Our team made it to New Orleans this year for NACRJ, where our Restorative Justice Director, Matthew Kama’aina, joined Mike Milton of Freedom Community Center to remind us that peacemakers must be political and locate our work in the fight for freedom and liberation of all people. This work is not neutral. It is a blueprint to get us free.
When CJ travels, we root ourselves with the people, land, and history of the place we’re visiting. Many of us first came to restorative and transformative justice work through our relationships with prisons—whether as incarcerated people, family members, survivors, advocates, or community members. For some of us, prisons - sites of state violence and repression - were among the first places we witnessed accountability, healing, leadership, and humanity emerge against incredible odds. So we started behind the walls.
Before we joined NACRJ in Louisiana this year, Collective Justice, Life Comes From It and the Louisiana Parole Project brought comrades to visit the Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola).
Peacemakers must be political and locate our work in the fight for freedom and liberation of all people. This work is not neutral.
Angola sits on a former slave plantation, where roughly 4,000 of the 5,000 prisoners are sentenced to life behind bars, where overwhelmingly Black incarcerated people still work the fields on that same land while armed guards sit on horseback, while others are held for decades in solitary confinement. Where the veil between plantation and prison is nearly nonexistent. The legacy and enduring conditions of Slavery are apparent. This visit was an opportunity to turn towards this reality, connect with and learn from those inside, and ground ourselves in the conditions that continue to animate our work.
From Washington, we can imagine ourselves far from that history. We are not. Our prisons also separate families, extract and exploit labor, disappear people behind walls in solitary confinement, and invest in punishment over vital community safety.
But, like our prisons here, Angola is also a place of resistance. People inside are organizing, mentoring, tending relationships, practicing accountability, and building freedom. Where there is oppression, there is resistance. At Angola, we witnessed both.
With Life Comes From It and Freedom to Grow, we gathered at the Abolition Apothecary and Abolitionist’s Sanctuary, where land and medicine reminded us that abolition is our birthright. Lastly, with Beyond Harm NOLA and CJ’s founding Healing Justice Coach Teddy McGlynn Wright, we deepened our circle practice among friends and comrades who are building community solutions to violence across the country.
We came home carrying the same lesson we encountered throughout the South: another world is already being practiced—in prisons, gardens, circles, and relationships. Our work is to grow it.
Gratitude to JustFund for making this ongoing learning possible.
To learn more, join Gary Tyler in conversation with Jesse Hagopian November 9 about his new book, “Stitching Freedom: A True Story of Injustice, Defiance, and Hope in Angola Prison.”
