Abolition of police and prisons

342 readers

1 users here now

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.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

mambabasa

Five

Against Carceral Communism, for Abolition Communism (haters.noblogs.org)

submitted 1 year ago by mambabasa to c/abolition

1 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Abolition communism is not a qualitatively new form of communism but rather an integration of abolitionist and communist consciousness. Abolition communism is the idea that communist measures must simultaneously be abolitionist steps. This does not mean that abolitionist steps such as the defunding of police and decarceration of prisoners are necessarily communist measures, though these steps do make communist organizing under capitalism easier. Rather, communist measures implemented by abolitionist communists dismantle systems of policing and incarceration simultaneous to dismantling wage-labor, the State, work, et cetera, precisely because policing and incarceration are central to the rule of capital. The freeing of the prisoners and setting fire to the prisons does more for the proletariat than a hundred programs.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Five 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Even anarchists are not immune to reproducing carcerality. There have been moments where revolutionary anarchists in the Spanish and Ukrainian Revolutions reproduced policing with militants of the Federación Anarquista Ibérica even operating a concentration camp for fascists. More recently, we have seen carcerality reproduced in radical projects like the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest. There, individuals who took it upon themselves to act as the new people’s police shot and killed Black teens. It matters not if the anarcho-concentration camp was leagues better than Stalinist gulags or if the anarcho-police are somehow better; abolition means the doing away of the anarcho-police and anarcho-prisons as well.

I think Magsalin puts too fine a point on it here, and is directly contradicted by the Bonanno quote he uses. The black teens in question stole a Jeep Cherokee in the middle of the night after stabbing its owner with a pickaxe, drove it through the Autonomous Zone barricade and reportedly fired haphazardly at people trying to escape while weaving erratically on the grass where people were sleeping in the park. Volunteers, organized and armed by other young black people in response to violent threats by fascist vigilantes and cars driving by the barricades and firing into the camp, fired back and stopped the vehicle. They successfully defended the autonomous zone from terror caused for the benefit of the state, and even used their volunteer medical services to get the injured assailants medical attention and saved the younger black child's life.

The death of Antonio Mays Jr. was tragic, but in losing his life, other lives may have been saved. How does condemning the commune's self-defense not completely contradict "Hurry comrade, shoot the policeman, the judge, the boss... Hurry to arm yourself" ? One reading would suggest Bonanno would celebrate both teens' summary execution. The purpose of police is to defend capital, it is not merely a person with a cause and a gun. The defenders of the movement on Chapel Hill saved lives, even those that belonged to their enemies.