We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Abolitionist Papers Book 1)

by Mariame Kaba

White supremacy does not thrive in spite of the menacing infrastructure of US criminalization and militarism—it thrives because of it.

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.

Refusal: because we cannot collaborate with the prison-industrial 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).

Fannie Lou Hamer: “I’m sick of symbolic things. We are fighting for our lives.”

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.

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.

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.

First, when we set about trying to transform society, we must remember that we ourselves will also need to transform.

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.

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.

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 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.

Whether it’s war, climate change, or the prison-industrial complex, Americans have been conditioned to simply look away from profound harms.

Hope Is a Discipline

hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense. Hope isn’t an emotion, you know? Hope is not optimism.

I am not against indicting killer cops. I just know that indictments won’t and can’t end oppressive policing, which is rooted in anti-Blackness, social control, and containment.

Transformative justice is not a flowery phrase for a court proceeding that delivers an outcome we like. It is a community process developed by anti-violence activists of color, in particular, who wanted to create responses to violence that do what criminal punishment systems fail to do: build support and more safety for the person harmed, figure out how the broader context was set up for this harm to happen, and how that context can be changed so that this harm is less likely to happen again.

The reparations framework outlines five elements—repair, restoration, acknowledgment, cessation, and nonrepetition.

Abolition, for me, is a long-term project and a practice around creating the conditions that would allow for the dismantling of prisons, policing, and surveillance and the creation of new institutions that actually work to keep us safe and are not fundamentally oppressive.

For Black people, the war on terror hasn’t “come ‘home.’” It’s always been here.

the system—the prison-industrial complex—isn’t broken. The system of mass criminalization we have isn’t the result of failure. Thinking in this way allows me to look at what’s going on right now in a clear-eyed way. I understand that white supremacy is maintained and reproduced through the criminal punishment apparatus.

our perspectives on historical moments that we inhabit can sometimes be myopic.

Being personally thrilled with someone going to prison is anyone’s prerogative, and we understand that a person may feel joy at another’s incapacitation if that individual has repeatedly and unrepentantly caused grievous harm. Let’s be clear though: advocating for someone’s imprisonment is not abolitionist. Mistaking emotional satisfaction for justice is also not abolitionist.

We believe in consequences for harm, for Kelly or anyone else. Those consequences may involve forgoing royalties and any future financial gain derived from the context in which the harm occurred, or being required to pay restitution or provide labor to those who have been harmed, their families, and, when appropriate, their communities. Those consequences might include restricted access to specific groups or spaces, or ineligibility for positions of leadership. Consequences might also include being required to make a public apology. Regardless of what’s chosen, the point is that any consequences should be determined in direct relationship to the harm done and should involve input by people impacted by the harm.

Morgan Bassichis, who was part of Oakland-based Community United Against Violence. Morgan had written that basically the very systems that we’re working to dismantle live inside us.

healed is not a destination. You’re just always in process.

you have to just be able to see the difference between inflicting cruelty, pain, and suffering and being uncomfortable and losing some privileges—these are not the same things.

For me, transformative justice is about trying to figure out how we respond to violence and harm in a way that doesn’t cause more violence and harm. It’s asking us to respond in ways that don’t rely on the state or social services necessarily if people don’t want it. It is focusing on the things that we have to cultivate so that we can prevent future harm. Transformative justice is militantly against the dichotomies between victims and perpetrators, because the world is more complex than that: in a particular situation we’re victimized, and in other situations we’re the people that perpetrate harm. We have to be able to hold all those things together.

Community matters. Collectivity matters. To me, that’s the whole thing. And if we can’t get along with each other, and we can’t take responsibility for what we do with each other, then what the hell are we doing?

I believe that when we are in relationship with each other, we influence each other. What matters to me, as the unit of interest, is relationships. The second thing that matters to me as a unit of impact is harm. I want to figure out how to transform harm in every possible context, because I have been harmed, and I have harmed other people. My political commitments are to developing stronger relationships with people and to transforming harm.

I don’t believe in allyship, and I’m super bored with the concept of performativity. I believe in co-strugglers and I believe in coworkers, and I believe in solidarity. I believe we need more people all the time in all of our work, in all of our movements, in all of our struggles. The question is: how do we get folks to struggle alongside us and with us?