What We Talk About When We Talk About Decarceration
By John Proctor
One part of my work as Communications & Digital Organizing Manager at Freedom Agenda is keeping track of responses on social media to our collective actions around the plan to close Rikers Island. The challenge of provoking and sustaining honest and considered conversation around an issue as complex, intellectually multifaceted, and budget-altering as how to close a giant penal colony in one of the world’s largest cities is made even more difficult when one is trying to have that conversation simultaneously with corrections unions, prison abolitionists, and the wide swathe of people and opinions between them, all on a platform that devalues everyone’s position by inviting us to presume nobody knows more than we do, even about things we know little to nothing about. It’s probably the most challenging part of my work.
There are of course obvious pillars of injustice and systemic violence that support the use of facilities like Rikers to subvert justice, like police reliance on arrests to signal controlling crime while actually increasing it, prosecutorial dependence on pre-trial detention to secure plea deals, and a DOC culture of violence and dehumanization that my colleague Darren Mack addressed in an op-ed last week. But there are also more subtle upholders of oppression, that we frequently enact carelessly through our individual acts. Maybe it’s the ease with which one well-placed expression of an ill-considered opinion can instantly change a discussion into a flame war. Maybe it’s that the dominant currency of a completely open forum is spectacle. But there is an alarming tendency, among people who genuinely want Rikers to close and a more humane form of justice to replace it, to abandon the process already in place to close Rikers in favor of ideological purity, based not on the pragmatic goal of decarceration but on an idea that can only exist on disembodied platforms like social media: That we should do nothing and just let the system and facilities rot, along with (though this is never stated) the people currently held in them.
I’ve written in the past on the tendency of people on the left to drift toward the middle when the rubber hits the road in engaging in true justice reform. We’ve seen it happen in the past year, from know-nothing backlash to something as unilaterally positive as bail reform to our election this week of a former police captain campaigning on crime control as our new mayor. But something I’m finding equally disturbing (perhaps because they’re two sides of the same coin) is a tendency among ideological purists of the left to misread both Foucault and Davis and declare any reform as simply the next generation’s oppression.
I’m writing this not to engage that faction ideologically, but rather to address tactics and their results. I had a Eureka moment when someone interceded into a flame war on Twitter about closing Rikers that had gone ad hominem with a link to a piece reminding all sides that airing these grievances on social media not only is antithetical to movement-building, it’s also providing fodder for the carceral state:
On a daily basis, you can see very inexperienced people carrying out attacks against other people on social media. Accusations are openly made, arguments encouraged, and any and everyone who has a keyboard is able to chime in. Most of these people are not even dedicated enough to these movements to join organizations that would hold them accountable to the ideas they say they believe in, but this apparently isn’t a great concern to most of the people who engage in this behavior because you’ll keep doing it. And, the most concerning part is you are doing this with an apparent disregard and/or complete ignorance to the forces you are putting in motion against us. These online attacks provide police agencies with all of the information they need to identify where the antagonisms exist. They can even figure out who many of the players are. And since much of the time, these social media activists have no qualms about mentioning whomever and whatever comes to mind, the police receive information about people and organizations that aren’t even directly involved in the social media dispute taking place. Since the police have this information, that many of you willingly provide to them, they can use it to research who the serious activist/organizers are from the keyboard warriors. From there, they can devise campaigns to attack the weak points that you are alerting them to in ways that can divert the energy of organizations away from productive work.
This is the challenge of organizing against an oppressive state apparatus on social media - everything is documented. As they do with most good things, the American right has ruined the term Social Justice Warrior. But I think there is a grain of truth its sarcastic use recognizes, which transcends political affiliation: a generalized tendency among Americans to complain on social media while doing nothing in the world to address the injustices we are complaining about.
To combat this, here is a beginning list of suggestions I’ve been developing for myself on having disciplined democratic discourse online, which is continually evolving:
Remember the old “two ears, one mouth” maxim, only pretend you have a hundred ears. Listen particularly to the people most directly and physically impacted by the injustices that provoke your anger.
When doing your research to support an argument, don’t take elected officials’ public statements as actual records of their beliefs and objectives at the time. Hold them accountable to their words when they’re in office, but don’t dig them up 20, 50, or a hundred years later and take them as a record of events. Elected officials almost never say what they mean.
If someone says something that gets you angry, especially if they are ideologically aligned with you in other ways, send them a DM, or talk to them in person if you can. Recognize that much of our communication online is performative. To quote Sting for perhaps the first time, people “go crazy in congregation, they only get better one by one.” This seems to go against every established norm of online discourse, but try to find points of agreement rather than disagreement.
Most importantly, don’t do all (or even most) of your work online! Earn your position by aligning yourself with organizations that have the political agency to enact your values. Show up in person, whether that’s in attending democratic rallies, advocating for people most affected by the injustices you care about, or whatever other means you find. Make your life a reflection of the values you espouse.
As always, be good to each other, but be true to the struggle we are engaged in. Hold each other to account to your principles, but also hold yourself accountable to them.
John Proctor is a writer, educator, activist, and founder of Re/Creation. He is also Communications & Digital Organizing Manager at Freedom Agenda, an initiative of the Urban Justice Center focused on decarcerating Rikers Island and helping create a post-Rikers New York City.