Emely

Emely grew up in Manhattan. Her brother, father, and uncles all served time at Rikers. She describes how painful, scary, and dehumanizing it was to visit her brother at Rikers, where the COs treated her with condescension and suspicion. She discusses systemic racism and the prison industrial complex, noting that "locking people up in prison and treating them inhumanely to rehabilitate them is not logical." She ends her interview imagining a world without prisons, "where we will take all the money that we’ve invested in corrections and put it in community resources, put it in free housing, put it in community land trust ... a world that is cooperative." (Summary written by: Annie Anderson)