Abolitionist Digest Vol. 5
Hejera Begum outlines 3 abolitionist reforms for the UK: Banning police being posted in schools, ending stop and search, and abolishing Prevent.
“Police in schools, a place children spend so much of their time, will normalise the idea of being policed as an everyday reality and expose children to police racism. It is black and brown children that are likely to be more often and more harshly disciplined, including exclusion.
2. Criminalising Black Lives Matter
With fast-tracked prosecutions of protesters planned, Jason Okundaye discusses the failure of the political leaders in both main parties to respond effectively to the Black Lives Matter protests and the scrutiny of the police. Okundaye draws attention to Keir Starmer’s response to the 2010 London Riots to raise serious questions about his ability to take much needed action.
3. Abolishing Policing Also Means Abolishing Family Regulation
In the US, Dorothy Roberts raises important challenges to the ways calls to Defund the Police might inadvertently legitimise and direct resources to institutions that pose as forms of care but have harmful and racist effects.
“I am concerned by recommendations to transfer money, resources and authority from the police to health and human services agencies that handle child protective services (CPS). These proposals ignore how the misnamed “child welfare” system, like the misnamed “criminal justice” system, is designed to regulate and punish black and other marginalized people. It could be more accurately referred to as the “family regulation system.”
“A more expansive understanding of abolition is essential to collectively building a new society that supports rather than destroys families and communities.”
4. Why Do the Police Exist?
Connor Woodman provides a long-read on the history of policing that draws attention to the ways that popular understanding of social function of the police - as an organisation that reduces crime and protects people from harm - is seriously mistaken.
“From the start, police officers were deployed almost exclusively to working-class communities, where they were commonly received as a “horde of blue locusts”. As they spread out from London across provincial England, officers acted as ‘domestic missionaries’, imposing the social values of domesticity and public order dear to the newly triumphant industrial ruling class.
5. Event: Criminal "Justice" Isn't the Answer
On the 13th July, molly ackhurst is giving what looks to be a very interesting talk on feminist politics and prison abolition.
“Focusing specifically on feminist engagements with law and sexual violence, this talk will explore why so many continue to rely on state-facilitated justice. In doing so it will trace the history of a type of feminism that continues to emotionally and financially invest in the criminal “justice” system, often called carceral feminism, and simultaneously look to alternative responses to sexual violence that lie outside of the criminal legal system.”
6. “Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings"
At a time when the Police are being subject to scrutiny in new ways, Sara Chitseko reminds us that understanding violence of prisons has to remain central to an abolitionist project.
A key reason why it is so hard to imagine a world without prisons, is because they are so deeply embedded in our understanding of how society functions. Punishment, in the form of incarcerating huge swathes of the population is taken for granted and viewed as necessary. Running parallel to this, is a collective reluctance by those who are not at risk of over-policing and criminalisation, to think about or address the unbearable conditions within prisons.