How I Came to Abolition

Before I was incarcerated, and even during the early years of my incarceration, I was firmly in the liberal reform camp. I believed the system was broken but fixable—that we just needed to tweak it a little, get the bad apples out. I believed prisons could make us safer. I believed policing could make us safer. I didn’t know anything else, and I want to be honest about that, because I think it matters for people to understand where I started before they can understand where I ended up.

The issue that first cracked that worldview open for me was HIV criminalization. Before my incarceration, and throughout my early twenties and thirties, I worked in service organizations in Philadelphia. As a Black queer man on the ballroom scene there, I watched a lot of my friends pass away from AIDS-related illness. My biological father died in May of 2009 from AIDS-related illness. I am HIV-negative, but this is an issue that has impacted me enormously—friends, family, ex-lovers, gone. 

So when I started reading about the Michael Johnson case out of Missouri from behind bars—I had been incarcerated in Pennsylvania for six years at that point—I was paying attention. In 2015 Johnson, a young Black college student, was convicted after allegedly failing to disclose his HIV-positive status to sexual partners. They charged him with thirty years.

And my initial reaction? I thought he deserved it. I thought: he shouldn’t have done that, he knew better. That was my whole take. Looking back, that moment illustrates exactly how deeply I had then internalized the logic of the carceral system—even as someone personally touched by the HIV epidemic, even as someone who had lost people I loved, even as someone who was behind bars myself. I still reached for punishment as the answer.

That mindset stayed with me for a long time. It didn’t begin to crack until around 2013, when I was transferred to SCI Smithfield and a neighbor of mine named Steph handed me two copies of the Abolitionist, the inside–outside print publication put out by Critical Resistance. I had never seen anything like it before. I had never read anything like it before. It intrigued me, and so I started writing to Critical Resistance: What about this? What about that? What do you say about this? I was peppering them with questions. And fortunately, someone there was patient enough and generous enough to write back. That began my relationship with Critical Resistance and my long study of abolitionism.

Around the same time, I reached out to Jason Lydon, a formerly incarcerated minister who founded Black & Pink, an abolitionist organization supporting LGBTQ+ prisoners. I reached out as a queer person, with a similar flood of questions. We talked on the phone, and he was patient with me in the same way, sending me things to read. Charlotte Pope, out of CR New York, was doing the same—answering my questions, pointing me toward more. What they were giving me was a real body of thought to work through—essays, articles, books, zines—and people willing to think it through with me.

I studied abolition for about three or four years before I published a single word publicly. I was reading. I was corresponding. I was asking questions and sitting with the answers. And then, in 2016, I began the first study group at SCI Smithfield. We were using zines, excerpts from books—the introduction and fifth chapter of Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Golden Gulag, a chapter from Angela Y. Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete?—just introducing people to the idea of abolition, giving them the same on-ramp that Steph and Jason and Charlotte had given me.

Slowly, I created an abolitionist community inside SCI Smithfield. As I got more deeply involved, my understanding and practice of abolition deepened. Having people around me who helped me study, held me accountable, and practiced alongside me was key. It also helped me weather the retaliation that inevitably followed my work. 

You can read books all day long, but if you’re not practicing, that’s not abolition. Practice is where the ideas deepen, where they become real. Community is where the ideas come to life.  I had people on both sides of the wall who helped me deepen my practice, and I would not be the organizer and thinker I am today without them. 

One of the things that studying helped me see is that there were things I had already been doing before my incarceration that were abolitionist—we just didn’t call them that. Being in the ballroom community in Philadelphia meant being part of something built on mutual aid. It meant not going to the police to solve problems, but dealing with harm outside of harmful systems. It meant operating from an idea of abundance—that we have enough for each other, that we take care of each other. That care work, that collective survival, that’s what we did in the ballroom. We survived. We just didn’t have the name for it yet.

Coming to abolition, then, was not a conversion so much as a recognition. The study gave me the language and the framework for something I had already been living. But studying alone didn’t do it. The community is what made it possible to move from reading about abolition to practicing it, teaching it, and eventually writing about it.

There was a time when that commitment cost me a year of my freedom. 

When I arrived at SCI Camp Hill in 2022, a security lieutenant called me into his office. He told me he knew about my activism, my organizing, my writing—he had seen it online. This is how the transfer system works: to move you from one facility to another, they need to put something on your jacket, something that makes you look like a problem. He put it in writing that I was an abolitionist, framing abolition as though it were a gang, a so-called Security Threat Group, or STG. The designation followed me.

In 2025, when I went before the parole board—no misconduct, all programs completed, even a DOC recommendation for parole—they told me I was part of a security threat group. The group, according to them, was named “the abolitionists.” They denied me parole on that basis. 

What carried me through the year that followed was the same thing that had brought me this far: the tradition itself. I had spent years studying the prison Black radical tradition, reading about people who had survived far worse in the service of the same work. One of those people was Martin Sostre. 

Sostre’s case drew attention from Amnesty International, which adopted him as an early prisoner of conscience and helped bring international recognition to his struggle. In and out of prison from the 1950s to the mid-1970s, he fought from inside the walls against censorship, for religious freedom, for prisoners’ right to help one another with legal work. He knew what it meant to have your words treated as contraband. After I read his prison letters, Sostre became a touchstone for me—someone I returned to throughout the rest of my incarceration. When prison officials retaliated against me, when they took my property, when they denied me parole and told me that abolition was a gang—I asked myself: What would Martin do? What would he say? His survival told me mine was possible. If he had made it through that, I could make it through this. In 2023 I wrote an ode to Martin called “Answering to Martin’s Ghost.”

The state understood my organizing as a threat. They weren’t wrong that I was committed to dismantling the system that held me. But they misunderstood—as they always do—that the threat isn’t a gang, and it isn’t one person. It’s a community, built through study and practice and care, on both sides of the wall. That community is what brought me to abolition, and it’s what kept me when abolition cost me something.

I maxed out my sentence. I gave them every single day. Since my release, I have continued that work as part of the editorial collective of the Abolitionist, the Critical Resistance publication that first found me in a cell at Smithfield more than a decade ago.

I walked out on February 9, 2026. I was fifty-two years old. Sostre walked out of prison for the last time on February 9, 1976. He was also fifty-two years old. We were released fifty years apart, to the day.

^{Image: “Four abstract motifs,” Jean Saudé, Ad Verneuil, and M. P. Verneuil, courtesy of the New York Public Library Digital Collections.}

Contributors

Stevie Wilson Stevie Wilson is a formerly imprisoned, Black queer abolitionist writer and oranizer.

Topics

• Decarceral Pathways

Tags

• abolition
• bookshelf
• incarcerated and formerly incarcerated authors
• martin sostre