Status Updates From Abolition. Feminism. Now.

“[even if SOME deterrence occurs], as an overall strategy for ending violence, criminalisation has not worked…impact of mandatory arrests laws for domestic violence have led to decreases in the number of battered women who kill their partners in self-defence, but they have not led to a decrease in the number of batterers who kill their partners. Thus, the law protects batterers more than it protects survivors.”

“research illustrating that the majority of calls to police are not about “crime” but about a need to support or services.”

Things police do that are unrelated “crime” could be done by other bodies e.g. social workers, bin collectors, counsellors etc. This is the “core of a practical, stepwise process of police abolition: begin to give nonviolent agencies…the tasks currently allocated to [police]”.

“The Coins, Cops, and Communities Toolkit produced by this campaign made visible the deep asymmetries and ethical dimensions of a city budget. For example, Chicago’s annual budget for substance abuse ($2,581,272) amounts to what Chicago spends on half a day of policing.”

“While there are undoubtedly individual police officers who are racist and transphobic, systems and institutions empower, educate, reproduce, validate, and arm these individual actors. Yet if the criminal legal system is barely equipped to indict its own employees, it is completely unable to critically examine and indict its own structure.”

“In the rare cases where state violence is made visible, accountability is thinly individuated: the problem is a discrete incident, a specific officer.”

“Turning to punishment agencies and tactics of social control will not protect women and others harmed by gender violence. Survivors of violence would be much more likely to benefit if [the money was spent on] free and subsidised services like safe permanent housing, education, accessible health and mental health care, high-quality childcare, and job training and employment placement……”

“Police are trained to use force rather than to prevent or address root causes of violence, which is perhaps why police officers are not likely to engage in violent behaviour with their partners than other groups.”

“Involvement in the criminal legal system does not deter intimate partner violence, does not lower rates of intimate partner violence, and it does not make violence less severe.”

“Remaining at the level of the individual will compel endless repetition of legal and other proceedings in efforts implicitly predicated on the impossibility of purging our societies of these harms.”

“As attention [around gender violence] is most often focused on individual perpetrators, as if they themselves are the beginning and end of these violences, the structural and institutional underpinnings of sexual assault and other forms of gender violence are neglected.”

“We have invested significantly in the criminal legal system, despite knowing that the vast majority of survivors choose not to engage with it and that those who do are often re-traumatised by it.” [a letter discussing why prisons and policing are not the answer to solving sexual and gender-based violence]

“The siphoning of public dollars to for-profit corporations to build carceral sites, a form of what Jackie Wang terms “racialised accumulation by dispossession”, is just one of the ways that the state funnels public dollars to private coffers.”

“Far from neutral and static, the malleable contours of public and private not only deepen inequalities but frequently mask the evidentiary traces of racialised, ableist, and heterogendered violence.”

“For some, (hetero)sexuality is considered a private matter, but queer, HIV-positive, disabled people…are subject to state repression.”

“Public/private distinctions not only engineer vulnerability…but race, gender, wealth, sexuality, and ability have also always defined who has access to any right to privacy.”

“…guileful mobilisation of the false division between private and public spheres. Feminists have long tracked these manipulations: the state frames childcare as a private responsibility but defines fetuses, reproduction, and select caregivers/parents as a public concern subject to partisan political manipulation.”

Good book. Although, as my first introduction to abolitionism, it feels the tinciest bit out of my depth. I could do with a book that just completely lays out e.g 10 reasons why police and prisons are an inadequate justice system

“…ideological connections between state violence, street violence and interpersonal violence, a conjunction at the heart of all the work of abolition feminism.”