My name is Chalay. I created this oral history project and this website over the course of an ongoing master’s program in oral history. It has been my hope to make something that might be of use to people experiencing the violences of incarceration, as well as to prison abolitionists.
Thank you to narrators Tay Owens, Crystal W, Minali Aggarwal, Caren Holmes, and Lawrence Jenkins. Thank you also to everyone else whose friendship and labor has profoundly informed and facilitated the project: Josh van Biema, Sam Leander, Heena Sharma, Tamara Santibañez, Eli Dunn, eae Benioff, as well as many others who have directly and indirectly shaped this work.
If this work has spoken to you in any way, I invite you to participate in support work by materially supporting the friends who made it possible and who continue to be affected by the prison-industrial complex. The project’s shortcomings are my own.
HOW I CAME TO THIS PROJECT AND TO ABOLITION
In the introduction to her recent book Becoming Abolitionists, Derecka Purnell writes, “When people come across police abolition for the first time, they tend to dismiss abolitionists for not caring about neighborhood safety or the victims of violence. They tend to forget that often we are those victims, those survivors of violence, too.” Her words are true to my experience: many abolitionists I know are survivors of gender-based violence who were radicalized by their experiences of seeking accountability through institutional means and coming up with nothing. This was true of my un-prosecutable experience of abuse; it was true of my un-prosecutable experience of sexual misconduct.
Indeed, as with many survivors, it never even occurred to me to engage police or the prison system because, even long before I had heard of abolition, I knew that what I wanted—the transformation of my harmdoers and the prevention of further harm—could not be achieved by those means. The non-carceral accountability I sought, however, fell far short of what I needed, because the carceral system holds such a profound monopoly on the meaning of justice. My friends and I had not been taught how to address harm ourselves, with love and self-determination.
When I learned about the abolitionist framework of transformative justice, which seeks to “address the current incident of violence … [while helping] to transform the conditions that allowed for it to happen,” it spoke to me directly. I saw a framework that would allow survivors’ needs to be fulfilled—not every time, not 100%, but to a far greater extent than the criminal legal system allows. As I kept reading hungrily about transformative justice, I grew persuaded by abolitionist analysis and was thereby mobilized into abolition as a whole. Friends, including other survivors, guided me to support work as a form of abolitionist practice deeply rooted in relationships and collectivity.
I had been doing support work for about a year, maybe a year and a half, when I started this oral history project. Like support work, oral history at its best is rooted in deep relationship, slow work, and collective desires/needs/world-making. Though the promises of oral history cannot be fulfilled within the institutions I have studied in, I hope this project productively mobilizes it to our ends.
Again, if this website has spoken to you in any way, I invite you to look at the resources page for points of entry into support work and abolition as a whole.
