PrisonTok for the Uncultured Among Us

🎶Mama, I'm in love with a criminal (who may not be a criminal and may just be in jail pending sentencing and is being denied a proper trial to determine innocence or guilt in the alleged crime)🎶

Apr 12, 2021

You may be wondering, “Emily, how are you going to make a newsletter about prison reform funny?” Truth be told, I’m not sure, but we’re going to find out together.

The topic on the table this week is Prisons in the Time of Corona following the second jail protest in St. Louis in which those awaiting sentencing in the City Justice Center begged those outside for help. With a complicated and nuanced topic such as this, you may have concerns as to whether I’m the right person to be leading this conversation as I am by no means an expert on the prison system.

If I were to list my knowledge of America’s prison system, I would sound like the stuck up dweeb in a coming-of-age movie slash Freeform TV sitcom: my first college research project was an archival deep dive on how prison ships used during the Revolutionary War shaped American colonists’ understanding of what prisons could be, after which I studied felony disenfranchisement through the lens of Supreme Court cases in a legal history course.

As I wrote that out, I couldn’t help but wonder…. was I Harriet, Head Girl at Abbey Mount School?

This joke is for a niche subsect among us who have seen this movie 30 times because you’ve either seen this movie 30 times or you’ve never seen it at all. Ps. they put it back on Netflix!!!

Anyway, like I said: I am not a prison expert. But I do know one! This week, I talked with Liz Pittenger (she/her), a prison abolitionist and junior at Emory pursuing majors in sociology and psychology. She currently works full-time in a public defender’s office and the majority of her time is spent working on criminal justice advocacy efforts. She’s also a ray of sunshine, but that doesn’t necessarily inform her opinions here today.

I asked Liz about what’s going on in St. Louis and in prisons around the country (both during the pandemic and in general), how our current criminal justice system has allowed for more issues than solutions, and how our overall society can and will benefit from prison reform.

As always here at Emily For President, I open with the most essential question

Emily: What are your thoughts on PrisonTok?
Liz: Oh my goodness, PrisonTok. I love.
I think it does an amazing job at humanizing people who are incarcerated. People who are in jail and prison are often stripped of their personhood and only thought of as the worst thing they have done. We, as a society, are also just so alienated from them. I think it’s great that people have access to this sort of content. PrisonTok allows viewers to see that people in jails and prisons are people just like you and I and it also helps to chronicle the experiences of those inside which are not commonly available to people.
The only thing that I have a little worry about is the retribution that people inside experience due to their use of contraband cellphones. I’ve heard of people getting six months of solitary confinement for getting caught on TikTok. I personally think it’s super dumb that people who are incarcerated aren’t allowed to have phones, but another topic for another day.

So already, we can establish that Liz is light years ahead of me in this arena and, honestly, in maturity and life as well.

For all of us to get halfway to the understanding of the prison system that Liz has, we first need to talk about the prison-industrial complex (or PIC, because I’m not typing out prison-industrial complex 30 times today). According to Critical Resistance, PIC “is a term we use to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems.” My favorite historian, Wikipedia, elaborates on this and notes that the complex “describes the attribution of the rapid expansion of the US inmate population to the political influence of private prison companies and businesses that supply goods and services to government prison agencies for profit.”

There’s a lot of different layers and tangential conversations around PIC, but I want to highlight one that we’ve started to hear more about that also captures a lot of the injustices and inequities in the prison system: the school to prison pipeline is a trend in which “children are funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Many of these children have learning disabilities or histories of poverty, abuse, or neglect, and would benefit from additional educational and counseling services. Instead, they are isolated, punished, and pushed out.” (x)

Because PIC relies on a constant influx of incarcerated individuals, the zero-tolerance policies established by schools function to either send children directly into juvenile and criminal justice systems or indirectly leading them in that direction: a Vox article published by the Justice Policy Institute found that “even when schools aren’t deliberately sending children into the juvenile justice system, disciplining them makes it more likely they’ll end up there.”

If PIC has inspired schools to do this to children, you know the whole thing is fucked.

I’d like to also address two arguments that I think are often made in bad faith when it comes to having conversations about prison reform. To address the more mild-mannered “Devil’s Advocate” approach to reform, I hereby include another segment from the PIC Wikipedia page:

“The portrayal of prison-building/expansion as a means of creating employment opportunities and the utilization of inmate labor are particularly harmful elements of the prison-industrial complex as they boast clear economic benefits at the expense of the incarcerated populace. The term also refers to the network of participants who prioritize personal financial gain over rehabilitating criminals.”

And for those among us who are thinking, “If you humanize prisoners, we are all just suddenly going to be super forgiving of murderers and thieves and…. bad people!!!” I’m going to have to ask you to mind your business elsewhere.

The idea behind prison reform is that it should be a place for the worst of the worst: serial killers, rapists, and Karens who cough on Uber drivers. But prisons and jails, as they exist right now, contain wrongfully convicted people and those serving horrifically long sentences for non-violent crimes, while there are legitimate criminals who are walking free. So there needs to be reform in the prison system in order to even have this no-basis argument.1

Before we go any further…

I asked Liz to clear up something I was confused about that some of you may be a little lost on, too:

Emily: What is the difference between prison and jails? I’ve literally never understood this.
Liz: These terms are used interchangeably but they are pretty different.
Jails are basically used for pretrial detention and for incarcerating people serving shorter sentences (usually for misdemeanors). People often do not spend much time in jails at all in normal times at least (since COVID, people have been in there since the start of the pandemic or earlier).
This might clear some things up: if you are arrested you might spend a couple nights in jail and be released; then when you go to trial and get sentenced, you might go to prison. So prison is for people spending a long time being incarcerated and jails just hold people for a little bit.

What You Came Here For

Now that we all have the literal bare minimum of context needed to understand the issues at hand, we can discuss what Liz sees as the most pressing issues regarding prison reform and the prison system overall:

Emily: What do you believe are the most pressing issues that need to be addressed in regards to prison reform and the prison system overall?
Liz: This is a hard question. I guess my main beef with the prison system right now is pretrial detention. If you aren’t familiar, pretrial detention is when individuals are denied bond before their trial because they are either too poor to pay the fine or the Judge has deemed them “too dangerous” for society.2
Since I’ve been working at the Public Defender’s office, I have also seen Judges refuse bond to individuals who haven’t committed that severe of crimes but are homeless. Judges won’t release individuals from custody if they don’t have an address to send legal mail. Obviously, this causes a ton of problems and puts entire communities at risk because of COVID. It makes jails unnecessarily crowded and, with people cycling in and out, the spread of infectious disease is almost inevitable both within the jail and also with the surrounding community.
I know it’s legal but something doesn’t sit right with me about this— especially because the courts are so backed up and people will literally have to sit in jail until their trial which could potentially be years away. Meanwhile, they are still innocent in the eyes of the law. Major beef.

Emily: In what ways has the COVID pandemic made prison reform an ever more pressing issue?
Liz: Loaded question! Just the sheer amount of people dying from COVID-related complications inside of jails and prisons has shed a light on how horribly a lot of jails are run, the overcrowding, and how vulnerable those populations are.
In the beginning of the pandemic, I remember Cook County Jail in Chicago having the highest rate of positivity in perhaps the whole country. Just horrible conditions. Folks inside were truly stuck and I think because it was such a human rights violation people started to look a little more closely at everything. Also, going along with that the Defund the Police movement and the murder of George Floyd, I think got people into caring about the injustices of the legal system again with all of that so clearly in front of them and in the collective dialogue.

I Know This Seems Bad, But It’s Actually A Lot Worse!

I feel just like an Oompa Loompa when I ask: What do you get when you [combine the unequal and therefore unjust practice of pretrial detention with an ongoing global pandemic]? While we don’t have time to unpack all of the subliminal messaging within Willy Wonka today (although there is always next week), we do have an example of what happens when these two problems collide, and that is what’s been happening in St. Louis.

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Last week, inmates at the City Justice Center led an uprising for the second time this year as they protested the long period of pretrial detention. Some of those held at the jail have been waiting more than a year for a scheduled court date so, as an act of desperation, inmates “broke the third-floor windows of the St. Louis City Justice Center, lit fires and held up a sign that read: ‘HELP US’ as onlookers watched from below. ‘We want court dates,’ they chanted, signaling frustration over delayed court hearings and conditions within the jail.” (x)

This is where the combo deal of pretrial detention and COVID comes in: according to Liz,

the court systems in pretty much every county in the United States have effectively been on pause since March of last year. No in-person hearings have happened or no juries have really gathered yet and that has set the trial calendar back truly years— my boss said that things in Georgia wouldn’t be back on track until the end of 2022 at the earliest.
And on top of that, there has not been any slowing down of cases being filed so people are just sitting in jail awaiting a court date that might not happen for years and years. The people who are incarcerated at the City Justice Center in St. Louis have relied on outside advocate support to write letters, run campaigns, write complaints, etc., to the people who run that facility with no avail so this was kind of the final straw.

PHOTO: Onlookers watch from the street as inmates chant and throw things from broken windows at the St. Louis Justice Center, known as the city jail, April 4, 2021. — Scenes from last week’s uprising. Source: ABC News.

To me, this is not great. It’s further proof of how (I believed I said) fucked our criminal justice and prison systems are and brings about a slightly hopeless feeling in me… but not in Liz “Ray of Sunshine” Pittenger.

Emily: Do you think what’s happening in St. Louis may happen in other prisons around the country?
Liz: Gosh, I hope so because I hope it will generate change. But more than my hope that other prisons take note, I also hope that it will inspire people outside to advocate a little harder for those incarcerated.
I think if we organize around these conditions and horrible circumstances we could force change from the outside in rather than within. Because ultimately, those individuals who do end up protesting from within will inevitably end up facing even more oppressive and violent circumstances inside.

I’ll say it because I know we were all thinking it… Liz For President

By now, you may be wondering: if prisons function so poorly, prey so obviously, and cause further problems so easily, why the hell are they still allowed to exist in their current state??? To which I would say: listen, we didn’t even have time to get into the Oompa Loompa’s efforts to unionize. You think we have time to break down all of capitalism??!?!?!?!?!

But hopefully, regardless of if you’re Team Reform or Team Abolition, you can see that things need to change in regards to our current prison systems. And if you can’t, let Liz spell it out for you:

Emily: In what ways do you see reforming the prison system benefitting our society overall?
Liz: On a pragmatic level, prisons are so so so expensive and they literally do not work. The recidivism rates are insane and crime rates are higher than ever before and it literally costs so much money for WHAT? If we reformed/worked towards the abolition of prisons, we would have a healthier soul of society and also probably a healthier wallet.
Additionally, ESPECIALLY during COVID, we know that jails are breeding grounds for infectious diseases which affect everyone. People work in jails and bring it home to their families and kids, etc. But also more deeply, this question really reminds me of one of my favorite quotes and speeches from Black civil rights advocate Fannie Lou Hamer: “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”
In so many ways Black women have created and sustained the civil rights movement and the prison abolition movement and I always want to pay homage to them. I truly do believe that until everyone is free from oppression, we are all a part of a sick society.

I also just want to take a moment here to hype up Liz and highlight some of the fantastic work she does. I asked her,

Emily: What does your personal activism entail and how did you get involved with this work?
Liz: I feel so strange calling myself an activist, which is dumb because I hold positions with that title. But I actually joke that I am a recovering Catholic and true crime addict and that’s kind of how I came into my passion.
For one, I had this incredible teacher in Catholic school and her thing was really that no one is all good or all bad and that no one is the worst thing that they have ever done. We also talked a lot about slavery and racial oppression more broadly which sort of dipped my toe into the movement.
Around the same time, I also listened to this one true crime podcast called Generation Why and they had this episode about the death penalty and I was like, “Wow, that is so crazy like there are all these people that could have been innocent that were effectively murdered by the US government.”3
Both of those things really pushed me over the edge, but my interest in activism specifically started from living in St. Louis and experiencing the origins of the Black Lives Matter protests when I was at the super impressionable age of 15 years old. There were a lot of contributing factors that allowed me to get kind of stuck on prison abolition.

You can check out Liz’s activism on Instagram @lizpittetalksabprison!!!

Now Comes That Finnicky “Doing the Work” Part

Our current prison system and the prominence of the prison-industrial complex’s influence are not going anywhere any time soon. As Liz said, the events of the past year have shown the problems within our criminal justice system to a far larger population. Fortunately and unfortunately, reforming our prison and our criminal justice systems is a long overdue issue which means there are so many fantastic resources to continue the conversation past my silly little newsletter.

People’s lives are being shaped by injustices and institutional barriers they can’t control and, with absolutely all credit to PrisonTok, many Americans are starting to see that for the first time as they put faces to statistics. My hope for myself and for everyone here is that more than just acknowledging that this past year has inspired us to put in more work to reforming, abolishing, and overhauling institutions that no longer serve our society, we actually put in that “more work.”

I asked Liz for some of her favorite resources to recommend for anyone who wants to continue learning about our current prison system and prison reform/abolition. Here are her picks:

I just finished this book and it really is an abolitionist Bible. It’s called We Do this ‘Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba. It compiles a bunch of amazing interviews, articles, and other resources about prison and police abolitionist organizing.
For people who like podcasts, “Justice in America” is the go-to. This podcast, although it’s a little old, goes in-depth into a bunch of topics within the legal system. It’s super cool and I’ve learned a lot from it.
My favorite docuseries: The Kalief Browder Story. Wow never have I cried more than during this series. This for sure radicalized me, especially regarding cash bail.
I also love @hannahcrileyy on Twitter! She talks a lot about Georgia-based activism and works at the Southern Center for Human Rights and has a lot of interesting thoughts and ideas about the criminal justice system more broadly.

Thank you again to Liz for being brilliant and a really good human!! One more time: her activism IG (which focuses on, you guessed it, prison abolition) is @lizpittetalksabprison!!!