As part of the Illinois Humanities Envisioning Justice Rapid Response Re: Form, I created a response reflecting Pritzker’s recent signing of the criminal justice omnibus reform bill HB-3653 and its implications on historically hypercriminalized and surveyed communities of color.

In her talk, The Fallacy of Prison Reform, Angela Davis discusses the meaning of freedom by posing the following questions: “What if the system cannot be fixed? What happens if we recognize the history of the prison is precisely the history of attempts to fix the system? The history of the prison is the history of prison reform--the prison itself was a reform introduced around the turn of the 19th century as a way of expressing that punishments--corporal, capital and corporal punishments were undemocratic.”

What is it that we have a right to demand? What is a demand? Is the right to freedom a demand or a simple basic human experience and living right? What are the possibilities of breaking something down? What happens when these metaphorical and physical walls of detention and punishment are gone? What takes their place? What doesn’t take its place and instead give us space to create?I am always challenged by Assata Shakur's words and poetry: "If I know anything at all is that a wall is just a wall and nothing more at all, it can be broken down.” How can understanding where things come from and where they might go allow us to either interrupt or learn from it? What walls—physical and metaphorical will we work to tear down and what spaces will we work to sustain?