Samora Pinderhughes

And I certainly think that I think we need a society that is ready and willing to engage

engage in and build otherwise possibilities that are centered around the structural emotional and material health of people in their daily lives so that's that's kind of how i think about it and the reason i really like that framework is that i also think that people do have

The solutions that we are seeking and are actually voicing those and practicing those things, it's just very often that those are not the loudest things or the things that are the most funded.

I mean, oftentimes, actually, they're the things that are attacked the most, you know, and that are threatened the most.

Certainly when I think about alternatives to the carceral system, like those alternatives are already there.

And people say over and over again, they're not there.

But they are there.

The reality is not that we don't know what they are.

It's that we don't want to practice or experiment or engage or fund those spaces where we would no longer need the prison.

You know what I mean?

And we also don't want to confront the parts of ourselves that we would need to confront to deal with what the prison does for us psychologically, how it allows us to actually feel that this set of material realities

allows us to demarcate whether or not we could be the type of person that would do something or not do something when often people have done many things that they just haven't been incarcerated for, you know, that are very bad.

So that's around power.

White collar crime.

You know what I mean?

So for me, that's why I really engage in this idea of otherwise possibilities.

Indigenous practices and structures have a lot to teach us about this.

And I think oftentimes also that

If and when we engage with those practices, it feels like people are not listening or wanting to really learn from those practices.

They kind of just want to provide lip service to them so that we can say we did it.