No More Police: A Case for Abolition

by Mariame Kaba

The report emphasizes that “criminalization extends beyond laws and policies to more symbolic—and more deeply entrenched—processes of creating categories of people deemed ‘criminals,’” using “highly racialized and gendered narratives—whether they are about ‘thugs,’ ‘crack mothers,’ ‘welfare queens,’ or ‘bad hombres’… to fuel a generalized state of anxiety and fear, and to brand people labeled ‘criminal’ as threatening, dangerous, and inhuman.” Thus, “violence, banishment and exile, denial of protection, and restrictions on freedom, expression, movement, and ultimately existence of people deemed ‘criminal’ … becomes a ‘natural’ response.”139 Criminalization is also a highly racialized process of determining who is “deserving” of social programs and investment and who is not.140 And, as organizer and somatics practitioner Prentis Hemphill teaches, it is also about the distribution of trauma, and of opportunities to heal from its consequences rather than be punished for them.