Oral history contributors offer crucial first-person information to our understanding of the carceral system in New York City. State records tell one story—often obscuring, misrepresenting, and flattening individual truths, or valorizing the expansion of police and jails. More often than not, these records reduce people and systems to mere numbers and statistics. The people who experience these systems firsthand, from the policing of public housing to the repression of political prisoners, to the police raids of massage parlors, to immigration kidnapping, know the realities and details best. They experienced and witnessed them within their full, complicated, and vibrant lives. These stories provide critical counter-texts to the paper trail maintained by police and prisons themselves, and offer profound, full-hearted wisdom about how to resist.
Listener's note: These stories contain details around themes of police violence, drug use, imprisonment, state repression, death, and intimate partner violence. General content notes are listed under each interview’s description, and more detailed and timestamped notes can be found in the accompanying transcript. Please take care when listening, and honor that these contributors have chosen to share what feels important for others to know.
Click through the different links below to access various oral history interviews.