No More Police: A Case for Abolition

by Mariame Kaba

We know that police and prisons do not—and cannot—contain all the people who engage in rape, battery, killing, and other forms of violence. Nor should that be our goal—while their actions are heinous, people who perpetrate sexual violence are not some monstrous “other,” easily (racially) recognizable and disposable. They are us—members of our families and communities. Eighty percent of survivors know the person who sexually assaulted them.154 Incarcerating them all would not stop or prevent sexual violence; it would simply move these forms of violence, and the people responsible for them, behind prison walls, where sexual violence is rampant, turning more people into survivors. If we want to end violence, including sexual, domestic, racial, homophobic, and transphobic violence, then we have to end police, prisons, and all carceral institutions. These structures breed and perpetuate these same forms of violence while robbing us of the resources needed to prevent and heal from them. As Beth Richie puts it simply, when we try to end violence with violence, “We lose the possibility of freedom from violence.”