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.
76 posts in ‘abolition’
Defund gives us a platform and pathway to reimagine a society with less police, more care, and services that meet the needs of all.
Films that imagine decarceral futures are a cultural antidote for the carceral messages and aesthetics so prevalent in popular media.
Social work must be anti-carceral, against oppression, and committed to ending the systems, structures, and ideologies that cause people harm.
Even before the uprisings in Minneapolis, communities have been radically reimagining a world that doesn’t depend on policing.
In seeking funding for non-carceral mental health crisis response, we're hoping to bring a small piece of our abolitionist horizon to our city.
When people need care, then the solution should be to get them care, not increase the risk of police violence.
Abolition and public health go hand in hand. Organizers are embracing both as they pursue decarceral projects that center everyone’s well-being.
A hopeful, practical new book shows how abolitionist organizers today are building the world anew.
They were incarcerated in Eastern Kentucky, far from home. Now they’re free and back, hoping the region won’t build a new prison there.
From sex work to sex offender registries, a queer politics requires that we end state practices of sex exceptionalism.
For many years, Kentuckians have been fighting the construction of a federal prison. They’ve been winning, but their fight isn’t over.
After Hurricane Katrina, law enforcement criminalized sex work and Black women like never before. We fought back—and won.
Reacquainting ourselves with practices that made prisons more permeable can be a step toward ending mass incarceration.
How might we reimagine our rights and liberties in the absence of incarceration?
A look at how decarceral, abolitionist filmmaking can help us envision new worlds.
As 2023 draws to a close, a look back at the books that informed, inspired, and empowered us to work for a world without mass incarceration.
The Gospel narrative places on Christians a moral burden to not turn away from the sexual vulnerability of incarcerated people today.
Black, Brown, Indigenous, disabled, and poor children and their families bear the brunt of a system that many now agree should be dismantled.
Attica represents far more than a historic rebellion about prison reform. Its revolutionary abolitionist vision endures today.
The work of tearing down structures of harm while building the world we want can and must start small.
Even among abolitionists, there's room for those who lack hope.
How the peaceful takeover of Walpole prison in 1973 holds lessons for abolitionists today.
The art of knowing what we’re confronting and revealing who is being made invisible by the carceral state.
Despite the stumbling blocks imposed by Republican state governments, abolition is happening in the South and in small towns, with organizing specially tailored to local needs.
In Atlanta politicians are pushing for a bigger jail they claim will be more humane. But health-care workers are pushing back.
Acting within the criminal legal system cannot be the solution, on its own, to the existence of the carceral state.
Organizing and collective acts of resistance allow us to not only imagine new understandings of justice and safety, but to live them out.
The crisis of colonized cities and state criminality. The first installment in a two-part series.
Community-based gun violence prevention is at a crossroads. A group in Chicago shows how abolition may hold the key to its future.
Putting our ideas into practice—allowing ourselves to try, fail, and try again—will be how we move closer to a world without the harms of policing, prisons, and punishment.