Perspectives on the Prison Industrial Complex & the Landscape of Carceral America
This session provides an overview of the prison industrial complex beginning with a definition of the term through communal meaning making. Addressing these problems from different angles, the two speakers share their perspectives as a social worker and an attorney navigating the carceral landscape in the United States. They highlight the increasingly dehumanized treatment of prisoners amid prison privatization and discuss their professions’ complicity in this state of affairs. This interactive session draws attention to pervasive injustice and challenges attendees to not take part.
Speakers
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K Agbebiyi
K Agbebiyi (they/them) is a macro social worker and organizer based in New York. They earned their MSW from the University of Michigan School of Social Work. The majority of their work revolves around political education and organizing strategy in regards to prison abolition. K is an active member of Survived and Punished New York, a grassroots group working to free criminalized survivors of gender and sexual violence. They are also a member of several abolitionist collectives across NYC, and a co-creator of 8toaboliiton.com. You can follow K on twitter and instagram @sheabutterfemme.
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Lam Nguyen Ho
Lam is the Executive Director of Beyond Legal Aid (Beyond). Its model, “community activism lawyering,” shifts the power of the law into the hands of impacted communities by partnering with them to create community-located, community-operated, and community-directed “activism-law programs.” Beyond’s radical network of community programs unites lawyers and activists to bring free legal services to over 4000 people annually, including undocumented immigrants, sex workers, day laborers, and activists, while impacting thousands more through its support of grassroots organizing, advocacy, and activism. Lam graduated from Harvard Law School and holds additional graduate degrees from Brown University and Oxford University. He was previously Chairperson of the Illinois HIV/AIDS Response Review Panel and served on the boards of the Community Law Project and Vietnamese Association of Illinois.
