The Radical Futures Now team got an opportunity to have a conversation with a special guest Amani Sawari to participate in our Black Lives Matter mini series and discuss the recent Uprising and its relation to Mass Incarceration in America. Amani Sawari is a writer, founder of the site sawarimi.org, coordinator for the Right2Vote Campaign, the Good Time Campaign to Repeal Truth In Sentencing and a 2019 Civil Rights Fellow with the Roddenberry Foundation. She graduated from the University of Washington with her Bachelor degree in both Media Communication Studies and Law, Economics & Public Policy in 2016. Her visionary publications, including the Right2Vote Report and Motivate Michigan newsletter, aid in distributing messages and building community among participants in the prison resistance movement on both sides of the wall. Learn more, take a listen, and be a part of this conversation.
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Transcript:
Intro:
Welcome to the Radical Zone Podcast, where we get updates on the current state of the world and how various communities are impacted from activists and organizers who are out there doing the work. The Radical Zone Podcast is housed under the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership. I know you’re probably wondering what the Arcus Center is. The Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership also known as ACSJL is an initiative of Kalamazoo College whose mission is to develop and sustain leaders in human rights and social justice through education and capacity building. We envision a world where every person’s life is equally valued, the inherent dignity of all people is recognized, the opportunity to develop one’s full potential is available to every person, and systematic discrimination and structural inequities have been eradicated. Listen to and engage in conversation with organizers and activists across the globe about social inequities that impact us all.
Rhiki Swinton:
Hey everybody, what’s up. It’s Rhiki again here, and thank you for tuning into the Radical Zone. Joining me today is my co-host, Tirrea Billings.
Tirrea Billings:
Hello everyone.
Rhiki Swinton:
So we have the pleasure of bringing special guest Amani Sawari to participate in our second episode of the BLM mini series to discuss the recent uprising and its relation to mass incarceration. So we don’t just want to focus on the police, because the police is just the first layer of a much larger and more jacked up system. So we want Amani to kind of break this thing down and talk a little bit more about the criminal justice system and mass incarceration overall.
Tirrea Billings:
Amani Sawari is a writer, founder of the site sawariMi.org, coordinator for the Right to Vote Campaign, the Good Time Campaign To Repeal Truth In Sentencing, and a 2019 civil rights fellow with the Roddenberry Foundation. She graduated from the University of Washington with her bachelor’s degree in both media communications studies and law, economics and public policy in 2016. Her visionary publications, including the Right to Vote Report and Motivate Michigan Newsletter aid in distributing messages and building community among participants in the prison resistance movement on both sides of the wall. Welcome Amani, and thank you for being with us today.
Amani Sawari:
Hi, both of you, thank you for the warm welcome. I’m happy to be here.
Tirrea Billings:
So Amani, how are you? And what’s happening in Detroit?
Amani Sawari:
I’m doing very well. And what’s going on in Detroit? I think that Detroit is sort of a microcosm of what’s going on around our entire country. When you talk about the recent uprising and the BLM movements that have reinvigorated recently, I think what’s happening in Detroit. It’s a reflection of what’s going on all across the nation, but more specifically, there are movements to expand what we think about when we think about Black Lives Matter to include and be inclusive of people in prison. So I’m really excited to talk about that, and what’s going on on both sides of the coin as it relates to BLM.
Tirrea Billings:
Speaking of Black Lives Matter and the protests and everything, what are your thoughts about the recent uprisings and what has been happening specifically like in your community in Detroit?
Amani Sawari:
So specifically in my community, there have been protests somewhere every single day, whether it’s downtown, where there are hundreds of people that come together, usually peacefully to just stand and take up space and hold up signs, or smaller groups that are above the highways, like in 10 or 696 with their signage showing support for the family of George Floyd, as well as others that we have lost to police brutality. And then on street corners as you’re driving through the city, or even in the area where I am more specifically in Southfield, there are people on the street corners holding up signs every day. And so it’s exciting to see that people are looking for opportunities and creating opportunities to get out and be in front of people and make sure that the momentum continues to build around this fact that Black Lives Matter.
And then more recently I was able to go to the unveiling of Malice Green’s mural on Juneteenth. So that was exciting. And that was a mural of Malice Green. He was killed by police in the early 90s, and he was one of the earlier cases of police brutality in our region, in our area, and he was holding a scroll that was infinitely long with names of other victims to police brutality like Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Sandra Bland, the list goes on and on and on of all the people that were included on the scroll. So it was a very beautiful monument and there was a rally going on there as well.
Rhiki Swinton:
Now Amani, you have a media company called SawariMedia that works to build community between prisoners, their families and future advocates. So can you talk to me about how you got started in this work and how that work led to the development of a media company? I just kind of want to know like why media, and Tirrea, you can probably speak to this too.
Amani Sawari:
SawariMedia is my media company that was created a little bit after I’d already gotten involved in the prison resistance world. As was said earlier in the introduction, I studied media communications in college. So I looked at the relationship between the media and the way that people are represented in the media and the way that they’re treated in society. And more specifically the way they’re treated legislatively by the laws that are written, and executively by the police with the study of law and economics with that.
So that was something I’d always been interested in, just looking at how does the media represent black men and women, and what is the impact that that has on black men and women. Because the mass majority of the media that we watch and consume isn’t created by us. So it’s telling stories about us that are creating a ripple effect in our communities that we, I believe don’t have much control over as it relates to like the television, what we hear on the radio and things like that. So that’s what initially sparked my interest in college.
And then with the new Jim Crow that has come out, Michelle Alexander’s book, I was in a class called race crime and law, and that was one of the assigned texts. And so being one of the only minorities in the classroom, I studied in Washington state where the percentage of black people is just 3%. So being one of the only black students in a class about race, crime and law, I felt the responsibility of having to understand and explain how it feels when you’re represented in a certain way in images, by the media. And then what we see happen in our communities, being a girl, a black girl from Detroit, knowing people who’ve been locked up, sent to prison who the people in my classroom would think about in a different way if they just saw the story. So that’s what kind of made the connection.
And then when it came to founding SawariMedia, before SawariMedia existed, I was working with a group of grassroots organizers on an event called the Millions for Prisoners Human Rights March. And so they’d recruited me to write a monthly newsletter that would go to their inside support base and let them know what was going on around the country in preparation for this march. And so that’s how I built a following on the inside. Once that march was over, I thought to myself, I want to keep doing this. I don’t want to just drop this support base. I don’t want them to stop knowing about what’s going on in the movement. So I put together another newsletter, the subscriptions expanded from there, and I just began to cover voting rights and felony disenfranchisement more specifically, but politics broadly.
Tirrea Billings:
That’s amazing. I’m definitely have seen this over the course of like my undergrad and my graduate career, the power of media and the importance of like storytelling and using media and film and video and as a tool to offer a visual representation of the movement and the issues that we’re currently enduring, and also a way to like kind of document what’s been happening and show people, like I said, a visual representation of everything. And so you were the spokesperson for the National Prison Strike. Can you tell us a little bit more about the strike and what events led up to it?
Amani Sawari:
So I’ve just mentioned the Millions for Prisoners March. The group that organized that march, that was in August 19th of 2017 is when the march happened in Washington DC and in sister cities like San Jose, California, New Mexico, Albuquerque, different partner, sister cities had marches on that day too. All of that was organized by a incarcerated group of inside activists named Jailhouse Lawyers Speak.
So at that time they recruited me to just put their newsletter together. They would send me a statement to put in there and I’d write an article. When the following year came, 2018, in April of 2018, there was a, what some would call a riot at the Lee County Correctional Institution in South Carolina, I would call it a massacre because the staff instigated conflict by having a lockdown for several months at a time. And when people began to fight, the staff did not intervene in order to save lives, and nine lives were lost that day.
So when that happened in April, 2018, later that month, a member of JLS contacted me and asked again if I would be their spokesperson for a new event which would be the 2018 national prison strike. And they said that they wanted that because they wanted to go about it that way instead of just a march, because they knew that the conditions that led to what happened at Lee County, the massive loss of life that day could happen at any prison at any time, in any part of the country, because those are the conditions that we have for our prison system right now. And so I was happy to participate and to uplift their message and to coordinate on their behalf on a national level, which further expanded the newsletter and the right to vote report is what was born out of that.
Tirrea Billings:
How were the demands met following the strike?
Amani Sawari:
There are 10 demands of the national prison strike, and they’re kind of in order of what the people on the inside have felt was the most achievable. First, being more all inclusive, all the way down to the last one, being more specific, their national demands. So some states have different policies that are already met in the demands and other states don’t. So for example, with demand number 10, the right to vote, wanting every single person, regardless of their criminal history or their incarceration status to have voting rights, and to be able to participate in the election.
There are States like Maine and Vermont, where people in prison can already vote. So demand number 10, that wasn’t necessarily something that they’d be striving for, but in the vast majority of our country, that’s still something that we’re striving for. So just to key in on that specific demand, which ended up being the overriding demand of all of them, other demands included repealing the prisoner litigation reform act, which doesn’t allow people in prison to use their right to sue for grievances. If they’re attacked, if they’re sexually abused, if they’re assaulted while in prison, they have to go through an internal grievance process and have all their complaints resolved by potentially their perpetrators, which a lot of abuses go under the rug. So that was the demand.
Another demand was for prisoners to be paid a living wage, and for them to be paid the minimum wage, the prevailing minimum wage in their state, as well as to repeal truth in sentencing, allowing for people in prison to have more access to earn credits, to earn time off their sentences. So these were all things that they wanted, but the overriding demand number 10, the right to vote was a pathway that would allow for all of those demands to be met, had that one been given.
And so that was the demand that got a lot of seen. The following year in 2019, there were 17 States that introduced legislation towards ending felony disenfranchisement. And even right now states like California, they were a part of our right to vote cohort or are, and they are a part of the right to vote cohort. And their bill is just past the house, and so now it’s on the Senate side. And so a lot of states are still making headway when it comes to giving people’s voting rights. They’re fighting for voting rights for people who are on parole in California, because people can vote while on probation, but not parole. We’re trying to make sure that we can eliminate all of those nuances to better serve and create a more inclusive democracy for everyone.
Rhiki Swinton:
So I’ve been doing a lot of reading, some of which includes The Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil, and also some articles that talk about this movement towards the use of technology in prisons and how it’s changing the prison system as a whole. So just to be more specific, there seems to be like a movement towards utilizing GPS tracking and ankle bracelets so that we get to a point where people can be confined within their home rather than a prison cell.
Now some would say that this is prison reform, but others like media justice for change would argue that electronic monitoring threatens to become a form of technological mass incarceration known as E-Carceration. So Amani I just want to know what are your thoughts on the technological advances around prisons and prison systems?
Amani Sawari:
So the first thing I’ll say is that there is no way to reform oppression or… A lot of prisoners would tell me there’s no way to reform hell. So if prison is already created to be over punitive, there’s no way to add reforms to something that has that explicit purpose, because it has to achieve that goal of being punitive over everything else, over rehabilitation, over keeping families together, all of those things.
So E-Carceration is a term that I definitely subscribe to and agree with. It’s a new form of incarceration that allows for people to still be exploited, monetarily, to be monitored by the state. They have to pay for those ankle bracelets. They have to pay for their parole officer. They have to pay fees that are attributed to maintaining these technologies. And so that’s a way that continues to exploit people that are already fighting against a system that is biased against them. And it further helps to expand the system as well.
And so I definitely don’t think that giving people ankle bracelets is going to be the solution to mass incarceration. Instead of mass incarceration, yes, we’re going to see mass E-Carceration because it’s a more convenient way to monitor people and exploit people. It’s a more convenient way for the state and for us. And we don’t actually see that E-Carceration is helping with the growth and development of an individual. We see a lot of things that impede a person’s life as a result of being under E-Carceration monitoring. For example, having the check-ins, having to make sure to check in. Well, if they don’t check in on time, they’re still threatened to be incarcerated. There’s always that threat of being incarcerated.
A lot of people are forced to be on E-monitoring pretrial, because they’re not trusted to show up to court on time, maybe because they’ve missed a court date. So it’s already been an abusive measure that we’ve used in an abusive way. I don’t think that it’s a proper reform. I think that the system that we’ve created needs to be completely restructured. But if we do allow for E-Carceration to replace the system, we’re going to see more people under E-Carceration than what we see people that are mass incarcerated. The same way that we see people, the more people who are mass incarcerated today than what we had slaves when there was a chattel slave era, I think it’s just going to help the system expand and for it to be more convenient for the state to exploit us.
Tirrea Billings:
And honestly, I, like with this quarantine, being in the house for a couple of months was hard. And even when, like I still can go outside to go to the grocery store and do certain things, but like being confined to your home is pretty tough, especially like I’m thankful that I was able to work from home and like I have access to certain technologies that allow me to reach out to family and reach out to friends, but with someone who doesn’t have those resources and they can’t get a job because they can’t leave the house and they can’t contribute to the family and the way that they want to did, like it’s tough.
Amani Sawari:
I agree. And I think that if we’re constantly looking for ways to reform the system, that’s making it a stronger system instead of tearing it down and putting our energy into building something that actually works. We already know that our criminal justice system is biased. We already know that it exploits people, it exploits their labor, it exploits them monetarily. And so we’re continuing to reform those aspects of an already broken system instead of putting energy into tearing it down and building something different.
Tirrea Billings:
Absolutely. So now I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about police reform versus police abolition. And so police reform, for our listeners who may not be aware, believes that the system has cracks and that rehabilitation and proper training can fill those cracks to create a better system versus police abolition approach, believes that since the entire system was created with racist intentions from its inception, the system has, as a whole is the problem and needs to be dismantled and rebuilt. So Amani, what are your thoughts? Do you support more of the police reform approach or the police abolition approach?
Amani Sawari:
I’m definitely an abolitionists to the core. We already see and there’s already a ton of evidence that shows that the system that we have today is just an evolution of, like you said, the slave catching system. So why are we keeping it in place? And why is it what we spend most of our budgets on in our states? Why is it something that we depend on in every aspect of life, whether it’s, Oh, we need to call the police because our daughter ran away or we need to call the police because there’s someone that’s been sitting in this restaurant too long. It’s so ingrained in so many aspects of our society.
We lean towards reforming it because of that. But think that that’s definitely not the right answer, trying to reform a system that from the start was created to be oppressive and abusive and exploitative. There’s no way to reform that. We definitely have to abolish it completely. And more recently, with all the attention on police brutality, there’s a new hashtag. I’m not sure if you all have heard of it, have y’all heard of hashtag eight to abolition?
Rhiki Swinton:
No, I haven’t heard of that.
Amani Sawari:
So there’s eight aspects that have been focused on in this method to completely abolish the system that we have today. And those eight points are one, deform the police. Two, demilitarize communities. Three, remove police from schools. Four, free people from prisons and jails. Five, repeal laws, criminalizing survival. Six, invest in community self-governance. Seven, provide safe housing for everyone, and eight invest in care, not cops. And so those are like eight points that have been identified that as a community, people are saying, if we attack these eight things, we can properly remove police from being such a central part of our society so that we can abolish that system entirely.
Rhiki Swinton:
So, I kind of want to revisit something that you were talking about earlier with the national prison strike and one of their demands being the right to vote. So I too read the new Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. It is a great book. If you have not read it, you should definitely read it. But in the book, the main takeaway that I got from it was the detriment behind the felony label, the prison label, and how that label affects people, even after they leave prison and in a way, so that kinds of strips them of their human rights, one of which being the right to vote.
So as Amani mentioned earlier, Maine and Vermont are the only state in the U.S. that allows inmates to exercise their right to vote. But it isn’t uncommon to do that. So like half of European countries allow all of their incarcerated people to vote. So Amani can you just talk a little bit about how this prison label could be a tactic of voter suppression for communities of color?
Amani Sawari:
Yes. I definitely agree with that statement that there’s two labels, one of two labels that you could get after serving a sentence or being convicted of a crime, and that’s a felony or misdemeanor. A misdemeanor is more swept under the rug. You can still exercise your right to vote. You might still be able to purchase a gun depending on what the crime was. If you’re labeled a felon, you certainly can’t exercise your right to vote anymore. You’ve probably had to serve extensive amount of time in comparison to someone who had a misdemeanor and probably didn’t have to serve any time. And then in a lot of cases, you can’t find housing, you can’t get a job. So there’s all of these aspects of society that you don’t have access to anymore because of this label from your criminal history.
And even after you’ve served your debt to society, you’ve served your time, you still have this label that’s usually on you for years and years until you have the funds to afford an expungement, if you qualify in your state. And so that’s one highlight when it comes to voting rights, it’s such a core aspect of democracy that if we can attack that and make people think about why is it that we choose to strip people of this core aspect of what our system is when we say that everyone has a voice here in America, we forget about the felon or the inmate, or the person who’s behind bars that doesn’t have a voice in this society.
So that’s why it was so important that we expose that and that the prisoners themselves were the leaders in exposing that and making a strong statement, saying, we want our voice back for those of you who think that everyone has a voice here, we do not, we don’t, and we want our voice, and we deserve to have it.
Tirrea Billings:
Yeah. And I think it’s just really important to make sure we always iterate this fact and iterate like the importance of allowing everyone to have the right to vote. I think a lot of people will talk mostly when they talk about prisons and trying to change things, they talk about sentence reducing. And I think that is important too. But even if we reduce the sentences, sometimes they can still leave with that label that still keeps them from operating in the world as a full citizen with agency, with the right to have a voice. How do you think capitalism plays a role in the prison industrial complex, and what can we do to combat that?
Amani Sawari:
Capitalism fuels the prison industrial slave complex, because we have a democracy that relies so heavily on capitalism and consumerism. We, as a nation, are dependent on free slave labor. We always have been since the first ship came and we began selling people amongst one another as slaves, our country was dependent on the system. It grew exponentially as a result of having this free labor class.
So now we’ve gotten to the point where we’re a world power, we’re still a capitalist democracy. We’re still a nation that’s really focused on consumerism. We have to have a class of people that we can call on and use and exploit for little to no cost. And that is the prison class, the men and women who are behind bars. And we see this time and time again, we already know that in Michigan people in prison make license plates and they train seeing eye dogs. And we look at it as, Oh, they’re serving society, they’re doing good, but a lot of people were put off when we didn’t have enough masks for everyone that was working in the medical field in the height of the coronavirus pandemic. And we recruited people in prison to make those masks and they weren’t even allowed to use them for themselves.
Then people were like, “Oh, wait, this doesn’t look good.” Also, when we didn’t have enough hand sanitizer in Georgia, people in prison were recruited to bottle hand sanitizer, but they’re not even allowed to have hand sanitizer because it has alcohol in it. So they can’t have it themselves. And we see this time and time again throughout our history that we call on whether it was slaves in the earlier centuries to indentured servants, to the convict leasing system, to today’s prison class, inmate of the state, property of the state. We have to have a free labor source. So capitalism fuels the industrial prison complex are being so dependent on that free labor source.
Tirrea Billings:
Absolutely. And I was like doing some reading and it’s so shocking how many industries rely on prison labor. Industries you wouldn’t even think about. I didn’t know like McDonald’s, Victoria’s Secret, AT&T. These are just a few of the many corporations that really rely on prison labor, which is super disappointing. I feel like every time I find out about a new place, it’s like, “Oh, I got to stop shopping there. Oh, I got to start shopping at like Walmart and Home Depot.” And it’s like, “Oh my gosh, is there any corporation that doesn’t rely on prison labor?” There’s so many. And it’s most of the big ones that are more common that everybody use are the ones that really exploit prison labor.
Amani Sawari:
Yes. And I’m one of those people I’ll search for something. And then if I see that it’s only at Walmart, the cheapest prices at Walmart, I really don’t care. I can’t go there. I can’t go to McDonald’s and Wendy’s and the places that use prison labor to make their products, their uniforms, because in my mind, I am paying the price, or the prisoner is paying the price of not getting a fair wage. That is why they can sell 10 McNuggets for five bucks. That’s why Walmart has the cheapest couch, the cheapest leather couch that you can buy because they have this labor force that they’re not paying a living wage. And these are the companies that have gotten so huge that they can compete during a pandemic like this and go on for three months without paying anybody or having much of a workforce because they have all this money that they owe to people in prisons who have been breaking their backs to get their products on the shelves at pennies per hour to the dollar.
A competitive wage for someone in prison is 20 cents an hour. That’s a very competitive wage. And in States like Washington, half of your wages are deducted as a restitution fee. So there’s not even much of an incentive to work, even if you have little to nothing, because you’re not going to make much. And the jobs are so competitive. There’s only so many spaces of people who can work in the program. So if you’re not feeling up to doing what you’re supposed to do today, or if you’re not working fast enough or getting it done the way we like, there are 10 other people waiting, and it really is operating like a human warehouse, like a slave ship.
Tirrea Billings:
That’s so sad.
Rhiki Swinton:
I want to backtrack to something that you said a little bit earlier in the hashtag eight to abolition, one of which was invest in care, not cops. So this is around the topic of defunding the police. I just want people to kind of like understand how much money is being allocated to police and to militaries. I came across this webinar, it was through the movement for black lives. It had Angela Davis on there. Natania, just a lot of great individuals. But one of the things that was said was that allocation to police budgets can take up half of the municipal city budgets and the federal privatization of militaries can take up half of the discretionary budgets allocated by Congress.
So I just want to get your thoughts on the allocation of money as far as when we think about what we use our money in different cities for, and then the allocation of our money when we think about nationally, what most of our money goes to and how we can take this information and use it to help us in this fight to defund the police.
Amani Sawari:
In Michigan, for example, we spend billions of dollars, over $2 billion on prison system. Our state prisons are taking up more than a third of the entire state budget, just the state prisons themselves, not to mention like people on parole, the cops and all of that stuff, just for people to languish in prison costs billions of dollars. And it costs… A life sentence, for every person that has a life sentence, that’s a million dollars. That’s $45 some per year, just for someone to sit in prison.
So we can see how it’s become such an expensive system. And it’s what we as tax payers pay into to have all of these people sitting in prison. But then companies get to make contracts with the prisons and exploit their labor. They don’t pay for the person to eat, the person to have clothes, these are mothers and fathers and even sons and daughters that send their incarcerated family member money to survive in prison while the company exploits their labor and the taxpayer pays for the facility to exist and for them to have the bare minimum three meals a day, and the uniform.
So the company is getting all of the profits and we’re investing so much and getting nothing out of it. We don’t feel safer. We don’t feel like the system is working to create better people. And survivors don’t feel like people are coming out and being better. They don’t feel like the system is working, but they get a bad rap for making sure that sentences stay longer. It’s prosecutors. Survivors want a better system. Survivors of crime want a better system. Families want a better system. The prisoners themselves want a better system, but the state facilitates, and it’s more focused on making sure that the system is fueled by capitalism and serving corporations. That’s what we see in our society as a whole.
The eighth point on eight to abolition is one of the points that I am most frustrated with. I think all the points are awesome, but I feel like point number eight could have been much more specific because it says, invest in care, not cops. I wish it would have said something like invest in education, not incarceration, or invest in rehabilitation, not cops, or invest in something specific aside from cops. Because I think in this movement, we have a hard time of envisioning how the system could be different.
We know how it’s not working. We see other alternatives around the world. We see how other structures might work better, but it’s hard for us to think of what we would replace the system with. So I think that that’s a more broader conversation, but I just want to point that out that the word care, we need to be more specific when we’re having these conversations about what we need to invest in instead of.
Rhiki Swinton:
One thing that I remember someone saying is that, kind of to what you were saying, that we pay more tax money to house an inmate than we do to go to like housing in impoverished communities or better the housing of black and brown low income communities. So maybe if they would’ve did something like that, I don’t know.
Amani Sawari:
Yeah. And it’s a trend, because we wait to invest that money into the individual until they’re in prison. Why can’t that $45,000 be moved directly into the community and spent on them prior to when they get locked up? For example, if the company like Victoria Secret that’s willing to pay prisoners to sew up garments. If they were willing to pay prisoners 20 cents an hour or so to sew up garments, if they were willing to have a factory in the ghetto and pay people minimum wage, they probably wouldn’t have ended up in the prison anyway, but they would rather wait to allow these people to be incarcerated and in a position to be exploited rather than actually investing in the community where they’re from, or into them as an individual prior to that moment.
And so that’s the corporations. They’re making that choice. And we, as citizens can try to invest in our communities. But when we look at these corporations, we need to hold them accountable to, okay, you use prison labor for 20 years to become this great Starbucks that you are because you let prisoners package your coffee for years, now you are one of the biggest coffee branches in the world. What are you going to do to invest in low income communities? Or what are you going to do to invest in people in prison? Maybe start a university partnership in a prison, or bring an even better equipment for the workout room or the gym in the prisons that you’re working in.
Like there’s a way that they could invest in the people. It’s just a simple choice of the corporations that we pay for that we consume from, we go to these places, our dollar is our vote. We chose for this corporation to exist. But we need to make better choices about which places we support and basing that off of how socially responsible they are when it comes to the prison industrial complex, is a great way to do that.
Tirrea Billings:
Amani, what should people know when going to the polls this year?
Amani Sawari:
This year, people should be signing up for an absentee ballot, they shouldn’t be going to the polls. And hopefully everyone has signed up to receive a ballot in the mail so that they can reduce the threat of the spread of the coronavirus and really just stay home and make it more convenient because we don’t know what our polls are going to look like in November. We don’t know how many polling locations there are going to be. So we really do need to be aware of voter suppression and how that’s going to work and filling out an absentee ballot is the first thing people should know, just do that, get your ballot mailed to you so that no matter how far your polling location might be, because they’re reducing a lot of locations, you can still have your rights exercised.
But another thing that people need to keep in mind is that all the information isn’t out yet. And we still have many months until our election. And I feel like a lot of people are disgruntled with the choices that we have thus far, make sure that you vote in the primaries, make sure that you exercise your right to vote. And don’t just look at the two parties. Don’t just look at the two main candidates, or the main people on the ticket. Take a look at third-party options. Take a look at the other alternatives to what’s presented before us and right in our face, because we can definitely make a statement about what changes we want to see in our system, even if the numbers are low.
When we lift up candidates that aren’t necessarily the front runners, and we just lift up their message, like what we saw with Bernie Sanders. When we just lift up their message, a lot of the other candidates that are actual front runners will take on those messages and hijack those messages just because they see the public is amplifying them. So make sure, regardless of how things look that you amplify the messages and the perspectives that resonate with you, even if it’s from a candidate that you don’t necessarily think has the chances of winning, it’s okay.
Rhiki Swinton:
Is there anything that people should know about policies and stuff affecting inmates that they should be aware of when they go to the ballot or absentee ballot?
Amani Sawari:
Yeah. And they get their absentee ballot. At this point, we don’t necessarily know what’s going to be on the ballot, but there is a great potential that we see in Michigan. A question around repealing truth in sentencing, we don’t know what the language is going to look like, but just to give a brief overview, truth in sentencing is the current sentencing structure that we have in Michigan. And just because it’s called truth in sentencing doesn’t mean that it’s the best sentencing structure. What it means is that people in Michigan have to serve a hundred percent of their minimum sentence before they’re allowed to even be eligible to be seen by the parole board, which is a double sorted edge, because usually in States where you have to serve a hundred percent of your sentence, there is no parole board. You just serve your a hundred percent and you go home.
In states where you can earn time off is where you can go to the parole board because you’ve earned time off, and that time needs to be approved. And so Michigan, people end up spending on average 120% of their time in prison. Even more time sentenced in prison for similar crimes in other states where people will serve 65 or 85% of their sentence. On a federal level, people only have to serve up to 85% of their sentence and they’re able to go home.
So we’re trying to bring Michigan in line with the majority of other states around the country and in our federal system by allowing people to earn time off of their sentence while they’re incarcerated, because we believe that there is no real truth in the way that we sentence people. There’s no way that any judge or jury can look at a person and determine factually when they’re going to be fully rehabilitated. It’s up for that person to have at least the opportunity during the period of their incarceration, opportunities to grow and develop, and they should be rewarded for behavioral professional and academic achievement while they’re incarcerated.
And we should be looking for opportunities to allow people to go home. Like our system has already bursting at the scenes. People are dying right now. We have over 60 people who have died in Michigan’s department of corrections due to the coronavirus. Over 2000 people have contracted the coronavirus. People are calming down about COVID-19, but it’s still very real and very threatening behind the wall. So right now is the time to really be looking for ways to restructure our sentencing system so that it’s not so crowded in Michigan state prisons.
Tirrea Billings:
I’m curious about your thoughts on… So I’ve been reading Just Mercy. And recently I read probably the hardest status chapter called All God’s Children. And it just talked about these incarcerated youth that were sentenced to die in prison for non-violent offenses. And I’m just wondering how, like truth in sentencing, how it impacts youth in prison. And if you have been doing anything to kind of combat this issue around youth imprisonment, or how it may differ from adults being in prison versus youth and the policy around that?
Amani Sawari:
So Just Mercy is a really hard read, but it’s a very rewarding read. It’s a very good book. So when you think about youth in prison, it’s really sad that that’s even a thing that we put children behind prison bars and in cages. And I want to point out the fact that we didn’t start off doing that, prisons were not created for women or children, they weren’t created for white men either, but when the system exists, it’s easy for the lines to become blurred. When I was in Washington state working as a poetry mentor, I worked in King County’s juvenile detention center. So I worked with young people between the ages of 11 and 17.
And they were really young elementary kids that were being sentenced to spend years incarcerated. And it all would start off with just the fact that they didn’t have anyone at home, and they would run away, or whatever the case may be. And then they got addicted to drugs. So we see a normal trend, especially with children who are incarcerated. So for me personally, I think that what we allow for adults is going to bleed over into what we do in the juvenile system. Though juveniles do have more resources when it comes to schooling and things like that. They’re still being kept in cages and some are even given life sentences like you said.
I’ve had the opportunity to work with some of the juvenile lifers that were sentences to spend life in prison as juveniles in Michigan. Michigan just recently made sentencing a person under the age of 18 to life in prison unconstitutional, it was ruled as cruel and unusual punishment. And that happened two years ago, in the 2018 election.
So with all of this people who were sentenced to life in prison as juveniles, they had to be resentenced. And so a lot of people have gotten released. People like Earl Burton, who is a fellow with Michigan liberation. And Kimberly Woodson, who has her own nonprofit called Redeeming Kimberly, they were sentenced to spend life behind bars, and now they are community organizers. And they’re serving and doing food drives and clothing drives and things like that.
So for me, I don’t think anyone should be sentenced to life in prison. But when we think about our juvenile system, a lot of people lean towards young people are more deserving, resources, they’re more deserving of opportunities. But if we don’t create those for the adults, then we’re not going to have anything for the young people either. Both systems bleed into one another. And so we need to make sure to think about both. A lot of my work focuses on adults. But that’s because I know that when we raise the bar for how we treat adults, it’s going to raise the bar for how we treat young people too.
Rhiki Swinton:
Absolutely. So Amani what projects are you currently working on now? And what should we be on the lookout from SawariMedia?
Amani Sawari:
So what I’m working on right now, I’m coordinating the good time campaign to repeal truth in sentencing laws. I’m also working on the right to vote report, which is a quarterly report that goes out to hundreds of people imprisoned in 30 states across the country, keeping them abreast of the movement and felony disenfranchisement and other pieces of legislation that impacts people in prison on a state level. And with the good time campaign, I have a monthly newsletter that goes out to people incarcerated in 30 facilities across the state of Michigan.
So with both of those, if you’d like to subscribe a loved one, you can go to Sawarimi.org to subscribe someone on the inside, they are free reports. They don’t have to pay anything for receiving them. And they can subscribe to one or the other or both. So that’s SawariMedia. I’m also in the midst of a collaboration with Reflect Media doing storytelling, a storytelling media program with people in prison at Gus Harrison Correctional Facility. So that’s really fun.
I’m also working with university students at Kalamazoo College on creating a book club and divestment program for incarcerated people in the state of Michigan, making sure that they can get books and work with students on getting resources like articles and research from student databases. So it’s really exciting. My main goal and focus is to make sure that people in prison have outside resources that they can use to develop their political power. And so making sure that they are informed politically is one of the things that I focus on as well.
Tirrea Billings:
Amani, thank you so much for joining us today and begin conversation about your work and the reform that needs to happen around mass incarceration and prison reform. We really appreciate your input. To those listening, please remember that the law is meant to be my servant, and not my master, still less my torturer, and my murderer, to respect the law in the context in which the American Negro finds himself is simply to surrender his self respect. And that’s a quote from James Baldwin.
Rhiki Swinton:
So thank you all for tuning in. And remember, the conversation is not over. This is just episode two of our BLM mini series. So please be on the lookout for further conversations. We plan to continue to talk about the current events happening in our society, with other organizers on the ground. So if you wish to hear more, please join us next time on the Radical Zone.
Outro:
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