From Incarceration to Critical Consciousness: A Speech By Ivan Kilgore

Good evening.

I speak to you not simply as someone who has studied the criminal legal system, but as someone who has lived inside it for nearly thirty years.

Almost three decades of incarceration, combined with my education in abolitionist thought, have given me a particular way of seeing the world. I have learned to look beyond the individual event; to look at the social conditions, the institutions, the history, and the power relationships that surround that event. I call this looking through a sociological lens. And when I look through that lens, I see something that is difficult to ignore: the foundations of racial inequality in America continue to shape how we understand crime, punishment, and justice.

The question is not simply, Who committed the crime? The question must also be: What conditions produced the circumstances in which that crime occurred? And perhaps even more importantly: Who designed, maintained, and benefited from those conditions?

This is where the work of Paulo Freire becomes important. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire describes what he calls the « banking concept of education » In this model, knowledge is deposited into students. They are expected to receive information, memorize it, reproduce it, and ultimately accept the world as it has been presented to them.

Freire argued for something fundamentally different: an education that develops critical consciousness—the ability to understand the world, question the structures that shape our lives, and recognize that we can participate in transforming that world.

That idea is extremely important when we talk about criminal justice.

Because if a young Black man grows up in a community affected by generations of racial inequality, underinvestment, segregation, poverty, unequal educational opportunities, aggressive policing, and unequal access to economic resources, we cannot understand his eventual contact with the criminal legal system simply by looking at the moment of his arrest.

The story began much earlier. And this is not simply a matter of opinion.

The National Academies has documented measurable racial disparities across multiple stages of the U.S. criminal justice system—including arrests, pretrial detention, sentencing, incarceration, probation, and parole—and has examined how broader structural inequalities interact with criminal justice involvement.

Even within federal sentencing, the U.S. Sentencing Commission reported that during fiscal years 2017 through 2021, Black men received sentences that were, on average, 13.4 percent longer than those received by White men when examining all sentences imposed, and Black men were 23.4 percent less likely to receive probation. These are statistical patterns, not proof that every individual case is motivated by race, but they force us to examine the system beyond individual intentions.

Now imagine the courtroom. A young Black man sits before a judge. There is a prosecutor. There is a defense attorney. There are police officers. There are laws. There are sentencing structures. Everyone has a role. And eventually, a decision is made about that young man’s future. But the courtroom is not where his story began.

His story may have begun with the neighborhood he was born into. With the school he attended. With the opportunities he did—or did not—have. With the economic policies that shaped his community. With the historical consequences of slavery and segregation. With the unequal distribution of wealth and resources. With the criminalization of certain behaviors. And with the social messages he received about his own value and possibilities.

So when we ask why certain communities are disproportionately represented inside prisons, we have to be willing to examine the entire chain of events. Not just the final link.

And this brings me to an uncomfortable question: If unequal social conditions contribute to unequal exposure to the criminal legal system,
can we honestly call the outcome justice without examining those conditions?

I am not saying that individuals should not be held accountable for harm. People get hurt. Families lose loved ones. Communities experience violence. Those harms are real. But accountability and understanding do not have to be enemies.

We can hold someone accountable for an act while also asking what social conditions helped produce the circumstances surrounding that act. That is what a sociological lens allows us to do. And there is another question we must confront: What role do we, as people of color, play in this system ?

Consider a young Black man who is killed during a drug transaction. Another young Black man is arrested, prosecuted, and convicted for that death. We often stop the story there. We say: He committed the crime, however, the sociological lens asks us to go further. Why were those drugs criminalized in the first place? How were drug laws created and enforced? Why are some communities exposed to certain forms of policing more intensely than others? Who benefits when our communities become divided between victims and offenders, when one young Black life is placed against another?

And perhaps the most difficult question: What happens when the harm occurring inside our communities is used to justify policies that ultimately produce more surveillance, more incarceration, and more separation from the very communities that need resources and investment?

This is where critical consciousness becomes essential. Because if we only teach our young people the rules of the system, we teach them how
to survive inside the system. But if we teach them to understand the history, the economics, the policies, the institutions, and the power structures behind the system, we give them something more powerful. We give them the ability to question it. To analyze it. And ultimately, to imagine something different.

After nearly thirty years of incarceration, I do not believe my experience should be reduced to a prison number, a sentence, or a criminal conviction. My experience has taught me to read the world differently. It has taught me that justice cannot be understood only by looking at the person standing in the courtroom. We must also look at the society that produced the courtroom.

And if we want to create safer and more just communities, we have to be courageous enough to examine not only individual behavior, but the conditions surrounding that behavior.

Because the question is not simply:  “What did this person do?” The deeper question is: “What happened before this person ever entered the courtroom?”

And once we begin asking that question, we move from simply administering punishment to actually understanding power. We move from accepting the world as it is to questioning how it came to be. And that is where education becomes liberation. That is where lived experience becomes knowledge.

And that is where people who have been treated as objects of the system can begin to see themselves—not merely as people acted upon by the system—but as agents capable of transforming the world around them.

Thank you.