E 59: The Dark Side of Justice: Lisa Guenther on Race, Gender and Solitary Confinement

Are you ready to journey into the dark realities of the prison system? With our esteemed guest, Lisa Guenther, we invite you to pull back the curtain on the unsettling practice of solitary confinement. Lisa's profound insights, drawn from rigorous research and the lived experiences of those who have suffered the brutality of isolation, will undoubtedly challenge your perspectives. Prepare to confront the weaponization of race, gender, and the devastating psychological impact of prolonged seclusion within the US prison system.

The second part of our conversation shifts focus to women in solitary confinement. Brace yourself as we share heart-wrenching stories from courageous women who have survived this harrowing reality. We critique the incongruity of punishment versus rehabilitation within the justice system and Lisa bravely shares her personal experience as a previously incarcerated woman. Her inspiring journey of resilience and activism, even within the confines of prison, speaks volumes about the urgent need for systemic change.

In the final segment of this episode, we probe the profound concepts of social death and creative resistance within the prison system. We discuss how incarceration often results in a loss of identity, yet, in the face of such adversity, many prisoners demonstrate remarkable resilience. 

The power of language and personal narratives are highlighted as we explore these complex issues. So, come along for a thought-provoking journey into the heart of the prison system. Join us next week as we continue our conversation on revolutionizing international justice systems. Let's learn together, let's grow together, and let's be the catalysts for much-needed change.

Transcript

Farah-The View/ Rebel Justice: 0:03

Welcome to this episode of the Rebel Justice podcast. I'm Fire Danji, I'm one of the three women who started the Vue magazine and I'm formally an incarcerated woman. I was once the pet criminal for an over-enthusiastic Manchester University student, joe Deakin, who used my experiences given to her without my consent in a book that she wrote as part of her academic research, and I knew nothing about it until a friend of mine who was studying criminology told me there was a whole chapter about me in this book that she had to study as part of her curriculum on female deviants.

Farah-The View/ Rebel Justice: 0:36

Imagine my surprise Once bitten, twice shy. So understandably, I've been put off by the thought of collaborating with academics since that unfortunate experience. I view them as outsiders of the system, trying to participate or articulate pain and dysfunction that they can never fully understand or comprehend because they will never experience it. Yet they demand to be a part of it, while those of us trapped inside the system are dying to get free of it. Suddenly, the gunthor is the antithesis of this prototype, an academic with a background steeped in phenomenology, the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first person point of view, what we might call lived experience. Immediately, I warmed to her openness and her empathy.

Farah-The View/ Rebel Justice: 1:20

Much of her work is focused on solitary confinement, or segregation Angela Davis wrote. The most well-known description of this vile practice is Charles Dickens's description of solitary confinement as torture and agony. After visiting Eastern State Prison in Illinois, he insisted that this daily trampoline with the mysteries of the brain was immeasurably worse than any torture of the body. Today we're talking to Lisa Gunther, renowned academic, who's spent a large amount of her academic life researching segregation and the effects of solitary confinement, which are tantamount to torture on prisoners and people held in custody. I'm really interested to find out from you, Lisa, what inspired or sparked your interest in criminal justice and sociology and the arts in general.

Lisa Guenther : 2:18

Yeah, sure. Well, it was a long and winding path. So I did my PhD in philosophy and I wasn't studying prisons or punishment or really, very concretely, social issues. I was doing a project in feminist philosophy, but it was pretty abstract, it was not very grounded in social practice and my philosophical framework was phenomenology, which is a philosophical orientation towards lived experience.

Lisa Guenther : 3:00

And so my research when I was a PhD student was motivated or moved by a friend of mine who had a baby and I was present at the birth and I was just blown away by the immensity of everything that was happening and the absence of a language to talk about this event of birth. And I thought what is it about philosophy that nobody talks about birth? Everybody's talking about death. The meaning of death and birth is at least as philosophically rich and mind blowing as anything else. And of course, the obvious answer to that is that, well, philosophy has been the domain of men, mostly white men for so long, and birth was just not on their radar. And so my way into thinking about prisons and solitary confinement in particular, was eventually moving to the United States for a job teaching philosophy, and I lived in Nashville, tennessee, and as a white woman in the US South, I experienced my race and my gender in a different way, and it felt like my body and my social positionality was being weaponized as that which needs to be protected and so that which justifies this whole apparatus of racialized violence in the form of policing and incarceration. And, without being asked or giving my permission, I felt like I was one of the alibis for that system of violence. But that was not an analysis that I immediately had access to. It was by learning from the former political prisoner and philosopher, angela Davis, who came to the campus where I was teaching and she was actually giving a very intense graduate seminar just a six week graduate seminar in our department, and I was a new professor and I asked if I could sit in on the class, and the class was on slavery, and it began with the 13th Amendment, which purportedly abolishes slavery in the United States except for those who have been duly convicted of a crime. And that was when I first learned that actually slavery was not completely abolished with the 13th Amendment, it continued and it was reinscribed in the prison system, and so Angela Davis's seminar was on prison slavery and we read texts about slavery in the context of the 150 years or so since the abolition of slavery, and it was in that context that we read a few testimonies of solitary confinement.

Lisa Guenther : 6:07

And as soon as I read the descriptions that people were giving of their experience, or their unraveling of experience, in prolonged isolation, it struck me that they were describing something that was completely at odds with the way that the architects of that system or the inventors of that practice imagined and basically sold the idea.

Lisa Guenther : 6:33

They sold the idea as something that was basically going to take someone out of a corrupt world and reset them, basically turn them, turn them off and then repower the machine so that then they would be good, upstanding citizens and they would behave properly. And the experience that people were actually describing in undergoing this extreme isolation was feeling like a ghost in their own life, feeling like they had been buried alive, feeling like they were cut off from the world, but in a way that didn't just make them sad or lonely but started to unravel and tear apart their own ability to think clearly, to keep track of time, to even feel like this is where I end and this is where the world begins, and so that struck me as a kind of torture, as you said, a kind of violence against the very structure of being of human being, and so my research, my more kind of concrete sociological research into solitary confinement, began there, with this seminar with Angela Davis, and with these testimonies of people who were sharing an experience that was at the very limits of experience.

Farah-The View/ Rebel Justice: 8:04

Wow, there is so much to unpack there, and we love Angela Davis, so I'm not surprised at all that she was the seed for this incredible body of research and work that you've done. There's so much to unpack there. These parallels between slavery, oppression and incarceration we're so frightened to voice them, but actually that's exactly what they are. And if you look at the prison system here in Canada and America any kind of westernised cost-rule estate. I think the reason they get away with it is because there's far too few people voicing the violence that's being done. Why do you think it's important to talk and think about segregation and the way that women experience it? I just want to tell you I'm one of the women who started the view. There were three of us who started it in prison. It's basically like a well, it was meant to be a kind of a glossy brochure for this crazy governor, and I have a background as a journalist and I was kicking off all over the place because I was very happy at being recalled for complaining about abation. So to shut me up, she said look, why don't you start this prison magazine? It used to be a journalist who writes so well all these complaint letters which she wasn't happy about. So we did, and I'll send you some of the printed copies because I'm so proud of what we've done. The first one, especially, is like a real punch in the gut.

Farah-The View/ Rebel Justice: 9:24

So she got this incredible kind of rebellion of women's voices that you know. We weren't allowed to speak, we weren't allowed to say anything, we weren't allowed to swear. If you swear in prison you get reprimanded, you know, I mean every other word that comes out of my mouth is swear words. So for me this is completely un-n that. And we're not allowed to have any sense of self or who you are. You'd leave yourself at the prison gate but I got put into solitary confinement for complaining, basically, and it was the hardest and most soul-destroying experience you just can't imagine. There's nothing, there's just the four walls and there's no television. There's supposed to give you a radio, but they don't, even if they can get away with it.

Farah-The View/ Rebel Justice: 10:05

The psychologists used to come and see me and say, look, the only thing I can do to help you is to keep you safe enough to get you out of here. That's all I can do. I can't treat you because you're being traumatized all the time. But I really feel from that experience and from the experience of other women who I know who've gone through this, that it has a deeply detrimental effect on your mental. I mean, mine wasn't very long. I managed to get hold of sisters and I managed to get out, but a lot of women can't do that and they stay there. We've got some of the most appalling statistics in this country of keeping people in segregation and they call it the care and support unit, which is one of those big brother kind of. The ministry of double speak has come out with this rubbish. So I was really interested to find out and to ask you about how you think it might affect women differently and also the effects on women if solitary confinement yeah.

Lisa Guenther : 11:02

Well, I mean, there's so much in what you just said that I would love to address and keep talking about, because I think what you said about being basically put in solitary to shut you up, I think is a pattern that I see like over and over and over again, both in prisons for women and prisons for men, that if you make too many complaints and even, or especially if you're making complaints about in women's prisons, an experience of sexual assault by a guard. So I was an external examiner on a PhD thesis by someone named Maury Williams at Villanova University, and she really focused in on this what she called the solitary cycle, that a woman would be assaulted by a guard, would make a complaint and she would be punished by being put in solitary. So a double punishment and precisely a silencing of the complaint, of the pushback through words that then deprives you of access to someone to share your words with, and so I think that that's just. It's a devastating kind of compounding of separation from the world in prison, then separation from other people in prison, in this prison, within the prison, and I wonder. So when I was doing my initial research on solitary confinement, I was reading as many first person testimonies as I could on the experience, and I was finding lots and lots of testimonies by men and fewer testimonies by women.

Lisa Guenther : 12:43

So in Asada Shakur's autobiography she talks about being in solitary, but she doesn't describe it in this intricate detail. Most of what she's talking about and many other memoirs of women in prison follow these lines is being separated from their children and from their kin, both from elders and from young ones that they're responsible for, and so the isolation within solitary, where often you're not even allowed to have pictures of your loved ones, is compounding what this theorist of slavery, claude Meassou, calls natal alienation, a kind of separation of you from the very people that you take care of. And so the fact that they would call these units care and support units is just mindblowing. To me.

Lisa Guenther : 13:42

In Canada, we have claimed, because of two class action lawsuits, to have abolished solitary confinement, but we replaced them by structured intervention units, and so, but care and support units is like one level, even beyond, precisely because it gets at this sense in which you're not just being punished for whatever threatening the stability of the institution or whatever you're being punished for being a speaking being, for expressing yourself, for being a relational social being, and the form of your punishment is you don't get to care for other people, you don't get to take care of yourself, you don't get to take care of directly, in an immediate way, for other people. So that's one of the reasons why it just strikes me as so counter to that other rhetoric of rehabilitation or getting people back on their feet or support so that people can re-enter society. Because how would you ever actually find the support you need in isolation to be and continue to be someone who lives in a concrete relationship with other people? It's just totally counter to what even the system says it's doing.

Farah-The View/ Rebel Justice: 15:13

Yes, but, as you said before, it sells it on these very sort of high-faluting ideas of reintegration and rehabilitation, and reset, I think, is such a good word, but it doesn't exist. I think as a society we're really conflicted about whether we want to punish people or whether we want to rehabilitate people, because the two drivers can't exist. They're totally oppositional and conflicting and so you can't have a justice system that is retributional, that is punishing, that is vindictive, that is nasty, and at the same time pretend to have this rehabilitation programs. I mean, we know there's no such thing as just nice words and dogma and people getting lots of money in private contracts. But I think what you said about the natal alienation is just the hardest thing is, as a woman, if you have children, or even if you don't, you know nieces and nephews or, in your case, like the child that you saw being born, you know there is such an incredible attachment to the people that we care about and the people that we love, and to have that wrenched away is actually such a denial of our own self-hood as well. It's really just wrenching out like the bit of you that is you. You know that relational part that just makes sense of who you are and all these different relations and all your different facets as a mother or a daughter or a child or an aunt or a lover or a friend. It just rips that away. And it is visceral, and it's deliberate and it's intentional.

Farah-The View/ Rebel Justice: 16:39

And those words, natal alienation, that's exactly. It's so stark, isn't it? It's so harsh, do you think. And then it's not sort of a race to the bottom for the genders? It's really not in my head. I don't think it's about that. But do you think that women are affected more deeply by the effects of segregation?

Lisa Guenther : 17:01

I've thought about this a lot and I haven't actually, you know, like I'm not trained as a sociologist, I sort of I work with people in prison, but I don't I don't like to write about the work we do. I'd rather work on projects together in a way that follows their lead on what they think is important to work on and amplifies their voices. So I've never kind of sat down and interviewed, you know, women who have been in solitary, men who have been in solitary and done a comparative study based on different gendered experiences of solitary. But I started talking about this and then I distracted myself when I was doing this, reading for the book that I wrote on solitary confinement, and finding all of these like long descriptions of the experience of solitary confinement in men's testimonies and acknowledgments that they were in solitary, but not long descriptions of solitary confinement in testimonies by women.

Lisa Guenther : 18:08

Something that struck me was that a different, gendered way of expressing oneself and putting the focus on Forisada Shakur and Angela Davis. Their testimonies, their memoirs are also. They're not just autobiographies like this is my experience as an individual. They are sort of collective autobiographies of a movement and there's something about that collective orientation where I'm not going to spend pages and pages dwelling on my own experience. I'm going to talk about the strategies that were useful to me, that might be useful to other people for survival.

Lisa Guenther : 18:53

I'm going to talk about what helped me to survive, because I had connections to other people in a movement that I knew would go beyond me, and so I think that in listening to some of the silences and seeing what do women write about when they write a prison memoir and what do they move over quite quickly in their writing, there is a focus on collective, relational, shared experience and helping one another. That, I think, attests to what you were saying and suggests that if you are a person who's deeply connected to other people and you can't be who you are without them, then the torture of solitary confinement is going to be even more visceral, and the fact that you don't write 10 pages about it is not in any way an indication that that was any less devastating an experience for you. It may be pointing to and suggesting that it was so devastating that you're not even going to put that on the page. That's something for you and for your close loved ones to talk about or not talk about.

Farah-The View/ Rebel Justice: 20:18

I think what you said just neatly brings it back to what I wanted to ask you around your interest in phenomenology and philosophical study of objectivity, and you touched on that in the way that you just spoke about women's experiences. So that's the study of reality more generally as subject to be lived, and experiences focused on academic research in a way that includes the voices and the experiences of the people who are going through these incarceration periods. How do you think that involving people with lived experience in your research is important and how do you think it can affect your qualitative research as well?

Lisa Guenther : 21:03

Yeah, this is super important. So I think there are some things you just can't see unless you are looking at things from a certain angle or you have a certain experience. So even just if we stay within phenomenology as a philosophical discipline, which you know, often philosophers in this field don't talk about social, complex social issues. You're talking about what is it like to perceive a table? Well, when I look at a table, I don't see all of it at once. I see it always from a particular angle, a particular perspective, and unless I walk around it and explore it from different angles, I'm not going to get a sense of the table as a whole. I'm just going to have quick shortcuts in my mind, like I know what that is. That's a table, I don't really need to investigate it any further. And I think if we move from tables to complex social phenomena like punishment, segregation, incarceration and criminalization, like who gets to count as a law abiding citizen and who gets labeled as a lawbreaker Looking at those complex, complex social phenomena, there are just certain things you can't see if you are looking at it from one angle. People who are directly affected by police surveillance that criminalizes them are going to see and notice the way that that system works, precisely because they have to navigate it on an everyday basis. So I think there are two things. There's one you just can't see certain things unless you have a lived experience of them. But also you are less likely to see the connections between things unless you have a lived experience of something or are listening very carefully to and working in alliance with people who are directly affected, who have lived experience.

Lisa Guenther : 23:12

So there's this 19th century philosopher and sociologist, web Du Bois in the US, a black sociologist, who coined this term double consciousness to talk about the way that he, as a black man, both experienced the world from his own perspective, but he constantly had to be anticipating, noticing, analyzing, projecting the possibilities and likelihoods, probabilities of how white people were seeing him, how they would respond to him.

Lisa Guenther : 23:49

And so he has a double consciousness. He sees the world from his own view, but he also had to see it from other perspectives just to be able to survive. And Bell Hook's black feminist philosopher, takes up this idea and develops it as a practice of seeing from the margins, that there's a capacity to know the world and to analyze what's going on, that is enriched by being in a marginal position, not directly at the center, because you can't just use these lazy shortcuts like I know what that is, that's a table. I know what who that is, that's a criminal. I know who that is, that's a law abiding taxpayer. And so that's one of the one of the reasons why I think lived experience is so important. It's both seeing different things and seeing different connections between things.

Farah-The View/ Rebel Justice: 24:45

That's really interesting. And I think that whole idea of double consciousness it's so tiring to even think about it, isn't it? Like it's such a huge psychological drain to like be living your life and then also looking kind of over your shoulder in 360, everywhere else about, well, what does everyone else think and what is everyone else seeing, and it's just such an incredible. It's like almost double the energy just to just to breathe and live and be. And I loved your analogy of the table and people and how actually people are not tables, which is quite basic, I know. I don't think that, which brings me on to something again that you just slightly touched on the idea of social death.

Farah-The View/ Rebel Justice: 25:22

Being incarcerated is not just about losing your liberty and losing your connections and the people you love. And you know it's supposed to only be about losing your liberty and the rest of your rights supposedly remain intact. But that is just so not true. That's another of these amazing fantasies or fallacies that's fed to people just to make the whole process of justice and incarceration palatable. And the very moment that you're arrested, indicted, enter this perverse criminal justice system, your social value is eroded and by the end of the process you know so much of your identity has just been corroded by the experience, through trauma and observing what's happening to people and witnessing what's around you, you can't not be affected by it. And also being told over and over and over again. You know like if you're a child and you're told you're a bad child, eventually you're just going to believe in and be the bad child. And in the same way, I think what happens to women in this country is you are told over and over again you will obey these rules, we will tell you when you can eat, we will tell you when you can sleep, we will tell you when you can shower.

Farah-The View/ Rebel Justice: 26:29

And at the moment, many of our women's prisons are still operating 23 and a half hour lockdowns and the excuse for this is, oh, covid. Well, I'm sorry, covid ended two years ago, but our system is in such a mess that they can't retain officers. Basically they just they can't. Young prison officers are getting so traumatized on what they're seeing that they're just leaving to go and join border force or home office or something else. They just don't want to be there. This whole thing of social death, I think, is really fascinating, and how it affects women and how you are entirely just negated as a human with a value by entering into this system, as opposed to be, as you said, resetting you to be a better person and a law abiding person or this other dribble that they put out there. So I'm really interested to know your thoughts around social death, and you've written about it extensively and so eloquently as well.

Lisa Guenther : 27:22

Yeah, this is something that I learned from that seminar with Angela Davis. So we read Orlando Patterson's book slavery and social death, and Angela Davis was making this connection between the social death of slavery and the social death of prison, and in both contexts there are these rituals of stripping someone from the markers of social life, from someone, so removing someone's name, giving them a number instead, taking away their clothes, all the, all the choices that they've made to express themselves in a certain way to others through their clothing. No, you're not allowed to have that. Here's your uniform. And this is not necessarily something that everybody goes through, but sometimes, you know, like for the sake of the health of the institution, shaving people's hair off, like just completely stripping down all of the ways that we express ourselves to other people nonverbally and the ways we're known to ourselves as having a very specific reality for other people, like our name. And so there are different rituals that unfold in different ways, but I think the logic of the system is to make you feel like you're socially dead and then so many people, I think, have incredibly powerful ways of connecting with and maintaining and affirming their social life, whether that is insisting that you know like I wear my uniform in a particular way, like I roll up the sleeves in a certain way, or I work with a group of women who were incarcerated at the Prison for Women in Kingston and they just organized an amazing art exhibition and one of the art pieces was a prison-issued t-shirt that Kathy Porter, who is in prison in British Columbia, had incredibly modified so that it was this gorgeous, woven, totally like deconstructed, reconstructed, no longer legible as a prison-issued t-shirt but as a work of art. This was one of the pieces in the show and, of course, that was punished as destruction of prison property.

Lisa Guenther : 29:52

So this is, I think, where we see the logic of social death which is imposed by the prison system, purportedly for the sake of rehabilitation or like resetting this person, putting them on the right track, and all of the creative ways that people push back against that and affirm no, I'm very much socially alive Like I am. I'm an expressive person, I am a person, I have meaningful relationships with other people, and that was one of the one of the critiques of this whole concept of social death is that Angela Davis shared with us in that seminar, but many other people have made in different ways, is that, and I'm kind of ambivalent about the degree to which I've leaned on this in my own research that if you adopt this framework of social death and don't attend to all of the ways that people remain connected to loved ones and affirm their relationships, then you're basically adopting the perspective of the system. The system wants social death, but I guess it's a question. It's a question for me as a both a researcher and someone who wants to contribute to social movements to abolish prisons to what degree does the language of social death box us into the framework of the system?

Lisa Guenther : 31:23

So thinking about social life in resistance to social death, kind of just it might not seem like a huge difference, but I think it's that kind of pivot where, instead of sitting at the table of like decision makers on who gets to be punished and who gets to be rewarded, versus maybe looking under the table and seeing all of the ways that people have kind of carved their initials and left their mark on the framework of social death that they've been set up to undergo.

Lisa Guenther : 32:04

And I'm so fascinated by this magazine that you started in the prison, because at the Prison for Women in Kingston, which people call P for W, there was a prison newsletter called Tight Wire, which I think is so beautifully named, because it is all about like that balancing act that was a site of incredible creative expression poetry, political analysis, drawing, art and that's an example of like a super vibrant social life that had to operate within the framework of social death because the prison system itself had to sign off on each issue. They had control, kind of editorial control, but within the constraints of that system the women managed to do incredible journalism and incredible, very subversive political work.

Farah-The View/ Rebel Justice: 33:01

That's fantastic and I love how you really emphasize the importance of words, because if we subscribe to these words of social death, then we are part of the problem, sort of like when people say women offenders or ex-offenders. It really just grates on me, because at what point do I stop being offensive and to who and who gets to judge? And it's just so oppressive to use that language. But yeah, I got into huge trouble with the prison magazine, so I got again put into segregation and they ghost you around the prison of the states and no one can find you. So I was ghosted. I was in London and my parole hearing was coming up for being recalled, for being rude about probation basically, and it was just being put off and put off and put off. And finally I had a parole hearing date that they said they wouldn't change. But they ghosted me up to South Yorkshire from London, so 400 miles away, and there was no way the parole board was gonna lift its ass to go up to there. So lots of kicking off, lots of lawyers, lots of legal staff and I managed to get the parole hearing. The parole board said no, this is an unlawful recall. You can't recall someone because you don't like what she's tweeting. That's a bit ridiculous. And I was released immediately well, not immediately, they put in all their delays and stuff, so it was two weeks later, but I sent out a copy of this prison magazine to a lawyer, which I wasn't supposed to do but I did, and I'm glad I did, because then we managed to pick it up afterwards and then Claire and Holly got involved and they're the kind of the business side of it, but it's still very much the heart of everything we do, including this podcast, is the women that I serve time with and their art in the magazine. You'll see, it is a testament to just the bravery and resilience and the ways that women have of like navigating the system. That is not made for us, that is not our shape, that is not even the clothes are made for men, lisa, you know. So you're wearing these like flat-tested T-shirts and these baggy baggy trousers and you just look completely ridiculous. I would love to see her subverted women's prison T-shirt.

Farah-The View/ Rebel Justice: 34:59

So something that's happened with us recently is we've been supporting a lot of the climate justice activists. You know, just Stop Oil Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain. So we've been supporting quite a lot of them and at the moment, as I was saying, our prison system is operating under ridiculous restrictions. There's one in particular, a Boston Hall in Darvishow, where they haven't managed to arrange children's visits for literally more than a year. So these women are being given these sort of perloined, basically copyright-stolen sheets of coloring pages that you would give to a child to color in right, and the Ministry of Justice is illegally downloading these coloring sheets of like Spider-Man and you know the bunny. You know everyone's seeing the bunny picture that the child colors in. But these women are so resourceful so they've taken the Spider-Man picture and they've got like all Just Stop Oil slogans all over it. The bunny's got like all flames behind him and oil rigs and it's just that we've made cards out of these and then the women get back half of the proceeds of whatever we sell the cards and the prints.

Farah-The View/ Rebel Justice: 35:56

So there is, there is such a super resilience to all of the trauma and the violence, because it is an act of violence to incarcerate a woman. It is an act of state-endorsed violence that we are all signed up to. Because we don't protest, we're all buying this lovely, cuddly version of oh well, they need to be in prison and they're dangerous to society and all the rest of it, and actually we need to examine it, which is why I think words are so incredibly powerful, and you've really made me think about the whole way that we use social death and how we're buying into that, the perversion of it, really aren't we? I learned so much in that conversation with Lisa Gunther.

Farah-The View/ Rebel Justice: 36:37

Ending on the issue of words and social death Feels like a precarious place to end this episode, part one of two, with this insightful and compassionate academic. It's been a pleasure to speak with her on the View Magazine's Rebel Justice podcast. Join us next week to hear the rest of our conversations and how Lisa feels we can revolutionize international justice systems with radical shifts in our own behavior, by confronting our own compatibility with the carceral estate which she feels has extended into our everyday, highly politicized and highly policed lives. The View Magazine is the only platform buying for women in the justice system where we keep our experiences, strength and hopes at the heart of our organization, in spite of enormous pushback from those who have referred the status quo of opacity and disinformation. They say that sunlight is the best disinfectant. Pull back the blinds and join our resistance movement fighting for a fairer justice system for all of us.