I had the distinct privilege of conversing with Laurence Ralph regarding his latest book, Sito: An American Teenager and the City That Failed Him. Laurence Ralph is an exceptionally busy person. He’s an inspired scholar, writer, filmmaker, and father. He holds the William D. Zabel ’58 Professorship of Human Rights with a dual appointment at Princeton’s Anthropology Department and School of International Relations and Public Affairs. I know him from his scholarship. I assign his 2014 book, Renegade Dreams, in my undergraduate courses on crime and punishment. That book won the C. Wright Mills Award and the J. I. Staley Prize. His second book, also published by the University of Chicago Press, is The Torture Letters, which I assign in my graduate courses. Both of those books intersect at race relations, governance, social inequality, families, and punishment.
The Torture Letters is also the name of his award-winning animated short film. That film was featured in the New York Times op-ed doc series, and Laurence has written for, or had his work reviewed in, the Paris Review, the New York Review of Books, The Nation, the Chicago Review of Books, Boston Review, and Literary Hub. Phew! That is an abbreviated list, but let me end by noting that Laurence’s work has not gone unnoticed. In addition to the major book awards I noted earlier, he is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Carnegie Fellow, a fellow of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he’s won grants from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the National Research Council.
No less important, Laurence is an all-around good person with a good spirit that always leaves you wishing you could talk to him more, so I am really excited to share this conversation on his latest book, Sito.
Michael Walker (MW): Can I just say that I was really surprised by Sito. It is a beautiful mix of deeply personal reflections and family pains and triumphs with what I think is a brilliant question about the role of revenge in American society broadly, and the American criminal justice system more specifically. Sito has that thing that I think is common to really smart books, and that is after you read the book, everything you reveal seems obvious. But before I read Sito, I wasn’t thinking about revenge in our adversarial courts, in sentencing, in police work—although The Torture Letters should’ve alerted me to the significance of revenge—or as a basic organizing mechanism that builds and destroys social relations, families, and our very sense of justice. But, here we are. Thank you! Okay so let’s start by you telling me, why was this book important for you to write?
Laurence Ralph (LR): It was important to write as a family member [of Sito’s] because this book grapples with cycles of violence and the very real possibility that retaliatory violence could occur at any moment in the name of someone who has recently passed. In telling Sito’s story, I wanted part of his legacy to be that the cycle of violence ends with him. That is why I decided to write the book. It is also what sustained me through writing it, which was very difficult.
MW: I can only imagine. You touch on this in the epilogue and throughout the book, but I wonder if you might say a little bit more about some of the difficulties that you faced just writing this book?
LR: The difficulties have to do with Sito’s story, which is at once exceptional, but also very common. It is exceptional in the sense that, at age 14, Sito was accused of a crime he didn’t commit. He spent five months in juvenile hall. What I like about your work, Michael, is that you make the case that time in jail isn’t like time on the outside. So, five months in jail can really feel like five years.
MW: Absolutely.
LR: It changes the course of someone’s life, especially if they are innocent and they spend every day anticipating “Well, will this be the day I get released? Will this be the day that the person who actually did it gets arrested?” So you live with that anxiety which not only ages you, but also makes the experience more difficult. The stated purpose of jail is to make you feel remorse, make you demonstrate to others that you have successfully rehabilitated yourself. If you are unable to do that because you feel like you are innocent, then anything other than such a demonstration of remorse reads as defiance. Sito had a hard time because he was perceived as defiant.
Miraculously he gets released. Five years later he is murdered by the little brother of the person he was accused of killing. Sito’s story is remarkable in the sense that he was exonerated, but then murdered. But then Sito’s story is commonplace, in the sense that many people, especially youth of color, are living with the experience of having their lives radically transformed by the criminal justice system. So I try to show the mundane effects of that as well.
MW: In the early chapters, there is this sense that Sito was dealing with a lot of anger. It would’ve been easy to create an ever-angry caricature of Sito. But on page 206, you have this beautiful story spliced between the moment at which the family was viewing Sito in a casket. Sito was with his Grandma Je-Je, and he noticed a young boy kicking a ball around without any shoes on. Before Grandma Je-Je could explain why the boy had no shoes, Sito, a Spider-Man-loving child himself, took off his Spider-Man shoes, tied the laces together, and hung the shoes around the young boy’s neck. At the time, Sito would hardly take off his Spider-Man costume to be washed, so it was poignant for Grandma Je-Je to recount that moment when she did. In the margin of my copy, I wrote: “So much love in him—extinguished.” I wonder how you make sense of that. All the demons that he fought, all the beatings that he took while he was in juvie—how could we have averted this and allowed this kind of love and empathy to grow within him?
LR: One of the most difficult things about telling his story is that I was introduced to Sito in a deep way after he died. In writing this book, I recreated his life after his death. I knew the ending. There are all sorts of ways in which he was a kid who was angry. He was sometimes a rude kid, sometimes a kid that was class clown, but he was also a kid that had deep empathy, loved deeply, felt emotions deeply, and was very considerate and brilliant. I saw a lot of these aspects of him at once, so a major aim of the book is to try to get at the complexity of who people are and to allow that complexity to sit there. To allow those contradictions to sit there and not try to resolve them, because I’m arguing against the tendency to paint a simplistic picture of who people “really” are, or even to search for that. Because this impulse manifests in how we see people as either guilty or perpetrators, which means they are responsible for their own actions and we should throw them in jail, or they are innocent and therefore we should grieve for them. Part of the experience of going through the criminal justice system for family members of an incarcerated person is that if the person you love is guilty, you are made to feel like you can’t mourn for that person. Their whole existence is defined by that one mistake they might have made. I’m really trying to argue against that simplification by just bringing up those contradictions and bringing up the complexity and allowing my readers grapple with them on the page.
MW: You did that in a really smart way—giving people the fullness of who they are without smoothing the edges off to make them seem more palatable. A bunch of examples come to mind, but I’ll leave those for future readers, and I want to ask you about Mrs. Lana. I was so moved by her story, and I just want to hear you speak about her more—about the complexity of a wailing woman on the streets. Can you talk a little bit about why you decided to include her story in this book?
LR: Mrs. Lana’s story is one of the things that I remember most about my fieldwork experience in Chicago, mainly because I developed a long-term relationship with her family. I see my relationship with that family as an accomplishment because when I was writing my first book, Renegade Dreams, they wouldn’t let me tell the story of Mrs. Lana in the book. Later they allowed me to tell it in an article.
Mrs. Lana’s story is that she was the so-called crazy lady on the street. Everybody on the block knew her and knew if she was yelling at you or just yelling, that you just had to accept it. It was okay because she had witnessed her son die. There was a way in which her madness became reasonable and indicated a duality of madness where it connotes insanity, but it also connotes righteous anger.
There is justifiable rage in the face of injustice. We are often made to repress this idea as the price of living a so-called normal life. But there is something about the people who refuse to repress that raw anger—we secretly admire that. Because we all feel that inside. We wish we could yell, we wish we could let ourselves scream, but somehow we feel like we can’t.
That is my experience with the criminal justice system. Wanting to scream, wanting to just point out the insanity of it, but realizing that you could also find yourself in a more precarious situation if you do that.
The immediate goal of the book is just to stop violence in Sito’s name.
MW: Sito has a moment that draws an interesting parallel between him and Mrs. Lana. He is being beaten in juvie. To protect himself, he curls into a fetal position, but he screams without shame or reserve. In the book, you explain how screaming in that moment was a kind of terrible freedom to express emotion. It is a powerful passage.
At the time, Sito was 14, innocent of the charges he faced, and the state was pushing to charge him as an adult. They vilify him. The counselors at juvie refer to him as a killer. His teachers denounce him. Rashawn’s family vilify Sito all the way to the end. These labels really chase him all throughout the book. Nevertheless, Sito’s family calls for peace after his death. And I wonder how your family sees that moment. A thirst for vengeance would be understandable, but Sito’s own words were, we owe it to that child to consider alternatives to imprisonment. I wonder how you all reconcile that?
LR: After Sito gets released from juvenile hall, years later he becomes an activist and advocates for the closure of juvenile hall. Then he is murdered at the height of his activism. You are referring to when Sito says we, as a society, owe it to troubled kids to find alternatives to incarceration. This is one of the main conundrums of the book: He is advocating for something that wasn’t granted to him, but also that would make the life of the person who killed him a lot easier. When Sito was 14, they were trying to charge him as an adult for a crime he didn’t commit. The person who killed him was 17 and, as such, the maximum he can get is five years because he is being tried as a juvenile. My family has to grapple with this.
I try to wrestle with that tension because it is not just about the impulse to make the person who killed him get a harsh sentence. It is about what happened to Sito when he was younger. My family can’t understand why the same DA’s office who was so strict and forceful with Sito is now seemingly lenient. The arbitrariness of the law is unjust, and it is a byproduct of the fact that in our country, because of the election cycles, there can be very different experiences within the same city for the same crimes, simply based on whether you have a progressive or a conservative in office. But the people who are living there are living on the same streets, they are subject to the same sorts of crimes, and so for me it signals that the criminal justice system we have in place is not good enough. We need to think more comprehensively, on a larger scale, about what we feel about these issues, what we feel about juvenile justice, what we feel about incarceration. We can’t just try to get a progressive elected official in there and change things, because we have seen how easily that can reverse itself and be even more reactionary. Sito’s family, my family, were living in the midst of that pendulum swing. The other question is: What would Sito have wanted? That is actually a key question in the larger effort to stop the retaliation.
Since he was an activist, and since we know that he would have wanted peace, that he would have wanted even his killer, even someone who committed a crime, to have a chance to change the course of his life, then everyone who loves Sito has to grapple with his wishes. His wishes are recorded in these speeches that Sito gave and they are documented in a way that is undeniable. His father can then make the argument that Sito would not have wanted you guys [his friends] to retaliate. That becomes powerful as well. That is part of the reason why I wanted to highlight his activist career. Not only to point to the contradictions of the law, but also to point to what is motivating people on a higher level.
MW: A major theme you develop is the role of acknowledgment for harms, needs, justice, and personhood. For instance, the San Francisco DA’s office seemed completely unconcerned with acknowledging the issues facing families on either side of tragedy. So, the families are left to struggle for acknowledgment on their own terms. How do you think about the role of acknowledgment in the criminal justice system? What if any role should acknowledgment play in justice?
And separately—to ask yet another question—could you say more about revenge? Your analysis of revenge pushed abolition further for me, as I started to think about just how ingrained revenge is. I wonder how you think we can get over revenge, or what do we do with these issues around revenge that are so embedded culturally, structurally, legally, and then maybe to some degree as an issue of human nature?
LR: You rightly said that the legal system is unconcerned with what Sito’s family really wants or what Rashawn and Julius’s family really wants. It’s motivated by its own internal logic of revenge. That is why a DA can just assert that they are fighting on behalf of a victim’s mother even if that conflicts with what the mother wants. They can say they are going to get justice on behalf of Sito using carceral means, even if Sito was an abolitionist. It is not about what Sito’s family wants. It is about the emotion you can use and mobilize in order to pursue a punitive end. That is important because when we think about abolition and the literature on abolition, it is largely historical, it is logical, it makes arguments as if the issue is primarily a question of logic. Saying things like, look how much money we are spending locking people up.
All of that is true. But part of the reason why the system is so difficult to dislodge is because of the emotional aspect, the way that revenge feels natural and is tied to a sense of justice not only in our legal system but in culture. So by the time we get to a particular case, the logic of revenge is already ingrained completely. We need to really grapple with that emotion honestly and really think about how to challenge it. If we truly care about imagining a different world or a world that can exist without jails, prisons, or police, then the emotional complexity is something that really can’t be glossed over.
I’m referring to a social and cultural critique of accountability. Accountability is crucial, it is just that we have tied accountability to revenge. Is there a way we can imagine accountability without revenge? What does that look like? I don’t have an answer for it, but the future of abolition would depend on developing an idea of accountability without revenge.
MW: Earlier, you mentioned the pendulum motion of criminal justice—how, even within the same period, we can get vastly different outcomes for similar crimes. I wonder what you think is going on here. Why are we getting vastly different outcomes from the criminal justice system, and to what extent do you think criminal justice actors are paying attention to community responses to the variance in outcomes?
LR: It depends on what kind of knowledge we are presuming to bring to our understanding of the case before it happens. There are all sorts of cultural assumptions about who people are, what motivates their actions. Often these assumptions are racial. The actors that are making that decision about giving someone probation and someone else prison time are bringing their own biases about particular groups of people to the case. In Sito’s case, there was the assumption that young people like him were committing gang violence. When Sito was arrested as a 14-year-old, the narrative went: He, Sito, had harmed a respectable young man with a bright future; therefore, he needs even more punishment, right? Those stark dichotomies, as well as the presumptions that are brought into the arena but never acknowledged or allowed to be debated—those inform the way that so-called justice is meted out in each instance.
MW: I really love the writing in this book. It is deeply emotional. It is deeply personal. It is deeply religious. It is deeply analytical, all at the same time. It is full of complexities and contradictions. Can you talk a little bit more about the complexities of writing a book like this? What was the process in writing a book like Sito? Did you have some goal in mind while writing?
LR: The main thing was that I wanted to tell Sito’s story, and I really wanted it to be about him and not so much of a story about who killed him.
Because you could figure out who killed him pretty early and why. There are clues about that. But it is more about the fact that we think we know these stories when we see the headlines, but we actually don’t know anything about these stories. We see the headlines of young man shot in the Mission, 19. The whole public thinks they already know what happened—oh, it’s gang related, okay, and they go on with their day, but we don’t know anything about that kid. Anything about his family. Anything about what he loved or cared for. So my first goal is to just do justice to the story behind the story.
The immediate goal of the book is just to stop violence in Sito’s name. It comes from a moment that I also write about in the book where we are at Sito’s funeral and his father and his brother are making a plea to his friends not to retaliate. At one point his father asks his friends to turn around and look at each other and embrace each other and make a commitment. It reminded me of some of the gang truces that I was involved in and helped to orchestrate in Chicago. You leave those moments saying I just hope this call for nonviolence outlives this moment. Those moments are so emotionally charged and so powerful and you really do believe that there has been some commitment and some good-faith exchange. You just want to bottle that up and keep it and, you know, make people just hold onto it and remind them of it when they need it.
At that moment at Sito’s funeral, I was like, “Man, I hope this thing can live on.” I was returning to this moment in the book, wanting to figure out how I could make this live on for the people who are too young to remember this moment or too angry to remember this moment. How can I attach this moment of peace and commitment to Sito’s legacy forever? This was a major motivation for the book.
MW: What do you want people to come away with? How do you want people to feel about this book, and Sito’s story?
LR: I want people to really just think about the aspects of the law that they take for granted and the people who are impacted. To think about all the ways that there is a disregard for the things that impact people most, like the fact that somebody can’t afford bail or the fact that someone was incarcerated and now they are out, and it is almost assumed that okay, now they can just live a normal life. But it is never going to be a normal life. There is always this specter that haunts you. And if you are a person of color, it is going to haunt you because you are always going to be connected to it in some way, whether through a family member or a friend or a friend of a friend. I just want people to be able to understand the complexities of those dynamics.
I also want people to understand the emotional aspect of the law. That it is an emotional investment. I want people to be aware of what they are investing in, or what they are really saying when they are vilifying someone that they hate and what work that does. Not just for the person that they hate in that particular moment, but also the so-called criminal who is also going to be impacted by it later, once they are released. 
This article was commissioned by Caitlin Zaloom.
Featured-image photograph of Laurence Ralph courtesy of the author.