Transcript

Jaison Oliver 

Coming up this episode on the upEND podcast.

Erica Meiners

Yes, of course we want to remove police from schools, but that’s not sufficient. We want to make sure that those same policing functions aren’t being fulfilled or executed by social workers or teachers in those schools. What are the steps towards building futures that don’t rely on policing and prisons and the sort of fuel in the lifeblood of policing in prisons and borders, which is of course white supremacy?

Josie Pickens 

Welcome back to the upEND Podcast. In this episode, we’ll be discussing how schools have become sites of policing and how the work towards liberated schools includes the abolition of the family policing system. We’re joined today by Erica Meiners, who we know will have a great deal to offer us as we delve into the intersections of policing in schools and family policing.

Jaison Oliver

Erica Meiners is a writer, educator, and organizer. Their recent books include For the Children, Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State, a co-edited anthology, The Long -Term Resisting Life Sentences, Working Towards Freedom, and the co-authored Feminists and the Sex Offender, Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence, as well as 2022’s Abolition Feminism Now. More importantly -most importantly- Erica has collaboratively started and works alongside others in a range of ongoing mobilizations for liberation, particularly movements that involve access to free public education for all, including people during and after incarceration and other queer abolitionist struggles. 

They are a member of Critical Resistance, the Illinois Death in Custody Project, the Prison and Neighborhood Arts and Education Project, and the Education for Liberation Network. Erica is also a sci-fi fan, love that. An avid runner, that’s also great. And a lover of bees and cats. Welcome, Erica!

Erica Meiners

It’s so great to be here. I’m honored and just looking forward to our conversation today. 

Jaison Oliver

Thank you, thank you. So can you tell us about your introduction to abolition and how you came to organize and write about it.

Erica Meiners

Thanks for that question. And I think it’s a really important question to ask because in this political moment when we’re surrounded by so many brilliant, amazing organizers who identify as abolitionists, I think that the pathway to becoming one, it’s important that people share those. They’re not all the same. And it reminds us that there aren’t necessarily what I like to call conversion narratives or like ways in which people just wake up and be like, today I’m an abolitionist, right? You know, I certainly wasn’t born an abolitionist. I came from a household where when I was a teen, when my father was arrested, he was a long time addict. It was something that I didn’t necessarily see as a strategy to make my own life safer, but it was sort of, you know, a moment of respite, a tiny moment of respite in my own life. But as I learned about policing, as I learned about what we call the prison industrial complex in the United States, I began to get a little bit of a critical lens on thinking about prisons and policing. And I started to work, because many of my loved ones when I moved to the United States as a person in my late 20s when I moved to the United States, I started to work on challenging the prison industrial complex. But I hadn’t heard the word abolition used in relation to dismantling the prison industrial complex until I read Angela Davis’s book, Are Prisons Obsolete, and I got introduced to an organization called Critical Resistance that was pushing us to think about, what are the steps towards building futures that don’t rely on policing and prisons and the sort of fuel in the lifeblood of policing in prisons and borders, which is of course white supremacy and settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy. So that’s a little bit of a journey. And I think I’m still somebody who’s like learning and unlearning what it means to be an abolitionist. I still struggle with those questions and I still struggle with how do we make our world stronger and safer without relying on more cops or the cops in our hearts, like in all of us. So that’s a little bit of a snapshot about how I came to the work, both from a personal pathway, but also from a political pathway, and most importantly, a collective study pathway.

Josie Pickens

I love that and especially love the idea of learning and unlearning as we deepen our thinking around abolition, which is what we’re doing at upEND. And this season, we’re focusing on drawing connections between movements because I think that is such important work. We’ll be exploring abolition from the vantage point of topics like immigration, sexuality, and even international liberation movements in other episodes. But can you talk about why your work focuses on drawing connections between issues like these in your organizing and scholarship?

Erica Meiners

Yeah, I think de-siloing work or reminding us of the essential interconnections between sites of struggle is so, so important in this moment. Sometimes I think about it as that old kind of carnival game, the whack-a-mole game, like so many of us, because of what’s happening to our loved ones, to ourselves, to our communities. We get involved in a campaign to stop the construction of a new prison or stop the expansion of policing or to try to stop the expansion of mandated reporter laws. And we do that work because it’s critical. It’s about our lives. It’s central work. And I think, of course, we wanna be fighting against that new prison, fighting against the expansion of policing. But at the same time, it’s absolutely important that those individual campaigns make the connections between other struggles and systems. 

And that we’re also exposing the rules of the game at the same time as we’re working on one particular campaign or struggle. So it’s like that carnival game, you know, where you’re smashing the little whack-a-mole, you’re smashing the individual hedgehog (which is such a violent image, right?) that pops up with your mallet. Of course you’re doing that, but at the same time you, that campaign, has to also be changing the rules of the game as you’re going. So I think that that’s one of the, I think, political tensions we face in this moment is how do we do the work that is threatening our communities in the immediacy in the now, but also see our work as always interconnected with other struggles and campaigns, whether it’s migrant justice movements, and also see beyond the artificially constructed borders that have been created. So I really appreciate your focus on internationalism in this moment because I think that’s also central.

So I think, and that’s true for all of us, I think it’s really challenging. We’re fighting a new prison construction project here in the state that I live in, Illinois. The governor has proposed two $900 million new prisons. And one of the big proponents of that is the Corrections Officers Union in the state of Illinois. so how do we connect workers’ rights and labor movements with challenging the prison industrial complex, like it’s imperative that we see those as interconnected, those movements that a world for a more just, you know, forms of labor and working and economic freedom, right, has to be connected to also dismantling the prison industrial complex. And I think that’s a real challenge. So I’m excited for the shows that you’re doing this season that are really gonna be connecting those movements.

Josie Pickens

Thank you so much. And as we’re talking about overlapping and this idea of like making sure that we are connecting all of these different liberation movements, justice movements, where do you see your work overlapping with family policing system abolition? And particularly what does feminism add to our toolkit as we work to create stronger families?

Erica Meiners

Thanks for that. I think some of the key architects of how we think about abolitionists today are people who came into the work because of their analysis, investment, experience with what we now would call the family policing system or the family regulation system. I think about the brilliance of scholars like Dorothy Roberts. I think there’s a whole history of sort black feminist thought that has been paying critical attention to the importance of seeing how the prison industrial complex is lived in the lives of women of color in particular, but families and what we think about as often private or domestic arrangements. 

So I think that we don’t have, sort of point blank, we don’t have an abolitionist movement in this moment without that genealogy, that history of Black feminist organizing and Black feminist organizing that has been challenging the ways in which Black families have been policed, regulated, dispossessed, disenfranchised. Not just Black families, but I think I’m just lifting up that core in this conversation today, but also thinking about the work of Indigenous scholars. I’m also thinking about the brilliance of so many in particular Black feminist and women of color feminist organizers. So for me, I think that that work was really instrumental in, as I began to think about abolitionist organizing and the prison industrial complex in the United States. 

But when I started to get involved in what was called abolitionist campaigns maybe 20 odd years ago, almost always the campaigns that were most visible as abolitionist campaigns or even proto-abolitionist campaigns were ones around policing and prisons. And those were incredible campaigns and important work, but always other work that was challenging the foster care system or advancing reproductive justice or work that was, I think about early work from my dear comrade Charity Tolliver in the state of Illinois that was raising the visibility of the criminalization of co-sleeping, which we couldn’t get bodies out for those kinds of campaigns. We couldn’t get as many people to turn out for those kinds of initiatives. 

So I think for me it was an early kind of paying attention to where people showed up, how people defined what was like important harm to intervene around. I think that’s always been, I think, a challenge in any movement and in any organizing. Another realm of work that I have spent years working in relation to is young people and working in relation to young people and schooling and the prevalence of family policing or the ways in which young people’s lives were, you know, hyper-regulated and coerced, the ways in which policing surfaced, of course, as uniformed police officers in those spheres, but also, as another comrade of mine calls it, like cops in cardigans. Or, you know, cops and blazers. 

So thinking about how young people were negotiating, especially young queer people, young people with disabilities, and young BIPOC folks in the Chicago public school system and the Chicago public school system is about 95%, non-white, so almost all young people in the Chicago public school system are kind of at the margins of experiencing forms of family policing. So for me, just to come back to your question, that was kind of a meandering response, for me, family policing was always present in abolitionist work. It was one of the reasons that I started to think strongly about abolition. 

It was those scholars, organizers, thinkers, brilliant folks like Loretta Ross that brought me into thinking about the ways in which the state is trying to regulate and coerce and dispossess families. But it was often harder when campaigns emerged or organizations emerged, especially in the last 20 odd years I’ve been in Chicago and Illinois. The most visible proto-abolitionist or abolitionist campaigns have been around things like policing and prisons, and less visible have been some of the work directly around things like mandated reporting or co-sleeping or what we would think about it in the family policing realm. And I’m really excited about, you know, podcasts like this scholarship that has really, you know, emerged in the last five years that has kind of, you know, flipped that. And there’s so much more work emerging now and people and campaigns and projects. So, but we do need to continually, as you framed earlier, connect the dots. How is challenging policing in schools connected to challenging mandated reporting laws? We need to be always making those connections.

Jaison Oliver

You led directly into the next question that I had for you, which was really about looking at schools. So people often will discuss the school to prison pipeline. That’s the widely used term. And yet you often use the term school-to-prison nexus. What does this school-to-prison nexus term mean? And how does a shift in language help us to understand the connections between schools and the prison industrial complex in new ways? Kind of separate from this pipeline idea.

Erica Meiners

Great question. I think when I started thinking about that, 20 odd years ago, I was working at a public university, a working class university, open access. It was sort of my ticket to staying in the United States. I got a legit job. And I was training a lot and working with a lot of educators that were in the wonderful Chicago public school system. And I was also teaching at and running a high school on the west side of Chicago for people coming out of prisons and jails, which I’ve done for about 20 years. 

And I…trying to make the connections between those sites, like what’s happening, most of the people in the high school on the West Side of Chicago were actively robbed of an access to a GED or a high school diploma in their lives. And then I’m also working to train teachers at the other end and working with people who are teaching in Chicago Public Schools. So I began to get really interested in what’s the relationship between these major institutions in the United States, schooling and prisons.

And it’s not rocket science, it’s not a new idea, but schools in the United States have always, under-educated particular populations. Have always targeted particular groups towards underemployment or the employment available after full white employment in the United States. They’ve always tracked, they’ve always shaped, they’ve always promoted particular kinds of ideologies. And they’ve also been sites of organizing and resistance. So they’ve been both, public schools.

So at the same time, young people in Chicago were organizing against, and across the country, when I moved to the United States, were organizing against punitive school discipline policies, like the sort of three strikes in your outlaws, and that came out of the Gun-Free Schools Act. And I won’t rehearse that history here. And the young people were using this language, young people in Chicago were using this language of a school to prison pipeline as a rhetorical strategy, as an organizing strategy, and to really galvanize communities to pay attention to the fact that their school didn’t have a sports team, funded sports teams or a science lab, but they had SROs or police throughout the school system. 

And just as a little side note here in Chicago, we just canceled with our school board, our $33 million contract with the Chicago Public Schools, with the Chicago Police Department. And that’s because of young people organizing. So I want to credit that two decade-long organizing history of young people largely and their loved ones and some teachers, some adult allies, but largely young people who, you know, that fight, that struggle became deeply visible in the uprising of the summer of 2020, but that struggle has a long history. 

So that language of school to prison pipeline, I always think it’s important to remind ourselves that young people use that as a rhetorical strategy. But if we want to use our scholar hat or our historian hat we also want to acknowledge that schools have always been sites of under education and tracking and sites where those ideologies of heteropatriarchy or white supremacy are reproduced and still are today. So I think that that reminded me to sort of move away from the language of school to prison pipeline, because that implies that if you just fix the schools, the communities will be fixed and then the schools will be fixed or that it’s somehow kind of linear. 

So nexus was just a term that I was using to try to figure out how to talk about it differently, how to talk about this relationship that was historic and ongoing and wouldn’t be solved just by putting restorative justice programs in schools or wouldn’t be solved by simply dismantling punitive so-called zero-tolerance policies in schools. That we really needed as abolition in the words of the wonderful, beautiful, Ruth Wilson Gilmore is about changing everything. So we can’t think about tinkering with a few policies or to come back to this political moment, yes, of course we want to remove police from schools, but that’s not sufficient. 

We want to make sure that those same policing functions aren’t being fulfilled or executed by social workers or teachers in those schools. That language of the nexus was just an attempt to kind of push away from a rather linear and ahistoric and also kind of a superficial response. But I always want to remind people that the work is also to credit young people who I think have been doing the lion’s share of organizing, to remind us that the young people came up with that framework. And they came up with that framework as a rhetorical strategy.

Jaison Oliver

I want to, for listeners who like aren’t familiar with the idea of a nexus to create the vision of, you know, more of like a web, I guess, this idea if there’s a, I don’t know, if there’s a better analogy or kind of mental idea that you give to people to think about it. But also something that I wanted to throw in is this idea of like, it doesn’t just go one way. It’s not just linear in terms of, it’s not one connection or you fix the schools and community is fixed, but also the ways that our jails and prisons and these sites of incarceration are changing. Both our schools and these carceral institutions are both changing and kind of taking on more functions of each other. The schools are taking on more prison functions, the prisoners are taking on more school functions. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Erica Meiners

Yeah, that’s such a great framing. And yes, Nexus is like a web. I think any rhetorical strategy, whether it’s a nexus or a pipeline, they’re always limited and flawed. And I try to differentiate between the strategies I use in organizing and the strategies that we want to use to have a more crisp analysis. And sometimes there’s overlap and sometimes there isn’t, just to put that out there. 

But yeah, I mean, just to come back to this political moment, I’ve been teaching inside two maximum security prisons in the state of Illinois for about 14 years. We have a democratic supermajority in Illinois. And now, be careful what you wish for. When we started 14 years ago, there were no college programs in prison. Not much was happening. We started this initiative because people inside asked for it. We do many things and we see ourselves as a kind of abolitionist organization in a complicated way.

But now I think we’re going to move away from offering formal college programs in prison because the state is now sort of claiming that work in ways that when we started 14 years ago, we were antagonistic. They threw us out. They didn’t want us there. And now the maximum security prison wants us there. And our goal is to work ourselves into obsolescence.

The primary goal is to get people out and get people free, right? So when we’re not, 14 years ago, that was a possibility because we were, you know, nothing else was happening in the state of Illinois. There were very…it was one other program way down south in Illinois, but we were the only program in the Chicago area. And, you know, it was antagonistic. It was in contrast with the prison. And now, you know, our governor the two new programming prisons, two new prisons that the governor wants to build at a cost of almost a billion dollars are gonna be programming prisons. 

Are gonna have state-of-the-art educational facilities. And you’re like, oh my gosh, funding for post-secondary education in the state of Illinois, public post-secondary education has cratered 50% over the last 20 years. And yet I don’t wanna live in a state where the only way in which poor working people can get access to amazing education for free is going to be in the maximum security prison system. Are you kidding me? So that deep contradiction reminds us that we have to stay nimble, we have to stay active, and we have to be, as you were sort of suggesting in your question, the dexterity, the flexibility of what we think about as the carceral state or the prison industrial complex. We have to be there.

They’re a bit clunky, right? Like they’re kind of doing the same things, the same kinds of reform initiatives. So that’s a good thing is they’re not particularly creative. If I can sound a little catty and trashy about the carceral state, they’re doing the same things they’ve tried before, but they’re not static, right? And we can’t be static either in our work. 

We have to always be reassessing collectively, how is this, is this work shrinking our reliance on the carceral state of the prison industrial complex? Is this work shrinking the footprint of the prison industrial complex? Is this work getting more people free? Is this work challenging the logics and those underlying ideologies or belief systems in the prison industrial complex? And I think that that’s something that we can only be assessing collectively and I think it’s something we have to always be doing.

Absolutely that kind of concept of the prison state, a prison-school nexus or web is just reminding us that it’s not a uniform linear path and education isn’t the solution to what we think about as prisons. And in fact, often education is part of the problem and a core facet of the prison industrial complex.

Jaison Oliver

Yeah, thank you. I also want to loop in family policing and thinking more…you talked a little bit about that before, but just how you see family policing playing into this nexus and these various connections within, between and among these systems of schooling and policing.

Erica Meiners

Yeah, I think it’s a really critical moment. And again, that’s why I’m so appreciative and so energized by this work, this podcast, the community coming out of Houston that’s been really pushing abolitionist work around the family policing system. Because as I was just flagging here in Chicago, we’ve removed police from Chicago Public Schools or we’re phasing out that $33 million a year contract that the police have with the public school system. But we can’t think that the work is done. We can’t think that, okay, we’ve achieved abolition. And I think that we have to be paying attention to those deep lessons from folks that have been working against the family policing system for decades and decades.

How is that same work of coercion, of state violence, how is that unfolding, maybe not with a badge and a uniform, but through different kinds of systems and practices. And I think we have a lot to learn for those of us who are newer to this work, right? Or those of us who have…I’ve been paying attention to it, but my primary campaigns and projects have not been around family policing.

But I think we have to be, otherwise, you know, we need to see ourselves in this work for the long haul and the long struggle. And we know that the prison industrial complex is going to be able to reform and reconfigure. So if we’re not going to have cops in schools, but we’re going to have social workers who are doing those same practices of sanctioning. And I think that the ways in which the prison industrial complex is able to to reform, right, to be able to reconfigure and to emerge in new kinds of state formations. So what we don’t want in this moment is social workers in schools that are sanctioning, that are making decisions about young people’s fitness and wellbeing and home lives. Which we’ve had that for decades. But without the police in schools, even some of the campaigns that we ran 20 years ago were counselors, not cops.

And I think that that was a dangerous campaign to run. Now we’re seeing people turning to that and saying, well, we need those, we need more school counselors. Well, of course we do, of course people need affirming mental health support and services, but careful, we need to be paying very careful attention to what that looks like, who’s sitting at the table, what the language is, where the resources are going. So I just want to lift up that kind of long haul struggle kind of work in this moment. So really, really important.

Jaison Oliver

Yeah, it’s so hard to get into the nuances of the counselors, not cops and like, yeah, but also, some counselors are cops. And so it can’t just be a one for one replacement thing. We have to change everything as you, as you mentioned earlier. 

We’ve talked about mandated reporting. This is something that comes up a lot. I know that you’ve written about, we talked about it last season, our episode about repealing CAPTA, which of the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, what advice would you give teachers and community members to help them challenge mandated reporting and rethink their own involvement?

Erica Meiners

Yeah, I’m so appreciative that you’re bringing up that question. And I think there’s so many more resources and networks in this moment. What I’ll offer for social workers and school paraprofessionals is to don’t feel like you’re alone. There’s so many more resources and networks of groups that are working against mandated reporting in this moment. So I think that’s the first thing is like Google, go online. Social workers against mandated reporting, the network of folks that are putting out podcasts and blogs against mandated reporting. I think that’s really, you know…and people who are coming up with the language about mandated supporting versus mandated reporting. So I think there’s resources out there. So I think it’s important to lead with that just to remind people you’re not alone, resources out there. And I think the lift for people sometimes is a high bar lift. It’s like, oh my God, I’m gonna get arrested. I’m gonna lose my job. And I think we do want people to be willing to take those risks. 

But I also want us to feel that we can position ourselves all over the spectrum of organizing. Maybe we’re the kind of person who wants to take a high risk. Maybe we’re the kind of person who has the ability to take a more medium level risk. Maybe we’re really not gonna be able to take the risk to lose our jobs. But there’s so many, everything from lobbying your school to get washers and dryers, to talk to young people. There’s so many strategies one can be deploying in order to not feel like they have to comply with those restrictive forms of legislation. Because almost every adult who works with a young person is a mandated reporter across the United States today. And I think that those laws we know don’t support young people, can often put young people in greater forms of jeopardy and their loved ones and their kinship and loved ones network.

I think trying to think about pushing back on mandated reporting laws and also doing some study here, and forming networks, study into action groups with other teachers, other paraprofessionals in the school. I think that’s another way to build up your vocabulary, build up your analysis, and also build up the tools that you can use in all different scenarios.

I don’t think we’re anywhere near at the state level challenging these forms, these laws, but I think we’re at an exciting moment where a particular kind of professional and advocacy and organizing networks are really proliferating tools and analysis about why mandated reporting laws don’t build safety. How they’re harmful and what are the tools that, you know, professionals can use to both protect themselves maybe economically, not to be selfish, but I think that’s important for people, for some people, but also how they can, how they can support one another to actually support young people and families and communities. 

I think that if we think about systems change work, what we know about systems change is that it’s going to take a couple more years of that, those levels of kind of grassroots organizing. That’s honing language, honing resources to be able to then push back on legislation and laws. And I think legislation and laws are sometimes the weakest tools we have in our toolkit for social change. I believe that grassroots movements are where the power lies because grassroots movements are changing language about safety, about harm, about community.

And I think that’s one of the most energizing places to be. And then once those can percolate and build and forge new languages, new cultural norms, then I think we can push back on, of course we need to change legislation and laws, but as importantly or more importantly, we need to challenge and dismantle the culture and the ways in which our communities have naturalized “Of course we need to report to the police.” Of course like in a we have to do that, right?

Josie Pickens

I think when I hear you speak so eloquently about organizing around abolition, I think about even my journey towards becoming an abolitionist and how sometimes my thinking has been right on the mark. Sometimes my thinking has missed the mark completely. It’s like an evolutionary process that we’re constantly trying to lean into. Sometimes we’re teachers, sometimes we’re a student. You’ve been involved in abolitionist organizing and scholarship for some time. How many years now, Erica?

Erica Meiners

I’m real old. think it’s been about 20 years now, maybe. Yes. Yes. I don’t know. When you’re old, it’s like you sometimes things are like 10 years ago. Sometimes it’s 20 years ago. I’m kind of, I’m not a very reliable narrator for years. 

Jaison Oliver

The pandemic has ruined everything. It feels like 2019 was a year ago. I am thrown off by that all the time.

Josie Pickens

Yeah. What is time?

Erica Meiners

I made a Y2K joke with somebody the other day and they looked at me like they had no idea what I was talking about. 

Jaison Oliver

That’s hilarious.

Josie Pickens

But I agree, I’ll say it, I’m old as well. I’m 47 and when I tell people, I’m like, oh, I’ve been organizing for like 25 years. The time goes so quickly, but you know, I’m grateful to have had all of the pluses and minuses of that time. And I imagine in your efforts over these last 20 years, you’ve yielded various results in your work. Where have you seen your work advance or undermine the collective goals of liberation in unexpected ways? Do you have any examples you can offer us?

Erica Meiners

Yeah, pluses and minuses. I really appreciate that question. I I think as I age, it’s also, I think I always, have more love and more deep, deep, deep, I think respect is sort of almost a too superficial word, you know, for holding collectives of people together for study and struggle and practice. And I think that that’s messy work, that’s full of pluses and minuses, that’s hard work. But I also, I am consistently odd, kind of mesmerized by people’s possibility for growing ourselves in different kinds of ways or growing ourselves otherwise. I’ll just, it sounds a little airy-fairy or flaky, but I just, especially in this political moment, we’ve got the RNC, DNC. Partially I can’t give a shit about either one of those entities, but at the same time, I’m also just reminded about all the deep love of, and comrade love I’m talking here from people who’ve done organizing with critical resistance and all the the all the brilliance that I’ve learned from people, know, in the Sylvia Rivera Law Project and from Creative Interventions, like so many networks and organizations and groups. So I just want to offer that as a, I’m a pessimist of the intellect, but an optimist of the heart and the will. Right. To, you know, misquote Gramsci and a million other people.

But I feel like nothing in our world is teaching us that we should feel optimistic about tomorrow. But I think it’s people and it’s groups. It’s listening to you two. It’s being with my comrades that really is actually both sometimes even as annoying and petty as they can be some days. That reminds me that we are the people we’ve been waiting for and we are building the world that we know that we need now and as messy and flawed as it is. 

But having said that, I mean, one of the things that I regret, you know, leaning into nonprofits, right? You know, as like the entities that we think are gonna be able to, you know, I don’t wanna trash them completely, but I’ve built a number over the years with comrades and colleagues. And I think that they’re…the nonprofit industrial complex is tense and real. I would do things differently there. I would make different choices about how to mobilize or how to build containers for people to do the work.

I think that how do we build political education into organizations? We were talking earlier about this need for being able to pay attention to how the prison industrial complex or the carceral state is deftly always reforming, sometimes in incredibly boring ways, but is able to reconfigure. We also have to have that ability to be able to reconfigure and have an analysis. I think having political building, like we often say that we build political education into organizations or forms of study, but often that’s the first thing to go because we’re tired, we’re exhausted, we’re trying to put the chairs up for an event, we’re trying to show up for something. So having an ongoing like a form of study is actually really hard.

You were talking about this season being about kind of de-siloing work. I sort of acknowledged earlier that one of the teachers, kind of one of the genealogies that brought me into abolitionist work was folks doing work around what we think about as family policing. Especially in relation to young people and families. How easy it is when you’re doing a campaign to have tunnel vision. And I use that analogy of the whack-a-mole game at the carnival, that you get so focused on your hedgehog smashing it down, that it’s often really hard to kind of draw back and say, okay, how is my campaign or strategy or our messaging material or my coalition I’m building,  how is that, as a wonderful, critical race theory scholar, Marie Matsuda said, how do we ask the other question? Is my strategy the counselors not cops? Okay, wait a second here. If we’re demanding counselors, what does that actually mean? Who is that putting at risk? Is that a strategy? 

So I think that trying to slow down work sometimes so that we’re able to ask the other question or we’re able to kind of have study. And sometimes we can’t, sometimes we…I was also involved in early restorative justice mobilizing, which I still think has political teeth and power. But the ability of the state to of co-opt work, now the Chicago Police Department has an Office of Restorative Justice. I think they call it restorative justice, actually. I think the school system calls it restorative discipline, or something. Maybe they do.

Sometimes we hang on to things a little too long because we feel like we did that work. Like, we believe in that, but being able to sort of let go. So those are some pluses and minuses. Not that it’s a ledger, it’s only a little on the ledger sheet and accounting, but yeah.

Josie Pickens

I love that idea of how do we ask the other question? And it in a broad way leads to the next question that I have for you. When we’re talking about movement storytelling or just storytelling all together. The stories that capture our attention are often focused on exceptionality. The adolescent in handcuffs, the parent arrested for stealing diapers, the quote unquote, nonviolent offender who dies in jail, what dangers does this create in your opinion?

Erica Meiners

Yeah, again, great question. Yes and no. I mean, it’s like a little bit of my bad language here today, but kind of like a gateway drug. And I think mainstream media loves those kinds of examples. But they often don’t lead us to a structural or a systemic analysis. Especially when they come through mainstream media outlets, then we focus on the individual and we see this individual as like, they made bad choices or they need fixing or they need support rather than systems or structures. And also systems and structures that are built by design. They’re not somehow arbitrary or accidental. Actually, these are systems that have been actively, we have a family policing system because we have directly funneled money towards investigations, towards a surveillance apparatus. 

That’s not at all about giving resources to people who are in need of resources, but it’s about policing and punishment and surveillance. So I think that often these stories can evoke sympathy or empathy or feelings that are actually about individuals and not systems and structures and not systems and structures that are actually by design about punishment or about harm. And I think mainstream media does that. And I’m differentiating between mainstream media and alternative or left media, because I think left or alternative or independent media has often tried to push on this a little bit and get us to try to see systems and structures sometimes through individual stories. 

And I think mainstream media, as opposed to independent or autonomous media, often uses the state’s language. So they use this language of child welfare, for example. Or they use the state’s language of violent or nonviolent offenders. And I think that that creates another gloss or framework that’s actually hard then for a reader or somebody who’s trying to learn something because then we’re trapped within the fun house, if I can go back to another carnival metaphor of mirrors. Where you’re like, what’s happening? And I think we want readers to see, of course, how those systems, or we want audiences, the public, everyone to see how these systems and structures that are created by us to punish, by our elected officials and our systems and are not new, are kind of old stories, harm individuals. 

So I don’t think we want to lose individuals and lose the differential impact on different kinds of individuals. That’s why I try to not…the language of mass incarceration often implies it’s arbitrary, but it’s actually, instead of mass incarceration, I like targeted criminalization or targeted punishment. You so I think we don’t want to lose, you know, the harm that people, real people, experience in these systems. And so I think we do want to have storytelling and narrative because I think that is critically important. But we also want storytelling and narrative and experiences that doesn’t rely on, that doesn’t use the state’s language, changes the state’s language. And uses language that actually points to systems and structures and histories, and also points to the rules of the game. To come back to that fun house metaphor, names things like settler colonialism, white supremacy, dispossession, disinvestment, coercion, surveillance, punishment. You flip it and especially in the family policing realm, it’s like protection or child welfare, right? 

So I think it’s really, really important to have storytelling and narrative, but storytelling and narrative that uses different language that points to histories, that implicates state systems, state structures, and doesn’t let the reader off the hook, right? Not to sound too punitive.

Jaison Oliver

I like hearing the reasoning behind as people introduce or use different language. I remember the first time that I started really, I think, learning about the prison industrial complex outside of the broader understanding of policing. I remember Rodney King as a child, like that being a part of the conversation, even jokes about all that kind of stuff. I remember that as a young person,v mass incarceration, targeted criminalization. 

I remember it was probably somewhere around 2005, a talk with Lani Guinier where she introduced this term of hyper incarceration. I was like, what, what is, I remember just like taking notes. It’s like, what is that…just taking all that in. That was really my first introduction to it. But I also really appreciate how you bring in the lessons and the storytelling. It seems like you really want to tell the stories of what’s the work that’s already happening, who are the people that folks should form and build community with and starting to create ways to send people in those directions, right? You study and track this organizing to dismantle the school-to-prison nexus, as well as the larger prison industrial complex. So what movements, wins, and lessons do you want listeners of this podcast to become more aware of?

Erica Meiners

Yeah, thank you for that. Language helps us both name the problem or name what’s unfolding or name joy, but also build and imagine and build the future we wanna inhabit now. I think about that beautiful line by Gloria Anzaldua that the first place that revolutions start is the ideas in our head. So I think abolitionist work has been really about imagining something different, imagining and giving people tools to imagine. Most of us, our imaginations are so colonized that it’s hard to imagine. I think about myself as a kid, like a world without police, you might have suggested that the world was flat, right? Like, because there wasn’t any tool. I might have been uncomfortable or they didn’t make me safe, but it was hard as a kid to imagine them not there because there weren’t a lot of tools.

One of the reasons I moved into things like sci-fi as a teenager is because it was like offering these like amazing alternative universes where anything was imaginable and possible. I think that point you made about language is really important and imagining something different. And especially as we go into God knows what other kind of fucking regime in the United States, I’m just thinking about the backlash against like so-called woke-ism or PC-ism or whatever. I think it’s because people are really afraid of the power language.  And I want to say, hot damn, yes! Of course I want you to pay attention to the words you’re using, and I want somebody to check me on my language! Because it matters. Because it is part of this ecosystem of cultivating or giving people, myself included, the little kernels to imagine something goddamn different. I think that is so central and worth fighting for.

And now I’m gonna come back to your question. You had a great question, and I got stuck on the language point. If you give me like two words, I’ll come back to it. 

Jaison Oliver

Yeah, the movement’s wins and lessons you think we should become more aware of.

Erica Meiners

Yeah, yeah. I mean again coming back to my other theme: I’m old now. So I think it’s fucking long haul work. It is long it’s long haul work, which doesn’t mean that we don’t have joy. I think that how we’re taught to think about social movements and social movement history is that it’s like big wins or big campaigns. 

I think about one of the joys in doing Abolition Feminism Now and reflecting on that was that, you know, the last chapter in that book is a little bit about Chicago where two of our authors, Beth and myself live. And we’ve both been involved in kind of different kinds, overlapping and different kinds of grassroots organizing in Illinois for decades. 

And I think about the power of those small grassroots organizing, like you throw a film screening, or like a rent party for somebody, or a fundraising party for somebody coming out of jail that needs a little bit of cash. And you make $300 and only seven people show up, but you do a film screening of an indie documentary about young people working against homophobia and their school system. And you feel like, okay, only seven people showed up and we made $200, right? But that little ecosystem of people imagining something different, with our posters for our events, our t-shirts. Our little organizations that we’re trying to create different response to the harm and violence that was unfolding in our neighborhoods that was experimenting and trying not to rely on the state and harmful state structures to build safer communities. 

Sometimes when we have our little ledger book, like when we’re taught about what counts, often that kind of work, very grassroots, small, organizing, sometimes nobody’s a paid worker. We don’t get mentioned in the New York Times or the Chicago Tribune or whatever. But that work got some money on someone’s commissary. That work stopped that young person from being removed from their aunt’s house. Those small things are part of remaking the quilt, right? 

And I think… I think that is one lesson I’m hanging on to is: of course we want the big wins sometimes, the major policies overturned, the big structural systemic shifts, but sometimes it’s these small organizations and the kind of cultural shifts, the language produced, and the relationships that matters enormously.

Jaison Oliver

I’m excited for this idea of remaking the quilt and just that  framing for it. I really love that. Along those lines, as we’re trying to remake the quilt, but to make it stronger instead of weaken it, what do you think we should be especially wary of in this political moment?

Erica Meiners

So many things, right? 

Jaison Oliver

Aside from everything, right?

Erica Meiners

I feel like it’s a moment of chaos, which is a moment of like, everything can change, but also things can just be reconsolidated so deeply and harmfully. I think that they’re in a sense they’re like old threats, liberalism, right? White supremacist liberalism which can kind of creep into so many spaces. 

Just thinking about the work that’s unfolding right now in Chicago and nationally around trying to rebrand the police as your kind of your nice, neighborhood mental health service provider, as your nice person who’s working to address interpersonal violence.

In a sense, the things we should be wary about are the things that we always should be wary about. They’re not necessarily new, but they feel, in this kind of political moment, heightened. 

I really appreciate the comment at the beginning of this that the season is also focusing on internationalist work. Here we are in the United States, or within the borders of what gets called the United States. And I think it’s important to look beyond our artificial nation-state borders to see how people are building safety and responding and learning. We’re pretty insular often, people who live in the United States, not always, but we can be. So trying to think about and learn from beyond that. And those are just some kind of worries. I don’t know if they’re the top of my head. I’m sure I’ll try to come back to more as the call goes along.

Josie Pickens

I love our conversations around imagining as a part of the building an abolitionist future. And for some folks who are thinking about abolition, so much of the focus is dismantling, but we have to be able to think differently about things. So let’s talk about imagination and thinking differently about safety. 

So discussions about safety often boil down to, it’s better to be safe than sorry, right? We hear this all the time. An example: the possibility of sexual violence is often used as a justification for intervention of the state by any means necessary, regardless of potential harm. How can we think differently about accountability?

Erica Meiners

Yeah, great question. I’m going to put a bracket on that because I want to come back to the last one because one thing that I am really worried about in this moment, especially as it relates to work against the family policing system, is the divergence or is the convergence in this moment. I’m thinking about young trans folks in southern states and the ways in which the right and libertarians and sort of the MAGA movement have kind of capitalized Parental Rights and are really invoking this sort of like, you know, privacy, parental choice and family, you know, and pushing against like family separation or making the argument that like parents should, you know, that parents’ rights are, you know, paramount, right? And I think at the very, very surface level, very surface level overlaps with, you know, some of the, you know, our pushes in our movements to end family policing. 

So I think it means that we need to be very rigorous and careful about how we’re talking about families. And we also need to ask the other question about like hetero-patriarchy in this conversation. Where is it moving? I just want to lift that I think that there’s a really interesting political moment right now around pushing back on governmental incursions and overreach into families and into family care. And I think that we could end up in this weird kind of strange bedfellows conversation. 

I think it’s an important moment that we get ourselves again really clear about bodily autonomy and what we mean by family and kinship networks because those of us against the family policing system means something very different than the MAGA, Republican, libertarian folks who also see themselves as against family policing, right? 

So I think that there’s like a weird language connection, but deep political differences, of course, but trying to push or rigor thereis really important. 

Josie Pickens

And it’s happening in Texas, let me tell you. We might be at the forefront of where it’s happening. Like we see it in legislation that’s passed and many folks are asking, well, how did that get passed? This particular legislation or some of the policy around these ideas that you’ve expressed. And yes, so it’s already here, unfortunately.

Jaison Oliver

So we shouldn’t join the school vouchers as a family policing abolition organization? It’s family agency, right? Isn’t that what you people want?

Erica Meiners

Exactly. I mean, that’s a classic. This is an old story. It’s totally an old story, whether it’s about healthcare, like midwifery, same example, right? You know, vouchers, excellent example. Especially, around reproductive justice. I think we want to use that language in this moment around queer and trans lives. It’s kind of a precarious moment yet again, right? 

So, it’s an old script, it’s not a new script. But I feel like we need to be paying careful attention about how we’re situated there, I think really important. 

Safety and accountability. I have a kind of a long history doing work against sexual harm, sexual violence. And when I started to sort of think about abolition, one of the first questions that came up for me was like, what about sexual harm? Like, hold on a second. Like, what am I thinking? What’s going on here? Like okay, I can kind of sort of understand, especially after I moved to United States and unlearned, I to learn about the relationship between race and white supremacy and power and the prison industrial complex. 

I was like, okay, I get that, but like, what about sexual harm? Like, hold on, wait a second here. So I had to do a lot of like thinking, but one of the kind of things that came from that study is the question that you’re raising, which is beautiful, which is about accountability. Is that one thing that I know from all of the work that I’ve done around sexual harm and sexual violence and, you know, the thinking and life experiences is that the criminal legal system doesn’t provide accountability for people that have experienced sexual harm. What I want, and what those of us who want to end gender and sexual violence want, is the harm to end, the systems that made that harm, and the ways in which that harm was possible or imaginable to make that go away.

I think if we start to shift our center of gravity away from the criminal legal system, we see so many more avenues to build from and to grow to actually address the root cause of the issue. When we’re just locking more people up or criminalizing or policing, we’re not actually addressing the root problem, which is sexual harm, sexual violence. And if we want to address that, we got to actually address that. Right? 

We can’t just keep saying well, we’re gonna hire more cops. We’re gonna lock people away for longer. We’re gonna build more prisons to put people in prisons, you who’ve done sexual harm. That actually doesn’t hold anybody accountable that’s done that harm. It doesn’t support people who’ve experienced that harm. Right? It doesn’t change the conditions that made that harm imaginable and possible in the first place.

I think I’ve been involved in paying attention to the last 20 decades of how are people working to address sexual violence and hold people accountable and transform the conditions that made that harm possible in the first place. And I think that is abolitionist work, is feminist work. My definition of feminism, that’s feminist work. And it’s not light switch work, it’s not immediate conversion work, but I think it’s really important work. 

And sometimes it’s preventative work. I think in this moment, if we had meaningful and affirming sexual health education in public school system, how would that act as a deterrent, as a protective move? But we don’t have that anywhere in the United States. So there are some things that are kind of not rocket science here that can actually work to reduce incidents of, particularly child sexual harm, but sexual harm in the United States. We’re not doing it, right? 

So I think if we really wanna be accountable and we really wanna end gender and sexual harm and we really wanna build our abolitionist worlds, we need to be asking the important questions like, why do we have gender and sexual harm? Not masking it through our criminal legal system. The criminal legal system response is we’re just going to hire more cops. We’re going to have more surveillance cameras. We’re going to have longer sentences. We’re going to punish people longer. And none of those acts as deterrent. We’re going to build more registries so we can track people. None of those are addressing the root problems. 

So abolitionist work, abolition feminist work, is really getting us to try to pay attention to that and ask those questions and then what do we do? And again, that’s not rocket science, it’s not new. I feel like I’m using rocket science here totally loosely, I have no idea what it is! 

That’s work that people have always done. Many communities could never rely on the criminal legal system to build safety, to address harm in their communities. People like sex workers, people who are undocumented, queer communities, people who are already targeted for eradication by the police. And it’s not that what those communities developed was necessarily THE solution, but there is a history of people experimenting, practicing, trying other forms of accountability. Like, what do you do with somebody in your network that’s really harmful or has done harm, and you can’t expel them or you can’t send them away? What do you do? So I think that we have those histories to learn from, to build on, to continue experimenting with. That’s the abolitionist vision, or the world, that is energizing to me and many of us.

Jaison Oliver

I hope people are taking this as an invitation. I think it’s clear that you cover a lot of the things that we’ll be discussing throughout this entire season. So much of this ties into your work directly, and we can’t talk about it in one episode, especially one episode that’s really looking at it specifically through the lens of schools and that as an entry point, even though schools touch everything. So I want to invite people to engage with you more broadly. Where can people find you and how can they stay connected with you and your work Erica?

Erica Meiners

I am funny and introverted and tall or whatever, but I think it’s not me, right? I wanna push people to so many amazing resources, whether it’s organizations like Critical Resistance, whether it’s organizations like the Dream Defenders, whether it’s work like the Movement for Family Power in New York. There’s just so many.

No individual’s gonna save us, but groups of people and their thinking, and their collective practice, their strategies, campaigns, and experimentation. If you’re interested in transformative justice amazing work from the Storytelling & Organizing Project and Creative Interventions that offer real examples of what people tried when shit went down. What did they try when they didn’t call the cops and how’d that work out, right? 

Check out the great blog posts from the Black on Both Sides folks here. There’s just so many great organizations. In this moment, we’re a little hyper-reliant on individuals and no one person had ever saved us. Not that you’re suggesting I can save anybody, but I would encourage people to get active, get collective! Get a study-into-action group going. Pick up something cool to read or cool to listen to, like these podcast episodes, and discuss them. Get together. How is this connected to our practice? How is this connected to what’s unfolding in our community, in our job? What are we gonna unlearn? 

Thinking about that old framework that we used in Critical Resistance, what do we need to dismantle? What do we need to change about ourselves? And what do we need to build? How do we think about that dismantle, change, build framework as we move through the world? And also have some fun! Get some food, get a little cocktail/mocktail. Just have some joy because I think it’s also long haul work. 

So find your people. Whether you’re in a church basement, a professional organization, your basement of your building in hot, sweaty Chicago as I am today. Find your people and study and to struggle into action together.

Jaison Oliver

I love that. I love how you took my question of where can people find you and turned it around to where to the audience, where can you find your people, right? Like this is a question and a call to action for the audience. Where can you find your people? And gave like practical steps to take to do that. So thank you, Erica. We really appreciate you. 

Erica Meiners

Also recruit! You can recruit too. You can find your people and you can recruit.

Josie Pickens

Yes! Yes! Find your people and find more people, and have your people find other people.

Erica Meiners

Yeah, exactly. Because look how good looking, smart, funny, amazing we are. Like we’re eminently recruitable, right? And who’s not going to be like swayed by us? Like, you know, what is that Toni Cade Bambara line? We are making the revolution irresistible every day.

Josie Pickens

Yes, that is it. That’s it.

Jaison Oliver

I love that. Well, thank you, Erica. We really appreciate you coming and joining us on the podcast. This has been wonderful.

Josie Pickens

Yes, thank you so much.

Erica Meiners

It’s been a real pleasure. Okay, thank you.