Transcript: Dr. BRETT STORY on How We Belong to Each Other /303
Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today I'm speaking with Brett Story.
Brett Story Just because this is the world, as it appears to us, as we've landed in it, doesn't mean that it's unchangeable. And in fact, thinking about how we've produced the spaces that we inhabit is an important reminder that we can make them differently, we can produce them differently, we can live in a different, and image, and make a different kind of spatial habitat for ourselves and for the species that we live with.
Ayana Young Brett Story is an award-winning nonfiction filmmaker based in Toronto whose films have screened at festivals and theatres internationally. She is the director of the award winning feature documentaries The Hottest August (2019) and The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016), both of which were also broadcast on PBS’s Independent Lens. Brett holds a Ph.D. in geography from the University of Toronto and is currently an assistant professor in the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University. She is the author of the book, Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America, and her writing and criticism have been published widely. Brett was a 2016 Sundance Institute Art of Nonfiction Fellow and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow in film and video.
Well, Brett, thank you so much for joining us across this continent, this morning, or my morning, at least, it's really lovely to be connecting.
Brett Story Thank you so much. I'm really glad to be here.
Ayana Young So I want to just start off grounding listeners in the theories that underscore much of your work. So I'm wondering if you can offer an explanation of what critical geography is, and explain why it's a necessary lens in a time where space and our understanding of it are rapidly changing because of climate change and globalization.
Brett Story Sure, yeah. I mean, geography is a funny thing. And when you say the word geography, I think a lot of people think maps, right, they think you're a person who draws maps, or looks at maps and that's certainly part of it, but for me, geography and particularly critical geography is really the social understanding of space. It's a way of thinking about how human beings on the planet produce space, and are in turn shaped by the spaces that we produce. So you know, I'm sitting in an office in a leafy neighborhood in Toronto, the city is a produced space, it's produced by human activity, ideas, historical circumstances, this office is produced, I've decorated it in a particular way, I'm sitting in it, because of, you know, the things that have landed me here are particular to my history. So it's a produced space, and I make meaning out of it and it shapes the kinds of work that I can do.
For me, critical geography, which I came to sort of late. I mean, I didn't study geography in school until I was a graduate student, but critical geography is really also a reminder that we have an impact on the world, which sounds both obvious, but also is, is really easy to forget. I mean, we, you know, the very fact that we're sort of born into a particular time and place, the world as it appears to us can feel almost like a given like, you know, it can be no other way. And it's really useful to remind ourselves that no, just because this is the world, as it appears to us, as we've landed in, it doesn't mean that it's unchangeable. And in fact, thinking about how we've produced the spaces that we inhabit is an important reminder that we can make them differently, we can produce them differently, we can live in a different and imagine and make a different kind of spacial habitat for ourselves and for the species that we live with and I think that that's really important for any kind of socially oriented, justice oriented activity or project, but certainly, and most, you know, obviously, I think it's essential to thinking about the climate crisis, because the climate crisis is itself produced by human beings and can be transformed by human beings and our activities.
Ayana Young Yeah, thank you for defining some of those nuances for us. And I wanted to bring into the conversation your book Prison Land, and you write “The United States operates the largest archipelago of jails and penitentiaries in the world, and yet it can be hard to find the prison in today's landscape. Prisons are after all, by design and definition of spaces of disappearance, they disappear or attempt to disappear the people inside them, and they are themselves increasingly disappeared from the dense social spaces where many of us live and move around. Prisons today are built far away from urban areas, often invisible from major thoroughfares.” I really am moved by the way you write, and I'm wondering, how does this disappearing of landscapes weaponized land and our relationship to it?
Brett Story Hmm. Yeah, I mean, I think it's I think the prison system is a great example of how thinking spatially about the world is also a way of thinking politically about it. So among other things, we can think about prisons as a space. I mean, that's why, you know, I describe it as a space and I describe it as a space of disappearance, but taking it seriously as a space, right, it's a building. You know, as a mechanism of punishment, the very idea of the prison or the penitentiary was to take punishment, state punishment on the so called criminal or the criminalized person, and take it out of the public sphere and transform it and move it to a new space, a space that would be hidden behind closed doors, and high walls.
The penitentiary in American life is only 200 years old. Before penitentiaries, we didn't have incarceration as our main mechanism of criminal justice. We had, you know, corporal punishment, public floggings things that happened in public space, and with the advent of the penitentiary, there was what we can describe as a spatial fix for the problem, the so called problem of crime and criminality. So the idea was that you build this edifice, this building, and within it, a series of locked cellular structures, and punishment itself would be one's removal from their life, one's removal from their home, their family, their neighborhood, and their relocation to this closed cell within the penitentiary space. And being reminded of the geography of the prison, I think is really useful in terms of thinking about and rethinking the function of not just punishment, but also ideas of rehabilitation.
So in the very early days of the American penitentiary, the notion was a rehabilitative one, it was actually Quakers and enlightenment humanists, who championed the idea of the penitentiary form, because in their minds, these public corporal punishments weren't actually having the desired effect, the suppose a desired effect, which was to, you know, rehabilitate people or convinced them to no longer do these, these deeds that were weren't considered criminal. And the hope or assumption was that there was that the isolation of the prison chamber would offer the criminalized person, the requisite peace and quiet, strangely enough to commune with themselves and with God and find the kind of requisite transportation transformation necessary to go back out into society. Now, this is a complicated history, that's one version of the narrative. And it's the sort of reformed version of the narrative, but that was certainly a part of it, right? The idea that actually, you couldn't beat the criminal out of a person, instead, you needed to give them sort of just a time out and a time away in order to you know, reflect.
Now, prisons over the past 200 years have ceased relate to have any kind of rehabilitative function, even if one imagined that they used to do in the first place. And I think it's important to think about geography at a number of different scales. So one of the interesting things about penitentiaries as a space 200 years ago, is that even though punishment was taken out of the public sphere, and, and the the punished person was relocated to these cells behind closed doors and high walls, the prisons themselves were located in urban areas, they they tended to serve a kind of dual function. So on the one hand, punishment itself was rendered less visible. It didn't happen in the public in the public sphere anymore, but people who resided in the city would constantly come up against the prison. So these prisons, their outside architecture would be very gothis in presentation, there would often be gargoyles built on them, you were meant to see the prison, there was a function of visibility, that was also really important to how the prison function, you were supposed to see the prison and be reminded of what kind of consequence might be, what might be consequent to one's actions if those actions were deemed illegal or criminalized. And over the past 30, 40, 50 years, really, with the advent of this era that we describe as mass incarceration, when prison rates have dramatically increased, not only in the United States, but elsewhere, we've seen a another interesting geographic shift, which is that prisons are no longer really built in dense urban areas, and then they're instead built in the industrial areas, rural areas, isolated areas. And I think that that's what I mean, in this passage about disappearance, there's a way in which prisons themselves were meant to disappear, state punishment, so you no longer saw it. And we're confronted with it instead happened behind these, these, these walls and these cellular structures, but prisons themselves are actually disappeared, in that they're very geographically isolated. And it's important to ask questions about why that is. It's not it's not an accident. It's historical. And I think that there's a few different ways of thinking about it. I mean, one way is just to think about the relationship between mass incarceration and deindustrialization, what are the towns and the communities that are becoming hosts to these penal institutions, but also, what kinds of invisibility are actually necessary for the project of mass incarceration to be so accepted in a society? Right? I mean, this is this is largely a wild experiment. This is what else I say, in this passage, you know, no other country in the history of the world has locked up so many human beings, and for such long periods of time. And it just seems to me that there is a relationship between that fact that we do that to human beings without any kind of real, you know, advantage in terms of safety or decreases in in violence as a society, and the fact that those places of punishment are increasingly invisible, right? So we're not confronting every day, the visible fact of the incarceration of so many human beings. And in fact that that project that I described is a project of state violence is hidden in lots and lots of different ways. And it's certainly just hidden geographically in that you know, those of us who are not incarcerated are not seeing spaces of incarceration in our daily lives. And that's, that's a political problem in terms of our, our ability to, to be faced and confronted with the horrors that might be happening and that we know are happening inside.
Ayana Young Yeah, it's really fascinating in a disturbing way to consider what our fantasy of prisons are and what they're actually doing and I think there has been so much cultural conditioning around this false security that prisons offer society. And it just seems like so much of the supposed security we have, at least in the United States is based on a false stability, predicated on control of crime and also of nature and the climate. So I am wondering, what is this need for control suggest about society? And how might your films The Hottest August and The Prison in Twelve Landscapes engage with anxieties around the lack of control regular people have over these issues?
Brett Story I think that's a great question, because I think we can think about the idea of anxiety on a number of different levels. Right? I think we can and we should think about who's anxious and about what, and I think you know, we can differentiate between the anxieties of those who are profiting from a social order that's predicated on so much exploitation and inequality and oppression. And then the anxieties of ordinary everyday people that are sort of satisfied, more eased, under sort of false up pretenses and I think I think your use of the word word fantasy is a really important one, because I do think that there are lots of very good reasons to feel anxious every day.
I mean, we're doing this interview on on May 25th, you know, I've spent the morning reading about gun violence against schoolchildren in Texas, I have a three-year-old, it's absolutely devastating to wake up in the morning and think about the kinds of violence that are every day inflicted on our friends and our neighbors needlessly, right? And so the question is, what do we do with our anxiety? And what are the ways in which the anxieties of those that might profit from a given social order that itself contains so much instability? What are the mechanisms by which those anxieties get transformed into what some geographers for example, like David Harvey and Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls, social or spatial fix.
So prisons are an excellent example of, in Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s words of a spatial fix, and they're a fix for a number of different kinds of crises. They're the crises that are really endemic to neoliberal capitalism, a capitalism that requires and enshrines racialized inequality at a variety of scales, the instability and crises of many, many people living, you know, paycheck to paycheck, who are faced with the possibilities of unclean and contaminated water to drink, the criminalization for not paying their water bills, this is something that I explore and in and one of the chapters in the book when I'm looking at the role of police and, and prisons in this in the state of Michigan and the city of Detroit, where the summer I was doing fieldwork there, the city was in the grips of a housing crises, and there was huge watershed offs and individual families were being criminalized for supposedly, you know, stealing water because they were trying to bathe their kids and have water to drink. So there are all sorts of instability and crises already inscribed in the very rules of capitalistic economics and economics that requires some people to make endless amounts of profit from the resources of the Earth and as quickly as possible, not in a sustainable way, but in an unsustainable way. And then also requires the exploitation of human beings.
So, one way in which we can theorize and think about the role of the criminal legal system is as a way of producing a class of people a class of people that we come to know as criminalized people, people who come out of the prison system with criminal records, this becomes a kind of class of people that like many other classes of people, like you know, so-called undocumented migrants, other people that are denigrated and dehumanized in the popular imagination, whose whose whose status is on the low lowest rungs of the social order is considered somehow natural, right? Somehow inevitable, somehow their fault, rather than actually produced by the inequities of the capitalist system.
So, I mean we can think about the prison system and we should think about the prison system, not so much as a product of a criminal justice system, or product of crime and criminality, but actually as a manifestation of the anxieties of a capitalist state and a capitalist class, who need and require to continue, you know, activities of exploitation that produce inequality and produce the instabilities that are intendant to inequality, and I think inequality is unstable because human beings want and know justice in their hearts. They know and want that it's not right to commodify water to contaminate water, to criminalize people for trying to feed their families, to treat some people as less than human and some people as more than human. And I think that the natural instinct of most people in the face of injustice in the face of gross amounts of inequality is to stand up for themselves. I mean, think that's why we we live in a world of ongoing social movements as well and the function of a one function of the criminal legal system and the prison industrial complex is, in fact to, to legitimize state violence and control, social control on a particular class of people.
You know, I could go on about this, but I think that the last thing I should say is just that there's a way in which living in the era of the climate crises, is like living and breathing anxiety every day. I don't know if this is how you feel, but it's certainly how I feel, right? And I'm raising a daughter in this world and imagining like, how do we think about how do we how do we imagine living in this world when the future itself feels unstable? Even unlikely, sometimes. How does the anxiety of that of, you know, reconciling ourselves to that, what does it produce? And I think we can choose to let it lead us in a few different directions. Certainly, the anxieties of living in such a world can produce the desire to blame some people and not others. I think that's why some narratives and vocabularies that have us you know, demonizing some people are saying, you know, it's this group of people that are at fault, or it's this group of people that are that are taking all the resources, that's why they can have such traction in anxious times. But I think and hope that we can also translate our anxieties into a commitment to live in different ways and to band together to find our power from different sources. And I think that that's why in anxious times you also see a resurgence in in all kinds of social movements and social coalition's, including coalition's between prisoner rights advocates and climate climate crisis advocates and activists.
Ayana Young There's so much there in your response. And there's this thought that's coming up for me around just in the individualized realities of a neoliberal world, I'm wondering how current conversations around crime and climate change places emphasis on controlling the individual's actions. And yeah, how much pressure can we really put on the individual?
Brett Story That's a that's a great question. There's a there's an anthropologist who I like Alan Feldman, who described arrest, you know, like police arrest, once as the art of individualizing disorder. And I've often thought about that, not just in the realm of, again, the criminal legal system, but in all walks of life. So a few years ago, I made this film The Hottest August which, you know, the the logline of the film is a film about climate change, just a film about climate change, disguised as a portrait of collective anxiety. And I set out to just explore the city of New York over the course of one month, not to offer a kind of take on the quest does climate change exist? Or does it not change? Is it terrible? Or is it not so terrible? Because I feel like those questions have already been answered, but rather to explore this question, you're asking of how we live and metabolize our own anxieties, and how those anxieties interact with the narratives that are dominant in our world, you know, that come to us through our media, or in our politicians and so on. And I set out to really, you know, ask a very honest question, which is, I feel like a fundamental question, one that I still ask every day, which is how, how is it that we can continue to sort of slow walk our way into our own extinction? Like, why does it seem like the climate crisis is failing to produce action on a mass level? And I think this, this problem of individualization is really at the heart of it.
So one of the things I did in this film was I just, I just engaged in a series of kind of spontaneous conversations with people, I didn't even bring up the climate crisis, I would, you know, tap people on the shoulder, and I'd say, “Hi, I'm making this film, it's made up of just conversations with ordinary people in public space. And I'm wondering how you're doing what you're thinking about how you're thinking about the future.” And a couple of things surprised me. One is that I think I expected people to express a lot of negativity and cynicism about the future, you know, to say, kind of explicitly, “Oh, God, I feel terrible things are really bad.” And instead what I encountered often was a kind of dual move where someone would say, “Oh, yeah, I'm having a really hard week, you know, I served an eviction notice and I need to find a new place to live, and I can't afford a new place to live”, or I'm dealing with this trouble, or that trouble with my employer, all sorts of ordinary, but very common, you know, struggles, especially for those living in an expensive city. But in the next breath, they would say, “But it's going to be fine. Next week is going to be fine, I'm going to get a little bit of luck, I'm going to make the right decision, I'm going to turn things around for myself.” And almost always, they sort of projected their own optimism about how things would go in totally individual terms, you know, I will make a better decision, a good thing will happen to me. I will be lucky in this way. And there was a kind of, for me, anyways, a feeling of real tragedy in that, because it rhymed and it resonated with this other narrative that I kept encountering. I mean, I was making this film in the summer of 2017, Trump was in office, there was a lot I mean, there still is, but there was certainly then a lot of racist immigrant scapegoating, talking about hordes of migrants at the border, this is also the summer of the racist white supremacist attack in Charlottesville. And on occasion, I would also get people talking about how, you know, certain people were stealing jobs, certain people were getting all the resources. And it seemed to me and it still does that, you know, when we're afraid, as there's every reason to be, there's lots of reasons to be afraid, but when we're afraid, and yet, at the same time, convinced by all the kind of dominant narratives, that the world is just composed of individuals, maybe acting, you know, within families, that those are the only units that matter, then all ones left with is that is the feeling that like that either things are totally hopeless, or that the only hope that might be possible for them is to decide how how they as an individual are going to, you know, get what they need, and everyone else be damned.
And I think that tragedy is especially clear in the era of the climate crises, because, I mean, if there's anything that tells us that there's no future in aloneness, it's the specter of planetary collapse, right? It is the very notion of ecosystem. It's the very notion of planetary interdependence. We live on a planet, we are dependent on the on the trees, the trees are dependent on the birds, birds are dependent on the insects like it all goes round. We know that and certainly, people are interdependent within each other, you know, on each other. In and there's just no individual way of getting out of this crisis. The crisis is too large.
In fact, individuality, I'd argue is what got us into the crisi,s is the individual desire for for profit, for exploitation at all cost and inability to think sustainably about intergenerationality, you know, a desire, of some, to plunder the Earth's resources for their own gain. That's the opposite of thinking through the lens of belonging to an ecosystem, and I'd argue that the idea of society is a way of thinking about ecosystem, right?
Margaret Thatcher, the famous British Prime Minister, who, you know, was contemporaries with Ronald Reagan, in the 80s, and considered the sort of one of the main architects of a kind of like era of neoliberalism. She's very famous for saying this thing, which was, there's no such thing as society, there's only individuals and their families, and the reason she said that was because she was engaged in a fulsome attack on all sorts of public resources, public housing, nationalized industry unions, all these societal forms that had at their bases, the idea of people taking care of each other, there being such a thing as a public there being such a thing as a union, as a social formation, and she was attacking those institutions, in order to privatize all these resources, and along with that project, was the necessity of convincing people not to believe in such a thing as society only to believe in the individual.
I think that that is, you know, hearing all these people over the course of this one month in, in New York, want to be optimistic about the future, but have no other vocabulary for being optimistic other than the hope or desire or fantasy that they as an individual will somehow be the lucky one that gets through, I found and still find very devastating, as I really do believe what's been lost is the commons, not just as a way of thinking about resources, but also a way of thinking about how we belong to each other.
Ayana Young That's really beautiful, how we belong to each other. Yeah, I think that sentiment has definitely been lost on many of us because of the divisiveness of our conditioning of the media. Yeah, I feel like it's very much by design, that we feel like we don't belong to each other. And yeah, it's like a divide and conquer tactic to think for those who have power to stay in power and decentralize that power for themselves. And, yeah -
Brett Story Yeah, can I just say, you know, I think that this is why I think it's really important to think about these things that often get treated separate, like the climate crisis, and the and mass incarceration together, because actually, when you think about, “Okay, how are people divided? What are the actual mechanisms? What is the actual work being done to describe and carve out, you know, the idea of difference, and the idea that there are some people that are deserving and some people that are not deserving?” Well, I think that the the language of criminality is actually one of the most powerful mechanisms for that, you know, because it's so naturalized, you know, even I imagine your listeners hearing me and thinking, “Well, yeah, if someone's a criminal, if someone's done a criminal act, they they are a different, you know, in a different category, they are less deserving.” But I think it's so important to be critical of that. I mean, especially when we recognize certain things about how the criminal justice system works, right, when we recognize the fact that the majority of people inside prisons and jails are poor people, right? When we think about how the degree to which People ofCcolor, and African Americans are hyper incarcerated and think about this overlap between criminality, the criminal mechanisms of criminalization, and mechanisms of racialization, and we think about that as one among many other kinds of projects, in which we, as a society are somehow convinced that there are people that are deserving and undeserving, and what kinds of harm get naturalized as being acceptable when you make those kinds of demarcations and even though it's really challenging for people to recognize, not even just through the lens of innocence and, and guilty, not just to say, “Oh, there are lots of people inside prisons and jails who are innocent”, to even let go of that binary and say even the people who did the thing that got them criminalized, you know, maybe stole something, well, you know who else is stealing all the time? Employers are stealing all the time, you could argue that, you know, mining companies are stealing all the time. And yeah, that's not rendered illegal. But stealing something from a grocery store to feed your kid is.
So we have this mechanism that is, in some ways you know, if we look at it sideways, we can see it as both sort of arbitrary, but also also historically produced and functioning to uphold systems of inequality. And I think that if we task ourselves, which was actually trying to think capaciously, about how those mechanisms of division and demarcation work and try and unthink them, you know, again, like, it's so arbitrary to decide that there's such a thing as an illegal migrant and a legal migrant, or undocumented migrant and, you know, what's the difference between an expat and a an immigrant and yet we hold these distinctions as if they're natural, rather than, again, socially produced and unnecessary to break down.
Ayana Young I'm so with you, especially in terms of what is stealing? The mining companies, or the Enron's, or the corporations, they're stealing all the time, or they're getting major fines for polluting and never paying, and they're completely able to destroy the Earth and human communities without any consequences, which is so much more massive than somebody going into a convenient store and even stealing something that seems big, or going into a department store and stealing even 1000s of dollars. I mean, that's nothing in comparison to what is being stolen from the Earth, and from communities every day. Wage slavery, I mean, like, the list goes on, and on and on -
Brett Story Intellectual property, right? Patents, right? How do we not think about like the fact that the vaccine patents are held by private companies, you know, even while, public money, which is to say, our tax dollars, you know, underwrote all that science, right? Like, what is that, if not theft? In the public imaginary, it doesn't get considered that way. Because theft, the idea of theft, is reserved for individual action, usually by poor people. And I think that that's precisely why we need to turn these narratives on their head.
Ayana Young Thank you for speaking to that, because I think that clarity is so important for us to just remember how much this isn't truth. So much of what we are told is true, real, or ethical, is constructed by those who want to have power and money and control and all of that stuff. But I'd like to turn to focus specifically on your film, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, and you explain that you make abolitionist media and in making an abolitionist documentary, you commit to abolishing crime stories. So I love if you can give us some insight into what that looks like.
Brett Story Maybe I'll start by describing the film a little bit. So the conceit of that film is that it's a film about the prison system in which you never see a prison. And instead, the film takes place through and across twelve discrete places, in which, you know, the audience is sort of tasked with figuring out how is the prison in this space? Right the title says it all there's a prison in twelve landscapes and you're landed in this place that is not a penitentiary or a jail and asked, how is the prison functioning in this place. The idea came from a lot of thinking and activism around the the contemporary criminal legal system and the the prison industrial complex, and was informed by the work of a lot of prison abolitionists who, among other things, ask us and invite us to think about prison as a system, right?
The prison, again, is not just as a building or an edifice over there, but as a system, an institution, a public institution, that is very much tied up with all sorts of other systems and institutions. And that's a sort of interesting challenge for someone who's working like I am in a visual media, I'm a filmmaker, I work through images, and so I was interested in a couple of things. I was interested, on the one hand, in just the fact that I don't find a lot of prison documentaries to be all that surprising or compelling. I mean, I think there are some really powerful prison documentaries that showcase the plight of an individual who's facing an injustice of some kind, they're often innocence narratives and they can be absolutely devastating and heart-wrenching and are important in that way. But there's a kind of sameness to a lot of prison documentaries that I've found frustrating over the years. And part of it is that I've questioned the amount of work they can do even when they have really good sort of social justice convictions, because they tend to, again, sort of showcase the system gone wrong, but don't help us make it, you know, don't really help us understand why the system functions the way it does in the first place. So you get a lot of kind of bad apple takeaways from these films, like it was a bad prosecutor, it was bad cops that may misuse the evidence, and the wrong person landed in jail.
So I tasked myself with making a film, not only in which we wouldn't see a prison, because I wanted, again, to think about the prison not as a building, but as a system that organizes is, you know, is very, is implicated in how, like the entire social structure of America is organized, but also a film about the prison system in which we wouldn't talk about crime, you know, and if we talk about crime at all, it's to put crime in quotations. And this very much relates to, you know, the conversation we were just having, in which actually, if you think about it carefully, as a sort of naturalized as the language of crime sounds like, of course, murder is a crime, of course, rape is a crime, they're bad things, how else would we recognize them as a society? Actual crime as a sort of social legal construct, is not just socially produced, but is very particular, right? There are things that get called crimes, and there are things that are not called crimes, there are things that used to be called crimes, but are no longer called crimes. You know, interracial marriage used to be called a crime, it's no longer called a crime in most places. You know, sex between consenting adults of the same sex used to be called a crime, it's no longer called a crime. So there's lots of ways and reasons that we can put the idea of crime in quotations in order to suggest that it's a malleable construct. That it is as much to do with rules of the social order as it is anything else. But also to think about how it can be very misleading in terms of this basic question of asking, again, why do we think taking people away from their homes and communities and putting them inside cells for long periods of time is going to help us solve endemic issues of harm and violence in society? And also, how does it reify or calcify ideas of what counts as harm and violence, and what doesn't count as harm and violence?
So I wanted to do two things. I wanted to make a film about the prison system in which we never saw a prison and I wanted to make a film about the prison system in which we didn't talk about crime. I think that that's what I what I try and do, because, you know, I think that as you explore the film, we start on a bus, it looks like an ordinary bus, it's a night bus. And we discover it's taking a group of mostly Women of Color to a prison far away to visit their loved ones. We start there. We spent some time in the suburbs of St. Louis, where people are in a long line up paying, you know, fines for sort of ridiculous poverty ordinances, like not putting their trash can lids on correctly, and then landing in jail and they can't pay their fines because they're low wage workers in the coal fields of Appalachia, where there's a building spree right now of penitentiaries, in many of them being built on top of decommissioned coal mines, as the economy of central Appalachia is transformed from a coal economy to bright new future in prisons.
And so the themes that emerge are not actually about crime and violence and criminality, and innocence and guilt, but are about things that are just really fundamental to the organization of everyday life, like jobs, you know, what we discover in Appalachia is that not only are prisons being built on top of decommissioned coal mines, but the reason that most people in these towns want a prison to come to their towns is because they're unemployed, and they're being promised good jobs, as prison guards, often those desires are going unfulfilled, those promises are going unfulfilled, those jobs aren't actually good paying jobs, but again talk about anxiety and about fantasy, the fantasy that there could be another there could be a future for them and their families has been hitched to the promise of a of a carceral building spree.
So the hope of constructing a prison film made out of scenes like that is that we're actually better equipped to have an abolitionist imagination, because abolition isn't just about, or even very much about just, you know, closing down these spaces of confinement, but it's about reimagining what's possible, what kinds of things can we build, if we understand how prisons function, what they're there to fix, then we're better equipped to imagine alternatives to them.
So if we understand that prisons are being built in Appalachia as a job creation strategy for unemployed coal miners, then actually the abolitionist alternative becomes not that hard, right? It's just don't build more prisons, build something else that will give people good jobs, right? It could be wind farms, it could be solar panel factories, it could be, you know, wonderful, like National Parks, and everyone gets trained as, as park rangers there. It could be not jobs at all, it could be like a more robust, you know, social wage and free daycare, free schools, so that people don't have to just sell their labor all the time in order to pay their bills.
So there's just lots and lots of ways to imagine possibility in these places where prisons are being built if we understand what prisons are actually about in the first place, and so long as we're sort of unable to think past this narrative that prisons exist because we're all in imminent danger and because the world is rife with interpersonal violence and harm and bad people, the only thing we can do with that people is put them in jails, as long as we're sort of tied and married to that narrative then we can't imagine alternatives and we have to I mean, the hope for that film was that it would de-center that narrative from our imagination of what prisons are even about, where else we can see carceral logics operating, and what alternatives we might imagine for these landscapes.
Ayana Young I’m sitting with all of this and there are so many questions I have and so many threads that I want to pull on, but I'm like okay, focus. Well, in all of your documentary work, I love that you commit to telling stories from the “factory floor” and I wonder how might this work? To counter the idea that these crises are purely intellectual and rhetorical, but they're rather deeply personal. And I'm wondering, how might this even work to fight the misanthropic feelings that often emerge when people talk about climate change?
Brett Story Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I'll speak personally, you know I've been involved in activism in one way or another, often, like, poorly, I'm not a very good organizer, actually, there's people that are much better activists than me. But I've been at least, you know, proximate to social movements, since I was a teenager. And I think it's important to admit that I do that not just out of principle and out of belief, but also as a way of fighting my own misanthropy, you know, as you say, it's an antidepressant for me.. I mean, like I said, this morning, the news is devastating. There's so much reason to feel despair, and hopeless, the stories of suffering are unending, they're unending, you know, I have a three year old daughter who will watch Blue Planet and look at all of these amazing species and I think about like the world in which we humans are just needlessly rendering them extinct by making the oceans inhabitable, and it makes me hate myself, makes me hate humans, makes me you know, want to give into this narrative that like, actually, maybe the best thing in the world, you know, that could happen to the world is if humans just cease to exist. I think it's really important to fight that because that kind of nihilism just produces more violence. And the fact is that we do live on this world, and we have to, we know, we're living here we have to, we have to continue living here. And the fact that we were capable of producing this mess means that we're capable of producing something else, and that gives me faith.
For me, the reason to be to stay close to social movements, and I have certainly found this, especially actually in movements for prisoner rights is that there's such an important reminder that people are intolerant of injustice, and people will make enormous sacrifice for themselves and for each other, to live in a better way. I mean, the prisoner rights movement in the United States is not filled with intellectuals and armchair activist, it's led by mothers, it's led by women, led by people who are tasked with doing care work all the time, you know, I spent a lot of time with people who, again, mostly women who take these long bus rides from New York City to the something like 54 penitentiaries, that are located in remote areas, upstate New York, and they'll take these long bus rides for 10-14 hours, not sleeping all night, even, you know, women in their 70s, in their 80s, mothers with young children will take these rides. And one of the things I heard over and over again, from many of these women was “I'm my son's only visitor, I’m my brother's only visitor, you know, I need to show those guards that this person is loved, you know, if the guard knows that this person is loved, they'll bother him less.” So they see their work as like the work of keeping their loved ones alive. And that is an important form of activism. And they're the ones who have been on the forefront of actually, you know, doing the organizing work of trying to get their loved ones free and being close to that kind of freedom struggle. I mean, it's intoxicating in its like, antidote to ultimate misanthropy. It's like the opposite of waking up in the morning and reading the news about how horrible human beings are to each other on the planet. It's like, tremendous what people will do for each other, right?
I'm making a film right now following the small group of workers who have been working at an Amazon fulfillment center in Staten Island, and I've been following them for about 14 months as this is a group of 567 people who are doing 10 and 12 hour shifts in a warehouse day in and day out, and they’ve been organizing for an entire year, just trying to start a union and in April, they were successful, they formed the very first unionized workplace of an Amazon facility in all of America. And they did that, while everybody around them told them they couldn't, you know, nobody believed in them. No politicians, no other organized unions. And they did it. You know, because what else could they do? They understood that things were fucked up, they understood that it's not okay for the company not to let them take time off when they're showing symptoms of COVID during a pandemic in which people are dying. They understood that they deserve better.
And so even while there is all of this reason to be cynical about how selfish people can be, and how willing people seem to be to hurt each other, and to try and get ahead. I think that there's just as much evidence and actually if we if we know how to look for much more evidence of how unstoppable people are in their quest to feel dignity for themselves and to live a liveable life, and I think that that's kind of what's at the crux of all of these struggles, the the struggle for the climate crises, the struggle for labor rights, the struggle for prisoner rights, is an understanding that life as it is, is unbearable and unlivable, and that the only way to create the conditions for a livable life, a life where people can take care of each other, can touch each other, can feed themselves, can be well, requires people banding together in struggle. And that for me, is not just good work for intellectual reasons, but it's good work for spiritual reasons, is the only way I wake up in the morning and feel okay about the day is to remind myself and to stay close to to the people that are doing that work. Because it can seem like it's against all odds, right? Again, it can seem almost unreasonable at times, but it's the fact of, it's the evidence of ordinary people, dealing with tremendous adversity, who are doing this work that offers the reminder that that the work is necessary and can be successful. That's the other lesson of history. That's another lesson of geography, of understanding how people produce space, you know, Rosa Parks on the bus, the buses have produced space and when she refused to get up, she's changing the meaning of that space, and changing history.
Ayana Young Such a beautiful response. Thank you for that. In Prison Land you write, “he most salient organizing features of the prison regime, as found in Detroit's downtown real estate corridor and Eastern Kentucky’s impoverished coal fields, for example, have to do with property, wage, labor and race. It is through the production and cognition of those social relations, rather than any overwhelming drive to punish that the carceral order is reproduced.” And I'm wondering, how does structuring the world according to the strict lines of private property, wage, labor and race, in turn structures, bodies born into that world? And how do we reproduce these values as selves within these systems?
Brett Story Yeah, I mean, it's very, it's very challenging, right? It's like how do you contest the things that are actually the law of the land? You know, it's like one thing to remind ourselves, “Oh, this is socially produced, race is sociall produced, pri ate property is sociall produced.” It's another thing to actually challenge it because it's how the world goes round. I mean I work in documentary and I teach, so I'm often talking to my students about, you know, what is reality? What is truth? How do we represent it? And one of the examples I use, as a sort of example, a benign example of how things are socially produced and real at the same time, is the idea of six o'clock. So it's like, what is six o'clock? Is it primordial? Is it natural? Is it an inevitable? No, it's made by human beings. It's part of a social clock, you know, that's given meaning by the working day. And yet, even though it's socially constructed, we can't just individually decide we're going to live without it. I'm not going to just individually say like, “Okay, six o'clock, it's meaningless to me, I'm going to live without time” and I think the same is true for much less benign social constructions like race, and private property, and even wage labor, right, so wage labor, what does that mean? It means it's not just like work, you know, activity, toil on the land, but it's the parceling out of the activity of the human body into time parcels that become sellable. You know my toil is available for a wage of X amount, depending on my status within the social system, oh, it's, you know, I'm only worth $15 An hour or my labor is worth $200 an hour, depending on what college I went to, depending on how I'm socially perceived, depending on what I'm wearing.
So I think it's individually very hard to challenge these constructions, because they do, they are just part of how the world works, but I think it's really important to be radical with our demands. You know, and I think that this is the other thing that I've learned from my time in the prison abolition movement, is that one can be practical and utopian in one's demands at the same time.
So one can be part of a labor campaign for an increased minimum wage, one can't live, one can't feed their family on $12 an hour, one needs $20 an hour, one can fight for an increased minimum wage, and also make them the important and radical demand that we not have to sell our labor in order to be able to be alive, you know, that debt should be abolished, that schools should be free, that housing should be free, that good food be available. You know those are ways of both sort of recognizing that wage labor organizes the world. And we need to press upon its limits in order to make life more livable for a lot of people. But also, at the same time recognize because it's a social construct, that upholds a social order predicated on inequality, inequality that's often enshrined in racial terms, we shouldn't and can demand more because again, there's no reason that we should have to live in a world in which you sell your labor power in order to buy the commodities that are necessary to live.
You know, imagine if you didn't have to pay rent, you know, what might be possible. Housing should be free. It's a human right. And I think that that we can sort of apply that thinking to all sorts of things. Including private property. I mean, I think it's been really inspiring over the past few years to see young people have a kind of, you know, an imagination and utopian imagination, to be able to imagine things like defunding the police, right, because that's not just a project in like, canceling something. It's also a project in recognizing that the resources that go to paying for the police are part of, what's called the social wage, or, you know, the public commons. Those are the resources we paid, we pay municipal budgets out of our tax money, and exploitation of resources that should be understood as belonging socially to all of us. And if they're not used to fund police, then they can be used for something else like, again, free schools, free transit, free breakfast programs, things that make life livable. And I think that as part of those demands, especially in the past few years, I’ve heard a lot of young people who are involved in movements really decry the privatization of all commodities and say, “No, these things shouldn't be privatized, be resources should be held in common.” And once they're held in common, I mean, again, this is what we learn from Indigenous communities and historical, colonized people who who saw their resources stolen from them is that when resources are understood as belonging in common, then it also enables a relationship to them of care and stewardship. And that's a different way of thinking about our relationship to a good I mean, I think that the other function of private property isn't just to say this belongs to you and can be policed accordingly. But it also defines the type of relationship one has to that resource.
It's not a coincidence that resources need to be privatized in order to be fully exploited in the capitalist sense and that's why we have this crises of fossil fuels, and contamination and pollution. If we, if we didn't have that kind of relationship, if we said, you know, we don't have a properied relationship to these resources, we have a relationship of care and of stewardship, then it would enable a different way of thinking about how those resources are to be used and to be adjudicated, not just across geography, but also across time, which of course, is essential to thinking about planetary sustainability and and the planet existing at all. I'm not sure that answer your question. I feel like I went a little bit off topic there, but, you know, there's a lot to say.
Ayana Young No, it's all good. And I appreciate all of the riffs and tangents because it's all connected and it helps us understand a bit deeper, these very complicated matters. So yeah, I'm so appreciative of you, Brett, thank you for your time today on this, this episode with us and for all of your work. It's really deep and important. And I think it will definitely shake some of those listening as it has me. So thank you so much.
Brett Story Thank you. It's been really wonderful to be in conversation and it's made me feel more hopeful on what started out as a as a very hard day and a hard morning. So thank you so much for for being in inviting me to be in conversation with you.
Emily Guerra Thank you for listening to this episode of For The Wild Podcast. The music you heard today is by Jahawi Bertolli, I Goodfriend, and Leyla McCalla. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Allie Constantine, Erica Ekrem, Emily Guerra, and Julia Jackson.