BEYOND PUNISHMENT
It was a freezing cold, grey October day in London. My hands and feet were numb but, transfixed by what I was hearing, I didn’t want to go home. It was 2018 and I’d travelled to the capital to join the annual United Families and Friends Campaign demonstration for the first time. The procession, from Trafalgar Square to Downing Street – the home of the Prime Minister – was led by family and friends of people who had died in state ‘care’: police custody, prison, immigration detention and psychiatric institutions. One by one they took to the mic. Every story was harrowing. Some were about people who had approached the state apparatus for help, only for their loved ones to end up dead.
This was a catalyst for me to learn more about the long-standing abolition movement organizing to abolish prisons, police and the systems that support them.
The term ‘abolitionist’ comes from the movement to end the transatlantic slave trade. As writer and activist Mariame Kaba told the New York Times Magazine in 2019: ‘This work will take generations, and I’m not going to be alive to see the changes… Similarly I know that our ancestors, who were slaves, could not have imagined my life.’1
Abolition is a construction project and the ground-works have already started. Across the world people are working to get others out of prison and reduce the power of police. But they are also working to build communities that are no longer reliant on punitive state-run law enforcement agencies.
‘I needed abolition,’ says Chelsea, a member of UK-based collective Cradle Community. When she first learned just how bad prisons, policing and the entire system were she felt hopeless. ‘Then I learned about all the people who were doing stuff about it… Abolition gave me something to be joyous about, to be excited about, to look forward to.’
Abolition is a process, and in part involves pushing for ‘non-reformist reforms’ that reduce – not expand or give more power to – prisons, police or the surveillance state. But there is no one-size-fits-all
