8
. . . ABOLITION IS THE ANSWER
“POEM NUMBER TWO ON BELL’S THEOREM, OR THE NEW PHYSICALITY OF LONG DISTANCE LOVE”
There is no chance that we will fall apart
There is no chance
There are no parts.
—JUNE JORDAN
Take a minute to reflect on these questions, and jot down your first responses: Where are we on the clock of the universe? What does the known demand of us, here and now? What is the urgency? What is to be done? And where do we go from here—chaos or community, slavery or freedom?
— REFLECTION EIGHT: FREEDOM AND ABOLITION —
Our kids were born abolitionists—they had no choice in the matter. Like all children, ours were thrust into a going-world, a world not of their own making nor of their choosing, but a world that was theirs nonetheless. The world they were born into was already up and running, and their job, like every other child who ever lived or ever will live, was to learn to walk, at first catching up with the forward-charging world, then running alongside, and soon enough sprinting ahead, passing their elders at breakneck speed, branching out onto curious and novel side roads, forging their own unique pathways, fleeing, perhaps, or spinning around in direct opposition. That’s life itself, the answer to a universal question: What will I make of what I’ve been made?
Their parents—us—weren’t their choice, just the first random toss of the cosmic dice, with a zillion chance happenings still to come. No one chooses their parents, of course, nor their brief moment in the sun. Everyone lands somewhere specific with a context and a ready-made set of circumstances: this country or that community, these fortunes or misfortunes, those accidental advantages or disadvantages. But for better or worse, our kids got the Upper West Side of New York, and they got us, and as part of the package they inherited an extended family of rebels and revolutionaries, freedom fighters, race-traitors, and abolitionists—they were dancing the dialectic with their very first steps.
My friend Maya Schenwar told me recently that she’d read her four-year-old a children’s book about Native grandmothers organizing a struggle to stop an oil pipeline from being built on tribal land. The pipeline would destroy valuable wildlife habitat, spoil farmland, endanger water sources, and add to the crisis of global warming and environmental collapse. What stood out for the child was the wisdom and courage of the old women—they studied and educated themselves and their neighbors, they got the community to stand up together, they stood tall, and they stopped construction—and so the child wanted to make a sign and join the grandmothers’ demonstration. “And what would your sign say?” Maya asked. The response was quick and sharp: “No Pipeline!”
A four-year-old doesn’t need to consider alternate routes that would endanger different rivers, or financial compensation for ruined land, or the relative value of an endangered owl and cheaper gas from tar sands. No. The moral position was crystal clear and unencumbered: no pipeline! A natural abolitionist.
Children spring to the ethical heart of abolition like fish cavorting in the water—it’s their natural habitat, and they get it. Kids are intuitive abolitionists because abolition points to solid solutions, and young people live in a world of concrete operations.
If you wonder about books for young children on complex and controversial topics, that genie has been out of the bottle for decades. There are wonderful, thoughtful, compassionate books for young children (and older children, and young adults and older adults) on women’s equality, racism, peace, environmental justice, gender rights, disability, war, empire, mental health . . . on practically everything. There are biographies that inspire empathy, celebrate accomplishment and resilience across world cultures. The issue goes beyond scope and variety, however, and urges equitable and uncensored access, and trusting children to pursue their own interests and engage with their own curiosities. Activists like Daphne Muse in Berkeley, California, and Judi Minter and BJ Richards in Chicago have assembled thousands of anti-racist, anti-sexist, inclusive, and delightful books for kids of all ages, and they share the wonder, offering advice and counsel for parents and teachers.
Well, there aren’t books on literally everything, of course—there’s still more to know, more to learn, more to see and experience. As James Baldwin once said, “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”1 So, if you can think of an urgent issue that’s not been written about for kids, reach for your pencils and paper, and get busy!
And if you worry about the above example being propaganda, note that the advertising industry wraps its rapacious claws tightly around our children’s minds while singing siren songs on a continuous loop into their innocent ears, and that Florida has outlawed the teaching of history except as a set of fictional myths ginned up by a small clique of politicians, and, to take only one egregious example out of zillions, that the American Coal Foundation, the coal industry’s lobbying arm, lavishly funds “educational materials” like a colorful classroom map called “The United States of Energy” that Friends of the Earth labeled “corporate brainwashing.”2
“That’s not fair!”—the mantra of most three-year-olds—echoed through our fifth-floor walkup for years, and it carried the same indignant tone in our family, whether referring to the smallest injustice on the playground or to some monstrous police murder on the streets of Brooklyn. Nuclear bombs were not fair, and when we joined one million others in Central Park wearing No Nukes T-shirts, our kids saw people who didn’t just pay attention to the evils of the world but were also willing to resist and to try to abolish those evils. There were no T-shirts advocating “Some Nukes” or “Only Tactical Nukes, Please.” Nope, “No Nukes” was the whole deal—abolition!
A character in Danielle Evans’s novella The Office of Historical Corrections says, “The beauty of motherhood is that all the choices are wrong.” Asked by her friend if it’s terrifying being a parent, she responds, “Yes . . . It’s like every day since Octavia was born I’ve had to choose between trying to do the best I can for her and trying to do the best I can for the world she has to live in.”3 Dancing another dialectic.
Our oldest said he knew nukes were bad and also gigantic—”as big as tall buildings”—and he wondered how freakishly big the war-makers’ airplanes must be to carry such monstrosities. As big as the Empire State Building? Concrete operational questions—honest answers. And, always, fairness mattered and activism counted. But abolition ruled.
We had reinvented ourselves years earlier as activists in the peace and justice struggles of mid-century America: We strived to be comrades with the Black Freedom Movement, community organizers in poor areas of the city, militants and troublemakers opposed to US militarism and empire. We built communes and collectives in order to live out our utopian visions of what could be or should be but was not yet, seeds of a possible world planted in the dirt of the dying one—the world as such, and the only world we knew. Everything old was questioned, criticized, and put on trial; everything new and unknown was worth a try . . . or two or three.
We vowed to become new women and new men in order to be worthy of the world of our dreams—so we smashed monogamy and experimented with “free love,” grew our own food in vacant lots, gathered up garbage during a city workers’ strike to deposit at the gates of high culture, made tofu from scratch, gave out free food in the parks, knocked on doors regularly, fought the cops in the streets when necessary, endorsed unruly flesh and anarchist activity, and dove head first into the great simultaneous circus show of youth culture. Did it “work”? Not exactly, but we were enacting that age-old rhythm mentioned earlier: try, fail, try again, fail again—fail better. We always act without guarantees and in situations not of our choosing, and we can never know for sure what the consequences of our actions will be. And still we must act, and in the aftermath, we can judge our efforts with a straightforward pedagogical standard: Did we learn? Did we teach? Then we move on to try again.
When our kids were born, they joined our tribe, of course, and expanded and enriched our wayward culture in miraculous ways. They altered our daily routines and rhythms dramatically, but our anarchist/socialist political dispositions and our experimental impulses remained. The mode and manner of our new family was shot through with politics and activism—the kids were born onto picket lines, our lively apartment abuzz with friends and comrades, potluck dinners, organizing projects and action planning sessions, meetings and discussions, along with the ordinary management of everyday life: overnights, play dates, laundry, groceries, and paying the damn rent. Because we never owned a TV, conversation was the liveliest current in the room and our kids’ earliest words and phrases included “Peace now” and “No racism.” Even without a literal understanding of every detail of every cause, there was a kind of child-friendly and joyful resistance on offer, a sense that we always stood up somehow for peace and freedom—against racism and for fairness. Once, leaving an Aqua Tots swimming class at the Y, we were swept into a feminist march to Times Square, happily chanting along: “Our bodies, ourselves!” and “No more porn!” We cruised off to get pizza, and once we settled into our booth, one of the kids said, “That was great. Why don’t we want any more corn?” Today I imagine we would carry signs demanding the decriminalization of sex work and the right to organize a union.
Malcolm X famously noted that Black people seemed forever to have an abundance of Washingtons and Jeffersons and Lincolns in their family trees, but white people didn’t even have a twig or a leaf for Nat Turner or Frederick Douglass or Harriett Tubman. Why, he asked rhetorically and pointedly, why the color line—even when it comes to naming the babies? We chose to take Malcolm’s observation as a practical matter, and so we named our firstborn Zayd Osceola, to remember a Black Panther brother killed by the police in New Jersey, and at the same time to raise up a Seminole leader who never surrendered to the US policy of relocation and extermination; we called our second Malik Cochise, this time in honor of Malcolm himself as well as a renowned First Nations legend, the great Apache guerrilla fighter.
Chesa—formally Chesa Jackson Gilbert Boudin—bounded into our family and crash-landed in our lives when he was fourteen months old and his birth parents, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, working with the Black Liberation Army, were arrested in Nyack, New York, for the attempted armed robbery of a Brinks armored truck in which a guard and two police were killed. His name was already attached, and it fit right in: Chesa, a Swahili word for dancing feet, and Jackson, taken from Soledad Brother George Jackson, murdered by prison guards at San Quentin. His prized T-shirt was a silk-screen portrait of Rosa Parks in dignified refusal.
We had two kids, and we were living in Manhattan; Kathy and David had fourteen-month-old Chesa, living with her parents in Greenwich Village since the catastrophe at Nyack. We’d known and loved Kathy and David forever, and they were family—our brother and our sister—and, whatever else, family should take care of one another, especially in times of crisis. The pulse and measure of our lives was fully tuned to the complex rhythms of raising young kids, and here we were, fully immersed in the joyful cacophony of a toddler orchestra. Yes, there would be room for one more. And if, God forbid, anything catastrophic were ever to overwhelm us, who, of all the people in the world, would we want to step up for our beloveds? We would want us, of course.
When we first visited David and Kathy in prison, they were fearful for Chesa, hungry for news, and worried about next steps. We broached the idea of taking him into our family, and they leapt as if at the last lifeboat pulling swiftly away from a sinking ship. “Yes, yes, we will coparent for a time, and when we get out . . .” Reality was still some ways away. Soon Bernardine was locked up in federal prison for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury investigating the Brinks robbery—civil contempt. Visiting prisons became a regular part of our family routine.
Kathy and David and Bernardine were all learning together how to be present to their kids in these terrible circumstances, practical ways to parent from a distance—applicable to hospitalization or divorce or death, forced migration and military deployment, but, in our cases, applied to the separation of prison. They each wrote long, intricate chapter books for the kids, and solicited advice and counsel from them on the phone about the direction of the next week’s installment. Bernardine created a growing catalogue of riddles and jokes for every visit, and she made a crossword puzzle every week for Zayd based on themes of his choice: favorite foods or best fruit, Central Park and dogs, baseball and mommies coming home. We were honest about what had happened but always following the kids’ leads on how far to go and what territory to enter.
One year we marked Passover with a seder at the women’s prison. The theme of freedom from bondage is universal at Passover, and our rewritten Haggadah focused on US imperialism, Palestinian freedom, and political prisoners—it was an abolitionist Haggadah. At the end of the traditional “feast” the rabbi hid the afikomen. After much searching in the visiting room, the kids found it, and when the rabbi said they had one wish, Malik said, “I wish all the women here could go home today.” Eventually they did all come home: Bernardine after less than a year in lockup—and never testifying—Kathy after twenty-two years, and David after forty years and ten days.
In those early years we were part of a homemade communal childcare community on the Upper West Side of Manhattan called BJ’s Kids. Fairness was a central value at BJ’s, and the deeply radical and profoundly ethical slogan of the Wobblies from a hundred years earlier was a poster on the wall: “An injury to one is an injury to all!” That standard was easily grasped by preschoolers.
We tried to speak an anti-oppressive language at BJ’s—”firefighter,” not “fireman”—and our block area fought racism and sexism: the figures included a Black woman doctor, a Latina firefighter, a male nurse. Reality imposed itself, however, and it was clear that the firehouse across the street was staffed by all white firemen. On a field trip Caitlin, one of the four-year-olds, asked the fireman showing us around when we would get a woman firefighter in the station, and our guide exploded in derisive laughter: “A woman! We don’t want any women! The neighborhood would burn down!” That’s not fair, Caitlin said, and back at BJ’s she dictated letters to the mayor and the newspapers.
We built solidarity between kids and adults, and with everyone in reach. Solidarity, not service, and not hierarchy. There was an open promise of acceptance, care, and repair at BJ’s Kids. No one was a target of instruction; everyone was a dynamic and growing part of the whole. We dove freely into the wide, wild world, and swam as hard as we could toward a distant horizon, powered by experimentation, discovery, and surprise, always asking the next question and the next, and then the next.
BJ’s Kids was raising abolitionists, people who would stand up against subjugation, people who together constructed a shared space of fairness and kindness, folks who were a prelude to the possible, and willing to ask the big question: What kind of world do we need to build in order to live free?
What would it mean to abolish private insurance, advertising, private drug companies, landlords, private homes? What about abolishing private profit and wage slavery? What worlds could we build then? Or, what would it mean to abolish the family? Heresy! But is it? “The family” plays a role analogous to the “American dream” in our dominant culture—anything at all can be inscribed on the words for any political purpose. Let’s abolish both.
“The family,” it’s worth noting, is the site of more sexual and physical abuse, assault, and murder than any other institution, more than the church and the schools and the workplace together. It’s a site of unpaid labor and hidden exploitation. “Dysfunctional family” is a redundant term—they’re all dysfunctional, all outposts of racial capitalism, asked to shoulder unbearable burdens that should be the responsibility of the larger community. Abolishing male supremacy, patriarchy, gender hierarchies, and forced dependence is the right thing to do, and each is embodied in concentrated and congealed form in the romanticized family.
Abolishing the family would not mean abolishing commitment or love, and in fact abolition may liberate love, release new energy, and represent a deeper expression of care and affection. Love means nothing if it doesn’t mean love for specific human beings. That special love can be generalized, performing as a model for treating everyone as worthy, but it does not work the other way around: saints and orthodox liturgists and dogmatic ideologues claim to love humanity or “the people” in general—a claim that allows them to squash particular individuals, often in large numbers, in pursuit of whatever Grand Plan is on offer.
The “American dream” and the “American family” are the domestic twins of American exceptionalism and perform as a kind of social Rorschach test. The dream could mean a one-family home in the suburbs with a two-car garage to some, marital bliss plus two beautiful and above-average children to others, or a partridge in a pear tree. Maybe it’s job security or a career, good health or a pension when you’re old, a college education for the kids, or season tickets to the Cubs. Yes, yes, yes—achieving the American dream includes picking up some or, preferably, all of the above.
But the dream includes rampant consumerism and unchecked acquisition, the freedom to acquire unlimited cash and shop till you drop, the embrace of a culture of malignant individualism. And individualism is a core capitalist value. In Aaron Sorkin’s TV show Newsroom, a hard-bitten reporter decides to cut the crap when a college student asks, “Why is America the greatest country in the world?” He points out that the United States is 7th in the world in literacy, 49th in life expectancy, and 178th in infant mortality. “We lead the world in only three categories,” he asserts: number of incarcerated fellow citizens, military spending, and number of adults who believe in angels. He could now add that in international surveys, the US ranks first in “individualistic.” The powerful reject the social, the communal, or the collective, as the country wallows in goblin mode.
The logic of prison abolition was first explained to me by the great freedom fighter Angela Davis: Prison is not just a place, she said, it’s an ideology. The ideology limits our imaginations and shuts down our capacity to think more broadly and more bravely. We need to wonder what might lie beyond prison, beyond making a better or more functional prison system—the focus of too many reform conversations—and initiate massive conversations about decarceration, that is, bringing folks home and shutting prisons down. We have to think of ways to close the front door, the pipeline feeding the beast as more and more people are funneled in, and open wide the back door.
Mass incarceration—the caging and control of criminalized populations and marginalized people deemed disposable—is a major part of the afterlife of slavery, and prison abolition is the next step in that long historic project of abolition and Black freedom. And, as we imagine dramatic change, we should also anticipate future attempts to contain and control, for just as Jim Crow followed abolition, and mass incarceration followed Jim Crow, some evil expression of white supremacy and Black containment yet unseen lurks just around the corner.
Over time Mariame Kaba taught me, as did Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Erica Meiners, Alice Kim and Beth Richie, Renaldo Hudson and Albert Woodfox. We talked about abolitionist values: liberation, community restoration, and shared fate as opposed to the hardening practices of cruelty and punishment, revenge and retribution. We were reminded of the ten renowned words uttered by Justice Harry Blackmun in 1994 when he announced publicly that he had become a death penalty abolitionist: “I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.”4 Blackmun wasn’t searching for ways to make state-sanctioned murder more efficient or more palatable; he wanted to get out of the death business altogether. Let’s get out of the caging business altogether, we said. Let’s not tinker with the machinery of mass incarceration.
The “prison nation” is an intolerable abomination. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it, and joining the insurgency becomes an urgent necessity. Modern misdemeanor law can be traced directly to the Black Codes after slavery that criminalized ordinary actions (loitering, staying out late at night) precisely to control formerly enslaved people.5 The explosive growth of the prison population followed close on the heels of the powerful modern Black Freedom Movement, criminalizing whole communities and exacting collective punishment.
I proposed prison abolition publicly—and a little anxiously—in a talk I gave about Freedom Schools at the University of Pittsburgh. Most of my talk was well received, even when I pointed out, as I always do, that the existence of an American gulag stretching the length and breadth of the country meant that you were never far from a prison, but there was a general sense of disbelief when I said I thought prisons should be abolished. The first question from the floor was a request to clarify the point, which I did, saying I thought we should work toward closing all the prisons since they were institutions of capricious cruelty and congealed violence. The next student up worried that I was kidding, and I assured them I was not, and followed up by politely accusing me of utopian romanticism and unrealistic idealism. Guilty, I said, of the idealism, but not of being unrealistic. The next person who spoke tried to show me the error of my logic and painted a terrifying picture of a world ruled by mass murderers (Hmm, I thought), pointing specifically to John Wayne Gacy, the gruesome serial killer who was electrocuted soon after Illinois reinstated the death penalty, a person about whom my interrogator had seemingly encyclopedic knowledge. I’m convinced, I said after an exhaustive portrayal, I give up! Okay, that’s one cell, I said, so who else? I’ll give you Henry Kissinger and Dick Cheney, so now we have three prison cells total—a far cry from the millions we support in reality.
This led to a discussion I’ve had countless times, and it begins with an exercise in the form of a question: Can we—right now—generate a thousand alternatives to caging people? It turns out we can, so let’s
■ Build “Community Restorative Justice” projects—spaces where perpetrators and victims can meet with peers and neighbors, community organizers and social workers, to discuss how to repair the harm inflicted by misbehavior
■ Redirect all misdemeanor offenses away from criminal court with its attendant culture of cruelty, humiliation, and punishment toward counseling, rehab, or anger management for some, and technological support (a simple breathalyzer device, for example, attached to a vehicle before it can be driven) for others
■ Do away with “truth-in-sentencing,” mandatory minimum sentences, “three strikes you’re out,” sentence enhancements, money bail, and other punitive measures that serve to swell the prison population
■ Restore or create opportunities to reduce time inside with policies like day-for-day good time practices
■ Immediately release all aging people in prison—say, anyone over sixty, who has done twenty years or more in prison—and grant mass commutation to entire categories of imprisoned people: women resisting violence, people possessing drugs, folks convicted on the testimony of dirty cops, people convicted of crimes when they were minors and have served significant sentences, and more
■ Develop a prisoner’s cooperative to operate the institutions, making decisions collectively about all matters concerning food, health care, education, and social services, the organization of work and leisure, and relations with outside institutions including religious, educational, and business organizations
That wasn’t hard at all, and we only have 994 to go.
Some of this may sound a bit like fiddling with the machinery of caging, but let’s not be dogmatic hard-liners when actual people could breathe more freely with just a bit of tinkering. The goal is not to reform or compromise enslavement, subjugation, abuse, cruelty, persecution, avariciousness, exploitation, predation, and oppression, so, OK, tinker, but let’s never lose sight of the north star: an end to prisons—abolition.
Similarly, talk of “defunding the police” is ridiculed in the commercial press, but we should ask ourselves, what qualities would make policing in a free and democratic society different from policing in an unfree or authoritarian society? Or, what is the link between aggressive and expensive policing and public safety? Is there any evidence that caging people makes us safer? And then we can perform once more the exercise we did regarding prison abolition, brainstorming one thousand steps toward police abolition:
■ Get guns off the streets, including guns in the hands of state agents.
■ Create massive public works programs.
■ Build homes for the unhoused.
■ Bring the endowments of all private schools, colleges, and universities under public and democratic control, and organize the redistribution of those resources toward a system of free quality education for all.
■ Use a public-health frame to rethink issues of violence.
■ Grant guaranteed income supports to the unemployed.
■ Provide a guaranteed living-wage stipend, free housing, and good childcare to anyone living at or below the poverty line and attending high school or community college.
■ Create a system of single-payer, universal health care.
■ Generously create and support community mental health programs.
■ Decriminalize illegal drugs and expand drug treatment centers to meet the real needs of people caught in the grip of addiction.
wow!!! Only 990 more items to discover and fight for!
I’m helping to organize a national network called CopagandaWatch, a collection of people dedicated to abolishing propaganda concerning public safety and policing, and replacing it with accurate data, verifiable facts, and compelling analysis. The term is the invention of the activist attorney Alec Karakatsanis. Here’s my “dictionary definition”:
“Copaganda (n.) Biased or misleading information generated to promote and publicize the point-of-view of organized police forces; deliberate misinformation spread by law enforcement bureaucracies and their political and media allies to confuse or pacify citizens; a coordinated effort to indoctrinate the public by creating a powerful positive narrative around police work and policing that is immune from fact-checking, counter-narratives, or lived experiences, and takes on, then, the odor of common sense; the Hollywood/TV spin on crime (the good-guys in blue versus the bad-guys in black) that dominates the nightly news; cop propaganda.”
Examples of the word used in a sentence:
The mayor’s description of the fatal police shooting was once again an instance of official copaganda, relying entirely on statements from the police department’s office of public relations.
The “exclusive” re-creation of the crime scene on Channel 2 Live Action News was copaganda based solely on lengthy interviews with two supervising detectives.
The profile of Officer Friendly in the “Features” section of Sunday’s paper was a classic puff piece—incurious, uncritical, one-sided—and another in a long and familiar line of copaganda stories that dominate the local press.
Copaganda foregrounds petty crime and presents it in all its gaudy detail while downplaying, hiding, or entirely ignoring other more serious crimes. Crime rates tend to capture a small subset of police-reported crimes committed by the poor and to exclude crimes committed by the wealthy. For example, property crime data reported by the police excludes most property crime, including wage theft by employers (which costs low-wage workers about $50 billion per year, three times more than all police-reported property crime that makes its way into “crime rates” and the nightly news), and tax evasion (which steals about $1 trillion every year, twenty times more than all wage theft and sixty-three times more than all police-reported property crime combined).6 The vast majority of all other types of crime—such as air and water pollution crimes, police perjury, prosecutor obstruction of justice, government corruption, insider stock trading, foreign bribery—are never reported to police and rarely pursued by prosecutors, and therefore they never show up in police-reported crime rates. Further, police-reported crime rates are generally lower in societies that spend less money on police, prosecutors, and prisons and that spend more money on health care, treatment, early childhood education, youth activities, poverty reduction, and wellness.7
CopagandaWatch is skeptical of a legal system that demands a high standard of evidence—beyond a reasonable doubt—to convict a person of a crime but allows caging millions without a shred of evidence that it does any good. We resist faith-based, fact-free approaches to questions of justice and safety. We’re critical of politicians who crow about public safety unless safety would require less inequality. We seek fact-based information.
CopagandaWatch engages people from a wide range of backgrounds, ages, regions, political perspectives, and occupations, including students and teachers, academics and scholars, professionals and laborers, fact-checkers and citizen-researchers. The network is not “anti-police”—in fact, charter members include police officers who understand the problem from the inside—but rather anti-copaganda, and pro-truth. The network came together in the belief that copaganda is in effect a Big Lie that has become so dominant in our country that it has had demonstrably negative impacts on our political system and our policy approach to public safety, justice, and criminal legal matters. It has distorted municipal, state, and national budgets, promoted a mythological link between safety and police, and led to a group of armed agents of the state roaming our streets free to do as they please. Copaganda needs to be abolished.
The way things are is not the way things have to be. We have choices to make and worlds to build. And none of this is possible in the absence of collective action and a social movement for radical transformation—we need to work collectively on a vision as part of the fight for abolition. We can abolish the ironclad logic of misbehavior = police = punishment = the cage, which leads onward and downward without end, and replace it with a logic of compassion and repair with incarceration as the last and least worthy alternative before us. Think of prison as the 1001st option—the last resort and not the default choice. We begin to frame the problem in different terms: recovery and restoration, forgiveness and redemption, grace and healing, public health and human rights, respect and faith. Alternatives liberate all of us from our own culturally imposed mental prisons, our dimmed consciousness and constrained imaginations. Without alternative ways of thinking and being, we become destined to be confined in a lockup state of mind.
Perhaps because we’ve lived so long in a culture of discipline and punish, or because copaganda has been so effective, or because traditional Puritanism became ravenous once again and demanded to be fed, or because our go-to-jail complex developed obsessive-compulsive disorder linked to attention-deficit hyperactivity—for these and other reasons, many folks hardly noticed as we slipped down the proverbial slope that Angela Davis, Ruthie Gilmore, Erica Meiners, Bernardine Dohrn, Beth Richie, and Dylan Rodriguez predicted, and we woke up living in a full-blown prison nation. That fact points to the true and deep-seated reason underneath the phenomenon of mass incarceration: white supremacy dressed up in modern garb. The system has been dubbed “the new Jim Crow” by the brilliant lawyer and scholar/activist Michelle Alexander, who points out that there are now more Black men in prison or on probation or parole than there were living in bondage as chattel slaves in 1850; that there are significantly more people caught up in the system of incarceration and supervision in America today—over six million folks—than inhabited Stalin’s gulag at its height; that the American gulag constitutes the second largest city in this country, and that while the United States is less than 5 percent of the world’s people, it holds over 25 percent of the world’s combined prison population; that in the past twenty years the amount states have spent on prisons has risen six times the rate spent on higher education; and that on any given day tens of thousands of men, overwhelmingly Black and Latino, are held in the torturous condition known as solitary confinement.8
Just as slavery was a defining fact of American life from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, racialized captivity and mass incarceration is a central feature in the US today. And just as the abolition of slavery was unimaginable to most Americans then, a society with no prisons or no police is difficult for many people to wrap their heads around now. But try it—imagine a world without prisons. When enough of us become liberated from the dogma of incarceration and the totalizing logic of captivity and control, we might mobilize ourselves to dive into the hard work of building a political movement to empty the prisons and shut them down. We may look back, just as we look back at slavery, with astonishment and anguish as we realize that the prison-industrial complex was a bad choice: it generated super-profits for a few while it vitalized white supremacy, ruined millions of human lives, devastated social capital, destroyed entire communities, and diminished our society. Slavery—the “peculiar institution”—made cruelty customary and callousness conventional, everyone forced to witness and embrace it as such, or to shut their eyes tight as communities were made more hard-hearted and hateful. Just as the abolition of slavery liberated enormous energy toward a more generous and compassionate social order, so a world without prisons will create the conditions for a more just and decent community for all.
Bernardine and I were in Montgomery, Alabama, on April 26, 2018, for the opening of the monumental National Memorial for Peace and Justice, commemorating the Black victims of lynching. The memorial is breathtaking, acknowledging past racial terrorism and advocating for racial and social justice. A few years earlier, we had visited the Museu Do Aljube in Lisbon with our dear Chicago friends James Thindwa from Zimbabwe and Martha Biondi. The museum is housed in the old prison where thousands of political prisoners and anticolonial freedom fighters were jailed and tortured during the dictatorship. We were moved and we were inspired. “Onward,” James said, fist in the air. Let’s build a world where one day our children or our grandchildren will visit the Museum of Mass Incarceration, the Museum of the Cops, and the Museum of Capitalism.
The brilliant geographer and intrepid abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues that the abolitionists of today, standing on the shoulders of the abolitionists who preceded us, are required to change just one thing: everything. Abolition is best understood not as a deletion or an erasure but rather as a collection of creative and complex acts of “world-building.”9 What kind of world would we need to build in order to have no slavery? our forebears asked. And what kind of world could we begin to create today that would render prisons and police and militarism obsolete, predation and exploitation relics of a cruel past? To do that, everything would have to change. Everything.
And abolition work—changing everything—is the practice of freedom.