The Perils Prison Reform, and the Vision of a Visually Impaired Artist

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, Wnyc, David, Arts, Yorker, Society & Culture, Storytelling, Books, New, Remnick, Politics

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 21 July 2020

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

In the past few years, there has been a growing bipartisan demand to reduce the extraordinarily high rate of incarceration in the United States, on both moral and fiscal grounds. But some of the key reforms, according to some prison abolitionists, are actually expanding the “carceral web”—the means by which people are subjected to control by the corrections system. “Reform operates according to a logic of replacement,” the journalist Maya Schenwar tells Sarah Stillman. Drug courts and electronic monitoring are widely popular reforms that, Schenwar argues, only funnel people back into physical prisons, and may cause addicts further harm. Stillman spoke with Schenwar and Victoria Law, the authors of “Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms.” Plus, Rodney Evans discusses his documentary film “Vision Portraits,” which has been streaming on PBS. It examines the creative processes of a writer, a dancer, and a photographer who are—like the filmmaker—visually impaired.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.7	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Ramnik. Sarah Stillman is a staff writer who's
0:15.0	covered immigration, mass incarceration, and other issues of social justice. Here's Sarah
0:20.0	Stillman.
0:25.5	Over the last few years, there's been a lot of coverage, including on our program,
0:30.2	about ending mass incarceration, a conversation that some communities have been pushing for decades.
0:35.8	This momentum for change is really encouraging for people who believe the U.S. puts way too many people in prisons and jails and for way too long.
0:39.7	But a lot of mainstream reforms are more complicated than they look.
0:43.5	I recently spoke with two journalists and prison abolitionists, Victoria Law and Maya Chenoir.
0:50.5	And they argue that many of the ideas being sold to us as alternatives to incarceration actually expand what they call the carceral web, the various ways that communities, and especially communities of color, get surveilled and criminalized and controlled.
1:06.2	And in particular, they call out reforms like private probation, things like sex offender registries,
1:11.3	and the use of electronic monitoring. And they both have personal experiences with incarceration.
1:18.5	Shenhua's sister spent much of her life in the system. She was incarcerated for the first time
1:24.3	in juvenile detention 15 years ago and was just in and out of jails and
1:31.8	prisons ever since then. And during the time periods that she wasn't incarcerated, she was
1:39.3	still being confined and controlled and surveilled. And there were always these very, very harsh conditions
1:47.6	placed on her to the extent that she'd end up back in prison, back in jail. It just was this
1:55.4	never-ending cycle. Victoria Law found herself sentenced to probation when she was a teenager.
2:02.0	When I was in high school, many of my friends joined gangs because when you are 14, 15, 16, 17, and looking at the prospect of spending all your time in classrooms that are overcrowded and somebody comes along and offers you
2:19.4	the opportunity to make several hundred dollars any night. Many teenagers might look at that as
2:25.8	the better choice. So they joined gangs, dropped out, got arrested, and at one point I got swept
2:31.7	up into some of this nonsense and I got arrested for armed robbery.
	...

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