Monica Jones

The following is an interview with activist Monica Jones conducted by Che Gossett and Eva Hayward. In this interview, Jones talks about her activism against the criminalization of sex work, recounting how the program Project ROSE, which was a revealing collaboration between the university and the police, functioned through carceral logics to detain and then according to a carceral economy of innocence, criminally prosecute or “reeducate” sex workers or those profiled as sex workers. Jones shows how the university is part of the carceral continuum and is a site of Black trans and sex worker and prison abolitionist struggle, which has intensified in the current organizing against police on campuses and entanglement of university and the prison-industrial complex and the policing functions of administration and university governance. Jones also shows how this is an HIV/AIDS activist issue given that the criminalization of sex work is bound up with from gentrification, displacement, and how that is exacerbated with COVID-19.