Digitizing Blackness with Dr. Brian Jefferson

Welcome to 1919Radio’s Black Geographies podcast series! This 4-part Black Geographies podcast series brings together four authors in the emerging field of Black geographies to explore the conditions of Blackness across multiple spatial dimensions. The goal of this series is to bring radical ideas of race, space, and the politics of place out of academia and into our community and streets through an engaging and open access medium.

In the fourth and final episode of our Black Geographies Podcast Series, our host Mohamed Nuur sits down with Dr. Brian Jefferson, an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and author of Digitize and Punish: Racial Criminalization in the Digital Age. The conversation starts off with Dr. Jefferson walking us through the main arguments of his book and moves into a more wide-ranged discussion on racial capitalism, the relationship between computing technology & mass incarceration, surveillance & biometrics, Foucaultian biopolitics, and the meaning of necropolitics. The conversation ends off with a discussion surrounding abolition as the only solution to digitized criminalization.

Title sequence credits:

Introduction clip: Angela Davis on Democracy Now!
Second clip: Sister Souljah response to Bill Clinton
Third clip: Kwame Ture on Organization and mobilization Song: The Pharcyde - Runnin'

Transcript

1919Radio Intro audio clip 0:00

I never experienced anything like the conditions we are currently experiencing.

I am mentally spiritually physically, emotionally, intellectually, and academically developed and acutely aware of the condition of African people throughout the entire world.

We don't want fortune, we don’t want popularity we want power, power. And power comes only from the organized masses.

MN [00:00:48]:

Welcome to another episode of 1919 Radio and the fourth and final episode of our Black Geographies podcast series. My name is Mohammed and I'm your host. In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Brian Jefferson, Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and author of Digitize and Punish: Racial Criminalization in the Digital Age. Dr. Jefferson starts us off by walking me through the main arguments of his book, and we get into a wide ranging discussion on racial capitalism, the relationship between computing technology and mass incarceration, surveillance and biometrics for Koshin, biopolitics and the meaning of macro politics. We end off on a discussion of abolition as the only solution to digitized criminalization. I hope you enjoy the show.

MN [00:01:32]:

Can you start us off by walking us through the central arguments within your book?

BJ [00:01:37]:

Yeah, yeah. The overarching argument is that like all sort of government services, criminal justice is becoming computerized and as a result, the ways that mass criminalization and the ways that people are excluded from mainstream society for having things like criminal records, like the game is changing because the technology is changing. And one of the things that I'm really looking at is sort of in the US, of course, we look at mass incarceration starting in the 80s up until recently, and as many people now over two, I think three million people are incarcerated, over one over disproportionately Black and Latinx. And what I'm looking at is the way that that same game is adapting to the digital revolution and it's able to bring sort of different methods of punishing people, detaining people more out into the public, into the public space, into public housing, into streets, into communities, into educational facilities like high schools and specific, but not only so through technology. So for me, the book is looking at sort of how that's the sort of where the wedding of digital technology and mass criminalization in this country is transforming the ways in which we sort of penalize or surveil or sanction people of color, poor people of color, to such a disproportionate extent. And one of the main arguments is that this sort of shifts the game when it comes to abolition, activism, decarceration, decriminalization, immigrant rights, et cetera. You know, the different sort of activist movements that are looking at people, groups of people who are punished and penalized disproportionately. So what I was trying to say is this is the marriage of technology and these policies change the game. So they change sort of how we have to approach fighting it and looking for it. So that would be the basic argument.

MN [00:04:05]:

My next question is, how do the racist logics of the past continue to persist?

BJ [00:04:13]:

Yeah, so a lot of the work I was reading about algorithmic governance and about control society, which looks at how computers are changing the way that power operates, a lot of that work, especially from Western scholars and Western White Scholars. Western scholars argue that a lot of the sort of old categories by which people were organized or by which people were separated are starting to break down. And the basic argument is this: it's that, OK, power doesn't just look at you because of your race. It could be a race or gender, your credit score, your educational attainment. And it creates these profiles. And then and then it operates on this on an individual basis. So when I said that that line is trying to push back against the trend and say no, like, first of all, all of those different categories are proxies of race, at least in the United States. They all share correlations, positive correlations or negative correlations with racial identification. So that was sort of first the part of the argument. The second part of the argument is that if we think about it individualistically, then we sort of lose the ability to talk about our group disparities. And in my opinion, politics is about group disparities. It's not about individuals, it's about groups. And I think a lot of the sort of the algorithmic governance stuff. And even if you look at some arguments, say there are no more individuals, they're just individuals. Right. There are different data packets. And in my view, that's going too far, especially in the case that I'm looking at all categories race, gender, nationality. These things still weigh heavily upon the way people are treated, what opportunities they get and their relation to the state. So I just, at the time, I felt there is a trend of a lot of more of the digital studies and algorithmic governance studies, people in surveillance, capitalism. And Zuma spoke, she says quite bluntly that race is no longer a major factor in the way that power operates. And so that was really the line where I was like, oh, wait a second, that's clearly not the case. Right. So that line is sort of trying to push back against the idea that race is becoming less important or any like religion is not becoming less important. If you look around the world, so a lot of those categories that come from colonialism, like Indigenous People, they didn't call themselves indigenous. The Europeans call them indigenous Black people. We didn't call ourselves Black because black, et cetera, et cetera. Those categories are still alive and well. And what I was trying to do in the book is to not only say that the technology are used to reinforce those identities and the divisions between those groups, but also to show empirically, look, I can crack open the algorithm and show you that it actually does have race in it. So I think it's not even just having to say a racial logic race is literally programmed into the software I was looking at.

MN [00:07:48]:

What role does computer technology play in the rise of mass incarceration, given that the development of early computer systems coincided with the beginning of the war on drugs in the 1970s?

BJ [00:08:01]:

So mass incarceration. This might seem obvious, but but then it just became more obvious than doing the research, it would not have been possible without, well, telecommunications infrastructures first, but then secondly, computer systems, because one of the things that happened during especially in the 80s, you start to see towards the mid to late 80s in the US, is so many people are being incarcerated that the paper systems, file cabinet systems are being overloaded. And you're getting these bottlenecks in courts as pretrial, but also in prisons, trying to keep inmates all of their paperwork together. There's an overload because they're incarcerating so many people. So computer technology enabled coordination on such a mass scale of something like mass incarceration. First of all, that sort of the first argument that I don't know that well, if there was a. Digital technology did not exist, mass incarceration would have looked different, they kind of turned to it to save the system from collapsing because it was just it was becoming too big to make it more efficient, make it more cost effective, et cetera. So that's the first thing with the computer technology. And then as we saw. So that's like eighties. Then as we shift more into the 90s, this is one big tech really starts rising as one of the biggest sectors in the economy. And from there, the tech companies are, of course, coming to the authorities. Hey, we got this piece of technology. We got this piece of technology. And one of the things I talk about in the book that a lot of the technologies that the companies were making, were the research and development was funded by taxpayer money. So, you know, it's not only that the technology enabled mass incarceration and mass criminalization, but also there is an economic incentive from the IT companies to perpetuate these systems because they have to buy cameras, they have to buy offender databases and all the like.

MN [00:10:15]:

One fascinating element you describe within your book is the way in which smart city infrastructure is designed to allow cities to administer communities as carceral spaces. Can you--?

BJ [00:10:28]:

Yeah, yeah, so and this is you know, there's a lot of great work on this, but as a sociologist, I think there's some good sociology and they talk about the how the prisonization of communities, mostly Low-Income Black and Latino Communities in the US. And there's been a sense that in many different ways, the communities are becoming more like prisons. And a lot of the work that previously that I was reading, they were talking about the bars or the gates in public housing. They were talking about a little mini stations, police stations by poor public housing and these types of things. So what I was hoping to contribute was to show the infrastructure, the technical infrastructure, the cables, the cameras, the satellites, et cetera. The, of course, the ankle bracelets, the data centers, the real time crime centers. And what I really wanted to do was trace in a very sort of, you know, trace the actual infrastructure that was being and continues to be built up in these communities to sort of build off of this idea that they're becoming more like prisons. So, for instance, you know, a big thing, of course, is privacy when it comes to digital technology. And we get our personal data stolen and they sell it to others. But if you're in a low income public housing unit in the communities I was looking at, they have cameras inside the houses, inside their living spaces, inside the public housing units, right in the hallways. They have ankle bracelets. And these technologies are oftentimes becoming more and more automated. And what they do oftentimes is they can trigger an alert to the nearest squad car or something like that. And my argument is it makes it more like living in a prison. So it, I'm looking at an application of digital technology that I think is different than mainstream,a lot of mainstream concerns. And at least in the US, I'm looking at specifically how it impacts criminalized groups. And one of the ways that it does is it puts more of it enables the authorities to have a tighter grip of for people's living spaces over public spaces, particularly poor people, and then also in financial sectors.

MN [00:13:07]:

What are the material impacts of digitization of records on former offenders and those in communities with them?

BJ [00:13:14]:

Yeah, and so that's connected to the previous question as well, because now if you apply for a job, employers often times will do background checks. And, you know, I learned a little bit about the background check industry, which is another sort of tech industry that that's a player in this story. And what it does is if we go back to the 60s or the 70s, having a prison record was not as much as a scarlet letter as it is now. You could still possibly get work and you wouldn't be as ostracized as you might be now because that mark is available for everybody to see. So one of the things that the prison records does is it makes that person it makes your identity as an ex offender inescapable to a degree that I think that it has never been. And so again, so making one mistake, getting one prison record, I think can be much more detrimental because it's publicly about is becoming increasingly publicly available. And not only just prison records. I mean, a lot of I don't know if it's the same in Canada, but I would imagine that for us is usually the worst in these things. But like, you don't even have to be, you could be arrested and not convicted and the newspapers will put your mugshots online so you don't even have to be convicted of a crime. But you can have a mugshot going online. And then there are these other sort of parasitic companies that say, OK, pay me twenty, three thousand whatever dollars and we'll scrape that information. So the records and sort of the publicization of the records, it just I think it deepens the stigma of having a criminal record and deepens the stigma of having just been arrested, even if you didn't do anything. And these are sort of the things and now the punishment may be you can't get a job in some states like Illinois, you might lose your eligibility for publicly funded housing. You might not be able to go to universities. So the public's perception of the record and making them accessible through just a click of a couple of buttons, I think it deepens the stigmatization and closes off more life opportunities, you know, in a very alarming way. And so that's definitely something that I wanted to emphasize.

MN [00:15:51]:

In your book, you describe the Obama administration's response to the Ferguson uprising as a “technophile black version of Lyndon B. Johnson's response to the urban uprisings half a century prior”. Can you compare the--.

BJ [00:16:07]:

Yeah, so one of the things in the book that I tried to emphasize, and especially, obviously most of the people I interact with will be, of course leftists and activists. And most people know this but the story of the rise of mass incarceration is not just a story of evil, conservative white supremacists. Liberals have played a huge part in building it up. But Naomi M’s book talks about it really brilliantly, but so one of the things I wanted to emphasize was that liberals and liberal technocratic solutions to social problems is an old story in the US and that even goes back to the early nineteen hundreds using science and technology and thinking that if you that can solve a social problem like urban unrest, like poverty, etc, etc.. So the point with that line was Lyndon B. Johnson was the president in the 60s. He was a Democrat. By modern standards, he would have been relatively easy, was he was not a centrist. He would have been seen a little bit more to the left, to his social programs at least. And one of the things that he wanted to do was to use the emerging technologies at the time. So he opened this huge national agency, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, and it was the first time in the US history that local police departments got equipment and were trained by a national agency. And a lot of technologies like, for instance, the dispatch, automated dispatch comes through during that period. A lot of the sort of stuff with community policing and mobilizing the community to be the ears and eyes of the streets and to extend the police division that really starts to kick up in the 60s. And so looking at Obama, the thing is, he's a big Silicon Valley president, as the Democrats are, and a very, I think, very stereotypical liberal in the sense that thinking that in perhaps over relying on technology and and introducing technology, whether it's very well intentioned or not, but oftentimes has the effect of extending the government's reach when you when you introduce these technologies into people's private space. Yeah, so with that in mind, when I was really just trying to say was that this is a bipartisan monster that we built, so let's at least be accurate about it.

MN [00:19:02]:

Digitizing punishment makes clear the extent to which digital technologies have transformed, intensified the nature of carceral power. Can you highlight how the intersection of policing and data technology is impacting Black and Indigenous youth every day through unsuspecting means, like social media and surveillance and web technologies?

BJ [00:19:22]:

Yeah, it's extending it. And so this is an interesting thing. At several times at conferences I've had well, they've always been white dudes and they say, why? Why are you only talking about people of color? Why aren't you talking about anybody? Because technology and the surveillance is spreading throughout all of society. And I understand that. But my point is that the way the technology is being used and the way that the digital surveillance is being used with respect to crime control policy, immigration policy, students doing that as well, is used in a very different way. Because it's being used by police who are essentially a quasi military institution. I've never heard of like a wealthy suburban area being surrounded by a quasi military institution and putting cameras in people's living spaces with or without their consent. So when I'm looking at the sort of digital policing, it's in many ways it's moving the frontier, in my view of carceral governance, more and more into your private space rather than just a jail or prison or a court. It allows police to stop you on the street and punch your information into a mobile phone, which puts you in the system. And so the technology, it's an extension of criminal justice in the criminal justice system into people's homes. And that's the major thing. And I've learned not to predict anything after 2016 especially. But so I'm not saying that the that the mass imprisonment is just going to that it's inevitably going to crumble. But looking at trends and tendencies, it seems that it's a it's a much cheaper, cost effective and perhaps even more efficient way to control people, control their mobility is to use technology rather than to put them in jail, because putting someone in jail in the US or its equivalent every year, you could send them to college for cheaper. So it's an uneconomical system. And I think that's not out of morality or ethnic or ethical principles. But I think because of money, I'm sort of anticipating more and more of a shift of mass incarceration from these traditional institutions into technology via these various technologies.

MN [00:22:09]:

During last summer's rebellions, we saw a huge influx of police departments using surveillance cameras and cell phone data pings to track and capture protesters days and weeks after a protest. What impact do you see the rebellions of last summer having on the future of AI and racial digitization in--

BJ [00:22:29]:

Now, that's a great question. I think there will be multiple I think it affects. one effect, I think on a positive note is seeing the power of social networking and seeing the ability of, you know, a an organization which is BLM, which has exploded into a globally recognizable symbol that people with other struggles are able to identify with and making their struggles, making our struggles visible to one another, creating the conditions in which we can build bridges across our struggles. That's what I think the major upshot of this last round of rebellions is you had people, you know, Hong Kong people, you protesters were waving BLM, right. And then we got to see what they were doing right on through the technology. And so I would say if there's any sort, the hopeful part of me would like to think that that creates a new sort of playing field for us to cooperate to try to create more just and democratic and equitable institutions. The bad part is the surveillance will continue to extend and privacy will continue, I think, to be sacrificed. And what you post on social media and what you post on an abso--. Perhaps what you email when you text. These things more and more. Well, they already are accessible by the state. So I think when we think of activism, and especially if you're an activist, a radical left wing or even liberal activist, I think you're always positioned against the status quo. I think that's sort of part of that comes with the territory. So as the surveillance expands, I think that there's this cat and mouse game of activists are going to have to come up with new ways of skirting the dragnet, new ways of getting around their surveillance. But I think that's all. I am a firm believer that politics is never over. As long as you're a human and you're alive, there's going to be politics and there's going to be power and there are going to be unequal relations. And those relations are maintained by different tools. And I mean, this is sort of, I guess, the bigger part of the bigger argument of the book, which is not groundbreaking or anything, but the tools are changing. So the strategies of, I think, trying to circumvent them have to change as well.

MN [00:25:06]:

Is there anything we could do to mitigate our vulnerability?

BJ [00:25:11]:

I don't use social media. I mean, you could do that, but it's the surveillance state is affecting, let's say, in the US or in Canada, I would imagine it's affecting everyone. Rich, poor, Indigenous, White. So I think of all our privacy is being sacrificed. So, you know, I think one of the ways that to try to push back is to link these struggles against the extension of surveillance. And for some people, it's about personal data and Facebook. For others that might be forced to wear an ankle bracelet. These are very different circumstances, very different histories. But I'm just a firm believer in the way that you fight against power through numbers and just through finding common ground with different people. And I think, at least in academia, there's such an emphasis on difference, difference, difference that it becomes almost difficult for us to come up with a vocabulary to talk about equivalent and what we have in common. What do what does a poor black kid in Chicago have in common with with a peasant worker in India, a Muslim peasant worker in India? Of course, they're completely different histories and we can't use the same terminology. But what we can do is we can look at their struggles and the ways in which technology is being used. You know, I read a little bit about how the technology is being used essentially on marginalized people and perhaps to think of ways that we can build and obviously. We can't use class anymore as a single category that didn't work. So it has to be something different. But I don't think we should give up on the efforts to try to link ourselves across our differences because differences are important. But if we only see differences, then there's no incentive to link with one another. And if we don't link with one another, then divide and conquer, I think wins.

MN [00:27:29]:

What is the relationship between information or IT capital and racial capitalism broadly? And probably how do you use a racial capitalism framework in your work?

BJ [00:27:39]:

So I'll start by saying for me again, its W.E.B. DuBois, Ruth Gilmore and Cedric Robinson, Clyde Woods, Angela Davis, to me, these are the thinkers that created the framework for what we call racial capitalism, when in many ways among other people. But for me, these are the influential people, given the demographic groups that I'm looking at. And what they do is they look at the relation between different sectors of the economy and how they benefit from racism. Indigenous scholar, settler, colonial theorist do similar things right in there. It's anti Indigenous policies and practices and how people make money from them, to put it in the simplest terms. So it's in the US, it's obvious how the agricultural industry made money from racism during slavery. Gilmore does a great job, of course, probably the best at looking at how the industrial sector benefited from racism in the US. So for me, I just wanted to take their model and the agriculture industry. There's a lot of great work on real estate and housing and racism. So I just wanted to look at the IT sector and essentially Silicon Valley and how does it benefits from racism and racist policies. And the argument in the book is that it benefits. They want to sell cameras. They want to sell whoever makes the ankle bracelets, Taser International, or they make cameras like whatever makes this equipment, they want to sell it because they make money. So there's a policy that we should flood a certain community with patrol officers or segregate a certain community. That's an opportunity for them to make money. So for me, the question of racial capitalism and information capitalism, my question is just how has the IT sector made money from off of racism? And I can look at it primarily through black people and cities.

But you can look at indigenous people, you could look, of course, immigrants, etc. You can look at Islamophobia, all of these different expressions of discrimination and just look how have they made money off it. And so one of the interesting things was a lot of well, not a lot of but a handful of people have been going back and forth. Well, when I was first doing my work and they were saying, oh, we don't cause racism, we don't cause and my response was, I never say you are causing it. I'm just saying you're making money off. Got all these equations that you try to come. I don't care what the equations that I'm saying. I have studied the history of criminal justice in this country and I have the data to show that you don't even need to make an argument to show it’s racist. I mean, Chicago. Eighty-eight percent of all people arrested for marijuana were Black or Latinx. When you're black, it looks like I don't need you have to be a huge theorist to come to the conclusion that there's that that it's a racist policy. So my whole point was, well, if you gave them the equipment to enact those policies, then you maybe you should take self-responsibility. To some extent, and so racial capitalism and IT capitalism or information capitalism, to me, in the simplest terms, is how has the IT sector and IT companies benefited,iIn my case from the war crime, the war on drugs.

MN [00:31:25]:

Digitize and Punish is an obvious wordplay on the book, Discipline and Punish by French philosopher Michel Foucault. Can you talk about a bit about his--?.

BJ [00:31:36]:

It's funny, when I was writing it, I refused to read it because I don't want it to influence me, but I already read it in grad school and I was rereading it as I have. And it's like completely like I just sort of like but Foucalt's is super important in many ways in terms of his insights, but also his shortcomings for me. So, of course, you know, Foucault is one of the early people to talk about discipline seeping out into the public space. And he talked about discipline not only being in the prison, but also being in the educational system. And then he looked in the medical industry, you know, and he looked at all different types of the barracks, the military barracks, and the ways that these sort of disciplinary techniques spread out into society and to not only focus on the institutions, the prison. So he really gives this powerful vision, OK, don't just focus on the prison. So in terms of my work, that's what I'm looking at, how the sort of the functions that the prison performs from a political economy standpoint, from a social standpoint, are being sort of exported via technology. So that's in terms of Foucault’s sort of giving the paradigm the model for the main argument. But his shortcomings, in my view, are, well, he's Eurocentric. So is that, of course. And in Discipline and Punish, one of the key arguments was that power rely on violence as much because it's able to these micro political techniques that shape your subjectivity. And it's and it does it through knowledge production, which so many people write about. And so for me, the argument was by the group I'm looking at, these practices are seeping out into society more and more, like he said. But I definitely wouldn't say they're becoming less violent one thing. And so I'm trying to show how, like the discipline seeping out , itnot only sort of creates all these practices that people are constantly subjected to, to be a good citizen, a law abiding citizen or something like that. But how it's connected, in the case of my work, to like, again, a quasi military apparatus. So those shortcomings and that was really if you read Joy James, she's oh, my God, this book, it's called The Amazing The Spectacle of Racialized Violence always is her essay. And I really that gave me-- she makes this argument that I just actually said. So I'm taking from Joy James and of course, is a huge thinker, hugely influential in American and US academia. Even if you haven't read Foucault, I hear like oftentimes people are repeating Focauldian arguments. I've heard people say we can't we can't read white male theory, white male totalizing theory because power knowledge is everywhere. You're just repeating Foucault’s life the last time I checked. But like, he's had, of course, a huge impact. And one of the things I think that his legacy is we look at knowledge production, power away more, and we look at these insidious everyday micro techniques of discipline more. But here comes Joy James. And she says, wait a second, this is applicable to, you know, your white male or perhaps female citizen in mainstream society. She says this while Foucault is writing Discipline and Punish, you know, Attica prison is a prison, a prisoner uprising or resulting in, I forget the exact numbers, but the state essentially coming in and mowing down some of the uprisings like this is happening at the same time that Foucault is writing this book. And he was blind to it. And there's a great anecdote of him meeting, I want to say, Angela Davis in California and going to a prison and him realizing in the eighties and early eighties and he realized in the eighties, in the early eighties, oh, maybe powers haven’t become less violent. So, you know, the digitizer, I figure you sort of get where I'm going with it from the title that it's about power seeping out into society. But then also looking, I think, at a lot of black US scholars who have engaged with Foucault and trying to build on their work as well.

MN [00:36:33]:

You touch on nacro politics in your work briefly, can you explain what that is?

BJ [00:36:40]:

Yeah, so this brings us back to Foucault, of course, comes up with the idea of bio politics. And what he's looking at is the way Western governments have taken on what we would call in the US more some quality of life policies, but not only quality of life policies, but things that are necessary for us as biological organisms, the government being administering our access to food, health, medicine and all of these things that are necessary to us as biological organisms. And so his argument is that it's not just the old king who says if you defy me, I'll kill you, right. Which is essentially a negative power. The power to subtract someone's life by politics is more of a positive power to shape life through reproduction policies like abortion, right. The government takes our biological existences as a field of politics to intervene in. Nacro politics comes from Akem Membey who's looking at colonialism. And again, just like Joy James, it's sort of the same thing. It's like all of those things that definitely are true. But I understand his essay well in his book now, it's a book that was originally an essay to say the power to kill is still very central to Western governance, especially he's looking in colonies during a similar time period. So that's who Foucault is looking at. So the nacro politics is the idea that from the way I'm using it is to say, look, these technologies are just another way of ensuring that poor Black, Brown, Indigenous people are exposed to police officers, border patrol more than your ordinary White citizen. And if these are quasi military institutions, if the agents in Border Patrol or the police departments have guns and have the ability to kill you, the technology sort of maintains their exposed differential exposure to these institutions. So in that way, it creates the context or creates the conditions in which George Floyd is murdered to some extent or reinforces that is not deterministic, but it maintains those conditions. It does its part, the technology. So we don't buy the argument in the book was like this Technology is not like a lot of the European and Anglo, I think on the theorists are saying making power necessarily less violent, more knowledge based more insidious. It's also used to track and target people and then to send out patrol units near them. And that puts their life at greater risk rather than another technique. So, for instance, if there was another way of trying to address poverty and violent crime in the communes that I'm looking at, because there are other ways of doing it right, education, having educational policies, housing policies, job training policies. there are also grassroots ways of doing it, creating alternative ways of living and caring for one another. But the way we do it in the state, is we punish them and we put the the the sort of militant very or the violent branch of the state. We send them into the communities to fix the problem. And so when I say nacro politics, what I'm saying is the technology aids, that policy of punishing, surrounding and using violence or the threat of violence to try to try to remedy these social problems.

MN [00:40:52]:

Your book ends with the statement that to quote, If opposition to digitized modes of criminalization is to gain momentum, it must be abolitionist, unquote. What do you mean by this? And how can we put up an effective front against the digitized criminalization of Blackness, Black people and Black communities?

BJ [00:41:09]:

So, of course, abolitionism has become sort of a big a big word. When I use it, I'm using it howAngela Davis and Gilmore. I'm using it straight out of their books. And if we start with Angela Davis and she's looking at the prison industrial complex, and one of the things that she talks about is don't only look at the prison, you also have to look at, you know, she goes into all the industries who who what companies supply prisons with toilet paper or with bed sheets or with all the stuff, food, you know. And then she goes out beyond the prison and she says, OK, how is the medical institution of hospitals or how is the educational system such as the school to prison pipeline? How are they also linking to the prison? And what she does is she creates this sort of web of all of the different institutions and stakeholders who prop up mass incarceration. And for her, it's about not only just thinking about crime and punishment, but also medicine, health care, mental health, the domestic abuse, domestic violence. Like all of these things, how do they connect and how do we create an alternative vision to deal with violent individuals, many of whom are mentally ill or suffer some mental illness? Like how do we find a non-punitive way to deal with a domestic, a violent domestic partner without throwing them in a cage? Right. So abolitionism is first. I, as I understand it, and released from the Davis perspective, is looking at the web of institutions and actors that prop up the carceral state. And so for me, there's a small, powerful contribution was to show the IT sector in more detail, but also it's important with abolitionism. And this is where I think the word sort of can be misleading. She also says it's about creating alternative means, right? Because we still do need to protect battered spouses or partners. Yeah, yeah. We still need to ensure that there is a violent person that they're not able to harm their brothers and sisters. So it's but it's abolishing the way that we deal with those problems and trying to institute more life affirming ways. So, I mean, it's, of course, an open ended question. I would I would say or my answer like, you know, what does that mean for us? One thing I also believe, you know, it's very understandably common for academics, it was something you write an academic book. They say, OK, what's the solution to all of this terrible stuff you're talking about? And it's completely and I think that's a very good impulse. I would sort of say that I wouldn't only look to academics for that answer. I would look to communities, different communities are different. They have different local cultures, different local institutions, and maybe dealing with spousal abuse in one community. There's one policy or, or way of doing it in a less punitive or damaging way than it is in another community. But I just would say with the abolitionist framework, it's like going back to Davis. Do we have to punish these people? Do we have to put them in cages? Are there ways that we can help, especially people with mental health issues or people, of course, who are in deep poverty who might resort to, for instance, gangs or drug markets without putting them in cages and without punishing them? So abolitionist thinking, in my view, is doing away in this context of criminal justice with the idea that punishment is the first and perhaps only tool that you use to remedy these issues. I don't think that any academic can give an answer to what will replace it, but I don't think that we just as people in general, Black people at or otherwise, should have an expectation that that one book can tell you what to do. I think to find the answer, we're going to have to live the answer, and it has to be trial and error. And some things will fail horribly. And some unintended things that work out will happen. But I think there will be instances if we do tear down and abolish the punitive system where things go horribly wrong and we might and things might even be worse.

But the point is still pushing and still pushing through trial and error to find a more humane way of dealing with a lot of the problems that are connected to poverty and violence at least, and drug use, which are not, of course, which are not limited to Black, Brown, Indigenous, poor communities. Because in the US we see it now in rural white communities with the opioid epidemic and, you know, with militias who, well, are their gangs as well. They've got some function as gangs like the mobs that we saw, of course, on January six. So. But they're not. We don't deal with their problems by putting a military in Iowa trying to crack down on, you know, on the left, of course, there are authorities and they are getting higher incarceration rates. But another thing you actually see in the US is a lot of the opioid epidemic. There are a lot of stories of how police are trained, giving a little bit to give the right to medical treatment to opiate addicts, right? Yeah. So it seemed like, and we know like Portugal, for instance, there are other ways to deal with drug abuse or drug addiction than punishment. And maybe for that question, how should we think about, you know, alternatives? Maybe we should look at how white people treat white people with the same problems to some extent because they might have some good ideas, too.

MN [00:48:07]:

That's all for this episode. Thank you so much for listening along to the Black Geographies podcast series. It was a joy and an honor to speak to each of the authors we welcomed to our radio. I hope that you learn from the conversations just as much as I did. In other news, the 1919 Collective just put out our Abolitionist Arts and Writing Program, which is a fund for Black and Indigenous writers, artists, and cultural workers to create a series of work around abolition. Check out our website for more details and stay tuned for more radical and community-based content to be released all summer long.