Playing the long game

Sep 02, 2022

Happy friday, friends.

There’s a massive black and yellow spider outside of our house that I’ve spent like 18 of the last 24 hours thinking about. Has anyone else noticed that spider webs seem to be way more intense than they used to? Like they seem…thicker? and stickier? Is this climate change? The pandemic? The deep state?

Anyway, some updates: Next week I’ll write about why I avoid using the cost of mass incarceration as a talking point. (That one will be for subscribers only, so please subscribe if you haven’t!)

This weekend, I’ll send out some reading recommendations. (One recommendation that simply can’t wait : Andrea Ritchie and Mariame Kaba’s new book No More Police is OUT and it is a banger, please read it. )

Today I’m writing about Atlanta — the best city in the world minus the current situation with the city jail.

As always, please tell me your thoughts, ask me your questions, present your hypotheticals, tell me why you agree or disagree. Think through this with me. This is a group exercise.

I currently live in Atlanta, which is also my hometown. For years, local advocates here have been trying to shut down the city jail.

The jail is this brutalist, gray monstrosity that looms at passersby from a corner downtown. The building is mostly abandoned, fluorescent lights toiling for the thirty to fifty people stuck there. Entire floors are deserted. Dust coats the insides of long-vacant rooms.

Given the option, I take an empty jail before a full one every time. But all varieties unsettle my spirit. A friend of mine, Bryan Lee, is an architect who once said to me that all spaces either facilitate or hinder justice. And few places hinder like correctional facilities—a far too clinical name. After all, not many places on this planet are built simply to generate suffering and loss.

A few years ago, when now-Mayor Andre Dickens was on the city council, he introduced legislation to turn that jail into a community center named after John Lewis. Lewis's family even approved it. It looked like one of the few places where the city as collective would take a place that exists to inflict despair and build something generative.

But recently, the Mayor decided he wants the opposite.

He proposed leasing the jail to Fulton County, which includes Atlanta. The idea here is that the city would help "solve" the overcrowding issues at the county jail by taking in the overflow. So, rather than a few dozen people a night, the city jail would now hold 800 to 1,300.

I’d love to tell you our city council rejected it out of hand. But the Mayor mostly kind of got his way - though, thanks to the work of organizers here, he still has a few barriers to overcome. (For more on what exactly happened, you can read JD Capulouto at the AJC— he does a good job covering this stuff.)

What I’m interested in, as always, is the Why — Why did the Mayor go from wanting to close the jail to wanting to fill it?

Sure, it could be the money. The city stands to make $50 bucks per person per night, plus 65% of phone and commissary funds. But I’m willing to bet this isn’t about that. From the AJC:

Michael Julian Bond, who sponsored the measure, said the city has a responsibility to work to improve the conditions of citizens held in poor conditions.
“We desperately need to act,” he said. “If we’re in a position to solve a problem ... at Fulton County we should immediately do that.”
Earlier in the meeting, Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens made a rare appearance before the committee to speak in support of the deal, describing it as a “humanitarian response” to the situation at the county’s facility.
“We are not in the jailing business. I don’t want to be in the jailing business for long,” Dickens said. “Nonetheless, we find ourselves where we are today.”

It’s the last sentence that sticks with me. “Nonetheless, we find ourselves where we are today.”

In many ways, that story sums up the history of carceral expansion in America. A perma-state of reactivity, avoiding reflection, the insistence on increasing risk by trying to avoid it. If politics is anything, it is this refusal to play the long game, because long term prosperity demands short term sacrifice. Politicians never wait for the second marshmallow. They eat one, and then they campaign for re-election.

Of course, you’d be forgiven for thinking Andre, Bond, and others were making that short-term sacrifice. That’s how they’re playing it, after all. “We desperately need to act,” says one. “I don’t want to be in the jailing business,” says the other. Another article quotes Bond stating, “We’re trying to relieve pressure.” This is the carceral politic we’re all subject to, one built largely on the politician’s self-image as hero. Turns out it’s a lot easier to lock people up if you feel a teensy bit bad about doing it.

The county jail is overcrowded. It’s a nightmare for the people locked up there. Bond is correct when he says that someone “desperately needs to act.”

But when the Mayor says this is the “humanitarian response” he is fooling us and, I suspect, himself. The “humanitarian response” to an overcrowded jail is not this preposterous form of carceral musical chairs. The “immediate solve” is not to bail out a jail that cost county residents over $1 billion over 11 years.

The “humanitarian response” is to reduce the jail population. The “immediate solve” is to send those people home.

I don’t just mean the people too poor to pay bail. I mean the people who have been convicted, too. If you’re serving time in jail instead of prison, that generally means you’ve been sentenced to less than a year. In Georgia, only a misdemeanor gets you a sentence that short.

Respond the humanitarian way. Play the long game. Send them home.

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I made this argument in a group DM (cursed phrase) on Twitter, and someone said that there are “child killers” in the jail. It goes without saying that the vast majority of people in jail are not child killers, but to be honest the hypothetical kind of underscores my point. We send literal children to the same jail as the child killers? What sense does that make? If the county jail is overcrowded with homeless people, poor people, people serving short sentences for misdemeanors, and…people accused of killing children…feels like we should go back to the drawing board.

Still, my Twitter acquaintance’s reaction is the typical one.

To most people, it’s too big of an ask — too risky, too uncertain, especially in a moment that feels too risky and uncertain as it is. And I understand that, to some people, “send them home” sounds a little preposterous.

But the alternative is actually riskier. The alternative is not asking questions about what’s driving the increased jail population. The alternative is relying on back-end punishment instead of fixing the front-end problems — a jail lease instead of stemming the tide.

The move towards a less punishing society requires we be a little preposterous. Requires we take on a little more risk. Requires we take a bet on our future, and double down on that bet, rather than do the thing that doesn’t work yet again. Requires us to ask ourselves how best to shape a society when we don’t have the crutch of incarceration to rely on.

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This particular story happens to be about Atlanta, but the general contours apply across geography. New York, LA, Chicago, and the countless other places where people are working to close the jails have encountered this same thing. And all of the justifications for keeping them open are echoes of each other. Part of the problem here is the difference between what we value and what we incentivize, especially from our public officials.

Politicians sell themselves as portals to utopia. Marketing a politician means marketing a visionary, whether or not they are one. You are telling a city, a state, a nation that the path to the promised land is through this person’s office. But eventually The Thing settles in. The realization that it’s always politically inconvenient to generate short-term uncertainty for long-term gain.

Getting elected means thinking big. Staying in office means avoidance. It means task forces and studies and action committees instead of actual action. Too often, a career in politics means embracing a myopia so extreme that it borders on delusion. It demands focusing on small details, the purpose of which is to obscure the broader picture. Ultimately, it means making short-term calculations about the community’s long term needs.

That’s how you end up with a Mayor who claims “we are not in the jailing business” while he is, at that exact same moment, proposing we get even more in the jailing business. That’s how we get a bunch of city councilpersons that, just a few years ago, voted to close the jail but suddenly believe it’s good politics to increase the population by 4000%. This is how city leadership can justify being whatever the opposite of a visionary is. Too often, their long term is election day, and then the election day after that. The future may favor the bold, but that only matters to people concerned with the future.

It’s not just politicians, though. It’s the rest of us, too. All of us often avoid doing the courageous thing, because bravery take risk. If you are like me, you are probably constantly overwhelmed by the uncertainty and danger inherent in our current moment, and haunted by the battles that seem to await us. But that is why we need vision, and courage, and people willing to reshape the future. That is why we need people willing to take risks. What would it look like for the Mayor to say to the Sheriff, “We are not going to be in the jailing business?”

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading! And please please please please check out PAD — Atlanta’s amazing policing alternatives' program!