This had changed by the time Kaba left college and returned to New York City to work with survivors of domestic violence. She was befuddled that many of the women she was working with did not want to call the police on their partners. Kaba said, Then I started asking people questions like, Why dont you want to go to the police? And people would look at me, like, What are you talking about? Why wouldnt I go to the cops? Do you not see who I am? The cops dont keep me safe. And so I slowly came to consciousness. In her book, Kaba writes, What happens when you define policing as actually an entire system of harassment, violence, and surveillance that keeps oppressive gender and racial hierarchies in place? When thats your definition of policing, then your whole frame shifts. And it also forces you to stop talking about it as though its an issue of individuals, forces you to focus on the systemic structural issues to be addressed in order for this to happen.
There is no definitive beginning point for prison-abolition politics, but it is clearly connected to a turn, beginning in the sixties, in American imprisonment, in which it went from a method, in part, of rehabilitation to one of control or punishment. During the civil-rights movement, police were the shock troops for the massive resistance of the white political establishment in the American South. By the mid-sixties, policing and the criminal-justice system were being retrofitted as a response to a growing insurgency in Black urban communities. By the seventies, they were being used to contain and control both Black radicals and Black prisoners. The scholar and activist AngelaY. Davis may be the best-known prison abolitionist in the United States today. But, in 1972, she was facing charges of kidnapping, murder, and conspiracy, after guns registered to her were used by the seventeen-year-old Jonathan Jackson, in a botched attempt to free his brother, the Black radical George Jackson, from Soledad prison.
Davis had become a leader of George Jacksons defense committee and had developed a close relationship with him. As a result of their collaboration, and of Daviss experience of spending sixteen months in jail before her acquittal, she devoted her political energies to prisoners rights and eventually to prison abolition. In an interview that she gave while awaiting the outcome of her trial, Davis said, We simply took it upon ourselves at first to defend George Jackson, John Clutchette, and Fleeta Drumgothe radicals known as the Soledad Brothers. But we later realized that the question was much broader than that. It wasnt simply a matter of three individuals who were being subject to the repressive forces of the penal system. It was the system itself that had to be attacked. It was the system itself that had to be abolished.
In 1995, the radical theorist Mike Davis wrote a cover story for The Nation describing a new prison-industrial complex being established in California, with no pretense that the exponential growth of prisons was tied to the rise and fall of crime. Indeed, according to the scholar and activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore, in her pathbreaking book Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, even though the crime rate peaked in 1980, between 1984 and the early two-thousands, California completed twenty-three major new prisons, at a cost of two hundred and eighty to three hundred and fifty million dollars each. By contrast, the state had built only twelve prisons between 1852 and 1964. Bodies were necessary to justify the rapid growth of the prison sector, and the Crime Bill of 1994, along with Californias three-strikes legislation, passed that same year, provided them. Gilmore writes that the California state prison population grew nearly 500 percent between 1982 and 2000. The three-strikes law, which mandated twenty-five-years-to-life sentences for a third felony, had an especially severe effect on Black and Latinx communities. Mike Davis reported that, during the first six months of prosecutions under the new law, African-Americans made up fifty-seven percent of the three strikes filings in L.A. County, even though they made up only ten per cent of the state population. This was seventeen times higher than the rate at which whites were being charged under the new law, even though white men were responsible for at least sixty percent of all the rape, robberies, and assaults in the state.
The three-strikes law was an accelerant to what would come to be called mass incarceration, but it was also the makings of a new movement against prisons and against the means and methods by which they became populatednamely, policing. In 1997, in Berkeley, Davis, Gilmore, and others formed the organizing group Critical Resistance, which brought together activists, the formerly incarcerated, and academics to build an international movement to end the prison industrial complex by challenging the belief that caging and controlling people make us safe. Ten years later, Gilmore published Golden Gulag, which she describes as the culmination of research projects undertaken with Black mothers of incarcerated persons in California state prisons. She wrote, What we learned twice over was this: the laws had written into the penal code breathtakingly cruel twists in the meaning and practice of justice. This produced new questions, extending far beyond the passage of new laws. The mothers, along with Gilmore, asked, Why prisons? Why now? Why for so many peopleespecially people of color? And why were they located so far from prisoners homes? In this sense, although academics have been important to formulating the movements arguments, the journey toward abolition is not an academic or intellectual exercise. Instead, it has been gestated within the communities deeply scarred by the disappearing of sons and daughters by the state.
By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the cumulative, devastating effects of twenty years of increasing policing and incarcerationinaugurated by Reagan but abetted by the policies of the Clinton Administrationcame into greater focus, as new conversations opened up about structural inequality in the United States. Michelle Alexanders book The New Jim Crow, published in 2010, offered a breakthrough analysis of continued Black inequality as a product of years of policing and imprisonment in Black communities. Kaba identifies the failure to stop the execution of the Georgia death-row inmate Troy Davis, in 2011, as catalyzing the emergence of an abolitionist consciousness among what Elizabeth Alexander has described as the Trayvon Generation. Five months after Daviss execution, Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman. Kaba noted that the call, when Trayvon Martin was killed, was to arrest and to prosecute and to convict Zimmerman. In 2014, after Michael Brown was killed, the push was to indict Darren Wilson, and for body cameras. Zimmerman was acquitted, and a grand jury failed to bring charges against Wilson. Kaba said, And, because so many of these young folks were actually mobilized in the organizing, they could see the futility of the demands that they were making and the limits of those demands, and wanted and were ready to hear something new.
That generations maturation in the world of police reform became apparent last summer, when many young activists and organizers began to embrace a demand that funding for police departments be redistributed to other public agencies and institutions. The demand originated in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed, and where the city council briefly committed to defunding the police department. But, Kaba said, its important to note that local Black radical organizationsBlack Visions Collective, Reclaim the Block, and MPD150had been campaigning for years to divest from the police department and invest in community groups, battling the police over the citys budget. She explained, Youve already got folks on the ground over there that have had two cycles of budget fights around defunding the police based on divestment. So the part of this people dont understand is the continuity of these ideas. They dont just come out of nowhere. People arent just yelling stuff randomly. It got picked up nationally because people were, like, This makes sense.
Although the demand to defund the police may have had its specific origins in Minneapolis, Kaba understands that the growing curiosity about abolitionist politics is rooted in something much broader. She said, People are frustrated by the way that the welfare state has completely been defunded. People dont have what they need to survive. And yet the military and prisons keep getting more and more and more. Contrary to the beliefs of their critics, abolitionists are not impervious to the realities of crime and violence. But they have a fundamental understanding that crime is a manifestation of social deprivation and the reverberating effects of racial discrimination, which locks poor and working-class communities of color out of schooling, meaningful jobs, and other means to keep up with the ever-escalating costs of life in the United States. These problems are not solved by armed agents of the state or by prisons, which sow the seeds of more poverty and alienation, while absorbing billions of dollars that might otherwise be spent on public welfare. The police and prisons arent solving these problems: they are a part of the problem.
At its core, abolitionist politics are inspired by the necessity for what Martin Luther King,Jr., described as the radical reconstruction of the entirety of U.S. society. They intend to promote systemic thinking instead of our societys obsession with personal responsibility. Derek Chauvins conviction was premised on the idea that he was personally responsible for George Floyds murder. The emphasis on his accountability distracts from a system of policing that administered his continued employment, even though eighteen complaints had been lodged against him during his nineteen-year career. Moreover, Chauvin was a field-training officer, who had trained two of the other officers who will face trial for participating in Floyds murder. Chauvin may be held to account for the killing, but neither the Minneapolis Police Department nor the elected officials charged with overseeing the M.P.D. will be held to account for allowing someone like Chauvin to be on the streets, let alone responsible for training others.
To approach harm systemically is to imagine that, if peoples most critical needs were met, the tensions that arise from deprivation and poverty could be mitigated. And when harm still occurs, because human beings have the propensity to hurt one another, nonlethal responses could attend to itand also to the reasons for it. To be sure, these are lofty aspirations, but they are no more unrealistic than believing that another study, expos, commission, firing, or police trial is capable of meeting the desire for change that, last summer, compelled tens of millions of ordinary people to pour into the streets. Indeed, the trial of Derek Chauvin could not even conclude before a Black man was killed at a traffic stop.
Our current criminal-justice system is rooted in the assumption that millions of people require policing, surveillance, containment, prison. It is a dark view of humanity. By contrast, Kaba and others in this emergent movement fervently believe in the capacity of people to change in changed conditions. That is the optimism at the heart of the abolitionist project. As Kaba insists in her book, The reason Im struggling through all of this is because Im a deeply, profoundly hopeful person. Because I know that human beings, with all of our foibles and all the things that are failing, have the capacity to do amazingly beautiful things, too. That gives me the hope to feel like we will, when necessary, do what we need to do. Abolition is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Even the guiding lights of the movement are embedded in campaigns for short-term reforms that make a difference in daily life. For Kaba, that has meant raising funds for mutual aid during the pandemic and campaigning for reparations in Chicago. For Gilmore, it has meant working with incarcerated people and their families to challenge the building of prisons across California. For Angela Davis, it has meant lending her voice to movements for civil and human rights, from Ferguson to Palestine. The point is to work in solidarity with others toward the world as they wish for it to be. Hope is a discipline, Kaba writes. We must practice it daily.
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The Emerging Movement for Police and Prison Abolition - The New Yorker