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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Thanks for this - it'll take me awhile to work through it, especially because I'm already bouncing off it (questioning existing systems is usually like that, though the sheer scope of things they're reevaluating before providing solutions is a little overwhelming). I'll get it eventually; it's something I've been on the lookout for.
In the small bit of solarpunk fiction I've read and discussions I've seen, I've felt a bit like the genre/community sort of sidesteps questions around the use and preventions of violence and how to handle individuals and groups who want to cause harm (with the exception of Walkaway, and Terraformers for opposing organizations). I know the underlying philosophies and movements like anarchism have been around for a long time so I figured they had answers, but haven't dug into them yet.
I suppose I'm pessimistic enough to see bad times ahead - scarcity of airable land, water, and society-derived stuff like medicines - and to expect that any more solarpunk societies would only build themselves up in space made mostly after our current systems break enough not to oppose them. With that kind of postapocalyptic bent in mind, it's tempting to picture something like the old west or early colonial societies' answers to these questions. I'm interested to see the alternatives.
The future that abolitionists work towards is quite similar to a solarpunk vision—in that everyone's needs are to be met and humanity is to live in harmony with the natural world. This is because meeting needs—including land and ecological rights—are integral to a future without policing or incarceration.