5 key lessons from our Reddit AMA: driving change, prison reform and mass incarceration

Our best advice on debunking prison myths and taking action for human rights in 2026 and beyond

Black Girl Times’ Alice Dunbar Nelson Sr. Journalism fellow, Dr. Christy Perez, kicked off the new year answering questions live on Reddit about human rights activism, policing, mass incarceration and systemic harm issues. In case you missed it, you can explore her advice on how to make a difference on the issues you care about (like prison reform) correcting harmful misconceptions about the prison system and connecting the dots on how Christian theology shapes modern policing.   

1. You can make a difference, even if you feel small    

Q: How can individuals make a difference on prison reform? It often feels too big for people to make a difference without big power behind them.   

Christy: That feeling is real. The system is big by design, and it’s meant to make individual people feel small and powerless.   

The truth is that most meaningful change in this space has never started with people who already had power. It started with people refusing to accept the story they were told about what was possible.   

Individuals make a difference by plugging into collective work, not trying to carry everything alone. That can look like supporting local bail funds, court watch programs, re-entry organizations, or mutual aid networks. It can look like showing up to city council or budget hearings where decisions about police funding and jail expansion actually get made. It can look like changing the narrative in your own circles when people default to punishment as the answer.   

One of the most underrated forms of power is consistency. Systems count on burnout. They count on people giving up because the harm feels endless. Staying engaged, learning, donating when you can, voting in local races that most people ignore and amplifying the voices of directly impacted people all matter more than one big heroic act.   

You don’t need to be powerful on your own. You need to be connected.   

Q: I’d like to learn more about how criminal justice reform and abolitionist movements can work together (or not)?   

Christy: They work together when reform is treated as a strategy, not a destination.

Abolition sets the direction. It asks where we are trying to go and what we are trying to dismantle. Reform is about what we do right now to reduce harm while that longer project is underway. In practice, that means reforms are evaluated through an abolitionist lens. Does this change shrink the system or expand it? Does it reduce the number of people under supervision or just make supervision more palatable? Does it move money away from cages and police and into housing, healthcare, education and community support?   

For example, ending cash bail, expanding pretrial release, reducing sentence lengths, or eliminating certain charges altogether are reforms that directly support abolitionist goals because they keep people out of cages. Investing in re-entry support, mental health care and community-based responses to harm reduces reliance on prisons over time. Where they stop working together is when reforms are used to legitimize or stabilize the system. Things like building “better” prisons, adding body cameras without accountability, or expanding diversion programs that still widen surveillance can actually deepen carceral control. So the relationship isn’t abstract. It’s about discipline. Abolition keeps reform from becoming cosmetic. Reform keeps abolition grounded in the realities people are facing right now. When both are honest about their role, they reinforce each other instead of competing.   

2. Our words matters: "prisoners” are still people 
   

Q: How can we change our prison system to both rehabilitate our criminals and significantly reduce recidivism?   

Christy: I want to answer your question, but I also want to pause on the language for a second.   Calling people “prisoners” reduces them to their worst moment or their current confinement.

Saying “incarcerated people” keeps the focus on their humanity. That distinction matters because language shapes how we design systems. When people are framed as less than human, it becomes easier to justify neglect, violence and permanent exclusion. 

As for rehabilitation and reducing recidivism, the biggest issue is that prisons are not built to rehabilitate. They’re built to punish and control. You can’t heal trauma, treat addiction, or build skills in an environment that actively produces more trauma.   

What actually lowers recidivism is boring but proven. Stable housing. Real jobs that pay enough to live. Access to mental health care and addiction treatment. Maintaining family and community ties. Most people don’t come back because they want to. They come back because they’re released into the same conditions that got them there, plus more barriers.   

If we’re serious about public safety, we have to stop pretending cages fix social problems. Human-centered approaches do a far better job of reducing harm than punishment ever has.   

3. Challenge your own assumptions: high arrests ≠ high crime  

Q: Mass incarceration is just a symptom of the issue. How do you anticipate addressing the core of the issue which is high crime in these communities?   

Christy: Wow … interesting question! That framing actually relies on a few assumptions that do not hold up once you look closely at the data.   

First, crime is not uniformly “high” in the communities most impacted by mass incarceration. What is high is policing concentration, surveillance and arrest rates, which are not the same thing as crime incidence. The DOJ’s own Bureau of Justice Statistics has repeatedly shown that crime victimization rates are often comparable across communities, while enforcement is disproportionately concentrated in poor, Black, Latino and segregated neighborhoods. That produces higher arrest numbers without a corresponding increase in actual criminal behavior.   

Second, most crime statistics people cite are arrest data, not crime data. Arrest data reflects law enforcement activity, not underlying criminality. When police saturation increases, arrests increase even when crime remains flat or declines. This is why national crime rates can fall while incarceration rates rise. That divergence is not accidental, it is policy driven.    

Third, the majority of people in prison are not there for what the public imagines as “high crime.” Roughly half of incarcerated people are locked up for nonviolent offenses, including drug and supervision related violations. Even among violent crime categories, recidivism is far more strongly correlated with housing instability, lack of employment, untreated trauma and re-entry barriers than with community crime levels themselves.   

Fourth, when we talk about “the core issue,” decades of research show that poverty, segregation, school disinvestment, environmental harm and labor exclusion are stronger predictors of harm than incarceration rates. Countries and states that invest in housing, healthcare, education and living wage employment consistently see crime decline without expanding prisons. By contrast, places that rely on punitive responses see cycles of re-entry and re-incarceration worsen.   

Finally, mass incarceration itself creates instability that can increase harm. Removing large numbers of adults from a community destabilizes families, weakens local economies and increases the likelihood that harm will recur. That is not a moral argument. It is an empirical one.   

So if the goal is to reduce harm, the evidence points away from expanding punishment and toward reducing the conditions that produce desperation, informal economies and survival-driven offenses in the first place. Mass incarceration is not a neutral response to crime. It is a political choice that has failed by its own stated metrics.    

4. Christianity plays a bigger influence in our ideas about policing and prisons than one might think 

Q: You studied theology but focus on prisons and policing. I'm familiar with how religion contributes to harm (I think), but I never thought about how religion connects to policing. Can you connect those dots a bit more, please?   

Christy: A lot of modern policing in the U.S. is built on moral frameworks that come straight out of Christian theology, even when people don’t name it that way. Ideas like good versus evil, obedience versus rebellion, purity versus danger, punishment as redemption.

You see it in how certain people are framed as “threats,” “lawless,” or needing to be controlled for the good of society. That’s not neutral language. It’s moral language.   

Historically, policing grew alongside things like slave patrols, colonial control, and the enforcement of social order, all of which were explicitly justified with religious arguments at the time. Order was framed as godly. Disobedience was framed as sinful. Violence in the name of “keeping the peace” was framed as righteous.   

Even today, you see it in police culture. The idea of officers as warriors or shepherds protecting the flock. The language of calling. The way harm is justified as necessary sacrifice. Religion gives policing a moral cover that makes violence feel inevitable or even virtuous.   

So my work isn’t about saying religion automatically equals harm. It’s about showing how certain religious ideas get mobilized to make systems of control feel natural, necessary and beyond question. Once you see that, it becomes easier to ask different questions about safety, accountability and what justice actually means.  

That’s how those dots connect for me.   

5. How “Christy” became “Dr. Perez”    

Q: What do you have a doctorate in?   

Christy: I have a doctorate in theological and historical studies.

I’m a public theologian and religious historian who, among other things, studies how religion contributes to harmful, exploitative or oppressive systems, ideas and politics. Take policing for example 🤗 .  

Q: Did you know when you went for your doctorate that you would ultimately

focus on policing?    

Christy: The short answer is no, I didn’t go into my doctorate thinking “I’m going to focus on policing.”   

What I did know was that I wanted to understand how religious ideas shape power, who gets protected and who gets punished. Policing ended up being a really clear place where those ideas show up in everyday life.   

Q: How did you get started in journalism? Which came first the doctorate or the egg?   

Christy: Oh maaaan 😂.  

Well, I was already earning my master's I believe, when I started as an incarcerated journalist. (I wouldn’t earn my doctorate until 2023.) I wanted to tell stories, amplify voices and remaster the narrative around how we talk about power, poverty, strategically undervalued demographics (traditionally called “vulnerable communities"), public safety and wellness. I wanted to give life to the very real experiences of people being harmed, not healed, by ideas, policies and systems. I also wanted to make more difficult themes more humane and more palatable for those readers who were perhaps persuadable but didn’t have any real world experiences that made them connect to ideas like defunding the police, breaking up the foster care to prison pipeline, alternatives to mass incarceration and trans healthcare.  

So … I guess I was kind of working on all those things — the degrees and the journalism — at the same time but without realizing that they were destined for convergence.