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What is Abolition?
The Original Abolitionist Movement
Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution
Origins of Police
Contemporary Abolitionist Movement
Resources
Library Materials on Prison Abolition
What is Abolition?
"Abolition refers to the immediate and unconditional end to slavery."
Laichas, Tom. “Abolition, 1856–1869.” Civil War and Reconstruction, Third Edition, Facts On File, 2017. African-American History, online.infobase.com/Auth/Index?aid=17226&itemid=WE01&articleId=198467. Accessed 18 June 2020.
"For purposes of my analysis, I find especially useful three central tenets that are common to formulations of abolitionist philosophy. First, today’s carceral punishment system can be traced back to slavery and the racial capitalist regime it relied on and sustained. Second, the expanding criminal punishment system functions to oppress black people and other politically marginalized groups in order to maintain a racial capitalist regime. Third, we can imagine and build a more humane and democratic society that no longer relies on caging people to meet human needs and solve social problems. These tenets lead to the conclusion that the only way to transform our society from a slavery-based one to a free one is to abolish the prison industrial complex."
Roberts, Dorothy E. (November 2019). "The Supreme Court 2018 Term — Foreword: Abolition Constitutionalism" (PDF). Harvard Law Review. 133 (1): 1–122.
"You may be new to abolition as a movement or concept. While definitions range widely, the essence of abolitionism is the construction of a society without imprisonment and policing. It is about dismantling institutions and systems like prisons, jails, detention centers, psychiatric institutions, policing, immigration restriction, state surveillance, and many others. However, it is also about building. Prison abolitionists follow those dreamers and warriors who imagined an end to the slave economy and settler colonialism on which the US was founded. We imagine what would be required for a society without prisons, and propose different means to support collective thriving and more effective ways to address harms."
Abolition Journal (June 2020). "If You’re New to Abolition: Study Group Guide." https://abolitionjournal.org/studyguide/
The Original Abolitionist Movement
"The goal of the movement was to abolish or end slavery [...] as a social movement, opposition to slavery can be traced to 1831, when William Lloyd Garrison organized the New England Anti-Slavery Society, and to 1833, when he formed the American Anti-Slavery Society [...] As a movement, the abolitionists had relatively few resources. The authority of the federal government, the governments of the southern states, and most of the states of the North were arrayed against it. The majority of the white population in its size and solidarity was against the movement. [...]
Given this asymmetrical power relationship between the movement and its adversaries, its leaders were almost from the outset divided among themselves over strategy and tactics. First, some like Garrison were committed primarily to the use of morality—moral suasion—and nonviolence as the primary strategies of the movement. Although Frederick Douglass, the principal black leader of the movement, was for a time committed to Garrison's approach, when it proved unsuccessful he eventually embraced political action in the form of support for third parties that were opposed to slavery or its extension beyond the South. Douglass also eventually embraced violent resistance and rebellion as tactics, but his embrace was a reluctant tactical shift. Others in the movement, such as John Brown, Henry Highland Garnet, and David Walker, embraced violence as a fundamental strategy of the movement."
Smith, Robert C. “Abolitionist Movement.” Encyclopedia of African-American Politics, Second Edition, Facts On File, 2014. African-American History, online.infobase.com/Auth/Index?aid=17226&itemid=WE01&articleId=160242. Accessed 18 June 2020.
Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution
"Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."
Thirteenth Amendment : US Constitution. FindLaw. https://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment13.html
Dam, Sofie Louise. (September 2016). "Inmates Are Planning The Largest Prison Strike in US History" The Nib. https://thenib.com/inmates-are-planning-the-largest-prison-strike-in-us-history/
Origins of Police
"Well before the London Metropolitan Police were formed, Southern cities like New Orleans, Savannah, and Charleston had paid, full-time police who wore uniforms, were accountable to local civilian officials, and were connected to a broader criminal justice system. These early police forces were derived not from the informal watch system as happened in the Northeast, but instead from slave patrols, and developed to prevent revolts. They had the power to ride onto private property to ensure that slaves [sic] were not harboring weapons or fugitives, conducting meetings, or learning to read or write. They also played a major role in preventing slaves from escaping to the North, through regular patrols on rural roads [...] This was done through constant monitoring and inspection of the black population. [...] The only limit on police power was that enslaved people were someone else's property; killing one could result in civil liability to the owner. In rural areas the transition from slave patrols to police was slower, but the basic functional connection was just as strong.
"When slavery was abolished, the slave patrol system was too; small towns and rural areas developed new and more professional forms of policing to deal with the newly freed black population. The main concern of this time period was not so much preventing rebellion as forcing newly freed blacks into subservient economic and political roles. New laws outlawing vagrancy were used extensively to force blacks to accept employment, mostly in the sharecropping system. Local police enforced poll taxes and other voter suppression efforts to ensure white control of the political system.
"Anyone on the roads without proof of employment was quickly subjected to police action. Local police were the essential front door of the twin evils of convict leasing and prison farms. Local sheriffs would arrest free blacks on flimsy to nonexistent evidence, then drive them into a cruel and inhumane criminal justice system whose punishments often resulted in death. These same sheriffs and judges also received kickbacks and in some cases generated lists of fit and hardworking blacks to be incarcerated on behalf of employers, who would lease them out to perform forced labor for profit."
Vitale, Alex S. The End of Policing. Brooklyn, NY: Verso. 2017. Print.
"MUHAMMAD: One of the really powerful expressions of how important policing and punishment were in the conception of the end of slavery was that the 13th Amendment abolished slavery except as punishment for crime. So in some ways, the genius of the former Confederate states was to say, oh, well, if all we need to do is make them criminals and they can be put back in slavery, well, then that's what we'll do. And that's exactly what the black codes set out to do. The black codes, for all intents and purposes, criminalized every form of African American freedom and mobility, political power, economic power, except the one thing it didn't criminalize was the right to work for a white man on a white man's terms.
"ABDELFATAH: So when it comes to the police force specifically, and by police, I'm referring to sort of these slave patrols, what happens to them and how do they then morph into something new for this new context in which emancipation is the new reality?
"MUHAMMAD: Yeah. So this system of essentially tracking black people's movements to control them needed a similar kind of armed and/or empowered law enforcement constituency. So on one hand, you do have the growth of a formal bureaucratic nuts-and-bolts police system that emerges by the late 1860s, 1870s. You know, prisons are being remodeled or expanded and built. Prison farms are beginning to open."
Throughline: American Police (1 hour podcast)
Contemporary Abolitionist Movement
Abolitionist movements seek an unconditional end to slavery, and the US Constitution includes the condition that slavery is legal as punishment for a crime, so contemporary abolitionist movements seek the abolition of the entire criminal justice system including policing, prisons, and detention centers. The abolitionist movement is currently seeing a surge in interest in mainstream publications due to global actions, protest, and uprisings in response to widespread police brutality and extrajudicial murder of Black people on the street or in their homes.
Just like in earlier abolitionist movements, there are a range of supporters as well as internal discussion and disagreement on tactics. Some common tactics to contribute to the process of abolition are to defund the police and to teach communities how to solve problems without contacting police in order to minimize interaction between community members and police.
In a recent opinion piece in The New York Times, "Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police," abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba writes:
"The surest way of reducing police violence is to reduce the power of the police, by cutting budgets and the number of officers. But don’t get me wrong. We are not abandoning our communities to violence. We don’t want to just close police departments. We want to make them obsolete. We should redirect the billions that now go to police departments toward providing health care, housing, education and good jobs. If we did this, there would be less need for the police in the first place. We can build other ways of responding to harms in our society. Trained 'community care workers' could do mental-health checks if someone needs help. Towns could use restorative-justice models instead of throwing people in prison."
Kaba, Mariame. "Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police" The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html
A group of abolitionists across the United States including Mon Mohapatra, Leila Raven, Nnennaya Amuchie, Reina Sultan, K Agbebiyi, Sarah T. Hamid, Micah Herskind, Derecka Purnell, Eli Dru, and Rachel Kuo wrote an explanation of their proposals towards abolition on the site "8 to Abolition":
"We further believe that abolition necessitates decolonization. Settlers on this land have no right to build jails, confine, and terrorize people who have always been here. We recognize that all police and prisons will not disappear tomorrow. Instead, we believe in the strategic importance of non-reformist reforms, or measures that reduce the scale, scope, power, authority, and legitimacy of criminalizing institutions. We also recognize carceral agents’ constant attempts to co-opt and rebrand abolition through the language of harm reduction, as we are currently witnessing with the #8CantWait campaign. We envision abolition as not only a matter of tearing down criminalizing systems such as police and prisons that shorten the lives of Black, brown, and poor people, but also a matter of building up life-sustaining systems that reduce, prevent, and better address harm. We seek a reparations model, wherein our communities that have been harmed by policing and mass criminalization for centuries are given their due from every corporation and institution that has profited from policing."
Mohapatra, Mon; Raven, Leila; Amuchie, Nnennaya; Sultan, Reina; Agbebiyi, K; Hamid, Sarah T.; Herskind, Micah; Purnell, Derecka; Dru, Eli and Rachel Kuo. "8 to Abolition." 2020. https://www.8toabolition.com/why
8 to Abolition advocates the following steps towards abolition: Defund police; Demilitarize communities; Remove police from schools; Free people from prisons and jails; Repeal laws that criminalize survival; Invest in community self-governance; Provide safe housing for everyone; and Invest in care, not cops.
Critical Resistance calls for abolitionist steps as opposed to "reformist reforms." (PDF)
Resources
Library Materials on Prison Abolition
- Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-first Century
"In the wake of the murder of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012 and the exoneration of his killer, three black women activists launched a hashtag and social-media platform, Black Lives Matter, which would become the rubric for a larger movement. To many, especially those in the media, Black Lives Matter appeared to burst onto the national political landscape out of thin air. But as Barbara Ransby shows in Making All Black Lives Matter, the movement has roots in prison abolition, anti-police violence, black youth movements, and radical mobilizations across the country dating back at least a decade. Ransby interviewed more than a dozen of the movement's principal organizers and activists, and she provides a detailed review of its extensive coverage in mainstream and social media. Making All Black Lives Matter offers one of the first overviews of Black Lives Matter and explores the challenges and possible future for this growing and influential movement."
- Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex
Pathologized, terrorized, and confined, trans/gender-non-conforming and queer folks have always struggled against the enormity of the prison industrial complex. The first collection of its kind, Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith bring together current and former prisoners, activists, and academics to offer new ways for understanding how race, gender, ability, and sexuality are lived under the crushing weight of captivity. Through a politic of gender self-determination, this collection argues that trans/queer liberation and prison abolition must be grown together. From rioting against police violence and critiquing hate crimes legislation, to prisoners demanding access to HIV medications, and far beyond, Captive Genders is a challenge for us all to join the struggle. (See a preview here)
- Abolishing Carceral Society: Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics
Beyond border walls and prison cells -- carceral society is everywhere. In a time of mass incarceration, immigrant detention and deportation, rising forms of racialized, gendered, and sexualized violence, and deep ecological and economic crises, abolitionists seek to understand and dismantle interlocking institutions of oppression. These oppressions have many different names and histories and so, to build bridges across a multitude of movements, abolition articulates a range of languages and experiences between and within systems of domination to radically transform the world in which we find ourselves. Abolishing Carceral Society presents the bold and ruthlessly critical voices of today's revolutionary abolitionist movements. This collection of essays, poems, artwork, and interventions edited by the Abolition Collective calls us to the urgent task of reimagining and transforming the world rooted in creative, collaborative, and liberatory struggle
- Freedom is a Constant Struggle : Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundation of a Movement
prison abolitionism for today's struggles, Davis discusses the legacies of previous liberation struggles, from the Black Freedom Movement to the South African anti-Apartheid movement. She highlights connections and analyzes today's struggles against state terror, from Ferguson to Palestine. Facing a world of outrageous injustice, Davis challenges us to imagine and build the movement for human liberation. And in doing so, she reminds us that "Freedom is a constant struggle."
- Are Prisons Obsolete?
In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for "decarceration", and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole.
- The Revolution Starts at Home
"The Revolution Starts at Home is as urgently needed today as when it was first published. This watershed collection breaks the dangerous silence surrounding the "secret" of intimate violence within social justice circles. Just as importantly, it provides practical strategies for dealing with abuse and creating safety without relying on the coercive power of the state. It offers life-saving alternatives for survivors, while building a movement where no one is left behind."-AK Press.
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