ABOLITION
Restorative Justice is focused on the importance of relationships. It is focused on the importance of repair when those relationships are broken, when violations occur in our relationships. It is very much interested in community, because it asks whose responsibility is it to actually meet the obligations and needs that are created through violation? It asks the community to step in fully, to be less of a bystander and more of an actor in trying to repair harm. And finally, it’s very much a framework and an ideology and a way of living that is interested in making sure that we remain in right relationship with each other, with the land, with the environment.
- Mariame Kaba, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us, 2021
What Are Some Other Ways to Approach Harm?
Abolition, by definition, is to abolish or “get rid of” an institution, system, or practice. Prison abolition then, is at its most basic, to abolish the prison system. When people first hear about this concept, they are often terrified, as we are trained to think that prisons are essential to our society, universal and timeless. The first question that people ask is: “what do we do with the bad people?”
However, prison abolition is not simply opening the doors to prisons and letting people free, but a total restructuring of our society, our understanding of crime and punishment, and the very ways that we interact with harm done on a base level. Abolition is not replacing the prison system with another form of punishment, but creating a world where prisons are not necessary, and the social factors that lead to inequalities and mass incarceration are obsolete.
Abolition is often written off as idealist, something that would never work in the “real world,” but this is again because of our socialization, and the formation of the prison industrial complex as natural, or even an alternative to worse forms of punishment. Abolition has always been feared, those who fought to abolish slavery were similarly considered utopian, as it was an industry, like prisons, that was seen as unchanging. Of course, we see this thinking enhanced with the direct link from slavery to the modern day prison system.
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But how do we achieve abolition, and what does abolition look like?
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Prison abolition is to both dismantle and create. Dismantling the prison system, (ie prisons and police) but also the structural inequalities that lead to crime. As expanded on here, a great number of factors go into making specific groups of people more vulnerable to crime, such as disproportionate surveillance and violence in Black communities. Also, our definitions of crime are dependent upon our socialization, as well as these structural inequalities. ‘Crime’ is an abstract concept, as what is considered crime is changing routinely based on new laws and the ever-changing shifts in social consciousness. After all, it was only recently that homosexuality was decriminalized in North America, but for a long time, society pushed the idea that to ‘engage in homosexual behavior’ was a crime.
This awareness of the ever-changing nature of society is something that abolition takes into consideration when thinking about ways to move forward. Abolition requires not only decriminalization, but also questioning what “crime” really means, and the ways that we individualize and moralize criminality. It is to dismantle then, our very understandings of the “black and white” definitions of criminality, and the binary between the supposed “criminal” versus “victim.” After all, if all of a sudden we start to think about how complex crime really is, and about how a crime does not necessarily need to cause harm in order to be charged, we begin to see how simplified crime really is in our legal system. And, as abolition makes us question: when dealing with peoples’ lives, do we want a generalized, over-simplified system in place that is so easily corrupted? Or might we begin to think about different ways that we could approach ideas of crime, harm, punishment, and accountability.
After all, abolition is not merely tearing down the system and leaving society to fend for itself. Abolition also requires building and creating, as if we opened the doors to all prisons today, we’d be wildly unprepared. Getting rid of the prison system without also tackling the root causes of violence and harm would only bring us right back to the same place that we are right now.
So, where do we start? This is such a huge undertaking and it’s not something that can merely be decided upon at the drop of a hat. If our current system doesn’t work, but tearing down our old one would only bring us right back to the place we are now, how do we begin?
First, abolition leans away from ideas of crime and of criminals. After all, as we’ve shown in our section on crime, there are many different kinds of crime in the current legal system, and very little of it has to do with harm. The legal system is supposedly set up to seek ‘justice for those harmed’, but if crimes like jaywalking, public intoxication, and loitering don’t harm anyone, why are they considered crimes?
Abolition focuses on harm done versus criminality. Instead of focusing on rigid legal frameworks, abolition turns its focus to people and to community. Instead of trying to find ways to punish people who do harm to others, abolition wonders why the person chose to harm another to begin with. It refuses to label people as criminals, and instead looks at the broader picture, because it’s easy to point at one person and claim that they’re simply “bad”. It’s a lot harder to acknowledge that it’s our social conditions that create harm and violence.
Abolition takes a hard look at what is currently lacking in our communities that make people feel as though they need to harm others. It focuses on locating the places where there are no supports, or where people are struggling, and it insists on building social services, both for the perpetrators of harm and those affected by it. Similarly, aware that if people don’t have access to the basic needs of survival, abolition is concerned with redirecting the funds that would have gone into the prison industrial complex into services that are preventative, to make sure that harm stops before it can happen.
Second, abolition turns its attention to people, not to governments. Abolition refuses to hand power over to the police in any capacity, and instead does what it can to keep community issues within the community. This mentality often overlaps with the tenets of transformative justice, where the person who did the harm and the person who was harmed come together to resolve their differences together. This does not always equal forgiveness; transformative justice doesn’t try to mandate forgiveness. What it does try to do is make the person who was harmed feel heard, and it does rally the community around both people to ensure that they can get to the bottom of what needs aren’t being met. However, abolition is not necessarily aligned with transformative justice. Instead, it focuses on removing power from state institutions and putting it in the hands of people who acknowledge that power is complicated and too much for one person to hold.
And, thirdly, abolition acknowledges that this is not a quick fix. Many people who are interested in abolition are quickly overwhelmed and disillusioned when they realize that the road to abolition is a long one. They feel powerless when they realize that there’s not much that they can personally do to change the systems around them.
They’re right. There’s not much that they can personally do to evoke abolition. However, abolition is not an individual goal. To individualize abolition would be to leap back into an unsteady balance of power, and that’s what abolition is against. Instead, abolition is about community. It’s about what we can do to make change happen over time. It’s coming together as a community, as groups, as coalitions. It’s protesting, it’s collectively refusing to call the police on our community members so that prisons and the legal systems aren’t called upon. It’s pushing for universal access to housing and health care and mental health services. It’s ensuring that our neighbors are not going hungry or cold, and that we all have what we need to live our lives comfortably.
After all, abolition already exists in certain places. If you’re doubtful, all you need to do is to turn your attention to a rich, gated white community. There, all needs are met, conflict tends to be solved within the community, police are not called on to canvas the neighborhood, and petty squabbles are easily resolved because everyone has what they need to survive.
If these places already exist, and if they already thrive so easily, why then are we told that violence is inevitable? Why are we warned that the police are necessary to ensure our safety when a gated community like that is safe without a police presence?