Many of the reformist reformists in the United States
like to strap themselves in airplanes
and go to Scandinavia, any Scandinavian country will do, and take tours of the prisons there because the prisons
are small and they're very bright and prisoners wear their own clothing.
And then they come back to the States and say, we're going to institute that kind of prison here,
and that's going to fix everything in the prison industrial complex. And what they always refuse to do,
or fail to do, is look at the entire society in which those lovely prisons are situated.
The entire robust welfare state that has these small prisons with big windows.
When we say, "let's abolish prisons," is let us make a society that makes it possible for people to live
with each other, to flourish, to have lives, education, jobs.
It means to decriminalize a lot of currently criminalized behavior. And it means, therefore in sum, to put into
everyday life, the money and people resources that now are so consolidated
in and shifted to police punishment and prisons.
There are a couple of different frameworks that people use for thinking about
and then engaging in the very messy and difficult practice of solving and resolving harm.
So restorative justice has become somewhat mainstreamed actually.
And the notion behind it is to figure out a way for somebody who committed some kind of harm to take
responsibility for that and to make it possible for the community as it were to be whole.
And that's usually presented in the mainstream as an alternative to punishment.
There's the other framework, which is the more abolitionist radical framework,
is called transformative justice.
And what makes it different from restorative justice is it starts from the presumption that it's not only
the person who messed up who needs to fix what they did, but there has to be some kind of
radical dependency within the community that people can acknowledge through an entire encounter in practice.
So it's not a trial, it's a process.
Abolishing police and abolishing prisons would have to go hand in hand. They feed each other, of course.
But more importantly, the institutions of what I call "organized violence," the institution of policing
and prisons, as well as the military,
absorb greater and greater
and greater resources materially.
Austerity has concentrated people's minds to the degree that they do imagine the only way to be safe
is to have the possibility of organized violence lined up on their behalf, rather than what we're seeing
in the streets today, which is people saying the way that we can be safe is by undoing the police,
by opening the jails and the prisons where people are dying at a phenomenal rate from COVID-19
and other harms, and doing something else with those resources in our households,
in our communities, in our cities and in the country.
We harken back to the most radical aspects of 19th-century abolitions.
So the abolition from the ground up that people like Du Bois wrote about in the early part of the 20th century,
people who had been enslaved, or working people of all races throughout the Atlantic working class who
fought to free themselves.
So contemporary abolition then was a way for a lot of us to try to think very concretely about
the global maldistribution of symbolic and material resources and what that global maldistribution sits on.
And what it sits on is an increasingly underemployed and stretched working class that is organized
through the violence of racism. And therefore, if we attack racism and its most extreme expressions,
then we're attacking racial capitalism and we're attacking the global maldistribution
of symbolic and material resources.
The abolition of prisons would not necessarily result in the abolition of capitalism, but one could not actually
realize their abolition without working to abolish capitalism.
The imagination about abolition of slavery seems to end at the moment where they think,
"Oh, slaves weren't paid. So freedom is being able to get a wage." Rather than, abolition is about undoing all
of the relations of power and difference that make people vulnerable to not only enslavement or unfreedom,
but also vulnerable to hunger, lousy health care, lousy public education, poisoned water
and all of the other things that modestly educated people in the prime of life and their extended
families across the generations encounter in the United States today.
I like to say that to be an abolitionist, you just have to change one thing: everything.
What do you do when the problem is actually in the public sector? The prisons and jails are public, 95%.
The cops are public. We're talking about public resources. We're talking about the social wage
and talking about what should happen with it.
For the last 40 years, places where inequality has gotten deeper and deeper and deeper led by the
United States, I have seen the greatest growth in prison and jail used as all-purpose solution to
social problems. Prison and jail can't be used as all-purpose solutions to social problems.