Kupfer: Do you think that the green-jobs initiative will help soften the social, economic, and ecological shocks to come?

Jones: As much as they can be softened. One good thing about green-collar jobs is that they can’t be outsourced. If you want to weatherize this building, you can’t ship it to India or China. If you want to build wind farms, it’s the wind blowing in the U.S that has to be captured. If you want to install solar panels, it’s the sun shining on the U.S. they have to catch. Green-collar jobs create a stable source of employment for U.S. workers, who right now are under tremendous pressure from India and China. God bless India and China; I want their economies to do well. But the outsourcing of good blue-collar manufacturing jobs has created enormous social and political instability in the U.S.

Right now the Far Right has overplayed its hand, and the progressives have an opportunity to take advantage of that. In 2008 we are likely to elect a Democratic president, House, and Senate. But there’s no guarantee we will keep them. We can’t afford a repeat of what we saw from 1992 to 1994, when President Bill Clinton and a Democratic Congress lost the ball, and Republicans rallied behind Newt Gingrich and took over the Congress. I think we need eight to twelve years of progressive stewardship to deal with our ecological problems. The only way we are going to get that is if working people feel that help is on the way and that somebody on the Left is concerned about the economic crisis in this country.

Kupfer: Is this what some refer to as the “politics of inclusion”?

Jones: Yes, in some ways it’s the opposite of the traditional, white, mainstream environmentalist approach. Environmentalists sometimes don’t understand that what motivated them to get involved in political activism and change their lifestyle isn’t going to inspire everyone else. It’s not just a matter of their explaining louder and louder why everyone should be like them. That’s not the politics of inclusion; that’s the politics of elitism. The reality is that working people will support ecological solutions, but not for the same reasons that the eco-elites support them.

A lot of wealthy, educated people wanted to take action as a result of Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth, but most low-income people and people of color I know had no interest in seeing the movie in the first place. They already have enough problems. They don’t need new crises to worry about. Around here we say that the people who already have a lot of opportunities are the ones who need to hear about the crises. So if you have a house and a car and a college degree, then, yes, you should hear about global warming, or peak oil, or dying species. But poor and low-income people need to hear about opportunities. They need to hear about the expected reduction in asthma rates when we reduce greenhouse gases. They need to hear about the wealth and health benefits of moving to a sustainable economy. Otherwise you are just telling people who are already having a bad day that they should have a worse one.

The politics of inclusion requires that you let different people approach ecological issues through different doors. Wanting to create jobs for poor kids has to be just as valid an entryway as concern about the rain forest. These different crises — political, ecological, and spiritual — are all interlocked.

The people who are dominating the environmental discussion right now want everybody to watch their movie, sign their petition, and march in line behind them. But the movement cannot grow the way we need it to unless we let the working-class guy and the undocumented worker and the poor kid from the inner city articulate their own agendas.

Kupfer: You’ve also been involved over the years with prisoners’ rights and prison reform. What challenges do we face in reforming the criminal-justice system?

Jones: People ask me, “What do prisons have to do with the ecological crisis?” To me it’s no surprise that the country that has the world’s biggest pollution problem also has the most prisons. We’ve got a disposable mind-set: disposable products, disposable species, disposable people. We don’t see our sisters and brothers, much less all the animal species, as sacred. The failure to honor the sacred is at the root of both problems. 

Most of our prison-population growth has come from convictions on nonviolent drug offenses, which rich people and poor people commit in equal measure, but for which only poor people end up serving time. When I was at Yale, I saw more drugs on campus than I saw in the poor community. But the police never kicked in the door at the Skull and Bones Society and made arrests there; they were busy arresting people in the housing projects.

Drug users need treatment, not jail time. We know how to take care of people who are in trouble with drugs, because we do it for rich kids. We should do the same thing for poor addicts, because it’s the right thing to do and we’d save money doing it.

California, which is considered a liberal state, spends more money on prisons than any other state in the country — not because it is bigger, but because it has the wrong strategy. The governor wants to expand the size of the prison system by fifty thousand beds — the population of a couple of small towns. We need to be moving in the opposite direction.

In California the juvenile prisons are like expensive prep schools for adult prison. We are beating and brutalizing these kids, and 90 percent of them end up as repeat offenders. In the so-called “red” state of Missouri, on the other hand, they are taking juvenile offenders out of huge prisons and placing them in small, dormlike facilities. The doors have locks, but rather than the kids putting on orange uniforms and having adults in blue uniforms scream at them all day, everyone dresses normally. They have coaching, counseling, art instruction, yoga, and gardening. Seventy percent of those kids never get in trouble again, because they are being treated like human beings, not savage creatures. That Missouri program costs $30,000 a year per kid, as opposed to the $120,000 a year we are spending here in California.

Think of what you could do with a troubled kid and $120,000 a year. You could take the kid to Europe. You could buy the kid a hybrid. You could say, “Here’s fifty grand; if you stay out of trouble for a year, I’ll give you seventy more.” There is no way that that kid should ever get in trouble again.

We should close the prisons and bring the prisoners and the guards home and help them heal, and then put them to work installing solar panels and pursuing urban forestry and gardening and organic agriculture. But first we have to give up our addiction to punishment.

Kupfer: Dealing with the prison guards’ union here in California must be a significant challenge.

Jones: The prison guards’ union is the main obstacle to prison reform in California at the moment. It’s unfortunate, but the union pushes for tougher laws so that more people will be locked up for longer periods, which means we’ll have to build more prisons and hire more guards, which means a bigger union and more union dues. Then the union uses those dues to push for even tougher laws. Right now we don’t have a criminal-justice system; we have a massive incarceration industry that has to be fed with human bodies.

Kupfer: Some years ago you helped found the group Bay Area PoliceWatch, a legal help-line for victims of police misconduct. Since then a number of comparable groups have sprouted up around the country. Have you seen progress in the effort to end abuse on the part of law-enforcement agencies?

Jones: Unfortunately we haven’t. Instead we’ve seen an expansion of police power with no corresponding expansion of police oversight, which is always a recipe for abuse. Any human system that doesn’t have adequate checks and balances will tend toward corruption.

It’s hard to have a rational discussion about law enforcement in the U.S., because the Right wants to divide everyone into “cop lovers” and “cop haters.” All we’re saying is that oversight is needed. You can call for meat inspections without hating butchers, or building inspections without hating architects. And you can call for increased police oversight without hating anybody in law enforcement.

Since I started working on these issues in the 1990s, we’ve seen police-state-like measures being taken against Muslims in certain parts of this country. We’ve seen the loss of habeas corpus and the creation of secret prisons around the world and the abuses at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba and Abu Ghraib in Iraq. These are features of a society that has turned its back on its best traditions.

If the project of Western civilization has anything to offer the world, it’s our accomplishments in the domain of human rights. As recently as five years ago that contribution would have been unarguable. Now it’s become harder to defend that position, because the same society that’s bulldozing the planet is also bulldozing its own Bill of Rights. The Constitution is burning along with the rain forests.

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