The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Mansa Musa:

Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa. Today we have with us Nicole Porter. Essence Magazine calls her the new civil rights leader. I’ve been on a couple of calls with Nicole and some other people that’s in this abolition space, and I will take it a little further and call her a new civil rights leader. I would say in terms of the abolition aspect of what we’re talking about, and when we talk about abolition, we’re talking about abolishing the prison industrial complex as exists now. We have our ideas of how it should be repurposed, what I would call her, the new her Tubman. When it come to the abolition aspect of it, because we’re not taking no prisoners, we are mobilizing people to understand what freedom is. We mobilizing people to understand their rights under the Constitution of the United States. I think the coldest has always been our front on trying to change the narrative as it relates to the impact that the criminal justice system is having on people. She’s always been out front in terms of trying to get people to understand the importance of organizing around abolishing this system that we call the Prison Industrial Complex. Welcome to Rattling the Bars, Nicole.

Nicole Porter:

Thank you so much, Mansa. What an honor for you to call me that. So I appreciate you and it’s an honor to join you this afternoon as well.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, and I don’t take that lightly because like I said, when I opened up early, I had got the, I’m always tracking the sentencing project and some of the things that they’re doing, but I got on one of the initial calls where you had a host of people from different parts of the country that’s in this space that’s doing work around dismantling the prison industrial complex, but more importantly, being aggressive and intentional in terms of identifying new prisons. Being built out of the conversation at these calls came out was a lot of the prisons was stopped and their tracks from being built because of the strategies was being used. Let’s talk about your views on how this thing going to play out in terms of when we looking at ICE and we looking at the utilization of prisons in this country, in this country’s relationship with Salvador or other countries that they paying to host or harbor or control or contain people from United States.

Nicole Porter:

Yeah, and I thank you for the question. In fact, that’s how the call got started or came to be organized that you joined a few weeks ago, was that a closed prison in Arizona is and talks about being reopened as an ice detention facility. It’s a privately owned prison. As I understand it, I could have the specifics wrong, but at the end of the day, people in Arizona, organizers in Arizona were raising questions around how to stop it and had come together and held a community meeting back in October to start the conversation around ways to stop it. And so that created a snowball effect in many ways. And so through email and communication, not only connected to folks in Arizona, but sent a call out to folks around the country to see if people were interested in getting together because of not just efforts in Arizona, but also talks in Arkansas, Montana, Vermont, Massachusetts, California, Tennessee states all over the country where state legislatures are floating ideas and have funded

New efforts to either study the need for new prisons or get the ball rolling in terms of prison construction and citing new prisons. So following the communication with organizers in Arizona, had a call in early to mid-October that had about 30 plus organizers from around the country. And we sort of just discussed what was going on nationally and what capacity there was, what bandwidth there was to try to fight it. So it was a good start to the conversation and speaks to the reality that there are emerging issues, emerging fights that need to be worked on right now to help stop new prison construction and challenge the notion that prisons are the answer to social problems and supposed crime increases. That’s not what the data shows. But there are clearly interest that support new prisons. And so there needs to be a conversation around how to challenge that and that’s what we are trying to do.

Mansa Musa:

How are you looking at the fact that the phenomenon now is this country is using illegal immigrants as a form of rounding people up, federalizing the police departments throughout the country, and how do you look at that and the fact that they’re also on state levels passing these laws to change a lot of reforms that have been made that was progressive in terms of helping people get out of prison. Now you find yourself in a position, the federal government going to fund Arkansas. If the state legislation and representatives say they don’t want it, the federal government going to come in and say, well, we are fund it and under the pretense of housing illegal immigrants, but you be a prison hole with 3000 people, the math don’t add up. That’s where we being confronted. We’re being confronted with a situation where it’s live moving parts legally.

Nicole Porter:

Yeah, I mean I think there are a lot of parallel efforts happening at the same time that converge to expand the carceral footprint in the country. And I think in many states and localities, there are contracts with the federal government to detain migrants and there are collaborative or cooperative agreements between local law enforcement and federal immigration enforcement. I am not an expert on that. There are others that are, that I can follow up with you on. But I think that there are several overlapping policies and practices that create this context

For law enforcement, whether or not it’s ice or local law enforcement to detain undocumented migrants to arrest and detain undocumented migrants and many local and state prison systems have overbuilt themselves with the goal to contract and hold human humans warehouse residents as a money grab. It’s incredibly unfortunate. It has been a practice that state and local governments from Louisiana to Kentucky from a range of states have employed going back 40 to 30 years given the height of mass incarceration, particularly local parish jails in Louisiana. Local jails in Kentucky have overbuilt themselves and with an intent to have intergovernmental agreements with the federal government in order to contract for bed capacity and get payouts from the federal government to hold undocumented migrants as they await deportation or their immigration hearings. And so there are overlapping interest, but the reality is at the end of the day that the carceral footprint in the United States has expanded significantly over the last 40 to 50 years, creating the context which makes it possible.

Mansa Musa:

We find ourselves now at the crossroads in terms of how do we organize against the expansion of this footprint because to your point in Arkansas, they wanted to build this 3000 big unit, and the rule is part of Arkansas. Everybody got together and say ain’t want it, the state legislators refuse to fund it. I was on a call with some in Kansas just yesterday and in Kansas they’re talking about building a massive prison for the benefit of housing people that they refusing to let go, even though they, in fact, they give me passed the second chance acting cancer. On the one hand, they saying we creating this mechanism to let people go, but on the other hand we’re saying we creating this mechanism to house people. How do we get people in this space to understand this particular, that’s what we confronted with now.

Nicole Porter:

I think there’s a lot to look into and to understand specifically what we’re up against. I think we know from history that the federal government back in the nineties did through the 1994 crime bill authorized state grants, so federal transfers of state of federal funding to the states in support of prison construction at the height of mass incarceration, as well as incentivized states to adopt truth and sentencing mechanisms that abolished eliminated post conviction remedies to allow people release who were rehabilitated, who met other goals of rehabilitation while incarcerated. And so I think all of that is back given who is in the White House, given the times that we’re in and given the interest of the federal government, particularly through this presidential administration to use its federal authority to expand a law enforcement apparatus. I think in the bills that have passed this year in 2025, there’s been an expansion of law, immigration, law enforcement, billions of dollars have been dedicated to ICE to expand immigration, customs enforcement force.

I think there’s also through that funding, funding to state and local law enforcement agencies to help them from the federal government’s perspective beef up their ability to help with immigration enforcement. So we are currently living through a time when the administration is focused on using its money to expand law enforcement into militarized law enforcement. And I think it’s not a short jump from that to funding new prison beds, expanding the expansion of incarceration. And I also think currently under current funding levels, there’s an expansion of immigrant detention from previous levels to growth. Again, I’m not an expert on that, but my understanding of what’s happening now is that recent funding is supporting an increase in immigrant detention. What that means in terms of states and how the government, federal government will support new state construction in places like Arkansas or any state that has been looking at building prisons. But the state budgets don’t allow for that. I think it’s something for us to really look into and understand support state and local organizers on the ground who are trying to think of strategies to challenge that and work on that. I think some of these coalitions have been successful at stopping new prison siding. These have been local fights in the midst of a broader state conversation. So for example, in Arkansas, that state has been floating the idea of a new prison for several years,

And each time they cite the prison in a county, the organizers go to the county, try to work with folks in the county to challenge the sighting of the prison in the county. That same strategy has happened in other states around the country. For example, Vermont, where there have been similar successes, even though the state legislature has said a new state prison needs to be built and has dedicated resources to doing feasibility studies and figuring out where the prison is, you have to cite the prison somewhere. And so there’s procedural steps that have to be followed in terms of figuring out where the prison is going to be, what the regulations are that need to be approved in order to cross all the T’s and dot all the i’s. And so anti incarceration organizers in these states have taken these fights to the local counties where the state has tried to cite the prisons and have been successful to date in stopping the prisons, but they know that those prisons will come back. So they were able to defeat the prison, and this is true of Vermont in the northeast and also in Arkansas in the deep south. They were able to stop prisons in the counties where they were previously cited, but they also know that the state will try to cite those prisons in another county and those same states. And so they are in a wait and see period right now trying to figure out where the state will go next and then having to build a conversation in those new counties to try to stop the prisons there as well.

Mansa Musa:

How do we look at the reforms that’s been made, like second look at in Maryland? Got a second look at in dc, the fellow sentencing commission has allowed for the membership of full justice involved individuals to be on there as advisors. How do we look at that? How do we factor those things into our strategy in terms of trying to combat this mentality of lock ’em up and throw away the keo, whatever the motive is behind it, the money that’s being put generated in that area. We have, on the same token we have in states where they have actually saying brain signs developing reforms where if a person serves so much time that they meet certain criteria, they get released.

Nicole Porter:

So I think in states where there are active campaigns to stop new prisons, having prison population reduction conversations is also needed. And I think the organizers recognize that. And so knowing that there have been sentencing reforms recently in states like Maryland and in jurisdictions like DC or helpful to advocates in California and Montana and Arkansas, and I think those organizers are working to align a prison population reduction conversation with challenging the state to the idea that new prisons need to be built to address population growth, assumed population growth

To begin with. And so I think in the strategy calls that you were a part of and that need to continue and will continue those interests in digging into that and then understanding how to build out a prism population reduction conversation is going to be necessary. It’s going to be necessary because as organizers work to make the case that no new prison needs to be built in Arkansas or California, they’re also going to have to provide information on, well, what can the state do to reduce the pressure that it claims it needs to address in terms of building new beds? And so helping people leave prison who no longer need to be, there is one immediate solution to that. There are people in prison in many of these states who are past their parole date.

They certainly met the time served requirements. There may be other issues that prevent their ability from being released if the parole board requires them to go through a rehabilitation program or some other program and there’s a waiting list for that program. Well, that’s no fault of the individual. That’s because of a lack of capacity in a regulation of the parole board. So given if there’s such population pressure that is forcing the state to think of a hundred million, multi hundred million dollar project to build thousands of new beds, shouldn’t the state be looking at other immediate short-term solutions for people who no longer pose a threat? I mean, I don’t even really want to reinforce this idea that people do pose a threat to public safety because they don’t. Right? We’re talking about people, many of whom have served decades in prison. They’ve certainly met their time served requirements under the penalty that they were sentenced to.

We know because of the social science and brain science, which you talked about earlier, that people age out of prime for the most part after they reach their mid thirties. And the reality is, is that it’s policy failures that keep people stuck in prison and force them to be subjected to imprisonment and a loss of liberty because the state, individual states, and more nationally, the federal government has not met the need to address the hundreds of thousands of people that have been disappeared to prisons on any given day. And that is something that organizers can certainly leverage to make a case around two politicians who can make decisions around sentencing reform and release policies to alleviate some of that pressure rather than spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a new prison either in Arkansas or California or Colorado or any other number of states that are looking at this right now.

Mansa Musa:

At one point, the sentencing project, I think under your guidance and direction came up with the concept of 50 years in a wake up. And so we’re asking, what’s the status of that? Is this, what we seeing now is this, this is a continuum of 50 years in Wago where we’re seeing these calls being made. We’re seeing people coming together in a coalition manner around the abolition of this prison industrial complex as we see, is that what this is?

Nicole Porter:

There has been sentencing reform, but clearly this country is still challenged by the idea of too large of a number of people in prison. And we’re clearly at a moment of time where states are looking at expanding new prisons and building new prisons. So in spite of our call to action in 2023 marking the 50th year anniversary of mass incarceration, it just speaks to how challenged this country is because it’s so wedded to the idea of mass incarceration. So we are still working to challenge it. I think given the fact that states are looking at new prisons and there have been emerging coalitions to help challenge it and raise awareness or raise alarm around it, that is great. I mean, that was not necessarily around in 1994. I think it’s important to know that people did oppose the crime bill in 94. They did oppose the way the federal government was responding to increased crime that had happened through the eighties.

But by the time the 94 crime bill had gotten adopted, crime had already starting to go down, and yet the federal government wasn’t supporting policies to help keep people out of prison. It was building new beds and relying on incarceration as a strategy to address what they thought was continued crime. But here we are. We are now two years past that 50 year mark of mass incarceration. And during this year, and as we go into 2026, the reality is, is that states are looking at building new prisons. And the reality is that we’re in the middle of an administration who was focused on funding new expansions to immigrant detention, certainly, and expanding immigrant law enforcement. And that may have a spillover effect in terms of states and their criminal legal systems. So state police forces at the local level and at the state level too, to help the federal government with their immigration enforcement and also spillover effect in states that are interested in just throwing money, the same money at an old problem, building new prisons as opposed to funding the services that can help people avoid contact with law enforcement in the first place.

Mansa Musa:

As we build out these calls, is it a national conference on the horizon around abolition? What do you see these calls and this coalition going in terms of,

Nicole Porter:

I mean, I have people watching your show, maybe they’ll get inspired to support the conversation. I think at this point we are working on organizing other calls to bring together organizers or across the country to learn from each other, to figure out ways to challenge in the short term new prison construction projects in places like Montana and Colorado and California. So trying to stop new prisons that have been announced that are moving, figuring out tactics to prevent the sighting of a new prison at the local level in spite of what the state has set aside money for. Also working to figure out prison population reduction strategies, like you said, you mentioned about the second look law in Maryland to see what other immediate prison population reduction policies are possible in places that are looking at new prisons so that the prison population can be managed down and can help create an alternative perspective rather than relying on a new prison project, which is going to eat up hundreds of millions of dollars.

And we’re talking about many states that have low resources, limited resources for other social services, not just social services that can help address people at risk of imprisonment, but education, healthcare, housing, a range of social services for everyone in the state. So I think that that’s what’s happening in the short term, a bunch of strategy calls. Perhaps we can come together in person at this point. There aren’t necessarily resources for that. So I think we’re going to use the capacity we have, which is coming together virtually, and then supporting campaigns that are underway who are meeting in their states and in their localities to help challenge these new prisons and think about strategies to call for reducing state prison populations or help manage down state prison population.

Mansa Musa:

Can you, as we close out, can you give us your analysis on making a comparison between United States and other countries, even countries in nature, how they deal with this phenomenal mass incarceration?

Nicole Porter:

Yeah, I mean, there really isn’t an issue with mass incarceration in other countries. I mean, the United States by far is the world’s number one jail. Or even in looking at countries with large general populations, we don’t even come close. Now, there may be other severe forms of punishment in places like India and China and Russia, but certainly in terms of warehousing people behind prisons and other carceral facilities are, the incarceration rate doesn’t compare. I think other countries that are helped by low levels of incarceration have other forms of social services that help drive people who are at risk of vulnerability, social vulnerability and marginalization into other services and social safety nets that are outside of a carceral framework are outside of prisons and jails. And so the United States has a lot to learn from, certainly western Europe and a region of the world that we like to compare ourselves to, and even other large countries with large populations that continue to have low levels of incarceration.

So doesn’t even, cause I was actually just in Europe where we were talking about comparisons for women’s incarceration in the gender-based violence that women experience, particularly when faced with law enforcement and the prison system. And it doesn’t even come close because looking at countries in Eastern and central Europe countries that may not have a, or maybe backsliding in terms of democracy, their scale of incarceration is much lower than the United States, and they have their own social policy problems. We certainly talked a lot with colleagues over there around their approaches to addressing the structural conditions that lead to incarceration. And the reality is that the United States just has a lot to learn from. A norm for the United States is assuming that prison is an option, and prison should be an option for people who have substance use disorders, for people who commit property offenses, who are at risk of committing property offenses and due.

And that’s just not a reality in other parts of the world because they just don’t have the number of prison beds that the United States does and built up during the nineties and the two thousands. And the solutions over there are alternatives to incarceration, shorter prison terms to hold people accountable, but not in the same lengthy way that we do in the United States. And then social services to help people at risk of incarceration, not return to prison through job training programs and housing assistance in the United States. We just don’t fund those types of services in the way that we do prison. And the need in many parts of the country exceeds what’s possible. And so in a period where states like Montana and Colorado are looking at funding hundreds of millions of dollars in new prison beds, they could be making other choices and funding quality, affordable housing and funding job training programs for residents who are at risk of unemployment or who are suffering from chronic unemployment. There are other policy options as opposed to building new prisons, even if the state is predicting that the state prison population is going to grow at the end of the day, that’s a choice. People don’t have to go to prison even if they break laws. There are other ways to hold people accountable that doesn’t rely, shouldn’t rely on disappearing them behind a prison cell.

Mansa Musa:

To your knowledge, what’s the most progressive state?

Nicole Porter:

Well, I mean, I think it’s a way to consider which states have low rates of incarceration, but they may have, and they do have high rates of criminal justice supervision, which people at risk of future incarceration because of revocations on felony probation or parole, which could lead to future incarceration. So a state like Minnesota, for example, historically low rates of incarceration, but high numbers of people sentenced to felony probation. And many of those people can survive their felony probation term without being re-incarcerated. But also a large number of people do end up getting incarcerated. And so again, the United States has made a choice in terms of expanding its criminal legal system over the last 50 years, relying that has resulted in high rates of contact with police, high rates of criminal sanctions for people vulnerable to police contact and has subjected people to imprisonment or criminal legal supervision that has created an unfortunate cycle of people who are at risk vulnerable to the criminal legal system cycling in and out of it. There have been states that have reduced their prison population over the years, but it shows how vulnerable these policies are because there have been, they are at risk of reversing the trend and have seen reverse trends in terms of increasing prison population. But during windows of time in the last 10 to 15 year, states like California, New York and New Jersey substantially reduced their prison populations because of alternative sentencing for people convicted of property and drug

Offenses, minimizing the expectation that prison was an option for certain defendants convicted of certain drug offenses, sentencing them to diversion, and if successfully completing diversion, having their record expunged and being released from community supervision early for people who serve time in prison in places like New Jersey and released to parole rather than having intensive supervision with the parole officer, having a more modest day reporting requirements, and also shortening the amount of time on parole once released from prison. So those early exits help drive down prison admissions for parole revocations. So we know what works. Often, it’s not even about crime, it’s about policy makers making different choices and how to use the criminal legal system to hold people that it subjects to surveillance and imprisonment or other forms of criminal legal supervision to account. It’s also a recognition of the policies that got us here in the first place and trying to rethink, reorient what needs to happen to address crime, to address what makes people vulnerable to crime breaking and communities vulnerable to crime.

I think that’s why Maryland is such an interesting state to look at and to think about the solutions that are possible there and what the impact is on crime rates and also other indicators of thriving for all residents, particularly residents who are most vulnerable to crime. So we talked about the second look back earlier. I’m encouraged by that. I’m also encouraged by other reforms that have adopted in Maryland, and we’ll be eager to continue to look at Maryland over the next year or two years to see how those reforms are implemented to see how policymakers in Maryland, from the governor to the mayor of Baltimore and other locally elected officials, are using their authority to support people at risk of arrest and law enforcement supervision, and also the communities that are most at risk of being surveilled and impacted by criminal legal system policies and practices.

So I think shouldn’t be a surprise. Maryland is led by a black governor. The state legislature has a large black delegation. Many of the local officials are black Americans. And so I think a different way of governing is possible in Maryland than it is in other parts of the country. And so for me, I’m very eager to look at Maryland to see how the implementation will be, what observations there are in implementation, and what the impact is on the state prison system and other indicators in the state over the next year or two. And I hope that that provides potential solutions for other regions in the country as well.

Mansa Musa:

And I’m familiar with the advocates that was behind that bill. They’re intentional in creating a mechanism for when these guys get up, become eligible to get out. They’re doing some things in terms of ensuring that they have a smooth transition. But Nicole, when you rattle the bars today, you definitely seismic earthquake seismic proportion. I would be interested in us having a conversation on and possibly having this mechanism here, hosted a forum on abolition, and try to bring some of the key elements together to have that conversation and look at some of the best practices. I think at the end of the day when we look at war and it’s all about strategy and it’s not about one strategy fits every encouragement, every assault, it’s about about what’s effective, trying to centralize our voices so we can come up with a collective consensus on the direction when it comes to abolishing this. And you got an open invitation to always come back. I

Nicole Porter:

Appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me.

Mansa Musa:

We ask that you continue to look at the rallying bars. We ask that you continue to support the real news because guess what we’re asking The real news.