Abolition of police and prisons

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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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Five

The “forgotten fight” for prison abolition in France (roarmag.org)

submitted 1 year ago by mambabasa to c/abolition

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Long-time prison abolitionist Jacques Lesage de La Haye reflects on decades of anti-prison organizing in France and his personal journey from inmate to activist.

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[–] Five 2 points 1 year ago

At the Centrale where I served my time from 1958 to 1968, there were no anarchist prisoners. The prison population was poor and apolitical. I didn’t have much contact with people fighting from inside. It was only from the 1970s onwards that a fringe of prisoners became politicized. However, in the GIP, I saw prisoners released from the Centrale in Melun, like Serge Livrozet, who called themselves anarchists. I read up on this political current and I learned that it completely fit with my ideas. Livrozet wrote the book De la Prison à la Révolte (“From Prison to Revolt,” not translated in English), and co-founded the CAP with myself and some others.

This and the Behind the Bastards episode on Makno really emphasize the importance of prison activism to anarchist revolution. With enough anarchists and anarchist literature on the other side of the wall, prisons become universities of political theory. Anarchist ideas have helped prisoners organize and strike for better living conditions inside, and several prominent anarchists who have changed their communities and the world for the better discovered their anarchism with the help of other prisoners, including Jaccques Lesage de La Haye and Nestor Makno.