Project Priceless and the power of collective action
On what to do about this new means-tested fascism
Hey hey hey! Thanks for bearing with me these past few days. I’m back, locked in, and excited to share today’s piece with you all.
Proud of it, writing-wise. Proud of the people in it and what they pulled off and how they stood up for each other. Feeling grateful I get to do this stuff for work, and that I was able to document the moment you’re about to read, which so deserved it and wouldn’t have been written about otherwise. Certifiably a story you’d never read in another local outlet.
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Thank you to all the heartwarming responses to my quick update about my grandmother on Friday. After the main piece I’ve included the obituary I wrote for her. In our last conversation she said “don’t stop” re: this whole writing thing, with a little thumbs up. So, much to the chagrin of many, I’m not stopping.
Project Priceless—Shelob’s Lair—a hunting sport—rest in peace, Gram—odds and ends
Project Priceless and the power of collective action
The bailiff opened the large swinging doors of the East Brookfield courtroom and asked the smattering of people in the lobby if anyone was here on the Brittany Johnson matter. Four of us stood up and followed the bailiff into an otherwise empty gallery. Judge Maura McCarthy had Johnson on Zoom, piped in from the Western Mass Regional Women's Correctional Center in Chicopee. None of us—not me, not the members of Project Priceless—knew how this was about to go.
When the judge addressed us, she took a surprisingly pleasant tone. Friendly, even. The mood was in marked contrast from earlier in the day. One of us was asked to leave by court security for giggling too loudly when I showed them a note I’d taken—“humiliation ritual”—as a restraining order hearing was underway. District court is a hell of a place. If you don’t know, consider yourself lucky.
“So,” said the judge. “Couple things...”
And I watched the members of Project Priceless tense up. This was the moment they’d learn whether their friend would come home—the end point of weeks of organizing work, culminating in a campaign to submit the judge 10 handwritten and heartfelt letters ahead of the bail hearing.
Brittany Johnson, president of Project Priceless, had been in Chicopee since September 27. In April, she was arrested for drug possession and intent to distribute. She missed a court date and was picked up on the default warrant issued for doing so. She was held without bail ahead of the pretrial conference last week1.
Project Priceless is a collective of unhoused women engaging in mutual aid and self-advocacy. Most notably, they were the group behind the RMVillage encampment outside the temporary shelter last winter. The one that the city administration had cleared with ruthless speed and efficiency (on that: “The Cruelty Machine made visible”). But that was only a small glimpse of what they do. The group meets regularly, in coordination with other advocacy groups like S.O.S. Worcester, and charts a self-determined path. They have ambitions for a day center, eventually a self-governed shelter for women. In the meantime they look out for each other. And first thing’s first, that means getting Brittany out of jail.
“As I told Ms. Johnson, I read every single one of these letters, except the one in Spanish because I can’t read Spanish,” said Judge McCarthy. I watched Tammy start to smile. This was already going better than expected.
“And I said ‘how wonderful this is,’ and I’m very familiar with this program, and I’m fully supportive of it.”
She looked at Johnson on the Zoom screen in front of her. “The fact that all these wonderful people took the time. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 wonderful people took time to write to this court on your behalf... it says something about you. It says something that people probably see things in you that you don't see in yourself.”
There’s been a lot of talk, rightfully so, about mutual aid since the self-immolation of the Democratic Party on election night. Many of my favorite writers have written about the need to retreat from party politics, and take a new approach centered in real life and direct community networks of support. (My contribution: We need to start at the definition of “politics”). Here’s a good recent example from Joshua Hill’s New Means:
And we have to build that solidarity, we have to foster it. We can tell people about it until our voices go hoarse, but demonstrating the power of solidarity by winning a strike will always be more persuasive. The demonstration of solidarity that is a neighbor with a mutual aid group bringing groceries to your door will always be more powerful. Showing people that together we can stop an eviction will always be more potent than a speech. Solidarity is a verb, and it takes organization to make it a reality. To fight fascism we need to build; we need to build our unions, our community organizations, our mutual aid networks.
Theory’s all well and good but what I had the pleasure of witnessing at the courthouse that day was a real-life example of it in practice: Project Priceless organized, applied pressure, and—so rare and so crucial—got what they wanted. A small, triumphant example of the principles of mutual aid applied toward a tangible end.
“It's like a window for the possibilities of what can be achieved through collective action,” said Addison Turner, an organizer there at the hearing, in an interview after the fact. He runs Worcester Youth Co-ops, which supports Project Priceless.
McCarthy wiped the bail, reduced the one felony charge to a misdemeanor, and told Johnson she’d be free to go as soon as someone could get her—with stipulations for probation and a treatment program and random drug testing, of course. But no more jail. No scraping up the money to post bail. There was $250 on the books, and with a word from the judge, “remit,” it was gone.
Some choice examples from the letters:
“Brittany herself encourages a lot of women who themselves are homeless on the streets to feel comfortable and safe to join and participate with the group.”
“Since Project Priceless has started she is compassionate and brings a lot of structure to PP and her absence is extremely noticed. She shows the women how important and worthy they are by her strength and wisdom of the mission of our group.”
“She has put so much time into helping the women of this community have their voices heard and has worked even harder to change situations at hand. She is an inspiration to women in this city.”
“Brittany is very important ... to all the women in the group. It is important to me as well because she has helped me with many things. Please do not keep her in jail.” (This one was translated from Spanish by my sister Emily Shaner, a Spanish teacher-turned-administrator up in Lewiston, Maine.)
Judge McCarthy made it clear these letters had an effect on her.
“Surround yourself with these 10 people, the kind people that are here on your behalf in the courtroom,” she told Johnson. “Because that’s what really matters. When you come down to it, nothing else really matters except the kindness of other people.”
A muffled “thank you” rippled from the computer’s speakers through the quiet chamber. And that was that. Project Priceless banded together to make an appeal to the justice system, and it worked.
None of us could believe it. The minutes after the hearing were marked by stunned and goofy smiles. Tammy, the woman who first showed a hopeful glimpse, was just about skipping by the time we left the courthouse. I asked her how she felt.
“I am so excited that our program, our mission, is actually being heard. In court the judge was impressed by what we’re doing for our women, and Brittany coming home is awesome. We all miss Brittany, she’s a very essential part of our program,” said Tammy. “I was getting tears in my eyes.”
And then they were off to Chicopee to get Brittany out. To take her home. I left for Worcester, east down the same Route 9 corridor that the driver carrying Johnson in the rear passenger seat tried to avoid the night they were arrested. My inspection sticker was out of date, just like his was, the pretense for pulling the Ford Explorer over in the first place, or so they say—but I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s what happened to land Brittany in jail.
Shelob’s Lair
It was about 2:50 a.m. on April 14 and Brittany was in the backseat of a white Ford Explorer. She was one of three people in the car. A man drove and another joined her in the backseat. They were headed west down Main Street in Leicester when they passed cops at an intersection. For reasons that go unstated in the arrest report, Leicester Police Officer Edward Santiago ran the license plate in the Criminal Justice Information System, an FBI database, to find the Ford Explorer didn’t have a valid inspection sticker. So, on those grounds, he pulled them over.
Pretense number one, which begat another: why the driver wasn’t on Route 9—after all that’s the fastest way to get where he says he’s going, according to the police report. “I know from my conversations with other Leicester Police Officers that Mr. Lund’s vehicle is frequently seen traveling on route 9 from Worcester to Spencer, and has been stopped on Rte 9 several times.” Getting pulled over a lot on Route 9 didn’t track for the cops as a reason to avoid it. They noted that Johnson and another woman in the back weren’t wearing their seatbelts and “exhibited signs of narcotics impairment.” They shined a light in Johnson’s face before they let the vehicle go.
From there, a series of stacking pretenses: The driver didn’t go where he told the cops he was going, a pretense for investigating “suspicious activity,” as further justified by the past criminal history of those in the car. That pretense led to them pulling the car over again. Which was pretense then to bring out the “K9.” Bringing out the dog was pretense to conduct a “protective sweep” of the vehicle, according to the report, “to locate any sharp or otherwise hazardous objects that would jeopardize the safety and wellbeing of the K9.” This pretense led to the officer’s finding a few pipes, lending pretense anew to a full body search of Johnson and the other woman.
They found altogether about 15 grams of various drugs and a little more than $1,000 cash—evidence of, at best, subsistence-level drug dealing—the kind that goes around a community like a short straw. Who gets to carry the bag and assume the life-altering risk of such an interaction with such a police officer who just so happened to notice a bad inspection sticker on a car driven by a known individual. And that’s even if they were dealing, which I’m not conceding. I’m just making the point that it’s irrelevant either way.
A society serious about fixing a crisis of addiction would put stock in truly understanding the way drugs move through communities, and would come to the collective understanding that there’s rarely a meaningful distinction between “dealers” and “addicts” and that “crackdowns” are counter-productive. They only punish the people already most abused by the war on drugs—the same war these police actions ostensibly serve.
But we don’t live in such a society.
The society we do live in has a whole legal vehicle for outright theft of people struggling with addiction.
At the end of his report, Officer Santiago writes he’s “petitioning for Civil Asset Forfeiture for the $1035.90 in cash, and the white Ford Explorer.” The translation of that is that the cops are keeping the money. Keeping the car to be sold at an auction for more money still. They’re kicking it up to the DA, most likely. That’s how it usually goes. Transferred, fast and loose, into a fund no one gets to see, save the big man. And then the DA dips into that fund and buys the DCU Center a zamboni, for instance.
Johnson’s still trying to recoup the $750 she had on her person at the time of arrest. Apparently, the judge said it wasn’t filed as a seized asset, and told her to go to the police station and ask for it back. That’s what she did the next day and the same officer that arrested her told her the $750 was seized, and that the judge is lying.
Worcester County’s approach to asset forfeiture, under District Attorney Joe Early, is notorious across the country, so much so it was referenced in a recent Supreme Court decision. A 2021 ProPublica investigation found that Early was an outlier in an outlier state.
In Massachusetts, they can hold that money indefinitely, even when criminal charges have been dismissed. Trying to get one's money back is so onerous, legal experts say it may violate due process rights under the U.S. Constitution. It's especially punishing for people with low incomes.
Judging by past practice, it could take Johnson a decade to get her $750 back.
In more than 500 instances between 2016 and 2019, WBUR found that funds had been in the custody of the [Worcester] DA’s office for a decade or more before officials had attempted to notify people and give them a chance to get their money back. One case dated back to 1990.
You have to imagine Officer Santiago got at least an attaboy out of the deal for kicking a few Gs up the chain. That’s the society we live in. The cops randomly intern a select class of vulnerable people for unavoidable offenses baked into the misery of their lived conditions. They take their cash and their cars and their drugs. They get paid, the DA gets paid, the courts get paid, the prisons get paid.
Women like Johnson are made to endure the punishment on top of punishment that sustains this system. They fall into the judicial equivalent of Shelob’s Lair—around every corner, another thicket of webs. Routine police stops, a dizzying calendar of court appearances and warrants issued for missing them, the constant threat of losing belongings in an encampment sweep, the insane barriers to stable housing and employment. Going to jail, getting out. Getting clean, relapsing. The more “criminal history” one accrues, the less one is treated like a citizen with right to due process. The longer you’re made to stay in the lair, the more your prospect of escape diminishes.
Brittany wasn’t even jailed for the arrest, technically. She missed a court date in September, and was picked up on the warrant issued for doing so.
“I had gotten a random summons for trespassing on the railroad tracks and I didn't know about it. So literally a week later I was arrested for that,” Brittany said.
At any given time, she has no idea how many active warrants are out for her, she said. Without a fixed address, it becomes difficult to receive notices for court appearances. “In order to even leave jail, you have to give them an address. So I always give them just a random address in my head because they won't let you out unless you have an address on file. I don't know. Stupid,” Brittany said. She tried at one point to open a PO box, but you need an ID for that, and showing an ID gets risky when you have active warrants. So she opted not to. Understandable.
Often, she walks around with a hoodie, knowing that if a cop sees her, they’ll automatically run her name, use her for a quick and easy arrest on default warrants.
“Every cop knows me. So I'd walk down the street and [they’d] instantly know who I am. So the warrant will go on six o'clock and they know me and they pick me up.”
The cops get paid, the courts get paid, the jails get paid.
A hunting sport
When we talk about homelessness, we tend to focus on the issues with the shelter system. We say, rightly, that homelessness is a housing problem. But we downplay, always and always to our detriment, the role that the justice system plays in manufacturing homelessness. You cannot disentangle addiction from homelessness. You cannot separate addiction from the war on drugs, nor the municipal police department and district attorney from their role as foot soldiers within.
Massively inflated police budgets and the gleaming opulent brand new courthouses are built on the drug war. But the enemy casualties aren’t the drugs, they’re the drug users. The local judicial system of every city has the impossible project of suppressing domestic black markets as the Pentagon and Langley are actively opening new ones internationally. So, with low level arrest upon low level arrest, you manufacture at once the appearance of criminality and the illusion of having combated it. Meanwhile, the casualties of this doomed campaign stack up in the woods, in doorways, on the city common. They’re left with nowhere to go besides jail. And that’s all well and good for the cops, the courts, the prisons—they all need the bodies to justify the bloat. The more visible the homeless become, the more the public demands a “response.” All well and good! More justification still for more bloat. (For a local example, peep “He was part of the function,” my post on the arrest of an unhoused man on the city common a few weeks ago).
It’s a feature, not a bug, that this war is sure to produce endless casualties for the foreseeable future. The mass internment camps for the unhoused that President-Elect Donald Trump has promised will make a lot of contractors a lot of money should he follow through.
The arrest I depicted earlier reads like a hunter descending on prey. The “kill:” hitting an already destitute person with more hardship, less chance of escaping their situation. An additional trophy is the assets seized. Antlers for the mantle. The true nature of the war on drugs is a hunting sport made from poverty. It is a game all but designed to drive its prey eventually to a state of homelessness.
Meanwhile, zooming out farther, the long, quiet process of financializing housing markets carries on unabated. As illustrated in Urban Warfare, a 2019 book by Raquel Rolnik, the 2008 financial collapse was the end result of a decades-long process of converting housing from a social responsibility to a new frontier for financial accumulation. The response to the crisis was to further indulge this shift—to bail out the banks and “incentivize” private-sector housing production. We are still living under the effects of this attempt to “correct” the market without interfering with it. Housing production is increasingly at odds with housing need. The economy remains mortgaged-backed, reliant on land value and unconcerned with wage growth. Rent burdens increase. Debt burdens increase. The government continues to willfully remove itself from the responsibility of providing housing to those shut out of the market.
“States promote a ‘regulated deregulation’ that enables and strengthens a financial asset-based housing and urban policy,” writes Rolnik.
This manifests locally as a rash of highly subsidized private sector developments of high-end apartment complexes, which generate a “buzz” that inflates regional land value, which in turn sets speculators onto older, more affordable stock, flipping properties for short term gain, displacing people and raising rents. Meanwhile public housing stock continues to deteriorate as waitlists grow. Our local and state officials continue to promise that incentivizing high-end developers will have a trickle down effect, against the available evidence. To connect homelessness with the financiers extracting value from local communities is a third rail for Democrats and Republicans alike, and so they offer the public a narrative with no villain, and leave them to fill in the gaps themselves. Reliably, the villains most readily seized upon are immigrants and unhoused drug users.
A perfect example: Our governor’s imposition of caps on shelter stays, while failing to meaningfully add shelter capacity. Just three days ago, her administration rolled out new, even more austere changes to “lower shelter costs.” In this we see the rightward drift of the Overton window. We’re more and more comfortable letting people fall into unsheltered homelessness, and our Democratic leaders are all too happy to blame the “strain” caused by the “migrant crisis,” thus implicitly reinforcing the Trumpian worldview. It’s not hard to figure out why the Democrats lost Fall River.
So these are the twin pillars of a new era of means-tested fascism we’re just now starting to comprehend as such: the escalation of homelessness crackdowns and the deregulation of a financialized housing market. Both are matters of bipartisan consensus. Just look at Gavin Newsom, the California governor all but ordained to lead the 2028 Democratic ticket. He clears homeless encampments with his own hands, as a publicity stunt.
There is no foreseeable future in which the conditions get any better. No one is coming to save us. To stare that reality in the face is to truly understand what made Project Priceless’ action last week so important. It rubbed the grain of this grim reality. A small glimmer in a sunless place.
Sathi Patel, a close advisor to Project Priceless and organizer with SOS Worcester, said the letter campaign was a means of asserting a newfound empowerment.
“It was grassroots organized, it wasn't facilitated by a social worker or through some nonprofit’s authoritative guidance. It was something they just wanted to do for her. It started with just writing letters to her in jail, and then the vice president was like, what if we wrote letters to the judge? So they ultimately decided to do that amongst themselves.”
A mutual aid group put a judge in a position to see Johnson’s humanity where before it was invisible. But she saw it. The action worked. She gave Johnson a chance. There are people within this wicked system who want it to be less so, but it’s only hands from the outside that can release that valve.
One of the more insidious facets of this new social violence is its ability to make casualties anonymous—isolated units in discrete categories. The drug addict. The mentally unwell. The indigent. The migrant.
In this small example, we see how an active and organized community can undo that implicit othering. Project Priceless presented to the judge a human being, where previously there wasn’t one. Contesting this new means-tested regime starts right there, in my estimation: at remembering that individual human beings matter.
I asked Johnson how it felt, to hear the judge talk about that, then show some leniency.
“I was really, really, I don't want to say—I was shocked, because all my family's dead and I don't have support, so I never had anybody there for me. So I dunno if you heard but I was just crying the whole time.”
I said I had, though it was hard to make out through the computer speakers.
“I just wasn't expecting it, you know? I was just always doing everything myself, everything myself.”
Now, she said, she’s staying busy. She’s got a lot she wants to get done with Project Priceless. Stuff in the long term. Stuff coming up in a few weeks. She’s excited to get to work.
To support a Project Priceless You can donate via Venmo @BuildWYC CashApp $PowerWYC and put “PP” on the note/memo line. For any questions about the organization, send a line to Priceless@worcesteryouthcoops.org
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A few more things to get to. First, here’s the obituary I wrote for my late grandmother, as promised at the top.
Rest in peace, Gram
A graduate of St. Mary’s Catholic High School in 1957, Claudia Bird Gardner, born May 20, 1939, enjoyed a long career with Benjamin Moore Paint. She lived just down the road, at the same property between Milford Pond and Louisa Lake on which her mother and father first planted their roots in Milford. In that small, hand-built house on Dilla Street, Claudia raised four children—Michael, Jeannie, Cynthia, Jennifer—with her late husband, Bill Gardner. Later in life, she moved to Hopedale, settling into an in-law apartment built for her by Cynthia’s spouse, Bill, and his father, Pap.
There, she kept a fabulous garden, and from her screen porch held dominion over the screaming grandchildren in the yard. Nine of them—Billy, Jessie, Matt, Emily, Chris, Callen, Trevor, Olivia, Chloe—and by each she’s remembered as the beach chaperone, the museum-goer, the patron of the perhaps-too-avante-garde, the fly-by-night berry picker, the getaway driver, the international sight seer, at one time a rapper, possibly a secret agent. Always the life of the party, she could hold a fidget spinner there on her nose, spinning—no hands!—for longer than anyone else. Around a deck of cards, she became a different person. The later into the night, the louder she’d laugh. Sometimes right to bed she’d take herself, laughing. Those were the good days. But every day, bad included, she was the beating heart of an especially tight-knit and loving family. It’s a credit she’d wave away, making it all the more due.
And then there’s one grandchild who no longer needs to remember her Gram. Claudia and Taylor are together now, after too long apart. Perhaps on their own small planet with a single rose, and Jenny’s there too.
Claudia loved her late daughter in the secret way known only to mothers, as much in life as after her death. She carried Jenny everywhere she went. She loved Cindy, Jeannie, Michael—would have carried them just the same. But it was Jenny who needed carrying, and so she did.
To the end, Claudia remained independent, intellectually curious, an avid reader of literature and indulger of guilty-pleasure TV. She was quick of wit and faster to laugh, comfortable saying the uncomfortably necessary. She kept close friends and a busy schedule. Pattie, Ellie, Joanne, and ‘the Bettys’ will remember her as her brother, children, and grandchildren do—the woman who never forgot the time as a girl her brothers got to ride in the moving truck to Milford and she didn’t. Who never accepted the stated reason for that, nor the unstated. Who never made herself smaller for no one, and in that way lived more fully than many could. Most of all she knew it was a matter of great consequence whether the sheep ate the flower. And she’d prefer this obituary not drag on much longer.
Claudia Gardner died peacefully in her sleep on Friday, Nov. 22. She is survived by her brother, David, three children and nine grandchildren. She was 86.
Rest in peace, Gram.
Odds and ends
One more subscription pitch for the road.
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Tomorrow the council is going to decide on the tax rate (boring, stupid) and is all but guaranteed to give City Manager Eric Batista a huge pay raise (as is tradition). We’ll be streaming it, 6:15 p.m. on Twitch.
Fellow local newsletterer Giselle Rivera-Flores has launched a new project I’m excited to follow: Stories That Grow. As explained in her most recent post, the idea is to foster a Latino literary community around here, spotlighting new work.
I’ve always thought about how a Worcester Sucks essay contest would be fun. Maybe something to think about (and if there are any volunteers to run it... hit me up).
Extremely funny internet video: a brief history of convenience. Brother Kaczynski would be proud lol.
The Framingham/Worcester line is featured in a new video game called Train Sim World 5, per MassLive. News for a certain niche!
Friend of the newsletter Andrew Quemere, an expert in public records and related laws, was brought on the local TV news to talk about the exorbitant fees the state police are charging for records in the wake of Enrique Delgado Garcia’s death.
You can watch that here, and give Andrew’s newsletter a follow while you’re at it! Well worth it.
Oh and I’ve been getting better at lap steel, tinkering away at it. Follow me on BlueSky to watch me play the theme from Up.
Ok that’s enough for today. Talk to you on Thursday!
The first version of this story, which went out to inboxes, said here she was unable to post bail, not that she was held without it. I misread the court documents.
That was a lovely tribute to your grandma. My condolences to your family.