What would it take to make Detroit a “just city” – an actual sanctuary of justice for its residents? Amanda Alexander, founder and Executive Director of the Detroit Justice Center is working on exactly that. Based on a wide range of experiences – from learning alongside ACT-UP AIDS activists, to spending time in newly post-apartheid South Africa, to the Movement for Black Lives – Alexander combines her background as a historian and an attorney to reimagine safety and justice in Detroit.
What would it take to make Detroit a “just city” – an actual sanctuary of justice for its residents? Amanda Alexander, founder and Executive Director of the Detroit Justice Center is working on exactly that. Based on a wide range of experiences – from learning alongside ACT-UP AIDS activists, to spending time in newly post-apartheid South Africa, to the Movement for Black Lives – Alexander combines her background as a historian and an attorney to reimagine safety and justice in Detroit.
In this episode of Shades of Freedom, Alexander weaves together her own experiences, and the long history of global civil rights movements, to discuss what’s going on right now in Detroit, including innovative supports for community members that prevent contact with the legal system in the first place, shifting funds from a focus on policing to prevention, and supporting communities to define and create their own safety.
Guest Biography
Amanda Alexander, founding Executive Director of the Detroit Justice Center, is a racial justice lawyer and historian who works alongside community-based movements to end mass incarceration and build thriving and inclusive cities. Originally from Michigan, Amanda has worked at the intersection of racial justice and community development in Detroit, New York, and South Africa for more than 15 years.
Amanda is a Senior Research Scholar at University of Michigan Law School, where she has taught Law & Social Movements and was an attorney in the Child Advocacy Law Clinic. She was a 2015-2018 member of the Michigan Society of Fellows with appointments in Law and Afro-American & African Studies. As a Soros Justice Fellow, Amanda launched the Prison & Family Justice Project at University of Michigan Law School to provide legal representation to incarcerated parents and advocate for families divided by the prison and foster care systems.
Amanda serves on the Michigan Joint Task Force on Jail and Pretrial Incarceration, appointed by Governor Gretchen Whitmer to develop ambitious and innovative strategies to reduce Michigan’s jail population. She has served on the national steering committee of Law for Black Lives, and is a board member of the Center for Constitutional Rights and the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership.
Amanda’s advocacy and research have won the support of an Echoing Green Fellowship, Law for Black Lives/Movement Law Lab Legal Innovator Fellowship, Social Science Research Council Fellowship, Ford Foundation Doctoral Fellowship, and other fellowships and grants. She is the recipient of the NAACP-Detroit’s Great Expectations Award, the Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative’s Racial Justice Cultivator Award, and the A. Philip Randolph Institute’s Community Builder Award.
Amanda received her JD from Yale Law School, her PhD in international history from Columbia University, and her BA from Harvard College. Previously she has worked with the Detroit Center for Family Advocacy, the Bronx Defenders, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and the Centre for Civil Society in Durban, South Africa. Her writing has been published in The Globe & Mail, Detroit Free Press, Michigan Journal of Race & Law, Harvard Journal of African-American Public Policy, Michigan Child Welfare Law Journal, Journal of Asian and African Studies, Review of African Political Economy, and other publications.
As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, The Aspen Institute is nonpartisan and does not endorse, support, or oppose political candidates or parties. Further, the views and opinions of our guests and speakers do not necessarily reflect those of The Aspen Institute.
Visit us online at The Aspen Institute Criminal Justice Reform Initiative and follow us on Twitter @AspenCJRI.
July 7, 2021
Copyright 2021 Aspen Institute Criminal Justice Reform Initiative
Announcer (00:00):
Welcome to Shades of Freedom from the Aspen Institute's Criminal Justice Reform Initiative. This episode's guest is Amanda Alexander of the Detroit Justice Center.
Amanda Alexander (00:11):
This has never been about criminal justice reform to me or ending mass incarceration. I really see it as the ongoing work of Black Liberation struggles in the US and our generation's version of that. And so, of course, that involves ending criminalization and incarceration because those are the most significant barriers to people's well-being right now, but it's only a prerequisite to building the types of communities that we need.
Dr. Douglas E. Wood (00:41):
Welcome to Shades of Freedom. I'm your host Douglas Wood, Director of the Aspen Institute's Criminal Justice Reform Initiative. Our guest today is Amanda Alexander. Amanda is an esteemed criminal justice lawyer and community leader. Since earning degrees from Harvard, Columbia, and Yale, she's created local sustainable change nationally, as well as internationally. She's worked deeply in communities from Brazil to South Africa and in her home state of Michigan. Currently, she's the executive director and founder of the Detroit Justice Center, a nonprofit law firm that serves its community by re-imagining safety and justice. It's an honor to have her here as a guest. Amanda, welcome to Shades of Freedom.
Amanda Alexander (01:26):
Thank you so much, Doug. It's great to be here.
Dr. Douglas E. Wood (01:29):
So, my first question for you is pretty broad. What sets you on the path to becoming a transformational criminal justice lawyer and community leader?
Amanda Alexander (01:41):
So, I have been aware of the impact of incarceration on families since I was a child. One of my earliest memories is of my father being incarcerated when I was in elementary school. And so I have known, since I was a child, that this system needed to be torn down, not just tweaked, but that the damage that incarceration does to families needed to end. And the thing back then was that even within my household, we didn't have a language among ourselves, within my family, for what we were going through. I think that we each experienced it quite personally, very individually, and so we didn't have a way of situating our experience as a Black family in the Midwest dealing with incarceration within a broader collective systemic context.
Amanda Alexander (02:34):
And it was only much later that I understood some of the institutional factors behind what we were facing. I felt like I was living in one reality as a Black child in the US in the '80s and '90s, but what we were going through hadn't risen to the mainstream political discourse, which makes you feel quite alienated. And I think if nothing else, the fact that incarceration, criminalization, policing are part of the mainstream conversation that is not being ignored anymore, I think that that is a powerful thing right now. So, it was only in college where I came to understand how to turn personal pain into collective courage and came to understand the power of community organizing and movement building.
Amanda Alexander (03:23):
I was extremely fortunate, as an undergrad, to be mentored by the organizers with ACT UP, ACT UP New York and ACT UP Philadelphia. This was the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power. And these were incredible activists who, in the '80s and '90s, had become sick of seeing their loved ones pass away because HIV treatment medications were not reaching the market fast enough. And so, they realized that we need to make this a crisis for everybody in order to get the change that we need, and that meant putting pressure on the Federal Drug Administration to speed up the release of new drugs, it meant doing banner drops and occupations and doing lots of direct action. And so they taught me the power of not waiting around for someone to decide, to give you the change that you need, but really forcing the hand of those in power and elevating things to a crisis. And so, I learned so much of what I know today about direct action and movement building and organizing from these powerful activists in ACT UP.
Amanda Alexander (04:29):
And then I was fortunate again, after college I moved to South Africa, and this was just under a decade after the transition from apartheid. And there, I learned from incredible activists who had been fighting to end apartheid in the '60s, '70s', '80s, and '90s. And they had started something called this new wave of social movements that were fighting for the unfinished business of freedom in South Africa. And so they really helped me become laser-focused on this question of what does true freedom look like? What does true democracy look like? And they just really helped me understand that we are not free until the actual material conditions of life have changed for people and people have access to everything they need to live full and fulfilling lives.
Amanda Alexander (05:21):
And then I came back to the US and I was fortunate there to study with Manny Mirabal and be poured into by historians and activists who had come up in the Black Panther Party and in the Black Radical Congress. And so I got introduced to this real Black radical tradition in the US, and I ended up deciding to go to law school. I've always been a reluctant lawyer. I think of myself as a student of history and organizer first, but I decided that there might be a way that lawyers could not just dull the radical energy of movements, but actually be useful if we wield our tools correctly.
Amanda Alexander (05:58):
And so that is the path that I been on since 2013 when I graduated from the law school, and I moved back to Michigan in 2013, right around the time that Detroit was filing for the largest ever municipal bankruptcy. And I had started something called the Prison & Family Justice Project at University of Michigan Law School. And I was representing incarcerated parents who are at risk of losing their children permanently as a consequence of their incarceration. And so, I was representing incarcerated mothers and fathers. I was also representing people in Detroit who were impacted by the court system.
Amanda Alexander (06:37):
Several things became clear to me around that time. The first was that the families that I was serving through the Prison & Family Justice Project were being completely shut out of the future of the city. I was part of a national study that was driven by the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and that was called the Who Pays? Study. And it was the very first time that the actual cost of incarceration on families was tabulated. So, we surveyed formerly incarcerated people and their loved ones across the country and got back numbers, like the fact that families on average spend over $13,000 in court costs alone when a loved one is incarcerated. And that two-thirds of families had difficulty in meeting their basic needs, so putting groceries on the table, keeping utilities turned on because of a loved one's incarceration.
Amanda Alexander (07:30):
And yet, this intersection of criminalization and incarceration and familial poverty was not being talked about here in Detroit. If we're not talking about the difficulties that people were facing in getting work coming back from prison or the choices that families were having to make between taking a collect call from a loved one and putting groceries on the table, then we're not having a real conversation that centers the needs of people impacted by incarceration, which is so many people in the Black majority in Detroit.
Amanda Alexander (08:00):
The second thing that was clear to me was that the Movement for Black Lives was just getting going in 2013, 2014 as in my first years as a lawyer. And they were making demands, really visionary demands, for the future of safety in this country, the future of the economy in this country. And we, as lawyers, needed to figure out how to match the power and energy of these organizers. And the last thing that was clear to me, around this time in 2014, 2015, was that so many Detroit organizers had been doing visionary community building work. I would say Detroit is home to some of the most visionary organizing on the planet. These are folks who have seen the bottoming out of US capitalism and understand that we need to build neighborhoods that are valuing people and community outside of the capitalist system.
Amanda Alexander (08:59):
And so, when grocery stores left, people didn't want to leave and they taught themselves how to farm, how to share seeds, how to build resilient local food systems. People have been doing things like time banking, like building worker-owned cooperative businesses. And what I saw was that not only were these incredibly visionary solutions not being valued, they were being pushed out, so people who were doing urban farming were not able to own their land. And so, I did see an opportunity in talking with organizers where lawyers could be helpful in shoring up some of this work. Those were the factors that led to the idea with starting the Detroit Justice Center.
Dr. Douglas E. Wood (09:44):
Can give us an overview about Detroit Justice Center? What is your mission? What is your work all about?
Amanda Alexander (09:52):
Sure. At DJC, it has been really important to us to focus on not just what we are tearing down but what we need to create in order to create safe, thriving communities. And so, I first started thinking and talking about this idea of a just city back in 2014. I remember it was at a Soros Justice Fellows conference, and I had posed this question to folks saying, "What could we borrow from our comrades in the immigration movement who are thinking hard about the elements of a sanctuary city?" So, I love this idea that it wasn't just about stop deportations or what needed to end, but what would it mean for a city to be a true sanctuary?
Amanda Alexander (10:36):
And so, I got us all kind of brainstorming about what would a just city agenda be? And so, our work at DJC is really in that spirit. And we use a three-pronged approach that we call defense, offense, and dreaming because we need all three under one roof. And it's not something that lawyers are accustomed to doing but we, on our defensive prong, we have a legal service and advocacy practice. And that is where we are meeting people where they're at in terms of some of the most pressing challenges that they're facing. We address some of these key legal barriers when it comes to housing and employment and driving safely. And then, we go on the offense with our economic equity practice. And there, we have two attorneys who are trained in transactional law, community development law, who are using their skills to help support worker-owned cooperatives, community organizations that are starting community land trust.
Amanda Alexander (11:31):
And just to give an example, one of my favorite clients is an organization on the west side of Detroit that had bought up 14 homes around their community center, and they came to us because they have this vision for what this neighborhood could be. They said, "We want to turn one of these homes into reentry housing for men coming back from prison, and we want to start a small business corridor of cooperative businesses. And oh yeah, we want to put community solar over the entire neighborhood." And so, those are the types of things where it's like if you look at some of the economic basis that drive incarceration and poverty and displacement, there are organizers who are already tackling the roots of those issues. And so, it's our work, as lawyers, just to shore up some of those things. So if they need to incorporate as a land trust or if they need articles of incorporation as a business or an organization, those are the types of things that our attorneys can assist with.
Amanda Alexander (12:28):
And then lastly, we dream with our Just Cities Lab. And so that is where we are really thinking about what are the things that we need to create and pilot and build out in order to create a more just city.
Dr. Douglas E. Wood (12:42):
Can you talk to us about another DJC program, it's your Community Legal Advocates Program? And you talked about putting the law in the hands of people, can you say more about that and what makes this program unique?
Amanda Alexander (12:56):
Yeah. So, we have the honor of employing three talented community legal advocates, and so these are people who are not lawyers. They do not have formal legal training from a law school, but the beautiful thing is that you do not need to be a professional lawyer in order to help your neighbors and your communities with certain pressing legal issues. And so, we think of it as democratizing access to the law and figuring out are there discreet problems that people are facing that community members can be trained up to help with? And so, the first thing that the Community Legal Advocates identified was helping people to avoid foreclosure here in Detroit. And so, we partner very closely with the Coalition for Property Tax Justice, which has been fighting against the problem of tax foreclosures here in Detroit.
Amanda Alexander (13:51):
And essentially, in the city, we have experienced a wave, about a quarter of homes in Detroit have been subject to tax foreclosure, and this was a wave of foreclosures that was the largest since the Great Depression and that was a wave that came after the subprime mortgage crisis that hit the rest of the country. So, what the Community Legal Advocates have realized was if you help people early on in the process after they've received their property tax assessment, they can advocate to have that lowered. And by providing that legal help early on, it can protect people from having tax bills that are over assessed, that they should not be paying and, down the line, it could help them avoid foreclosure and help them stay in their homes. One of our Community Legal Advocates experienced tax foreclosure herself, and so it's been particularly powerful to say, "I have been through this. This is what I wish I had known. And let me help you stay in your home and not have you lose your home."
Dr. Douglas E. Wood (14:51):
I think that's such an amazing wonderful program, but I want to talk a little bit more about your background in history and how that's really informed how you've really thought about movements, particularly going back to South Africa. So, can you just tell us a little bit about how your background as a historian, how does that inform your work?
Amanda Alexander (15:14):
I think of history and the history of social movements as something that helps me keep my imagination as broad and full as possible. I think that, too often, we think that we are part of movements that are maybe 18 months old or four or five years old. And instead, if we look at the long history of people who have been fighting to be free, who have been fighting for Black joy and liberation, that is a struggle that is 400 years old here in the US, that is many centuries old if we look around the world that people who have been fighting against colonialism across the world. And so I think, for me, studying history and particularly global history, helps me to have a more expansive view of what is possible when people come together to change political systems. It helps me understand a broader range of tactics.
Amanda Alexander (16:15):
In teaching the history of law and social movements to law students, I think I always want to equip students with a broader range of possibilities. So, by studying the history of the We Charge Genocide petition to the UN 60 years ago, students understand that, "Ah, police violence or extrajudicial killings of Black people in the US is nothing new." People have appealed to international fora to the UN, people have tried different tactics before, and so students and lawyers and organizers can understand when certain tactics might be useful and what the full range of possibilities are. And that is what studying history has been useful for, in my mind, is kind of understanding how social change happens and what are the conditions that make certain types of tactics more useful than others.
Dr. Douglas E. Wood (17:11):
So, your work reminds me of my own work funding equal education and the Equal Education Law Center in Khayelitsha in Cape Town.
Amanda Alexander (17:18):
Yes.
Dr. Douglas E. Wood (17:19):
Yeah. And their work was so influenced by the advocacy of young people during apartheid. Can you tell us a little bit about how you engage with young people in your work with the Detroit Justice Center?
Amanda Alexander (17:33):
Yeah, I'd be happy to. So, back when we opened our doors in 2018, there was a battle going on around a proposed new jail here in Wayne County, in the city of Detroit. And without much public input at all, Wayne County was racing forward to build a new $533-million jail. And when we opened our doors, organizers had been going to meetings to try and get this stopped, trying to have a voice in the process. And they asked DJC to, one, file a federal lawsuit to try and hold up the construction of the jail. And they were also saying, "Hey, we need to slow down here for more people about how we could be spending this half a billion dollars."
Amanda Alexander (18:21):
And so, one of the things that we did that first six months that we were open was to hold a youth design summit, where we asked young people in the city, 13- to 18-year-old youth organizers, who had already been doing some of the most exciting work around ending the school-to-prison pipeline or on getting police out of Detroit public schools. We asked them, "What could we build with $533 million that would make you feel safe and valued and empowered?" And not one of those young people said that we need more jails or police or prisons.
Amanda Alexander (18:57):
And they had these incredible ideas and very practical ideas for how to create safety in their communities without more jailing and more policing. And they said things like, "Pay our teachers, fix the water pipes in our schools, I want a bus system, affordable transit that would get me from one side of the city to the other." One girl said, "I want a mental health spa where you could go and talk with someone about everything that's making you depressed or anxious." People wanted affordable, accessible housing. I remember one boy said, "I want affordable housing, and it needs to be accessible from my mom's wheelchair."
Amanda Alexander (19:38):
And so, it was just so powerful that young people are not used to, they're not accustomed yet to thinking of people as disposable, and they're so used to thinking about how do we design a world for all of us. And so it was important to us at DJC to talk with young people about what would safety mean to them, about what could we build for them. It was also important because young people use public space, even more than adults do. They're sitting in public schools all day. They can't get into certain bars and restaurants, so they're hanging out in public parks or in rec centers. So if we're having conversations about public spending that will disproportionately impact young people, they need to be part of that conversation.
Dr. Douglas E. Wood (20:22):
I want to just talk a little bit about leadership among Black women and how does DJC really support that? And what are your thoughts about expanding that in ways that are even deeper around the country?
Amanda Alexander (20:40):
At the Detroit Justice Center, we have a senior leadership team that is primarily Black women. Our staff is comprised of mostly Black women but a real diverse range of people or diverse along all sorts of axes of age, of gender identity, of sexuality. And so, we have taken our cues quite a bit from the work of Essie Justice Group, which is led by the visionary Gina Clayton-Johnson out in California. And they have so much to teach, I think, about Black feminist institution building and building organizations that really meet the needs of the people who are employed there. Some ways that we have tried to do that, particularly through the COVID-19 pandemic, is shifting down to a four-day workweek. Understanding that because the people that work at DJC are often directly impacted by the systems that we are fighting, we need to be able to do this work at a pace that feels sustainable over the long haul and that allows us to take care of ourselves, our families, our spirits, and our communities alongside the work that we're doing at DJC.
Amanda Alexander (21:56):
We try to approach this work with a balance between the urgency that many of our cases demand, but then also thinking about how do we sustain ourselves in a way that will help us to do this for decades to come. And so that is just something that we're constantly thinking about in terms of the pace of our work. Another thing that we are working towards is employing restorative practices to deal with conflicts or even harm within the organization. Because if that is what we're advocating for, then that means that we should not employ things like progressive discipline or replicate some of the punitive systems that the rest of the world is characterized by. So, those are some of the challenges that we've set for ourselves at DJC.
Dr. Douglas E. Wood (22:46):
This is a question that I'm sure it won't be too much of a surprise, but how did the murder of George Floyd and the uprisings from this past year impact your work?
Amanda Alexander (22:56):
I would say in general, in the past year, I think that we have seen incredible victories in terms of on-the-ground organizing. And the beautiful thing to me is that even though, I would say, many people have been preoccupied with this question of, is deep on the police the right phrase to be using? Fortunately, organizers have been busy doing the unglamorous work of shifting power locally and have not been so caught up in the semantics of it. And so what that has meant is that people have succeeded in shifting money. So, activists in 20 different cities have secured divestment of more than $840 million from police departments and one investment of at least $160 million, and that is the hard work of organizing. But for a perspective, that amounts to less than 1% of the over $100 billion that the US spends each year on law enforcement. So, there is a tremendous amount of work to do, and I would say that the movement for police abolition, yes, it is decades old, but in many ways it is just taking off. And so, I'm heartened and hopeful about where this movement stands.
Dr. Douglas E. Wood (24:11):
Well, building on that, what do you think the role of police officers should be in communities?
Amanda Alexander (24:16):
I do not envision a role far into the future for police, and I look to the example of so many communities that are already figuring out ways to keep themselves safe without relying on police or courts or criminalization. I look to the visionary work of youth organizers, like Detroit Heals Detroit and 482Forward. These are organizations here in Detroit who are working to get police out of their schools. They set a goal last year of completely defunding the school police in Detroit.
Amanda Alexander (24:52):
And they recognize that getting the police out wasn't going to be enough to create safety, and so they also have an affirmative vision of creating a safety team, a work group of young people, parents, teachers, counselors, others who are thinking together about how do we create safety in this school and in this community? They're calling for training and peer-to-peer de-escalation tactics. They're calling for counselors and social workers, trauma-informed responses to harm and incidents within schools. And so these are the types of visionary-organizing solutions that are happening that just need to be invested in. And instead, we have tended to have all of the money that is meant to produce safety flow into police budgets.
Dr. Douglas E. Wood (25:46):
We always ask our guests this question at the end of the podcast. And that question is, what does the phrase Shades of Freedom mean to you now and into the future?
Amanda Alexander (25:59):
I love this question, Doug. I'm thinking about... To me, the phrase Shades of Freedom makes me think of the need to define for ourselves what freedom must mean. And this is a lesson that I learned from South African activists back in the early 2000s. So, as I said earlier, I came to know activists who said, "Yes, we have the right to vote. Yes, we have elections that are open to everyone in South Africa now. Yes, we have this beautiful constitution that enshrine certain human rights. And yet, we are not free. And this is not the democracy that we struggled for." And they were saying, "We are not free if 45% of people are unemployed in South Africa. We are not free if a quarter of people are living in shack settlements without running water and electricity. We are not free if people living with HIV do not have access to treatments that can prolong their lives."
Amanda Alexander (26:59):
And so, they really taught me that we have to insist on what freedom means and not just accept the idea that we are free because we have certain civil rights enshrined or we are free because we have elections that are open to all. And these activists went as far as to when the ANC, the ruling party, which had been the revolutionary party, they declared April 27th in South Africa, Freedom Day. And that was the day to commemorate the first post-apartheid elections held on that day in 1994. And these activists, particularly with the Shack Dwellers Movement, said, "Nope, we call it Unfreedom Day because we are not free, and we recognize that South Africa has a ballot box democracy, but this will not be a democracy until we have democratized property relations, until we've gotten our land back, until we have finished the work of decolonization."
Amanda Alexander (27:54):
And that is a powerful political statement to say, "We get to define for ourselves what our freedom will look like and feel like." And so that, to me, is what I think of when I hear the phrase shades of freedom. I think of the people who have trained me to be laser-focused on what true freedom must mean and must entail.
Dr. Douglas E. Wood (28:16):
Thank you so much, Amanda. It's been such a pleasure to have you here as a guest on Shades of Freedom, and we look forward to having a conversation with you again and following your work.
Amanda Alexander (28:26):
Thank you, Doug. This is a pleasure.
Announcer (28:31):
Thanks for joining us for Shades of Freedom from the Aspen Institute's Criminal Justice Reform Initiative. We'll be back soon with more thought-provoking guests, so please subscribe on your favorite podcast app. This podcast was produced by Lynnea Domienik with research assistance by Willem Patrick. It was edited by Ken Thompson. Special thanks to Christian Devers and Wanda Mann. CJRI's programs are made possible by support from Arnold Ventures, the Bank of America Charitable Foundation, the Arthur M. Blank Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the Ford Foundation.