07 - A Summer for Justice, with Chloe Cockburn
“We were in a kind of a debate several months ago of ‘where are we in criminal justice?’ And then George Floyd happened and this is summer: where the heat has the public attention. And there’s people on the move, your movement is growing, people are signing up, people are learning, reading about it, talking about it, making podcasts about it. That’s summertime. And what summer does is sets up the conditions for good harvest. ”
Chloe Cockburn is a lawyer, an activist, and an organizer. She currently leads strategy on criminal justice reform for Open Philanthropy, a research and grant-making foundation that identifies giving opportunities, makes grants, and publishes its findings publicly. Prior to joining Open Philanthropy, Chloe oversaw state policy reform efforts at the ACLU’s Campaign to End Mass Incarceration, and before that she worked with the Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Sandy movements, which led her to better appreciate her role as a connector between funders and activists.
We spoke to Chloe last summer, when those connected worlds were in overdrive. Prison populations were among those hardest hit by the Coronavirus, and weeks of intense protests had followed the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police, sparking new awareness and focus on systemic racism and the need for criminal justice reform. Chloe took a break from her work and family to walk us through the woods near her home in the Catskills. Her dog Logan came along.
Links and things:
Chloe’s recent oped in the Washington Post - “Money can’t buy criminal justice reform. But it can fuel a movement.”
Open Philanthropy - https://www.openphilanthropy.org/
Transcript
Chloe:
Yeah. I mean, Occupy was pretty formative. I will just say one piece about Occupy, for me personally, it was the first time in my life where I started to understand what my role was going to be, which was as a person who could bridge between certain kinds of worlds. I think everyone has different worlds that they inhabit, of course, everyone's code switching, switching languages, different realities that they inhabit. But I started to notice how I, unlike many people that I knew, could be perfectly happy at 2:00 a.m. in Zuccotti Park having a political conversation with someone by a tent and at the Bowery Hotel the next day having a cocktail with some more fancy person. That I could live in both of those worlds, and one of those worlds has a lot more resources than the other.
I started to think of myself as someone who could communicate with the world of resources about this world of movement and try to get the resources into the movement, which really set me up to come into this job, because I can translate, for resource types, why movement work strategically makes sense or it good for the world, whereas there's a lot of people in movement who didn't grow up around resources or aren't comfortable around it or don't have access to it, and so can't really speak that language. And people who have resources who would like to help the world, but have no idea where to start. They don't know what they're looking at, they don't know what's good, they might be attracted to things where anyone who knows anything is like, "Oh, why are they doing that? That's the Red Cross of this issue. Don't give to the Red Cross." Give to the local Black women farmers who are the ones replanting the trees in Haiti or whatever. Obviously, that's better. Well, how would you know that or how would you know where to find them?
Emily:
Welcome to the Wild Talk podcast, where we speak with leaders, thinkers, researchers, writers, artists and organizers in natural settings about their work and what they can teach us about venturing into the wild unknown. I'm Emily Kagan-Trenchard.
Jay:
And I'm Jay Erickson. Chloe Cockburn is a lawyer, an activist, and an organizer. She currently leads strategy on criminal justice reform for Open Philanthropy, a research and grant making foundation that identifies giving opportunities, make grants, and publishes its finding publicly. Prior to joining Open Philanthropy, Chloe oversaw state policy reform efforts at the ACLU's campaign to end mass incarceration. And before that, she worked the Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Sandy movements, which led her to better appreciate her role as a connector between funders and activists.
Emily:
We spoke to Chole last summer when those connected worlds were in overdrive. Prison populations were among those hardest hit by the coronavirus, then in its second wave, and weeks of intense protests had followed the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police, sparking new awareness and focus on systemic racism and the need for criminal justice reform.
Jay:
Chloe took a break from her work and family to walk us through the woods near her home in the Catskills. Her dog Logan came along.
Emily:
The great outdoors.
Chloe:
I know. I'm so glad the kids are getting nature. It's wonderful.
Child:
Yeah. I love nature.
Chloe:
Love playing Minecraft out in nature.
Jay:
Nature.com.
Emily:
Nature.com.
Chloe:
Jeff, would you mind keeping an eye? make sure Phoenix doesn't tromp up after us, just two minutes. Yeah, Logan's coming with but not Phoenix, okay? She's so slow, then we keep losing her. Sorry Phoenix, you're the best. I've been looking forward to the walk.
Emily:
Awesome.
Chloe:
It's going to be good, but we can go up into the trail.
Emily:
Perfect.
Chloe:
Get legit crackly nature noises in the background.
Emily:
Exactly.
Jay:
Can you tell us where we are? Just orient us in space and geography?
Chloe:
Sure. We're in either Saugerties or Woodstock, we're right about on the line between the two towns. At the foot of, I guess it's Indian Head Mountain, but it's part of the Catskills, so we're walking towards... there's private land, but then, at a certain point, it's all state land and it's probably many thousands of acres. The land here is pretty cool, because it steps up. There's a climb a ledge, go flat, climb a ledge, go flat, and you can just make your way up the mountain that way. And I notice that when the land is inclined slightly, when you're going up the mountain, on the flat when it's curved a little bit down, as it is right now, you get the pines, and you'll see when it curves up the other way, we get the deciduous trees. And that, continues up. I'm sort of curious why that is. Maybe someone who actually knows about trees, at some point, will tell me. But the woods switch back and forth between these different stands. And then, there's border wars between the pines and the deciduous trees.
Jay:
Well, I know the pines like acidic soil more.
Chloe:
Ah, sounds like science.
Jay:
There's probably some science involved in that.
Chloe:
And so, we're told, 50 years ago the land next to the road would've been farms. But you'll see there's not too many truly old trees.
It's a lot of younger ones. We also have a bunch of interesting human made rock piles all over the place, and hard to tell are they Native American burial sites? Totally could be. Are they colonial burial sites? Are they something someone built in 1960, I don't know. But once we get up here, there's trails cutting across and people just walk on the trail. It's not a big deal. I've never actually passed, I might've once passed someone walking up here, so it's pretty chill.
Jay:
And what's your relationship with this place? How long have you been here and do you come back here every day?
Chloe:
Oh, up to this land? Well, we've had the house for 10 years. We bought it from George Carlin's estate. When George Carlin died, there was estate taxes and his family decided to sell it. His brother was living here. We're told that Carlin's ashes are scattered on the land, which is kind of cool. And this area back here is definitely special to me. If I can just come up and do a 30 or 40 minute walk, that's pretty refreshing. But I don't necessarily make it up every day. There's a lot going on with two small children and parenting in a pandemic, trying to keep work going. And then, also, a lot of pressing swimming hole appointments these days.
Jay:
That's important when it's this hot-
Chloe:
Yeah, definitely.
Jay:
... and humid.
Chloe:
Well, there's a lot of politics of swimming holes these days, too, because they're swimming holes that have been used for generations or, perhaps, time immemorial, but now people around are putting up private property signs. I just encountered this yesterday at a place I had been to recently, that I thought was definitely for the public, but there's a menacing sign now, next to the path. I don't know. I suppose it's anti New York Cityism. But it seems especially cruel, it's a pandemic, it's hot, a lot of options are closed. Let the people swim. But this whole, "Who's land is it and for whom and for what?," is, of course, always an interesting question.
Jay:
Your organization's not Open Swimming Holes? Right?
Chloe:
Yes, yes. All of this is just my private life we've been talking about. I work with Open Philanthropy, and have for the past five years.
Jay:
And what happens at Open Philanthropy?
Chloe:
Open Philanthropy is, I guess I'd call it, a collaborative project between these donors, Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna. He was a co-founder of Facebook. But they have a lot of money and had been giving, for some amount of time, in large amounts, to a thing called GiveWell, which is an entity that sought to answer the question of, "What's the best use of a dollar to improve human well-being?" And they gravitated towards projects in very low-income countries, like in Africa around malaria and malaria nets, getting rid of certain worms that will totally destroy your life, but cost 10 cents to get rid of, that kind of thing. And so, you can help a lot of people that way, but of course it's the case that you're not addressing any structural problems there, you're dealing with the fact that people, right now, are at risk of malaria, rather than, "Can we transform the public health infrastructure of a country?," or something like that?.
Open Philanthropy was founded to make riskier bets, things that are less sure. It's not like I spend $10, I save a life. But I spend money and it might not work a lot of the time, but if it does work, it'll be well worth it. It's a higher risk, higher return kind of model, and there's various different areas that seem kind of eclectic, but were the result of a pretty rigorous inquiry around what are the cause areas that are important, tractable, and neglected. So it's really going to matter if we make change, we can make change, and there's less money than there should be in it. So when you do that, there are things that are clearly important, but that are maybe not tractable or maybe not neglected, like education work, for example. Important, not neglected. There's tons of money going into it and people trying to figure it out.
So the cause areas they picked were criminal justice, which is what I work on, risks from artificial intelligence, farm animal welfare, biosecurity, and they have some kind of smaller areas, like macroeconomic policy, some slivers of immigration and housing that they've done some things in, but haven't hired full-time staff around. Within criminal justice, I direct that program with a pretty small team, and my mandate is to cut incarceration as much as possible per dollar, consistent with public safety, and I have a lot of leeway to devise the strategy to achieve that goal. But my assessment has been while the reason things are the way they are and not a different way is the politics of the issue, not technical questions about how could we have less people in prison.
It's pretty trivially simple like, "Change these laws. Adjust these policies." It's not actually mysterious, but it is very politically challenging to achieve that goal, or has been. So we've put a lot of money into changing the politics of the issue, including building up constituencies of people who are directly impacted who are now organized saying, "We want it to look different. Safety means something different to us." This year's been a banner year for Open Philanthropy issues. First, there was COVID and the bio risks team sprang into action and was in position to make a lot of great grants.
Emily:
Ooh, yes. We went through that spiderweb, didn't we. Woo.
Chloe:
Yeah, I hate that walking through spiderwebs thing.
Emily:
They wrote a whole song about it.
Chloe:
I usually walk with a branch. Let me pick one up and-
Emily:
You can blaze the trail here, and-
Chloe:
There's another one.
Emily:
There we are.
Chloe:
Get rid of that one.
Emily:
That one's smart.
Chloe:
I hope there's not a giant spider crawling on me. You'll let me know.
Emily:
Oh no, it's just on your stick I think.
Chloe:
Okay. First, the pandemic, that was big for them. Then, with the Minneapolis George Floyd uprisings, that's been a big moment for criminal justice, obviously.
Emily:
How much, when you were thinking about how to be impactful, how to change the narrative around this, did you have things in place already that could take advantage of this moment? And how much is this moment something totally different from what you thought you'd be up to at this point in time?
Chloe:
Hmm. Yes and yes. To take the second question first, I remember when it happened and I was like, "Of course we're having a Black Lives Matter moment again. Of course, we are," because policing is where state violence hits the ground. That's where people really come into contact with these structures, and then with the dry tinder of COVID, it really set the stage for all of these frustrations and resentment and sense of, "How are we still in this place? I really need it to be different," coming to the fore. The first part of your previous question, were we ready for it? Yes, I'm really excited about how money that I've recommended be spent over the past five years has set up a number of awesome leaders and groups to act right now, in COVID and with the George Floyd uprisings.
Take Los Angeles, for example, there's fantastic organizers and people there who had been agitating for years, but not really getting anywhere, not really being taken particularly seriously, and we started backing them in 2017, and they've built just an incredible apparatus. I think we'll go up this way. Yeah. Just built a really great organizing program, and really put in the work around... Oh, that's the path. Okay, never mind... the relationships, the policy analysis, the identifying the pressure points of elections, and so on. So when COVID hit and presents a very dangerous prospect for people who are incarcerated, because you can't distance, you can't clean, medical care was lacking to begin with. Just horrible. And they were in position to say, "You have to release as many people as possible right now." And so, in LA, there's been a 40% reduction in the daily jail population in the past few months, which is huge. Huge.
In various ways, people that we've backed have flexed in this time, which is really satisfying. And, of course, with more we can do more. It's about, the way I look at it, is establishing local strongholds, because when I was at the ACLU years ago, we always used to say, "Criminal justice, it's about the states, not the federal government." But I think it's better to say it's about the counties, because that's where the most important deciders are. The judges, the prosecutors, all of these deciders with a ton of discretion, the police chiefs, are at that level. Whereas, the state attorney general will do criminal prosecutions, but it will be more about things like major fraud or a big environmental problem or something. Immigration is kind of a mixed bag, because it's federal law, but of course, definitely about how the sheriff and other local elected decide to enforce and what relationship they have to immigrants in their community.
Emily:
Right? Because it sounds like you were positioned with some of these organizations to be supporting them ahead of it, so they could act in the moment, but you called that shot. What are the ways you think about projecting some of that impact or even in this moment now, directing the energy of the donors that you're working with?
Chloe:
Yeah. There's a very simple and clear answer to that question, which is, "How many people are in a jail or prison cell at any given moment, and are we reducing that number? Could you trace that decline to your funding?" But then, if you're ambitious, like I hope I aspire to be, you don't just want to have 5,000 less people in jail on a given day in Los Angeles, which is a big deal, and something I'm very excited about and proud of. You want to do something more. I keep looking for this turnoff and I'm not seeing it. We can keep going this way.
Part of the impact, then, is about building a field infrastructure, building up strategic leaders, making sure they have the resources to execute on their plans and also train up others like them. Backing their campaigns that they may win or lose, but they're gaining, capacity, skills, political credibility, and so on. In this moment, one could say that part of the impact of our giving has been to prepare a segment of people and organizations to be very effective. And then, they can jump in do things now that it's not like were in the plan two years ago or five years ago, but-
Emily:
Yeah, you planted the seeds.
Chloe:
... they're ready. Yeah.
Emily:
And that takes time to mature.
Chloe:
I'd say I water the seeds.
Emily:
Watered the seeds.
Chloe:
Yeah. I'm not creating the genetic material of people's strategies, but I can spot it and try to nurture it.
Jay:
Can you just, for a top level, for the people who are maybe new to the debate and the conversation, what is the argument for criminal justice reform and why is it so important to reduce incarceration rates, at least in the US?
Chloe:
Something I'm realizing lately, that has been lacking and I need to develop, so I'm not going to do it well right now, is really capturing what most people think about how things currently work, because I realize so much of the time we've been making an argument for change based on millions of people impacted, families broken up, children much more likely to go to prison if their parents are incarcerated, terrible health impacts at a community-wide level, all of those things. It's causing harm, but I think that people may hear that, but if they hold their current assumptions, which are incorrect, about the goals that the system serves or how it functions, they might be like, "Ah, I'm really torn. That sounds bad, but I need things to be this way, because it's serving these important goals."
Emily:
Like goals of safety, you mean?
Chloe:
Well, in particular, I think people have assumptions like, "Most people in prison are there for rapes and murders," for example. Not true. It's a tiny percentage. They would assume, if they've watched Law and Order, one of the most destructive shows ever on television, that trials are really quick after the crime and the police are mostly above board, and if there's someone behaving badly, they're dealt with. And the prosecutors are mostly above board, and of course they would never prosecute someone they didn't think actually did it, and so on and so on. There's this sense of a set of people trying to achieve safety and-
Jay:
There's one of those cairns.
Chloe:
... doing it somewhat efficiently. Yeah, that's a good example-
Jay:
I'll take a picture.
Chloe:
... of a circular rock pile. And when you get into the work, you start to realize, "Wow, 95% of people charged with a felony don't see a trial. They plead guilty." And they plead guilty without having access to all the evidence. And even if they technically had the access, that there's reforms to the law requiring that things be turned over to them, do they have legal counsel that can examine it? You could have a public defender, but the public defender has about 29 minutes for you, isn't going to go through 10 boxes of documents.
Emily:
Not like in a movie? It doesn't happen that way?
Chloe:
Of course, public defenders, they're not all fantastic, but many of them are incredibly devoted, hard working, put in five times the amount of hours trying to help people as best they can. But when you're carrying a caseload of hundreds of cases, what can you do? If you were given the choice between, "Well, take a plea to two years," just something you were maybe a little mixed up, but you didn't do or maybe you just live in that neighborhood. Maybe the police, maybe they don't think you even did it, but they're sure you did something else, and they're going to get you on this, to punish you for that. But so, they might say, "Take two years now or go to trial and we'll up-charge you so that you're facing 20 years." So do you take a two year plea or go to trial and risk 20 years? Some people risk trial, because they say, "I didn't do it," and they lose and they go in for 20 years, even when the DA said, "I would be satisfied with two years."
So what relationship does that have to any notion of safety? What it is, is very cruelly enforcing a certain efficiency of process, running rampant over rights along the way. There's that whole set of things. There's also, a lot of people in jail and prison aren't there on their first charge. They first started encountering the criminal justice system maybe when they were teenagers. Maybe if you, as a teenager, steal some lipstick from Walmart, it's probably not going to be a problem for you. Someone else steals a lipstick from Walmart or whatever, I'm not saying it's cool to steal, but teenagers do things, and what are the consequences that they'll face, what kind of record is being built, and each time, if you come back in this system again, the penalties are more severe, the chance of escaping from that maze are significantly reduced. It's like a big, bureaucratic, very punitive set of practices that could be summed up as an apparatus of control, rather than safety.
And the ways that people keep themselves safe, you can see it actually, interestingly, there's tensions here really starkly when you look how undocumented communities try to keep themselves safe, so if you're undocumented, suffering from domestic violence, you don't really want to call the police, because once they get involved, you're going to be arrested yourself, all this kind of stuff. There was a group, for example, in New York in the '90s, where women banded together and dealt with it. If someone was having a problem, they would call on the other women and invoke a community response without involving the police, to address the safety issue, in a way that would allow everyone to keep living and surviving, instead of, "Hey police, come pluck out this person."
That's a kind of low flying... it's a helicopter. We don't see that much. Maybe it's going from Albany to the city. That could be. People assume that this very expensive, very punitive, and cruel apparatus, at least, is keeping them safe, but what is safety? When I tell you, "Think about safety. What do you imagine?" You don't imagine 100 police officers right outside my door. You think, or most people say, "My grandmother's kitchen table," "My kids playing in my backyard."
Emily:
Safe neighborhoods have fewer police.
Chloe:
Exactly, exactly. And stronger community infrastructure. We're seeing some more cool cairn things.
Emily:
Oh wow. Yeah, these are huge.
Chloe:
Yeah. I have the suspicion that these are more recent, but there's ones back up in the woods that I think may be older.
Emily:
Yeah. It's interesting, because it's a little bit of a spire, but also then it's a swirling pattern that leads up to the tall shaft.
Chloe:
Well, I think the rocks were here. You see these piles of rocks.
Jay:
That shale. Yeah.
Chloe:
But then, there's stonewall construction, and then these circles on top are added. Yeah, so the criminal justice system, all this to say, when we say system, it's really a set of systems, all of these local jurisdictions making their own discretionary choices about how to enforce things, because you've got to understand the prosecutor has, basically, un-reviewable, limitless power to decide whether to charge you or not. They don't have to charge even a murder. There's no requirement to charge anything, so they're deciding how to direct their resources. Now, if they don't charge a murderer, for some reason or another, the state attorney general might or a federal prosecutor might. But they can decide what to charge and then the type of charges that you're allowed to bring, it's kind of flexible. So if you're carrying two bags of drugs of some kind, is that for personal use or is that for sale? Personal use might be misdemeanor, sale might be a felony.
And they might say, "Based on the circumstances, it was a sale." Was it a sale? So they'll call it possession with intent to distribute, which is going to be a much more serious charge than simple possession. So there's a lot that is happening at the local level, with discretion, and not just the elected district attorney, but all of the line prosecutors who work for them. We have this new wave, that I've worked hard to create, of forward thinking district attorneys, but there might be 1,000 DAs in the Chicago office, for example. That's a lot of personnel with a lot of habits, a lot of assumptions, a lot of ways that they are sure they're helping communities.
Emily:
Yeah. I've been hearing about some of these DAs, actually from friends who are public defenders, they say what a radical thing it was for Chesa Boudin, in the Bay Area, to go from being a public defender to the DA's office, because the worldview can be seen as so radically different, to be on that prosecutorial side.
Chloe:
Yeah. Chesa Boudin, it's interesting too, because his mother, Kathy Boudin, was incarcerated for like 20 years, and his father's still in prison. They were in the Weatherman.
Emily:
That's interesting, back to what you were saying before, about involving people who are directly effected to get into these positions, because if what you're saying, at the local level there's so much discretion, then your own upbringing, the ecosystem you grew up in is going to inform so much, right? Like the soil you're in. It's like you were saying before about the trees and what side of the mountain they grow on, right? The soil's going to dictate what grows there.
Chloe:
Yes, and on top of all of that, is the fact that these offices have been stepping stones to higher political office, and often people will campaign for state legislature, mayor, senate, any of these positions saying, "I was tough. I brought safety." I mean, that was the line for years. Now, what we're seeing and really happy about, as a result of a lot of hard work, is a sense of a different standard for what people are going to expect and want to see in their representative. So you might have seen that Kamala Harris followed the perfect path, particularly for a Black woman, to achieve higher office by being a prosecutor. But she's been dinged for it, because she was a prosecutor in the '90s and the early aughts and sent a lot of people to prison and jail. She wasn't brutal and ruthless, the way some of the other folks have been. I think she has somewhat of a reformer orientation, but is that a little adjustment or smash it down, and people now are looking for some smashing.
Emily:
This notion of starting to smash it down feels like a very different shift, and you're actually the person who introduced me to this concept that movements have seasons, right? And you change, literally, the weather around a topic. From your perspective, one, I'd love to hear you explain that idea, and then what season are we in right now for this movement?
Chloe:
Seasons, which I've been trained in by Carlos Saavedra and Paul Engler of the Ayni Institute. A-Y-N-I. Ayni Institute. The seasons concept says that on the individual, organizational, and movement level we have seasons and they happen at different lengths. For people, a person, according to Carlos, ideas we're chewing on, he thinks a season for an individual lasts maybe a year or a year and a half. Winter, spring, summer, fall, and I'll get into what they mean in a second. Organizations, a bit longer, and movements a bit longer. And the seasons aren't guaranteed to be of equal length. You can have a really long, bad winter, for example. What do they represent? The winter is a cold... it's kind of like East Coast seasons, right? Winter is a cold, quiet, reflective time. You can't really build things. You can't grow anything, but you can plan, and you can recover, you can rest. [inaudible 00:33:08] to the extent people had ancestors in Ancient Europe, in the Ice Age, who'd basically try to sleep the whole winter, rest most of the time, and they were very active in summer. So winter is cold and quiet, and we'll come back to it.
Spring, starting to see some buds, new activity, it can be a hungry time, though, because your winter stores have run out and you haven't yet hit a real summer. Then summer, it's hot, it's flourishing, there's abundance, a lot of activity, and then the fall is starting to cool off, but you hopefully get some kind of harvest and you store up for the winter, figure out how you're going to last through the next winter. On a movement level, winter would be, "No one's talking about my issue, can't get any traction." I think, immigration is in a winter, for example. Because even though we have these moments, like the border crisis, when people all were paying attention to the kids incarcerated at the border, that was like a hot day in January. Unseasonably warm, but then it goes back to feeling like you can't catch any traction, you can't get anything done, and it's just politically impossible.
Chloe:
Spring, there's a lot of new organizations, new things happening, maybe, maybe. And we were in kind of a debate several months ago of, "Where are we in criminal justice?" There's a lot of good prosecutor stuff happening, is that a mild summer? Are we still in spring? Did we pass? Are we now in fall? Where are we? And then, George Floyd happened and we're like, "Oh, this is summer. This is what we're talking about." And where the heat is the public attention and there's people's on the move, your movement is growing, people are signing up, people are learning, reading about it, talking about it, making podcasts about it. That's summertime. And what summer does is, again, sets up the conditions for a good harvest. If you want to pass something big, like the Civil Rights Act, for example, in the '60s. The bus boycotts and all of that activity set the conditions where that felt kind of essential. The political bodies have to give in some kind of way.
Emily:
Perhaps, even inevitable.
Chloe:
Well, something has to give. When the people are in the streets for a really long time, I mean, you could just try to repress it or you could give... there's a nice frog... or you could give in. But what are the politicians going to give in on is also important. Do you want a bridge renamed after John Lewis or do want the Voting Rights Act reinstated? Obviously, we'd like to have both, but there's a certain kind of, "Where is the energy of the moment going to be directed?" The thing about the seasons is, and there's a lot of interesting things about this model, but one is to recognize the extent to which people are normally living their lives. Wouldn't it be better if we were always in summer? Can we keep the attention and heat? We just want to stay in this moment where people care about our issue, or in your own life, "I just want to be flourishing in this energy."
But staying in summer too long, you just get cooked. It's hot, you get dried out, you run out of ideas, you overuse the land. You need to restore. You need to go through some stages to be able to have a series of bountiful summer, which on the movement level, as you can imagine, winter, spring, summer, fall. Winter, spring, summer, fall. Or actually, from summer to summer. Good summer, through the seasons, next summer, next summer, if you want to achieve a big goal, like the abolition of prison, it's not going to happen in one year, movement year, so to speak. Not one calendar year, obviously. But winter, spring, summer... one cycle will not get you to abolition. But maybe you could plot a course and say, "In five jumps, we could get there. Or three jumps." If this summer we get to hear and establish these principles and have this many people paying attention and change these laws, then next summer we could get to here and so on.
And I found that really helpful, because normally it's just like, "From now to the future, let's hope that public attention always stays on our issues, so we can just fight and fight and fight and get there." And this seasonal model gives you a rhythm and a sense that you'll achieve a bunch, then you need to have your fall, have your harvest, go back to your winter, replenish, read, train, rest. Fix the tears in your organizations. Get yourself ready and think, "Okay, what's the next thing we're going to go for?" But it's very rare that people in movements are thinking like that. Like, "Okay, great. Looking forward to our winter, because our next summer..." I think people worry the next year will just never come or the winter will last for 50 years. We have to just hold on.
Jay:
We have to just eat everything right now, in the middle of summer, or else. It makes me think of, I've planted probably 20 fruit trees on our property, and it's a similar thing, it's a multi-year thing. There's also the pruning that you have to do. There's some growth that you need to just let go of, but the stakes get higher every year. That particular pear tree, now I'm three years in, if some little vole comes and tears all the bark off that, I'm going to be extra mad. The stakes get higher the more and more that gets invested, but I think that's part of wisdom.
Chloe:
But you also see it as this continuous process, instead of I need my tree to go from zero to producing a ton of fruit in this one year, and if it doesn't, I'm done with that tree. You think people mourn understandably. The passing of the Civil Rights moment. It was great in the '60s and in the '70s it got depressing, and then Reagan, oh my god. I'm not saying to celebrate that, but people feel time like, "I guess that's it." And then, the energy comes back, "Oh god, another chance." Instead of saying, "Okay, if there's important unaddressed material needs, we're going to see that energy again."
For example, I know a group working on Me Too stuff, which isn't the focus of public attention right now, and it could be hard to work when people aren't paying attention. But if they get everything ready for the next movement moment on Me Too, which is going to come, because it's an unaddressed important need around gender-based violence and power and patriarchy, that didn't go away, it's going to come back. So know that you will get your public attention moment and prepare for it, even though along the way it's kind of disappointing that people aren't caring.
Jay:
It's just a much longer horizon, too. It makes me think of, I think it's Ovid or one of those old Roman fellas. There was a saying, I'm probably getting it wrong, and it's a patriarchal formulation, but it's, "It's a good society, in which old men plant trees, in which they will never feel the shade." That sense of long-term investment.
Chloe:
Or I remember our chaplain in my high school telling us once that there's a church in England or something, where they built the church and planted a grove of trees that, in 500 years, would be ready to fix the roof when it needed fixing.
Jay:
Wow, yeah. That's a long view.
Chloe:
That's a long view. I mean, of course, religions, perhaps, have the confidence to have that kind of length of perspective as to how long they going to be around.
Jay:
Or the faith.
Chloe:
On the personal level, the seasons are important, too, because Carlos will say, "Respect your winters. Don't fight it." People are like, "Oh god, my energy is down. I just don't have..." They're feeling disappointed and depressed that they don't have the ability to produce. Produce, produce, produce. They don't have the ability to produce. And people then think, "Oh, it's just really bad. It's just really hard." They want to fight that feeling and maybe be ashamed of it, or in an organization feel like, "I'm supposed to be directing this organization, but I'm in this personal winter and my movement is in summer." If you have the language for it you can say, "Ah, this is what's going on. I'm in winter. You're in summer, so here's how I'm going to engage and be helpful, even though I can't be manic right now."
Jay:
It gives you permission to lie fallow?
Chloe:
Yes. And recognize that, I mean, perhaps someone could say capitalism pushes us to produce, produce, be in summer all the time, which is totally exhausting and unsustainable, instead of to, strategically, on the movement level, to say, "Let's get ready for a summer moment, I think it's going to come," so what will we need to be ready? What will we wish? Because in summer you can't build anything. You got what you got. But you could anticipate, "Well, if we're going to have a summer movement, I will wish that we had done 50 more trainings of this kind, so let's do those, and then be ready."
Emily:
It sounds like that also requires an awareness of other around you. You can't just be the one human lifespan and assume that's where the goal is going to get accomplished. And that interdependence, then, feels super, super important.
Chloe:
Well, the way Carlos puts it is, "Sometimes, you have a person who's a great leader. They're really passionate about an issue, they really want to help, and they should work on their own individual level on something that is important they care about, and run around and go to meetings and try to make a change." At some point, the individual may learn or decide, "I can't do this by myself. I need an organization. I need to team up with others to do this." So you form your group or maybe form a legal organization and work away. And then, at some point, you say, "The issue is actually still bigger than what we can handle. We need a movement. We need to be working in ecology with our groups like ours, other groups that are different, because the structural change needed is bigger than what we can accomplish as an individual or as an organization."
And what is interesting about criminal justice, as I've observed, and it's probably true in other movements, too, there's a recognition that a movement is necessary to achieve the change we want to see, but a lot of people are moving with individual or organizational logic, so defending their own turf or their organization's turf.
Emily:
So not the super organism.
Chloe:
Exactly.
Jay:
Just to go back for a sec to the seasonality piece, for this movement that you're involved in and related issues, well, two part question, as the fall comes, we're obviously in the summer of it, as you look towards the fall, what is the harvest? What is the specific legislation you're seeking? And then, what is that longer five, 10 year harvest?
Chloe:
Well, I think there's not just one harvest, particularly because this issue, as we described, lives so much at the local level. There's not a federal bill explicitly on criminal justice that's your home run thing, so the harvest looks different in different places. In one county it might look the county resolving to tear down a jail, like they're doing in Los Angeles. They are examining whether they can decommission Men's Central Jail within the next year.
Now, there are many jails in LA, but the biggest one and the baddest, in the sense of it's just violent and a really bad place to be. Kind of falling apart and horrible. It's been acknowledged for a while Men's Central is horrible, but the liberal response is to say, "That jail was horrible, let's close it and build a much nicer jail, where people can have educational classes and see their families, and all this stuff." Which starts to beg the question of, "Why are we doing all that in jail?" People need those things, but does it have to be in a locked facility? Maybe in extreme cases, but there's kind of few of those. So they're harvesting things all the time in LA right now. It's kind of an amazing-
Jay:
Bears.
Chloe:
... bountiful moment.
Jay:
Bears.
Chloe:
Is there a bear?
Jay:
That's a mama.
Chloe:
Oh my god.
Emily:
Oh wow.
Chloe:
Logan.
Jay:
They're little babies.
Chloe:
Baby bears.
Jay:
Two cubs. Mama and two cubs.
Emily:
Three, I think.
Jay:
That's a mama-
Chloe:
Logan, you want to stay-
Jay:
... and two because.
Chloe:
... away from that bear.
Emily:
I think there's three cubs.
Chloe:
Wow.
Jay:
Don't mess with a mama bear.
Chloe:
Okay, we're curving down to the right and we can just move it along.
Emily:
Yep.
Jay:
Oh, wow.
Chloe:
Logan. Let's not have my dog eaten by a bear.
Emily:
Yep.
Chloe:
Logan.
Jay:
Oh, it's three cubs.
Emily:
Yeah.
Chloe:
Logan, come.
Jay:
She is...
Chloe:
Logan.
Emily:
He's going after them.
Chloe:
Okay, well, he's quick. I think he'll hold his distance and not-
Jay:
He's coming.
Chloe:
... actually get eaten.
Emily:
Yeah, he's coming back.
Jay:
He's coming.
Emily:
Wow.
Jay:
And luckily, the cubs were on the other side of her.
Emily:
Yeah, they were running off. Wow.
Chloe:
That's pretty cool.
Emily:
Those were awesome.
Chloe:
So the harvest looks different in different places, it might also be in LA right now, we've been planning for years, for four years, to challenge the incumbent, who went completely without a challenger in 2016. LA County has 10 million people and 86 cities, I think. 10 million people, twice the size of Louisiana and larger than many states, vast budget. It's a huge jurisdiction. It would be a very major state in its own right. And so, it's kind of a big deal to do anything in LA County, because one in 33 Americans lives there, that's another way to think about it.
Emily:
That's where I grew up.
Chloe:
Yeah. Cool spot. Lacey went unchallenged in 2016.
Emily:
And Lacey is what role?
Chloe:
The incumbent district attorney. Sorry.
Emily:
District attorney. Okay, got it.
Chloe:
Overseeing the county criminal justice system, from the perspective of deciding who to charge. But to the movement moment point, in Los Angeles, good timing. The harvest, it looks like, could be, that George Gascón, who is the pioneering reform prosecutor in San Francisco, but is from LA, moved back home for family reasons, was recruited by community organizers to run, may win this year. And if he wins, it will be because of the larger movement moment that we're in. The infrastructure was in place. He's a great candidate, but to take out a sitting incumbent, who happens to be a Black woman, as well, is a huge task. But Black Lives Matter Los Angeles has really been calling attention to DA Lacey's bad policies and lots of people are now paying attention to what Black Lives Matter Los Angeles says, so it's a good confluence.
If all of this were happening in 2018, it would've died down by the time she was up for election and it would be much harder to unseat her. Elections matter a lot. I'd also say that money streams matter a lot, so when the federal government allocates money to the states for their safety budgets, where does that money go? Where does Victim of Crime Act money go? Does it all go to the police or does it go to other things? And that's starting to be questioned right now. Under the CARES Act, there was a portion of that act that sent millions of dollars to the states for public safety and, in Illinois, advocates convinced the government to commit to allocating all of their CARES Act money to community-based organizations, addressing violence and safety in their communities, instead of to police. Imagine that as a philanthropic gift. That's a huge deal for those organizations to get this influx of cash.
So yes, elections matter a lot, and also the more people at levels of government and in the public are understanding that, the way to address safety concerns isn't just through more prison, jails, and police, the more a lot of decisions can shift around allocations of resources that change the result.
Emily:
That's awesome.
Jay:
Cool. It's so beautiful here.
Emily:
It really is.
Chloe:
It's pretty good. Good bird action. And I'm really proud, they say of course, that frogs, there's certain species that are really sensitive to the environment being disrupted, frogs among them. So the fact that we have so many frogs makes me feel like we're doing a good job, meaning we're not slathering pesticides all over the place.
Emily:
The children have caught an exponential number of frogs.
Chloe:
They're everywhere. Frogs, lizards, lightning bugs, howling dogs in the background.
Emily:
Bears.
Chloe:
I mean, we had a good distance from that bear, but anytime you see a cub it's just this sense of like, "Oh no."
Emily:
One of the things that we like to ask people is to take us far afield, right? What is something that you do or have in your life that you're either passionate about, a hobby, an interest or obsession, recent Wikipedia death spiral, just something that you find really interesting that you could talk to us about?
Chloe:
That's not criminal justice?
Emily:
That's not criminal justice.
Chloe:
I mean, I do have this problem of always working, in the sense that my mind is devoted very deeply to this topic, so everything around me, I'm relating to it all the time. But something I was getting into pre-Minneapolis, but once we were in COVID was scenario planning, trying to understand that better, because I thought, "What is the world going to look like in a year? And are we thinking properly about it?" And mostly, we're like, "Oh yeah, the budgets are going to be in trouble," this or that, but it wasn't clear thinking, so I read up a bit about it. And it's something that companies do all the time, which is to take the two biggest uncertainties that are going to have the most impact on your situation, which could require a lot of thinking to discern what those are, and you map them out at X and Y axis. So all the way from definitely not going to happen to all the way going to happen.
So you could take COVID deaths, for example, if you say, "That's really important to what we're trying to work on." Very few deaths to a lot of deaths, and the other axis would be the other uncertainty. Trump wins, Biden wins, something like that. And then, in the four quadrants you say, "Low deaths, Trump wins. Low deaths, Trump loses. High deaths, Biden wins," whatever. And then, you name them. You're like, "What is the reality where these different things are true and when you can focus on it like that, you're like, "Okay, now I'm in a world where Biden is president, but COVID is raging. How do we even think about that kind of world? Well, now I'm in a world where Trump is president and COVID is raging," or whatever your uncertainties are.
And I like that, again, for the same reasoning I was telling you before, to get away from the mush and into some specific stances and to see, "Okay, we can deal with one, two, and three, but four would be just catastrophic. Can we orient ourself a little bit better to the possibilities of four?" It's not meant to predict which world you're going to be in, but more to say, "Are we comfortable being zero prepared for that fourth scenario, which is just as likely as the other three."
Jay:
Right. And at least you've contemplated it, even if you haven't gone and procured a whole bunch of whatever. You've contemplated it, and if it doesn't go there, then you can maybe appreciate where you are more and have deeper gratitude.
Chloe:
So apparently Shell did this in the '50s and '60s and they were better prepared for the oil shock in the '70s, because they'd thought about it.
Emily:
There's something valuable about just even naming the possibility. Right? And then, you can start to think about all of those futures, and I like that concept of actually naming the points of intersection, too.
Chloe:
I still am interested in this. Now, we're sort of past the height of the real Minneapolis moment, though it's still around, to think like New Orleans after Katrina, that was catastrophic, but literally and figuratively washed a lot of things away, so now you could build other things instead. You can't stick with your old habits, because that stuff just literally isn't there anymore. That's the transformative moment potential, is when things are going to be... Hi, this is my dog. Hello, Logan.
Jay:
Hi Logan.
Chloe:
You're breathing very hard. So that's one thing that I've been thinking about.
Jay:
These days, what are your practices or what are the things that are keeping you grounded, that are keeping you anchored?
Chloe:
You presume that I'm anchored and grounded.
Jay:
Or attempting.
Emily:
Attempting.
Jay:
Attempting.
Emily:
What shore are you heading towards?
Chloe:
Well, being up here in upstate New York is definitely more grounding than being in the city. Logan, come here. Stop bothering the microphone. I really, really like going to our local swimming hole and diving in. That's very refreshing. Walking just around the house outside, barefoot on our terrace, and looking at the sunlight in the trees. That's very restorative. I'm not one of those elevated people that has a good daily yoga regimen or mediation or anything like that. I recognize that those are good things for people to do, it just has never been my style.
Jay:
Being barefoot on the terrace, looking at the sunlight sounds like a meditation, to me.
Chloe:
Yeah. They're little moments, like two seconds. Like, "That's really excellent the way the light is falling through the trees." And appreciating all these rock formations around here, and water flowing past rock. That's restorative.
Emily:
Thanks so much. This was fun.
Chloe:
Great.
Emily:
This was a good hike. I really appreciate you taking the time.
Jay:
And we saw toads and we saw cairns and bears and-
Emily:
Deer.
Jay:
... deer.
Emily:
We saw all the things.
Chloe:
And I yelled at my dog, who might've got eaten by a bear.
Emily:
Didn't, didn't get eaten by a bear. Good job, Logan.
Chloe:
Good job, Logan.
Jay:
An update, the reformer George Gascón won his race for LA County District Attorney. Last month, Chloe wrote about the significance of that victory in an op-ed for the Washington Post titled, Money Can't Buy Criminal Justice Reform, But it Can Fuel the Movement.
