abolition
Finding the Opportunity in Crisis
The public’s appetite for meaningful change ebbs and flows. When it peaks, how do organizers capture that energy and channel it into the fight to end mass incarceration?
abolition
24 posts in ‘abolition’
abolition
Put Children First
Abolishing the child welfare system would create more avenues for protecting children, instead of devoting all of society’s energy to propping up a coercive system of surveillance and punishment.
abolition
Following the Money
Attempts by carceral authorities to shield their funding sources from public interference are proof that working to interrupt money flows is an effective way to oppose prisons.
abolition
Organizing the Already Mobilized
People involved with labor justice, grassroots community-building, and independent watchdogs make obvious allies for abolitionists—but how do we win them to our cause?
abolition
Custody and Power
Those wishing to abolish prisons must understand the legal and financial mechanisms through which the carceral state organizes itself to hold people against their will.
abolition
Abolition and Environmental Justice
Solidarity between abolitionist and environmental justice organizers doesn’t just happen. It results from careful, long-term work to unearth a shared set of goals.
abolition
Uneven Expansions
In the fight to abolish prisons, it’s vital to attend simultaneously to the scale of U.S. mass incarceration and how it manifests differently in specific regions.
abolition
Abolitionist Lessons from the Prison Belts
In a six-part series, we look at how organizers can adapt lessons learned in twenty-five years of abolitionist organizing to their own political terrains, with examples from Appalachia, California, and…
abolition
Building Toward Abolition
Abolition wouldn’t guarantee a society free from harm—but it could create a society in which the ways we address harm actually help people rebuild their lives.
abolition
Transformative Justice Is Global
A transnational approach to abolition brings a new appreciation for community—both broader and narrower than the nation-state—as the site for care, justice, and democratic self-governance.
abolition
A Thousand Possibilities
Abolition requires the world-building work of imagining all the many life-affirming alternatives to incarceration.
abolition
The Transformation of Justice
What does genuine safety look like? And what will it take to prioritize it rather than simply managing inequality and other injustices?
abolition
Community Is a Verb
Defund gives us a platform and pathway to reimagine a society with less police, more care, and services that meet the needs of all.
abolition
For the People’s Health
Abolition and public health go hand in hand. Organizers are embracing both as they pursue decarceral projects that center everyone’s well-being.
abolition
How We Rode the Storm
After Hurricane Katrina, law enforcement criminalized sex work and Black women like never before. We fought back—and won.
Futures
Fractal Abolition
The work of tearing down structures of harm while building the world we want can and must start small.
abolition
In Defense of Hopelessness
Even among abolitionists, there's room for those who lack hope.
abolition
Abolishing the Family
The fight against police and prisons cannot be separated from the struggle to extend care beyond the limits of the family form.
abolition
Stories That Wound
The gendered norms of U.S. settler colonialism subject Indigenous and LGBTQ+ people to the violence of our cisheteropatriarchal carceral state.
social control
Putting Reentry Out of Business
Reentry is an extension of the carceral continuum, a limbo between confinement and freedom.
abolition
Slave Rebel or Citizen?
Abolitionist Ruchell Cinqué Magee is the country’s longest-held political prisoner.
prison closures
A Punishment Profiteer
A rare instance of state prisoners, state prison administrators, and the governor of California all publicly agreeing that a particular prison ought to be closed.
excerpt
The Problem With Innocence
Human sacrifice, and nothing else, is the central problem that organizes the carceral geographies of the prison-industrial complex.
abolition
Divide and Conquer
For those of us on the inside who believe in prison abolition by any means necessary, prison closures really mean prison closures. The state and some of my fellow prisoners…