Claudia Peña - Abolition as Amends to Mother

Like so many of our other industries, the enormous mass incarceration system has wreaked havoc on our society. Our desire for punishment, and the profits made by the incarceration of millions of human beings, consequences be damned, lead to the destruction of the social fabric of countless communities in the short term, and contribute to the ravaging of the larger global environment in the longer term. Our only path forward is to make amends with the land, water and air, one harmful industry at a time, including abolition of the prison industrial complex as we know it.
Claudia Peña, Executive Director of For Freedoms, an artist collective that centers art and creativity as a catalyst for transformative connection and collective liberation, serves on the faculty at UCLA School of Law and in that school’s Gender Studies Department. She is also the founding Co-Director of the Center for Justice at UCLA, home of the Prison Education Program, which creates innovative courses that enable faculty and students to learn from and alongside currently incarcerated participants. Claudia has devoted her life to justice work through community organizing, transformative and restorative justice, consciousness-raising across silos, coalition-building, teaching, advocacy through law and policy, and the arts.
This keynote talk was delivered at the 2024 Bioneers Conference. To see more conference talks visit www.bioneers.org/2024talks

[@truepatriot6388]

Thank you for Claudia for sharing your understanding of where we are and how we got here, and for the Bioneers team for organizing and sharing the conference with us.
At the heart of the trauma-based European culture and history is the pursuit of power and control, through technology, warfare, hierarchy, ideology, trade and finance - culminating in the the arrogance, greed and cruelty of industrial capitalism. This irresponsible concentration of coercive power at the core of "Western" culture is inherintly Entropic - it focuses energy and power to separate and degrade the "things" around it into "utility". Our physical-animal nature includes this aspect. All animals are consumers after all. But the narrow attention of human cleverness has allowed us to consume and control far beyond the realm of the physical body - beyond the just realm of our needs and into the wastelands of endless desires. This is the expanded Entropic realm - the realm of wanton death and destruction. But we also have a spirit nature (soul) which involves wisdom and loving Awareness, not consumption or power-seeking. This is the Syntropic realm - the realm of the living world. It subsumes and transcends the Entropic realm, providing Awareness as the proper guide for our animal natures and capacity for clever power-seeking. All of us, and especially our men, must gain the capacity to restrain superficial narrow-focused attention (Entropic power) in favour of expanding the breadth and depth of our awareness and our spirit natures (Syntropic awareness). This sacred duty and obligation falls to each of us, and we are free to pursue it. The regeneration of mother Earth, the spreading and growth of justice and peace among men and other beings, the future generations and the legacy of the ancestors, all depend up our choice to walk the path of expanded awareness and self-restraint. Now, let us put one foot in front of the other, our eyes and ears and hearts open, our minds humbled and our mouths mostly shut... and we are on our way.

[@evereynolds1]

I love this talk from beginning to end. Thank you for your wise words and for sharing your heart so beautifully!

[@tuckerdinnes2132]

Thank you 🙏

[@zeropointconsciousness]

Beautiful Thankyou.

[@megm.c4026]

Prisons are disgusting. An absolute horror all about profit. Thanks for speaking out!!

[@jefferyheppler7650]

Humanity is One