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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One time I was riding my bicycle to our city park. I had just started down the last stretch of back road to get there, and I was riding on the very edge of the road as I usually do where there's no sidewalks or bike lanes.
Anyways, a Marine Patrol truck came up behind me to pass, and there was nobody coming the other direction in the other lane, so he had plenty of room to pass. So what's the Marine Patrol driver do?..
As he starts to pass, he lays on his horn like an asshole. Not just a polite quick tap either, he really laid on it, as if I were in the way or something, when clearly I wasn't. He could have actually startled me and made me crash, but I'm not easily startled.
I didn't even look his way, I just threw him the middle finger. He said to me "You know I can arrest you right?". I said back "Fuck you, I knew you were there and I'm not in the road."
I guess the passenger in the truck told him that he was in the wrong, not me, because he didn't do shit but keep on driving to the park.
Fuck 'em LOL!
Cagers have no idea of the life-threatening bullshit that bikers mostly survive on a daily basis.