You are required to write a response for each text read. Inthese three to four page response papers, you will analyze and evaluate authors’ claims todemonstrate thorough reading and critical understanding of the text. Tania Unzueta
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We Fell in Love in a Hopeless
Place:
A Grassroots History from
#Not1More to Abolish ICE
Tania Unzueta Jun 29, 2018 · 6 min read
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By Tania Unzueta, Maru Mora Villalpando, and Angélica Cházaro
Histories of social movements show time and again that powerful
organizing makes the impossible possible.
As the demand to Abolish ICE begins to catch fire, we must not forget that
it was profoundly criminalized working class and poor undocumented
people who first had the courage to challenge assimilationist demands
in favor of aspirational ones. It was them and their
accomplices who dared to dream up a campaign that could fight to win the
end of their own incarcerations and deportations.
A motley crew of undocumented people, women of color, queers, and
grassroots organizers first pushed forward the demand for “not one more
deportation,” prefiguring the current moment. As the words of Assata
Shakur remind us, it’s those who “have nothing to lose but our chains” who
have made the most daring demands in times of conformity. When we
forget this we lose lessons about how movements are born, pivot, grow, and
win.
To be clear, the organizations who were part of the #Not1More campaign
are not the only ones or the first ones who have named the need to Abolish
ICE, but their tremendous work — the risks and sacrifices they made to
bring us to this moment — is what has made this both a national demand
and a real possibility.
As late as 2016, many mainstream immigration organizations remained
insistent that the only way forward for the immigrant rights movement was
holding out for Congress to introduce and pass Comprehensive Immigration
Reform.
Meanwhile, grassroots immigrant-led groups facing the worst versions of
the deportation violence of the Obama years were fighting on multiple
fronts: combating racist state and local agencies who were doing everything
possible to hand our people over to ICE, confronting ICE raids, detentions,
and record deportations. They were fighting in local sites all over the
country, but many were based in border states, where the crimmigration
police state is in plain view for all to see.
When the #Not1More deportation campaign emerged in 2014, it was a
direct challenge to the strategy, even then, to continue to focus on lobbying
Congress and not anger the President with our demands. #Not1More was,
at its heart, an abolitionist call to action.
We Fell in Love in a Hopeless Place: A Grassroots History from
#Not1More to Abolish ICE
What do we mean by abolitionist? It was a call to shrink mass incarceration
systems. Building alongside Black Lives Matter, it was a call to expose the
prison industrial complex and directly confront police violence. It was a call
to dismantle government agencies that exist solely to bring terror, harm,
and violence to communities of color. The movement was designed not
around advocating for those in our movements who were most sympathetic
to the US mainstream, but around those who were criminalized and easily
discarded by a messaging machine focused on “hardworking” immigrants
who were “not criminals.”
An important part of this story is how the #Not1More demand grew:
with the original organizations freely sharing the hashtag and the
vision with grassroots local groups all over the US, and grassroots
LGBTQ groups who saw their own hope in the call as well. No one
owns this demand, just as no one owns the call to #AbolishICE. It came
from the ground up.
We picked the title of this piece when reflecting on the development of the
#Not1More network. We started as a disparate set of local groups, working
with different constituencies inside immigrant communities, discouraged
by a national landscape devoid of demands that had meaning or real
aspiration for our bases. We became a team of the willing: building
relationships, hope, and possibility out of few monetary resources, but
a wealth of shared risk and aligned principles.
Some of the groups and individuals who formed the heart of the
#Not1More movement came from local fights against Sheriffs and police
who were using their power to target immigrant communities, some were
following the leadership of immigrants detained who had begun going on
protest hunger strikes, while others were undocumented youth
disenchanted by the accepted narratives that they “deserved” to stay while
their parents “deserved” deportation.
They included Puente in Phoenix, Arizona, the Georgia Latino Alliance for
Human Rights in Georgia, Juntos in Philadelphia, Organized Community
Against Deportation in Chicago, the New Orleans Congress of Day Laborers,
Northwest Detention Center Resistance in Washington State and National
Day Laborers Organizing Network and some of its members. They were
used to doing a lot with very little.
They had also learned from undocumented youth who in 2009 began to
break off from the hegemony of the DC-based grasstops to take on the cases
immigration attorneys wouldn’t touch, turning these cases into the bread
and butter of the #Not1More demand. When they said #Not1More, it was a
recognition that they would put their work, their time, their resources, and
their bodies on the line to stand in the way of the deportation machine.
We Fell in Love in a Hopeless Place: A Grassroots History from
#Not1More to Abolish ICE
#Not1More was a call for a moratorium on deportations — an idea at the
heart of the notion that ICE should be abolished. It was the radical idea —
at the time — that no one should be subject to the harm of immigration
enforcement. The core groups of #Not1More eventually created Mijente.
Under the Trump administration, the violence that communities in
border states have faced for years has spread to the rest of the country,
with ICE and CBP officers fully unleashed on all of our communities.
Many other groups are now organizing around abolishing ICE. We need all
of this pressure now joining the 15-year struggle against ICE, and the even
longer struggle against previous forms of immigration enforcement.
While we have currently lost the possibility of shaming a shameless
administration (which worked to our advantage in the Obama era), what
we have gained in the Trump era is an emerging consensus about ICE as a
toxic, out-of-control, unaccountable, violent actor. With Trump and current
ICE heads fully embracing and encouraging the worst instincts for violence
of on-the- ground ICE officers, the time is ripe for a push for ICE to be
eliminated altogether, rather than reformed and made more humane. This
is in line with a broader #Not1More stance on deportation, which calls for
ending the use of deportation as a response to the social crisis of migration.
The opportunity right now is to keep changing the conversation from one
about fighting individual unjust deportations to delegitimizing deportation
as a tactic used to deal with immigrants.
The most recent spectacle of harm at the border, with parents and children
ripped apart, has elevated the Abolish ICE demand in a new and urgent
way. Many have asked how it is possible to Abolish ICE, forgetting that ICE
is only 15 years old, and that it was created (and heavily resourced) in a
moment of Islamophobic right-wing political opportunism post 9/11.
As terrifying and exhausting as this moment is for our communities, it’s also
one of possibility. More people are experimenting with thinking about
radical alternatives because the current reality is so terrible. We remain
grounded in our history of struggle, and deeply heartened and encouraged
by all the leadership, from many different organizations, who stand ready
to imagine a world without ICE.
The poet Martin Espada wrote: “If the abolition of slave-manacles began as
a vision of hands without manacles, then this is the year; if the shutdown of
extermination camps began as imagination of a land without barbed wire
or the crematorium, then this is the year…”
Comrades and accomplices, let’s make this the year. The year that we
escalated our resistance in a way worthy of our actual children, our
actual families, our actual future.
#FreeOurFuture #AbolishICE #ShutDownSessions
Immigration
Racial Justice
Community Organizing
About Write Help Legal
Praise for We Do This ’Til We Free Us
“This book writes a political genealogy of one of our movement era’s most
significant intellectuals and community organizers and her people into the
record of a feminist and abolitionist Black Radical Tradition. She teaches us
to praise the choir, appreciate vulnerability, and be disciplined in service of
transforming ourselves and the world in which we live.” —CHARLENE
A. CARRUTHERS, author, Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist
Mandate for Radical Movements
“Mariame Kaba isn’t trying to save the world. Instead, this collection of
liberatory practice serves as a building block for a new kind of existence,
filled with the hum only evolved humanity can sound. Kaba returns
questions unanswered; Kaba spirits the flame untethered; Kaba is the water
well in the middle of a thirsty town. And in her unyielding abolition work,
Mariame Kaba reveals our reflection’s purpose. She is generous in offering
us a blueprint to save ourselves.” —MAHOGANY L. BROWNE, author,
Chlorine Sky
“So many of us have been introduced to abolition—or invited into a deeper
understanding and practice of abolitionist politics—through Mariame
Kaba’s words, work, and vision, as well as her brilliant sense of humor,
skillful use of Twitter, love of poetry, practice of hope, and appreciation of
art. For those of us new to abolition, this book is the primer we need. For
those of us who have been on an abolitionist journey, it is full of the
reminders we need. No matter where and how you enter the conversation,
We Do This ’Til We Free Us brings all of us infinitely closer to creating a
world premised on genuine and lasting safety, justice, and peace.” —
ANDREA J. RITCHIE, author, Invisible No More: Police Violence
against Black Women and Women of Color
“Anyone and everyone who has had the privilege of learning from Mariame
Kaba has been transformed into a better thinker, organizer, artist, and
human. What Kaba does is light the path to abolition and liberation with
equal parts intelligence and compassion, experience and hope. This book
brings together the scattered pieces of her wisdom she has shared publicly
in different venues so that those who don’t have the pleasure of sitting and
learning with her can absorb a small part of what makes Kaba one of the
most impressive and important thinkers and organizers of our time. Let this
work fortify those who are already engaged in the struggle and be an
energetic spark for those just starting out on this path to freedom.” —
MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH, author, Stakes Is High: Life after the
American Dream
“Mariame has the rarest of gifts: the ability to imagine a better future, the
skills to help construct it, and the courage to demand it. For years, Mariame
has been thinking through some of the toughest questions about society’s
addiction to punishment, and We Do This ’Til We Free Us showcases the
extraordinary depths of her knowledge about our criminal legal system.
This book could not arrive at a better time—as more people become
familiar with abolition, Mariame’s words are especially critical. But it is not
just a book about systems. It’s a book about people, the powerful and the
struggling. And, ultimately it is a book about each of us—the values we
possess and the choices we make. Mariame has the uncanny ability to
illuminate the murky and complicated elements of who we are and give
them voice. As an abolitionist, Mariame is not just calling for the
destruction of old systems but also the creation of a new world. This book
will change the way you think about your community, your relationships,
and yourself.” —JOSIE DUFFY RICE, writer
“Mariame Kaba is a people’s historian, an ultra-practical problem solver,
and a visionary prophet whose work dreams and builds a world made by
collaboration and healing where putting people in cages is unimaginable.
We Do This ’Til We Free Us is packed with Kaba’s brilliant insights and
detailed examples of how the work of abolition is put into practice in
grassroots campaigns. Kaba’s boundless creativity is rooted in her rigorous
study of resistance and inspiration, and the wisdom of her words is woven
through with poetry, literature, history, and music, so that her offerings are
both grounded in practical discernment and inclined toward our most robust
imagination of what freedom could mean. This book will be both a practical
tool and a source of comfort in hard times for change-makers and worldbuilders.” —DEAN SPADE, author, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity
During This Crisis (and the Next)
“This suite of essays and interviews blends the verve, insight, skill, and
generosity of one of the most brilliant abolitionist thinkers, curators, and
organizers of our time. Marked by lush imagination, care, and strategic
acumen, We Do This ’Til We Free Us is a manual for all those who want to
create new collectivities and new futures from the ashes of entire systems of
carcerality, racism, sexism, and capitalism. Always teaching us how to
‘have each other,’ there is no wiser or more inspirational figure in the fight
for justice than Mariame Kaba.” —SARAH HALEY, author, No Mercy
Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity
“We Do This ’Til We Free Us is an organizer’s gift: a vision of abolition that
is also a practice of it and a road map. Essay by essay, Mariame Kaba
guides us through the abolitionist futures she has created in real time by
turning questions into experiments, learning from failures as much as
successes, and doing everything with other people. Let her words radicalize
you, let them unlock your imagination, let them teach you how to practice
hope, and let them show you why the everyday is the terrain of our greatest
abolitionist creations. We Do This ’Til We Free Us is not a book to be read;
it is a portal to a collective project of liberation that literally requires every
last one of us.” —LAURA McTIGHE, Front Porch Research Strategies
and assistant professor, Florida State University
“In her new book, We Do This ’Til We Free Us Mariame Kaba demonstrates
the ways that discipline—in intellect, in practice, in relationship—leads not
to despair, but to hope. The far-ranging series of essays and interviews
draws on her deep practice as a seasoned organizer who persistently distills
the questions surrounding abolition to basic human decisions about the
world we want to inhabit and how we will go about building it. Abolition,
as Mariame sees and practices, is fundamentally both generous, and
pragmatic and her writing will move both seasoned abolitionists and those
just now asking these questions for the first time to join in her conclusion
that ‘your cynicism is unrealistic.’“ —DANIELLE SERED, author, Until
We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair
“Mariame’s wisdom trues my restorative justice compass. The restorative
justice movement has much to learn from Mariame’s steadfast commitment
to protecting our approaches to harm and healing from state co-optation and
control. Her unwavering belief in ‘we got us’ offers powerful inspiration to
imagine, ground, and elevate our practice. What a gift!” —SUJATHA
BALIGA, restorative justice practitioner
“The intertwined analysis and collective organizing archived in this
invaluable collection provides crucial entry points in the everyday work of
abolition. Engaging the most pressing questions of our time with clarity and
commitment, as always, Mariame makes abolition irresistible and, as
imperatively, doable.” —ERICA R. MEINERS, author, For the
Children: Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State
“Working through a range of concepts and struggles—from the
criminalization of self-defense to what is needed to inspire our imaginations
toward abolition— We Do This ’Til We Free Us truly demonstrates,
Mariame Kaba’s teachings that ‘hope is a discipline.’ With this book Kaba
brings with her a community of organizers, workers, and writers to show us
how abolition is a practice and to guide our actions for liberation.” —
SIMONE BROWNE, author, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of
Blackness
“For the last twenty-ive years, prison abolitionists have been treated like the
Don Quixotes of social justice movements, chasing an impossibly
unrealistic vision. In We Do This ’Til We Free Us, Kaba demonstrates,
through her work as an organizer and scholar, that putting an end to the
carceral state is not only necessary but also possible. This collection offers a
remarkable history of abolitionist organizing and a road map for the work
we must do to make a new world and transform ourselves in the process.”
—KENYON FARROW, Co-Executive Director, Partners for Dignity &
Rights
“We Do This ’Til We Free Us is a beacon, a watch fire, a guidepost for all of
us who are seeking transformational and life-giving change in a deathdealing society. Mariame Kaba is a force of nature, unafraid to step into
great storms of violence. As this long-awaited collection of abolitionist
essays, interviews, and conversations demonstrates, Kaba knows that
relationships are at the center of everything; that new possibilities and
insights arise from the organized efforts of ordinary people; that only
collective endeavor can move us forward. This isn’t simply a book. It’s a
portal.” —KAY WHITLOCK, coauthor Queer (In) Justice: The
Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States
“Mariame Kaba’s We Do This ’Til We Free Us exudes her brilliance as an
organizer, educator, and visionary. A primer in abolition as an organizing
vision, strategy, and practice, this collection of essays is rooted in a
structural analysis of policing, incarceration, and surveillance while
uplifting collective strategies, actions, and practices that lend themselves
toward ending these systems. The collection shares some of the amazing
abolitionist projects she’s initiated, organized, and nurtured, and is a
testament to the power of collectivity and community. This is a book for
those who have never thought about abolition and for those who have
thought about it for years. Through the lens Mariame Kaba offers, the
possibilities for abolition become quite tangible, possible, even inevitable.”
—ANN RUSSO, author, Feminist Accountability: Disrupting Violence
and Transforming Power
“If ever there was a time we needed Mariame Kaba’s words and insights all
in one place, it is now! Principled, pragmatic, and, most of all, visionary, We
Do This ’Til We Free Us not only casts an unflinching light on our violent
carceral system but also illuminates real pathways towards justice and
freedom. This book should be read, studied, and acted upon by everyone
committed to seeding new worlds amidst the ruins of the old.” —RUHA
BENJAMIN, Princeton University
“We Do This ’Til We Free Us is a series of essays that operate as gifts,
reflections, and political interventions from the humbly prolific organizer
Mariame Kaba. Whether contending with abolitionist organizing, the
application of transformative justice, or relationships as survival, she
creates necessary guideposts for all of us. This is a deliciously nuanced
read, one that you will pick up multiple times and receive something new
each time. And this is a book designed to accompany your political
endeavors, inspiring you to deepen your activism and organizing, and
insisting that you, alongside Mariame, have a place in the creation of a
more liberatory society.” —EJERIS DIXON, organizer, strategist,
facilitator, and coeditor of Beyond Survival: Stories and Strategies of the
Transformative Justice Movement
“Brimming with organizing insights and burning questions, this collection
is a must-read for those engaged in, or looking to learn more about the
movement to abolish the prison-industrial complex. We Do This ’Til We
Free Us so clearly and beautifully shows us that the road to abolition is
paved in collective struggle, solidarity, accountability, love, and ‘a million
different little experiments.’” —EMILY THUMA, author, All Our Trials:
Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence
“This long-awaited collection of the works of Mariame Kaba is what the
movement for abolition needs right now. Kaba blends radical critique,
historical analysis, ground theory, and practical application to help guide
organizers building an abolitionist future. Tere are very few scholars and/or
organizers who are able to seamlessly bring abolitionist and transformative
justice theory with practical organizing strategies as Kaba so successfully
does. Kaba’s essays also demonstrate the transformation our movements
need to make so that they are guided by principles of love and care that can
sustain our communities into a different world. She teaches how to build the
discipline necessary so that we can be guided by hope rather than despair.
Kaba’s work is a true gift to the movement.” —ANDREA SMITH,
professor of ethnic studies, University of California, Riverside
“Mariame Kaba is a political genius and truth-teller for our times, as an
abolitionist, political organizer, educator, and writer, she is audacious in her
dreams for our Black future freedoms. This book says what needs to be said
in this political moment as we reckon with abolition in response to police
brutality, white supremacy, and a pandemic that is disproportionately killing
people of color globally. Each chapter is a beautiful and archival testimonial
to the lineage of Black organizing, especially Black feminists, that have led
us to this political and cultural moment of mass uprisings creating resilient,
abolitionist, and transformative strategies in the face of police brutality,
massive incarceration, and the genocidal state response to COVID19. We
Do This ’Til We Free Us is a remedy for our collective survival, and a
manifesto for responding to harms and violence for our future.” —CARA
PAGE, founder of Changing Frequencies
“Mariame Kaba’s We Do This ’Til We Free Us is a treasure trove of essays
and interviews that shares her knowledge, insights, and wisdom developed
over decades of organizing against the prison industrial complex and
supporting survivors of violence. In this book, Kaba recounts scores of
campaigns, projects, collaborations, and activists that brought us to historic
moments in 2020 and beyond, and provides concrete steps people can take
on the path to abolition. A brilliant organizer, educator, political theorist,
and preeminent abolitionist of the twenty-first century, Kaba succinctly
breaks down the anti-Black foundations of the US criminal legal system and
makes the case for abolition and transformative justice. This book is a must
read for anyone striving for more peace and justice in this world.” —JOEY
MOGUL, coauthor, Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT
People in the United States
“This collection of writings embodies Mariame’s gifts to the abolitionist
movement, not only in content but in format. As readers, we are invited into
the conversations Kaba has been having for decades as she lifts up
countless stories that belong to the larger movement of which she is an
essential leader. We are offered Mariame’s personal and also collaborative
writing that highlights a central message running throughout the book; we
will not achieve liberation alone. While there are no blueprints for abolition,
this text is a guiding light that offers crucial answers and an expansive
invitation for all to join in the work.”—REV. JASON LYDON, Second
Unitarian Church of Chicago
“We Do This ’Til We Free Us outlines an approach to transformative
politics that we have been hungry for: brilliant strategies that are at once
practical and prophetic. For decades, Mariame Kaba’s pathbreaking
leadership has steered us towards a horizon of radical freedom that, as she
has repeatedly demonstrated, is within our reach. Tis remarkable collection
is a powerful map for anyone who longs for a future built on safety,
community, and joy, and an intellectual home for those who are creating
new pathways to get us there.”— ALISA BIERRIA, cofounder and coorganizer of Survived and Punished
“Mariame Kaba’s living example continuously teaches me that
accountability and abolition are daily internal and external practices. We Do
This ’Til We Free Us is both timely and timeless. This compelling collection
is an offering of Kaba’s thoughtful experiential perspectives and insights
about the strenuous, compassionate, and rewarding work to not harm in
response to witnessing and/or experiencing harm. Kaba’s words are a sacred
road map for an embodied praxis that invites all of us to imagine, envision,
and work collectively to co-create a society without violence.” —AISHAH
SHAHIDAH SIMMONS, creator, NO! The Rape Documentary and
author, Love WITH Accountability
“We Do This ’Til We Free Us has so much wisdom to offer, particularly at
this unprecedented moment. Kaba not only challenges the corrosive notions
that only policing and prisons keep us safe but also invites us to see
abolition not as a faraway goal but an everyday adventure that we can
embark upon in our daily lives. Mariame Kaba is a galactic treasure. Her
passion, dedication, and commitment to abolition, safety, and accountability
are unparalleled. Read this book.” —VICTORIA LAW, author, Prison by
Any Other Name
“Mariame Kaba is one of the foremost grassroots intellectuals of our time.
She is a strategic, brilliant, and practical genius whose intellectual and onthe-ground-work is foundational to the past twenty years of transformative
justice and abolitionist theory and practice. She’s someone whose work I
urge anyone to read who is curious about exactly why and how we are
going to dismantle prisons and build the different future we need. I am so
happy to have this book in the world, collecting so many of my favorite
pieces, to give to new and old comrades alike.” —LEAH LAKSHMI
PIEPZNA-SAMARASINHA, author, Care Work: Dreaming Disability
Justice
“The miracle is Mariame’s collaborative, accountable, future-facing,
legacy-bearing presence in our movements and her intentional practice of
evaluating how she can contribute to our collective future. This book, which
documents some of Kaba’s most important interventions, crucial
conversations and paradigm shifting ideas makes this ongoing miracle
shareable, teachable, and available for study in community. We Do This ’Til
We Free Us is a necessary offering towards the possibility of our intentional
participation in the actions that will create a more loving and liveable
world. Read this book, hold this archive, share this journey, to nurture your
own presence, practice and collaborations towards the freedom we already
deserve.” —ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS, author, Dub: Finding
Ceremony
“Beautiful and timely, We Do This ’Til We Free Us is more than a book. It is
a gathering: a conversation, a coming together, a call to be not only our best
selves but also together in struggle. It is a how-to gift for all who believe in
freedom from violence. In a wide-ranging series of essays, interviews, and
speeches, inveterate organizer Mariame Kaba shares strategic wisdom from
the abolitionist front lines. Read it, pass it on, and get to work!” —DAN
BERGER, author, Rethinking the American Prison Movement
The Abolitionist Papers Series
Edited by Naomi Murakawa
Also in this series:
Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Abolition. Feminism. Now.
Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Beth Richie, and Erica Meiners
© 2021 Mariame Kaba
Foreword © Naomi Murakawa
Editor’s Introduction © Tamara K. Nopper
Rights to select articles noted on page 199–202
Published in 2021 by
Haymarket Books
P.O. Box 180165
Chicago, IL 60618
773-583-7884
www.haymarketbooks.org
info@haymarketbooks.org
ISBN: 978-1-64259-526-0
Distributed to the trade in the US through Consortium Book Sales and Distribution (www.cbsd.com)
and internationally through Ingram Publisher Services International (www.ingramcontent.com).
This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund.
Special discounts are available for bulk purchases by organizations and institutions. Please email
info@haymarketbooks.org for more information.
Cover artwork by Monica Trinidad.
Cover design by Eric Kerl.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.
To my father, Moussa Kaba, who taught me that failures are always lessons and that everything
worthwhile is done with others
Contents
Foreword
Naomi Murakawa
Editor’s Introduction
Tamara K. Nopper
Part I: So You’re Thinking about Becoming an Abolitionist
So You’re Thinking about Becoming an Abolitionist
The System Isn’t Broken
Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police
A Jailbreak of the Imagination: Seeing Prisons for What They Are and
Demanding Transformation
with Kelly Hayes
Hope Is a Discipline
Interview by Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein
Part II: There Are No Perfect Victims
Free Marissa and All Black People
Not a Cardboard Cutout: Cyntoia Brown and the Framing of a Victim
with Brit Schulte
From “Me Too” to “All of Us”: Organizing to End Sexual Violence without
Prisons
Interview by Sarah Jaffe with Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan
Black Women Punished for Self-Defense Must Be Freed from Their Cages
Part III: The State Can’t Give Us Transformative Justice
Whether Darren Wilson Is Indicted or Not, the Entire System Is Guilty
The Sentencing of Larry Nassar Was Not “Transformative Justice.” Here’s
Why.
with Kelly Hayes
We Want More Justice for Breonna Taylor than the System That Killed Her
Can Deliver
with Andrea J. Ritchie
Part IV: Making Demands: Reforms for and against Abolition
Police “Reforms” You Should Always Oppose
A People’s History of Prisons in the United States
Interview by Jeremy Scahill
Arresting the Carceral State
with Erica R. Meiners
Itemizing Atrocity
with Tamara K. Nopper
“I Live in a Place Where Everybody Watches You Everywhere You Go”
Toward the Horizon of Abolition
Interview by John Duda
Part V: We Must Practice and Experiment: Abolitionist Organizing
and Theory
Police Torture, Reparations, and Lessons in Struggle and Justice from
Chicago
Free Us All: Participatory Defense Campaigns as Abolitionist Organizing
Rekia Boyd and #FireDanteServin: An Abolitionist Campaign in Chicago
A Love Letter to the #NoCopAcademy Organizers from Those of Us on the
Freedom Side
Part VI: Accountability Is Not Punishment: Transforming How We
Deal with Harm and Violence
Transforming Punishment: What Is Accountability without Punishment?
with Rachel Herzing
The Practices We Need: #MeToo and Transformative Justice
Interview by Autumn Brown and adrienne maree brown
Moving Past Punishment
Interview by Ayana Young
Justice: A Short Story
Part VII: Show Up and Don’t Travel Alone: We Need Each Other
“Community Matters. Collectivity Matters.”
Interview by Damon Williams and Daniel Kisslinger
Everything Worthwhile Is Done with Other People
Interview by Eve L. Ewing
Resisting Police Violence against Black Women and Women of Color
Join the Abolitionist Movement
Interview by Rebel Steps
“I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies”: The Living Legacy of June
Jordan
Acknowledgments
Sources and Permissions
Index
Foreword
Naomi Murakawa
January 2021
When Donald Trump incited his supporters to sack the US Capitol on
January 6, 2021, the world saw rioters overtake the citadel of global power.
With on-duty police taking selfies and off-duty police among the rioters, the
insurrectionists easily breached the security perimeter and broke into the
Capitol building, waving the Confederate flag and wearing neo-Nazi Tshirts. Shocked commentators wondered: How is it possible that a nation
that spends $1 trillion a year on security—military, police, and prisons,
domestic and global surveillance—met thousands of white-supremacist
rioters with a police response that ranged from the casually ill-prepared to
the openly welcoming?
The question is misguided. White supremacy does not thrive in spite of
the menacing infrastructure of US criminalization and militarism—it thrives
because of it. The anti-Blackness of policing is not necessarily a point of
shame but just a simple fact, an expectation summed up in the indignation
of one pro-Trump rioter: “They’re supposed to shoot BLM [Black Lives
Matter], but they’re shooting the patriots.”
Police push millions of people into the criminal punishment system,
where anti-Black death-dealing rises through each circle of hell. Black
people comprise 13 percent of the US population but roughly 30 percent of
the arrested, 35 percent of the imprisoned, 42 percent of those on death row,
and 56 percent of those serving life sentences. Inside the largest prison
system on the planet, the Covid-19 death rate is five times that of the
general population. The roughly eight hundred US military bases the world
over—like the nation’s birth in native dispossession and slavery—reinforce
the lessons that Trump’s band of white brothers know all too well: take by
force and invent the racial enemy. We live in the age of human sacrifice,
says Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and our prison and military machinery
normalizes industrialized killing.
We must abolish the prison-industrial complex—this is the opening
premise of the Haymarket Books series the Abolitionist Papers. Beyond all
that we must dismantle, abolition is a vision for all that we must build—and
this makes it wonderfully fitting to inaugurate the series with the inspiring
abolitionist builder Mariame Kaba.
Kaba’s abolitionist vision burns so bright precisely because she refuses
to be the single star, dazzling alone. Why be a star when you can make a
constellation? And that’s what we see in this book—the brilliance that
shines from Kaba and an entire constellation of co-organizers, cofounders,
and coconspirators, together in an abolitionist practice of refusal, care, and
collectivity. Refusal: because we cannot collaborate with the prisonindustrial complex, as “only evil will collaborate with evil” (June Jordan).
Care: because “care is the antidote to violence” (Saidiya Hartman).
Collectivity: because “everything worthwhile is done with others” (Moussa
Kaba).
In Kaba’s words, abolition envisions a world where we address harm
without relying on the violent systems that increase it, a world where “we
have everything we need: food, shelter, education, health, art, beauty, clean
water, and more things that are foundational to our personal and community
safety.” Critics charge that abolitionists are naive about violence. But Kaba
demonstrates that abolitionist analysis witnesses connections through every
layer of violence—interpersonal violence, the state violence of
criminalization and incarceration, and everywhere the structuring violence
of anti-Blackness, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism.
Complex structures of violence become disturbingly clear when we
center Black women and girls, as Kaba encourages us to do. For Bresha
Meadows, Marissa Alexander, and thousands of Black women and girls
who survived domestic and sexual violence by defending themselves, the
criminal punishment system brings no relief, only more violence. Rather
than neutralizing or countering interpersonal violence, state violence
enables and reinforces the same oppression of racialized gender terror. After
reading Kaba’s analysis, it is clear that the criminal punishment system, not
abolition, depends on a superficial view of violence, a facile view of good
and evil based on the victim-perpetrator binary. Simple stories of the perfect
victim and the monstrous perpetrator bend reality to fit the pretexts for state
violence, helping us to pretend that the physical, emotional, social, and
civic injuries of prison are somehow justice.
To readers who finish this book saying, “Yes, I understand, but now
what?” Kaba’s work is a portal connecting us to living currents of
abolitionist organizing. If you nod in agreement while reading “Yes, We
Literally Mean Abolish the Police,” then let that spark lead you to the
#DefundPolice Toolkit, created by Kaba, Woods Ervin, and Andrea
Ritchie.* If you are a youth organizer, teacher, or parent, Kaba and
collaborators have created Defund Police: An Animated Video with a
companion discussion guide. † After reading “Free Us All: Participatory
Defense Campaigns as Abolitionist Organizing,” consider hosting a letterwriting event to support criminalized survivors.‡
Kaba has created and curated essential toolkits, artwork, and resource
lists, but I highlight them not as magic formulas or shortcuts. There are no
life hacks to revolution. As Robin D. G. Kelley reminds us, “Making a
revolution is not a series of clever maneuvers and tactics, but a process that
can and must transform us.” Abolition requires dismantling the oppressive
systems that live out there—and within us. Police not only protect private
property and saturate Black, brown, and working-class neighborhoods.
They also station themselves in our hearts and minds. Joining an
organization, educating yourself about the prison-industrial complex,
donating to a criminalized survivor’s defense campaign: these are
seemingly small doings to begin a process that can transform us. As Kaba
tells us, start where you are. Connect with others already doing the work.
Experiment.
This book gives us glimpses of Kaba becoming abolitionist, cultivating
ways to reduce violence, to hold pain, to support and care. Becoming is a
funny word, Imani Perry observes, because it means beautiful and a process
of change. Not just a vision to behold, but a doing to arrive at a new state of
being.
When asked what exactly a world without police and prisons would look
like, Kaba returns the question to us, saying, “We’ll figure it out by working
to get there.” Instead of certainty, she gives us as invitation to our future
world—one where everyone has their needs met, where Black women are
free, and therefore everyone is free, and where human disposability is
unimaginable.
Mariame Kaba shows us that abolition is becoming. It is beautiful. And
it is what we do ’til we free us.
* #DefundPolice: Concrete Steps Toward Divestment from Policing and Investment in Community
Safety,
created
by
Interrupting
Criminalization:
Research
in
Action
(see
interruptingcriminalization.com).
† Defund Police: An Animated Video, script by Mallory Hanora and Mariame Kaba, created by
Project Nia and Blue Seat Studios (see project-nia.org).
‡ Ideas and Tips for Organizing Letterwriting Events (see survivedandpunished.org).
Editor’s Introduction
Tamara K. Nopper
December 2020
If you follow Mariame Kaba on social media, or even know a little bit about
her resolute political work, it probably will not surprise you to learn that she
was initially reticent about this book. Characteristically, Mariame wasn’t
sure an entire project should be solely developed around her. Over the
years, Mariame has declined previous requests from Haymarket Books to
publish a collection of her writings. As summer 2020 approached,
Haymarket asked again.
As someone committed to building things, Mariame already had
numerous projects lined up for the summer. From her home base in New
York City, Mariame was running Project Nia, the organization she founded
in 2009 to “end the arrest, detention, and incarceration of children and
young adults by promoting restorative and transformative justice practices.”
She was also working with Andrea Ritchie and Woods Ervin on
Interrupting Criminalization, an initiative of the Barnard Center for
Research on Women’s Social Justice Institute, which she cofounded with
Ritchie in 2018. Along with running organizations, Mariame is always
building or co-building campaigns.
Mariame was also managing increased requests for her time from the
mainstream media. No doubt some of these inquiries directed her way
stemmed from the growing public debate during the spring and summer of
2020 about defunding the police and abolition circulating on social media,
in mainstream publications like Good Housekeeping, and on shows like
Good Morning America. While the contemporary abolitionist movement is
decades old, calls to defund the police rapidly gained traction in the United
States during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. As public health
expert Kenyon Farrow has noted, the US federal government’s mendacious
response to the Covid-19 crisis is nothing short of genocide.
In the midst of quarantine life and a deepening socioeconomic and
emotional depression gripping the nation, many in the United States— and
all over the world—courageously put their lives on the line and took to the
streets to express their rage and sorrow at the murders of George Floyd and
Breonna Taylor by police officers, and the hunting and murder of Ahmaud
Arbery by white vigilantes. Protests occurred in cities all across the United
States. In many cities cop cars were burned or flipped over, buildings set on
fire, windows smashed, and stores looted. And in Minneapolis, where Floyd
was killed by Derek Chauvin while other officers watched, a police precinct
was torched. Some elected officials sought to quell the insurgency with
symbolic gestures, such as painting the phrase “Black Lives Matter” on
streets.
While satisfactory to some, many organizers and protesters made it clear
that symbolism is not enough. They resisted such overtures in many ways,
echoing the sentiment of Black freedom movement organizer Fannie Lou
Hamer: “I’m sick of symbolic things. We are fighting for our lives.”
As calls for defunding the police accelerated, so did broader
conversations about abolition. When a publication date for We Do This ’Til
We Free Us was announced on social media, numerous people responded
immediately and enthusiastically, noting Mariame’s power and influence as
a political educator, and her direct impact on their thinking and activism.
Many people have been waiting for this type of book from Mariame for a
long time, and for good reason.
Hopefully, though, many readers will come to this book with no clue
who Mariame Kaba is, or with little knowledge of her significance to the
contemporary abolitionist movement. Simply, we want as many people as
possible to learn more about abolition, and Mariame’s writings and
interviews provide a compelling introduction.
Mariame helps us make sense of how criminalization, regardless of race
or class, is grounded in anti-Blackness. As she emphasizes in “A People’s
History of Prisons in the United States,” included here, “You can’t talk
about criminalization in this country without understanding the history of
Blackness and Black people in this country. Politicians have used us as the
fuel to make things happen. We’re always the canaries in the coal mine.” In
her discussions of #MeToo and #SayHerName, Mariame draws from her
decades of organizing against gendered and sexual violence to raise
provocative questions about supporting survivors and demands for
accountability. Several pieces in We Do This Til We Free Us address how
calls for carceral protection are used to criminalize women and girls,
particularly those who are Black, engaging in self-defense, and detail
Mariame’s organizing in support of criminalized survivors. Mariame
underscores why centralizing Black women’s experiences with the criminal
punishment system is urgent and necessary. This centering allows us to
create conditions that support Black women’s safety and well-being, and it
sharpens our understanding of state violence. Mariame also encourages us
to distinguish between policing and safety, and to build a society where
people experience real safety in terms of the climate, the economy, our
schools, our neighborhoods, our housing, and with each other.
This book also has constructive criticism for seasoned critics of the
carceral state, including those who identify as abolitionists. Mariame’s
analysis is particularly relevant and instructive to those wishing to
determine what accountability for harm and violence might look like if
guided by abolitionist principles and values. As Mariame notes, “A big part
of my life’s work has been to try to imagine new ways of trying to address
accountability and get accountability for survivors of violence.” Addressing
how “restorative justice” and “transformative justice” are often treated as
interchangeable, Mariame observes how restorative justice initiatives are
increasingly institutionalized in ways that differ from transformative justice.
Mariame also shares that she is grappling more with punishment and
revenge as elements of carceral logic, even when enacted outside of the
criminal legal system. One of Mariame’s “touchstones,” Angela Y. Davis,
has said,
We know, for example, that we replicate the structures of
retributive punishment in our own relations to one another …
even those of us who are conscious of that are still subject to
that ideological influence on our emotional life. The retributive
impulses of the state, the retributive impulses of state
punishment, are inscribed in our very individual emotional
responses.
A critical examination of revenge is particularly useful and needed—
including for readers who self-identify and organize as abolitionists. For
example, in the interview “From ‘Me Too’ to All of Us’: Organizing to End
Sexual Violence without Prisons,” included in this book, Mariame raises
some very provocative points regarding the space politically available for
grappling with tough and uncomfortable questions regarding supporting
survivors. And in “Transforming Punishment: What Is Accountability
without Punishment?” an essay about R. Kelly published for the first time
here, Mariame and coauthor and Critical Resistance cofounder Rachel
Herzing examine how the legal system deals with high-profile perpetrators
of violence, as well as the public’s thirst for punishment. As Mariame and
Rachel underscore, this drive for retribution is sometimes expressed by
those who claim to be abolitionists, yet this urge goes against abolition, and
conflates individual emotional responses with political outcomes. As they
state, “Abolitionism is not a politics mediated by emotional responses. Or,
as we initially wanted to title this piece, abolition is not about your fucking
feelings.”
This book reveals Mariame to be a voracious reader, active listener, and
courageous experimenter, and someone invested in serious thinking about
her political work. Mariame also describes shifts in her thinking and
approach. For example, Mariame shares how, as a teenager living in New
York City, she came to abolitionist work via the police murders of Black
men and boys—in the process, she did not always foreground gender
justice. Mariame discusses how she learned to situate herself as a Black
woman in her analysis, and how she began identifying as a feminist over
time.
We also get more insight into Mariame’s philosophy regarding political
change; her belief in the capacity for growth and evolution draws from
many sources. In a 2019 interview with Chicago-based poet, writer, and
scholar Eve L. Ewing, we are treated to a rare public exploration of
Mariame’s family history, including her father’s involvement in Guinea’s
independence movement and post-independence politics, and her mother’s
mutual aid work. Mariame reflects on how her parents and upbringing
inform her political philosophy, especially regarding the overlapping
practices of relationship building, collective care, and abolition. As shared
with Ewing, Mariame’s father impressed upon her, “Everything that is
worthwhile is done with other people.” As Mariame notes, that “became the
soundtrack in my head,” and is articulated in both her organizing work as
well as her reflections on the current political moment as more people seek
to understand abolition and hopefully get involved.
Her pithy tweets widely circulate and are often quoted, but as we see in
We Do This ’Til We Free Us, they are informed by consistent study,
reflection, and an interest in being moved as much as moving others. For
example, Mariame is known for the aphorism “Hope is a discipline.” As
Mariame reveals in an interview for the podcast Beyond Prisons, the fourword phrase articulates a philosophy she was introduced to by a nun that
has since become “really helpful in my practice around organizing. I believe
that there’s always a potential for transformation and for change.”
As Mariame shows time and time again, “a potential for transformation
and for change” cannot just be the basis of positive rhetoric, but must be
enacted—this involves risk. And in short, we must experiment. To this end,
several pieces in this book seek to inform readers of how we can practice
abolitionist organizing. Whether the battle and historic victory for
reparations for survivors of police torture in Chicago, the campaign to hold
Chicago Police Department officer Dante Servin accountable for the murder
of Rekia Boyd, defense campaigns for criminalized and incarcerated
survivors like Marissa Alexander, the #NoCopAcademy campaign in
Chicago, and, in response to the murder of Breonna Taylor, a call for
reparations and repair rather than the prosecution of officers—all are
committed to abolitionist praxis.
In some of the interviews conducted during the summer of 2020,
Mariame is asked about the co-optation of the abolitionist movement or
performativity versus real politics. What we see in Mariame’s responses is
her desire to bring as many people to the movement as possible. As Toni
Cade Bambara wrote of emerging writers, Mariame expresses of people
participating in abolitionist work: they “have to be given space to breathe
and stumble. They have to be given time to develop and to reveal what they
can do…. There are no soloists after all; this is group improvisation.”
For Mariame, group improvisation means working together, learning
together, and failing together by “building a million different little
experiments, just building and trying and taking risks and understanding
we’re going to have tons of failure.” While Mariame encourages
experimentation and being open to failure, she remains steadfast that
abolitionist politics requires certain principles, such as seeking
accountability for harm and violence without involving or expanding the
prison-industrial complex. Mariame also notes that practicing abolition
demands healthy ego checks in terms of not confusing our feelings for
policy or politics.
Mariame Kaba, the writer
In her interview, Ewing asks Mariame about her increased visibility, as she
is well known for not wanting her face to appear in photos or videos: “I saw
a picture of you in The New York Times, and I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness.’
… I would love to hear your thoughts around why you generally choose to
not be photographed, and some of your other choices around naming
yourself, not centering yourself. And then ways in which that is changing,
and why.” Mariame’s response reveals that she is pushing herself to take
credit for her work. She tells a story, the details of which I won’t spoil here,
that “began the shift in my life around putting my name on my stuff.”
When I read Mariame’s reply to Ewing, I remembered the first time I
learned of Mariame’s resistance to putting her name on things. Years ago,
when we still hadn’t met in person, I wanted to tag her and post something
on Twitter from Prison Culture: How the PIC Structures Our World, the
blog she has published since 2010 that explores “the many arms of the
carceral state and how we might dismantle our current systems of
punishment.” Because she did not have her name as part of her Twitter bio
(and still doesn’t!), I messaged to ask if I should include her name. She was
fine with the post being shared but preferred to not have her name included.
As someone who prefers lower frequencies, I was intrigued but didn’t ask.
Years later, when I first met Mariame in person, I would gain more insight
into her citation practices. As we dined on Indian food, she told parts of the
story she shares with Ewing.
As Ewing prefaces her interview, “It is no surprise that many of those
struggling to believe in something in the face of despair have turned to the
work of educator and organizer Mariame Kaba. Many (myself included)
came to her first through Prison Culture.” Like Ewing, I first became
familiar with Mariame as a writer through her blog.
That Mariame blogged regularly is significant for a few reasons. First,
she is busy organizing and educating, sometimes teaching college classes,
and constantly creating curricula, developing and facilitating workshops
and trainings, and providing mentorship, particularly to younger organizers.
Second, as Mariame frequently shares publicly, she does not like writing
and makes herself do it. This might seem a pedestrian point as other writers,
including those recognized as literary giants, express the same sentiment.
Yet rarely in public profiles will you see Mariame describe herself as a
writer. She is more likely to let you know she is a Hallmark Channel
devotee.
Some of her writing circulates widely through social media and email,
such as her articles, essays, tweets, and Facebook posts. Some are books,
like Missing Daddy, written for children with fathers in prison and
illustrated by bria royal, and her coauthored book with Essence McDowell,
Lifting as They Climbed: Mapping a History of Black Women on Chicago’s
South Side. Other writings include her blog, zines, organizing guides and
toolkits, curriculum, research reports, and emails in which she responds to
requests for guidance from those getting involved in political work for the
first time or seasoned organizers reaching out to a comrade. With some of
her writing, Mariame’s name does not appear. Nevertheless, she wrote it.
And there is a whole other body of Mariame’s writing—not included in
this book—that appears in academic publications, produced while she was a
sociology graduate student at Northwestern University. Her move to
Chicago to attend graduate school brought Mariame to the city that would
be her political home and the site of many of her abolitionist experiments
for decades. Unsurprisingly, Chicago—and the relationships, organizations,
and campaigns Mariame built in the city—are featured in much of her
writing. It is here we see Mariame making connections between the
international, the national, and the local while always being present in a
particular way in the city in which she lives. After all, as Mariame notes,
abolitionist practice involves getting to know your neighbors.
So why has Mariame written so much if she detests writing? And when
it’s often—but not always—done solo? In addition to writing that advances
organizations (such as Project Nia or Interrupting Criminalization) and
writing to support campaigns, Mariame is practicing what she preaches to
fellow organizers: document your work and write yourself into the record.
Mariame encourages organizers to do so, despite any attention given to
them by journalists, pundits, and academics, as many from the outside
might not get it right. In doing so, Mariame has joined a publishing history
of Black women organizers and activists who wrote themselves into the
archives, including Mary Church Terrell and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.
As Mariame shares in her interview with Ewing, Wells-Barnett is a
major touchstone. Like Wells-Barnett, Mariame spent many formative years
in Chicago. Shamefully, Wells-Barnett was initially written out of the
political historiography of anti-lynching organizing by contemporaries who
knew better. But Mariame’s political work and writings have, at least
recently, received considerable attention—partly aided by her adroit, lively
presence on social media. And unlike those who sought to write
autobiographies reviewing their lives, Mariame is writing herself into the
record as a simultaneous exploration of organizing, archiving, and thinking
through ideas and next steps.
Read this urgent and revelatory book, and see for yourself—Mariame
Kaba is a serious organizer, thinker, and writer. She engages and produces
ideas in the course of political organizing, building relationships, and
waging campaigns. She thinks through her work. A lot. She studies. She
reflects. She struggles. She experiments. She rethinks. She writes. She and
her work are always “moving toward the horizon of abolition.” Read this
book, and move toward the horizon with her.
PART I
So You’re Thinking about Becoming an
Abolitionist
So You’re Thinking about Becoming an Abolitionist
LEVEL, October 2020
Today, more people are discussing and contemplating prison abolition than
ever before. Decades of collective organizing have brought us to this
moment: some are newly aware that prisons, policing, and the criminal
punishment system in general are racist, oppressive, and ineffective.
However, some might be wondering, “Is abolition too drastic? Can we
really get rid of prisons and policing all together?” The short answer: We
can. We must. We are.
Prison-industrial complex abolition is a political vision, a structural
analysis of oppression, and a practical organizing strategy. While some
people might think of abolition as primarily a negative project—“Let’s tear
everything down tomorrow and hope for the best”—PIC abolition is a
vision of a restructured society in a world where we have everything we
need: food, shelter, education, health, art, beauty, clean water, and more
things that are foundational to our personal and community safety.
Every vision is also a map. As freedom fighter Kwame Ture taught us,
“When you see people call themselves revolutionary always talking about
destroying, destroying, destroying but never talking about building or
creating, they’re not revolutionary. They do not understand the first thing
about revolution. It’s creating.” PIC abolition is a positive project that
focuses, in part, on building a society where it is possible to address harm
without relying on structural forms of oppression or the violent systems that
increase it.
Some people may ask, “Does this mean that I can never call the cops if
my life is in serious danger?” Abolition does not center that question.
Instead, abolition challenges us to ask “Why do we have no other well-
resourced options?” and pushes us to creatively consider how we can grow,
build, and try other avenues to reduce harm. Repeated attempts to improve
the sole option offered by the state, despite how consistently corrupt and
injurious it has proven itself, will neither reduce nor address the harm that
actually required the call. We need more and effective options for the
greatest number of people.
Let’s begin our abolitionist journey not with the question “What do we
have now, and how can we make it better?” Instead, let’s ask, “What can we
imagine for ourselves and the world?” If we do that, then boundless
possibilities of a more just world await us.
An abolitionist journey ignites other questions capable of meaningful
and transformative pathways: What work do prisons and policing actually
do? Most people assume that incarceration helps to reduce violence and
crime, thinking, “The criminal punishment system might be racist, sexist,
classist, ableist, and unfair, but it at least keeps me safe from violence and
crime.”
Facts and history tell a different story: Increasing rates of incarceration
have a minimal impact on crime rates. Research and common sense suggest
that economic precarity is correlated with higher crime rates. Moreover,
crime and harm are not synonymous. All that is criminalized isn’t harmful,
and all harm isn’t necessarily criminalized. For example, wage theft by
employers isn’t generally criminalized, but it is definitely harmful.
Even if the criminal punishment system were free of racism, classism,
sexism, and other isms, it would not be capable of effectively addressing
harm. For example, if we want to reduce (or end) sexual and gendered
violence, putting a few perpetrators in prison does little to stop the many
other perpetrators. It does nothing to change a culture that makes this harm
imaginable, to hold the individual perpetrator accountable, to support their
transformation, or to meet the needs of the survivors.
A transformative justice movement led by Black, Indigenous, and
people of color survivors has emerged in the past two decades to offer a
different vision for ending violence and transforming our communities.
A world without harm isn’t possible and isn’t what an abolitionist vision
purports to achieve. Rather, abolitionist politics and practice contend that
disposing of people by locking them away in jails and prisons does nothing
significant to prevent, reduce, or transform harm in the aggregate. It rarely,
if ever, encourages people to take accountability for their actions. Instead,
our adversarial court system discourages people from ever acknowledging,
let alone taking responsibility for, the harm they have caused. At the same
time, it allows us to avoid our own responsibilities to hold each other
accountable, instead delegating it to a third party—one that has been built to
hide away social and political failures. An abolitionist imagination takes us
along a different path than if we try to simply replace the PIC with similar
structures.
None of us has all of the answers, or we would have ended oppression
already. But if we keep building the world we want, trying new things, and
learning from our mistakes, new possibilities emerge.
Here’s how to begin.
First, when we set about trying to transform society, we must remember
that we ourselves will also need to transform. Our imagination of what a
different world can be is limited. We are deeply entangled in the very
systems we are organizing to change. White supremacy, misogyny, ableism,
classism, homophobia, and transphobia exist everywhere. We have all so
thoroughly internalized these logics of oppression that if oppression were to
end tomorrow, we would be likely to reproduce previous structures. Being
intentionally in relation to one another, a part of a collective, helps to not
only imagine new worlds, but also to imagine ourselves differently. Join
some of the many organizations, faith groups, and ad hoc collectives that
are working to learn and unlearn, for example, what it feels like to actually
be safe or those that are naming and challenging white supremacy and
racial capitalism.
Second, we must imagine and experiment with new collective structures
that enable us to take more principled action, such as embracing collective
responsibility to resolve conflicts. We can learn lessons from revolutionary
movements, like Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos
Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra), that have noted that when we create
social structures that are less hierarchical and more transparent, we reduce
violence and harms.
Third, we must simultaneously engage in strategies that reduce contact
between people and the criminal legal system. Abolitionists regularly
engage in organizing campaigns and mutual aid efforts that move us closer
to our goals. We must remember that the goal is not to create a gentler
prison and policing system because, as I have noted, a gentler prison and
policing system cannot adequately address harm. Instead, we want to divest
from these systems as we create the world in which we want to live.
Fourth, as scholar and activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore notes, building a
different world requires that we not only change how we address harm but
also that we change everything. The PIC is linked in its logics and operation
with all other systems—from how students are pushed out of schools when
they don’t perform as expected to how people with disabilities are excluded
from our communities and the ways in which workers are treated as
expendable in our capitalist system.
Changing everything might sound daunting, but it also means there are
many places to start, infinite opportunities to collaborate, and endless
imaginative interventions and experiments to create. Let’s begin our
abolitionist journey not with the question “What do we have now, and how
can we make it better?” Instead, let’s ask, “What can we imagine for
ourselves and the world?” If we do that, then boundless possibilities of a
more just world await us.
The System Isn’t Broken
The New Inquiry, June 2015
“Ms. K, they got me again.”
Six words set up the familiar routine. A car ride to the station. An
unwanted and unwelcome conversation with the officer at the desk.
Rudeness, contempt, and that awful perma-smirk. Waiting in anticipation;
false alarms. A reprieve: an escape without ransom. More waiting. Finally,
the bowed head and slumped shoulders of a young Black man walking
toward me. No tears. Where are the tears? Another court date or maybe not.
Another record to expunge, always. Then it starts all over again.
I dread summer. It’s the season of hypersurveillance and even more
aggressive policing of young people of color in my neighborhood.
The urban summer criminalization merry-go-round—a kind of demented
child’s play. Quotidian terrorism in the service of law and order. Lowintensity police riots against young Black people. My anecdotal
observations are supported by empirical data. The ACLU of Illinois says
that last summer, based on population, Chicago police made “far more
street stops than New York City police did at the height of their use of stopand-frisk. The CPD stopped more than 250,000 innocent people.”
Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of those stops involved Black people who,
while making up 32 percent of Chicago’s population, were 72 percent of the
stops.
Some studies suggest a correlation between summer and a rise in
“crime.” I can hear the justifications: “If crime increases in the summer,
then more police aggression is justified.” This fails to take into account that
“routine” interactions between police and young people in my community
are fraught all year long. Summer exacerbates these oppressive contacts,
because many more young people are out of school and usually without
jobs, hanging out in public spaces.
Public spaces in urban and suburban towns are contested. Residents
collude with law enforcement to police and enforce boundaries. Young
people of color are criminalized not only by the police but also by
community members.
Yesterday yet another video went viral on social media. It depicts police
officers in McKinney, Texas, swarming a pool party filled with teenagers,
and one particular officer manhandling a fourteen-year-old Black girl
wearing a bikini. The young people are cursed at, have a gun pointed at
them, and are taunted for being afraid of the cops. Fifteen-year-old Miles
Jai Thomas explains what happened:
“So, a cop grabbed her arm and flipped her to the ground after she and him were arguing
about him cursing at us,” Thomas said.
When two teens went toward the cop to help the girl, they were accused of sneaking up
on the cop to attack.
“So, a cop yelled ‘get those motherfuckers’ and they chased [us] with guns out. That’s
why in the video I started running,” Thomas said.
“I was scared because all I could think was, ‘Don’t shoot me,’” he said.
Watching the video, I was struck by how the young people were denied
the right to be afraid. Their fear was illegitimate. And it makes sense; only
human beings are allowed to be afraid. For the cops, these youth of color
(mostly Black) are not human.
I dread summer.
I attended a conference recently about youth–police interactions. The
familiar trope about the need for young people and the cops to get to know
each other was bandied about, useless pablum offered as a solution for
ending police violence, which relies on a faulty definition of the problem.
As a young person once told me: “I know the cops here very well, and they
know me. We know each other too well. That’s not the problem. The
problem is that they harass me daily. If they’d stop that, we’d be fine.”
The young people in my community who come into contact with the
police can recite their names and badge numbers. Those are unforgettable to
them; the stuff of their nightmares. It’s unclear to me how more
conversations will change the dynamics of such oppression. For most of the
public, whether liberal or conservative, it’s the cops’ job to arrest people,
and they are incentivized to do that work. Presumably, then, what would
need to change to shift the dynamics are the job descriptions and the
incentives.
A persistent and seemingly endemic feature of US society is the
conflation of Blackness and criminality. William Patterson, a well-known
Black communist, wrote in 1970, “A false brand of criminality is constantly
stamped on the brow of Black youth by the courts and systematically kept
there creating the fiction that blacks are a criminally minded people.” He
added that “the lies against blacks are propped up ideologically.” I would
suggest that they are also maintained and enforced through force and
violence.
When Baltimore police dressed in riot gear turned their violence on high
school students at the Mondawmin Mall a few weeks ago, some people
were horrified. “These are children,” onlookers exclaimed on social media.
I thought grimly of how the cops would see the situation. There are no
children here; only targets and threats. Social science research suggests that
cops see Black children as older and as less innocent than their white peers.
The research confirms what most of us already know—Black children are
considered to be disposable and dangerous mini-adults.
This is not new. I came across the story of thirteen-year-old Beverly Lee
when I read the 1951 “We Charge Genocide” petition many years ago. Lee
was shot in the back by a Detroit police officer on October 12, 1947. Here’s
the item that piqued my interest as it appeared in “We Charge Genocide”:
Beverly Lee, 13-year-old youth, was shot to death by
Policeman Louis Begin of Detroit, Michigan. Mrs. Francis
Vonbatten of 1839 Pine testified that she saw Lee and another
walking down the street, and saw the squad car approach. She
heard, “Stop, you little so-and-so,” and then a shot. The officer
was subsequently cleared by Coroner Lloyd K. Babcock.
I was particularly interested in the incident because I thought that
Beverly was a girl, and police violence cases involving Black girls and
young women have been overlooked. In fact, I haven’t found any historical
incidents of police violence against Black women and girls that led to mass
mobilization. Current campaigns, such as #SayHerName, point to the
enduring erasure of state violence against Black girls and women. The
incident in McKinney, Texas, featured physical violence against a Black
girl, underscoring the fact that girls (cis and trans) are consistently at risk of
law enforcement abuse. On further research, I learned that Beverly Lee was
actually a boy. On the day after Beverly Lee was shot, the Detroit News
reported on the incident:
Shot in the back as he tried to evade arrest, a seventh-grade
schoolboy was killed by a Detroit patrolman late Sunday. The
boy, Beverly Lee, 13, of 2637 Twelfth Street, was shot by
Patrolman Louis Begin, of the Trumbull station, when he
disregarded orders to halt. Begin and his partner, Patrolman
William Owens, were called to Temple and Vermont avenues
where Mrs. Mabel Gee, 1930 Temple, reported her purse
stolen. Approaching the intersection, they saw Lee, ordered
him to halt, and Owens fired a warning shot. Begin shot him as
he continued to run away from the scout car. A watch
belonging to Mrs. Gee and $18, the amount she said was in her
purse, were found in the boy’s pockets. The purse was
recovered nearby. Begin and Owens made statements to
William D. Brusstar, assistant prosecutor. They said Mrs. Gee
referred to her assailant as a man and, when they encountered
him, they thought he was an adult [emphasis mine]. Lee was
about five feet, six inches tall. Other victims of recent purse
snatchings were being invited to view the body at the County
Morgue. Lee attended Condon Intermediate School. His body
was identified by his mother, Mrs. Leah Lee.
The discrepancy between these two accounts is unsurprising. As we
have so often seen, there is usually a variance between initial press reports
and official police accounts and community narratives. Notice that the cops
and the alleged robbery victim said that they thought Lee was an adult. The
adultification of Black children has long and deep roots that date back to
chattel slavery. In fact, before the Civil War, half of all enslaved people
were under sixteen years old. Enslaved children were property and were
expected to work; children as young as six years old worked the fields.
Beverly Lee was the third Black boy killed by police that year in Detroit.
Community members were furious and organized protests over Lee’s
killing. Despite the uproar, only eight days after the shooting, the prosecutor
closed the investigation into Lee’s death, calling it “justifiable homicide.”
The Detroit NAACP met with the prosecutor and called for an inquest into
the facts to the case. They presented him with signed statements of
witnesses contradicting his findings. It appears that the community, led by
the NAACP, continued to organize around Lee’s case without success;
charges were not brought against Officer Begin. Police impunity has a long
history in this country. In the end, a thirteen-year-old Black boy was shot in
the back by police and died. To quote Ossie Davis, Black people understand
that “we live with death and it is ours.”
Most often, it’s police shootings and killings that spark urban uprisings.
However, the daily indignities and more invisible harms are ever-present
and are the foundation of hostilities between young people of color and
police. Routine state violence carried out by the police happens outside of
public view, under the guise of addressing gun and other forms of violence.
If past is prologue, my community can look forward to another summer of
intense, relentless, and surely illegal police harassment of young people of
color, and specifically of young Black men.
Young people riding their bikes on sidewalks, instead of being ticketed
as prescribed by law, will be hauled into police lockups. They’ll be accused
of resisting arrest and then funneled into Cook County Jail. Teenagers
leaving summer programming will be followed by cop cars, and asked
where they are heading. One cross word will lead to being roughly thrown
on car hoods in front of the whole neighborhood. Walking through alleys as
shortcuts to head home from work, young people will be hounded,
provoked, and dragged to the station. But not before being beaten in the car,
without any concern for health conditions like seizures. Trans and gender
nonconforming youth will be bullied and verbally harassed for walking
down the street. Young people will be picked up without cause and driven
into rival gang territory to be dumped without wallets or phones—only to
hear the cops announce for all to hear that they belong to the rival gang.
Young women walking down the street minding their own business will be
sexually harassed by those sworn to “protect and serve.”
I dread summer.
Besides stop-and-frisks and other violations, young people in my
community are also subjected to warrantless searches of their homes. One
young person I know narrated his experience in the 2014 We Charge
Genocide report to the United Nations Committee against Torture:
We’re sitting in a house playing video games, and we hear a
banging on the door. Before we know it, the door is kicked
down and there’s five special-ops officers with their huge M16s
drawn, pointed at us—three 15-year-olds playing video games.
And they tell us get on the ground. They say if we move, they
are gonna kill us; “Don’t look at me, we’ll fucking kill you in a
second!” Pointing their guns at us. Then they don’t find
anything. They let us all go, they laugh, try to joke with us,
apologize, then leave out. And we’re sitting there like, “What
just happened?” They tear up the house. They stole money.
Lest you think that this is an innovation of zero-tolerance militarized
policing born out of the war on drugs, here’s an example from eighty years
ago. When the people of Harlem rioted in 1935, it was once again an
incident of police violence that lit the fuse. A rumor that Lino Rivera, a
sixteen-year-old Black Puerto Rican young man, was killed by New York
City Police led to nearly four thousand Harlemites taking to the streets.
Seven hundred police officers were dispatched to the community. When all
was said and done, three people had died, and more than $200 million in
damages were sustained from the riot. In the aftermath, Mayor LaGuardia
commissioned a report to understand the causes of the uprising. In a section
titled “The Police in Harlem,” the report’s authors maintained that cops
routinely entered the homes of Black Harlemites “without a warrant and
searched them at will.” Instead of drugs, Harlem cops in the 1930s were
searching for policy slips in efforts to crack down on illegal gambling.
Reprinted in the report was a letter by a Harlem resident addressed to the
mayor. Below are a few excerpts:
On Tuesday morning, April 16, 1935, between 10 and 11 o’clock, the superintendent of the
house rapped at my door. Upon opening it, I was confronted with three men (men in civilian
clothes) who the superintendent said were policemen. He explained that the men were
searching the house, for what he did not know.
The men entered the room, and proceeded to search without showing shields or search
warrant. I asked twice of two of the men what was the reason for such action. I received no
answer from any of them.
My dresser drawers were thoroughly gone into, dresser cover even being raised. My bed
came in for similar search, covers were dragged off and mattress overturned. Suitcase under
my bed was brought up and searched. My overcoat hanging on the door was gone over and
into. My china closet was opened and glassware examined. After this startling act the men
left my room, still without saying a word.
These types of violations span centuries for Black people and are one
reason for racial disconnects in discussions about privacy and civil liberties.
Black people have always been under the gaze of the state, and we know
that our rights are routinely violable. Civil liberties and individual rights
have different meanings for different groups of people. They also have
different priorities, depending on social contexts. A review of Black history
suggests that considerations of civil liberties are always embedded within
concepts of equality and social justice. In other words, by design or
necessity, Black people have focused on our collective rights over our
individual liberties. This makes sense in a society where we don’t just
assume individual Black guilt and suspicion; we are all guilty and we are all
suspicious (even if we may want to deny this reality). In that context,
individual liberties and rights take a back seat to a collective struggle for
emancipation and freedom. Additionally, as a people, we have always
known that it is impossible for us to exercise our individual rights within a
context of more generalized social, economic, and political oppression.
History offers evidence of the intractability of the problem of police
violence. What should we do then? Quite simply, we must end the police.
The hegemony of police is so complete that we often can’t begin to imagine
a world without the institution. We are too reliant on the police. In fact, the
police increase their legitimacy through all of the non-police-related work
that they assume, including doing wellness and mental health checks. Why
should armed people be deployed to do the work of community members
and social workers? Why have we become so comfortable with ceding so
much power to the police? Any discussion of reform must begin with the
following questions: how will we decrease the numbers of police, and how
will we defund the institution?
On the way to abolition, we can take a number of intermediate steps to
shrink the police force and to restructure our relationships with each other.
These include:
1) Organizing for dramatic decreases of police budgets and redirecting
those funds to other social goods (defunding the police).
2) Ending cash bail.
3) Overturning police bills of rights.
4) Abolishing police unions.
5) Crowding out the police in our communities.
6) Disarming the police.
7) Creating abolitionist messages that penetrate the public consciousness
to disrupt the idea that cops = safety.
8) Building community-based interventions that address harms without
relying on police.
9) Evaluating any reforms based on these criteria.
10) Thinking through the end of the police and imagining alternatives.
Importantly, we must reject all talk about policing and the overall
criminal punishment system being “broken” or “not working.” By
rhetorically constructing the criminal punishment system as “broken,”
reform is reaffirmed and abolition is painted as unrealistic and unworkable.
Those of us who maintain that reform is actually impossible within the
current context are positioned as unreasonable and naive. Ideological
formations often operate invisibly to delineate and define what is acceptable
discourse. Challenges to dominant ideological formations about “justice”
are met with anger, ridicule, or are simply ignored. This is in the service of
those who benefit from the current system and works to enforce white
supremacy and anti-Blackness. The losers under this injustice system are
the young people I know and love.
I really dread summer …
Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police
The New York Times, June 2020
Congressional Democrats want to make it easier to identify and prosecute
police misconduct;Joe Biden wants to give police departments $300
million. But efforts to solve police violence through liberal reforms like
these have failed for nearly a century.
Enough. We can’t reform the police. The only way to diminish police
violence is to reduce contact between the public and the police.
There is not a single era in United States history in which the police
were not a force of violence against Black people. Policing in the South
emerged from the slave patrols in the 1700s and 1800s that caught and
returned runaway slaves. In the North, the first municipal police
departments in the mid-1800s helped quash labor strikes and riots against
the rich. Everywhere, police have suppressed marginalized populations to
protect the status quo.
So, when you see a police officer pressing his knee into a Black man’s
neck until he dies, that’s the logical result of policing in America. When a
police officer brutalizes a Black person, he is doing what he sees as his job.
Now two weeks of nationwide protests have led some to call for defunding
the police, while others argue that doing so would make us less safe.
The first thing to point out is that police officers don’t do what you think
they do. They spend most of their time responding to noise complaints,
issuing parking and traffic citations, and dealing with other noncriminal
issues. We’ve been taught to think they “catch the bad guys; they chase the
bank robbers; they find the serial killers,” said Alex Vitale, the coordinator
of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, in an
interview with Jacobin. But this is “a big myth,” he said. “The vast majority
of police officers make one felony arrest a year. If they make two, they’re
cop of the month.”
We can’t simply change their job descriptions to focus on the worst of
the worst criminals. That’s not what they are set up to do. Second, a safe
world is not one in which the police keep Black and other marginalized
people in check through threats of arrest, incarceration, violence, and death.
I’ve been advocating the abolition of the police for years. Regardless of
your view on police power—whether you want to get rid of the police or
simply to make them less violent—here’s an immediate demand we can all
make: cut the number of police in half and cut their budget in half. Fewer
police officers equals fewer opportunities for them to brutalize and kill
people. The idea is gaining traction in Minneapolis, Dallas, Los Angeles,
and other cities.
History is instructive, not because it offers us a blueprint for how to act
in the present, but because it can help us ask better questions for the future.
The Lexow Committee undertook the first major investigation into
police misconduct in New York City in 1894. At the time, the most
common complaint against the police was about “clubbing”—“the routine
bludgeoning of citizens by patrolmen armed with nightsticks or
Blackjacks,” as the historian Marilynn Johnson has written.
The Wickersham Commission, convened to study the criminal justice
system and examine the problem of Prohibition enforcement, offered a
scathing indictment in 1931, including evidence of brutal interrogation
strategies. It put the blame on a lack of professionalism among the police.
After the 1967 urban uprisings, the Kerner Commission found that
“police actions were ‘final’ incidents before the outbreak of violence in 12
of the 24 surveyed disorders.” Its report listed a now-familiar set of
recommendations, like working to build “community support for law
enforcement” and reviewing police operations “in the ghetto, to ensure
proper conduct by police officers.”
These commissions didn’t stop the violence; they just served as a kind of
counterinsurgent function each time police violence led to protests. Calls
for similar reforms were trotted out in response to the brutal police beating
of Rodney King in 1991 and the rebellion that followed, and again after the
killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. The Obama administration’s
Final Report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing
resulted in procedural tweaks like implicit-bias training, police-community
listening sessions, slight alterations of use-of-force policies, and systems to
identify potentially problematic officers early on.
But even a member of the task force, Tracey Meares, noted in 2017,
“Policing as we know it must be abolished before it can be transformed.”
The philosophy undergirding these reforms is that more rules will mean
less violence. But police officers break rules all the time. Look what has
happened over the past few weeks—police officers slashing tires, shoving
old men on camera, and arresting and injuring journalists and protesters.
These officers are not worried about repercussions any more than Daniel
Pantaleo, the former New York City police officer whose chokehold led to
Eric Garner’s death; he waved to a camera filming the incident. He knew
that the police union would back him up, and he was right. He stayed on the
job for five more years.
Minneapolis had instituted many of these “best practices” but failed to
remove Derek Chauvin from the force despite seventeen misconduct
complaints over nearly two decades, culminating in the entire world
watching as he knelt on George Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes. Why
on earth would we think the same reforms would work now? We need to
change our demands. The surest way of reducing police violence is to
reduce the power of the police, by cutting budgets and the number of
officers.
But don’t get me wrong. We are not abandoning our communities to
violence. We don’t want to just close police departments. We want to make
them obsolete.
We should redirect the billions that now go to police departments toward
providing health care, housing, education, and good jobs. If we did this,
there would be less need for the police in the first place.
We can build other ways of responding to harms in our society. Trained
community care workers could do mental-health checks if someone needs
help. Towns could use restorative justice models instead of throwing people
in prison.
What about rape? The current approach hasn’t ended it. In fact, most
rapists never see the inside of a courtroom. Two-thirds of people who
experience sexual violence never report it to anyone. Those who file police
reports are often dissatisfied with the response. Additionally, police officers
themselves commit sexual assault alarmingly often. A study in 2010 found
that sexual misconduct was the second most frequently reported form of
police misconduct. In 2015, the Buffalo News found that an officer was
caught for sexual misconduct every five days.
When people, especially white people, consider a world without the
police, they envision a society as violent as our current one, merely without
law enforcement—and they shudder. As a society, we have been so
indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging
people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police
as solutions to violence and harm.
People like me who want to abolish prisons and police, however, have a
vision of a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism,
on mutual aid instead of self-preservation. What would the country look
like if it had billions of extra dollars to spend on housing, food, and
education for all? This change in society wouldn’t happen immediately, but
the protests show that many people are ready to embrace a different vision
of safety and justice.
When the streets calm and people suggest once again that we hire more
Black police officers or create more civilian review boards, I hope that we
remember all the times those efforts have failed.
A Jailbreak of the Imagination: Seeing Prisons for
What They Are and Demanding Transformation
with Kelly Hayes
Truthout, May 2018
Our current historical moment demands a radical reimagining of how we
address various harms. The levers of power are currently in the hands of an
administration that is openly hostile to the most marginalized in our society
(Black people, Native people, the poor, LGBTQ people, immigrant
communities, and more). While we protect ourselves from their consistent
and regular blows, we must also fight for a vision of the world we want to
inhabit.
For us, that’s a world where people like Tiffany Rusher, who began a
five-year sentence at Logan Correctional Center in Broadwell Township,
Illinois, in 2013, are not tortured to death in the name of “safety.” Our
vision insists on the abolition of the prison-industrial complex as a critical
pillar of the creation of a new society.
Imprisoned on charges related to sex work, Tiffany Rusher was
eventually placed in solitary confinement for getting into a physical
struggle with one of her cellmates. During her time in solitary confinement,
Rusher’s mental health began to deteriorate, initiating a cycle of self-harm.
After a series of suicide attempts and periods of solitary confinement,
Rusher was placed on “crisis watch” for a period of eight months.
According to Rusher’s lawyer, Alan Mills, being on crisis watch meant
being stripped of all clothing and belongings, and placed in a bare cell with
only a “suicide smock” (a single piece of thick woven nylon, too stiff to
fold, with holes for one’s head and arms). During this time, Rusher was
monitored through a plexiglass wall, with the lights on, twenty-four hours a
day. Rather than receiving mental health care, Rusher was kept naked,
except for her rigid smock, in an empty cell. She was given strict,
dehumanizing instructions about how to wipe herself and manage her
menstrual hygiene, which included a requirement that her hands be visible
to the guard watching her at all times. In order to read, Rusher had to
persuade a prison guard to hold an open book against the glass of her cell,
and turn each page as she finished reading it.
As time wore on, Rusher asked her attorney: “Who in her situation
wouldn’t want to kill themselves?”
At the end of her sentence, Rusher was finally transferred to a mental
health facility. Rusher, who disclosed to her doctors that she had
experienced childhood sexual abuse, had received dozens of diagnoses over
the years, including schizoaffective disorder, but nonetheless made great
strides while in treatment. Eight months into her in-patient care, however,
Rusher got into altercation with another patient. Rather than treating the
episode as a symptom of her mental health problems, she was sent back to
jail, where the cycle of carceral violence continued.
After Rusher’s death, her mother, Kelli Andrews, said in a statement,
“Tiffany was a beautiful soul with hopes for her future. She was looking
forward to coming home to be with her family. We miss her every day.”
Sangamon County jail returned Rusher to solitary confinement, where she
remained for three months before being found unresponsive with a ripped
piece of a towel around her neck. Rusher died twelve days later when the
hospital removed her from life support. In the words of Mills, “First they
tortured her, then they killed her.”
At the time of her death, Tiffany Rusher was twenty-seven years old.
Sadly, what Rusher endured was not exceptional. The US prison system
is designed to crush people like Tiffany Rusher every day, with only a small
section of society laboring to help prisoners save themselves from being
ground under. In Rusher’s case, the attorneys and staff of Uptown People’s
Law Center in Chicago were her defenders, but, in the end, the wounds
inflicted by the system were too deep, and the cycle of carceral violence
was simply too entrenched to interrupt. Rusher, now a statistic to the world
at large and a court filing to those her attorneys would hold accountable for
her death, was refused any recognition of her humanity while incarcerated.
But Rusher was not a number. She was a human being, and restoring our
awareness of the humanity of prisoners is a crucial step toward undoing the
harms of mass incarceration.
As prison abolitionists, grassroots organizers, and practitioners of
transformative justice, our vision for 2018 is one of clear-eyed awareness
and discussion of the horrors of the prison system—and the action that
awareness demands. As a society, we have long turned away from any
social concern that overwhelms us. Whether it’s war, climate change, or the
prison-industrial complex, Americans have been conditioned to simply look
away from profound harms. Years of this practice have now left us with
endless wars, dying oceans, and millions of people in bondage and
oppressively policed. It is time for a thorough, unflinching examination of
what our society has wrought and what we have become. It is time to
envision and create alternatives to the hellish conditions our society has
brought into being.
The Illusion of a New Idea
Outspoken opponents of abolishing the prison-industrial complex typically
portray abolitionists as politically inactive academics who spout impossible
ideas. None of this could be further from the truth. Abolitionists come from
all backgrounds, and most are politically active. From bail reform to
strategic electoral interventions and mutual aid, prison abolitionists are
steadily at work in our communities, employing tactics of harm reduction,
lobbying for and against legislation, defending the rights of prisoners in
solidarity with those organizing for themselves on the inside, and working
to forward a vision of social transformation.
As a political framework, abolition has gained significant ground in
recent years, with groups like the National Lawyers Guild adopting the
philosophy in their work. A growing number of grassroots abolitionist
organizers have co-organized nationally recognized campaigns such as the
#ByeAnita effort in Chicago, which helped to successfully remove former
state’s attorney Anita Alvarez from office. Abolitionist organizers also
helped lead efforts to win reparations for survivors of torture that occurred
under the now infamous police commander Jon Burge in Chicago—a city
that has, over the past two decades, become a hub of abolitionist organizing.
Abolition is a practical organizing strategy.
Like any enterprise that was born of a manufactured demand, prisons
perpetuate themselves, and that requires the maintenance of conditions that
foster crime. From 1978 to 2014, the US prison population rose 408
percent, largely filling its cages with those denied access to education,
employment, and human services. About 70 percent of prisoners in
California are former foster care youth. And given that the system is
actually geared toward recidivism, there can be no argument that the prison
system supports either public safety or the public good. Our failure to build
a culture of care that nurtures human growth and potential, rather than
incubating desperation, ensures that more “criminals” will be created and
subsequently punished, to the great benefit of those who profit from
industries associated with incarceration. Prison is simply a bad and
ineffective way to address violence and crime.
Yet when we speak about the abolition of the prison-industrial complex,
many react as though the idea is alien and unthinkable—as if, to them,
prisons, policing and surveillance are part of a natural order that simply
cannot be undone. In truth, the prison system did not see its most massive
population surge until the 1980s, when deindustrialization created the need
for dungeon economies to replace lost jobs, and a backlash against the Civil
Rights Movement and other social gains by Black people propelled
heightened efforts at social control.
As a society, we have been taught to embrace social control, which is
often enforced by people with guns, because we have been taught to fear
each other, and to acquiesce to authority. We live in a culture that celebrates
criminalization, cops, and prisons. Abusive, torturous police become
sympathetic television characters whose harms the public can understand or
even sympathize with. But when a civilian has committed an egregious
harm, the national solace we are taught to seek is to see them suffer. They
must be thrown in a cage, and, once they are, justice is considered to be
done, and we can all move on with our lives without ever asking questions
like: Why did this happen? Why does it keep happening? And is there
something we could change that would make this tragedy unthinkable in the
first place?
Clapping for Incarceration
Even those who acknowledge that mass incarceration in the US is
nightmarish and unjust often feel compelled to applaud when the system
ensnares someone whose harms disgust us. When Martin Shkreli, a former
hedge fund manager, was sentenced to serve seven years for securities
fraud, mem…