Each and every one of us has the power to improve the places we hold in common, whether we are concerned with the neighborhood, city, nation, or planet.—Mindy Thompson Fullilove 2004, 7

Coming Together, Face to Face

In January of 2018, our community hosted civil rights attorney and educator Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010). Though Alexander’s visit was to be a short one, many folks worked tirelessly to ensure that the impact of the visit to our university campus and its larger community would be a lasting one. Throughout the fall of 2017, several reading circles, film screenings, discussion groups, and workshops on Alexander’s work and ideas brought together academics, K–12 educators, advocates for civil rights and criminal justice reform, and other members of the community as we all prepared to welcome our guest. One of these reading circles comprised a few members of the campus community and several formerly incarcerated citizens involved in the Buncombe County Reentry Council, an organization dedicated to helping ex-cons “locate resources and assistance in [our state]” (Buncombe County Reentry Council 2016). All participants in this group had recently read The New Jim Crow and were eager to share their views on it with one another.

Though not every person was able to make every meeting of this circle, the conversations were lively, fluid, and friendly. Given the relative rarity of opportunities for collaboration between academics and the community of the formerly incarcerated, we were all delighted simply to meet in person and share an hour of each other’s company once a week for four weeks. Though we all came at the common reading from very different directions, as often as not we found shared perspectives and reactions to the text.

Several months later, a few of us gathered again to talk about the experience of reading Michelle Alexander’s work with one another. Over beers at a local brewery, we looked back on our engagement with the text in the year past and unpacked our thoughts on the book and on the subsequent impact it has had on our ways of seeing the world. What follows is a “curated” version of this more recent conversation, edited for length and clarity and rearranged thematically to explore some of the ideas that presented themselves most strongly. Indeed, our primary purpose in the present piece is to examine the concrete takeaways that emerged from a collaboration between various communities, including universities, communities of faith, and former inmates.

As participants in the conversation, we represented several smaller communities within the larger one we all share, and each of us in our own way helped to build bridges between those smaller communities. Brent Bailey is the coordinator of the Buncombe County Reentry Council. A formerly incarcerated African American male, he came to our conversation with a better firsthand understanding of the criminal justice system than any of the rest of us. Luke Broderick and Jeffrey Deon Jones (Deon), also formerly incarcerated individuals, brought similar experience. Deon, a black male, was unable to join in the face-to-face conversation but sent his thoughts on our meeting separately, and Luke, a white male, has enrolled at our university as a full-time student in our chemistry program since his release. Rob Parsons, a middle-aged white male who serves our region’s United Methodist Church as its vitality strategist, represented our area’s faith community. His work often puts him in close contact with currently and formerly incarcerated individuals, and led to his collaboration with the university on Michelle Alexander’s visit.

Meanwhile, Patrick Bahls, Regine Criser, and Laura Meadows represented the campus community. Regine was born in Germany before emigrating to the US; Patrick and Laura are American citizens. All three of us are white and serve the university as tenured or tenure-track faculty members in our disciplines (foreign languages, mass communication, and mathematics, respectively). All three have taught courses in which criminal justice plays a central role. Additionally, Regine has taught a number of courses inside correctional facilities. With Patrick’s help, she is currently working to revive our university’s long-defunct higher education in prison program.

As our conversation made clear to us, our reading group and subsequent reflection on it offered several important takeaways, all of which were inflected in some way by our participants’ relative levels of power and privilege. One takeaway was a sense of immediacy and concreteness that our conversations gave to the systematic discrimination at the core of Michelle Alexander’s work. For the more privileged among us, our interactions moved the discrimination Alexander addresses out of the realm of the abstract and into the here and now. These persons, who were not, as Brent put it in the first meeting of the reading group, “criminal-justice-involved individuals,” gained a greater understanding of the capriciousness of the criminal justice system. Meanwhile, those who had served time in a correctional facility developed a better sense of just what had happened to them. Reading and discussing The New Jim Crow helped them see the systematic biases built into the prison industrial complex, biases they often found difficult to see clearly from within the system itself.

Another takeaway was a desire for more conversation, based on the realization that it is largely through conversation that we build our communities and shape our identities, particularly our identities as members of a broader national community in need of, as Michelle Alexander herself has put it, a moral and spiritual awakening (2016). As our words in subsequent sections will show, we were often acutely aware of our roles as representatives of various communities (e.g., the campus, the church, and the formerly incarcerated), and we saw conversation among our respective communities as a critical ingredient in social change. Conversation also helped bring to light commonly overlooked connections between our communities. While there is overlap between, for instance, the academic community and the incarcerated community, this overlap often remains explicitly unacknowledged. Conversations like ours can help to illuminate the common ground these communities and others occupy.

A final important takeaway from our work together was a collection of concrete actions for future collaboration. If it is a moral and spiritual awakening that is called for, we asked ourselves, what work can we do, in and across our respective communities, to help bring such an awakening about? Ultimately, our conversation helped us to plan allocation of community resources, advocacy for political change agents, and future collaborations. Through our dialogue, potential solutions took on the same concreteness and clarity that characterized the inequities in the criminal justice system against which we were fighting.

As noted above, the purpose of the present piece is to understand how concrete ideas for social change can arise from interactions among community members with very different backgrounds who come together around a common cause. Our hope is that our readers might adopt and adapt our model (read together, reflect together, write together) in other settings, as a means of building community.

Our Conversation’s Context: The New Jim Crow

Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow is not without its critics.¹ Nevertheless, the book has proven groundbreaking in its indictment of the American criminal justice system as “a system of social control unparalleled in world history” (Alexander 2010, 8) that “marginalizes large segments of the African American community, segregates them physically . . . and then authorizes discrimination against them in voting, employment, housing, education, public benefits, and jury service” (17). According to Alexander, the prison industrial complex has taken over the position earlier occupied by Jim Crow laws and, earlier still, slavery. She argues that our legal system relies on a crazy quilt of ostensibly race-neutral laws and procedures to systematically discriminate against persons of color at every step from a person’s initial contact with law enforcement officers, through arrest and arraignment, trial and sentencing, and even beyond, after the person’s formal release from the penal system. Moreover, Alexander indicates how legal challenges to discrimination have been rendered difficult, if not impossible, by several decades of court cases that have eroded defendants’ judicial standing.

Though it is not the focus of her book, Alexander connects her analysis to the prison industrial complex more broadly, comparing modern prisoners’ experience to that of prisoners in the post-Civil War era of convict-leasing, and remarking on mass incarceration’s profitability. “Even beyond private prison companies,” she notes, “a whole range of prison profiteers must be reckoned with if mass incarceration is to be undone,” and she proceeds to implicate phone companies, gun manufacturers, health care providers, the US military, corporations reliant on prison labor, and the politicians, lawyers, and bankers who prop up the for-profit system (Alexander 2010, 231–232). Given this enormous scope, Alexander maintains that “nothing short of a major social movement can successfully dismantle the new caste system” bolstered by the prison industrial complex (18).

Such a social movement must indeed be a broad one, for there is no place in the nation that remains untouched by the prison industrial complex. Indeed, the citizens of our region have seen its effects, most prominently in discretionary misapplication of police force (Burgess 2018). All too often these ills go unseen and consequently unaddressed. Though our conversations cannot offer a panacea, they offer a means of connecting citizens across the boundaries that break our communities apart.

Our Conversation Begins: Mass Incarceration in the Here and Now

Patrick began the brewery conversation by asking folks to identify what they got out of the initial meetings on The New Jim Crow, and Regine responded to this invitation by pointing out how those meetings helped to make the issues Alexander addresses tangible and real, urging us to go beyond thinking about these issues to formulating solutions to pressing problems:

For me, it made it all more concrete, more important, and instead of just talking about the book, I think the conversations really helped me understand like, how this relates to the day-to-day . . . it brought it very much to real life and made it very current for me, and also it made it more of a call to action. I feel like at the end of our sessions, we always go to a “what now? What next? What can we do?” and I thought it was very motivating, because some of the chapters could be overwhelming and depressing, but I feel like our conversations always allowed me to say, “okay, I can take this and channel it into something else.”

Laura agreed. In her words, “as someone working on a college campus, I sometimes feel disconnected from the real world. Talking through this material with this reading group really helped get me out of that ‘ivory tower mentality’ and refocused on more pragmatic solutions to problems we too often treat as purely theoretical.”

Patrick concurred: “It’s so academic when I teach [Alexander’s book] in my classes . . . but to bring it home and to talk to people who have been caught up in the system and who have been directly impacted.” Patrick went on to highlight the experience of one particular group member, for whom we use the pseudonym “Reggie”:

I think it might have been Reggie who talked about his experience of reading it for the first time on the inside and coming to the realization of what exactly had happened to him, and how he had gotten caught up in the system . . . until he had read the book, I think he had some understanding that the system was rigged, but to see how thoroughly it was rigged and stacked against him . . . it was really powerful for me to hear that from a living, breathing person who had been through that and not just in the abstract.

On further reflection, these words gave those of us in the academy pause. Though many of our students and colleagues have entanglements with the criminal justice system, those entanglements are generally not talked about. What benefit might there be, we wondered, were we to recognize and destigmatize such complicity? The mere acknowledgement of overlap between the academic community and the community of formerly and currently incarcerated individuals might go a long way toward repairing social rifts nationwide.

In his role as Coordinator of the Buncombe County Reentry Council, Brent was familiar with Reggie’s case, and in elaborating on this case he showed how for him the reading had helped to contextualize the workings of the criminal justice system that were already familiar to him:

What [Reggie] was in prison for, to see the disparity in sentencing in his case . . . possibly no one in the state of [our state] had done as much time for what he did. . . . Obviously he was targeted, and they had the leverage to throw the book at him, and they did . . . I had seen it happen, in real time, to myself and other people, but then to get the explanation right there [in the text], it definitely was enlightening.

Thus, the bridge our reading group built for us permitted travel both ways. Those of us in academia may have had more familiarity with legal rulings and their impact in the abstract, but the on-the-ground implications of those rulings were foreign to many of us. Meanwhile, those of us who had experienced injustices in the courts may have been unfamiliar with the scope of such injustices until encountering them in Alexander’s work.

The meetings also helped some of us to make real both our privileges and the need to act on them. As Regine put it later on,

I think that the learning circle was very powerful in that it was a very immediate reminder of the different privileges we have . . . you know, you are in a position of privilege and you have certain responsibilities that come with that, and you’d be fine to not do that work, to do some other [academic] work . . . but being in that group was a very immediate reminder that that would just be selfish. There’s immediate work that needs to be done and that we should be doing.

Patrick, a white male from a middle-class background, pointed out that privilege can be a shield, a shield that our conversations on the book had helped to penetrate. He asked, “If you don’t have a friend or family member on the inside, how many folks in the community even know where the jails and prisons are?” Brent, an African American male who had been incarcerated, responded:

It depends. I’ll give you an example. Where I grew up, we all know where the jail is. We all know how to get you out of jail, we know who to call to get you out, it’s just what you grow up with. It might be that there are people who grow up in places where it’s not the norm, so if one of their family members got in, they wouldn’t know. But for most folks, who grew up in any type of poverty, they know.

It is worth remarking that our conversations on Alexander’s book allowed us to speak openly and civilly about our divergent experiences. This was not the only time that one of us noted the “distancing effect” of privilege that led to distinct communities. Rob brought up another concrete example near the end of our time together, referring to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice that had recently opened in Montgomery, Alabama (Equal Justice Initiative 2017):

I recently read an article on the Racial Justice Museum, or what’s it called? . . . How it did such a great job of just saying, “You know what? These cute little girls dressed in their Sunday best? They’re part of the problem too.” You know, it’s just all of society agrees with lynching . . . when you have, not just the thousand people who show up, it’s the churches that go along with it, it’s all that kind of stuff.

Rob’s point is clear: much as the memorial he refers to here encourages visitors to interact with it and to reckon with their complicity in social phenomena like institutional racism and race-motivated violence, our conversations on Alexander forced all of us to acknowledge complicity in mass incarceration, in the here and now. This mutual acknowledgment, performed in each other’s presence, was a recognition that, as Desmond Tutu put it, in translating the Nguni term ubuntu, “my humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours” (Tutu 1999, 31).

In this way, our conversations served as a sort of truth and reconciliation smaller in scale but in kind not unlike that overseen by Archbishop Tutu in South Africa. Our conversations opened up a path to community with one another, and some of us saw signs of a similar phenomenon in the broader community. For instance, Regine hoped that the public outrage over recent instances of racial bias (see Snider 2018 and Wootson 2018) signaled growing skepticism of institutional authority:

Calling the police on barbecuers, and people sleeping in dorm rooms, and whatnot . . . I feel like people are getting called out on for doing bullshit like this and I kind of wonder if this is the beginning of people being like, “I don’t believe it, just because you’re police officers.”

Can conversations really be so powerful?

Conversations, and Community, and Identity

In his book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, Kwame Anthony Appiah holds in high regard conversation, which he interprets “not only [as] literal talk, but also as a metaphor for engagement with the experience and ideas of others” (2006, 85). Though he admits that conversation will not always “lead to agreement about what to think and feel” (84), he remains confident that “conversation doesn’t have to lead to consensus about anything, especially not values; it’s enough that it helps people get used to one another” (85). As Patrick put it in our meeting at the brewery:

I teach [Appiah’s work] in my senior capstone course every semester, and the students hate it because the guy’s a pompous ass, but the central message of the book is one that sticks with the students, and they really appreciate it . . . the central message is . . . we can’t just agree to disagree, because agreeing to disagree just shuts the conversation down . . . what we really need to do to bring people together, to bring community together, is to keep the conversation going, even if we start off hating each other or hating each other’s views, we don’t see eye to eye . . . keep on talking . . . maybe we don’t come to an agreement, but just keep on talking anyway, and just try to understand what the other person is trying to say.

For Appiah and other scholars of intercultural relations, conversations allow each of us the opportunity to come into contact with others’ experiences and perspectives, thereby enriching our own worldview, whether or not we ever come to mutual agreement. In his first contribution to our brewery conversation, Brent was very explicit about how successful our initial meetings on Alexander had been in this regard:

I appreciated the diversity of the group . . . I mean, we were reading the same material, but were able to get different perspectives, and how everybody’s bringing their experience to it . . . [if] I’m only reading it myself, I’m only getting my perspectives, but to get other people’s perspectives was very beneficial to me . . . and broadened my mind and helped me see things differently . . . even other people who was impacted as well, because, you know, we had four or five people in the group who had been incarcerated, and even in mind I thought we’d kind of see it the same, but we didn’t.

Rob seconded this assessment, pointing out the relationships that our conversations had helped to foster, from the very outset of our time together:

For me, the biggest part wasn’t as much the reading and the intellectual journey or whatever, but it was the relationships. For us to be able to partner together and go, let’s open this up to more folks, and the Methodist Church to come in and not only support that but to be able to begin and get Methodist folks to come out and begin that conversation.

Regine circled back to this relationship building later on, also assigning high value to the opening up of the conversation to members of many communities:

But getting together on campus, in that space in the library, I thought it was really powerful to share that space with so many people from different backgrounds with different experiences and we created pretty quickly a community where we were vulnerable in different ways and it was very . . . there were no hierarchies . . . there was a communal spirit that was incredibly powerful for me, and I’m very grateful for that. I think it made it clear that all the differences that might be visible on the surface, if you look at names or ranks or titles or whatnot . . . they were all erased. We were just people reading together and discussing the book and wanting to learn from each other. It was really the spirit of the group that carried on beyond that.

Rob responded by holding up such conversations as an integral part of his work for the United Methodist Church:

Part of our strategy is to have crucial conversations or courageous conversations. To gather people in the community together, church folks and other folks, to be able to have these conversations, without having the fear of “well, I grew up in a racist family, and here’s the only vocabulary I know.”

Yet all acknowledged that sustaining conversations is hard work, especially when the conversations we hope to have lay bare profound differences between the interlocutors. As Luke put it,

I mean, even in my family, it’s like, I’ve got immediate family members who’ve got the most polarized views on the world from what I do, and honestly, I’ve almost gotten to the point where I just don’t want to. It’s really hard, I love you so much, internally, though it’s very difficult to hear you speak. I don’t know, maybe people not being that close to you, like your community, allows you to bridge that gap, but I don’t know.

Regine responded to this immediately, echoing Luke’s views:

I know exactly what you’re talking about. I was temporarily in a point where, like, “you know, why don’t we just avoid those conversations? We can talk about a lot of other things, but we don’t need to talk about this.” Then I had a conversation with a colleague who was like, “Regine, you’ve given up on them! You’re assuming they cannot change, and that’s kind of shortchanging them and it’s creating distance. You’re sealing off a whole part of your thought-space and are being like, ‘you’re not going to talk about that.’ And most likely those are topics you feel rather passionate about, at least in my case,” and I was like, “yeah, I care about these issues and I care about these people,” but this topic and subject . . . I shouldn’t give up.

Sustaining conversations often requires overcoming institutional barriers that separate communities from one another while reinscribing differentials in power and privilege. The campus/community divide offers such a barrier. The university’s campus, a tight cluster of academic buildings and residence halls sprinkled over well-maintained grounds and clearly demarcated by signs and banners prominently displaying the school’s colors, is clearly distinct from the surrounding residential area. This distinction is mirrored and underscored by the school’s majority-white, middle-class demographics. Indeed, Nedra Reynolds (2004) has demonstrated ways in which college campuses are unwelcoming spaces even for traditional undergraduate students, while the experience of folks of color in such spaces is often considerably worse (see also Reddick and Sáenz 2012).

In the middle of our brewery conversation, Patrick interrogated the shared space Regine mentioned in her comment above:

I’ve been trying to break down those barriers between the campus and the community . . . I always wonder when I’m doing these things . . . is it better to do that sort of outreach or bridge building, is it better to meet off campus or on campus? If you go off campus, it sort of signals to the community, “Hey, we wanna be out there,” but if you meet on campus, that’s offering a way into the sphere that isn’t traditionally open to a lot of folks. I don’t know what y’all’s thoughts on that are.

Brent and Regine offered similar responses. As Brent put it, “Personally, I’d strike a balance, probably do a little bit of both. Because if you always do off-campus, then people begin to develop, ‘oh, they don’t want us to come on campus.’” Regine elaborated on the benefits of on-campus meetings:

I remember first meeting, standing in the library, and Reggie coming in with his copy of the book, and he was just looking around, and I was like, “You’re looking for the group!” and he was like, “Yeah.” You know, I just felt like we established that everyone who was in the group belonged here, no matter if you were enrolled or whatnot, I mean, yes, this is a campus, but everyone in the group belonged there, and I felt it was really powerful for everyone in the room to imagine they were part of this campus. And I think yes, we need to be in the community and physically be in the community because we need to get off our campus and out of our offices and see things with our own eyes where it’s happening, but maybe bringing people who would have never considered setting foot on a campus, because why would they? For them to be able to say, yeah, “I belong here!” and have that conversation . . . I thought that was great, and I really like that.

Brent underscored the significance of occupying the campus’s physical space, speaking of his own and his peers’ experience:

Because people tell [formerly incarcerated persons] all the time, “Yeah, you can do what you want to do, you could go to school.” But I’d never be there. But I’d never been on a campus. Something just as small as setting foot on a campus can open up their mind up and say “I can really do this.”

We found it likely that in holding our meetings on campus we had added “scholar” to the list of identities several of our group members carry with them. This identity is one that higher-education-in-prison initiatives aspire to develop for students on the inside. As Patrick noted, referring to past conversations with Regine and others on teaching in prison,

In all of the conversations we’ve had on higher ed in prisons, when you’re teaching there, you don’t refer to people as “inmates” or “felons.” It’s “students.” They are students, in that room, and you are a teacher, in that room. And it reminded me of the term you used, Brent, I think it was “criminal-justice-involved individual.” All of these . . . words matter, and when we use these words to refer to ourselves and one another, that starts to shape identities and really confine who you can be.

As noted in the introduction, in our initial meetings on Alexander, Brent had used the term “criminal-justice-involved individual,” the current legal euphemism for all persons currently under the purview of the criminal justice system (incarcerated persons, parolees, persons on probation, etc.), disparagingly. Now, though, Regine took the term up in a more literal sense, noting how it signals another institutional barrier, between those who are directly “involved” and those who aren’t. She called for us to build community by denying this barrier and owning this shared identity:

What if we start to consider all of us to be criminal-justice-involved people? Because, you know, given the people we know and the communities we live in, we are involved in different ways, but we definitely are all involved somehow, knowingly or unknowingly so.

Rob agreed, noting that it is a problem that

We don’t own our communities. In the Old Testament, in ancient times, if someone was brought before what was like their court then and they were mistakenly charged or got killed or whatever and it was wrong, it was on the whole community. They felt that they got the same responsibility as the person who made the false accusation.

Brent, too, called for us to acknowledge the breadth of the community and its membership: “Parole officers, a part of the community. Prison, like it or not, is in the community. So, if we’re gonna say we’re ‘community-oriented,’ you can’t just pick what part you want to participate in. You gotta take the good with the bad.” Though he was unable to join us for our conversation at the brewery, Deon, also formerly incarcerated, shared his thoughts on our past meetings via email. In his message, he also, independently, exhorted us to recognize our common causes as members of the same community:

This war on drugs that professor Alexander speaks of in The New Jim Crow is typically aimed at what’s not wealthy and white in this country. Being very clear, black people, brown people, and poor people of all colors including WHITE are affected by this mock war on drugs. As an attempt to simplify all of this, I’ve devised this equation: GREEN is the sum of (poor black, brown, and white) BLACK lives being made casualty RED.

This dichotomy (“good/bad”) came up several times in our conversation, often in reference to personal identities. Our social systems, we agreed, tend to view persons as either bad or good but rarely both, as either inmates or scholars but rarely both, and as either burdens to society or contributors to society’s wellbeing but rarely both. And these valuations have real consequences. As Luke pointed out, an asset-based perspective in criminal justice might suggest a reformative, rehabilitative prison system: “European prison systems . . . you go there, and there are systems to make you a better person. Whatever moral standards they’re based on, they’re not punitive. They’re not punitive in nature, which is all we know in the US.”

Meanwhile, a deficit-based perspective of felons, exacerbated by a political culture in which leaders are pressed to lobby for the harshest possible anti-crime measures, underlies our retributive penal system. (“It’s historically been harder if you’re seen as soft,” Laura noted, adding sardonically, “Just ask Michael Dukakis.”) Midway through our conversation, Brent vented his frustration with retributive justice: “But here, we got people right here, right here in [our capital], going ‘we gotta start this death penalty again! Those people on death row? We gotta start getting people out of there.’ Just disposable. These are people!”

Moving Forward: Moral Awakenings and Future Action

In her final post on Facebook before leaving social media, Michelle Alexander explained her reason for leaving behind her legal work and taking a position at Union Theological Seminary:

Without a moral or spiritual awakening, we will remain forever trapped in political games fueled by fear, greed and the hunger for power. American history teaches how these games predictably play out within our borders: Time and again, race gets used as the Trump Card, a reliable means of dividing, controlling and misleading the players so a few can win the game.

This is not simply a legal problem, or a political problem, or a policy problem. At its core, America’s journey from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration raises profound moral and spiritual questions about who we are, individually and collectively, who we aim to become, and what we are willing to do now.

I have found that these questions are generally not asked or answered in law schools or policy roundtables. So I am going to a place that takes very seriously the moral, ethical and spiritual dimensions of justice work: Union Theological Seminary. Union has a proud history of deep commitment to social justice, and I am happy to call it home for awhile. (Alexander 2016)

In her January 2018 presentation at our university’s campus, Alexander reiterated her call for a moral and spiritual awakening, and our own conversation came back to this call several times. As Rob pointed out near the start of our meeting,

For me, the other big takeaway was Michelle Alexander herself saying, at the end, after she did all the work, what she said was we need a moral and ethical revolution. And it’s like, “dang, that’s on us!” A lot of the worst attitudes come from folks who are sitting . . . maybe in our pews, maybe somebody else’s pews . . . but they’re sitting in church on Sunday.

When we got around to talking about what actions a moral “re-visioning” might lead to, we began with very pie-in-the-sky solutions, as evident in the following exchange late in our conversation:

Rob: My son keeps talking about wanting to do away with prisons. He wants to abolish prison. Like, really, how do you do that? He’s like, “Dad!” And I’m like, “No really? What’s step one?” I mean, yeah. I gotta sit down and make him tell me . . .

Brent: It’s so wild to us because we’ve never not known it . . . no matter how far back you go in civilization, we’ve never not known it, so you can think it’s possible . . . it’s unfathomable.

Patrick: I think those are the things that require us to see a moral path that we don’t see right now. Couple that with policy and laws and whatnot, but I don’t think we’re ready to implement policies and enact laws if we don’t have a moral vision that we’re lacking right now.

Regine: I think first we have to agree that everybody is a human being and that is . . . of the same value. I think it’s sad that we have to start at that level. But I think that that is the first step. We have to be like, everybody is a human being and everybody has value.

At times, we all found ourselves frustrated by the intractability of the solutions required of us if we hope to overcome the ills of mass incarceration. Early on, Laura lamented,

Because [Alexander’s] work tackles this problem from a structural perspective, it’s so easy to be daunted by the amount of change needed. But, as the group reminded me every week, we can’t fix the entire system, but we can do something tangible. We can help these folks. Or we can start this program. And, if enough people do the work they can do, maybe we can revolutionize a broken, immoral system.

Ultimately, our conversation at the brewery gave us hope. In looking back over the transcript of our talk with one another, we found a number of ways in which we could do the tangible work Laura refers to here. For instance, early on Rob gave an example of a colleague’s work in the criminal justice system in a nearby county:

We began talking about diversion programs and we had a walk through the new jail, and I was talking to [a former Reentry Council leader], and he was like, “You know what would be really cool here is if you could . . . you know, they’ve got it set up in pods? . . . if you could talk to the jailer before you even set this up, and have a [substance abuse] recovery pod, where there are people in there committed to that.” So, all of a sudden you take it from that academic realm to “how can we work on this?”

Laura reminded us to put a similar focus on mental health issues: “We can’t talk about substance abuse without addressing mental health. Access to mental health care is nonexistent for so many folks. What are they gonna do but self-medicate?”

Other opportunities presented themselves in later exchanges. Current policies addressing inmates’ communication with family and friends on the outside led to a discussion on accessibility and equity, and subsequently to ways in which our organizations could help provide inmates’ loved ones with more sustainable means of keeping in touch with persons currently incarcerated:

Brent: In Buncombe County, you can get one 15-minute visit, but if they wanna visit you more than once a week, you gotta pay for it. That, to me, is illegal.

Rob: Video visit or person-to-person?

Brent: Video.

Rob: That’s what this is . . . nobody ever comes to the jail, it’s none of this . . .

Regine: So, what kind of communities are . . . how do we assume that everybody has access to the technology to participate in a visit?

Rob: Well, they don’t. That’s one of the things that I think the church community needs to make sure of. That there are places where they have . . . good bandwidth, and so on.

Patrick: [Our university] could probably help with that, too.

Over and over, Rob stressed the importance of providing support to the families of inmates, in particular the children in families affected by incarceration. Referring to recent work by the local district of the United Methodist Church, he explained how

We ended up writing a grant to get some help pulling all of these different groups together, and the way we decided to focus in is to start working with the children of families who had gotten involved in the criminal justice system. My idea is, one: if you care for my kid, I trust you. But, knowing that to work with the kids, we’ll need to work with everybody along the way, you know, mental health, health, education, all that kind of stuff.

Regine referenced similar work being done by colleagues of hers in the Chicago area, and Luke seconded the importance of focusing on children, returning once more to the theme of identity development: “You need strong mentorship for those kids. The number one substitute, one for one, someone you can look up to versus someone you can’t look up to.”

Other concrete plans came up, including the idea of a road trip (Rob: “Either to go to Chicago . . . or aren’t they doing some interesting economic development stuff with jail in [a nearby city]?”) along the lines of the bus trip Gilmore describes in her prologue (2007) and lobbying efforts with local political aspirants and officeholders, including the sheriffs, sheriffs-elect, and candidates for sheriff in the various counties in our region. As Patrick pointed out,

I think because there are so many different arguments that can be made for [ending mass incarceration], and I think for folks that tend to be more conservative, the fiscal argument is the one that works, because it costs a lot to keep folks in prison, and I think this is the turning point.

Ultimately, it all came back to conversation. As Regine put it as our time together neared its end,

I think we need to have another learning circle. I mean, I think we’re working on a few things, and the more conversations . . . going back to relationships . . . the more conversations we have where we have a common starting point, we’ll just see where the conversation goes, the more relaxed we get with each other, just talk to each other, because once these conversations happen in one space they can be replicated in other places, and people can find each other in the middle of downtown and say hi, people who wouldn’t have known each other or talked to each before. It’s small, but it can multiply so quickly . . . you know, low stakes, high outcome, doesn’t cost much, it’s not complicated to do, but it’s so worthwhile.

As we talked about whom we’d like to include in future conversations, our scope was broad. Our thoughts turned to other inmates and former inmates, civic leaders, leaders of local nonprofit organizations, and students at the university and in the local K–12 systems, as well others who might be more skeptical of our efforts.

Laura, a faculty member expert in messaging in social movements, made a disciplinary argument for including the latter group of people:

From a social movement perspective, this is the cultural work that I think does the most to move people. People don’t usually change their minds through one-sided messaging. Protest signs and well-researched, in-depth scholarly works have their place, no question, but conversations are crucial. They’re time consuming, often frustrating as hell, but they move people, who then move other people.

Rob, too, kept skeptics in mind as he offered a pastoral reminder to be mindful of every voice we hear: “If I feel like you’re trying to change me or if all I’m trying to do is change you, then no one is going to listen, and we’re going to come to blows at Thanksgiving . . . and that first step, like [Patrick] said [about Appiah], no agenda, is let’s just actually listen. And that’s hard.”

No doubt we have a good deal of work yet to do, and our conversations with one another mark the start of the path and not its end. However, the ease with which conversation was able to bring together a group of people who have up to this point followed decidedly different paths gave us all hope, and not just hope alone, but hope bolstered by concrete ideas for institutional change. While we acknowledge the limitations of conversation, we cannot dismiss it as mere lip service or cheap talk. Indeed, when the voices of the incarcerated or formerly incarcerated persons in our society have been unheard for so long, conversation is radical and revolutionary.

Michelle Alexander ends The New Jim Crow by reminding us to pay our attention to these voices, and to not be surprised by the horrors they speak when given audience. Her closing thoughts would have fit right in with our own, that day at the brewery. She speaks with prophetic wisdom in cautioning us:

Those of us who hope to be their allies should not be surprised, if and when this day comes, that when those who have been locked up and locked out finally have a chance to speak and truly be heard, what we hear is rage. . . . We may be tempted to control it, or douse it with buckets of doubt, dismay, and disbelief. But we should do no such thing. Instead, when a young man who was born in the ghetto and who knows little of life beyond the walls of his prison cell and the invisible cage that has become his life, turns to us in bewilderment and rage, we should do nothing more than look him in the eye and tell him the truth (Alexander 2010, 260–261).

And, we would add, we must listen to what he has to say. Above all else, we must listen, for he has a truth to tell, too.