Abolition on the Horizon
For many Americans, prison is entrenched in their minds as an indispensable and indissoluble institution necessary to preserve public safety. Police are viewed as honorable authority figures who maintain law and order by rightfully locking away the harmful individuals that pose threats to our communities. Decades of propaganda have injected these fallacious perceptions into our society, thus dismissing alternatives to these institutions as unnecessary, impractical, and even dangerous. In reality, policing and incarceration are deeply pernicious to public safety and public health and should be strategically dismantled.
All too often, police violence results in traumas, injuries, and deaths that disproportionately affect marginalized populations including people of color, immigrants, low-income communities, people with disabilities, and the LGBTQ+ community. In jails and prisons, incarcerated people suffer from mental health issues, substance abuse issues, and chronic health conditions that are frequently left unaddressed and untreated.
Recently, jails, prisons, and detention centers have also witnessed the devastating impact of COVID-19. At least 43,967 people in prison have tested positive for the illness, and there have been at least 522 reported deaths from coronavirus. Michigan, in particular, has the third highest number of cases in prisons and the second highest number of deaths in prisons.
Dr. Nora Krinitsky, a historian of the carceral system and the interim director for the University of Michigan Prison Creative Arts Project, notes that the built environment of prisons makes isolation and social distancing almost impossible. Due to overcrowding and unsanitary conditions that predated the pandemic, Michigan prisons have become incubators for the virus. Those who show and report any symptoms are immediately segregated in solitary confinement cells. Dr. Krinitsky contends that “…the prison system [is] using a traumatizing, violent punitive measure as a public health tool” and that this pandemic has “exacerbated all the things that were already incredibly huge disasters and human rights violations” inside of prisons.
Given the rampant injustices and indignities within the carceral system, the idea of abolition is increasingly gaining relevance. The movement comprises a vast network of activists, community organizers, writers, and thinkers who seek to address the root problems that lead to policing and mass incarceration. Through the reimagining and reorganization of society, abolitionists believe in gradually shifting from a system of punitive mechanisms to rehabilitative, restorative, survivor-centered practices that provide opportunities for redemption and growth.
Abolition cannot be understood without understanding the insidious rubric of the prison-industrial complex. Critical Resistance, one of the organizations that brought the abolition movement to prominence, defines the prison-industrial complex as the “overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems.” Most abolitionists are not only critics of the carceral system, but also critics of the capitalist system that has allowed corporations to pounce on any opportunity to privatize prison services and financially exploit the poor.
From food to communication to healthcare services, more than half of the $80 billion spent annually on incarceration is used to pay the vendors that operate within prisons. These companies consistently prioritize their own economic gains at the expense of incarcerated people’s livelihoods and health.
Michigan is no stranger to this phenomenon. In 2014, 30 people were treated for food poisoning days after maggots were found in the food service lines at Parnall Correctional Facility in Jackson, Michigan. Aramark, the company involved, has even served literal garbage to people at the Saginaw Correctional Facility. In 2017, a man complained about having chest pain and difficulty breathing at the Cotton Correctional Facility in Jackson. Corizon Health, the company hired to handle healthcare inside prisons, sent him back to his cell where he collapsed and died. In 2019, phone calls through ICSolutions at Mecosta County Jail in 2019 cost incarcerated people and their families nearly $173,000. These incidents are not isolated and unrelated; they are reflective of how companies are less concerned with the wellbeing of incarcerated people and more concerned with making as much money as possible.
Abolitionists recognize that prisons are fraught with cruel, inhumane, and degrading conditions that are no places for any human being to live. These are not places where people have access to nutritious food, clean water, sanitary washrooms, proper ventilation, natural daylight, free communication, and robust healthcare. These are places of ubiquitous brutality, sexual abuse, and exploitative penal labor in which people are mentally ill, overcoming substance abuse, and struggling to recover from trauma. These are neither places that address criminogenic circumstances nor places that promulgate justice. These are places of suffocation that effectively reproduce the conditions that lead people to prison in the first place. In fact, a study conducted in Michigan concluded that imprisonment is an ineffective intervention in preventing post-release violence and may actually lead to an increase in post-release violence.
Dr. Krinitsky points out that from an ideological perspective, abolition is about “…abolishing the very logics that tell us that punishment is the best way to govern.” Perhaps one of the most profound misconceptions regarding the abolition movement is that abolitionists seek to bulldoze over every carceral structure with the snap of their fingers. This conjecture fails to realize that abolition actually advocates for taking steps toward programs that help people struggling with issues such as homelessness, poverty, substance abuse, and employment instead of criminalizing and alienating them from society. The long-term goal is to render facilities of incarceration obsolete and replace them with lasting alternatives.
Instead of using prisons as de facto psychiatric hospitals, homeless shelters, and detox centers, abolitionists seek to create life-sustaining facilities and programs for those who desperately need them. Instead of responding to mental health emergencies with police officers who throw people in jail, abolitionists are interested in building response programs that dispatch behavioral specialists and health professionals to provide assistance. Instead of fortifying the school-to-prison pipeline, abolitionists support funding for schools to have diverse counselors, social workers, psychologists, and nurses without relying on police officers to handle the manifold problems that students face. Instead of punishing people for struggling with the disease of addiction and homeless people for sleeping on park benches, abolitionists would rather construct accessible treatment centers and safe housing options. Instead of subjecting people to an adversarial court system and locking them in cages for committing transgressions, abolitionists work on developing restorative justice models that involve the person who committed the harm, person impacted by the harm, and community impacted by the harm in the decision-making process of how to redress the harm. Clearly, abolition is capacious.
One of the most common questions about abolition asks what will be done about those who perpetrate sexual violence. This question suggests that our current system is effectively dealing with those individuals. Rapists, for example, roam everywhere from our workplaces to our campus fraternities to our own government. Only 5.7% of rapes end in arrest, tens of thousands of rape kits have gone untested, and less than 1% of reported rapes actually lead to convictions. Furthermore, this is a movement that is heavily led by Black women, a demographic that experiences high rates of sexualized and gendered violence. It is deeply contemptuous to suggest that they would develop a framework that excludes this lived experience.
Recently, the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd have prompted protesters all over the world to take to the streets in their condemnation of systemic racism and police brutality. In response, police departments are tactically weaponizing mace, flash bangs, and teargas to quell the protests. Given the growing consciousness of police violence, some reformists are arguing that it is better to invest in police departments and provide them with extensive training and body cameras in order to prevent harm and increase responsibility for their actions. However, these measures have not been enough. The Minneapolis Police Department spent millions of dollars on implicit bias training, established dialogues to foster ties between the police and community, and created an intervention program to detect problematic officers. Yet, George Floyd was still killed.
Moreover, body cameras and dashboard cameras do not protect people from being harmed by the police because increased technology bolsters the powerful complex of community surveillance without producing any accountability. One study examined Washington DC’s comprehensive body camera program and concluded that there was no statistically significant effect on use of force by police officers. Researchers at George Mason University’s Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy looked at 70 other studies and similarly found that cameras do not have statistically significant effects on most measures of officer behavior. In some cases, officers refuse to turn the cameras on when they are planning on using force. Frustratingly, even when they do, obtaining and releasing footage from these cameras can be an immensely bureaucratic process. Video footage cannot save lives if it cannot substantially change police practices.
The abolitionist response to policing seeks to demilitarize and defund police departments by strategically reallocating funding towards emergency response programs that disconnect health crises from police response, design community-based sexual assault centers, develop publicly financed housing, promote anti-violence and peacebuilding programs, and create multitudinous employment opportunities. These are not new ideas. Through the tireless advocacy of people like Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Mariame Kaba, we have been able to open up discussions about what a better society could look like. There are myriad models, toolkits, resources that exist to help people navigate nonviolent community safety. For example, the model created by Creative Interventions lays out strategies for how to intervene in situations of interpersonal harm. The Young Women’s Empowerment Project examined ways in which sex workers can take care of themselves while working in the street economy. The Oakland Power Projects developed the Anti-Policing Health Toolkit to provide health workers with the tools to respond to health emergencies without a police response. The New York Harm Free Zone Collective outlined practices used to build community-based harm-free zones in New York City.
At its core, abolition seeks to strengthen the social fabric of a community and uphold models of safety, support, and prevention. Yet, abolitionists are incessantly ridiculed for being idealists. The accepted notions of feasibility are confining us to a bleak reality in which violent, anti-black, white supremacist institutions that traumatize, cage, and kill people are continually being funded and sustained. When we hide behind the veneer of pragmatism, we acquiesce to the ills that our injustice system creates. Abolition is about redefining the parameters of our imagination. Only in doing so can we achieve liberation.
