Shutdown Rikers with No New Jails

The Mayor is planning on expanding Rikers while building new jails for over $10 billion. Instead of building new jails, this money should be used to create safe, strong neighborhoods by addressing our needs.

Entering Accountability

July 19, 2020

To our No New Jails NYC followers, organizers, friends, collectives, and network,

Some former “core group” organizers of No New Jails NYC are writing to you now to address the harm we collectively enabled and inflicted in our group. 

No New Jails NYC failed to center the safety, care, and credibility of survivors. We had no internal procedures for collective accountability, no mechanisms for confronting when one member of NNJ NYC harmed another, and no resources or practices for handling or transforming conflict. We made many mistakes, and nevertheless we stand with our comrades who were harmed and who have spoken up about the abuse they faced. You can read their words: here, here, here, and here.

We remain committed to challenging the Prison Industrial Complex, shutting down Rikers, stopping New York City’s borough-based jail plan, and abolishing the NYPD. However, to have any hope of PIC abolition, our movements must first be safe for survivors, must first center Black and Indigenous femmes, and must be trauma-informed and based in relationship-building. 

To work towards repair and to recognize the harm we enabled, as “No New Jails NYC” we will:

• Engage in an internal accountability process in which all those who are willing will participate, and specifically name how we enabled abuse and different kinds of harm, and how we plan on doing better, by asking questions such as these.

• We will prioritize this collective accountability process for as long as we need.  

• Produce public reflections and information on practices for transforming harm, and for interrupting misogyny, patriarchy, anti-Black racism, ableism, transphobia, and all linked forms of oppression in movement spaces. In these documents, we will be as transparent as possible for the benefit of other abolitionists to learn from our errors.

The reflections below refer to only some of the harm we have been able to assess, and does not include everything we expect to learn in our accountability process:

• Enabling abuse:  We created an environment that was ripe for abuse and isolating for people who experienced harm. We did not care for each other in the way we wish to see in the world, and we did not keep survivors safe. 

  • We let two members of NNJ NYC evade repeated attempts at accountability and did nothing effective in response when they did.

  • We failed to listen to Black women and femmes as a collective when they raised concerns of abuse.

  • We would like to briefly address four people who left NNJ NYC to lead We Keep Us Safe (WKUS). We did not stop these members from non-transparent decision making, which allowed for ongoing harm in NNJ NYC. We allowed one member to offload his own accountability process -- and therefore labor -- onto Black women and femmes. We enabled their ongoing harm and unprincipled behavior. By failing to adequately address these members, we created an environment that enabled harm. After this point, we will no longer address WKUS. 

• Lack of decision making structure: We dismissed the efforts of Black women, femmes, and formerly incarcerated people who repeatedly tried to steer us towards developing consensus and collective accountability structures, in a method that was misogynistic and anti-Black.

• Unintentioned structure: We created a leadership structure that was opaque and lacked intention. Decisions made by us were not clear to others in the larger organizing body of NNJ NYC, nor did we slow down to support leadership development or capacity building within our community.

• Avoiding conflict: Rather than addressing conflict and harm in order to stop it, we left survivors and people experiencing direct harm to figure it out on their own. 

• Centering the state: Instead of prioritizing the critical work of building relationships with incarcerated people or with members of the NYC community, we centered work involving interactions with the State, in ways that traumatized some of our members.

There are working groups affiliated with NNJ NYC still organizing to stop jail construction and close Rikers. Many members of these groups were not actively involved in the conflicts that occurred last year and continue now because they were not “core” members. Both “Stop the Plan” and “Inside/Outside” working groups are not represented in this document. They may decide whether to come back and how to reform the NNJ NYC platform so that we create anti-misogynist, anti-racist abolitionist organizing spaces centered on survivors.

A statement is not enough, and the work does not stop here for us. We hope to move from these words towards principled, deep collective (and personal) reflection and action on what we must do to center survivors, keep each other safe, and unlearn the ways we have been taught to remain silent in the face of abuse and oppression.

Signed,

Some former core organizers of NNJ NYC