Late Easter Sunday night, people currently incarcerated at the City Justice Center (CJC) in downtown St. Louis took over the third floor of the building to bring awareness to the inhumane and unjust treatment they are currently experiencing. This is not the first time they have called us to action; this week’s protest is the fourth uprising in the CJC since late December. Are we paying attention yet?
Yes, a few windows of the CJC were broken. Yes, computers and furniture were thrown from the windows. And, yes, several small fires were started. But instead of focusing on the destruction of property, I want us to consider and care about why people were driven to break windows and start fires in the first place. People are suffering. Human beings are currently being caged in inhumane conditions. Through the broken windows, people held a banner that read, “HELP US.” Are our eyes open to their suffering yet?
According to Blake Strode, the Executive Director of ArchCity Defenders, a nonprofit public interest law firm in St. Louis, the average number of days people are incarcerated before a probable cause hearing, before even going to trial, is 146. At the CJC, the average is 344. For almost a year, during a global pandemic, people are being held in cages, separated from their families, before a trial or conviction, simply because they cannot afford a money bond or no bond was allowed. On Sunday night, people were literally screaming, “We want court dates.” Are we listening to their cries yet?
Many of us are familiar with the oft-cited MLK quote, “a riot is the language of the unheard,“ but I want us to sit with and reflect on some of his not-so-familiar words. In the aftermath of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, King wrote:
“The flames of Watts illuminated more than the western sky; they cast light on the imperfections in the civil rights movement and the tragic shallowness of white racial policy in the explosive ghettos.”[1]
What else is being illuminated for us by Sunday night’s uprising? What are we being invited to see, to hear, to question, to bear witness to? What are we being challenged to do, to deconstruct, to build together?
The arrest and incarcerate model and the punishment paradigm are not working. In fact, they are doing more than simply not working, they are actively causing us harm. Criminalizing and caging people of color and poor people does not create real community safety. Eradicating poverty by investing in education, health, and neighborhoods does. The 2.3 million people currently incarcerated in the United States, and the almost 1,000 people currently being held in the CJC, are people, not “bad” or “dangerous” or “criminal” people, but people. Like all of us, they have interconnected stories and complex lives; they carry the imperfections that make all of us human.
What could be possible if instead of criminalizing and incarcerating, we centered accountability and healing? What if we worked to build a system of transformative and restorative justice and abolished the punishment paradigm?
Restorative Justice recognizes the harm that we do to one another as a rupture in our relationship with each other. When harm occurs, the focus is on repairing the harm done and restoring the relationship in community, not simply punishment. Imagine a world where investigating a crime[2] means uncovering what led a person to commit harm (ex. trauma, addiction, poverty, lack of adequate mental healthcare, etc.) and actually addressing that root cause in a way that drastically reduces their likelihood of committing that harm again. Practicing restorative justice holds the person doing harm accountable in a way that leaves the person or community harmed not only feeling safer, but being safer long-term.
In the first chapter of her prophetic book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, scholar-activist Angela Davis writes: “In most circles prison abolition is simply unthinkable and implausible. Prison abolitionists are dismissed as utopians and idealists whose ideas are at best unrealistic and impracticable, and, at worst, mystifying and foolish. This is a measure of how difficult it is to envision a social order that does not rely on the threat of sequestering people in dreadful places designed to separate them from their communities and families. The prison is considered so ‘natural’ that it is extremely hard to imagine life without it.”[3]
Those engaging in the uprisings at the City Justice Center in St. Louis are inviting us to imagine what life could be without police and prisons. Their “HELP US” banner and “we want court dates” chants challenge us to not just advocate for a better prison system, but to creatively envision and intentionally work to build a restorative system where all of us receive the support that we need to thrive.
Will you join us in this work? Here are some ways you can get engaged:
- Connect with AFSC’s Community Safety Beyond Policing initiative by watching previous recordings, checking out our resource guides, and signing up for upcoming community conversations at https://www.afsc.org/CSBP
- Sign on to the “No Promotion for Judge Jimmie Edwards” petition created by the Organization for Black Struggle, one of AFSC St. Louis’ partner organizations.
- Follow the recently launched Defund, Re-Envision. Transform campaign in St. Louis that seeks to alleviate the root causes of violence in our region through the defunding of the City of St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department and the reinvestment of funds into the community.
- Support and hold accountable Louis Mayor-elect Tishaura Jones who will be sworn in on April 20.
- Check out these book recommendations from the AFSC St. Louis team:
- Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis
- We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice by Mariame Kaba
- The End of Policing by Alex Vitale
[1] King, “Beyond the Los Angeles Riots: Next Step, The North,” Saturday Review (13 November 1965): 33–35.
[2] We use the word crime carefully. As Mariame Kaba points out, we recognize “[a]ll that is criminalized isn’t harmful, and all harm isn’t necessarily criminalized. For example, wage theft by employers isn’t generally criminalized, but it is definitely harmful.”
[3] Davis, Angela Yvonne. Are Prisons Obsolete? (Seven Stories Press, 2003), 9-10.