Rehabilitation can’t exist in a vacuum. You can’t “fix” someone you’ve stripped of dignity, community, connection, hope, and choices. These conditions only further harm and reinforce the “broken record” that played in your head to lead you to jail. With nothing to interrupt or change that narrative apart from four brick walls, it remains the same.
"It becomes a very strange line to cross, as I did, finding myself in one room of addicts criminalizing addiction, only to be locked in a similar room of addicts, having our addictions criminalized. However, crossing that line taught me perhaps my most important lesson yet. There is no line. Life is not static, life is not compartmentalized, life is not linear, and we are not made to occupy one singular coordinate on a graph."
"...I’ve learned through the twists and turns my life has taken to appreciate the magnitude of finding unexpected joy in anything, no matter how small or ridiculous. I owe much of that gratitude to these human beings we call criminals. They were there, live, a literal captive audience for my 'Transgender Former Cop' jail open mic. They looked past the labels, stereotypes, and stigmas in a way that only those who have pleaded for the same from the world can. "
"One year ago today, you brought Stella to the vet to cross the Rainbow Bridge. I was in Dane County Jail “seg” (solitary confinement). My goodbye to the cat I’d loved, cared for, and who slept by my side for the past 12 years was said over a DCJ phone at 16 cents a minute."
"These words are not a plea for radical new ideas, Mom. It’s a plea to start restoring humanity at its most fundamental levels. It’s a plea to begin considering what outcomes we want to see when the cage doors re-open. Healthcare is a human right, even in jail. We need to believe that even in our carceral systems, this nation cares for reproductive health. It is an essential human need and immensely impactful to greater society."
"...But in that moment, it was a reminder of what it feels like to have a human, genuine reaction to the world. Existing in a job that prioritizes rules and laws to an extreme, it was freedom to break them in the name of something stronger. It was the pull of human dignity and respect."
"The vision I look towards is not one of reshaping every detail of crime, law enforcement action or the courts. It is to start handing people with immense periods of confinement tools to manifest their own growth. It is giving freedom to people with virtually none otherwise the choice to participate in reshaping what their exit from our carceral systems will look like."
"...And that snowball hasn’t stopped rolling downhill. Each time we go into the community, each time we step into the post office with a stack of care packages, we create new connections, the word spreads a little further, and this movement grows bigger."
"It's about the fact that, for some reason, when everyone else seemed to understand Eli, and I looked good on paper, I didn't understand a single thing about my own identity. I lived my life from the cockpit of an airplane I wasn't flying, just watching the clouds drift by. And with no reason to steer the plane in any intentional direction, I let life steer me. I let friends and family be the pilot, my career be the flight plan, privilege be the airplane, and alcohol be the gasoline. I merely rode along and wondered what might happen if I disrupted the most outwardly stable seeming flight of all time so I could try flying."
