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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That makes much more sense, focusing on rehabilitation and prison reform, re-forming the criminal justice system.
What I'm hearing from the community here, though, is "this is bad" rather than "this is how to make it better."
Abolition of what I'm assuming it's the American carceral system makes sense, and it needs some discrete goals to focus on, rather than "not what we have now".
A lack of practical solutions is where anarchism rises or stagnates.
The pirate party in Sweden successes because their mission was very clear, to reform copyright law from punitive for consumers to practical for the artists, and then on strengthening the right to privacy.
Any "abolition" movement should have clear stated intentions; getting rid of broad foundations of the current system without even theoretical replacements or organization necessarily results in an entropic echo chamber of ultimately dead air.
You're making a lot of assumptions without doing the work of engagement. You're literally making stuff up about what abolitionists and anarchists believe. Please instead read something by Interrupting Criminalization or Critical Resistance instead of making stuff up.
I'm directly responding to the community info, the posts made in the community, and your responses with very specific suggestions and concrete examples.
Browsing a small sub hardly gives you mastery over a subject matter. Please do some self-study instead of making bad assumptions.