In 2020, the United States faces an election like no other. Citizens will vote in the midst of a global pandemic, severe climate change, an uprising for racial justice and an administration that has eroded the norms of democracy. In ‘What’s on Your Ballot,’ KQED checks in with ten different artists, activists and cultural figures about the issues on their minds and their hopes for the country.
Adnan Khan is the executive director of Re:Store Justice, a nonprofit that he co-founded in 2017 while incarcerated in San Quentin State Prison. The organization offers resources to survivors of violent crimes, leads transformative justice workshops to those who’ve committed crimes and holds restorative justice discussions between offenders and survivors of violent crimes.
At the time of the organization’s inception, Khan was serving a sentence of 25 years to life under California’s felony murder rule, after participating in a robbery in which his accomplice killed a person. While behind bars, Khan researched and contributed to the efforts that led to the passing of Senate Bill 1437, which allows people charged under the felony murder rule, like himself, to have their cases revisited.
Khan was the first person re-sentenced under the new law, and subsequently released that day. Out of San Quentin for just over 18 months, Khan now lives in Los Angeles with his partner and newborn child, Aidan.
While Aidan took a nap, Khan recently took time to answer questions about this fall’s election, national politics and how to make a difference in a country where most people feel as if they have no say.—Pendarvis Harshaw
Coming from your background, how do you look at the two presidential candidates that we have now, and say, ‘One of them might benefit me and the community that I come from?’
You know, I think that a lot of focus can go to the presidential election, and I believe that there is a huge importance there. But as many of us do know, mass incarceration is a systemic problem, it’s a new form of slavery… And what I’ve learned is that when it comes to mass incarceration or prison, 90% of the people are in state prisons and local jails.
So, when it comes to this voting cycle, it’s really important to know who your governor is, who your state senators are, who your state assembly members are, who your mayor is, who elects the police chief, and who’s your city council, who are your people who can defund the police and reallocate that money. Once I started learning more of the process, I learned that [those] can be very important pieces to focus on the larger pictures.
Now, when it comes to the big debate of the lesser of two evils: Kamala Harris, what she’s done toward the contribution of mass incarceration, and Joe Biden, the ’94 crime bill, and what he’s done with the contribution to mass incarceration is horrible. So a lot of people, morally, feel like they can’t vote for them. But not picking the lesser of two evils, and just settling with the larger evil? I personally can’t do that.
The last thing I want to add to this—I’ve constantly reflected on this a lot—is as a person who has experienced many losses, and done 16 years in prison, and starting at a maximum security prison as a young adult, I lived in losses. So, we learn how to maneuver around loss, and what that looks like, how to survive another day, if not a moment, with the correctional staff. I lived under an authoritarian state for 16 years, I lived in autocracy for 16 years. And I’m seeing the parallels with the Trump administration. For me, I can’t see voting for Trump.
How did you get inspired enough to do something to change your situation?
First, I took the steps to educate myself. As you know, in prison, access to information and knowledge is very limited, and it’s done intentionally. I think that gave me more of a hunger, more than anything. Early on in my incarceration, I wanted to investigate my conditions. And as I started to investigate my conditions, I learned that, whoa, there’s a whole systemic thing going on here. And as I kept digging and digging, while living what I’m reading, it was just enlightening. Not in a good way, but in a frustrating way.
Another thing that’s very personal to me, as we talk about agency, is that I take full responsibility for my crime and for the harm that I’ve caused. And in order for me to take full responsibility, one, I have to acknowledge what I did, and then two, I have to make a living amends. Which means, how do I repair the damage that I’ve caused? But then, in order for me to even do that, I have to understand: how did I go from an eight-year-old little league baseball player to an 18-year-old with a life sentence?
And once I learned how that happened, my amends now would be incomplete if it was only telling someone that I’m sorry, without preventing a child from committing the same harm that I did. And that is rooted in policy, and how our society is structured, and how marginalized children are criminalized in schools. So my amends and my remorse can be there, but it’s incomplete unless I learn about the conditions that led me to commit my crime in the first place.
