No More Police: A Case for Abolition

by Mariame Kaba

As Wilson Gilmore theorizes, increased investment in police and prisons in the U.S. serves as a mechanism for racial capitalism to save itself from crises of its own creation. For instance, labor rendered superfluous by automation, deindustrialization, and globalization is funneled into police and prisons—white labor as personnel, Black and Brown labor criminalized and caged; surplus land and technology is turned toward increased surveillance and the proliferation of prisons, particularly in rural areas.120 Divestment from communities similarly serves the interests of racial capitalism: “As racial justice movements succeeded in achieving increased access for Black people, the state simply divested from public schools, hospitals, housing, social benefits and entitlements, while demonizing and projecting individual moral failure onto people who accessed them to survive in the wake of structural economic oppression and exclusion and growing deindustrialization.”121 Building on the work of Marxist geographer David Harvey, Wilson Gilmore names this process “organized abandonment,” a concerted divestment from meeting basic needs of the populace while simultaneously promoting criminalization as a response to the fallout.