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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mambabasa

Five

Cops, Colleges, and Counterinsurgency: An Interview with Dylan Rodriguez (www.blackagendareport.com)

submitted 1 year ago by mambabasa to c/abolition

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Many of us observed this firsthand during the two-plus years of organizing and mobilizing the Cops Off Campus movement within the statewide University of California system and across North Amerika. Many of the academics—included those tenured and relatively financially secure—who publish, teach, tweet, post, and eagerly broadcast their critiques of state violence and policing were nowhere to be found when it came to supporting what i considered to be a relatively modest, contained attempt to confront campus police departments and their long histories of repression and profiling. This absence was unsurprising, but no less disappointing and enraging.

Don’t get it twisted: i’m not throwing this criticism out there with some projected threshold of “authentic” participation from these people—i’m saying that the academics i have in mind were wholly absent. Zero. These people know who they are. You know who you are. They ghosted the whole thing and wanted nothing to do with the collective work of confronting police violence on their own campuses. It was their loss, because this period of campus-based organizing and collaboration built and strengthened a continuum of relationships between scholars who were actively exceeding and contributing to the obsolescence of the “academic” position.

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