Silicon Valley De-Bug

When Raj Jayadev was working on a printer company’s assembly line twenty five years ago, Silicon Valley was just beginning to create its mythology about the economic opportunity of tech and the great prosperity it would bring. What Raj saw behind the scenes, however, was a different picture. While part of the population was, indeed, experiencing opportunity, non-unionized workers making sub-living wages laboured in the back rooms to make it possible. He began speaking with other workers about organizing and was fired.

A resulting journal entry he wrote, summarizing what older South Asian workers on the line had told him about their situations, started making its way through lunch rooms. It got passed around, landed in a small local magazine, and other stories started pouring in about the unseen side of Silicon Valley. Enough to warrant a magazine. He and his co-founder called it Silicon Valley De-Bug, after the tech teams that were brought in to fix glitches in assembly line systems.

Since then, De-Bug has followed a very fluid path in its quest to help create agency in those least likely to have it, across a range of situations. Storytelling and the search for equity are still at its heart. “It started as a community,” says Raj, “which grew into a kind of family devoted to one another’s support, then an organization. Now, through a network much larger than ourselves, it’s become a movement.”

Their approach doesn’t involve having a team of ‘experts’ to advise the people who come through their door. De-Bug is a community of people who’ve each followed their own path to gaining influence over a situation in which they initially felt they had none. When someone comes in looking for help, the community identifies who has the relevant personal experience to teach and support that person in their own battle. It might be a mother advocating to keep her son out of jail or an immigrant who wants to make t-shirts. “The issues people bring to De-Bug might seem disparate, but on the inside they’re the same. We provide a nurturing solidarity for individuals trying to gain self-determination in their lives.”

When the issues being brought to their door began to be, increasingly, in the criminal justice system, De-Bug’s community urgently set to work creating a practice to protect its people. Over several years, they developed a model to help keep loved ones from harsh incarceration sentences or bring them home sooner. “We didn’t have a blueprint,” says Raj. “We had a community learning from one another about how to navigate the system and gain some power within it.” The result became a shareable process known as Participatory Defense. “The ultimate proof of the model’s efficacy is the ability of others to adapt the approach and use it successfully for themselves.”

That proof is ample. Participatory Defense has grown to become a network of 55 hubs across America, of which De-Bug is purposefully a member, not a head office. Says Raj, “Participatory Defense has turned into a whole field of activity from the origins of a few people sitting around a table. It freaks me out sometimes to think about what they’ve birthed, just from having the courage to try in the first place. It’s very moving.”

The impact of the model comes from how it develops a sense of agency in participants, in a system built to exclude them. As Raj explains, “People come in feeling they’re not capable of influencing the situation, or aren’t allowed to. So the whole idea that they can – which is demonstrated and passed on by others in the community - is monumental.”

The first time a family member comes to a De-Bug community meeting can be quite a surprise. When they arrive, often expecting a lawyer or some other authority figure, what they find is a group of people just like them, full of stories and advice about how they reduced or avoided time served for their own family members. “New people come in and are told they, themselves, are going to be agents of change for their loved ones. It’s shocking for many of them to imagine. But all around they see others who’ve done just that.”

The names of those in prison or awaiting trial are written on a white board. When the person is let off or let out, the group holds a ceremony in which the name is erased from the board by the person themselves. Whether they’ve been paroled after serving thirty years or have had charges dropped, the whole room celebrates the relief and joy of victory.

Among other tools, De-Bug uses its roots in storytelling to help create personal ‘social biography packets’ for those in, or at risk of, prison. The profiles capture the full humanness and connection they have to their family and community. When they appear to a DA or judge as a whole person rather than a crime statistic to be penalized, it often reduces or commutes sentences.

Experience in Participatory Defense can also lead to general advocacy. When people start participating in the justice system in this way, they see ‘under the hood’ and recognize endemic issues that need to change. All of De-Bug’s advocacy work has arisen from the families in the meetings. They see a flawed system and think ‘we should do something about this’ – a notion they would have been highly unlikely to even imagine before they came into the De-Bug fold.

The Patchwork Collective’s funding  support is unrestricted for multiple years, which has allowed De-Bug to deploy funding across the whole network, facilitating the growth of a movement rather than just their organization. “We’re trying to expand the field to make an historically significant impact for each individual – we are not empire-building, we’re people-building. There are people who have become national leaders in this movement, after starting as a person who thought they couldn’t have any effect at all.”

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