Larry "Luqmon" White: Hope Lives For Lifers Program

August 26, 2015 Larry White runs a program inside New York prisons called Hope Lives For Lifers---and he’s well-qualified for that task because he once served a 25 years-to-life sentence. Still vigorous at the age of 80, Larry White offers recommendations, born of experience, of how a society should deal with crime and punishment. https://www.ssense.com/en-us/editorial/culture/a-conversation-with-larry-white-the-radical-anti-prison-activist-and-teacher-for-life The Radical Anti-Prison Activist And Teacher For Life “FREE YOURSELF AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE.” Larry White will never stop fighting for liberation. In and out of jail since he was a teenager, he arrived at Green Haven Correctional Facility on his final bid in 1976, staring down decades of time. Sentenced to 25-to-life, he paroled in 2007 at the age of 72. He signs every email with: “struggling.” During the 32 years he spent inside, White became one of the leaders of a movement—the Non-Traditional Approach to Criminal and Social Justice—that laid the groundwork for prison abolitionist organizing today. Green Haven was home to a “think tank” studying and opposing the burgeoning criminalization of Blackness and poverty. In 1979, White and his fellow leaders produced the groundbreaking “seven neighborhoods study,” proving 75% of New York’s largely Black and Latino upstate prison population—staffed by white guards—hailed from just seven New York City neighborhoods. Simultaneously, White began to study the psychological effects of lifetime incarceration. He developed a theory of hope as a lifer, which hinged on the commitment to free yourself as quickly as possible. To White, if one’s intention is to free himself, then every act committed in service of that intention becomes a liberating act: lobbying for parole reform; accepting harsh deprivations to avoid disciplinary infractions that add time to a sentence; unionizing prison workers to gain collective-bargaining power; connecting with activists on the outside. He raised a generation of men sentenced to long-term confinement. Every lifer in the system knew his name. Prison officials saw his success organizing as a threat and transferred him repeatedly, but he continued wherever he was sent. In summer 2020, amid a nationwide uprising demanding an end to the epidemic of fatal police brutality against Black people in the United States, the concepts of prison and police abolition proliferated widely. Previously marginalized by reformists as unrealistic, mainstream news outlets began to platform leading abolitionist thinkers; Angela Davis, for example, appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair. Meanwhile, COVID-19 infections surged in American prisons. While campaigns such as Release Aging People in Prison (RAPP) and COVID Bail Out NYC work tirelessly to depopulate jails and prisons, paying bonds and calling for clemencies, the task they face is monstrous in both scale and inhumanity. Older lifers remain at particular risk. The older lifers are still White’s focus—those he left behind. Until the pandemic took hold, he continued to teach his curriculum, now under the umbrella of Hope Lives for Lifers, a program of the Quaker organization American Friends Service Committee, in New York State prisons. I met White in 2013, when I became his editorial assistant. We have remained close friends since. He is equal parts jovial and solemn, greeting every person with a warm laugh but often turning the conversation to heavier realities that weigh on his mind. He brings up the teachings of Paulo Friere and Carlos Castaneda casually, and speaks often about the abject conditions of those sentenced to life without parole. He also offers inimitable vitality and joy; he grew a red pepper plant in his apartment from the seeds of one he had eaten, and when I noticed it, he promptly offered me the solitary fruit. He gives people life, without a second thought. The conversation that follows is part of an ongoing dialogue, and an effort to preserve the long and too-often-hidden history of anti-incarceration activists fighting from within prison walls.