Olayemi Olurin On Fighting The Prison System

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Lawyer and folks’s advocate Olayemi Olurin discusses the ills of the American jail industrial complicated. Olurin sat down with host Amanda Seales for this episode of “Small Doses: Facet Results of the Pipeline to Jail” to interrupt down what the mainstream narrative will get incorrect concerning the legal system.

As a motion lawyer and public defender, Olurin’s work focuses on difficult the jail industrial complicated and systemic racism.

“I’m very a lot towards the system,” Olurin says. “I’m not an individual who loves the legislation. The legislation impacts Black individuals disproportionately and deliberately. So let me go and work in the direction of that in service of Black individuals, however not as a result of I respect this establishment.”

The Case For Jail Abolition

A part of Olurin’s work is educating individuals about jail abolition. She was launched to the concept by a thesis advisor in faculty who gave her the e-book Are Prisons Out of date? by Angela Davis. The individuals’s advocate is nicely conscious of how radical it could appear, however a part of systemic reform is offering “entry to info” and differing views, she says.

Olurin explains why the present system’s strategy to crime is ineffective and, in truth, dangerous to society. “We would like repercussions for behaviors that the society in and of itself are the breeding grounds for. That’s what turns into unfair,” she says. “We would like repercussions for manifesting the attitudes that we’re instructing individuals.”

As an alternative of feeding billions of {dollars} into prisons and policing, funding might go towards “communities to have the ability to afford training, housing and healthcare,” she says. “That method, we get ourselves to a place sooner or later the place we shouldn’t have to have this large legal system.”

You don’t have to like your neighbor for it to make sense. Olurin calls this “the politics of selfishness.”

“When are you your greatest self? If my payments are paid, if I’ve neighborhood, if individuals are being good to me, I’m so more likely to think about my neighbor,” she explains. “The politics of selfishness is recognizing that wanting good for others or wanting to place different individuals in the most effective place to succeed is in order that when that individual can succeed, they don’t have any curiosity to carry you down.”

The Struggle to Shut Down Rikers Island

As a public defender working in New York Metropolis, Olurin witnessed firsthand the disproportionate influence that the American legal system perpetuates towards Black and Brown communities.

Olurin is a distinguished voice within the motion to shut Rikers Island, New York Metropolis’s notorious jail complicated, the place the overwhelming majority of inmates are Black and Brown people from low-income neighborhoods.

Olurin calls Rikers a “human rights disaster.” What most individuals don’t understand, she says, is that Rikers is definitely a pre-trial detention heart the place nearly all of inmates haven’t been convicted of against the law.

“Eighty-five p.c of all people at Rikers has not been convicted of against the law, they’re there pre-trial,” she says. “Folks assume it’s this notorious, horrible place for awful individuals. No, Rikers is the destiny of anyone that will get arrested in New York Metropolis and doesn’t have the cash for bail.”

Rikers is only a snapshot of the broader failures of the jail industrial complicated, Olurin says.

“There’s by no means this acknowledgment that the identical individuals in our communities that you’re labeling the criminals and legal defendants are additionally the identical individuals on the receiving finish,” she says. “They’re in that very same neighborhood receiving all of this struggling and trauma and these failures of the system.”

Hearken to the total episode “Small Doses: Facet Results of the Pipeline to Jail” right here.