A Brief But Spectacular take on how to protect your people

Transcript

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Geoff Bennett: Raj Jayadev is a MacArthur Fellow and founder of an organization which supports people who’ve been through the criminal justice system.

Tonight, he shares his Brief But Spectacular take.

Raj Jayadev, Founder, Silicon Valley De-Bug: If you’re going to dismantle an entrenched system like mass incarceration, it needs the size and bulk of something large enough to challenge it.

Participatory defense is a community organizing model for families whose loved ones are facing charges, how they, the family and community, can be part of the legal team to change the outcome of that case and free their loved one.

Isolation, I believe, is a feature, not a bug, of the criminal punishment system. It is how it forces unfair decisions. It is how it harms and breaks people, particularly Black and brown people. If that is the building blocks of that oppressive system, the way to dismantle and bring down that system is to do the opposite, to take something that feels isolating and lonely and convert the solution into something collective.

Courts are really just places where stories are told. The problem is, is that the narratives that dominate the day are almost exclusively the ones told by prosecutors and police. And so, when families would go to courts, the most common thing people would say is: “I wish they knew them like we know them.”

Well, there’s something practical, urgent, and necessary that families and communities can do, and that’s to tell the fuller story of their loved one, so that the court that is trying to reduce a person to a single act or single allegation, that that narrative could be overshadowed and a person could be understood through the fuller context of their lives.

What that means in a practical way is families and communities make what we call social biography packets and social biography videos. It changes how decisions are made in the courtroom.

We have been doing participatory defense since 2008. The biggest challenge we had when we started was people realizing that they could actually have impact, because everyone had been told that the courts is really only for the judges and the lawyers, and if you weren’t a judge or lawyer, there’s nothing you could do, except bear witness to the injustice.

And we said that, actually, families and communities have knowledge and experience that could actually tangibly make the difference if someone is at home or stuck in a prison cell.

Participatory defense is an abolitionist strategy. It’s not about making the court experience smoother. It is trying to liberate and free and challenge that system so that our communities could be whole.

My name is Raj Jayadev, and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on how to protect your people.

Geoff Bennett: And you can find more Brief But Spectacular videos like that one online at PBS.org/NewsHour/Brief.