have gone into that into Housing Health care and other lifeaffirming projects. Abolition is presence. Abolition is how we connect with form, grow from and multiply organizations that have the capacity to lift the Movement Read we are at better talking heads sometimes on skype move with the movement. To listed to show how anti violence people are central to the Abolitionist Movement as a movement in the mutual aid organizations which are now searching everywhere because of the emergency of covid19, Health Care NursesBuilding Trades all of these organizations have become in one way or another connected with the movement in that direction of abolition because abolition is about abolishing the condition under which prison became the solution rather than abolishing the building the call prison. There are faith organizations and neighborhood organizations, tenant organizations, prisoner organizations inside and out come Environmental Justice, legal aid, transit workers, rights advocates, bail funds come you name it large and small. All of these people are coming together in various configurations around the world to try to relieve the stress of organized abandonment and its realization through organized violence by changing the world in which we live. That is the big picture that connects inequality with abolition and mass incarceration. Here we are with organized abandonment and now entered the covid19 pandemic. What are the possibilities now and what might the pandemic meet for the future of criminalization . Certainly the pandemic is focusing on everybodys mind. Theres nothing like fear to focus the mind and fear as many many aspects to it and the responses that people are putting together are in many ways quite astonishing. For example just to take one very pointed case some people i think mostly students at the New York University law school put together a sheet, a guide for all of the state jurisdictions in the federal bureau of prisons in the country to show who had the authority to release people so that people who are organizing on the ground could focus using this power map on those who could in a brief amount of time make the decision to release people. What we know about mass incarceration is that it is class war and it is as class were very tightly knotted to the vulnerabilities by the type of organizations ive listed a few minutes ago and the kinds of organizing they do are trying to relieve. Labor unions are trying to relieve the vulnerabilities as our housing advocates and as our people who are incarcerated who are advocating on their own behalf, Families Communities and so forth. We could spend some time perhaps thinking about the fact that in the United States over the period that mass incarceration has become this catchall solution for a wide array of social, economic behavioral and other problems the number of prison beds have gone up as the number of hospital deaths have gone down. Its a movement in the opposite direction. Its quite startling to me. As many people have tweeted out those who are against and those who are for the configuration of hospital and health care in the United States today, we still see the fact that many many areas of the u. S. Are underserved if served at all. Laces 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, working in transportation, working in all of the venues of the system to try to keep people whose lives are in danger of becoming sick and dying are struggling with inadequate resources when the resources could be there. So what can we think about in terms of organizing now . Certainly a lot of the work that many people have done concerning rural workers vulnerabilities shedding can be lifted up now. Whether we are talking about the msp in brazil and the land workers that ive been organizing for years to have access to land to produce food and wellbeing and to live and have shelter but who have also built an enormous Educational Program for themselves and others that has very Strong International connections to our hemisphere and indeed around the world or in the u. S. The Highlander Center which has been in tennessee since 1920s and its been a special place for organizations, antiracist pro working Class Organization and they will have a program on it right after we log off tonight starting at 7 00 at 7 00 eastern time. Similarly when we think about housing i can give a fantastic story about a young abolitionist artist who is based in new orleans. After katrina destroyed a good deal of everyday life in new orleans and then the antistate state came through and destroyed which hadnt already been destroyed, shayna and some of her comrades got together and said we are going to create a housing tracts of few households at least can have a safe, secure in Pleasant Place to live. How do take a trust and how to take land out of the market and find a place they want to bind raise the money to buy the place. What Shayna Griffey had to say about it was we did do this. We helped ourselves and this tells me the state we need is the one that will do this. We actually need that state that the logs to us rather than think that we can do this ourselves or each other. We need the state to state and the antistate state. Other possibilities with respect to covid19 connects with the various kinds of things that people are doing immediately to try to get people out of ricin in jail to look after people who have gotten out who are vulnerable because they need shelter or food or other kinds of sustenance. There are bail funds that have sprung up around the United States. They are new with covid19 but they are more urgently reaching out and raising money. We know in cook county in chicago shameless grant shaylas grant and the college shes been working with have done in alnoor mostly wonderful job of getting people out of the county jail. This is a good thing to do and yet we also know that in the last four weeks 22 Million People in the United States lost their jobs. That means they need couldnt be greater for people to have the wherewithal to buy food and so forth. Theres less discretionary cash available to help out with the bail fund and therefore like shayna discovered in the work that she did in new orleans we have to make demands on the social wage which is our right and our requirement of ourselves. Around the world there are examples of artists such as pedro and reload the de niro and educators here, the Detroit Justice Center people who can work on behalf of undocumented people on behalf of migrants all over the United States. Disability organizers whose work has been so beautifully hold together. People who work with food in chicago. Many many people have been working as we try to extend protections and opportunities and see in this emergency that would be the time not to say these people are deserving and those people are not but rather say if indeed and four weeks 22 Million People in the United States have lost their jobs that means many of us with jobs, are curiously employed, steadily employed or unemployed, lets join forces together rather than imagine that we can prevail by the working ourselves up into smaller and smaller groups. I wanted to turn more specifically to some current calls for incarceration in light of covid19 but you have cautioned us again using conventional dividing lines to mark violin, nonviolent versus tyrant and sympathetic or unsympathetic. Some of these lines seem to be hardening with covid19. Can you explain why its problematic to demand incarceration using these categories . Well first and foremost we should always plan to win and if they plan to win we should ask ourselves what happens next in the event of victory . If what happens next in the event of victory is that the people who have been rightly released are the only ones who could ever be released do we will not have one. I do say this, most people who go to prison leave prison. Most people are not doing life sentences and they should not get life sentences. Most people do leave prison so rather than imagining that there is some magical line between less guilty and more guilty or more innocent or less innocent or more deserving or less deserving or violent and nonviolent, we should say why not take seriously the fact that most people leave prison. Do a little bit of analysis to see that we could be closing prisons already in jails already if we cut by two weeks in three weeks and four weeks in years the kinds of sentences people are serving and then move on to the work of undoing organized abandonment. The examples as i gave to you from Los Angeles County, this is not an impossible challenge. It did take a long time in los angeles and next time you shouldnt take as long. They shouldnt take as long because of what we have learned and it shouldnt take as long because theres model behavior that others can follow. One of the most important speakers and organizers, leaders revolutionary revolutionaries of my consciousness talk to us or cautioned us i should say against clean and easy victories and hes absolutely right. That said, we should gather all of our victories and then stop and think about them and say what is this victory going to make possible next . Why do these victories matter . Who have we abandon and who have we used are in our own capacity to organize violence and to not include them in victory. To give an example from new york city. New york city plans to build and spend 11 billion building for new jails. This was the socalled rikers project. The mayor yesterday or today announced that the city budget ravaged as it is by the effects of covid19 will shrink by 2 billion. 11,000,000,000. 2 billion less for everything the city needs. This is really straightforward. The mayor could learn from Los Angeles County, do not know the new jail, closer igers use the resources and the money and Human Resources that would have gone into that entire array of carso role institutions where people would be organizing to close just as people organized to close rikers which was open because people organized cold to close the institution that preceded rikers. The mayor and the city council could use the money for the wellbeing of the city that has been ravaged by unemployment, ravaged by the highest number of deaths from covid19. How can that he . How can that be . Turning a corner has to happen now because where live is precious, live is precious. A young organizer and thinker who has an entire story of his own to tell just published a piece in which he argues really beautifully about what is