I recently completed a two-year project on mass incarceration and poetry, and the biggest thing I had to confront throughout the project is my own hypocrisy, my whiteness, my class position, unlearning carcerality and how deeply engrained it is in us. https://twitter.com/dwaynebetts/status/1356822408859185152

Prison abolition is not an easy position to take, and I'd honestly be deeply suspicious of anyone who claims to espouse its politics without proof they work with incarcerated people. It's deeply challenging to see the humanity in monstrous people who've done unspeakable things.

Prison abolition is also not an easy thing to understand. You can't arrive at it through tweets or articles. It is a journey and an education, a daily confrontation with yourself in how you are deeply complicit with the invisible violence of the state. The illusion of justice.

I still really struggle with it. I draw the line at sexual violence, and any harm related to children. Most feminists do. It's complex especially for women of color, because criminality is so entangled with our men. It's hard to imagine justice for survivors beyond the state.

What does it mean that the prison abolition movement is led by Black women, women of color, survivors? Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Davis, women working with unthinkable violence and still standing with those who do harm, imagining new ways to restore victims and communities.

I cannot call myself a prison abolitionist because I don't have the range, STILL, after two years of focused study. I'm still trying to become one. Even as a racialized person, a working poor person, a child of migrants, a person with formerly incarcerated family:

I have not truly lived the consequences of incarceration. And I think this is where a very old failure is happening: two sides, with very different structural relationships to prisons, to police, to justice, trying to make their unfathomable traumas known to each other.

Please don't mistake this for both-sidesism, it's intersectional: I am a survivor, AND I am someone invested in abolishing the carceral state. AND, now with a graduate degree and access to the middle class, I am someone who prisons are designed to "protect."

The ability to abstract the prison as where dangerous people are disappeared fundamentally roots my sense of safety in violence and fear, which makes it all the more fragile. This has implications: it forms your politics, your relationships. And that's whiteness.

I don't have any answers. KN was never structurally vulnerable to incarceration, he's a white former professor. But prison abolition is about standing with EVERY prisoner. I'm not saying I do, but was POETRY ever equipped to host that conversation? Reckless.

How can you host a conversation on incarceration and prison abolition and not understand that its alternative is community accountability? How much has PoFo contributed to rehabilitation and transition orgs? Does it employ convicted felons? Maybe just sit there and eat your food.

I cannot express the depth of harm done by this POETRY issue. I don't want it to be an avenue for this man to re-enter communities and gain access to survivors or spaces where he can do harm. Survivors have to lead the conversation, and I stand with them on removing his poem.

I just also don't know how to read "too-short prison sentence," "alert the police," "rot in prison," "FBI Report" in direct response to a special issue on incarceration. I think the responses to Dwayne and Tara Betts from white people are violent. I expected better. I don't know.

I got a lot from this thread, and I hope you'll read it. I don't know if I agree with this tweet, but I'm open to being challenged by it. https://twitter.com/amandaknox/status/1357028058255949826?s=20

I lost faith in POETRY a long time ago, so I object on principle to "special issues" and the idea that a hedge fund disguised as a journal can be reformed. I'm more interested in poetry as another site of grappling with justice, where humanity is centered, even in the monstrous.