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No surprise that Darren Walker & the Ford Foundation support building 8-12 new jails in NYC. Walker was a member of the commission that drafted the plan. His new In Defense of Nuance is a not very nuanced attack on #NoNewJails organizers opposing NYC’s jail construction plans 1/
Walker laments extremism, enemy of nuance & complexity. Rather than building consensus “based on mutual understanding or shared respect”, extremists, he argues, vilify those not in alignment with their ideologically pure position. The “perfect” becomes the “enemy of progress.” 2/
Is Walker modeling or mocking how to build “bridges and relationships based on mutual understanding or shared respect” by comparing #NoNewJails organizers to the climate change denial movement? 3/
His attempt to drum up support for the plan to build 8-12 new jails by tying it to enthusiasm for the Climate March is crass & obvious opportunism, but… 4/
But there is a connection btw climate change denial & jail (& prison) ‘reformers’ who advocate building our way out of racist mass incarceration. Both climate deniers & reformist jail builders like Walker willfully deny history & in most cases intentionally mislead the public. 5/
The biggest problem with Walker casting #NoNewJails as advocates whose pursuit of “perfection” makes them “the enemy of progress” is that building 8-12 more jails ISN’T PROGRESS. 6/
Pretending that building jails will move us away from racist mass incarceration is like pretending that carbon trading will solve the climate crisis. Or as the @roundtablepnw argued, stopping global warming requires “enhanced domestic supply of oil and natural gas”…7/
@roundtablepnw ...which is “vital to creating the stable economic conditions necessary to support large-scale investments in the nation’s energy system” To reduce carbon emissions we need more oil and gas, and to reduce racist mass incarceration, we need more jails? 8/
@roundtablepnw Building new jails & prisons will guarantee that we won’t “address the root causes of mass incarceration.” The billions to be spent on new cages and jail guards is money that won’t go to health care, education, job training or affordable housing 9/
@roundtablepnw Deciding that NYC needs cages for the tens of thousands of New Yorkers who cycle through its jails each year is to reaffirm a ‘cages-first’ policy that helps define those in cages and under threat of caging as undeserving of public support. 10/
@roundtablepnw Police, jails & prisons are tools that have defined those under their control as undeserving of sympathy or public support. Jails reproduce racism. There are no anti-racist jails. There is no anti-racist jail construction. 11/
@roundtablepnw There are “some cases … so morally odious & corrupt that no nuance is required: We can disagree abt immigration policy w/out accepting that a government separates parents from their children,” he writes. Why accept prisons/jails that separate families by the millions daily? 12/
@roundtablepnw Dividing us between those who are cageable and those who aren’t is not how “we can reclaim the commons.” There are a lot of reasons to oppose @NYCMayor 's plan to build jails, not the least of which is that it doesn’t guarantee that Rikers will close. 13/
@roundtablepnw @NYCMayor Most important is that we end the #CommitmentToCages in NYC & the US and if @darrenwalker and @FordFoundation aren’t going to help, they should get out of the way. #NoNewJails 14/14
