Excerpt: What (or Who) Is Broken?

To pave the road of his revolution, Ivan Kilgore, [founder of United Black Family Scholarship Foundation,] has enlisted the help of a younger generation. Like the liberation movements he learned about from elders while sitting in the Alameda County jail, such as the Black Panther Party and the Free Speech Movement, Ivan’s strategy relies primarily on the hunger, resilience, and curiosity of college students. These students serve as interns, and each cohort is focused on one element of Ivan’s blueprint for a reimagined future. 

The same year he arrived at Salinas, 2014, the California legislature had passed Senate Bill 1391, removing an obstacle erected in the 1970s that prevented community colleges from receiving compensation for teaching courses inside carceral settings. As luck would have it, Salinas was one of the first facilities to start offering college courses. Ivan signed up for a sociology course taught by Professor Megan McNamara. 

“I signed up with a plan, specifically to open a doorway to engage with students,” Ivan said. “I didn’t really give a shit about sociology, I knew that stuff like the back of my hand.” At that time he was always carrying around Domestic Genocide, his pride and joy. One day after class, he slipped a copy into the teacher’s backpack. The following week, she asked Ivan if he’d lecture her class of students at UC Santa Cruz.

Ivan maintained a rapport with Megan over the years, regularly participating as a presenter or a student in her classes. In 2019 a group of UC Santa Cruz undergraduates under Megan’s tutelage signed up to be the first intern cohort at UBFSF. That same year, the organization raised enough funds to fly the entire group to Oklahoma City for a conference regarding the REBUILD project. Attendees were met by Glenn E. Martin, an entrepreneur and activist who founded the campaign CLOSE rikers to close New York City’s main jail complex, and former state senator Connie Johnson. These feature guests led the students in a series of leadership training sessions and walked them through neighborhoods they’d previously identified for potential revitalization.

“If you’ve ever planned a conference before, try adding on an element of sitting in a prison cell on top of everything else that could go wrong,” said Glenn, who spent six years imprisoned in New York and now consults with social justice nonprofits across the country through his entrepreneurial endeavor GEM Trainers. As of 2023 he also sits on the board of United Black Family Scholarship Foundation. “The fact that he was able to plan this conference, motivate these volunteers, including a former state senator, to show up, to participate, to share their gifts was really impressive to me, to be quite honest.”

Since the pilot internship program, Ivan’s organization has penned additional agreements with groups at UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, Stony Brook University, and Langston University. Ivan meets with each cohort, either by prerecording a video or via a prison-issued tablet. After the introductory meeting, they are guided by volunteers—usually university professors or teaching assistants—who train them in grant writing, data collection, or whatever skill set is needed for their particular assignment.

The UC Irvine students, for example, were seeking out and applying for grants to fund the REBUILD project. I sat in on the introductory session and watched as students popped into the virtual meeting one at a time, seemingly busy with other goings-on in their screen-filled lives. When Ivan connected—his face warm and welcoming against a backdrop of cold, harsh walls—all eyes were transfixed on him.

He’s come to embrace this kind of reaction.

“It creates a space where we can have very authentic conversations about what prison does to families and individuals, and how change can be effected through their efforts,” he told me afterward.

The meeting started with round-robin sharing, each student saying why they had chosen an internship with UBFSF over more traditional, trade-based opportunities, ones you might see at a job fair. The usual array of reformist buzzwords echoed in the corner of my kitchen where I sat listening in:

“I just think the criminal justice system is broken and we need to fix it,” said a soft-spoken young man, his eyes never looking directly at the camera.

“Is it, though?” pressed Ivan. “‘Cause from where I’m sitting . . .” He paused to look around at his surroundings, drawing attention to the lack of good lighting and the prison-labor-manufactured furniture. “. . . it’s working just the way it’s supposed to. It’s silencing a generation of voters who could threaten the establishment. I’d like y’all to think about that for a second.”

One by one, the students shared their desire to make a difference, and one by one, Ivan challenged them to think beyond the usual course of protest and reform. In this first meeting, he didn’t mention abolition by name, but he did start leading the flock toward it.

“It only seems logical that if we’re going to make a change, it starts with the next generation, because they’re the ones coming in on the coattails of our ideas and building on them,” Ivan said. “If we look at the history of revolutionary movements, they all got their start on college campuses, probably because—and I quote Frederick Douglass when I say—’It is much easier to build with strong children as opposed to broken men.’”

Whenever Ivan mentions the Douglass quote, which he does quite often, I think about Malcolm X, specifically the black-and-white image of him standing in front of the window, rifle at the ready, peeking through the curtains. He knows that the police won’t protect him and the world is out to get him, not just the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover—probably the greatest all-time example of white supremacy infecting law enforcement—not just the violent racists, but his community of Black Muslims, infiltrated and corrupted by the aforementioned police. He is fighting against a system that has pegged him to be a violent man, an image he has refuted both by his general demeanor and his religious devotion, and here he stands with a gun that reaches from his hip socket to the top of the doorframe. Imagine waking up one day with all the answers, knowing all the steps between where you are and where you belong, grabbing your gun, and carefully drawing back the curtain to see if today is the day you are going to die. How could that not break someone?

People talk about the criminal legal system being broken, but as Ivan told the students, that’s not entirely accurate. The heinous scenes of police brutality we find so shocking on the nightly news are what abolitionist Mariame Kaba calls the “logical result of policing in America.” (Kaba founded Project NIA, another abolitionist organization that focuses on juvenile justice and community-based alternatives to formal legal proceedings.) The system is working just as it was designed to work.

Rather, it is we who are broken, a society crushed under the moral weight of never fully accounting for our history of enslaving our fellow humans; under centuries of state-sponsored execution, civil death, and prison labor. Kaba talks about this phenomenon in terms of “systems that live within us, that manifest outside of us.”

I recognize this manifestation in my own life. For years, I played little league baseball under New York City’s Robert F. Kennedy Bridge on a small islet known as Randall’s Island. Looming large just over a mile across the East River from Randall’s Island is Rikers Island, the 413-acre home to New York City’s main jail complex. The island is named after Richard Riker, who served as the recorder of New York City for three consecutive terms and was a member of the “Kidnapping Club,” a group that would capture freed slaves and sell them back to Southerners in the 1830s. In the age of mass incarceration, Rikers has developed a reputation similar to that of its namesake: violent and cruel. In 2008 guards ran a prisoner fight club that ultimately led to the death of eighteen-year-old Christopher Robinson. It only got worse from there; prisoner injuries doubled (from 15,620 to 31,368) between 2008 and 2017, even as the population declined 32 percent. Since 2016, there has been a 105 percent increase in use-of-force incidents by New York City correctional officers at Rikers against people in their custody.

“When it comes to ignominies, New York City’s island jail complex has it all: inmate violence, staff brutality, rape, abuse of adolescents and the mentally ill, and one of the nation’s highest rates of solitary confinement,” stated a 2013 Mother Jones article ranking Rikers as one of America’s ten worst prisons. “Yet the East River island remains a dismal and dangerous place for the 12,000 or more men, women, and children held there on any given day—mostly pretrial defendants who can’t make bail and nonviolent offenders with sentences too short to ship them upstate.”

This torture tomb was the backdrop to my childhood Saturdays on the dirt fields of Randall’s.

My brokenness, my internalization of oppressive systems, is reflected in the fact that I don’t remember seeing it. Mind you, this is a monstrous facility that I would have had a direct line of sight to from my position at shortstop. Perhaps I wouldn’t have understood the concept of crime and punishment at that age, but I didn’t even think to ask. The adoring parent fans didn’t seem to take notice of it or attempt to shield us from it, so it simply faded into obscurity amid the winding roadways and railways connecting Queens, Manhattan, and the Bronx. When I fly into New York today, it’s the first thing I notice as we approach JFK, this sprawling complex of X-shaped buildings and barbed wire interrupting the calm flow of the East River on its way out to sea. 

“As a society, we have long turned away from any social concern that overwhelms us,” Kaba writes. “Whether it’s war, climate change, or the prison industrial complex, Americans have been conditioned to simply look away from profound harms.”

In fact, this is the brokenness Frederick Douglass may have intended to expose. The quote Ivan references is frequently attributed to Douglass, but it hasn’t been traced back to any of his known works. The closest thing is a paragraph in his 1855 slave narrative My Bondage and My Freedom, in which he writes:

When I went into [Master Hugh’s] family, it was the abode of happiness and contentment. The mistress of the house was a model of affection and tenderness. . . . She had bread for the hungry, clothes for the naked, and comfort for every mourner that came within her reach. Slavery soon proved its ability to divest her of these excellent qualities, and her home of its early happiness. Conscience cannot stand much violence. Once thoroughly broken down, who is he that can repair the damage? It may be broken toward the slave, on Sunday, and toward the master on Monday.

Considering prisons and jails are where we hide away, or “disappear,” thousands of people a year, the facilities themselves are quite prominent. They are hidden in plain sight, surrounded by large cities, or alongside major highways. And yet they might as well be invisible. We gloss over them, our brokenness allowing us to operate with clear consciences by denying their existence. 

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1 Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Haymarket, 2021), 14.
2 Kaba, 'Til We Free Us, 139
3 Brentin Mock, "What Should Be Done about Rikers Island's Dark Fugitive Slave History?" 
Bloomberg, July 23, 2015, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-23/what-should-be-done-about-rikers-island-s-dark-fugitive-slave history.
4 James Ridgeway, "America's 10 Worst Prisons: Rikers Island," Mother Jones, May 14, 2013, 
www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/05/america-10-worst-prisons-rikers-island-new-york-city.
5 Ridgeway, "10 Worst Prisons."
6 Kaba, 'Til We Free Us, 20
7 Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (Miller, 1855), 153

Reimagining the Revolution Four Stories of Abolition, Autonomy, and Forging New Paths in the Modern Civil Rights Movement by Paula Lehman-Ewing, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 2024. Reprinted by permission of publisher.