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?
community organizing
35 posts in ‘community organizing’
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…
interventions
Changing Courts from the Ballot Box
In Los Angeles, judges are elected, and most are lifelong prosecutors. Community members are now fighting this carceral status quo by working to elect career public defenders.
In Depth
Turning Death into a Commodity
ShotSpotter has leveraged gun violence into a multimillion-dollar business that promises safety but delivers only increased policing and drain on the public’s resources.
Criminalizing Dissent
The Tools of Repression
The sweeping conspiracy and terrorism indictment of Stop Cop City activists reveals the new playbook for state suppression of protest. But we can still win.
activism
Back to the Basics
At a time of political realignment, progressive movements need to get back to building relationships, across differences, and growing their base.
organizing
Build Your Fortress
Now more than ever communities must protect our own, even as we prepare for a long battle.
Essay
The Ferguson Decade
A decade on, Ferguson remains central for those working toward a world free from the harms of policing and prisons.
organizing
People-Powered Defense
Participatory defense gives families and communities an opportunity to protect their own in courtroom spaces that have long robbed them of power.
social control
Safety from Surveillance
In their fight to get ShotSpotter out of Chicago, organizers have emphasized the ways that for-profit technology can never deliver on its promises to make communities safer.
Policing
Safety Without Police
Even before the uprisings in Minneapolis, communities have been radically reimagining a world that doesn’t depend on policing.
organizing
A Safer, Healthier Boston
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.
organizing
Letcher Is Us
A new prison won’t fix the many problems that afflict our community. Only a vision for, and investment in, a different future will.
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.
Futures
Abolition as Human Liberation
A hopeful, practical new book shows how abolitionist organizers today are building the world anew.
advocacy
Back to Appalachia
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.
organizing
Building Community
For many years, Kentuckians have been fighting the construction of a federal prison. They’ve been winning, but their fight isn’t over.
In Depth
How We Ended Wealth-Based Jailing
In Illinois, ending money bond was our target. Pretrial freedom is our goal.
Crimmigration
Deconstructing Immigrant Binaries
To truly provide justice for those with criminal records, we must question harmful binaries that separate “good” from “bad” immigrants.
organizing
Abolition Everywhere
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.
roundtable
Keeping Each Other Safe
Acting within the criminal legal system cannot be the solution, on its own, to the existence of the carceral state.
roundtable
From Reformism to Revolution
As organizers in Illinois know well, it is necessary to engage with criminalizing institutions to better learn how to defeat them.
roundtable
A Constellation of Tactics
Radical acts of justice can happen within the confines of the system. Or well outside it, as demonstrated by the organized resistance to Atlanta's Cop City.
roundtable
Radicalized in Service of Others
Organizing and collective acts of resistance allow us to not only imagine new understandings of justice and safety, but to live them out.
interventions
On Both Sides of the Gun
Community-based gun violence prevention is at a crossroads. A group in Chicago shows how abolition may hold the key to its future.