Transcript

Jaison Oliver

Coming up this episode on the upEND Podcast. 

Bianca Tylek

Every single time a judge makes a decision to put somebody in prison, they are making a decision to separate a family. Whether that’s a parent, a sibling, a child, an aunt, an uncle, a granddaddy, at the end of the day, they are making a decision to separate someone not just from society but from their family. 

So I think abolition is a project, it’s a journey. I like to often describe it as both a demolition and construction project. Something that requires…I think very often we get stuck in the demolition. 

Josie Pickens

Welcome back to the upEND Podcast. Today we’re talking about the prison industrial complex and how its abolition is intrinsically linked with the abolition of the family policing system. The abolitionist-centered organization, Critical Resistance, describes the prison industrial complex as, a term used to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social, and political problems. 

We know that nearly half of the people in state prisons are parents to children under 18, which pushes thousands of kids into the foster system while also destroying their support systems. Prisons also charge inflated and outrageous amounts for phone calls one in three families dealing with incarceration goes into debt trying to stay in touch.

Jaison Oliver 

That’s where today’s guest comes in. Bianca Tylek is one of the nation’s leading experts on the prison industry and the founder and executive director of Worth Rises, a national organization working to end the financial incentives for incarceration. Bianca is a leader in the national movement to make prison and jail communication free, which has saved families more than $400 million and generated 2 billion additional minutes of call time to date. She also leads the End the Exception campaign to end prison slavery. Welcome, Bianca.

Bianca Tylek

Well, thank you.

Jaison Oliver

So for starters, can you tell us about your work and how you found your way into the space?

Bianca Tylek

Sure. So I lead Worth Rises. Worth Rises, we’re an organization that works to dismantle the prison industry and end the exploitation of people who are incarcerated and their loved ones. You took many of my tapping points from the top with the introduction, but just to back up, the prison industry is an $80 billion industry that relies on human caging and the separation of families in order to enrich a small number of people. I come into this work from a lot of different directions, both as someone who was impacted as a youth, going through a youth system, as well as kind of coming through finance. So I actually, my background is professionally on, from Wall Street.

And I use a lot of those skills that I sort of joke I developed to build up companies that I now use to dismantle them, those that are prying on our communities.

Josie Pickens

Okay, so a bit of an intro for this next question. Law professor Dorothy Roberts notes that the rate of children in the foster system is 576 per 100,000. And this mirrors the rate of incarceration for US adults, which is 582 per 100,000. How do you see your work connecting with family policing?

Bianca Tylek

I think you teed it up at the top, now I’m like, can I just go back to that?

Josie Pickens

Sure! Yeah.

Bianca Tylek

I think the reality is incarceration is definitively equivalent to family separation. And we don’t think about it that way. And what I mean by that is every single time a judge makes a decision to put somebody in prison, they are making a decision to separate a family. Whether that’s a parent, a sibling, a child, an aunt, an uncle, a granddaddy, at the end of the day, they are making a decision to separate someone not just from society but from their family. And then what happens is they’re incarcerated and their family becomes their entire support system in the sense that they can no longer really support themselves even, right? 

So people who are incarcerated on average make 14 cents an hour. In some states, it can cost as much as you know, 25 cents a minute for a phone call right now. And thankfully that’s going to change soon given some new recent regulations. But you know, when you think about it that way, you’re like, there’s no possible way that somebody who’s incarcerated can actually support themselves, let alone support their families, which we know that a lot of people who are incarcerated, not just parents to children under 18, were also primary breadwinners when they were incarcerated. And so there’s this extensive loss of income that happens when somebody’s incarcerated and then that’s exacerbated by the cost of incarceration that families are then expected to essentially subsidize for the US government and taxpayers. And then not only are they subsidizing this system, but they’re often being surveilled by it. So when we talk about family policing, you have to ask yourself how much of the interaction between people who are incarcerated and their families is actually surveillance of those families and their communities. 

For example, universally phone calls between parents and their children are recorded. And these days they’re doing all types of voice biometrics using AI, but also doing things like voiceprinting. When you voiceprint somebody, you are literally taking their voice as if it was an identifying feature of their identity, like a fingerprint or DNA, and databasing it, putting it inside of a database. And they don’t just do that to people who are incarcerated. These companies and this system does that to their families, to their children. So we have literally millions of children whose voices are being databased and then sold to law enforcement. 

And so there’s a lawsuit, for example, in New York City that is actually challenging the city’s invasive sort of spying apparatus on Black and brown communities because in New York City, at Riker’s jail, which is our city jail, 95% of those who are incarcerated are Black or brown. And so that means that the surveillance is specifically happening in those communities and people are starting to challenge that. And so there is this inextricable reality of the carceral system and the family policing system.

Jaison Oliver

Yeah absolutely. What have you come to learn about incarceration and policing that you wish others understood better or acknowledged?

Bianca Tylek

Oh, man, a lot. I don’t think our society knows anything about our carceral system or our court system or the way policing really works. We are sold from a very young age the hero story of the police officer, of the good guy. And at the end of the day, that sits within us. At the top of the segment, you talked about abolition from school and where we start. And where we really start is having to remove the police from within us. That part of us that even when we’re looking at external systems wants to say it’s wrong, but there’s an inherent part of us that’s been built. And abolitionists who’ve been around for decades longer than I have have talked about that same reality, how much we internalize this.

I would say that it starts with the idea that you need to break down the lens through which you are looking at the system and that you have been given. And then question everything. I think every single step of the way, there are things that I would say people don’t know. There’s another lawsuit right now actually challenging the right that a child has to hug their parents. Or trying to establish that right, I should say, specifically. And why? Because over the last decade or so, corporations in the carceral space have conspired with sheriffs and wardens and correctional administrators and officials to get rid of visits so that they can make money on video calls and phone calls. Because the jails get a cut of that. 

And so there’s a lawsuit in Michigan, two lawsuits actually, one against the corporation and provider county that uses Securus and another using ViaPath. And those are the two biggest corporations in this space. And each of them has engaged in this practice. And the plaintiffs are children. Children who are asking for the right to hug their parents. Right? To say that like because my father is incarcerated does not mean that he is no longer my father and that I shouldn’t have a right to that actual physical intimate relationship that one should have with the person that brought them into the world and loves them more than anyone else on this planet. 

I think that’s an example of something that I think few people know, how many jails lost in-person visits simply because they were trying to make money off of phone calls and video calls. And there are just endless examples like these of what’s happening in our carceral system that people have no idea.

Jaison Oliver

You’re making me think about, I was in the Harris County jail just a couple weeks ago and one of the Harris County jail is in Houston. It’s definitely one of the biggest jails in the country for people who are listening and may not know that.

They were the people that were giving us the walk through, the jail staffers were like, oh yeah, people can come through. They were trying to hype up these video, these virtual visitation kiosks or whatever. And were saying, families can come to the jail and then they can video call for free from the jail. So it’s actually affordable. I’m like, you’re making them come to the jail to like use these video kiosks for free because you don’t want to like allow them to actually see one another in person. They have to come to the jail just to not have to pay a ridiculous amount of money for these virtual calls. 

Bianca Tylek

Absolutely spot on. And I think the reality is that at one point they had visits. And then they got rid of those visits and they tried to convince you that there’s this free option where you can come to the facility and it’s like, yeah, but when I used to come to the facility, I got to see my daddy. Now I’m coming to the facility to get on a computer screen. And the only reason I’m coming to the facility is because if I get on that same computer screen at home where you want me to, and that’s why you’re making it this difficult, it will cost me a lot of money. But by the way, it still costs me money to get to the jail. I still have to pay for gas. I still need to take time off from work to take my kids. I need to do all those things.

So actually getting to the facility is not free, but it was worth it when you got to hug your loved one, right? It was worth it when it was like, I get to have this moment where they get to see someone out of the carceral setting that loves and cares for them and wants to support them through whatever this crisis is that they are going through. 

But I also want to flag something that you said because it is one of the most sinister ways that this industry moves. You mentioned the term video visitation. And, you know, I am talking about policing, I am the like video visitation language police. Because that is language that was created by the industry and I encourage us never to repeat it. Why? Because they created it to synonymize video calls with visits and make it easier for the public and others to accept that they have ended visits. So instead, now they say, well, you can have a video visit. We didn’t end visits. 

When, anywhere else in our society have we referred to a video call as a visit? My sister lives in Miami and I’ve never FaceTimed her and said I’m about to visit you. That is the wildest thing. But they coined that language so that our brains don’t process the difference between a video call and an actual visit in the same way anymore. And that we can replace one with the other and suggest that they’re the same. I always say like not all slogans are trademarked, but they do a lot of work. 

Josie Pickens

We hope you’re enjoying The upEND Podcast.  A quick note: upEND is funded through the generosity of people like you who believe that ending the harm of the family policing system will help us to create a safer future. If you’re enjoying this podcast, we hope that you’ll consider donating to our work. Visit upendmovement.org/donate for more information.

Jaison Oliver

You touched on this a bit in talking about especially some of the internal work that we have to do both in language and then also in the ways that we think about being in relation with one another. But what does abolishing policing and prisons and incarceration mean to you?

Bianca Tylek

So I think abolition is a project, it’s a journey. I like to often describe it as both a demolition and construction project. Something that requires, I think very often we get stuck in the demolition and the like, break all the walls down. And we need to do that. And in fact, that’s a big part of our work. We’re largely about demolition. That’s the part of the work that I love. 

But the part of the work that’s equally, if not sometimes more important, is the construction work. Is what are we building in its place? How are we replacing prisons and jails with the actual ecosystem that’s necessary to serve the needs of our communities? We use prisons as the complete catch-all for every last thing in society, whether that’s mental health or… you know, substance addiction or poverty or lack of education, like all these different things. Homelessness, right? Like everything. 

And the reality is that we need tons of solutions. There’s not going to be one other system that we can just replace this one with and it’s going to solve all that. It’s going to be a collection, a constellation of resources, of infrastructure that has to serve our community that provides mental health, physical health, education, social nets, all of these different things. I think of abolition as that project, that journey, that the steps that we’re making and by steps I mean often leaps that we need to be making every day to get us to freedom for all.

Josie Pickens

I appreciate that. I appreciate the bringing in of this conversation around construction, because as you said, very often when we’re talking about abolition, we’re talking about dismantling, we’re talking about demolishing. But really, a large part of this journey is that journey towards building something new and different. And that’s a part of this work around supporting those who are incarcerated and supporting the families of those who are incarcerated. So as we’re talking about building, what does building solidarity with incarcerated folks and the families of incarcerated folks, what does that look like in your vision?

Bianca Tylek

Yeah, I love that question because one thing that I love about it is to say that abolition is both an individual and a collective project. And this is what we were talking about, taking that police out of ourselves, having grace with ourselves and with others, offering redemption, consistently seeing people’s humanity. All of these things are actually just in our bodies. And so that’s the individual work that we all have to be responsible for. 

And then there’s the collective work that we do together to build and construct that infrastructure. And none of it is done without those who are at the core impact of all of it. And through intersectional lenses, right? I think the reality is that we know climate change impacts, for example, where prisons are built. 

All of these different pieces and components are super critical. When we think of reproductive justice we should be thinking about know, people in prison giving birth and things of that sort, or access to abortion care for people in those situations. And so, I think in our work, we are consistently in community with people who are incarcerated and their families. That means when we’re building a coalition, ensuring that we’re like reaching out to the community and the community has representatives or as many folks that they have that represent that specific community, whether it’s a local community, a state community, or even going national. Having folks that have both had those experiences or supporting folks with those experiences and ensuring that their voices at the table are respected, centered, honored, and all of those things as we do this work.

We write a lot with people who are incarcerated. In fact, I’ll share that like in September we released an archive of letters from people who are incarcerated about our End the Exception campaign. And that’s the campaign to end the exception of the 13th Amendment that still allows for slavery to be used as criminal punishment. And so there’s probably 200 letters there from people who are incarcerated, talking about their solidarity and also thoughts around labor and the way in which their labor is exploited today. I don’t think any of this work happens without those obviously impacted at the table, but all of us sort of coming together and understanding the problem and developing solutions.

Josie Pickens

Whether we’re talking about family policing or the traditional prison systems and policing, we’re always talking about money and following the money. In the case of the family policing system, we see forcible separation of kids and their parents like being monetized by this system. Parents are forced to pay for parenting classes and these other quote unquote “voluntary services” while their kids are being held hostage by the foster system. That’s an example from the perspective of family policing. Can you talk a bit about this problem we’re having with conversations around the focus on private prisons versus all jails and prisons, especially with regard to this money trail.

Bianca Tylek

Yeah, sure. I think it’s an extensive question and I think a more analogous situation that I think happens in the prison industry. So yes, the prison industry, as I mentioned, is an $80 billion industry. Private prisons make up four to five billion of them. So they’re a piece of the pie, but by no means like, you know, the biggest piece of the pie. Private prisons hold about 8% of the entire prison and jail population.

Notably though, they hold over 80% of the immigration detention population. So understanding the different roles that they play in different systems, again, that are intersectional is important. They did play an outsized role in how we got to mass incarceration in the first place, because they in large part helped draft the model legislation behind things like Three Strike laws and mandatory minimums and truth and sentencing laws back in the 80s to boost that business.

But their work then has sort of birthed entire industry that’s much bigger that includes everything from like privatized healthcare to privatized telephone systems to food and commissary. And so even completely publicly run facilities are heavily privatized in their various services. For example, every single jail in the country outsources prison telecom to the private industry. Just understanding the broader landscape as to how money runs. But something that came up for me as you were talking about these programs that parents are required to participate in as their children are taken from them or held hostage, and that they have to pay for these programs often, is actually similar to something that’s actively happening in the carceral system through diversion programs for people who are on probation. 

Same exact situation, they’re basically held over their head that they can go to jail or be thrown in prison unless they participate in some kind of program that they have to pay for or in some cases or in the worst cases they have to do unpaid labor for corporations. Walmart for example has historically like being engaged with probation offices, well they’ll allow people to come who are facing charges to come work for them for free in order to avoid going to prison or jail. Which is like a wild system and absolutely outrageous for corporations in any way to benefit off of somebody’s rightful trepidation, fear, terror being incarcerated. And that they can do that by literally extracting free labor from them. And so this system is far and wide and has many overlaps with the family policing system.

Jaison Oliver

I want to talk about the wins. Worth Rises is one of the organizations that’s made big changes that directly improve the lives of families in a way that people may have early on said like, oh we can’t change this, right? This is too much. But the telecom industry, it seems so big. This is an $80 billion industry around prisons. A lot of that money, all the profit motives go toward making this more deeply entrenched. And the prison industrial complex excels at co-opting demands for reform. Would you say you’ve managed to avoid that? And what can other advocates learn from your work?

Bianca Tylek

Well, I wouldn’t describe it as we’ve avoided the industry. The industry is here, right? The industry has wreaked havoc over communities and at this point we’re just, we’re trying to reverse that trend more than necessarily avoid it.

You know, there’s a thought coming to my mind around something happening in California. Or the fact that it’s been happening all over the country, but a particular example in California around retail theft. There’s been this fraudulent narrative that organized retail theft is this huge, emerging, increasing category of crime. And retailers like Walmart and Target are screaming at the top of their lungs, basically saying that they can’t survive because of organized retail theft. And they misrepresented data that was then acknowledged, but the page six correction, while they’re fear mongering and creating all of these threats out in society. And they put a lot of their money behind efforts to essentially increase funding for police to deal with organized retail theft. And the interesting thing and the important thing is people might be like, well, how do they like benefit from that? Well, let me explain. 

They’re losing business and losing money, not because they’re losing business in these stores from organized retail theft or that they’re losing product or anything like that. They’re losing business because most of us now buy things online. And so they have a huge sort of shift that’s happening. Their business is down. And what are they trying to do? They’re trying to cut costs. And how are they trying to cut costs? By socializing their security costs. By putting that and shifting that to taxpayers. By saying, fund police to have specialized task force to protect retailers so that we no longer have to hire security staff or invest in the traditional technology and surveillance that we have in our stores. 

Let’s socialize that to taxpayers and cut down on costs so that we can recoup the sales that we’re losing. Understanding how that manipulation happens is super critical to unwinding it all, and that’s where you know some of our work has been really successful, which is in actually exposing the truth of these stories of manipulation and what’s happened. We’ve targeted the prison telecom industry and really exposed the way in which they prey on people who are incarcerated and their loved ones with egregious costs that are absolutely not necessary other than to feed every hand they have in the cookie jar.

In doing so, we’ve been able to really get legislators to turn against them, media to turn against them, even capital markets and investors to turn against them by bringing all of that to light and relentlessly talking about it. Thousands of articles over the last few years that we have either directly pitched, been a part of, inspired, whatever, to bring to this situation and importantly put faces on it. Too often I think what happens is that people get scared and kind of hopeless about creating change because we’re talking about a system and systems feel hard to break. Like what is that? It’s like a habit. 

Who am I even supposed to talk to about this system that is broken or, not broken but really doing what it’s designed to do, but just harming people. Well, who do I talk to? Well, a lot of what we do is literally put faces and names to that problem and say, it’s actually this guy. This guy right here is his fault. Call him. I think we keep trying to unpack that and encouraging others to do the same. And when you do that, it becomes a very different conversation that allows for things to start changing. We started exposing that through our narrative change work, but then taking our policy work and starting to pass these laws state after state after state to make communication free in prisons and jails. 

Now we’re up to five states that have passed such legislation and then increasing regulation, going to Congress, getting them to expand the FCC’s authority and mandate to regulate this industry, working with the FCC to inform them of what’s happening, educate them and provide them the information that they need to regulate, going to investors and telling them what’s going on, making the industry frankly less and less attractive because it can’t be as profitable as it once was, which is just naturally gonna drive investors away. And so all of those pieces are part of the strategy that we deploy to create change. And we’re blessed to say that we’ve been able to do that successfully in many places and expect that trend to continue.

Jaison Oliver

I love that about focusing, yeah, putting that attention on like this person is an actor that can directly change and influence this and make these issues go away immediately if they chose to, right? This can be ended by this person taking action. What are the challenges that you see or have encountered in advocating for changes that don’t increase the reach of the system.

Bianca Tylek

I love that because it actually dovetails with the question that Josie asked, which is, how do you organize people inside? And how do they come to the table? And I think one of the most powerful things about the simple act of making phone calls free, which is like by far the easiest thing to understand. What it means to have access to a phone call. And some might reflect on it as just this slight conditions change.

I think we would argue it’s far more than that. It is families that are not going into debt and poverty in the way that they were. But it’s also stories like one in Connecticut where we were able to make phone calls completely free, all communication actually, not just phone calls, but emails and everything else. So now organizers in Connecticut who are working on enfranchisement, for example, for people who are incarcerated, like voting rights, are actually organizing with people inside in a way they could never before because that communication is free. And because they have access to that much more interaction with the folks who are inside and so that they can participate in a different way in their own re-enfranchisement efforts and other liberation efforts.

Those are some of the ways. I think about the way we even did hearings for our bill in Connecticut. You know, we could have just brought the families, which would have been sufficient and is important. But we intentionally found ways to elevate the voices of people who are currently incarcerated through hearings by working with our partners, create a hotline and record testimony that we can then play during the act of testimony, like live. Or get volunteers to read transcript of people’s testimonies so that we could, again, elevate those voices. And still other states actually fighting for legislators to create open lines during hearings for incarcerated people to actually be able to and that takes a whole lot of gymnastics to do, but it’s incredibly important to elevate those voices. 

When you ask the question how are all these efforts that we’re working on directing us towards like abolition, and I take that also to mean like in liberation, it is by creating avenues for people to engage in and empower people to engage in their own representation and pathways to financial relief and liberation and beyond. It’s one of many action steps that we need to be taking. But I don’t think anyone can argue that having a family more connected, having people who are incarcerated more connected to organizers, community supports, is anything shy of what we aspire to through abolition.

Josie Pickens

I’m literally over here about to give myself whiplash, shaking my head yes to everything that you’re saying, Bianca. This conversation has been so good and so eye-opening and I’m learning so much. Which brings me to my next question or my next comment about this book that you have coming out around prison abolition. What are you hoping that you will help the people who read your book better understand about this topic from your perspective.

Bianca Tylek

Yeah, absolutely. To be specific, the book is about the prison industry and it’s entitled The Prison Industry, How It Works and Who Profits. It’s a trade book really. It’s meant to kind of provide a lot more information, historical and current about how the prison industry came about, how it worked, who’s involved, what harm it causes, it tells the stories of people who have been impacted by this system. And it goes sector by sector. Every chapter is a different sector. It starts with architecture and construction, and then goes into the operation and management of facilities. It talks about telecom and healthcare, including commissary, transportation, community corrections. Each of these is its own chapter. 

And so it really provides the information that we need that we were talking about that we need to start exposing so that we can see what the system is, which is a system designed to benefit a small number, both politically and financially, at the expense of those who have been marginalized and disenfranchised by those same people. I wouldn’t refer to it necessarily as a book on specifically prison abolition and that body of work, but rather a component part of it, which is the prison industry and how do we get rid of that piece. But I do encourage people to read it. You’ll learn a lot.

Jaison Oliver

Yeah, looking forward to checking that out when it comes out. And then finally, where can people stay connected to you and your work?

Bianca Tylek

Yes, thank you. So definitely encourage folks to sign up for our listserv or newsletter just at our website worthrises.org. Of course, if you want to support the work, can support the work there. There are also tons of resources. When we’re talking about learning, there is a curriculum that we have about the prison industry that similarly goes through these sectors that we’ll be revamping and revitalizing when the book comes out in February. 

But I also encourage folks, if you’re just interested in really staying in the know on what the prison industry is doing, follow us real time on Twitter, X, whatever they want to call it these days, at @WorthRises, as well as on Instagram, @worthrises. You can follow me on Twitter, just my name at @BiancaTylek. I talk a little bit snazzier about some of these things. Then finally, if you’re really interested in the #EndTheException campaign, which is our campaign to end prison slavery, then I encourage folks to follow us at @endtheexception on Instagram. Visit endtheexception.com to take action.

Josie Pickens

Yeah, we really appreciate you joining us today, Bianca. This conversation has truly been a crash course. Thank you.

Bianca Tylek

Thank you so much for having me.

Josie Pickens

Thank you for joining us for The upEND Podcast as we explore family policing system abolition. To learn more about upEND and our work to strengthen families and communities, visit our website at upendmovement.org. And follow us on Twitter and Instagram at @upendmovement.