Inside the Industrial Prison Complex: A Conversation with Paula Lehman Ewing
Paula Lehman Ewing, an award-winning journalist and author, joins the podcast to discuss her debut book, "Reimagining the Four Stories of Abolition, Autonomy and Forging New Paths in a Modern Civil Rights Movement." Central to the conversation is the concept of the prison industrial complex and its pervasive impact on society, highlighting the need for a complete rethinking of justice beyond mere reform. Paula shares her insights on the systemic issues surrounding mass incarceration and emphasizes the importance of amplifying the voices of those directly affected. She draws on her experiences and interactions with individuals like Ken Oliver, who spent nearly three decades in prison, to underscore the resilience and intelligence of those within the system. The discussion also touches on grassroots movements and innovative approaches to achieving social equity, urging listeners to consider new definitions of justice that prioritize community and restorative practices.
Paula Lehman Ewing, an award-winning journalist and author, converses about her pioneering work in criminal justice reform and her debut book, "Reimagining the Four Stories of Abolition, Autonomy and Forging New Paths in a Modern Civil Rights Movement." Ewing's exploration of the incarceration system unveils the often-unseen struggles of those locked away, emphasizing the necessity of rethinking our approaches to justice and social equity. Ewing's personal journey highlights the influence of her grandmother and mentor Ken Oliver, whose resilience and wisdom have shaped her understanding of the complexities surrounding incarceration and social justice advocacy.
As the discussion progresses, Ewing delves into the intricacies of the prison industrial complex, explaining how it operates as a web of economic and surveillance systems that disproportionately affect certain communities. She draws historical parallels between current practices and past injustices, such as the convict leasing system in the post-Civil War era, revealing the continuity of exploitation within the justice system. Ewing's insights are particularly poignant as she addresses the real-life implications of these systemic issues, using examples from her research and interactions with incarcerated individuals who are striving to create change from within the system.
Ewing advocates for a shift towards restorative justice, a model that focuses on healing rather than punishment, and she shares stories of individuals who have taken the initiative to create community-based solutions. The episode encourages listeners to engage with social movements and consider their roles in advocating for change. Ewing's call to action resonates as she urges the audience to remain curious, challenge binary thinking, and explore how they can contribute to a more just society. This conversation serves not only as an exploration of Ewing's work but also as an invitation for listeners to reflect on their understanding of justice and the importance of amplifying the voices of those affected by the prison system.
Takeaways:
- Paula emphasizes the importance of remaining teachable and curious throughout life.
- The prison industrial complex is a complex network that extends control over society.
- Restorative justice offers a more effective way to serve victims than traditional incarceration.
- Ivan's story highlights the need for community investment to combat recidivism effectively.
- Abolition movements must think beyond binary political solutions to achieve real change.
- Critical Resistance aims to shift power from prisons to communities through grassroots initiatives.
Links referenced in this episode:
Companies mentioned in this episode:
- BuzzFeed News
- Just Mercy
- Greenwood Bank
- North Atlantic Books
- Penguin Random House
Transcript
My guest today is Paula Lehman Ewing.
Host:She's an award winning journalist, social documentarian and author specializing in criminal justice and social equity.
Host:Her debut book, Reimagining the Four Stories of Abolition, Autonomy and Forging New Paths in a Modern Civil Rights Movement, amplifies the voices of incarcerated individuals and advocates for social justice.
Host:We welcome her to the podcast.
Host:Well, Paula, welcome to the podcast.
Host:How you doing today?
Paula Lehman Ewing:I'm doing great.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Thank you so much for having me.
Host:It's good to have you on.
Host:Looking forward to this conversation.
Host:I've covered this topic on so many different ways before and haven't really delved into the particular part that you bring to this conversation.
Host:So it's going to be an exciting opportunity to talk about one other aspect of how we deal with things that are going on in our country, in our world.
Host:So looking forward to this conversation.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Yeah, I am too.
Paula Lehman Ewing:I have listened to some of the other guests on this topic, so hoping to add some something new.
Host:I think you will.
Host:But before we get started, let me ask you my favorite question for my guests.
Host:What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?
Paula Lehman Ewing:Well, I mean, I grew up with a Jewish mother, so I'm chock full of unsolicited advice, but I would say is to remain teachable.
Paula Lehman Ewing:My grandmother, Audrey, she passed away last year and she was 96.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And every summer she would go to college to a seniors program to learn.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And I thought that in a day and age where we have all the answers at our fingertips, perhaps we have gotten a little cocky in terms of what we think we know.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And I have found to have much more profound conversations with people of all sorts of backgrounds by asking questions and remaining curious and remaining teachable, remembering that maybe I don't have the answers to everything.
Host:I love that you kind of mentioned your grandmother.
Host:Are there other people in your life who served as an inspiration for you or even even a mentor on your journey?
Paula Lehman Ewing:Yeah, you know, especially with my book Reimagining the Revolution.
Paula Lehman Ewing:A huge mentor and inspiration for me is Ken Oliver.
Paula Lehman Ewing:He's mentioned in the book several times.
Paula Lehman Ewing:I worked with him in a grassroots organization called all of Us Are None.
Paula Lehman Ewing:He still does work in Fair chance employment and he still does work to sort of help with justice causes.
Paula Lehman Ewing:But he was incarcerated for almost 30 years.
Paula Lehman Ewing:He spent eight of it in solitary confinement.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And he never gave up.
Paula Lehman Ewing:He educated himself.
Paula Lehman Ewing:He's one of the smartest people I've ever met.
Paula Lehman Ewing:He's educated me.
Paula Lehman Ewing:He's always been really tolerant of my, you know, naivete he's always pointing me to certain writers, but, you know, he's the reason why, you know, Frantz Fanon is in the book and not just kind of the more modern thought leaders.
Host:I love that.
Host:So give us a brief overview of your book and tell us what inspired you to write it.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Sure.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So the book is about organizations and individuals strategizing to exact change in radical new ways.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So people that have looked at the protests on the street and say, this hasn't got like, you know, this has looked pretty much the same for 60 years, and it hasn't gotten us to where we need to be.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Let's get off the street, let's strategize and come up with something new.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And so the book is about my interactions with people in the organizations, about their ideas.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And, you know, I think it came from a couple places.
Paula Lehman Ewing:I was a criminal justice reporter, and it's not unheard of for someone who looks at the system of mass incarceration in the face to have a difficult time remaining objective about it.
Paula Lehman Ewing:You know, Chris Geidner was BuzzFeed News editor.
Paula Lehman Ewing:I was the legal editor for BuzzFeed News, and he left to pursue a nonprofit working on reform measures in criminal justice.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Scott Budnick did the Hangover movies.
Paula Lehman Ewing:You know, he started volunteering in prison, left the movie business for a couple years, and then the next time we saw him, he did Just Mercy, which is not funny as not like the Hangover movies.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And that's what happened to me.
Paula Lehman Ewing:I was a criminal justice reporter, and I.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And I decided to get more involved.
Paula Lehman Ewing: I was sitting at a protest in: Paula Lehman Ewing:People had been protesting a few years before and then a few years before that, and.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And Ken was like, this isn't going to do it.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And I thought that that was really.
Paula Lehman Ewing:I was like, well, what if there's something else out there?
Paula Lehman Ewing:And so that's again, where the teachable stuff came in.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And I decided to look for people who were being.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Who are trying to get change exacted in a new way.
Host:One thing you.
Host:One term you mentioned in your book I don't think people think a lot about is the industrial prison complex.
Host:Can you define that for people who may not be familiar with that concept?
Paula Lehman Ewing:Sure.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So the prison industrial complex is a large network of surveillance and economic systems that interweave to control certain elements of society.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So if you have a surplus population or workforce, they will.
Paula Lehman Ewing:The prison industrial compacts will use things like electronic Monitoring to make sure that anyone who has already done their time is still under surveillance after they leave, thus extending the power of the prison and control of the prison of that person.
Paula Lehman Ewing:It also takes the form of prison labor.
Paula Lehman Ewing:One of the things that we're looking at right now is incarcerated firefighters who are in Los Angeles trying to fight those fires.
Paula Lehman Ewing:They're able to do that because the state pays them a dollar versus their counterparts in the firefighting field who make well above that.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And so that's sort of how the prison industrial complex works.
Paula Lehman Ewing:It then makes the state kind of dependent on those firefighters, thereby creating a reason to keep people in prison and to continue expand the.
Paula Lehman Ewing:The budget and control of prison departments, which are largely unregulated and tend to just kind of operate under their own set of guidance.
Host:Wow.
Host:I grew up in Louisiana, so one of our worst prison abuse systems was Angola.
Host:And you had people working in the fields in Louisiana from the prison complex, doing something you just described for basically pennies on the dollar.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Yeah, Angola.
Paula Lehman Ewing:I write about Angola in the book because, I mean, when you.
Paula Lehman Ewing:When people talk about slavery not being a thing, and then you look at Angola prisoners harvesting the same fields and plant that used to be plantations as people who were kind of captured under Fugitive Slave act or captured kind of the convict leasing laws that came out, like you could be.
Paula Lehman Ewing:After slavery was abolished, you could be convicted for vagrancy, and then they could put you back to work.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So Angola, I think, is one of the starkest contracts, one of the starkest reminders that.
Paula Lehman Ewing:That it's still a problem.
Host:Yeah, most definitely.
Host:So you write about some important people in your work, and one of them I want to kind of talk about is Evan Gil Kilgore.
Host:Tell us a little bit about his story and why is it so prominent in your book?
Paula Lehman Ewing:Everyone loves Ivan.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So when I started writing the book, I checked in with Glenn Martin, who is formerly incarcerated, and he was.
Paula Lehman Ewing:He founded Just Leadership, and he's been involved in a number of things.
Paula Lehman Ewing:He has a great saying that the people who are closest to the solution are far this from the resources needed to exact that solution, closest to the problem are farthest from the sol.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Are farthest from the solution.
Paula Lehman Ewing:That's what I'm trying to say.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And he said, if you're going to write a book about oppression, the people who you should highlight should be at the closest to the oppressor.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And I know a guy.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And so I was introduced to Ivan.
Paula Lehman Ewing:I had heard of him.
Paula Lehman Ewing:The organization I worked for wrote an amicus Brief for Ivan, because he had.
Paula Lehman Ewing:The prison was trying to transfer him.
Paula Lehman Ewing:He had recorded COVID protocols being broken inside prison.
Paula Lehman Ewing:This was, like, right before they became epicenters for Covid outbreaks.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And the prison department didn't like the PR that.
Paula Lehman Ewing:That got.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And so they were doing things to try to get Ivan in physical danger.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So I had heard of him.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Glenn told me about his organization, United black family Scholarship foundation.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And I found it really interesting and that it was, I think, ideas coming out of prison, they are able to.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And I kind of talk about this in the chapter with Hashima Denham, who's also incarcerated.
Paula Lehman Ewing:They have this sort of view of society that's frozen.
Paula Lehman Ewing:We're all out here putting out the next media craze, whatever is the crisis of the week.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And they sort of have this idea of a society that they're able to visualize and then use their experience to come up with something different.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And because everything's been stripped away with them, they can start from the.
Paula Lehman Ewing:They can start from nothing.
Paula Lehman Ewing:They can start from zero.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Which I think is kind of an underlying theme of the book, the idea that abolition means come up with something that hasn't been thought of before, Come up with something that uses different vocabulary, that uses different tools, that uses different resources.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And so that's where Ivan's idea came from.
Paula Lehman Ewing:He was.
Paula Lehman Ewing:He couldn't get work after he was released from prison in Oklahoma.
Paula Lehman Ewing:He was forced back into the underground economy.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And, you know, he knew to.
Paula Lehman Ewing:He knew one way to make the money that he needed, and.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And that led him to, you know, the same sort of outcome as many people who fall into that trap and.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And ended back incarcerated.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So he said, okay, well, then what could it.
Paula Lehman Ewing:What could have been done differently for me?
Paula Lehman Ewing:Because.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And he.
Paula Lehman Ewing:He decided that it was.
Paula Lehman Ewing:You know, he would have been more invested in his community if people had made him feel like he was a part of the community.
Paula Lehman Ewing:You know, Ivan came out and he worked on the revitalization, which ended up being the gentrification of downtown Oakland.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And then they priced the units so they couldn't live there.
Paula Lehman Ewing:But maybe if he lived there, he would have been, you know, more cognizant of his neighbors.
Paula Lehman Ewing:He would have been more invested in seeing it succeed.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And so he is developing an organization that does that, that trains community members so that they have a way of being economically independent, and then they revitalize their own neighborhoods where they're going to live, so that everyone has a stake in that community.
Host:I know in the church, we love change.
Host:I'm sure most organizations do.
Host:But because we are so resistant to change, how do we tackle something as big as the prison industrial complex?
Host:Because let's face it, in order for it to succeed, people are making money off of it.
Host:So how do you begin to reform a system that has no desire to reform?
Paula Lehman Ewing:Well, so I think you take reform off the table.
Paula Lehman Ewing:I don't think that reform is, I mean, prison started as a reform, right?
Paula Lehman Ewing:It started as a reform to capital punishment and then convict leasing was a reform to slavery, and then Jim Crow was a reform to, you know, like the Confederacy.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And so you, you have these things that are reforms that have allowed the prison industrial complex to evolve rather than dissolve.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And so I think you need to start from scratch now.
Paula Lehman Ewing:I don't think that it's safe for anyone to say, okay, just let everyone out of prison tomorrow.
Paula Lehman Ewing:That's not safe for communities, that's not safe for the people in prison who have not been given any road to, to, to release.
Paula Lehman Ewing:But you have to start thinking about what justice will look like without those sort of norms.
Paula Lehman Ewing:You know, if you're, you're talking about people in church and, and they talk about change, they also talk about forgiveness, they also talk about, you know, this idea that the Internet, this idea of like, justice.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And I don't think that people are finding justice in incarceration anymore.
Paula Lehman Ewing:There seems to be, you know, with DNA evidence and wrongful convictions and the things they were learning about the human mind not being fully developed until they're 25.
Paula Lehman Ewing:You know, it seems to be, it seems to be kind of a, a catch all for society's ills.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And it doesn't seem to be fixing anything.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So I think people are, I think the first step is to think beyond how can we make prison better and sort of think about how can we serve justice without it.
Host:I remember when I was working on my research, I ran across the idea of restorative justice and how it was being applied.
Host:I believe it was in Australia or New Zealand.
Host:It was in New Zealand actually.
Host:And I remember one of the drawbacks for that was the judges didn't want to do it because it took too much time and too much effort.
Host:So it kind of fell apart because, like, that's just too hard.
Host:Let's just do the prison system because that's easier for us to kind of manage.
Host:So if we, if we did tear this down, like you talk about, do you have some thoughts of what that new system might look like?
Paula Lehman Ewing:So restorative justice is really interesting because saying like it's easier to just throw people in prison.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Restorative justice is actually a more satisfying experience for victims of crime.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And that, that's who we're trying to seek justice for.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Right.
Paula Lehman Ewing:We're not just trying to like punish people because we think they're bad.
Paula Lehman Ewing:We're trying like people are complicated.
Paula Lehman Ewing:I've made mistakes, everyone's made mistakes.
Paula Lehman Ewing:That's what makes us people.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And so, so restorative justice actually geared toward the victim who finds more satisfaction than they do in traditional court.
Paula Lehman Ewing:You know, I think that I like the ideas of putting, I think there's some good, good out there.
Paula Lehman Ewing:I think that it needs to, that it needs to be handled on a lot of levels.
Paula Lehman Ewing:It needs to be handled, you know, with a school to prison pipeline.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So like as, as young as, as school age children, you know, we have kind of militarized security in prison that, I mean in school that sort of makes kids feel like they're criminals anyway.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So like why not if that's what society expects of them?
Paula Lehman Ewing:So it has sort of that element to it.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And then you have the element of okay, well if you have like the idea of amends, so if you have done a wrong, how are you going to right that wrong to that person?
Paula Lehman Ewing:So, you know, Hashima gives a great example of this in his chapter where, you know, if someone is, if someone is killed, the head of a family, right?
Paula Lehman Ewing:Let's say like, let's take worst case scenario that them going to prison and you garnishing their prison wages to help support that family is not helping that family.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So maybe, maybe justice in that situation looks like that person working, that person being isolated in a separate community until reparations are made to the family that's been harmed.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Maybe it looks like a restorative justice conversation where you can't be held accountable without an account of what you did.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So if a family comes in and tells you like this is who you took away, that's accountability, that's taking into account the entire situation.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And so I think something like that is a lot more effective for exacting justice and, and keeping communities whole.
Host:I like some of the things that the reformers you've mentioned in your book came up.
Host:But you want to share some of the things you discovered from your research of working with people who were incarcerated.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Yeah, well, so first there are two kind of categories of incarcerated people.
Paula Lehman Ewing:In my, in my book there are the activists, Eisen Kilgore, who you mentioned, Hashima Denim.
Paula Lehman Ewing:They're both incarcerated in California.
Paula Lehman Ewing:They've both come up with these amazing ideas.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Ivan's organization is the Rebuild.
Paula Lehman Ewing:The element that I focus on is the Rebuild program, which, like I said, trains community members to make livable wages and then restore their own communities and then have an investment in maintaining the integrity of those communities.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Hashima is the autonomous infrastructure mission and he basically has designed communities independent of the state.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So they have closed circuit economics, they grow their own food, they have their own security system, they have their own education system.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And they've actually put a lot of those into place.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And in Grand Rapids, Michigan, it's working quite well.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And then there are the incarcerated artists.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So each chapter is introduced by piece of art that was drawn by someone during their incarceration.
Paula Lehman Ewing:One of the artists is still incarcerated.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And I think like, one of the great things about it is that there's so much more forgiving than we are.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Like society has said, I want nothing to do with you.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Go live in a cage.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And they are all, whether they're artists that create these beautiful drawings or like amid a place with no beauty and no joy, or they're an activist who are reaching back to better a society that they might not even ever get to be part of again.
Paula Lehman Ewing:That was really powerful for me as an experience.
Host:So I just had a guest on my show and he wrote a book too, about the situation of.
Host:I think his book is about leveling the playing field.
Host:Was never level, was kind of his thought.
Host:And we focused on in that podcast, and this will probably go back to back with that because it's a really interesting conversation.
Host:We focused on the fact that education and social justice and housing are all kind of part of a bigger problem.
Host:And if you don't solve all three of those pieces, you end up creating a pipeline to the prison complex.
Host:So if you just fix education, but you don't fix the housing disparities, you're not going to have the income to be able to pour into education.
Host:As you look at justice, this part of it, this prison section of it, how does that influence and really kind of trap communities into a cycle of just repeating the same problems over and over again or just recycling more and more people for this industrial prison complex?
Paula Lehman Ewing:Right.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So they.
Paula Lehman Ewing:There's no.
Paula Lehman Ewing:I kind of touched on it earlier, like, there is no rehabilitation element in prison anymore.
Paula Lehman Ewing:In fact, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote an opinion that said the states have decided this isn't about rehabilitation anymore, it's simply about punishment.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And so when you do that and you take someone who is then released but still on electronic monitoring, or they can't get a job because of their felony conviction or they can't get live with their family because Section 8 housing doesn't allow for someone with a conviction history.
Paula Lehman Ewing:You don't let them vote because of felony disenfranchisement laws.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Those things emit signals that you're never going to, like, you're not going to be able to come back here.
Paula Lehman Ewing:You're not part of the society.
Paula Lehman Ewing:You, you made that mistake and we're going to judge you by your worst day.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And that's like, that's the end.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So if that's, if that's as, as best as it's going to get, like, what kind of motivation does that person have to, if you keep telling them you're never going to be anything more than a criminal, why would they try?
Host:Right.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And so I think that, you know, a lot of this has to do with, I think, I think it has to do with non binary thinking is like my, it's my one takeaway.
Paula Lehman Ewing:If, if you, if you read the book and you only take one thing away, it's to think beyond conservative and liberal, to think beyond good and bad, to think beyond, you know, like prison and then just letting everyone like, you know, anarchy.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So people don't, people aren't, people are complex.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And so society is complex.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So you can't take a system like a political system that is, that is binary and at least in this country and, and say, all right, well let's have politics fix society.
Paula Lehman Ewing:You don't need a political solution to societal problems.
Paula Lehman Ewing:You need a social solution.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So, so that, that's what I would, that I would take away.
Paula Lehman Ewing:I'm not sure if that answered your question.
Host:No, it did.
Host:It was good.
Host:You also mentioned in your book a grassroots organization called Critical Resistance.
Host:Tell us a little bit about what that is hoping to accomplish with the work it's doing.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Right.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So the, so Critical Resistance is one of the, I call it the OG grassroots organizations that are still out there.
Paula Lehman Ewing:It was founded by Angela Davis, Rose Baez, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, all people who have been fighting since the 60s.
Paula Lehman Ewing: ce that happened in the early: Paula Lehman Ewing:I think it was at that time, 500% increase.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And so, and this massive building that had gone out that had gone on in California to create, I think it's something like 34 prisons.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And they target specifically the prison industrial complex.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So, you know, Ivan kind of focuses on communities and stopping that revolving door.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Critical Resistance looks at shipping power away from the Prison industrial complex and putting it into communities.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So if you have, you know, taxpayers are paying for empty beds in California prisons right now because they've emptied a lot of those places.
Paula Lehman Ewing:But the prisons still want their money, and so they still want that budget.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And, and so, you know, when they talk about, well, I'm not going to pay for, like a criminal to get an education.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Well, you're just paying for him to sit there, like, minus, well, have him do something better himself so that when he's your neighbor, eventually, like 80% of people in prison are going to be released.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So, I mean, there's those sort of education programs, and so that's what critical resistance is working on.
Paula Lehman Ewing:I talk about their initiative to close 10 prisons in California.
Paula Lehman Ewing:They've.
Paula Lehman Ewing:They're halfway there, which is very admirable.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And with those funds kind of creating things that you mentioned, putting it into public education, putting it into health care, putting it into things that better communities and that don't break them apart.
Paula Lehman Ewing:I mean, one of the things that they promised during the building boom of prisons is that they would bring economics to these small towns.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And what they did is no business wants to go there because there's a prison in the background.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So, like, so the towns never got the.
Paula Lehman Ewing:The income.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And so that's what they're doing.
Paula Lehman Ewing:They're looking at the real needs of the communities and they're figuring out how the resources that are being poured into empty beds and essentially just human cages can be used to better communities.
Host:Tell us about Greenwood.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So Greenwood is my tricky chapter.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So Greenwood is a bank.
Paula Lehman Ewing:It is based out of Atlanta, Georgia, and it has a very unique cast of founders.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Ryan Glover is the kind of serial entrepreneur that spearheaded it.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And then the other two founders are Killer Mike, Mike Render, who is a part of Run the Jewels rap duo.
Paula Lehman Ewing:He also has an amazing solo career at this point.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And Andrew Young, Ambassador Andrew Young, who was a close confidant of Martin Luther King and he orchestrated the Birmingham march.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So I became interested because why wouldn't you?
Paula Lehman Ewing:It's like, it's.
Paula Lehman Ewing:I mean, it's like the start of a joke, right?
Paula Lehman Ewing:Like a civil rights activist, you know, an entrepreneur and a rapper walk into a bank.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Like what?
Host:Right.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So that starts off immediate.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Yeah, so.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So I looked at what they were doing, and essentially what they're doing is they're creating what they call compassionate capitalism.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And it is a bank that is for communities of color, specifically black and Latino.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And they invest, they build that power of capital in order to exact change in society.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Now, the Reason why it's difficult chapter is because true abolitionists, including Angela Davis, who is literally the chapter before, think that capitalism will always perpetuate racism, human exploitation, you name it.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Like capitalism has historically not worked out for people of color.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And I totally understand that argument.
Paula Lehman Ewing:I think the reason why I still included them in the book is twofold.
Paula Lehman Ewing:One, you know, Bobby Seale, who is one of the co founders of the Black Panther Party, he said if you're going to get, if you're going to fight systems in this country that I'm paraphrasing obviously with, you know, if you're going to get economic and political gains in this country, you're going to need capital.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And that's coming from, you know, a very radicalized group that Angela Davis was closely tied to.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And I also think that their form of capitalism, you know, just, I don't think it's like it's, it's not a capitalism I've ever seen.
Paula Lehman Ewing:I've never seen a capitalism that like cares about people.
Paula Lehman Ewing:You know, they, they get, every, every month they give out a grant to a business, a startup.
Paula Lehman Ewing:They do financial literacy classes, they create, they've partnered with various organizations that you know, take, you can round up when you do a deposit and then that when that roundup will go towards giving meals to the community.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And so they're doing it in a way that like yes, it's a bank, yes it's churning out capital, but to me it doesn't look like capitalism.
Host:I can understand why that would give you some interesting challenges.
Host:Your book has been, is well researched and I'm always curious when you do a book with so much research, what were some surprising revelations that came out of your research?
Paula Lehman Ewing:It's a good question.
Paula Lehman Ewing:You know, I think, and it seems so obvious now but that we have locked up so many people that there are such smart and talented people in prison.
Paula Lehman Ewing:You know, I sort of like yes, I think my, my training as a recovering journalist sort of like I read a lot of books and I, and I came across a bunch of data and I wrote it all down and, but what I found was, you know, the teachings of like George Jackson was what came out of prison and it's become this sort of makeshift educational system for, for people who become resilient and become self taught and become open minded.
Paula Lehman Ewing:You know, Glenn Martin, who I mentioned before is a great quote in the book where he says like, I don't think black and brown people like asked to go to prison to become resilient, but that's what's happened.
Paula Lehman Ewing: know, some of us only had in: Paula Lehman Ewing:They unfortunately have a big moment of pause to come up with these, with these really incredible ideas.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And so I have found some of the teachings coming out of prison and the writings and the artwork to be profound and quite humbling because they're very talented.
Host:So for people listening to our conversation going, yeah, I really want to, I think something needs to happen.
Host:What is your book's call to action for the normal everyday citizen who goes, yeah, something's wrong, we need to do something about it.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So two things.
Paula Lehman Ewing:One I mentioned before is non binary thinking.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So challenge yourself when you hear there are only two options to think of a third.
Paula Lehman Ewing:I, and some people say like, oh well, that you're talking about like a third party candidate.
Paula Lehman Ewing:I am not talking about a third party candidate.
Paula Lehman Ewing:I'm talking about refusing to look for societal, for solutions to societal problems in a political.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Stop looking for political solutions.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Look to social movements.
Paula Lehman Ewing:You can, if one of the groups in the book speak to you, seek them out.
Paula Lehman Ewing:They're always looking for volunteers or come up with, you know, with.
Paula Lehman Ewing:There are people who have been trudging this path for a really long time.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Kind of check in with them, remain teachable and just sort of start having conversations about how we can, what does justice really look like?
Paula Lehman Ewing:Come up with your own definitions of what justice look like.
Paula Lehman Ewing:To me.
Paula Lehman Ewing:It doesn't look like prison anymore to me.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Safety doesn't look like calling the cops anymore.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So I, you know, come up with those definitions.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Find people who, who are already kind of trudging that path and then use whatever tools you have to help them trudge.
Paula Lehman Ewing:My tool is amplification and writing.
Paula Lehman Ewing:I can, I can tell a story.
Paula Lehman Ewing:I've been, I decided I want to be a writer in fourth grade.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So I, you know, my, my fourth grade teacher told my parents, like, I'm so sorry, she's not going to be a consultant.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Like she wants to be a writer.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And so, so like that's what I'm, that's, that's what I can do.
Paula Lehman Ewing:I can tell stories, I can amplify people's voices.
Paula Lehman Ewing:You know, Ivan has four books of his own, but you heard about him in mine because I have that kind of access, so I'm going to use that access to elevate his story.
Paula Lehman Ewing:People with large social media platforms can do the same thing.
Paula Lehman Ewing:People with, you know, multimedia experience, they can tell stories in a visual way.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Maybe you have excess funds that you can use to help these organizations kind of get that capital that they need to fight economic and political battles.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And so that's what I would suggest.
Host:So what do you see?
Host:The future of the prison abolition movement?
Paula Lehman Ewing:Oh, God.
Paula Lehman Ewing:I mean, what I'm hoping is that the prison abolition movement has been a story of playing catch up.
Paula Lehman Ewing:You know, the system has evolved.
Paula Lehman Ewing:It looks different, it's maybe not as overtly racist, but it still has grave racial undertones.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And I think that's becoming.
Paula Lehman Ewing:The idea that it's not working is becoming more mainstream.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So I hope that the next iteration of that is that the movement doesn't have to play catch up anymore, that at some point it'll develop a strategy that takes into account all the evolutions of the past and prevents them in the future.
Paula Lehman Ewing:To me, that looks like, not, to me, that looks like no carve outs.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Right?
Paula Lehman Ewing:I mean, what's allowing California to employ firefighters for a dollar an hour out of prison is.
Paula Lehman Ewing:This is the loophole in the 13th Amendment, the exemption that allows them to be treated as slaves because they committed a crime.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So today that looks like when you call for people to be released, you don't say nonviolent versus violent.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Right.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Like we're looking.
Paula Lehman Ewing:First of all, those definitions, I think are very misunderstood.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And second, that sort of carve out while, like, I think appeases voters to an extent.
Paula Lehman Ewing:If you really research it and explain it and look at it, that kind of carve out will only allow again another iteration.
Paula Lehman Ewing:It'll make harder to abolish it if you just keep putting.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Well, except for these guys.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Except for these guys.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Except for these guys.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So, so that would, that's what I'm hoping, is that they find a way forward that takes into account evolutions of the past and that they can get ahead of it.
Host:So I love to ask my guest this question.
Host:What do you want your legacy to be?
Paula Lehman Ewing:Oh, God, I don't know.
Paula Lehman Ewing:I wanted to be.
Paula Lehman Ewing:I want to be a storyteller that, that caused people to think differently.
Paula Lehman Ewing:I don't know.
Paula Lehman Ewing:I, I, you know, one of my favorite, my favorite writer, to be honest, is, is Hunter S.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Thompson.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And the way that he just basically like, threw up on, on a page and then.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And it like.
Paula Lehman Ewing:But it made your mind, like, think like yeah, you're right.
Paula Lehman Ewing:The people at this.
Paula Lehman Ewing:The people in Las Vegas, they are acting like animals.
Paula Lehman Ewing:You're right.
Paula Lehman Ewing:You know, I think that.
Paula Lehman Ewing:I think that that that's what I want to do.
Paula Lehman Ewing:I want to take.
Paula Lehman Ewing:I want to tell stories that take people into places where they might not have otherwise have access and to open, you know, open their eyes to new possibilities and new ways of thinking.
Host:So what upcoming projects are you working on?
Paula Lehman Ewing:So I am writing a second book.
Paula Lehman Ewing:It is very early stages, so.
Paula Lehman Ewing:But I am going to be, you know, Reimagining the Revolution started as a digital journey.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So I'm doing a number of interviews and profiles that are online.
Paula Lehman Ewing:If you go to reimaginingtherevolution.com there's a blog that's been started, and the big project is Scotty's Vision.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So the artist that is still incarcerated is Scott Smith, and he's wildly talented.
Paula Lehman Ewing:This is his over there.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Oh, cool.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Yeah.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And this portfolio is, like, all the stuff that I refuse to give away.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So.
Paula Lehman Ewing:But I have opened a store for Scott.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And so, you know, one of the things is, you know, I want people to.
Paula Lehman Ewing:You know, as a journalist, I felt weird about payment in a monetary form.
Paula Lehman Ewing:It was more about, like, amplification.
Paula Lehman Ewing:But as an incarcerated artist, Scotty, that doesn't help him.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So what I've done with his permission is I've opened a store of his artwork.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And you can get prints, you can get bookmarks, you can get originals, you can get commission pieces.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And all of the proceeds fund Scotty and his so he can get tools to create more art.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And so if you go to reimaginingtherevolution.com and you visit Scotty's Vision, you'll see all of Scotty's amazing artwork.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Not all of it, but a good swath of it, and you can purchase a piece for yourself.
Host:So where can people find your book Reimagining a Revolution and connect with you on social media?
Paula Lehman Ewing:Reimagining the Revolution is available in most stores, you know, Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes and Noble.
Paula Lehman Ewing:It's published by North Atlantic Books.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Excuse me.
Paula Lehman Ewing:It's published by North Atlantic Books and distributed by Penguin Random House.
Paula Lehman Ewing:So it's available in most places.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Social media.
Paula Lehman Ewing:You can find me on Instagram and Instagram, Facebook and YouTube at Reimagining the Revolution.
Paula Lehman Ewing:And I just joined Blue sky, where it's at RTR on Blue and all that information.
Paula Lehman Ewing:If it's too much, just go to reimaginingtherevolution.com and you'll get links to everything.
Host:Well, Paula, thank you so much for tackling this very difficult issue and talking about topics that we don't often think about.
Host:But it's really important for us to look at as we try to solve some of the internal problems in our country that we just don't often think about and make.
Host:And also making the stories more human.
Host:So we can see that there's not just situations, but they're actually people impacted by some of the policies that we make.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Yeah.
Paula Lehman Ewing:I think that when you tell the story of another person, it's easy to relate to because I think people forget we have a lot more in common than we have in uncommon.
Host:Well, thank you so much, Paula.
Host:Blessings on your work.
Paula Lehman Ewing:All right.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Thank you so much, Keith.
Paula Lehman Ewing:Thanks for having me.
