We Keep Us Safe: De-escalation, Working Time, and Abolitionist Praxis at The Sanctuary

The Sanctuary: An Experiment in “Radical Hospitality”

I stood for a moment listening to the verbal abuse come thick and heavy at Cal, the de-escalation specialist I had brought over to help me, and remembered the other guest trapped in the stall, now presumably searching for his own pathway out of a bathroom where a naked man was screaming. I heard shuffling, scuffling, grunting. The guest by the sink, whom I could no longer see, was still moving in my mind as a memory of what I first saw: a naked man, soft-bellied, salt-and-pepper beard, cursing, panic in his eyes. The possibility of violence entered my gut. What if it comes to that? If the naked guest rushes for Cal, if he throws something, if the other guest in the stall comes out and gets attacked?

Simply by being in the bathroom Cal and I had “escalated” the guest using the sink as a shower, which is to say, we amplified within him a sense of danger and unsafety. Our presence as two men, one white, one Black, wearing nametags and associated with The Sanctuary, was enough to fire up a conflict. Simply by being there, by walking in the door at the moment that the guest happened to be halfway through his shower—maybe the only one he’d have this week, maybe the only semi-private space he’d be in for days—Cal and I had become, in the eyes of this guest, ambassadors of the carceral state, legible only in the most surface-level way, there yet not there. If the bathroom could be a refuge for the guest, for a short time, a place of peace and privacy, it was no longer. We had busted it up.

* * *

The Sanctuary is a multifaceted social services operation housed inside a cavernous turn-of-the-century limestone church in Philadelphia, though the organization itself is secular. Its mission is simple: to provide resources and support to anyone in need. Within The Sanctuary’s honeycombed building, staff and volunteers provide visitors with hot meals, clothing, hygiene products, medical treatment, psychological counseling, denominational and non-denominational spiritual support, help navigating state bureaucracies and locating shelters, housing, and jobs, as well as a stable mailing address from which to send and receive mail. The range of services is ambitious, and The Sanctuary has a large staff and many volunteers—often fifteen to twenty-five people working together during the day. Busy days will see up to two hundred visitors pass through the doors, looking for toothpaste, soap, socks, someone to talk to, a place to wash up, hot food, or a chair to rest in.

Guest is the term Sanctuary staff use to describe visitors to the space. While no archetypal “guest” exists at The Sanctuary, they typically come from Philadelphia’s most vulnerable populations. Many are unhoused, living in shelters, on the street, or in precarious situations in which necessities are hard to come by. Many are Black and Brown. Many are queer and/or trans. Some do not speak English. Some do not read. Many have survived sexual and physical abuse. Some are drug users or recovering from drug addiction. Some are single parents. Some are victims of rape and domestic violence. Many are formerly incarcerated. Many are veterans. Many were raised in abusive households. In short: most guests live at the dangerous intersection of the neoliberal privatization of urban space and the carceral state’s ruthless criminalization of poverty, mental illness, queerness, drug use, and racialized and gendered difference (Willse 2015; O’Brien and Willison 2022; Mogul, Ritchie, and Whitlock 2011).

Living in the intersections of these criminalized populations, guests are frequently caught in the “carceral continuum” (Wacquant 2001): cycling between police cruisers, correction facilities, highly surveilled shelters, rehab centers, and the fugitive moments between. This experience is a function of time as much as space. Many guests live in what P. J. Brendese (2023, 43), building on the seminal work of Angela Y. Davis (2003), describes as “carceral temporality,” on the run and on the move from the police and the “constant threat of carceral contact,” their sleep and work and everyday routines overshadowed by the ever-present possibility of sweeps and arrest. Carceral temporalities extend into the state-funded nonprofits and social services on which many of The Sanctuary’s guests rely for survival. Security guards, metal detectors, arduous intake and verification processes, and other means-testing measures ensure that even to receive basic services, guests must expose themselves to various forms of surveillance that further drain their time and increase their vulnerability (Kurti and Shanahan 2021; Weber 2024). This harsh reality leaves people making impossible choices, like turning a sink into a shower in a semi-public bathroom, knowing full well that someone else can walk in at any moment, that the situation could collapse into conflict, violence, another ride in another cruiser, another night spent in a cage.

The Sanctuary strives to look and feel radically different than the typical carceral nonprofit. Walking through the door that much is clear: there are no metal detectors, no bag screenings, and no traditional security guards. As Tamara, a Black woman and architect of The Sanctuary’s de-escalation program told me:

For all of those government-funded services you have to go through an intake process that can be super alienating. Someone has to tell their entire life story, which often exploits their trauma and mental health symptoms, whereas here guests get to show up however they’re doing, with their dignity intact, and they get to open up at their own pace. We don’t terminate guests, so if we stop seeing them, they don’t just disappear from our system and become forgotten. They can come and go as they please.

In short, The Sanctuary refuses means-testing, surveillance, and exhaustive intake interviews because these processes deny the fundamental humanity of its guests. Again, this is a function of time as much as space: guests are not asked to dredge up traumatic pasts to receive services; they can “open up at their own pace”, and the choices they make today won’t result in their termination tomorrow. Instead, The Sanctuary embraces what they call “radical hospitality”: the simple premise that all guests, regardless of background, identity, history, and even behavior, deserve access to The Sanctuary’s resources.

My eighteen months of field research at The Sanctuary included in-depth interviews with staff, volunteers, and management, regular volunteer shifts, shadowing staff positions, undergoing de-escalation and trauma-awareness trainings with long-time practitioners like Tamara, and coordinating trainings for outside community groups. Over these many hours, I came to learn through my own body how the practice of radical hospitality challenges deeply internalized logics around safety. During a normal day volunteering, for instance, it was common to witness verbal disagreement and arguments, be spoken to aggressively or incoherently, and generally encounter a range of scenarios that might cause you or the people around you to feel unsafe. While these encounters strained against my own internalized norms of safety, staff at The Sanctuary emphasized a definition of safety as the tangible mitigation of violence in all forms—physical and verbal abuse, physical and sexual harassment—rather than a feeling of unease. Part of the practice of radical hospitality, then, is developing an embodied, situational awareness of when someone’s behavior is approaching violence or abuse, while at the same time reckoning with your own internalized assumptions around what a safe place looks and feels like.

Overtly unsafe behavior was less common during my field research but not necessarily rare: I witnessed shouting matches between guests, shoving and pushing, verbal abuse, threats of violence against staff and other guests, sexual harassment, and misogynistic, racist, transphobic, and homophobic comments. Staff also recounted to me one or two more extreme examples in The Sanctuary’s past, including a stabbing. While The Sanctuary has a zero-tolerance policy for this kind of behavior—it can get you escorted from the space and banned for incrementally longer periods depending on severity—its staff, after years of firsthand experience dealing with extremely vulnerable populations, have come to understand this kind of harm as a structural inevitability, an outcome of the extreme precarity and vulnerability produced by the neoliberal carceral state. Further, staff have concluded that police, policing, and their adoption into the social services context do little to prevent such harmful interactions, let alone address their root causes. Similarly (and not surprisingly for such a highly surveilled and criminalized population), guests themselves do not necessarily associate the police with safety. At best, I was told, calling the police—or threatening to—might offer a last resort for staff who have exhausted all other avenues toward de-escalation. At worst, police intervention could exacerbate any conflict to the point of deadly violence.

The Sanctuary, however, does not take an explicit stance on police or prison abolition, and many employees and volunteers do not identify as police or prison abolitionists. Further, over the course of my fieldwork I observed many ways in which The Sanctuary and its staff reproduced carceral logics. Often, this came in the form of men (and sometimes others) aggressively enforcing Sanctuary rules, reproducing masculinist attitudes that are themselves foundational to policing (Barrie and Broomhall 2012; Prokos and Padavic 2002). It also came in the form of white people (and sometimes others) reproducing racist and anti-Black stereotypes around respectability and so-called good behavior. As Tamara told me early on, “All the racial things that are happening outside of here can happen in here too.” Such failures point to the persistent problems of masculinity, whiteness, and anti-Blackness in undermining radical worldmaking projects. Yet in my conversations with Tamara and other management staff, problematic behavior was described as something to address collectively through peer support and accountability sessions rather than termination (a topic I briefly discuss in the conclusion of this essay).

For all of these reasons, I came to understand The Sanctuary not as an abolitionist organization per se, but as a place that offered an exceptional set of parameters for understanding police-free approaches to community safety. The Sanctuary is a particular kind of experiment in social possibility, where dozens and sometimes hundreds of people each day encounter one another across complex differences in power, identity, privilege, and psychological state—whether desperate, hungry, on the run, on drugs, or just volunteering in their spare time—and attempt to keep each other safe. Within this field of heterogeneous social, institutional, and political alignments, de-escalation emerges as an “everyday practice of abolition” (Branson et al. 2023; Winston 2020): the messy labor of building a future without police and prisons.

How to be There and Not There: Escalation, De-escalation, and Working Time

Cal is in a tense situation now, standing in the doorway to the bathroom, understanding that what the guest across from him is seeking is the ability to take care of some of the most basic human needs: privacy and cleanliness. Yet Cal is unable to meet these needs, because the bathroom is just a regular church bathroom, a few stalls, a couple of sinks, a soap dispenser, a swinging door. It’s a shared space, and guests aren’t allowed to strip down and use it for themselves as a shower, as much as they might need to. Because, well, we all need to be able to use that bathroom safely, including whoever is currently trapped in the other stall.

* * *

This is the impossible situation the carceral state creates: houselessness means little access to privacy, which means not being able to clean up, even though getting cleaned up can be disease-preventing, restorative, life-giving. These structural contradictions between basic human survival and interpersonal safety manifest in our bodies as fears, tensions, tightenings—the gut reaction to conflict that exists without our consent. We escalate just by existing side by side, body in the same room as body.

Escalation, in clinical terms, is an increase in anxiety and anxious behavior, typically triggered by conflict and/or embodied memories of traumatic experience (Du et al. 2017; Spielfogel and McMillen 2017). People escalate in different ways (we all do): quietly letting anger build and then lashing out verbally; reacting violently to benign interactions; using threatening body language and invading someone else’s airspace. We might see these as normative expressions of escalation, but it looks different for everyone. It can also mean talking to someone or something not visible to others; making non-linguistic sounds like grunts or screams; moving around wildly; quietly retreating to a corner of the room; or just becoming non-responsive. At The Sanctuary, a space crowded with trauma survivors and people seeking resources for their material survival, escalation among staff and guests—and the tension that anticipating escalation creates—is always a possibility.

De-escalation, on the other hand, is the practice of helping yourself or someone else return to a non-escalated state (Atkins 2023). It too can be expressed in all kinds of ways: leaving the room for fresh air, lowering your voice, apologizing or taking a step away from a situation, smiling, sitting down on the ground, turning your back to face the wall. And it can be felt differently: like “coming down,” feeling grounded or at peace, blood pressure lowering, heartbeat slowing, connecting with friends or ancestors who aren’t in the room, or laughing awkwardly. Indeed, sometimes de-escalating for one person looks like escalating for another. But when we de-escalate effectively—both ourselves and each other—we reduce the pathways to harm, and we become safe again.

At any given time at The Sanctuary there is a dedicated de-escalation team of two to three people like Cal (or me during my training) circulating through the building—communicating with one another over clip-on walkie-talkies, interacting with guests, and monitoring for escalated behavior. And because there is no single behavior that indicates escalation, and because no two people are alike, de-escalation is also the practice of getting to know people, building relationships, familiarizing oneself with patterns of behaviors, attuning to the many intimate embodied signals that people are constantly putting out, and arranging the space to minimize conflict or what is sometimes referred to as “pre-escalation.” As one staff member told me, the de-escalation team are “glorified minglers,” a casual description that belies the rigorous discipline, intersubjective knowledge, and embodied vocabulary they draw on to prevent and diffuse crisis.

The Sanctuary’s theory of de-escalation assumes that conflict among guests and staff is an inevitable outcome of the extreme precarity guests face every day. Even in a space as generous as The Sanctuary, one cannot expect to have access to all resources necessary to maintain basic dignity. If the carceral state produces this impossible situation for guests, then providing affirming care might also be a matter of “impossibility.” For Cal, it is to be in the doorway, offering support to the escalated guest, and at the same time not in the doorway, threatening the guest’s sense of safety. This is where understanding de-escalation through the lens of temporality becomes especially useful. Though Cal might understand the crisis in the bathroom as an outcome of the decimation of accessible public bathrooms and services for the unhoused, in the moment he must figure a way forward without much-needed structural changes to urban life. To do this, as I will show, he “works time.”

Here, I am borrowing directly from the anthropologist Chloe Ahmann (2018, 144–45), who describes the “deliberate manipulation of time” by environmental activists in Baltimore as a political strategy that unsettles hegemonic narratives of industrial progress and reveals time as “an arena of creative action.” But unlike Ahmann and other anthropologists for whom working time is a discursive practice—what she describes as “directing attention and making claims” (Ahmann 2018, 153)—here I want to emphasize the embodied nature of time work, in which the transformative agenda of abolition converges with our most intimate phenomenological experiences of the world. This analysis is grounded in Black feminist thought, which emphasizes the somatic nature of political struggle (hooks 2015; Lorde 2012), or as Ki’Amber Thompson (2023, 1700) puts it, the practice of “embodying the worlds we desire.” And yet, as I will show, de-escalation work reveals how “embodying the worlds we desire” can be a messy and sometimes contradictory practice, as multiple needs and desires can compete within a moment of crisis. Thus, my analysis is also inspired by performance studies and the anthropology of performance, which has shown how experiences of time and subjectivity can be rendered “otherwise,” and even multiple, through embodied practices of ritual, creativity, and political action (Thomas 2016; Crosson 2022; Fleming 2022). As I will show, the embodied practice of de-escalation briefly transforms the imminent possibilities of the present—such that one can be there and not there—and in so doing ruptures the supposed inevitability of carceral outcomes.

Conclusion: Making Possibility in a “Tight Space”

Cal reaches through the door and takes the Ikea bag of clothes from me. The door closes gently shut and I turn to Cassidy and Rae, still together in the hallway outside the men’s bathroom. We wait together, tense but also not so tense, having not quite left The Sanctuary’s quotidian rhythms even as we attend to the crisis at hand. We wait. We direct some guests to the additional bathrooms upstairs.

Cal emerges with the focused stare of someone moving at a different tempo. Cassidy puts her hand on his back, “You OK?” and he makes a kind of frown-shrug and raises his hands skyward as if to say, “What’re you gonna do?” We let silence settle in against the din of everything else carrying on as usual: the mail service, the kitchen cleanup, the constant creaking of guests going up and down the old church stairs. “It’s better if he comes out alone,” Cal says.

Cassidy, Rae, and I disperse, returning to our roles as floaters and shadows. I approach the front desk ands check in with Betsy, the concierge. “How’d that all go?” she asks. I open my eyes wide and raise my hands skyward, imitating Cal. “OK, we’re gonna walk out to the front,” I hear Cal say through Betsy’s walkie-talkie.

Shuffling, Cal and the guest—wearing the clothes I gathered from upstairs—move side by side out of the bathroom door and toward the front entrance. Rae and Cassidy drift back into the hallway gloom. Cal and the guest leave through the front door. I stare off. Cal re-enters. “Yeesh . . . . We’ll huddle up later.” Other guests continue to trickle in, looking for masks, looking for food, looking for their mail.

* * *

Through embodied techniques of suspension, the open hold, bridging, and collectivity, de-escalation practitioners work time, expanding the field of the possible and searching within it for a safe resolution to crisis. “It’s a dance,” Tamara tells me when I ask her about this process of moving with others. “An emotional dance.” Or, as Danielle Goldman (2010, 4) describes dance improvisation, it is the practice of elaborating new possibilities within a “tight space”—a highly rigid set of sociopolitical, physical, and choreographic enclosures that delimit one’s range of motion. De-escalation at The Sanctuary is an improvised dance, unfolding within the tight spaces of our bodies (our guts, our minds, our muscles) and our identities, inside an institutional choreography oriented toward “radical hospitality,” inside a state choreography that seeks to move unhoused, Black, queer, neurodivergent, and otherwise marginalized people into prisons.

Harm—and even failure—are built into the model, and thus so are individual and collective processes of recovery, accountability, and repair. Though beyond the scope of this essay, I have found “working time” to be a useful concept for understanding these other critical stages of de-escalation practice: from preparation (“pre-escalation”) to rest, recovery, and repair. As Sanctuary staff gather at the end of each day, they work the past together, collectively reviewing and assessing their memories of de-escalation, understanding what succeeded, what didn’t, and what must be addressed to continue. These sessions call for a different kind of time work, one that unsettles linear orientations to the past while inevitability feeding into the spatial arrangements and choreographies meant to anticipate future conflict. Occasionally, restorative justice sessions are arranged between guests and staff to repair for harm, although staff will tell you that this both needs to happen more and can become unsustainable among overworked employees and disinterested guests, leaving an open question as to how a more abolitionist approach to repair might be implemented under conditions of burnout and scarcity.

Working time through de-escalation is an abolitionist practice that “has legs,” meaning it moves beyond controlled spaces like The Sanctuary in unpredictable and impactful ways. In addition to the dozens of volunteers per year who train at The Sanctuary, experienced staff also offer de-escalation trainings around the city, and multiple times during my fieldwork we were able to coordinate these trainings for community groups. Within abolitionist organizing, we practice the “5 D’s” of everyday de-escalation: Distract, Delegate, Document, Delay, and Direct.⁴ In this way, de-escalation works time across multiple scales and registers, bridging radical visions of a future without police or prisons into intimate moments on the sidewalk or at the coffee shop. My hope is that this practice might also move—humbly and unpredictably—beyond the experience of reading this article. If you’re still here, I hope you are convinced: “Do the de-escalation training!” Learn the skills you need—on campus, on the subway, on the block—to keep each other safe.

Abstract

This essay explores “de-escalation,” the embodied practice of intervening in interpersonal conflict and crisis without resorting to police or carceral tactics. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic research at The Sanctuary, a non-profit organization in Philadelphia that provides free social services, clothing, and food to vulnerable populations, I show how de-escalation practitioners use their bodies to manipulate both time and space into non-carceral outcomes. I focus on four overlapping techniques: suspension, the open hold, bridging, and collectivity. Unlike much of the clinical and psychological research on de-escalation, I situate these techniques within Black feminist, performance studies, and anthropological analytics that insist on the embodied nature of political struggle and the malleability of time and temporality. I argue that de-escalation at The Sanctuary creates a space-time in which abolitionist horizons of a future without police or prisons are negotiated through intimate, quotidian social interactions. [abolition; de-escalation; temporality; carcerality; practice; performance; safety]

Notes

Acknowledgments  I am deeply grateful to the staff, volunteers, and community of The Sanctuary. Thank you for welcoming me, sharing your expertise with me, and, most of all for your everyday labors in radical hospitality. I am also grateful to the editorial team at Cultural Anthropology, Julia Elyachar, Kate Ehrenhalt, Petra Dreiser, and the three anonymous reviewers, all of whom provided thoughtful and constructive feedback during the drafting process. Much of this writing was drafted in dialogue with the ethnographic writing group: Max Dugan, Jimil Ataman, and Kim Fernandes. Thank you, friends, for your time, compassion, and insight. I thank Jane Robbins Mize for steadfast editorial and intellectual support. Research and writing for this article was also supported by the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences, the Center for Experimental Ethnography, and the Library Company of Philadelphia.

1. 1. The “we” here remains deliberately ambiguous. In the summer of 2020, I participated alongside thousands of Philadelphians in numerous rallies and actions. Some were tightly organized by groups with clear leadership and explicit demands, such as the staunchly abolitionist Black Philly Radical Collective (Strong et al. 2022). Others loosely coalesced under the #BlackLivesMatter banner. Still others were more spontaneous and open-ended expressions of frustration and rage. As a white organizer and then-graduate student, I contributed to these movements in various modes of allyship, solidarity, and organizing, including planning marches, rallies, and teach-ins with the abolitionist assembly Police Free Penn and the national #CopsOffCampus Coalition, as well as by simply showing up to the many events organized around the city by others.

2. 2. “The Sanctuary” is a pseudonym. I use pseudonyms in this article for the institution and the people who work there, as agreed on in my research protocols with participants.

3. 3. In summarizing the principals of Black feminist transformative justice organizing, Mia Mingus (2015, 20) writes that individual and collective forms of justice are co-dependent: “There can be no individual justice without collective justice and vice versa.”.

4. 4. For a simple how-to, see J. J. Skolnik, “Abolitionist Bystander Intervention & De-Escalation,” Interrupting Criminalization, https://www.interruptingcriminalization.com/resources-all/abolitionist-bystander-intervention-and-de-escalation-a-pocket-zine-for-youth, last accessed April 9, 2025.