No More Police: A Case for Abolition

by Mariame Kaba

Similarly, because controlling enslaved Africans’ labor and movements was essential to the maintenance of chattel slavery, the U.S. criminalized refusal of enslavement and running away as both medical conditions and crimes, and regulated movement through “pass laws.”26 Black Codes criminalized certain acts only if performed by Black people.27 At the same time, political decisions were made to not criminalize violence against Black people—such as the rape of Black women that was a systemic aspect of chattel slavery.28 As historians Sarah Haley and Talitha LeFlouria document extensively, when the institution of slavery was legally abolished in the U.S., the state increasingly criminalized Black women for offenses like vagrancy (for not working in waged labor), theft (for eating leftovers at an employer’s house), or disrupting public order (for being loud, or merely present, in public), in an effort to continue to control and capitalize on their sexual, reproductive, and economic labor by forcing them back into domestic servitude through convict leasing.29