In ‘Reimagining the Revolution’, Paula Lehman-Ewing examines new ideas about criminal justice

Late in her book, Paula Lehman-Ewing writes, “This is not a political book because I have long given up on political solutions.” That might be a chilling statement in a book centered around the American criminal justice system. But in “Reimagining the Revolution,” Lehman-Ewing writes about a modern prison abolition movement centered on paths outside of traditional politics, proposing new ideas about justice and how to create a better, safer society.

Lehman-Ewing spoke to the Chronicle by phone about the prison industrial complex, what abolition entails and what she learned working with former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Question: In your book you write about how incarceration is a system that is fundamentally about punishment rather than rehabilitation. Why do you make that distinction?

ONE: There was a (2023) Supreme Court decision and Clarence Thomas wrote the majority opinion. He essentially said that the legislature has erred on the side of confinement and punishment rather than rehabilitation. So to me that means incarceration is just putting someone away, just taking them out of the equation. That means they have no voice, they have no path to redemption. They have something on their record that will follow them throughout their lives when they try to get a job.

So for me it’s really about control. One of the things that I found most fascinating in the book was this rare partnership in Pelican Bay (State Penitentiary) between the four alleged gangs in the California prison system. They asked the guards to publish a letter calling for a ceasefire, and the guards destroyed it. In my mind, that’s really what prison is all about. It is about not necessarily controlling violence or creating a rehabilitative environment. It’s about controlling ideas and the flow of ideas and partnerships and solidarity between different groups.

Q: In the book, one of the people you profile, Ivan Kilgore, talks about how the prison industrial complex isn’t necessarily broken, but that it’s working exactly as designed. Can you describe what that design is historical?

ONE: Basically, it is an ever-expanding control system with very little overview. It’s like the John Ehrlichman quote, it’s like wanting to control hippies who are against the war and the Black Panther Party, Black liberation movements. They punish them. They ban marijuana. They introduce crack cocaine into urban neighborhoods.

When a problematic factor arises, the first thing that happens is that the prison industrial complex provides a way to control the undesirable. And so in the past it has simply looked like this: The slaves are free, so if you catch them, we can imprison them for things like loitering, and then we can loan them out again (for labor). The system is the same. It just looks a little different.

Each iteration has had to, I would argue, look a little less racist. Today we’re looking at things like sentence enhancements. They’re not saying, on the surface, that black people should spend more time in prison, but because of over-policing and hot-spot policing and different ways that crime has been regulated in the past, there’s a much greater chance of someone who’s in minority to get a second chance.

One of the things that I know Chesa (former SF District Attorney Chesa Boudin) tried to do was end bail, but to do that, the only available mechanism is pretrial risk assessment tools, and those are very problematic because data is completely produced in this space.

Q: You write about how the prison industrial complex was used for “convict leasing” after slavery was abolished, and today prison labor produces many of the products we buy and use. How do you see the prison industrial complex as a cog of capitalism?

ONE: It started as a way to keep cheap labor. It continues to keep cheap labor: they have a fire department out of the California prisons, and that allows them to fight these wildfires and pay these guys a dollar a day. Capitalism is the driving force of slavery. Before they defined caste by race, it was defined by who owned land and who didn’t, who was rich and who wasn’t. To preserve it they (the poor class) split. So they had slave patrol like poor white people and they had slaves like poor black people. Any system that starts like that treats people like cogs in a wheel. It doesn’t treat people like people. And every time you do, you will be taken advantage of.

Q: You mentioned Chesa Boudin, who you briefly worked for as communications director during his campaign for district attorney. You write that that experience early on made you feel that there was no such thing as reforming the criminal justice system from within. Why did you feel that way?

ONE: Chesa was an elected official. We look for reforms in legislatures. We are looking for reforms at government levels. And in my view, you cannot fix social problems with political solutions. They are not aligned. A person running for office, it is individual progress that they are focused on. And then when you get there, as we’ve seen, it’s about keeping power, whether it’s for the individual or for the party as a whole, but very little of it trickles down.

Question: Do you then, especially in an election year, feel disillusioned with voting?

ONE: I think it is important to vote in the election. It is important to stop the bleeding, but you can. I work as a paralegal for the public defence. Do I think most people who go before a jury are looking at a rich system? Yes. But I will still participate in that system to try to stem the bleeding until something better comes along.

It’s important for people to show up and speak their minds, but I think it’s more important for people to curb their constant outrage…and show up the day after Election Day. Because I haven’t spent a lot of energy on politics, I have energy to spare for social movement. The great thing about social movements is that they have a much longer lifespan than any presidential candidate.

Q: In your chapter centered on the activist group Critical Resistance and their efforts to close prisons, you clear up some misconceptions about prison abolition. Can you describe what is behind their philosophy of “disassemble, change, build”?

ONE: When people talk about how dangerous it would be if we just started letting people out of prison, they’re usually talking about rapists. That’s an extreme example, and it’s a valid one. In reality, if you want to take an accountability approach, rape victims rarely report it because they don’t think anything will happen. The very small percentage of people who actually go to trial usually plead in most cases. If you want to look at punishment and crime as the person who is affected, what would heal them? That is not our current system.

Critical resistance, they go to these prison cities and say, what does (this future) look like to you? No one in social movements seeks to prescribe. People ask questions. It’s about community development versus pretending to know the answer. They don’t figure out what life without prison looks like in a vacuum. They are actually on the ground asking what it would look like.

Q: The “Build” element seems to focus on how, economically, a lot of the money that would have funded these prisons can go to resources in a community to stop a cycle of crime in the first place.

ONE: Right. I think people don’t realize that they are paying for prison beds that are no longer needed. They pay a high price in incarceration while taking a person out of the economy who is unable to replace it.

One of the things that (activist Mariame) Kaba says is that it is not a deconstruction movement. Abolition is not about tearing down all prisons, the end. It is a building movement. It is a movement to create something new. They are not only focused on the dismantling part. It’s important that it ends with “build” because they don’t stop at ‘Close all the prisons, now figure it out.’ At the same time, they are focused on building something new.

Brandon Yu is a freelance writer.