Sheila A. Bedi is a clinical professor of law at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and director of the Community Justice and Civil Rights Clinic, a law school clinic that provides students with the opportunities to work within social justice movements on legal and policy strategies aimed at redressing over-policing and mass imprisonment.
Bedi litigates civil rights claims on behalf of people who have endured police violence and abusive prison conditions. She also represents grassroots community groups seeking to end mass imprisonment and to redress abusive policing.
Since 2017, Bedi has been teaching classes on legal reasoning, writing and abolition, and the law of state violence to students who are incarcerated through NPEP. In a recent interview with NPEP, Bedi spoke about the first time she stepped into a classroom on the inside, facilitating a course that has both NPEP students and Northwestern University Pritzker Law School students enrolled in it, and how NPEP has left a lasting mark on her teaching career.
Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
I first heard about NPEP in 2017 when Jennifer Lackey asked me to come and give a guest lecture in her class about the Chicago Police Department and the U.S. Department of Justice’s civil rights investigation into the CPD. Many NPEP students shared reflections on the intractability of police violence. The Department of Justice’s 2017 findings described the exact same things that many of them had experienced on the streets of Chicago in the 1990s. The students also made connections between police violence and other forms of state violence: underfunded schools, community divestment, lack of access to health care, and addiction services.
I remember being so struck by the depth of the questions, the refusal to accept the limits of the law, and the push to get radical, as Angela Davis would describe it. NPEP students wanted to get to the root of what these problems are, but they recognized that police violence coexists with white supremacy and economic injustice — issues that I feel like I often have to slowly walk my law students through. We got into those immediately.
Students weren’t just engaging with these issues from their lived experience; they were engaging with these issues as scholars and as thinkers. They brought together their own experience to the political theory and the relevant jurisprudence. I thought I was going there to teach but I learned so much from the NPEP students. I was so inspired by their connection to the material I teach and their rigorous engagement. It was one of the most transformative moments I’d ever had inside the classroom. After that experience, I asked Professor Lackey if I could develop a class for the program that explored the variations of state violence and alternatives to policing and the carceral state. I also wanted to integrate my law students into NPEP. Jennifer was immediately supportive.
Professor Sheila Bedi teaches inside Stateville Correctional Center (photo credit: Monika Wnuk)
I teach a class called “Abolition and the Law of Violence,” and in the class, we examine the theory and practice of abolition and juxtapose that study with the way the law regulates state violence and interpersonal violence. For example, we’ll look at things like qualified immunity — which often allows state actors who engage in acts of violence to escape civil liability — with various types of truth-in-sentencing laws that impose extreme sentences against individuals who are alleged to have violated criminal law. We interrogate the rationale for some of those distinctions. We also debate and consider the possibilities and the potential pitfalls of abolition. Law students enroll in this course alongside NPEP students.
We begin the course by reading key cases on policing, prisons, and sentencing, thereby grounding ourselves in abolition theory and practice. Then, NPEP students and law students work in teams to develop policy proposals that will interrupt or prevent some form of violence. Some teams focus on police violence, others develop interventions that prevent inter-communal violence. The relationships between law students and NPEP students during this process are transformative for law students because they’re not engaging with NPEP students as legal professionals. Law students are co-learning with NPEP students on a level playing field. NPEP students’ maturity of thought, their willingness to push themselves to think deeply about these issues, and their personal experiences teach the law students quite a bit.
A law school environment can feel very sterile and far removed from the people most proximate to injustice. In the classroom in Stateville or Logan, students can’t ignore the human toll of the carceral state and they engage with the socio-economic, political, and historical conditions that have contributed to mass imprisonment.
I feel so strongly that every lawyer needs to have had the experience of being inside a prison; it is an abstract thing until you have to do it. Even though I’ve spent so much time in prisons conducting legal visits, having the experience of actually walking through prison and witnessing the human toll of incarceration is sobering, jarring, and incredibly important.
The brilliance and potential of so many people locked away in our prisons is undeniable. That’s been sobering and heartbreaking for my law students. Law students leave class and realize so many of their fellow NPEP students must remain behind bars—even though they have so much good to contribute to the world. You don’t have to be an abolitionist to find that devastating.