May/June: What We're Reading

94A6325: Coming of Age in the Era of Mass Incarceration

This May and June, our Toward Liberation community will be reading 94A6325: Coming of Age in the Era of Mass Incarceration by Dr. Kirk “Jae” James.

This book is it’s a lived account of what the system does, how it works, and what it takes to survive it.

In 94A6325, Jae tells the story of being arrested at 18 years old and sentenced to life under the Rockefeller Drug Laws, entering a system that would hold him for 3,268 days. What follows is in part a narrative of survival through places like Rikers Island and other prisons. And, this story is a deeper account of transformation—of how, even within cages, people build knowledge, relationships, and political clarity.

The title itself—94A6325—is the number the state assigned to him. A reminder of what these systems do: reduce human beings to property, to data, to something to be managed and controlled.

But this book refuses that reduction.

Instead, it shows how the violence of mass incarceration is not accidental. It is rooted in the same logics that have shaped this country from the beginning—slavery, racial control, and the ongoing criminalization of Black and brown communities. And it insists that if we are serious about confronting that history, then we must also be serious about abolition.

What makes this book especially meaningful for me is that Jae is not only an author we are reading—he is a friend, a colleague, and someone who has deeply shaped my own thinking. His work, his presence, and his commitment to abolition have been an inspiration in my own journey. It is an honor to read his story together as a community.

And that matters.

Because abolition is not limited to theory. It is not just something we just argue about in articles or classrooms. It is built through relationships, through shared struggle, and through the willingness to learn from those who have lived what many of us only study.

This book invites us into that kind of learning.

Over the next two months, we will move through 94A6325 together to understand Jae’s story and to sit with the broader questions it raises:

• What does it mean to survive a system designed to break you?

• What does it take to maintain your humanity in conditions meant to strip it away?

• And what would it mean to build a world where no one is ever reduced to a number again?

We hope you’ll join us.

And we’re especially excited to share that Jae will be joining us at the end of June for a live Zoom conversation about 94A6325. This will be a chance to engage directly with him, to reflect together on the book, and to deepen our collective thinking about abolition, survival, and transformation.

We’ll be sharing more details soon, including the date and how to register. In the meantime, we invite you to read along with us and be part of this conversation.

In solidarity always,

Alan