The Significance of Carceral Advocacy by Alexander Valentine
Natural Rights
This nation was founded on the recognition of inalienable rights – those which cannot be completely taken from a person by anything short of death. These are your natural rights – life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Among these, the pursuit of happiness stands out because it is your right to act. You have the right to act in the ways which will influence the world you experience as you believe correct.
Social Agreements
In forming a society, there is an agreement that you will limit your rights in one specific way. Your rights will not exceed the rights of others. Once others are involved, their rights balance with yours, and the collective agreements – government, laws, and regulations – of your society will be binding on you. However, you have just as much right to shape those agreements as any other member of society. This can be seen in the five expressions of these principles found in the First Amendment – freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, and freedom of exercise (action).
Our society has agreed that its members may be imprisoned. Imprisonment imposes on your natural rights in physical terms, but you still retain liberty interests and you still hold a place in society – your right to petition. You have a right to act and advocate for what you believe in, and that right must be recognized, however grudgingly, by society and its government. No agreement – no confinement can take that from you, but your choice to remain idle can.
Carceral Advocacy: Personal Value
Imprisonment is designed to incapacitate – to promote being idle – and this is the first reason why your efforts of advocacy are so important. Overcoming the dulling of prison requires you to advocate for yourself – demand of yourself that you recognize your own worth.
Imprisonment creates learned helplessness. It comes from influences like having meals and their times decided by others, unwanted jobs given by others, and doors opened by others. Overcoming this learned helplessness requires you to advocate for yourself. This begins with your voice and your writing to petition for change – change of the agreements, rules, and regulations that impose on your daily life.
Imprisonment is founded on isolation. You are physically removed from society, stigmatized, and disregarded by others. While there is a suggestion that this is justice, it is just a suggestion. Too many take it as fact. Too many simply accept they have no place and are no longer relevant or entitled to a place in society’s decisions. Overcoming this suggestion requires that you advocate for yourself and for others.
Carceral Advocacy: Social Value
There is power in having been discounted. Anything you do – other than nothing – will be unexpected. Your voice and your efforts of advocacy will have shock value. You will have the capacity to be a restorative disruption to society. Like any right it is up to you in how well you will use that capacity. This is a lesson that those of us writing this guide and many before us have come to appreciate. There is no answer for a person who was forgotten when they suddenly speak boldly with a purpose greater than themselves.
Practice matters as much as perseverance and patience to give carceral advocacy its power. As you learn, take up issues, and reject the suggestion that you have no place, your contribution to wider efforts of social change grows in value and in respect. There are many opportunities such as initiating pop-up campaigns like #CACityWhereWeCageChildren (opposition to new ICE facility), videos made from kiosks, local organizing efforts connecting to larger organizations, letters in support or opposition to legislation, or outreach through families, friends, and professors. You have tremendous potential to be a force of change.
Your voice matters if you make it matter!
