mk: Hello and welcome to The Child and Its Enemies, a podcast about fear and neurodivergent kids living out anarchy and youth liberation. Here at The Child and Its Enemies, we believe that youth autonomy is not only crucial to queer and trans liberation, but to anarchy itself. Governance is inherently based on projecting linear narratives of time and development and gender onto our necessarily asynchronous and atemporal, And youth and teens are at the center of this form of oppression.
Our goal with the podcast is to create a space by and for youth that challenges all forms of control and inspires us to create queer, feral, ageless networks of care. I’m your host, MK Zario, I’m 15 years old, and I’m the youth correspondent at The Anarchist Review of Books, author of the blog Debate Me Bro, and organizer for trans liberation in the Great Lakes region and beyond.
With me today is Clover from Portland Jail Support.
Clover: Hi, thanks for having me. I’m in my late 20s, I use he him pronouns, and yeah, I live in Portland, Oregon. I do a variety of solidarity work of the anarchist flavor. Alongside jail support, I’m also involved with a relatively new network of community free stores across Portland, as well as my local tenants union.
mk: Cool. So what exactly is Portland Jail Support? How do y’all support incarcerated people, and what does that process look like in this era of intense state repression, such as the RICO churches in Atlanta, and recently some similar churches in Northumberland, Mass, and just general repression towards especially eco anarchist types of organizing?
Clover: Yeah, so this model of community jail support that’s happening in places like Portland and Chicago it kicked off in the summer of 2020, like a lot of things did the protest focus jail support splintered off to try and greet anyone and everyone who has to experience being arrested. We viewed it as a kind of a natural extension of abolitionist.
thinking. Regardless of whether someone did or did not commit one of the good or bad crimes, what the police do is directly opposed to how a healthy society responds and just how we morally think we should respond. And so whatever they might deserve, it isn’t that so we try to offer whatever we can to help them get back to their life, feeling better.
Then when they first get released, and right now, especially we’re not really an organization or even a formal network. I know of at least 1 person in Portland who comes out to the jail completely independently throughout the week just to be there with some cigarettes and some conversation and others can’t do it regularly.
But we’ll make a day of it once in a while. And so we like to think of it similar to being a camp support. Where anyone can really get to do it on their own schedule, just whenever they can rather than having to have 1 kind of centralized network. We yeah, so we do have a social media and all of that because folks that were had been doing jail support for a while wanted to spread information about the practice and help provide some helpful information about doing it yourself.
Because. Sitting outside of the jail isn’t the most approachable thing to do. Sometimes whenever there’s a major crisis or event in the city. Also, we have that platform to help people get tapped in and find ways to help a lot of times people who are doing jail support regularly. Don’t have that extra time and capacity to come out when there is a huge wave of arrests.
And so we can help the people that get excited when they see something happening, come out and put it forward that energy. Yeah, social media is only 1 of the ways to coordinate and spread the word, but it’s helpful for people who don’t already have a lot of relationships or know where to start. As far as actual jail support when we’re outside of the jail.
We’ll have an assortment of snacks and beverages some supplies for the weather. We have hand warmers ponchos, sunscreen in the summer and any other camping gear that we can manage to have a lot of time. Socks, shoelaces, hats and gloves can get. Lost or thrown away by the police. Those are some of the common things.
Some of it we buy, and some of it is from crowdfunding and some people just drop off supplies at the jail when they know that we’re out there. And since, as with many places, police are mostly arresting poor and homeless people. And yet they have a habit of stealing or throwing away your property and we can’t always get that stuff back.
We can’t undo that harm. But we can at least meet you on the other end and be for at least some people the community that everyone should have after a traumatic event. Having an arrest record isolates people. It restricts the kinds of jobs, housing, and social services that you can get. And it’s ironic for a system that claims to lock people up in part for rehabilitation, because it makes your life way harder afterwards.
And people don’t even know if they can tell their friends what happened without losing them. So jail support is great for people who want to reduce that harm and do something about what the police do to people but if you don’t necessarily want to be going into the courtrooms and directly engaging with those things we show up for anyone and help them figure out what they need to do next.
And I always want to emphasize that even if someone can’t bring a lot, just having someone to talk to in that moment. Or being able to call someone with your phone can seriously change the path of that person’s life. And it can even increase the time that person has before they’re arrested again.
I feel like almost every week. Someone tells me that I have no idea what it means to them that we’re out there. Yeah it’s relatively a pretty easy thing to do that can have a huge effect on people’s lives. And just the act of waiting outside for people to be released does so many things, both for the people you meet and in the broader political context.
You have the potentially immense directive, of course, of the specific thing that you’re doing. And you’re also challenging the founding principle of policing by being average community members engaging with criminalized people. For context, I’m pretty small. And people generally think that I look like someone who should be afraid of a man released from jail, but look, I’m fine.
We’re all fine. We’re just talking and it contextualizes people who do break laws or cause harm within the situation. They were in rather than maintaining the myth that they have to be kept separate from us. Most people haven’t broken laws. Only because we haven’t been in the situation where that was the best option for us.
It also just annoys the police a lot, since we talk a lot of passerby and dispel myths, share stories about the systemic pointless cruelty and the failures of the legal system. It’s a very visible form of solidarity, encouraging people to think about the fact that they also can find little ways to help their neighbors.
And when jail support is a common practice, it can change the culture of the entire city. It makes it harder for people to ignore what’s happening inside of jails when they’re seeing people caring and paying attention. When we had community jail support happening almost around the clock back in 2020, people inside would tell each other to look for jail support when they got out because someone would be there.
And so even before they got released, we were able to make their experience a little easier. Often, that’s the most important thing for someone who’s incarcerated. They need to know that they still exist to people outside. For us in Portland nowadays jail support has actually been much easier than it was in 2020 to 22.
There’s a kind of weird dynamic going on in Portland where the police are expecting everyone to like, Play into the same playbook as 2020. And thankfully, people are trying different things. They’re the forms of mutual aid that and solidarity that we’ve been seeing have actually been relatively undisturbed for now.
We’re waiting for that to change. But in 2020, there wasn’t of so much. Super clear divide between the protests and jail support because they were all happening in the park across the street from the jail, which is also the central precinct. So I started doing jail support after was already arrested and doxxed and there was a lot of.
Open hostility between us and the police. People would heckle every single cop driving or walking by, and there was also a camp that was formed with unhoused people who were doing jail support, and they got swept constantly. And so there’s back and forth all the time. People would be followed home in marked or unmarked police cars.
There are passerby who would throw things or yell. And so nowadays partially because jail support has a much smaller presence we have to stay aware, but things are much less volatile. We had that big confrontation, and now the cops know that we’re abolitionists and we’re not trying to work with them or make the process of arrest any kinder.
But they also know that directly messing with us for no reason, we’re Would rile up a lot of people. So we’re in a bit of a stalemate for anyone starting to do jail support for the 1st time. It’s important to think about what the current dynamic is between your local police how the public feel about the police and the jails and be prepared for at some point, the possibility of that intimidation, bogus arrests and harassment.
But a lot of it does depend on. What kind of presence you want to have? If you assert that openly hostile energy against the police, there’s a lot more of that. There’s a lot of benefits from that. There’s also a lot more risks that come with that. Police across the United States regularly arrest people for serving food in a park.
So you just anticipate these things and you create the support networks. You know what happens if something escalates and you talk about who can deal with that aftermath of a possible arrest and who needs to like, dip out if the police start issuing threats. And I will say that at least in Portland over the past 4 years, I haven’t seen someone arrested in Portland specifically and exclusively for doing jail support.
mk: Thank you so much for speaking on all of this. I love the ethic of universal love you’re playing here, especially because carcerality has so many parallels to the oppression that youth and teens face. Because within the nuclear family and compulsory education, we also feel invisible and stigmatized, like we’re blamed for our situation, especially those of us who might also be stigmatized in other ways, and like we can’t really access support.
And the work you’re doing to make those issues visible rather than just having incarceration be swept under the rug of what society considers to be a problem feels like it has all these parallels to what needs to be done about ageism, because I imagine that if there were more of a support apparatus for people who were facing repression from their nuclear families or from the Or from compulsory education, then maybe it would seem less societally entrenched and more like something that actually can be solved.
On that topic, have you ever gotten to work with incarcerated youth on supporting them, and what has that been like?
Clover: Yeah, one thing that I always think about when we talk about incarcerated youth is that there’s also a lot of older people that I meet that talk about how they were arrested as a teenager, and then Either literally have spent decades in jail and prison without ever walking out and being free or just being caught in an endless loop of arrest and release and arrest and release.
And that’s like a whole topic of how we support people who have been through that experience. But in general, a really depressing number of people released from jail are under the age of 24. And. And similarly to the general trend of arrests, a lot of those youth are homeless. And unfortunately, they often compare the violence that they experience while incarcerated with that violence at home school shelters and other institutions.
And so I definitely think that there is that link of what we, how we think it’s okay to treat people that we think we know better. And, all of that into autonomy. Yeah, let’s. I can definitely say from my vantage point that like school to prison pipeline alive and and there also were homeless youth that were involved in jail support from day 1 and some of, homeless teenagers as well.
And they were there because they had already been policed and failed by the system. And when there was energy behind a way to confront that they were. Right there with us. And yeah, that was it.
Yeah most of my direct work with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated minors has come from outside of my direct community jail support experience and was more intertwined with my broader past political work when I had a brief venture into academic school programs.
I’ve seen the different ways that even the most culturally minded and best staff programs generally just funnel kids back into succeeding in their formalized test scores and reaching employment. And the fact that some youth are able to scrape by with that support. That justifies the mistreatment of all those who can’t and all of these methods still relying the same threats of violence.
It’s just outsourced to security or the police and it’s obscured and the 1st time I really encountered the issue in a tangible way was in Seattle. And as a young person, I experienced protest related jail support on both sides and witnessed the violence that police were willing to commit against minors.
And when I was 19, I got involved with the no new youth jail campaign in Seattle. The under filled youth jail downtown was a health hazard. So they decided to build a sparkling new one right next door. And that was the first time I had heard directly from kids and young adults. Who had been imprisoned and the ways that it harmed them.
And it had planted the seed that there were other ways to respond to harm, even violence than putting someone in a cage. And years later the campaign did make progress. The jail was built late and out of financial loss, and then within a year announced it would be closed in 2025. The campaign is still alive and well to pressure early and complete closure while driving the support of alternatives.
And so it’s not a fairytale ending, but it is one that shows long term community commitment to ending youth incarceration.
mk: Yeah on a broader scale, how would you say youth liberation fits into anti repression work, and how might jail support be relevant to teens who maybe haven’t been incarcerated?
Because this campaign to end incarceration in Seattle sounds like it had a base of community support that wasn’t just from people who had been incarcerated. And I kind of wonder, like, how might teens with maybe more privilege, or haven’t been involved in social movements, or for whatever reason just have not encountered state repression, how might they still find this relevant to their situation?
Clover: In the big picture I can say I think youth liberation is just as much as part of that collective movement as any other class or identity. I always really appreciated the way Lori Couture framed it when she said historically, Children have been and are still the most oppressed, exploited, and victimized group of human beings on the planet.
I definitely, I’m not going to speak to her work as a child developmental psychologist, let alone the field of child developmental psychology. But I think the point that she makes is a good one. In most situations, if you are part of any marginalized class or in an oppressive situation, you’ll have less autonomy, respect, and support if you are a child.
Violence against children, if authorized by the parent, is so accepted that it’s protected by the law that is supposed to, quote, unquote, protect us. In order for universal liberation to be consistent, it has to include the liberation of youth. Because what does it mean for everyone to be in control of their own lives if children can’t decide where they live?
And can there be freedom of speech when a child can be punished for disagreeing with their parents? Is involuntary servitude really abolished if children can be forced into labor for profit? Abolition as a framework is at its best when it strives to dismantle every manifestation of policing, prisons, and slavery that exists around and inside of us.
Our movements will be more powerful once we, as adults engage With childhood as own marginalized experience on one hand, that means that people who don’t experience ageism at the moment, asking how to make spaces accessible to youth and being mindful of how youth interests are being overlooked.
It also means extending solidarity on issues that do specifically affect young people and considering. Them, you worthy of our solidarity because adults tend to cheapen the input of youth by assuming there are only certain things a young person can offer like passion, new perspective, ambition, but the individual experiences and input, especially the ones that are that challenge the establishment of point of view are dismissed.
And I know I don’t need to tell any young person this. But it’s something that I remember well, when I was trying to engage growing up, and I think is an under examined part of the obstacles that we put up in our collective movements. And in terms of direct forms of solidarity with people who are incarcerated.
Things like jail support and letter writing there are several things that I think make it worthwhile to anyone both directly again, in that moment and for building towards our broader collective, liberatory goals. It’s a great way to get involved with mutual aid that you can do without already knowing a lot of people.
And it’s easy to fit into whatever your schedule is, even if you can only do it every once in a while, you can still make a big difference in someone’s life. And if you’re a person who wants to do something about the way that police hurt people, but don’t know where to start, this is the place. The other thing about caring about community jail support and all sorts of prisoner support before you get arrested, is that similarly to any other of similarly to many other parts of capitalism.
The only reason it hasn’t happened to you yet is mostly luck.
mk: Yeah thank you so much for speaking on this. I love the framing of abolitionism, that basically anything we’ve tried to resist that mostly faces adults is also something that you have experienced on a nuclear family or country. Like, how, incarceration, we can all agree is terrible, but it might be carceral for youth to not have a choice as to where they live, etc.
I always remember using this argument as a kid, like, when I was like six. If you wouldn’t warehouse adults in a building, why are you doing it to me? And, from a six year old, it isn’t taken seriously because ageism, but it still is valid to think about. So speaking of age positionality and how it affects us, In this ageist hell of a society.
There is a cliche out there, especially among folks who maybe have class or racial privilege, that age is a protective factor against state repression and therefore teenagers shouldn’t worry about or try to resist state repression. But the narrative, at its bare bones discarding the privilege aspect, is that if someone’s legally a minor or presents as a younger child, they might be unlikely to get arrested.
In your jail support work, do you think there’s anything to this, or would you say HSM operates more intensely in jails and prisons?
Clover: Age can sometimes be used to leverage a situation, but I’d say that’s the exception to the rule, and depends a lot on other factors. Some police officers are hesitant to use violence against someone they perceive as a child.
Others think that violence is the best way to address misbehavior in youth. Some police will see you differently once they learn that you’re a minor, and others will judge you purely on how you appear. In terms of incarceration, there are more intervention steps that exist. With youth jails being framed as a last resort, but it doesn’t mean that those intermediary steps operate under a different logic than jail like jail.
They’re usually pointlessly restrictive arbitrarily cruel, and you’re not able to opt out. And as with many other things, who your parents are, what sort of resources they have at their disposal, and whether or not they’re willing to to spend it, determine a lot of what your experience might be?
There’ve certainly been enough lawsuits to show that the same discrimination and abuses that happen to adults, whether they’re when reporting a crime or during an investigation are rampant for youth. As we’ve seen in so many ways, adults are more concerned with the idea of protecting children than the actual process of it, or what protecting children means.
Another myth is the clean legal slate of turning 18. Some charges will be automatically sealed at 18 and dismissed later. Some have a longer process, or you have to put in a request, and even more will be with you for life. And if you’re a quote unquote habitual offender, they’ll not only keep your arrest record from childhood, they’ll use it to justify harsher sentences and mistreatment.
So a lot of how the, your legal experiences before 18 will go, will happen depends a lot on where you live. It’s always good, as with anyone, to research what laws will apply to you and how.
mk: Yeah, that definitely makes sense, because at its core, this narrative tends to be grounded in this idea that, oh, it could never happen to you, and therefore incarcerated.
People are othered and treated as if they don’t need support. And I think we’ve all heard this somewhere in our childhoods, and it tends to actively discourage the kind of mutual aid that honestly teenagers need to participate in most. But yeah, you’re very much right that youth and teens need to do our own legal research, and that can even be a site of teen empowerment, realizing that we can Manage our own legal needs, and we can do that for other people in our lives, and it doesn’t necessarily need to be driven by our nuclear family.
On this topic, how did you organize as a kid and teen? How and where were you of incarceration, and did you ever do jail support or any other organizing? Did you identify with the anarchist label, and if so, how did that affect your life?
Clover: I grew up in the suburbs outside of Portland. So I was taught pretty much as long as you obeyed the law, then the police were there to protect us.
And yeah, there was some concern about, police brutality and corruption, but that was, the idea was, yeah, as long as I’m not breaking the law, then everyone, everything will be fine. I was told, in school all the time, call the police if I needed help. Even though my main direct experience was that my friend’s divorced dad was a cop, and she didn’t like him.
And he gave me weird vibes and my dad had as much personal history with police as you would expect a black man in the Pacific Northwest to have but he tried to shield us from a lot of that and just, again, always reinforced, be polite, obey the law. My brother, when he was a teenager and I was a fair bit younger he did have one unfortunate encounter with a police officer that I witnessed that definitely gave me some fear of the police, but I mainly remember wondering at the time, like what my brother had done to get a gun pointed at him.
It turns out that he didn’t pull over after speeding. Even then I knew he didn’t deserve to have that happen to him but the lesson my parents drove in out of fear. It was at a bad cop. Won’t have a chance to hurt you if you don’t break the law, which is obviously naive. But so I knew cops were racist and did bad things, but I, at the time was very much like policing should be reformed.
I was very concerned with social justice in theory, growing up, particularly around, the effects of climate change to people around the world, but having restricted Internet in the suburbs creates a lot of isolation. So there were a lot of things that I just didn’t have a framework for the furthest.
I think I got was that I knew we needed to stop climate change. War is bad, and everyone should have their basic needs, the food, medicine, shelter and I went to a couple of marches here and there, and I always just assumed that I’d get involved with some kind of politics after school, and then I’d make real change, but I had no real political analysis outside of the status quo frameworks of the liberal left.
So anarchy to me was very abstract and not like a. Political framework or theory that doesn’t mean I couldn’t have found it, but it had never occurred to me that there were other ways of being and relating. And so I had the archetypal experience a lot of people have of moving to a new city for college and getting a huge wake up call, realizing I was trans, realizing our political systems were walking us to our doom, all that kind of stuff.
And I’m really grateful for some of the people I met because they really helped me break out of that mindset that I was raised in. I was able to unlearn a lot as messy as that process has to be. So by the time I actually met some like print. Principled anarchists that were willing to sit down and really talk it through.
I was ready to hear what they had to say. But still, I like to think that if I had been able to encounter anarchism when I was younger, I would have still found myself in that movement.
mk: Yeah, I’m so sorry that you had those encounters with state repression as a young person and what you said about wishing you had access to anarchism at that age is so resonant.
Honestly, like I feel like we’re all anarchists on some level, and the main difference is just whether we have the words for it, and whether we have the openness to it. As a little kid in the Midwest, I didn’t hear about anarchism until I was 13, but I think that if I had heard about it before then, I would have been all over it.
So I definitely Get how you feel. Speaking of which, in terms of being radicalized as a young person and what that can look like what advice would you have for kids and teens who want to start a jail support network in their region or maybe have an incarcerated relative or friend who they want directly support?
Clover: So there are three main things to that I would recommend thinking through when like you’re interested in doing jail support. And really these are three things that. Work for any whatever it is that you want to start getting involved in the 1st is what jail you want to do it at and it seems a little obvious.
But once you know where you’re going, planning, the rest becomes a lot easier. Most big cities have more than 1 and at least 1 juvenile detention center. Some other places have 1 facility that incarcerates people across a wider area. So you want to pick 1 out that you can get to consistently and make sure it’s actually where people are coming out of after they’re being released.
The 2nd is figuring out who you want to do it with. And you can start in a lot of places. Some people will get together a group of friends that they already have, or a community group. They’re already a part of that they want to that. They know want to get involved in solidarity work.
And you can also invite people from different groups that, you know, and networks that. Want to start a project more intentionally rather than it being people that already know each other. It all depends on what kind of relationships that you already have. And if you want to do the work informally, or more formally, there’s a lot of pros and cons, and it Can change based on the circumstances.
At 1st, we had, we hadn’t jail support meetings and all that kind of thing. And then eventually we, as even as we got to know each other better, that kind of formal structure became less necessary. And yeah, so once you know who you’re going to have involved, you can talk about the different things that you can offer.
Sometimes people can do more on the material side and other people can help a lot with navigating the legal system, getting access to different organizations or even just like I have a hot spot on my phone so that people can. Use their own phone to contact someone. And again the only necessary component is being able to center.
The person is being released and offer them compassion. Listen to them. See if what you can help them out. And the 3rd is to anticipate some of the boundaries and obstacles that you might come across. A lot of skills come with experience. So you might encounter people or situations that you don’t know how to respond to yet.
And a lot of times there are times when packing up for a while and coming back another time is just the right move. I’ve learned how to deescalate a lot of situations over the years, but there’s really only so much you can do with a dozen police cameras pointed right at you. And of course, the last thing you want is for police to get involved in a situation outside of the jail.
Not everyone is going to be willing to treat you with respect. So knowing how you want to respond in advance and what you’re willing to put up with will help you feel more prepared in the moment. We always try to get people the things that they need, but we will ask them to move on after if they won’t redirect from saying things that are targeted or hateful, because, that’s how we respond when community members.
Won’t stop doing those things. Yeah, I always recommend people learn de escalation techniques in general, but especially if you’re planning on meeting people immediately after their arrest or release, which is extremely emotionally intensive time. Police repression and Police bootlickers like we discussed, they will come and go.
And so having strong community relationships can discourage police meddling since arresting jail support isn’t going to do much if it results in five times as many angry people doing jail support for that. So knowing how much time and labor you can contribute is also important because as long as our societies are structured this way, there will always be scarcity and there’s always going to be.
More time in the clock than people able to do jail support. And there’s been times that I’ve had to stop doing jail support altogether because I just had to make sure I was doing okay. But when I came back and acknowledge those limitations, and, I take a week off when I need to, I was able to do jail support.
It becomes something that fulfills and sustains me, and it keeps me going in other areas of my life. Yeah, all of this can sound intimidating or overwhelming, but really, these are things that we should all be learning to consider with all kinds of liberation work. And just 1 last thing for anyone who knows someone who’s incarcerated, I’ve heard again and again from people who’ve been incarcerated long and short term communication and connection, because that is 1 of the greatest tools of. Jails and prisons is isolating people and making you literally disappear from the rest of the world. And so just the act of making someone know that someone is thinking about them and cares about what’s happening to them.
Can really, it can help lessen jail and prison from something totally life shattering to something that they can imagine getting through. So that’s always just the common bottom line is we have a bunch of people in our society that. Have been disappeared. And I think we should all do something about that.
mk: I agree. And to that end any shameless plugs for how people can support you or your jail support group or do jail support work in general.
Clover: Yeah, I don’t have too much in regards to jail support specifically we do have an Instagram, pdx underscore jail support and a blue sky account that we just got to sit on the handle pdx dash jail support but we generally use that social media to help other people get involved.
Jail support or whatever mutual aid and solidarity work they are wanting to do. And we also have some of the resources both for jail support specific information and broader abolitionist thinking. And if you want to get in touch but don’t want to associate your social media with this kind of communication, we do have ProtonMail at contactpdx_jailsupport@proton.me and of course, I always have to give a shout out to the indomitable human spirit. Spirit amazing amenity has made it through some truly mindbogglingly horrifying times, but we just keep plotting on, don’t we?
mk: Yeah, we do. Thank you so much for sharing your Youth Liberation journey. This has been Clover from Portland Jail Support and you’re listening to the Child and Its Enemies.
If you wanna learn more or join us on Discord and Signal, or both, our website is the thechildanditsenemies.noblogs.org. I’m mk Zariel. Thanks. for listening. Stay safe, stay dangerous.