Organizing Against Mass Incarceration During COVID-19: An Interview with Angela Butel
In this series, Abby Rampone interviews CTA members about their responses to the COVID-19 crisis. Listen to 2019 Re/Generator Angela Butel discuss her work with Oregon DA for the People, the intersections between public health and mass incarceration, her Catholic faith, and more.
“Hold police and prosecutors accountable” is part of the Oregon DA for the People platform.
Transcript
Abby: Hi, Angela! So you could you tell us a little bit about yourself to start out with?
Angela: Sure! So I am currently based in Portland, Oregon. I kind of bopped around a bunch of places recently – I’m originally from Kansas City, Missouri but spent some time in Minnesota and then New York City for various school pursuits. I just recently finished my Masters in public policy, so my work focus is around local government. I’m really interested in city government and how that is a reflection of how communities come together to organize themselves and work toward a more just vision for how we all kind of live together in community. And I was also part of the most recent Re/Generation cohort, which was a really meaningful community for me. I’ve been a lifelong Catholic but have struggled, as I think a lot of members of the Call To Action community have, with how to stay engaged with that identity, and so it was really wonderful to explore that in community with other people in their twenties and thirties.
Abby: Thank you so much for that context, Angela. So for this interview, Angela’s going to talk a little bit about the work that she’s doing right now out west. So can you tell us a little bit about this work and what it looked like before the coronavirus crisis hit?
Angela: Sure. So very shortly after I arrived in Portland back in August, I got connected through a friend to a group called Oregon DA for the People. This is a group of folks who are organizing around the upcoming District Attorney election. Our county, Multnomah County, is electing a new District Attorney in May. This group of people- there are similar campaigns across the country in other cities as well, and there have been DAs elected in several places recently that have a much more kind of progressive vision for what a District Attorney can do to reduce the harm done by the criminal justice system. So this campaign kind of grows out of a recognition that the District Attorney is actually the most powerful position in the local criminal justice system. They have a lot of sort of leeway to make decisions about which crimes get charged, what kinds of sentences to charge people with, they have influence over how policing is done through making those kinds of decisions, they are the ones who would prosecute police officers who engage in misconduct, so kind of across the board they have a lot of power.
People often don’t realize that they’re elected and they often are not contested elections. The current DA sort of hand picks their successor and that person runs as the only person on the ticket and gets elected and sort of there hasn’t been a whole lot of attention paid to this position – or oversight of it. But in Multnomah County this year, we actually do have a contested race with two candidates, and so this campaign formed around a goal of trying to push these candidates to adopt policies to make commitments to making significant changes to how they’ll operate if they’re elected. So the campaign partnered with a lot of community organizations here in Portland who are led by folks who have been impacted by the criminal justice system, so for example there’s a group called Pacific Northwest Family Circle, which is family members of folks who have been killed by police. There’s a group called Liberation Literacy which is made up of folks who have been incarcerated and also just supportive allies who meet- there are meetings that happen inside of prison and outside of prison and kind of these communities are working in support of each other.
So the campaign connected with a lot of groups like that and wrote a platform, which you can find at oregondaforthepeople.com. And the platform lays out what these groups hope the next DA would change in how they operate. So it’s things like choosing not to charge low-level crimes or crimes of survival, so things that often disproportionately affect folks who are living outside or people undergoing mental health crisis, to stop disproportionately targeting black and brown communities, to treat kids like kids and not push them into the adult criminal justice system, so things like this.
I’m realizing this is quite a long answer, so I’ll wrap up, but just to say that before the crisis, our work was really around spreading the word about this platform and trying to get individuals to sign on and also just to make people aware that there’s an election coming up since folks often don’t realize that we’re electing this position, so that was a lot of canvassing, door knocking, going to events, and then working on trying to pressure the candidates to adopt some of these pieces of the platform through going to debates where they’re speaking and asking questions, doing a lot of social media and other media work, things like that.
Abby: Great. Yeah, thank you for all that context, that’s really helpful. Really important. So my question then is, how has the outbreak of COVID-19 affected your organizing and your work and how have you adapted or struggled to adapt?
Angela: Sure. It definitely has affected it quite significantly, in both challenging ways and ways that actually present exciting opportunities. So the challenging ways are, I mean, obviously all of the events that we were planning to go to to try to pressure the candidates or ask questions of them have been cancelled. So we’re trying to figure out how to adapt our strategy there and move more online and more into social media. And then we’ve decided to call off all of our in-person canvassing efforts just because it doesn’t seem very safe to go door-to-door in person, so we’re trying to adapt that and move more- we were planning to eventually go into phone banking but we’re trying to do that faster so that we can still contact people and let them know about the upcoming election but over the phone.
The areas of opportunity are actually that now here in Multnomah County and across the country, a lot of people are calling for a lot of the changes we were asking for to be implemented immediately because of the public health crisis. So people are calling on District Attorneys to stop prosecuting a lot of crimes because we can’t put more people into incarceration. They’re calling on them to release a lot of people from jails and prisons, to create more space in those institutions so that there’s not as much crowding and potential for the virus to spread, so that’s actually kind of exciting to us that a lot of these things that were in our platform, there’s energy around them to be implemented right now. So in that sense we’re sort of shifting our strategy a little bit. We’re still focusing on the election and the candidates but we’re also joining together with some other partner organizations here in Portland to make calls to current elected officials to pressure them to implement some of those changes right now. And then adapting our messaging to say, we need to do this right now for public health and then we need to keep these reforms in place because our system of mass incarceration is an emergency all the time.
Abby: Right. That’s really interesting and that really does answer my follow-up question which was going to be, why is this work specifically important right now, during a public health crisis?
Angela: Mhmm. Yeah, I think that’s exactly it. This public health crisis illustrates the underlying and ongoing problems with how we do our policing and prosecution and the fact that the way we’re doing it right now is not really making us safer. Incarcerating as many people as we incarcerate, we can see right now in light of this public health emergency that it’s creating a really dangerous situation for all those folks, but we’re trying to kind of highlight that and also point out that it’s causing a lot of harm for those folks all the time, even when we don’t have this public health emergency happening. So in that sense we’re hopeful that this might help spur some of the change that we were already working toward.
Abby: Absolutely. That does sound hopeful, yeah. So my final question then is, how does your identity as a Catholic inform your response to both the coronavirus crisis and the ongoing crisis of mass incarceration? What do you think your Catholic faith and identity obliges you to do right now, in response to these matters of human dignity and health and survival?
Angela: Mhmm. Absolutely. I think Catholic social teaching has always been the most foundational part of Catholicism for me, it has always been sort of the route through which I have connected with my faith tradition and the communities that I’ve been part of through my faith tradition. And so I think what that means to me is some of the principles of Catholic social teaching, like human dignity, like the option for the poor and vulnerable, and like solidarity, I think like all of these pieces have informed my approach to getting involved in my community, which has really looked like finding ways to be in community with people who are directly affected by some of the injustices in our society and kind of taking the lead from those folks about what needs to change and how best to go about changing that. So I think that’s part of why I was drawn to this campaign is that it did grow out of such close partnerships with people who have direct lived experience of the problems that we’re trying to address and that the people who are working on it, while it’s not necessarily, you know, it’s not really a faith-based space, but I feel some of those principles of Catholic social teaching being embraced by the other folks in this campaign. So yeah, I think our faith calls us to be in relationship with other people and when we do that, we are necessarily drawn to work to make our community better for all of those folks.
