Ian Partman

Ian Partman /
Survived and Punished /
New York, USA /

In wanting, somehow, to reflect on my experiences this summer – lessons I’ve learned, lessons I’ve unlearned, knowledge and experience shared with and between me, et cetera – I’ve spent some time trying to pinpoint what, if anything, has shifted in my thinking, my practice, or my orientation. Peeking up quietly from all that reflection is a thought that, at first, felt morbid, horrifying, and discouraging; but I’m trying now to see it as a source of strength, a site of interminable struggle.

Liberation takes a lifetime. Whether in research and allocating resources for the re-entry of our formerly incarcerated members, preparing for a meeting with the commutations working group, or distributing social media campaigns to my peers, I could not escape the sense that there was an incredible distance separating the world we live in – a world consumed by a coerced assumption that prisons and police do keep us safe, a world committed still to the quotidian and grandiose acts of carceral violence that encage thousands of us daily – and the world I want so desperately. On my toughest days, this thought became so consuming that it made my work seem futile, unimportant, or worse – counterproductive. But if there is anything to be gleaned from the histories of violence in the US – histories of conquest, genocide, and captivity – it is, to paraphrase Michel Foucault, there is resistance wherever there is power.

In those moments, I reminded myself of the legacies of Black activists and freedom fighters who came before me who dared, audaciously, to march towards a future totally and impossible incommensurate with their present; who dared to burn down or flee waywardly from their plantations, who turned away from the whipping post and the baton and the water hose, who produced mutual networks of care and community when the state relegated us to continual negligence, who dreamt up and dreamt on the long emancipatory march towards freedom. I reminded myself that liberation is not an event, but an event-horizon. The arc of another world does not begin with me or any of my fellow “fellow” peers – and it doesn’t end with us either. It is entirely possible that none of us will see the world we wish to live in anytime soon. But it is our struggle – our everyday and intimate struggle against oppressive institutions and towards justice – that moves us closer to those worlds. If there is anything I’ve learned this summer, then, it is this: my work does not end or begin here; the things I’ve learned I will need to continue to learn, the systems I’ve challenged I will need to continue to challenge, the care I’ve performed is care I will have to continue to perform.

I may not see a world without prisons or police within my lifetime, but I’ll know, as I approach my horizon, that my life was a life spent assuring that the generations succeeding very may will. 

Ian Partman /
Survived and Punished /
New York, USA /

This summer, I’ve had the pleasure of working with an amazing host organization to take on work that I take very seriously; work that is stalwart in its love for the people and community, that remains in struggle against the oppressive institutions that comprise the Prison-Industrial-Complex, and that begins primarily with the supposition that another world is possible. Though, I’ve struggled to know or generate a way of talking about my work in a way that doesn’t feel self-gratifying or self-centered, especially because so much of it traffics in active and constant collaboration with peers, volunteers, and other members of the organization. So I think that the best way to go about describing it is by way of an anecdote.

One thing that I internalized very early on in my summer project was that the line between practice and pedagogy should remain very, very thin. Put simply: if you preach it, you should also practice it. Those of us involved in activism against the Prison-Industrial-Complex know that the stakes are too high — and the margins of victory too slim — to sacrifice conviction for compromise. In general meetings with my host organization, when tasked with debating the merits or pitfalls of meeting requests for approval/endorsement of certain legislature or organizations, the first questions we asked ourselves were “how does this legislation/organization align with our ideological tenets?” and perhaps, more seriously: “how does the endorsement of said legislation/organization advance our ideological goal as an organization?” If the approval risked failing to meet the litmus of those two questions, it was denied and immediately shelved. In a world where the legitimacy of prisons and policing remains relatively unquestioned in federal and local-level policies, the risks of advancing towards goals with unproductive ends remains high. 

I recognized this immediately when I began working on developing a comprehensive set of resources for the re-entry of our formerly incarcerated/newly decarcerated members in the state of New York. I quickly realized that in many parts of the state, resources for formerly incarcerated persons remained insufficient, non-existent, or, in the worst cases, seemingly aimed at deterring them from full re-entrance into society. Nevertheless, we had to make sense of the available resources, and figure out how to tactically employ them in productive ways. We also had to figure how we could best honor the work of community-based organizations to fill the gaps in the resources allocated by local-level governments. All of this was met with assuring we remained allegiant to the core tenet of our organization: that we are responsible for keeping each other safe. Put simply: I had to figure out how to practice what I preached. And just like that, a seemingly basic task became a lesson for a lifetime. 

Ian Partman /
Survived and Punished /
New York, USA /

The summer before entering sixth grade, I watched from my living room as George Zimmerman was acquitted of all charges for his murder of Trayvon Martin. Every summer after, in a strange succession, I watched as more and more black people were executed at the hands of the police, and, perhaps more brutally, as those police officers received little more than slaps on the wrist for their extra-judicial murders.

Feeling almost incapacitated by the senseless state violence (which I would later come to understand as the very condition of our white supremacist normal), I turned to books, films, photos–anything I could get my hands on that would give me a sliver of understanding. As these summers swelled, and with them, protests, riots, and uprisings, so did my knowledge.

Now it feels difficult to define precisely when, but at some point, I began to recognize the fundamental contradictions of the state apparatus that many of us term the “prison-industrial complex.” It was no longer lost on me that the very same system that let police officers indiscriminately kill and target black people with impunity was the same system that disproportionately and indiscriminately incarcerated black people. These contradictions angered me, and it was with this rage, which I couldn’t describe or fully make sense of, that I became an activist.

So, let me rephrase: every summer after, in a strange succession, my passion for a world better and greater than the one given to me and to other black people around the world, in the duress of our white-supremacist normal, grew stronger and stronger. It is precisely this passion which has led me to the Gallatin Global Fellowship in Human Rights, and this passion illuminates my summer project.

As a Human Rights Fellow, I will be working with Survived & Punished NY, a nonprofit organization that campaigns and organizes for the abolition of custodial sentences for victims of sexual violence, who were incarcerated for “failure to protect,” self-defense, and other forms of criminalization aimed at caging human beings for their attempts at survival. At Survived & Punished, I will be working to build communication networks between our volunteers, legal assistants, and currently incarcerated people. I will work directly with the mass commutations team to advocate for the release of prisoners in the state of New York.

I will also provide research and other assistance for our ongoing collaborations with human rights programs, law clinics, and other prison and police abolitionist organizations in the Americas. Further, I will conduct individual research on sexual and domestic violence within what I call the “carceral apparatus,” researching transformative justice strategies and assisting another nonprofit, Project NIA.

As it stands, abolition is an impossible project. Many of us have internalized the belief that prisons and police–and the whole of our white supremacist normal–is all that there is. Abolition, thus, is steadfastly utopian, the work of the future. Perhaps for many of us who are vulnerable and proximate to state violence, the utopian is our only claim to the world.