Tell me a little about you, your background, and how you show up to the movement and advocacy work that you’ve done.
Thank you so much for having me, I really appreciate it. My name is Katie Dixon. I’m currently the Program Associate with the San Francisco Foundation. I really just transitioned into philanthropy full time. Prior to that, I really spent the past almost decade learning, engaging, and practicing in social change in the criminal justice space. And that’s taken me everywhere from organizing, street outreach, direct service work, policy work state and federal, and yeah here I am practicing in philanthropy.
I’m a formerly incarcerated Californian. My entire family is formerly incarcerated. My mother, my father, and every child born to that couple has spent some time incarcerated in this country. I have been home for eleven years now and I still have one family member that’s currently locked up. I spent time in my reentry journey navigating homelessness for about a good three to four years, navigating low wage jobs, employment discrimination, and so all those things helped shape me and my journey as I continue to trailblaze through life.
So I definitely try to show up in the movement work as being authentic, being a whole person, and really trying to capture the complexities of the issues at hand and speak truth to power. I try to bring that level of openness and reality and transparency to all spaces because we are in a lot of spaces. A lot of actors in the field right now, a lot of the work is now being seen as political. So I try to just stay true to who I am and my roots.
You were at California Coalition for Women Prisoners, you come from a grassroots organizing background, and from what I understand CCWP really practices and focuses on the principles of abolition. I’m curious from your personal experiences, professional expertise, what kinds of insights have shaped your thinking around abolition and how did they bring you to abolition as a framework to work within?
Abolition, to me, is a living practice. I’m thinking about it in the way that I learned about the Constitution. The Constitution is a living document that the people who are tasked with interpreting it must be interpreting it within real time, not 250 years ago. I mean, that document was written as a racist document. I was not included in the definitions of the people who were being protected in the Constitution. And so as the times and society changes and develops, so should the interpretations. I bring that view to this framework and practice of abolition. What does that mean right now, today? When we’re thinking and talking about abolition, we have to be talking about more than just abolishing the prison system. Because they abolished slavery, and look at what we got. So I think abolition should be seen as a living framework that needs to be interpreted with the times.
What does abolition look like right now? We’re trying to call for the end to the current system of incarceration and see more resources going to violence prevention, education, food, health, and environmental health; your social determinants inform a path of criminality. People are starting to look at the impacts of living here in Oakland by a freeway from being a five year old child to now I’m 40, what are the neurological impacts that have on me and my decisionmaking, my physical being, things like that. My understanding of abolition is it should be seen as a living practice.
This speaks to your work on how we need to think about prisons, incarceration, and the carceral industry through the public health lens and how public health can inform the work we do in this advocacy space. How would you define public health and make that connection to incarceration and these larger systems, even incarceration as a public health crisis?
To me, it’s all the same conversation of what keeps us safe, whole, and healthy. The prison system is very large and it’s very extractive. I think we have paid attention to the way it extracts from Black and Brown families that get trapped into urban, ghetto communities. I think we got pretty good at researching and understanding how it extracts from those specific communities. I think now we’re starting to really pay attention to how this massive system of incarceration really impacts the larger community as a whole.
We spend more money on public safety which is usually law enforcement. So when you put together the police, the jail, the sheriff, the state prisons, we spend more money on law enforcement and control than we do on the education system, the healthcare system. California has more prisons than universities. We built 34 prisons over the span of about 10-13 years, starting in the 80s. We haven’t built any universities. That’s just one glaring example.
Another thing that people are starting to pay attention to is how that impacts other people’s health and safety as a whole. Now you have these white, affluent communities that’s starting to see how incarceration impacts them as well. These things on public safety and how we respond to people in need impacts everyone. I like to point out to folks that in certain communities, when you go to the store, you can’t even buy hygiene products, they’re locked up. We’re locking up and encaging the hygiene products in response to fear of homeless people. The media makes it look like there are whole crime rings when that’s not what’s really going on, these are survival things. And now a regular ol Joe can’t even go buy a pack of smokes. So the impacts are really far reaching and we’re now starting to pay attention to it.
I like what you said that when we look at public health and we look at the prison industrial complex, these are all questions of safety. I’m curious, what do you think public health offers us as we advocate for a change in the way we relate to one another?
I think public health can be a starting point for where we all agree. That’s a unity starting point. After 2020, the shutdown, COVID, people were crying out loud for how crazy they were going while staying at home. You can’t even stay in your house for a week? You have a TV, laptop, you can work out and run, cook food, you got all of this and you’re going crazy. Wow, can you imagine what’s going on in a prison cell? In solitary confinement?
People were able to see what being caged and locked up and restricted and restrained can do on people’s mental health, physical wellbeing. The pandemic really exposed how prison and jails really affects people. People forgot how to interact with folks and be nice in the grocery store, that’s when all those fights started over random stuff in the grocery store. People were saying folks forgot how to interact with each other. Wow. That fast? So just thinking about when people come home from 20-30 years and the impact that had on the person and the community as a whole. I really think the pandemic exposed some of those things.
Another thing the pandemic exposed as far as this public health crisis: what about the impacts on people who work inside these systems? Correctional officers have some of the highest rates of domestic violence, alcohol and drug abuse, people are now starting to pay attention to that. You also come into the same toxic, controlled environment every single day of your life. And then, remember, you forgot how to deal with people, you can’t be nice, you’re bringing all of that to your family. Now what about the COs and their families and how that reverberates out in the community? Are their children also at school slapping other kids? Just like you would say to some children growing up in the ghetto: adverse childhood experiences. What are the rates of those among correctional officers and other law enforcement bodies?
We need to start paying attention to how big of a problem this really is. What about the healthcare systems inside of these places and the people who work in these systems? We all seen the stories of Wellpath and Maurice Monk. That man lied on the floor for three days. They faked records, it’s all on video, they were lying and saying they checked on the man. Food and pills stuck at the door for days, you obviously weren’t checking on him. What about those workers? This is really a crisis when we start to think about these other communities that’s also impacted by this massive system of incarceration. Wellpath is being sued, who’s paying these out? The local sheriff department, our county? Is that why we had to cut back on childcare and schools so we can come up with the money to pay off lawsuits?
This is really a public health crisis that people are now starting to pay attention to and connect the dots.
In public health, the first thing they teach you is we have to zoom out and see what types of power structures are at play that interfere with true health. That’s what you’re applying to the prison industrial complex. Hearing you talk about public health as a starting place for unity, some would argue with the pandemic that the public’s trust in public health declined a lot. With everything happening at the federal level, MAHA, RFK, there’s a sentiment that people don’t trust public health anymore. How do you grapple with that and with believing that public health is a starting place to think about incarceration and what our responses to it should be?
Can we recognize that we have lost trust in the public health system as a whole? Yes. But we have never lost trust in the carceral system. Why is that? We can clearly see some kind of connection here. We can clearly see locking up more people ain’t working, it’s draining resources, it’s distracting us. We’ve never lost trust though in continuing to lock up more people. We see this other system, we lose trust in it, they’re classifying people and saying they’re not professionals anymore. We done lost trust and we’re ready to throw up our hands and rely on ChatGPT now and AI for doctor’s help. Why is that? How come we are so quick to lose trust in this system that maybe isn’t working, but not this other system? I would ask that question. Why is that? And how come we keep ignoring the connections here?
Look at the money they’re paying ICE agents. I went on the DOJ site one day and it was looking like we’re giving folks $130k plus bonuses. My mother died as a teacher. Teachers don’t even make that much money. And so it’s just like we’re willing to vote for someone and vote for giving this sort of money to another carceral setup, another law enforcement body, and yet, at the same time, we’re declassifying public health professions over here. What’s next now? ICE is going to be professional agents?
People need to pay attention to why we’re willing to lose trust in one system and not the other.
People also have a lot of questions about what we should do. What is the alternative? What is the replacement? Violence happens. People get hurt. What do we do?
CCWP tried to launch their campaigns to close both women’s prisons, but we keep getting stuck. They ask us ‘you want to close both of the prisons at the same time?’ And then we try to make the case about looking at all the people we can safely bring home. We do get stuck there. What is an alternative to jails and prisons? It comes up all the time. What we try to do is bring it back. If we were giving people the proper resources out the gate, fifteen years later I wouldn’t have been caught up in a gang-murder. I wouldn’t have been riding in their car, with their stolen guns, you know, looking for love with my gang-banger boyfriend. And now we robbed the store, and now in the midst of trying to get away we done shot the store manager. How did I even get here? Because I was coming from a community that did not have a school system for me to go to, so I was not smart enough to be able to pay attention to a disastrous situation. My parents were either nonexistent or working five jobs, so I was not getting the love at home. That’s why I was out here with my gang-banging friends and boyfriend, looking for love in all the wrong places. I did not have any self-esteem, so of course I don’t know how to speak up and say I don’t think we should be going to rob that store. So I’m just sitting in the car doing anything.
Now, of course that family doesn’t want to see me coming home. I don’t care how many accolades I got in prison, how great I’m doing, how many classes I taught, programs, whatever else we got going on up in there. That family doesn’t care what I did up there. I took someone. I need to be locked up forever. So we have to bring it back – how did we get on this disastrous path? And then for that family, what are we offering families other than locking them up and throwing away the key?
I watched something on the news today. There was a chain reaction vehicle accident, and part of the chain reaction, one of the vehicles got knocked into a parking lot and their baby got killed. They said after the investigation, nobody was found at fault for the baby because it was an accident out the gate. The District Attorney and the Victims Board, what did they offer that family other than someone is to blame and someone should be locked up? That was probably the only avenue offered to the family, and so when that doesn’t happen, of course I’ll be on the news talking about a miscarriage of justice. We’re not offering nothing else. We’re not offering the family a healing process. We never offered a restorative process. And what about the two people in the car accident where a baby died? You don’t think these people are living with that?
What else were the people offered other than jail and prison?
California had this huge rebrand – they added ‘rehabilitation’ to CDC (California Department of Corrections, now California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation) – this new model about supposedly helping people during incarceration. Something that is sticking out to me in this car accident incident is that the response was how do we paint someone as the victim, paint someone as the criminal, and how do we separate them from each other? We can’t identify humanity with one another. I do think that’s a strategy where we try to divide, divide, divide, and then we have nowhere to put our faith in but existing institutions.
When we highlight mass incarceration as a public health crisis, we try to highlight mass incarceration as state violence. It is sanctioned state violence. Did you know it is legal to deny you help? It is legal to deny you childcare. You need childcare to get a second job to get out the hood, but I’m denying you the childcare subsidy because you make $2 more than what the government said you should, so now I’m caught between a rock and a hard place. When someone is looking for help out of a domestic violence situation, how many times is the victim being blamed? How many times are you being told to document, document, document and build your case? Build up my case? Now I’m being denied help, that’s keeping me boxed into the same situation that an abuser has over me.
There’s no resources at the schools, nobody’s getting fed academically. The quality of food…there are more liquor stores and Planned Parenthoods in the ghetto than there is access to healthy food. Why are there ten liquor stores in a five block radius? Who is approving those applications? You don’t see ten liquor stores in Oakland Hills.
And so just paying attention to how state violence really shows up, these things are serious. We need to paint a picture of how state violence is sanctioned through mass incarceration. Once you have a felony, you lose all kinds of rights. You can’t vote, you can’t work, you can’t live in certain places. Sanctioned state violence is unleashed through law and order, mass incarceration. Look at what’s going on now. ICE is about to be going door to door. They’re comparing this to the Nazi days.
Where is this going? We need to be paying attention to state violence as sanctioned through law and order and unleashed on our communities through this prison industrial complex.
State sanctioned violence is, like you said, through the food deserts, through the lack of third spaces, through the declining investments in children and their upbringing. All of that is state sanctioned violence, and all of those facets make up a social care fabric that is broken. And of course we don’t invest in it, money plays a huge role. Can you talk about what marked this transition to go into philanthropy? What do you hope to accomplish in philanthropy that you think is necessary to move our policy and organizing work forward?
When all the money dried up after we got over the shock of the George Floyd movement, it left me wondering, what is going on over there? How come most of these organizations were not well resourced? We can’t really put together a well resourced movement because it’s so patchwork. So I was just curious to see what was going on, on this side and the mystery of philanthropy.
Now that I’m here, there’s a lot of money people are working with. People are playing with a lot of money when you think of philanthropy as a whole. I’m at a community foundation and we have about $2 billion. I can only imagine what the players at Silicon Valley Foundation have. The Chan Zuckerberg Foundation.
What I want to get out of my time in philanthropy is the knowledge, resources, and strategic framework to bring back to the criminal justice community so we can find a way to really leverage the money to help move the needle further when it comes to highlighting mass incarceration as a public health crisis. I’m hoping that the folks in charge of money can get the public on board to pay attention to doing something different for the next 30-50 years. Can we design something other than this large, prison industrial complex? Is there an appetite for that?
I’m just hoping to really get the knowledge and resources to bring back to my people, where we can really build and leverage the money, partnerships, and presence to really move the needle.
When I think about philanthropy, I think about the amount of money we are up against with these violent institutions, and how much of our state resources they have. I was reading the Governor budget summary for California and it’s nothing new, another year, another budget deficit in the billions. And what was also in the billions, and at an increase, was CDCr’s budget. And at the same time, there is this critique of philanthropy that it’s not sustainable and doesn’t put money directly in the people’s hands. Understanding your new role in philanthropy, how do you reconcile those two things? Money is power, we’re up against institutions that have so much money and power, and in that way philanthropy is needed. And at the same time, the money is not wielded by the people.
One thing you can’t get away from is philanthropy is capitalistic. This is just an arm of the capitalist system that we also exist under. Some of these same capitalist practices go into the thinking behind investing in and keeping up the prison industrial complex.
This all got started with Andrew Carnegie, who made all this money and he couldn’t spend it all, and he came up with a framework of giving it back. People pointed out that he wouldn’t have all that money if he had paid his workers correctly. He made the money by depriving his workers. He wrote the Gospel of Wealth that lays out why conglomerates think that rich people with the money should control society. They are the best people to tell society what they need and how to structure it, because they are rich. Never mind that you got rich off not paying your workers right.
This Gospel has rationalized that all those years of not paying your workers is to give the money away, but yet still control it. He says that rich people are the best ones to tell society what to do because they are rich. The rumor is that these rich conglomerates like the Elons and Bezos’ gift each other the Gospel, this is like the guiding principles of their philanthropy. Remember, philanthropy really started as a tax loophole so rich people feel better about themselves. So when we think about that, what can we do with it now? How can we utilize and leverage these rich people to help us reach our goals?
I’m an insider. I feel like I have infiltrated the masses that control us. Because remember these are the same people who invest in prisons. Everyone knows about Amazon Web Services. They don’t make their money off of the Amazon account where I order stuff, those are private vendors. They make their money off their contracts. Most jails and prisons are operated by the government. ICE is the government. These are the same people investing in these systems.
I am really trying to infiltrate this thinking and the understanding of how the money moves, where it goes, and how to get more money to move through us. How do we talk their language and keep their interest, and bring it back to the criminal justice space?
While you’re learning, what kinds of conversations are there about accountability to the community?
That comes up a lot. They started with trust-based philanthropy. Instead of making you fill out a 20-page report, we’ll give out unrestricted grants, require less reporting, less paperwork. That’s an example of us trying to make it easier for you to apply for funding, trying to give out more multi-year unrestricted dollars. That’s one way that philanthropy is supposed to be building relationships with the community. People are also doing that by hiring people like me, who have relationships with the community. Most people who work here got academia skills and all that stuff, I don’t. I just got here off hard work and tears. What else? Paying advisors. I used to be a community advisor to provide advice on groups dealing with incarceration. So those are some ways philanthropies are trying to talk about what it’s like to be accountable.
But that’s not necessarily going far enough. People are saying be more transparent with the money. Philanthropy is like we can’t be more transparent with the money because of what’s going on with Trump. Trump is going after philanthropy groups that’s giving money out to trans groups, immigrants rights groups. And so that’s the reason they said they can’t be more transparent for the larger donors because some of these donors, you’re in bed with everybody. So you don’t want to see that you gave a million dollars to immigrant defense work because you know you’re also over here, doing this. So you’re trying to protect yourself.
I think another way people really try to have the conversation about accountability is raising the payout. Right now the federal government says you have to pay out 5% minimum. Five percent of $2 billion sounds like crumbs. The minimum is 5%, is everybody going to just meet the minimum? Nobody is ambitious? There is also such a thing as a spend down, which means we’re going to spend all the money over a set period of time. Our goal should be to not exist anymore, spend $2 billion over 20 years. So people say, hey, if you don’t want to increase the pay out, become a spend down.
It’s almost a conversation of how philanthropy can be in the business of redistribution of wealth.
That’s it. That’s the conversation. They’re saying we’re in the greatest wealth transferral of all time. Carnegie and them took however long it took to make their money. They’re saying now people are making money faster, I guess with tech, investments. People are making money so fast now that people at my age, they’re going to have to transfer their money to their kids. It’s a lot of money going to be transferred from these people making money now to their heirs. We need to be going after the heirs. We need to be talking to the kids.
Those are things I’m paying attention to. How do we get the next generation involved? We need to shift focus because the giving can shift. A good example is Mackenzie Scott, she’s giving that money away. What is she teaching her kids? How do we get involved with the next generation?
But again, they’re all in bed with everybody. In the Bay Area, so many of them don’t even have websites. Like Sergey Brin, that’s one of the Google people. He’s got a foundation too, what’s the name of it, we don’t know! Where’s the money going? We don’t know with Zuckerberg and them where their money is going, if it’s staying in the Bay Area, so we probably can’t count on that money. The wealth is still concentrated because only certain people are thriving in the BayArea.
So again, where is the money going, where is it concentrated, and do we really want to distribute it?
There’s ecowashing or pinkwashing where corporations will use the language and imagery of social movements and still do horrible things, but they sell it to you through social movement frameworks. I wonder for some of these larger foundations, is there philanthropy-washing or something going on where it is not about redistribution? Thinking about the bigger player foundations that are highly contested in public health because they are pushing imperialism through the veil of public health.
This is like the prison system. We did a talk with the students, you have to be realistic too. You won’t change the prison system. It’s more likely to change you. How many good people go in there thinking they’re going to do good and the next thing they’re throwing pills through the door like what happened to Maurice Monk? I feel the same way about philanthropy. I’m not about to change philanthropy. I want to get the language, get the rhetoric, learn how to play the book, and bring this stuff back to us. I want to make sure we have the inside on who is funding what and how to repackage it.
I’m also trying to figure out how we just give money directly to certain organizations. Why do we got all these intermediaries? If you really want to give some money to an intermediary to help redistribute, give it to Critical Resistance. How long has Critical Resistance been around? Why can’t we just give them an endowment sized check and make them somebody that can help redistribute money out?
We need to funder organizer. The Ford Foundation gives money, let’s get them to put in $4-5 million. The Quakers give out money. Let’s patch up this $10 million and come with a team of people ready. You know somebody, I know somebody that’s formerly incarcerated that’s been doing this work at grassroots level. Let’s build up these groups and make it so they’re the primary people giving money out. We ain’t even thinking like that, that sounds groundbreaking when I say that to people. Cause are we really trying to redistribute the wealth?
This stuff is another industry. It’s like how the nonprofit complex is self-serving, doing enough to keep the grants rolling in. Philanthropy is the same way. This is all made up. That’s what everybody tells me. Every role and position we got is made up. If I’m about to die and I’ve got $10 million, I don’t need to give it to a Foundation to dole out, I’ll just give it away. Why do I need to give it to a foundation? Cause I done crafted a story about what my investment team can do, my donor advisor team, we got Katie Dixon on the community impact team.
It should be as easy as handing it out to people who know what they need it for. But you have to actually believe that people know what they need and if you don’t believe that, then what is the motive?
Yes. and remember, he said that in the Gospel of Wealth. They don’t think people know what to do with the money. That is where that comes from. They said that we don’t know what we need, because we’re poor. Since they’re so rich, they are the best person to know what they need for their community.
This has been an extremely insightful Monday morning with you, thank you. To wrap up, we ask all of our guests, why do you think public health is political?
Somebody taught me this: politics is just the system we have in place that decides who gets what, when, where, how, and why. That’s all our political system really comes down to. And so public health is part of the political system on who gets what, when, where, how, and why. With healthcare for example – is it private? Is it public? Why do some people have easier access than others? It’s all a part of the political process. To me, it’s that simple. It comes down to power.