Meet our managing editor, Danielle, then check out our conversation below.
Below is a conversation I wanted to have with Ashley as her managing editor and friend. I’ve known Ashley for 15 years, and during that time spent a large chunk of my professional career as an educator and nonprofit leader. After reading Angela Y. Davis’ book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, we wanted to further explore how incarceration has affected both of our lives.
When Ashley first asked me to join her in bringing light to how incarceration affects everyone, I wasn’t sure what I could offer other than a behind-the-scenes system of support as her managing editor. But once I started to realize the education process I would ultimately receive could strengthen my ability to share my own experiences, I was all in.
Ashley:
When we initially talked about doing this project together (Who We Belong To) focusing on how incarceration affects families and individuals who have loved ones who are incarcerated, why did this interest you?
Danielle:
My interest level is not directly related to me, but I've had plenty of experience via family members. The whole idea that incarceration only affects those who are incarcerated is what was taught to me growing up. Nobody ever really talked about what happens if family members end up in the system. As I got into adulthood it happened, first with my father-in-law and then with my stepbrother. As a child, my uncle. And as adulthood came around and I really understood what it meant to be affected by it, I could reflect on things in my childhood too, and see now how it had affected my family. When I learned about this project, I remembered feeling such shame that I had family members who were incarcerated, which is probably why I technically forgot that I'd had an experience with it from a childhood perspective because I'd buried it. You know, we don't talk about that. Kind of like with Encanto. We Don't Talk About Bruno.
Ashley:
Once you were in your adulthood how did having family members who were incarcerated affect you?
Danielle:
I mean, it was just a hurricane of shame swept over me when my father-in-law ended up having to go to jail. Knowing what I know now, fifteen years later, I have no reason to feel shame for what happened to him. In fact, I think that's why I want to do this project. If more people would talk about it, and could better understand the system itself, and realize really just how normal it is to have a family member who has been a part of, whether that's prison, local county lockup, or even just detained for a night for whatever, it's really common. And when I started having conversations about my own experience with family members, it opened this floodgate of why don't more people talk about this? I feel like part of the reason the system is so suppressive is because we don't talk about our shared experiences with it.
Ashley:
What are some ways you think talking about it could change?
Danielle:
People are afraid to ask questions like, "Well, do you know how to navigate the commissary? How did you deal with visitation? What was it like when your family member was transferred from one facility to the other? How did you handle that? What was the paperwork or forms involved?" And you think, "Well, I'm not going to ask anybody that because I don't want anybody to know." That was like the initial response my husband and I had. But knowing what we know now, I'm like, "Who wants to know?" I'll tell you everything because I don't want anybody to have to stumble and fumble like my family did when I was a kid, and again like we did as adults.
Ashley:
Growing up, the reality of having somebody who I was related to, or who I cared about, be imprisoned or incarcerated, not only came with a lot of shame, but a lot of weird isolation. I feel like there were a lot of connections that were missed because I felt like I had to hold back or I had to distance people from this part of my life.
Danielle:
I don't like using the term, but it was a prevalent belief around me, that if your family has somebody who goes to prison, being white, we say you're “white trash”. Like your family must have done something wrong to have a family member who spent time being incarcerated. And in reality, my uncle struggled with addiction his whole life. There's more people with mental health and addiction issues in prisons and jails than actual facilities that could help them. I didn't want to talk about it because I didn't want people to think my family was “white trash”. And in reality, there were a lot of other people going through similar things.
Ashley:
Did that change with your father-in-law?
Danielle:
I still had that feeling I did as a kid. I don't want people to think we did something wrong. His story was pretty prevalent and it was kind of on the news, which was awful, and I remember going into a local restaurant that he had frequented, and I found out he had frequented because they saw the name on my husband’s name tag, and asked us if we were related to him. And we actually were like, "Oh my gosh, I don't even want to order food here anymore. I don't even want to be here anymore." We had only ordered drinks.
Ashley:
Wow.
Danielle:
She saw his name, asked if we were related to him. We said, "Yes." And then when she went to get our drinks, we threw down 10 bucks on the table and left because we didn't even want people to know we were there. That was how raw and isolating it felt. I remember getting in the car and crying and being like, "I don't want anyone to know about this, but it's all over the news. It's all over every media outlet. How are we going to avoid people knowing?" And I think that was like the first time I really went, you know how you avoid isolation? You tell people and you see who shows up for you and you see who's curious, not judgemental, about what's going on with you.
Ashley:
Yeah, it can be really clarifying who your people are when you’re dealing with something like this. Heartbreaking too.
Danielle:
And then when my stepbrother was incarcerated, I know my stepmom felt very much in the same spiral my husband and I were in. I shared all those experiences with her. And I know she still felt very isolated, but I do feel in some small way, the shame was slightly reduced because I could openly talk to her about it and know that no judgment was ever being brought from our end. The more we talk about it, the less isolated we feel.
Ashley:
I mean, that's the big difference, right? Having somebody who understands it, who understands how it feels. I mean, it's great when people understand it from a place of, "I feel for people who are incarcerated and for the family members around them." That's cool. But somebody who feels it, who knows what it's like to watch their brother or favorite cousin or uncle or dad or mom go to prison or go to jail and be separated and thinking about how that affects their lives and the implications of it, it's almost more powerful to just have someone who can sit beside you, knowing how it feels than to even be able to fix it.
Danielle:
Exactly. And I think when you do the work of being vulnerable to actually say, "I know how you feel from my experience, but I can't tell you how to feel in yours." I think that's important too, because everybody has their own background that they bring with them to an experience. And one like this, where society has basically said if you have a family member who's incarcerated, that's a stain on your family's name. If it's a parent who has a child that's incarcerated, well, the assumption is the parent must have done something wrong. Right?
Ashley:
Right.
Danielle:
Or if it's a child who has a parent that's incarcerated, there's always this sense of, well, you don't want to be like them. And it's like, well, maybe they just messed up once, and it could have been royally, because to be human is to error, but what if they have a lot of really great qualities and are generally compassionate and kind?
Danielle:
I think about my uncle specifically, he was an incredibly kind soul, an incredibly compassionate man when he was not sober. He did not always make kind and compassionate choices when he wasn’t sober. So when somebody says, "You don't want to end up like him," it's the concept for me of, no, I want to be aware of substance use and abuse. Because while you're right, I don't want to end up getting into a system that just perpetuates problems, I do want to take on the qualities of him that were to be admired.
When people stood up at his funeral and spoke about him, nobody was like, "Well, nobody wants to be like him." Everybody talked about how loyal he was and what a great friend he was. And we all knew the undertone was “when he was sober”, but I think that's the point.
Ashley:
Right. It's being able to separate an action from a character. I know personally I have said and done things that are wrong. That are unequivocally wrong. And I also know that those moments do not make up the sum, the whole, or even the bulk of who I am. It's not even close.
Danielle:
Right.
Ashley:
And I can't imagine that that's not true for everybody, that a lot of us do things sometimes that do not make up who we are.
Danielle:
And I think that it's that degree of severity that we've kind of arbitrarily placed. And I think about the book that you recently were having me read, Are Prisons Obsolete? And it really ties deep into how laws change. What's considered criminal changes, and sometimes people end up in a system when something was deemed criminal and are still there once society's mindset, or their paradigm shifts. I specifically think about mental health and things like how we know somebody went into prison because of their addiction, but the lack of change is also not an excuse for us to not help them. Somebody might be sitting in an incarceration situation where they still haven't got the help they needed for the actual root cause.
Ashley:
I think that happens much more often than we want to admit. And I want to talk to you a little bit more about out the book specifically, because one of the things that I feel like has been really meaningful working on this with you is reading books at the same time, or just the same books and being able to have that context around these conversations when we have them in our personal life, and when we have them professionally. And reading this book, one of the things I was really excited to talk to you about was this idea of the difference between, and it's right in the introduction, between prison reform and prison abolition.
Now, I cannot say that 15 years ago when we first started knowing each other, that I would've known anything about prison reform or prison abolition.
Danielle:
Same.
Ashley:
But obviously we've been hearing them a lot more in the past few years, especially in conversations around reactions to highly publicized instances of police brutality. But what has it been like for you to encounter those concepts in this text?
Danielle:
What's interesting is the book was written the year I graduated high school and went into college, and finding it as late in life as I have almost angers me to this point, because I feel like this conversation was a long time coming for the United States. I would've thought if somebody would've said to me, "Well, we need to abolish the prison system," "Well, but what will you do with the criminals?", would've been my immediate first question. And now reading this book, my thought is, "Well, what's criminal?"
Ashley:
Right.
Danielle:
That's the real question. And is criminal defined by the law? Is criminal defined by morality? Is law defined by morality? How do you envision life without some sort of sequestering of those who are the rule breakers, right? And when you really start to dig into this book, Angela Davis does a really great job of breaking that down. Reform has tried to happen many times where you think about when incarceration began. I'm talking about the real roots of incarceration because initially it wasn't the punishment, it was just the holding place before for the punishment. And now, 300 years later, you look at incarceration and it is the punishment. Holding somebody away from society is the punishment, not reforming them or having them pay penance so that they can go back into society with a real shot at never seeing incarceration again.
Ashley:
Yep!
Danielle:
Reform has always seemed to tighten the grip. It's always seen to be like the spring that has coiled tighter together, loading. Where abolition really seeks a truly new form of holding people accountable for their actions and helping to provide rehabilitation. Give them the skills they need, fill in the knowledge gaps, or the skill of gaps, or wealth gaps. I tried to pick up all those different lenses she was putting down. And if you start to think about social welfare and that system, well, that's what prison really is, but everybody's all about lock them up, lock them up. But it's like the biggest social welfare ticket in America right now.
What if it wasn't lock them up, lock them up? What if it was educate them, educate them? What if it was provide for them, provide for them? What basic needs were many of these people missing? Whether that was income, housing, coping skills for their own traumas. Whether it was childhood or adulthood. You think about reform and that's not what reform has done. Abolish that system and you bring in the ones that are actually going to change things from the bottom up, the ones that are actually going to alter how society functions.
--
Peeling back the layers of incarceration has been a heavy experience. But, it’s worth the struggle to reckon with my own perceptions and misunderstanding, and the reward has been affirmation and clarity on my own experiences with incarcerated loved ones. When considering the abolition of something, I used to hear that word and think, “go away forever.” Now, I consider the word as a signal to think about how to create more effective solutions to systems that no longer serve a productive purpose. As a former classroom teacher, I know exactly what it means to reconsider punitive systems and pour into people (specifically children) and consider an array of alternatives to shaping minds and behaviors for a more productive purpose.
After reading, Are Prisons Obsolete?, by Angela Davis, my only regret is that I had not found this text sooner. The questions she poses, and the succinct ways she presents the history and true foundations of incarceration are equally eye-opening and disappointing. In turn, she also provides data alongside human stories to further investigate the question, “What if prisons no longer existed? What ‘constellation of alternative strategies and institutions,’ would need to exist for reparation and reconciliation of what incarceration has done to families, communal systems, and our society as a whole?
I would encourage everyone to read this book. Then, consider your own constellation of possibilities. I look forward to you joining us for Part 2.
