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Spring 2021 Issue 018 US $20

The Ghosts of Prisons Past Ex-lawyer reflects on the prison system

0 704521 511938

Page 22

How Can I Help? Mutual aid responds to harmful systems Page 28

Futures of Policing Will they be by default or by design? Page 66

Contents. DEPARTMENTS 4

Contributors

12 Q&A

From the Guest Editor

74 References

Recommendations

FEATURES 14

Plato's Cage An Ontology of Policing in Three Acts By Ajay Revels and Jennifer Rittner Illustrations by Blacksneakers

The Ghosts of Prisons Past By David Lamb Illustrations by Jon Key

How Can I Help? Mutual Aid as a Response to Harmful Systems By Shanti Mathew and Stephanie Yim Illustrations by Myahn Walker

FRONT COVER ILLUSTRATED BY BLACKSNEAKERS

Spring 2021 • Issue 018

The Policing Issue

Design Activism A Dialogue on Protest, Policing, and Demanding the Future We Need Featuring Niki Franco, Liz Ogbu, Dustin Gibson, Ivy Climacosa, and Annika Hansteen-Izora

Abolish the Cop in Your (Designer's) Head Unraveling the Links Between Design and Policing By Sarah Fathallah and A.D. Sean Lewis Illustrations by Lamees Rahman

Designed For Harm How Products of Policing Enforce Extra-judicial Practices of Control and Submission By Timothy Bardlavens and Jennifer Rittner Illustrations by Sophia Richardson

Futures of Policing By Default or By Design By Jamie McGhee Illustrations by Ariel Sinha

Have a great design impact story? editor@designmuseumfoundation.org

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DESIGN MUSEUM MAGAZINE ISSUE 018 SPRING 2021 (ISSN 2573-9204) IS PUBLISHED QUARTERLY BY DESIGN MUSEUM FOUNDATION. 100 SUMMER STREET, SUITE 1925, BOSTON, MA 02110. POSTMASTER: SEND ADDRESS CHANGES TO DESIGN MUSEUM FOUNDATION, 100 SUMMER STREET, SUITE 1925, BOSTON, MA 02110.

Contributors. A.D. Sean Lewis A.D. Sean Lewis (he & they) is currently completing his studies at Stanford Law School. Prior to law school, he was the Director of Public Policy & Legislative Affairs at the City of Chicago's Civilian Office of Police Accountability and an auditor at the Office of Inspector General. These experiences led him to commit himself to police and prison abolition.

Ajay Revels Ajay Revels is a design researcher, systems thinker, and innovation consultant who illuminates the structural roots of capitalism, racism, and environmental destruction in order to design better systems from the ground up.

Annika Hansteen-Izora Annika Hansteen-Izora (they/she/he) is a Brooklyn-based designer, art director, and poet. They lead design as Creative Director of Somewhere Good, a social platform designed to give people of color the safety they need to connect and create online.

Ariel Sinha Ariel Sinha is a designer and illustrator in Chicago. She loves to explore bold portraits, shapes, colors, and humor to create digital artwork that is representative of people from all walks of life.

Blacksneakers Blacksneakers is a 20-year-old illustrator and painter based in North Carolina, USA. Her primary focus is the human body. She's able to express concepts of emotion, mentality, and physicality combined with vibrant color schemes to create complex, Black narratives.

David Lamb David Lamb is a native New Yorker bitten by the writing bug since he was in elementary school and had handwriting nobody could decipher. He is a graduate of NYU School of Law and is the writer and producer behind the longest running Black & Latino off-Broadway play in history, "Platanos Y Collard Greens."

Dustin Gibson Dustin Gibson develops he[art]work that embodies a practice of disability justice that can live, build, support, and be implemented by marginalized communities to address the nexus between race, class, and disability. He's the Access, Disability and Language Justice Coordinator at PeoplesHub and a Peer Support Trainer with Disability Link.

Ivy Climacosa Ivy Climacosa was born in the Philippines and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a worker-owner at Design Action Collective, happily existing at the intersection of design and movement building.

Jamie McGhee Jamie McGhee is an experimental novelist who believes that political change begins not with the stories we tell, but with the way we tell stories. In addition to co-authoring You Mean It Or You Don’t, an inquiry into James Baldwin in the era of Black Lives Matter, she has authored several biographies about revolutionary figures such as Toussaint Louverture and Mary Bowser. She lives in Berlin, where she writes about pidgins and anti-languages as sites of resistance.

Jennifer Rittner Jennifer Rittner is a writer, educator and communications strategist who teaches in the graduate and undergraduate design programs at the School of Visual Arts. Her courses include design history, design for social value, design & politics, and thesis. A daughter of women, Jennifer centers the voices of Bernadette, Aurea, and Dianqui in her practices.

Jon Key Jon Key is an artist, designer, writer, and educator whose work focuses on Blackness, Queerness, Family, and Southernness. He lives and works in Bushwick, Brooklyn. His work has been featured in the Armory Show, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic.

Contributors. Lamees Rahman Lamees Rahman is a Graphic Design Intern at Design Museum Everywhere, pursuing an undergraduate degree in Media Arts and Science at Wellesley College. Growing up in Bangladesh and Singapore, Lamees is inspired by the vibrancy of her surroundings and loves to experiment with bold colors, shapes, and textures in her artwork.

Liz Ogbu Liz Ogbu is a designer, urbanist, and spatial justice activist who is an expert on engaging and transforming unjust urban environments. Her multidisciplinary design practice, Studio O, operates at the intersection of racial and spatial justice. Among her honors, she’s a TEDWomen speaker, a member of Public Interest Design’s Top 100, and an Aspen Ideas Festival Scholar.

Myahn Walker Myahn Walker is currently a student at the University of Pennsylvania studying Design with minors in Consumer Psychology and Africana Studies. She works as a Graphic Design Intern at Design Museum Everywhere. She is interested in the intersections between design and social impact.

Niki Franco Niki Franco (she/they) is a Caribbean abolitionist community organizer, writer, and facilitator of spaces for collective study. Seeking to disrupt the institutionalized bureaucratic frameworks of academia and transactional ways in which relationships exist under capitalism, her work experiments with truthtelling, radical history and thought, and revolutionary imagination. She also curates educational and cultural programming that navigates the current urgency on global solidarity, environmental, and ancestral preservation, and strategies on building emotional and intellectual capacities to dismantle systems of oppression that inform and deform our current lives. She is the host of "Getting to the Root of It with Venus Roots," a podcast that leans into conversations with artists, theorists, and organizers.

Sarah Fathallah Sarah Fathallah is a designer, researcher, and educator who specializes in applying design to the social sector. Outside of her paid work, Sarah is involved in prison and police abolition organizing.

Shanti Mathew Shanti Mathew believes in our collective ability and responsibility to help each other flourish. She is the Deputy Director of the Public Policy Lab, a Brooklyn nonprofit that partners with government agencies—and the communities they serve—to make public services more effective, equitable, and dignified.

Sophia Richardson Sophia Richardson is a multidisciplinary graphic designer based in Boston, MA. Currently she is the Senior Graphic Designer at Design Museum Everywhere, where she facilitates the visual design of the museum's publications, exhibitions, and programs.

Stephanie Yim Stephanie Yim is a multidisciplinary designer whose work centers around civic tech and social justice. Currently at the Public Policy Lab, she designs with city government to better deliver public services to New Yorkers. Previously, she co-founded Good Call, a nonprofit that runs a free 24/7 arrest hotline in NYC. She is a proud native of Queens, New York and daughter to immigrant parents.

Timothy Bardlavens Timothy Bardlavens is a design leader, cultural strategist, diversity, equity & inclusion consultant, and writer. At Facebook, Timothy supports Community Relevance within the Facebook App, leading teams focused on Participatory Member Experiences and Ecosystem Growth. As a cultural strategist, he specializes in assessing and dismantling organizational cultures built on systems of oppression and white supremacy—rebuilding them to be diverse, inclusive and equitable. Timothy is also Co-Founder of &Design and the Access_&Design Fellowship Program, an active member of Adobe’s Design Circle, and an international speaker and facilitator.

How Can I Help? Mutual Aid as a Response to Harmful Systems By Shanti Mathew and Stephanie Yim Illustrations by Myahn Walker Anatomy of an Arrest In New York City, when an individual is arrested, they are stripped of their belongings and thrown into a black box, disconnected and isolated from their families, friends, and communities. Sometimes they’re allowed to make a call on a dial-pad phone to a number that they must have memorized. They must hope that someone picks up a ringing phone—no matter the time of day—and comes to their aid. Once arrested, the individual is shuffled between police precincts and then eventually transported to the arresting borough’s central-booking facility. They will wait between 24 and 48 hours in a squalid cell crowded with other arrestees and one metal toilet littered with feces and urine. Without information and sustenance except for a slice of cheese between two slices of bread, they wait for their arraignment hearing, at which time a judge will determine if they remain in jail, can be released on bail, or return home for a later court date. In the last published report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, almost 90 percent of defendants are indigent and don’t have access to legal support before their arraignment.1 If they cannot afford their own private counsel, they will be assigned a public defender 15-30 minutes before arraignment. Once their arraignment hearing begins, they will be read their charge(s) and asked how they plead.

Thirty minutes is not much time to do justice for each defendant, and to find the best argument for their freedom. By law, a judge is meant to determine the outcome of the arraignment based on the individual’s risk to flee and not appear for their future court dates. However, data continues to show that only a small percentage (15 percent in 2017) of those released, regardless of charge severity, missed one court date.2 Instead, frequently a judge determines the outcome of the arraignment based on the individual’s ties to their community. An existing job, a permanent home address, someone the client can call, or a loved one who can show up at the time of arraignment. These are all imperfect representations of community ties that can significantly impact the outcome of an arraignment, including influencing the bail amount that is set. In this system, those who are homeless, unemployed, or separated from their families are penalized. Further penalized are the poor, who will land in jail because they or their loved ones cannot afford their bail. In this system, freedom has a price tag. At this very moment, there are over 7,500 people sitting in pretrial detention in New York City, waiting for their trial before being convicted of any crime. That number is about 77 percent of the average daily population in jail.3 Even though our Constitution ensures a speedy trial, prosecutors in New York City can stop the trial clock until they are "ready" for the trial, 29

Ideologies Employed & Reproduced by Design and Policing 50

In the design of many products, privacy is commodified as a luxury good rather than a basic right. Able consumers can purchase privacy-friendly features, such as the option to export their data or the ability to auto-delete data after a certain time, or buy their way out of having to see advertisements by paying a premium. Research shows that even the act of reading all of the privacy policies to which one is exposed online would take the average adult 76 working days per year, the equivalent of a $781 billion opportunity cost to the U.S. market.17 As Sarah T. Hamid put it, privacy is "less like a design value, and more like a luxury demand."18

Commodification of Rights

Policing and the criminal legal system often require money for freedom, even absent criminal convictions. Cash bail and bail-bondsmen literally put a dollar amount on freedom, effectively making jails debtors’ prisons.14 Similarly, policing targets non-criminal behavior (drinking in public) and low-level crimes ("graffiti, public urination, panhandling, littering, and unlicensed street vending") in public spaces.15 Policing criminalizes individuals for simply existing, or being poor, in public. Finally, once ensnared in the criminal penal system, individuals find that poverty becomes nearly impossible to escape.16

Discriminatory design practices take many forms, including determining who is worthy to design for based on their race, class, consumption ability, or other characteristics. For instance, "hostile architecture" is an intentional design practice to keep unhoused people out of public space. These practices literally install bolts and spikes on surfaces and steps and place intermittent armrests on public benches.20 Discrimination in design extends to a wide range of products and services, from optical heart rate monitors21 to the design of bus systems, railways, and other forms of public transportation.22 More recently, discriminatory design was described as the "New Jim Code," with tech designers encoding biases and inequity into technical systems.23

Discrimination

At the local level, "discriminatory" policing defines policing. Stopping "suspicious" people, pulling over "unfamiliar" cars in the neighborhood, and ticketing car drivers for broken tail lights. Discrimination is legally protected through relying on officer discretion; the law permits officers to determine "where to patrol, when to use force, who to arrest, who to kill or let live"19 based on how judges interpret the law. The criminal legal system, including judges, is deferential towards officer discretion. At the national level, discriminatory law enforcement looks like Muslim-targeted screenings at airports, surveillance of Black activists, gendered body scans that out trans individuals, and the failure to reckon with the links between white supremacist violence and policing.