Abolition of police and prisons
Abolish is to flourish! Against the prison industrial complex and for transformative justice.
See Critical Resistance's definitions below:
The Prison Industrial Complex
The prison industrial complex (PIC) is a term we use to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems.
Through its reach and impact, the PIC helps and maintains the authority of people who get their power through racial, economic and other privileges. There are many ways this power is collected and maintained through the PIC, including creating mass media images that keep alive stereotypes of people of color, poor people, queer people, immigrants, youth, and other oppressed communities as criminal, delinquent, or deviant. This power is also maintained by earning huge profits for private companies that deal with prisons and police forces; helping earn political gains for "tough on crime" politicians; increasing the influence of prison guard and police unions; and eliminating social and political dissent by oppressed communities that make demands for self-determination and reorganization of power in the US.
Abolition
PIC abolition is a political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment.
From where we are now, sometimes we can't really imagine what abolition is going to look like. Abolition isn't just about getting rid of buildings full of cages. It's also about undoing the society we live in because the PIC both feeds on and maintains oppression and inequalities through punishment, violence, and controls millions of people. Because the PIC is not an isolated system, abolition is a broad strategy. An abolitionist vision means that we must build models today that can represent how we want to live in the future. It means developing practical strategies for taking small steps that move us toward making our dreams real and that lead us all to believe that things really could be different. It means living this vision in our daily lives.
Abolition is both a practical organizing tool and a long-term goal.
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Kelley says the things I mentioned at the Socialism 2023 Conference.
Lenin says a lot of things in S&R that can be contradictory, but on this specific matter about proletarian power during the dictatorship of the proletariat, he is correct. The proletariat needs a force to enforce their class rule. This cannot be confused with police or prisons. The armed force is the whole proletariat armed, whose political power flows not from the barrel of guns but from their ability to subvert and overturn their proletarianization. The problem with Lenin is that, whatever the reasons, he precisely ignored his own theory and set up his own police and prisons.
A final point, I disagree with Five over here on that police and prisons aren't specific to capitalism. Lenin's system was capitalist, he admitted so himself. The later USSR was capitalist too. There's a lot of different ways to define capitalism, but my favorite way is to define it with the historical contingency of the proletariat. Proletarian existed and their conditions did not tend towards the abolition of their class, therefore the system is capitalist.
Sure, precapitalist systems had their dungeons and their armies that enforced carceral power, heck the Romans obviously had a word for it, but these systems are vastly different from the historically contingent form carcerality takes today. I would place these systems as seeds of police and prisons, but not as how we understand these concepts today. It is also telling these carceral seeds co-emerged with capitalist seeds.