by Erik McFrazier
In 2023 I took a formal tour of the Whatcom County Jail.
I want to tell you what I saw. What I smelled. What I felt standing inside that building. Because everything that’s wrong with how this county is about to spend your tax money starts right there.
The jail is a long concrete building. That’s the only way to describe it. No softness anywhere. No curves. No color. Nothing that suggests that human beings live inside it. It feels like a long hallway you can’t see the end of. A shotgun corridor of concrete and metal that just keeps going. The kind of place that reminds your body, not your mind, your body, that you are not supposed to be here. That you are contained.
The recreation yard is a metal cage. That’s it. Metal and concrete with just enough of a gap at the top to let some light fall in. Not warmth. Not air. Just light. Enough to remind you the outside world still exists somewhere around you. But it’s not touchable.
It smelled of urine. The holding cell reeked of it.
The jail was full. Beyond full. So full that people were being booked and then released not because they were cleared but because there was physically nowhere to put them. Others were still sitting there not because they had been sentenced but because the system was so backed up, that they hadn’t even seen a judge yet. Just waiting. In that smell. In that concrete hallway that goes nowhere.
I looked around at the people inside. Most of them were visibly struggling. Addiction. Mental illness. The kind of pain that doesn’t hide itself when there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do and no way out.
I asked one of the officers what was the most frustrating part of the job.
He didn’t hesitate.
He said they didn’t have the right training and resources to actually help anyone. That there were not enough of the right kind of resources for the kind of population they had housed there. Nothing that addressed why most of these people ended up inside in the first place.
There was nothing nice about that place. Nothing that suggested the people inside it mattered.
It looked like what it was.
A place to hide people away from the community’s gaze.
I’ve been thinking about that building ever since. Not just what it is. What it means. What it represents about who we are and how we’ve decided to respond to human suffering.
That jail is not an accident of architecture. It is a philosophical argument manifested into the physical.
No softness. No nurturing. No care. No natural light. Just concrete and metal and the smell of human beings who have been discarded. That building is the clearest picture I have ever seen of what a white male patriarchal dominated society actually looks like when you strip away the feminine, softness and nurturing, and you just look at what it builds.
It builds that.
Hard. Unforgiving. Designed to contain. Never to heal.
This is a system that has always responded to pain with punishment. That has always looked at the most vulnerable among us, the addicted, the mentally ill, the houseless, the broken, and decided the answer was a cage. Because softness is weakness. Because care costs money. Because certain bodies were never meant to be seen as worth saving in the first place.
That is not an accident. That is a value system. And it has been the controlling them in this country since before it was a country.
That jail sits on occupied land.
The Lummi Nation and the Nooksack people were here long before any of this concrete was poured. Long before this county existed. Long before anyone drew a line on a map and called it theirs. They built entire ways of living on this land, ways of organizing community, of caring for each other and for the earth, of understanding that the health of a people and the health of the land are the same thing.
And then colonialism arrived. With its hard edges and its extraction and its absolute certainty that some bodies were meant to rule, and others were meant to be managed.
What happened to the Lummi and the Nooksack, the theft of land, the erasure of culture, the boarding schools, the generational trauma, is the same colonial project that built the slave trade. The same logic. The same machinery. Different targets. Same outcome.
Today the Lummi and Nooksack people make up a minority part of the population in this county. And they are disproportionately represented in that jail. On their own land. Behind concrete and metal. With nothing inside to help anyone.
We built a cage on stolen ground, and we keep filling it with the people we stole from. We keep filling it with the marginalized, those that fell through the cracks, the ones that don’t fit the idea of a real American.
I am an Afro American man. I can’t say that I have ever “loved” this country. I have loved where I have lived in this country. I have built community and family and meaning in many places in this country, but I have never felt like an American. I am an American, no doubt, but it’s complicated.
Our culture is everywhere. Black music. Black style. Black language. Black food. The whole world wants a piece of what we created. This country has taken all of it and sold it back to everyone including us.
But taking from our culture and knowing our people are two very different things.
This country does not know us. It has never known us. What it has done, consistently, efficiently, and at enormous scale, is lock us up.
Afro Americans built this country. Fought for it. Bled for it. Made it beautiful and rhythmic and alive in ways it never would have been without us. And what we got in return, generation after generation, was exactly what I walked through in that jail. Hard walls. No resources. Nothing rehabilitative. The smell of neglect. The pain of how we are actually valued.
The Lummi and Nooksack people know this feeling. Different history. Same concrete. Same system deciding that their bodies were problems to be managed rather than lives to be supported.
This capitalist, colonialist project does not see people. It sees liabilities.
The prison system does not disproportionately imprison Black and brown and indigenous bodies by accident. It was designed around a specific idea of who is dangerous. Who is disposable. Who needs to be contained rather than cared for. That idea is not new. It did not begin with mass incarceration. It came over on ships. It was written into law. It was upheld by courts and churches and county budget meetings.
And two days ago, it was upheld again.
On April 29 2026 the Supreme Court gutted what remained of the Voting Rights Act. Section 2. The provision that was supposed to protect voters of color from maps drawn to erase their political power. Gone. Written into irrelevance by six justices who decided that proving discriminatory intent is now nearly impossible. An hour after the decision came down Florida was already redrawing its maps.
We may be headed for the lowest Black representation in Congress since 1877.
Since Reconstruction ended and they took it all back the first time.
Let that land.
This is not history. This is not a warning. This is happening right now. The same system that filled that jail with Black and brown and indigenous bodies is now making it harder for those same communities to vote out the people who keep building more jails.
The colonial project is not past tense. It is present tense. It is working exactly as it was designed.
And we are still debating whether it can be reformed.
So, when I tell you – Whatcom County voters passed a tax in 2023 with a promise. A written, public promise that 50% of the revenue would go toward services, a behavioral health, diversion programs, the infrastructure that keeps people out of that building in the first place. That was the deal. That was what got it passed after voters said no twice before.
Then March 2026 came. The county presented four budget scenarios. Four chances to honor what they promised.
Every single one overspent on incarceration and gutted the services.
I need you to understand what that means.
It means they want to build a newer version of what I walked through.
Bigger. More modern. Still on occupied land. Still concrete. Still no softness. Still no resources to help anyone.
That’s the plan.
With money voters approved for something different….An actual solution.
Voters rejected this jail twice. 2015. 2017. It finally passed in 2023 because they rebranded it. Put health and justice in the name. Made a promise about services. And now that it’s time to fund those services, when the rubber meets the road, suddenly the building is the priority and the services are negotiable.
That is the playbook. It has always been the playbook.
The promise that we actually care. But instead, we deliver cages.
I consider myself a pragmatist. I have spent years pushing back on the abolitionist argument, not because I didn’t understand the pain behind it, but because I worried about the fallout. Tear down major systems and people get hurt in the chaos. I believed that.
I’m having a harder time believing it now.
Because here’s what I’ve come to understand: the fallout is already here. The chaos is already happening, and almost all Americans are feeling it. The most vulnerable people, the ones these systems were never built for, have been living in the fallout for generations. We just didn’t call it that because it wasn’t happening to the right people.
We have a drug epidemic. A houselessness epidemic. Cities are overrun by people who fell through every crack in every system that was supposed to catch them. And our answer, over and over, is to lock them up. To put them in buildings exactly like the one I walked through in 2023. Because that is what this system knows how to do. It does not know how to nurture. It does not know how to heal. Softness was never part of the design.
Most of our mass murders are committed by men. We have more guns than people. We have more people in prison than any country on earth. And we keep building more prisons.
At some point you have to ask yourself what we are actually treating here. Because it is not the wound.
I used to argue against abolishing systems because of the fallout. But I am watching the fallout happen in real time. I am watching systems break down. Norms dissolve. A country that was already not working for those closest to the cracks and now is working for even fewer.
I am watching the highest court in the land take a sledgehammer to the last legal protections that gave Black and brown communities any meaningful political power. And I am watching a county get ready to break a promise it made to its own voters so it can build a bigger version of a concrete hallway that smells like urine.
Maybe the abolitionist argument is right.
Maybe you cannot reform a system that was never designed to do what you’re asking it to do.
Maybe a country that responds to human suffering with the hardness of concrete, needs something more than reform.
Maybe it needs to look at the people whose land this actually is and ask what they knew about taking care of each other and the earth before we paved over all of it.
Because here is what I know about many indigenous cultures. They are not organized around containment. They are organized around care. Many are matriarchal. Centered on balance. On the feminine. On the understanding that a community’s strength comes from how it treats its most vulnerable members not from how efficiently it removes them from sight.
That is the opposite of everything that jail represents.
That is the opposite of our current white straight male Christian colonialist capitalistic hyper individualistic patriarchal society that we currently live.
We need more of that. Not as a romanticized idea but as an actual governing principle. More softness. More nurturing. More care for people and for the earth they live on. More balance between the masculine and the feminine, more tenderness. More willingness to ask what someone needs before deciding where to put them.
The Afro American community and the indigenous community of this county have more in common than we have been allowed to recognize. We have both been on the destructive receiving end of the same system. We have both been contained by the same logic. We have both been told our ways of knowing and caring and organizing were less than.
They were not less than. They were the threat. Because a people who know how to take care of each other don’t need to be managed.
It is time we found each other. It is time we built something together that looks nothing like that jail.
That is what it means to be an abolitionist. Not tearing things down for the sake of destruction. But refusing to keep building the same thing and calling it justice. Refusing to keep pouring concrete on stolen land and calling it public safety. Refusing to keep watching the most vulnerable people in our community get warehoused in a building with no light and no resources and no path toward anything better.
Being an abolitionist means choosing something different. Out loud. On purpose. Right now.
And we have that chance right now in Whatcom County.
Voters were promised something in 2023. Services first. Care first. People first. Half the tax revenue going toward behavioral health and diversion and the kind of support that keeps people out of cages in the first place. That promise is still on the table. The vote has not happened yet.
We can hold them to it.
We can show up and make enough noise that breaking that promise costs more than keeping it. We can be the community that said enough with the cages. Enough with the concrete. Enough with the hard cold logic of a system that was never designed to heal anyone.
We can be the ones who choose softness, who choose care, who choose to fund the things that actually address why people end up in that building in the first place.
We can choose to be abolitionists.
Not someday.
Now.
CTS Whatcom has a petition, Fund Services First. Sign it. Pass it along. Make some noise. Hold them to what they promised.
https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/fund-services-first
Because if we let them break this promise, we are not just losing a budget fight, we are choosing what we believe people deserve.
And I already know what that choice looks like when it gets made without accountability.
I stood inside it…..and It smelled like urine.