"We tear at the faces we are told are the enemy's. We tear at our own faces"

The title of this post is from Angels With Dirty Faces: Three Stories of Crime, Prison & Redemption, the phenomenal book by Walidah Imarisha, an education, writer, activist and poet. In the book, she gets to the messy and challenging heart of mass incarceration in the U.S. through the stories of two people, her adopted brother Kakamia, and his friend, Mac. I appreciate how Walidah intertwines her personal history, particularly with experiencing sexual violence, with Kakamia's and Mac's stories, forcing us to question and rethink what justice, accountability and healing can look like. Like the majority of sexual violence survivors, Walidah did not report her rape to the police, instead, she chose to utilize community-based restorative justice methods to hold her partner accountable for the harm he caused her, and to facilitate her own healing. In describing the restorative justice process, she shows the messiness of implementing these practices, and how even though they are not perfect, it's important to continue trying. Her story combined with Kakamia's and Mac's, both of whom were imprisoned for violence crimes, forces us to see through the worst thing that people have done to their humanity. 

Imprisoning people does not address the systems that structure all of our lives and that gives too many people nothing but bad and worse decisions to choose from. The violence and harm does not stop when you imprison someone; it can’t, because prisons are inherently violent themselves. As Walidah states, “prisons are not about safety, but about control and containment of potentially rebellious populations.” It’s politically fashionable to lament about the number of people held in U.S. jails and prisons, feign shock at the racial disparities that exist, and even to advocate for the release of people convicted of nonviolent drug offenses. But that is not enough to undo and reverse the damage of decades of hyper-incarceration of mostly Black, Brown, queer and trans poor people. As others have so eloquently stated, even if all people incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses are released from jails and prisons, the U.S. will still have the highest incarceration rate in the world. Jails, prisons, immigrant detention centers, mandatory “treatment” or residential centers, and any other institution that imprisons people, must be abolished and replaced with community-based transformative justice systems.

As the stories of Kakamia and Mac illustrate, people who are incarcerated each have their own unique story and history with how society’s systems have worked or not worked within their lives; but there are also similarities between them, even though they grew up in different eras. While Kakamia grew up in Crown Heights Brooklyn in the 1970s and 1980s and Mac in 1960s Hell’s Kitchen, the same underlying institutional structures impacted their lives, including unemployment, disinvestment, and violence. Government policies led to their communities being a kind of prison, preparing them to be incarcerated in actual prisons. Both Kakamia and Mac participated in harming other people’s lives, even ending lives, so how do we hold them, and others who seriously harm our communities, accountable, outside of a punishment and retribution model that reproduces that same violence? How do we center the healing of people and communities?  I don’t have the answers to these questions, but we have to continue having these hard, painful, but necessary conversations, implement transformative justice models of accountability, and if one way doesn’t work, keep trying.