Prison Abolition: Never Too Late to Decarcerate

Prison Abolition: Never Too Late to Decarcerate!

Freedom exists for all and focus should remain on the most impacted citizens. Global society will not be liberated without rectifying the 500-Year-War on Black, Indigenous people on Turtle Island via Christian imperialist conquest and patriarchal prison labor!

We consider modern jails as the Americas' plantation system end result. Expansion into peonage (debt slavery which targeted African-Americans after Reconstruction) created a prison-industrial complex with incenvitized criminalization. Now this aggressive issue is not unique to the U.S., but consider that 25% of Earth's prisoners are here.

Karl Marx referenced pre-Civil War peonage throughout Mexican land in Das Kapital. Hegel elaborated on this well-known fact in “Philosophie des Rechts.” (Marxists.org)

Prison abolition affects historically anti-capitalist communities like Native American, Afro-descended, workers' movements and internationalists because the state's punitive system for dissent IS prison, especially when we see its connection to leftist and non-white individuals.

Intersectionality (an academic term by Kimberle Crenshaw) describes the overlapping identities of oppression in anti-Black structures from an institutitional to personal level. Black LGBTQ, undocumented immigrants experience different bias than a documented, straight Black person. A middle-income Latinx employee may benefit from lighter skin and having no criminal record.

We mention income since bail is often dependent on affordability across the United States. Read BYP co-chair Nnennaya Amuchie's article about the PIC connection on Rewire. They work toward reversing harm against LGBTQIA, imprisoned and poor people's lives.

And again, #EndSARS is a decentralized Naija movement to decarcerate the country!

PRINCIPLES

Black Youth Project, Current Movements, 8 to Abolition, Showing Up for Racial Justice, SONG, Prison Policy and many essential people out here are incredibly compassionate, impactful leaders on a decarceral path--prison abolition. They aim for a decolonial, progressive society instead of perpetual violence. We must be anti-harm and uplift truth for independence.

SURJ's values remind us as continually growing resisters (CW: police brutality): "Every person has their own story about why they started to do this work. Maybe they saw violence as a queer person that connected them to violence people of color experience at the hands of police. They may have grown up poor and seen how racism and money are connected. These stories help us find our mutual interest." Learn more!

Prison Policy's resource guide addresses carceral holds on us through nine perspectives. The Prison Research Education Action Project (Faye Knopp) still applies forty-five years later!

8 to Abolition is a response to Campaign Zero's pro-police reform: #8CantWait. Its authors are amplified voices from communities who have clear demands: K. Agbebiyi, Nnennaya Amuchie, Eli Dru, Sarah T. Hamid (Carceral Tech), Micah Herskind, Rachel Kuo, Mon Mohapatra, Leila Raven and more necessary organizers.

TACTICS

Transformative justice, community accountability processing, facilitation training, mutual aid and social tools for harm reduction all provide a preferable police alternative. This framework has been consolidated from Current Movements' teach-in, Angela Davis, PPI+.

Davis enlightened listeners on 2005 that "the most difficult question for advocates of prison abolition is how to establish a balance between reforms that are clearly necessary to safeguard the lives of prisoners and those strategies designed to promote the eventual abolition of prisons as the dominant mode of punishment.

...Demands for improved health care, including protection from sexual abuse and challenges to the myriad ways in which prisons violate prisoners' human rights, can be integrated into an abolitionist context that elaborates specific decarceration strategies and helps to develop a popular discourse on the need to shift resources from punishment to education, housing, health care, and other public resources and services."

Reconciliation is group or peer-to-peer meditation for one person, and de-platforming to someone else. Our approach is interdependent on the context and choice to eliminate hurt.

ORGANIZATIONS AND PEOPLE TO SUPPORT

Black LGBTQIA+ Migrant Project (Transgender Law Center)

Blackout Collective

Black Youth Project Chapters (About Us)

Carceral Tech

End SARS Response Unit

Hot Girl Abolitionist

Queer Trans Nigerian Collective

Prison Policy

Solutions Not Punishment Collective

Stop Police Terror Project D.C.

READING/RESOURCES