Practising Everyday Abolition

by Sarah Lamble

The following is a chapter from Abolishing the Police: An Illustrated Introduction, (edited by Koshka Duff, illustrated by Cat Sims, and published by Dog Section Press.). The collection provides rigorous and accessible analyses of why we might want to abolish the police, what abolishing them would involve, and how it might be achieved, introducing readers to the rich existing traditions of anti-police theory and practice. Its authors draw on their diverse on-the-ground experiences of political organising, protest, and resistance to policing in the UK, France, Germany, and the United States, as well as their original research in academic fields ranging from law to security studies, political theory to sociology to public health. Without assuming any prior specialist knowledge, they present the critical tools and insights these disciplines have to offer to ongoing struggles against the injustices of policing (and consider, in turn, what these disciplines must learn from these struggles.)

An audio version of this chapter is also available.

“Abolition is not absence, it is presence. What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities. So those who feel in their gut deep anxiety that abolition means knock it all down, scorch the earth and start something new, let that go. Abolition is building the future from the present, in all of the ways we can.” - Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Gilmore and Lambert, 2019).

Abolition can seem like a daunting task.  We live in a world that is saturated with the assumption that police and prisons are necessary to address widespread problems of violence and harm. Even amongst those who recognise that police and prisons do not make us safe and instead perpetuate inequality, violence and harm, it can still feel hard to imagine life without these institutions (Davis, 2003).

But as leading abolitionist thinker and organiser Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminds us, abolition is not simply about getting rid of the prisons, police or systems of surveillance and punishment; abolition is about what we build in their place. “Abolition is about abolishing the conditions under which prison became the solution to problems, rather than abolishing the buildings we call prisons" (Gilmore and Murakawa, 2020). Likewise, we cannot simply do away the police - we need to address the conditions in which people feel that police are the only or best option for responding to harm in their lives. We must build other means for preventing and addressing harm that will actually keep us safe.

Part of that task means not treating abolition as a singular or revolutionary ‘event’ but as an ongoing process and practice. Abolition is a way of life and a collective approach to social change.  It requires us to engage in strategies that dismantle the structures, institutions and systems that underpin and sustain prisons and police while at the same time building up systems of care, well-being, and support that fulfil human needs and enable communities to flourish.  Abolition requires the double work of engaging in what abolitionists call ‘non-reformist reforms’[i] – strategies that reduce the power and scope of the criminal justice system and reduce our reliance on it – whilst simultaneously building up our skills, capacity, and resources for alternative systems of preventing, addressing and responding to harm (Berger et al., 2017).

Such change means practicing everyday abolition.  Everyday abolition is a means to connect efforts toward structural change with our everyday cultures and practices. Everyday abolition means undoing the cultural norms and mindsets that trap us within punitive habits and logics. There are many different ways of approaching this, but below are four key strategies.

1) Undo carceral cultures: Identify and challenge punitive logics in everyday contexts

The carceral is everywhere. Look around and we see punitive logics in our schools, our workplaces, our public services, our families, our relationships. The carceral is embedded in the social norms and institutions we inhabit. It is culturally engrained in our consciousness. 

By ‘carceral’, abolitionists refer to logics and practices that normalise punitive responses to harm. It’s the ‘common sense’ logic that equates justice with punishment.  When a harm occurs, carceral logics encourage us to locate the cause of the problem in an individual (bad choices, inherent evil, poor upbringing, cultural deficiencies, monstrous otherness, etc) and then isolate and punish that individual and often stigmatise the community that person is part of.  Sometimes this is done overtly – by the state and the criminal justice system or when someone calls the cops on someone else – but it’s also done in more subtle everyday ways that normalise vindictive or punitive behaviour or celebrate redemptive violence.  These punitive logics seep into our daily interactions at work, at school, at home, in our neighbourhoods and in our organising communities.

For example:

• A kid ‘misbehaves’ in class, so we exclude them from the classroom.

• Our lover says something hurtful, so we give them the cold shoulder.

• A work colleague does something we don’t like, so we publicly shame them in front of other co-workers.

• A neighbour is dealing drugs from their flat, so we report them to the council even though they will likely get evicted and be made homeless as a result.

• An organisation that we are in coalition with uses language or strategies we think are oppressive, so we simply stop working with them.

• A prisoner who needs housing support upon release has a conviction for sexual violence, so no one will assist them.

• We humiliate or denigrate people on social media or encourage others to ‘cancel’ them when we don’t like what they say.

• We get our daily moral workout by consuming media that encourages us to divide the world into good and bad, those deserving of empathy and those we demonise and abandon.

While most of these examples are not direct forms of state policing and violence, they all can contribute to carceral cultures that normalise punishment and isolation as a response to social problems. Instead of addressing a problem directly or figuring out why the problem has arisen, we are encouraged to react with blame, retaliation and punishment. We try to address the problem by removing the person from our community, marking them out as fundamentally different from the rest of ‘us’ and by distancing ourselves from them. These patterns often play out on class, racial and disability lines. For example, the kids who are mostly likely to be removed from school are those who are racialised, from disadvantaged backgrounds or have learning disabilities (Graham et al., 2019). Instead of asking why the education system isn’t meeting their needs or what else is going on for them, we label the kid as the ‘problem’ and try to remove them.

A key task for everyday abolition is to identify and challenge carceral logics creep into our daily practices. This isn’t always easy. The line between setting legitimate boundaries versus punishing and isolating others is not always straightforward. More importantly, none of us are immune to the wider cultural norms that constantly equate justice with punishment. These narratives are deeply engrained and internalised and it takes work to identify and unravel them – particularly if we feel emotionally invested in punitive or retaliatory responses.  Punishment can feel seductively good in the moment, but rarely generates the resolution, healing or long-term change we are ultimately seeking.

Abolitionists argue that if we don’t challenge these carceral logics and practices at the everyday level, it’s hard to challenge them at institutional levels. It’s easy to be an abolitionist in theory. Putting it into practice requires ongoing effort and reflection. That’s why everyday abolition needs to be a collective effort to push back against the individualisation of social problems.  We need to support each other to figure out how to do things differently, to build the world we want.

This does not mean that we shouldn’t challenge harmful behaviours or hold people accountable. It means that we need to respond with strategies that are not about escalating harm through individual punishment. To do this, we need a second strategy in our everyday abolition toolkit: a support-based, rather than punishment-based framework for responding to harm.

2) Shift our everyday responses to harm: We need to stop responding to harm with punishment and isolation and instead offer support, safety, healing and connection – even when it’s hard.

When someone hurts another person, there are often two common tendencies: one is to deny or minimise that harm (say it didn’t happen, or it doesn’t matter, or it wasn’t as bad as it seems); the other is to blame, demonise and retaliate (the harm-doer is terrible and should be punished or separated from the community)(CUAV, 2013). The first tendency is common when we care about or love the person that did the harm; the second tendency is common when we love or are close to the person who experienced the harm. But neither of these strategies are effective because they don’t actually address the impact of the harm. The responses also don’t address why harm occurred in the first place or what can be done to prevent it from happening in the future.

Offering support, safety and healing is important for both the person or people that experienced the harm and the person or people who did the harm. That support needs to be focussed on the specific and immediate needs of the situation and the people affected, whilst also considering how to address the wider conditions that led to the harm. It is also important to recognise that harm is a collective problem (with collective consequences) and therefore requires collective solutions.  Harm enacted by an individual rarely occurs in complete isolation. The behaviour and conditions that led to the harm are often normalised, condoned, ignored, enabled or even supported by others. This is particularly the case for interpersonal violence, including childhood sexual abuse (GenerationFive, 2017; Simmons, 2019a).

Instead of responding to harm with punishment, we need to build infrastructures of support and care - culturally, institutionally and in our daily lives.  This is often easier in theory than in practice, particularly when a harm occurs to someone we love or is enacted by someone we dislike; it can be easy to fall into punitive logics and practices. But even when harm is done by people we disapprove of or people who repeatedly act in harmful ways, we need to ask why those harms are occurring and address the needs of everyone involved. We need to look at the broader context and not just at the individual.

Carceral logics teach us that there are good people and bad people, victims and perpetrators, innocent and guilty. We are taught to respond to people as one or the other. But reality is much more complex. Many people who harm others, have also been harmed. Experiencing harm doesn’t prevent you from harming others. Just look at the demographics of who is locked up in prison, and it is clear that the most socially disadvantaged and discriminated against populations end up in prison. That doesn’t mean that people in prison haven’t engaged in harmful behaviour or that we need to resort to claims of ‘innocence’ in order to challenge the injustices of imprisonment.  Rather we need to be able to hold the reality that people can be both harm-doer and harmed; we need to recognise that people can do terrible things but still need support and care. We need to embrace a politics of ‘no one is disposable’ (Gossett et al., 2014).

Part of our task is to better understand and interrupt patterns where hurt generates further hurt. For example, people sometimes respond to trauma by lashing out and hurting others. Or people exert power and abuse over others in relation to their own feelings of powerlessness or vulnerability. This does not in any way excuse or condone abusive acts, but it means that if we want to challenge that behaviour, increasing a harm-doer’s vulnerability through isolation, shaming or punishment is unlikely to work.  Responding to one form of violence by enacting another form of violence is not only ineffective, it is counterproductive and exacerbates cycles of harm.

Shifting our responses away from punishment is particularly difficult when it comes to sexual violence; people who are committed to abolitionist principles sometimes make exceptions when it comes to sexual violence and gendered harm. There can be an assumption that people who commit sexual violence are somehow different or irredeemable. But as feminist abolitionists have long argued, sexual and gender violence is so widespread and pervasive, it needs to be at the centre of our abolitionist responses. ‘Sexual exceptionalism’ will not enable us to meaningfully address it. The reality is that most sexual violence is not committed by strangers, but by people we know and often love. This is partly why it can be so difficult to address (Creative Interventions, 2019).

Advocates for transformative justice [ii] argue that instead of responding to harm with punishment, we must enact forms of ‘love-centred accountability’ or ‘compassionate accountability’(Moss, 2019). This means finding ways to support each other when we or others have done harmful things. It means focussing on reducing harm and preventing it from happening again  (Dixon and Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2020). To do this, we need a third strategy, which is about capacity building.

3) Build our collective skills and capacity to prevent harm and to foster everyday accountability and reparation.

Responding to harm with support and care requires us to build up our collective skills and capacities.  If we can train people in first aid and emergency CPR, we can also teach safe bystander inventions, violence de-escalation, conflict resolution and harm reduction. We can learn the early signs of abusive relationships and support each other to intervene before things escalate.  We can find ways to support each other to heal from our own and collective traumas.

Part of this work involves identifying the many ways we already can and do respond to harm without resorting to policing, punishment and retaliation. When a problem comes up, we can consider the different ways we could potentially address it without relying on police or prisons (and without becoming police-like or punitive ourselves).

As the Creative Interventions Project (2019) recognises, people’s immediate community (whether it be family, friends, neighbours, co-workers and even acquaintances) are often much better placed to intervene in, and respond to everyday harm, than the formal criminal justice system. So we all need to skill-up to feel able and confident to intervene. We shouldn’t assume that only professionals can act to address violence. Groups like Hollaback (2020), for example, are teaching people ways of intervening in everyday sexual harassment through safe bystander interventions.

We also need to think about accountability as a daily practice and skill we all need to foster, rather than something which is exceptional or delegated to others. As Ann Russo, author of the book Feminist Accountability (2018), describes,

If taking accountability for harm became a daily practice, rather than solely something that we demand of others in egregious situations, then taking accountability would be less fraught with guilt, shame, defensiveness, punishment, and retaliation. It would create more compassion for one another when we make mistakes, when we speak and act in harmful and oppressive ways (intentionally or unintentionally), and/or contribute to harm in some way. And it would make it easier to admit wrongdoing. (Russo, 2013)

Part of this shift means actively recognising that we ourselves may be the harm-doers or harm-enablers.  Too often we are invested in aligning ourselves with the good and the innocent, and in distancing ourselves from the guilty and the harm doers. Everyday abolition requires us to acknowledge we are all capable of harm just as we are all vulnerable to being harmed. This doesn’t mean that the distribution of harm is equal; we know that harm and violence is deeply connected to structures of power that render some bodies more vulnerable than others. But we must understand our role in enabling or upholding structures of power that produce violence and impact on the distribution of life chances.

Confronting our complicity with violence can be painful to address, but it is crucial for ending harm, particularly when it comes to violence within our homes, families and social institutions.  One of the most painful aspects of coming to terms with the pervasiveness of childhood sexual abuse, for example, can be acknowledging the extent to which other people knew about it and didn’t act. Or that people didn’t listen or believe survivors when they made brave disclosures (Moss, 2019; Simmons, 2019b). Sometimes we refuse to see or believe what is right in front of us. We can often fail to recognise our own harmful behaviour and resist being accountable. As Russo (2013) notes, “There are few spaces to talk about the harms we’ve caused and the systems of oppression in which we’ve been complicit. Mostly it seems that when confronted, we try to prove that we are not responsible – to prove our ‘innocence.’ Or we try to blame others, or to claim that we are the real victims.”

We can all make accountability part of our everyday abolition practice. As Kai Cheng Thom (2020: 69) notes: “When we are able to admit that the capacity to harm lies within ourselves—within us all—we become capable of radically transforming the conversation around abuse and rape culture. We can go from simply reacting to abuse and punishing ‘abusers’ to preventing abuse and healing our communities. Because the revolution starts at home, as they say. The revolution starts in your house, in your own relationships, in your bedroom. The revolution starts in your heart.”

There are many grassroots organisations doing important work to challenge everyday carceral logics and to build collective capacity for support, healing and accountability.  Many of these projects have developed simple tools and resources that can help us extend the skills we already have and channel them into everyday harm reduction and violence prevention work.[iii]

We already have many of the tools and resources we need to stop violence – particularly amongst communities where calling the cops was never an option because of the threat of violence or deportation – where alternatives have been necessary for survival (Dixon and Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2020; Amezcua et al., 2016; Rose, 2018; Kaba, 2020).  But we also need to develop new tools and resources, particularly for survivors of violence. As Darnelle L. Moore, notes in Love with Accountability: Digging up the Roots of Childhood Sexual Abuse, “the tools that many people need to heal have yet to be imagined and created”(2019: 3).

This work takes ongoing practice. It is not something we can attend one training session on or read one article about and then know how to respond or address every situation.  As transformative justice advocate and anti-violence organiser Ejeris Dixon (2020: 21) notes, “We must practice community safety as we would practice an instrument or a sport. By practicing in slow, measurable, and deliberate ways, we build the knowledge we need to diffuse and address conflict within our communities.”

4) Connect the everyday to the big picture

Finally, none of these everyday practices will be enough unless we connect them to larger long-term goals. As the LGBTQ anti-violence group Community United Against Violence (CUAV 2019) reminds us, violence exists internally (within ourselves), interpersonally (between people) and institutionally (between institutions and individuals). Work to address violence needs to happen at all three levels. We need to link the micro and the macro so that our everyday efforts are contributing to the broader social, systemic and institutional change that will make a world without prisons and police become possible.

This means we need to consider how the tactics we implement today, will impact on the medium and longer term strategies for the future.  We don’t want to enact strategies today, that we’ll have to undo at a later point.  We need to dismantle and transform the institutions and structures that normalise prisons, police and punishment. This means supporting campaigns to stop prison expansion, redirect police budgets and reduce the size of criminal justice system. It also means organising for housing, health care, racial and economic justice, climate emergency and clean water campaigns, disability justice, labour rights, reproductive justice, decolonial struggles and broader social justice campaigns -- as these are all part of abolitionist work.

While abolition can sometimes feel daunting, it is important to keep in mind that much collective work and effort is already being done to make possible abolitionist futures. Connecting to, and building on, that existing work is essential for developing sustainable and collective social change.  We need to do the work of lifting up and joining together various struggles that comprise the many different facets of abolitionist work. We can take hope and inspiration in the creativity, collectivity and determination that is found in both the daily efforts and the wider struggles for abolition that occur across the globe. These connected abolitionist efforts are what enable us to do the work in the here and now that gets us closer to the world we want in the future.  

REFERENCES

Amezcua T, Dixon E and Long CJR (2016) Ten Lessons for Creating Safety Without Police. Available at: https://transformharm.org/ten-lessons-for-creating-safety-without-police/ (accessed 1 May 2020).

Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective (2013) Transformative Justice and Community Accountability. Available at: https://batjc.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/tj-ca-one-pager.pdf (accessed 1 May 2020).

Berger D, Kaba M and Stein D (2017) What Abolitionists Do. Jacobin Magazine. Available at: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/prison-abolition-reform-mass-incarceration (accessed 1 May 2020).

Cheng Thom K (2020) What to do when you’ve been abusive. In: Dixon E and Piepzna-Samarasinha LL (eds) Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement. Chico, CA: AK Press, pp.74-87.

Community United Against Violence (CUAV) (2013) Gems of Change: Pendulum of Approaches. Available at: https://everydayabolition.com/2013/07/11/cuav-posters/ (accessed 1 May 2020).

Community United Against Violence (CUAV) (2019) Our Analysis of Violence. Available at: https://www.cuav.org/aov (accessed 1 May 2020).

Creative Interventions (2019) Creative Interventions Toolkit: A Practical Guide to Stop Interpersonal Violence. Available at: http://www.creative-interventions.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/CI-Toolkit-Complete-FINAL.pdf (accessed 1 May 2020).

Critical Resistance (2020) Reformist reforms vs. abolitionist steps in policing [Abolitionist Reforms Chart]. Available at: http://criticalresistance.org/abolish-policing/ (accessed 1  May 2020).

Davis A (2003) Are Prisons Obsolete? Toronto: Seven Stories Press.

Dixon E (2020) Building Community Safety: Practical steps toward liberatory transformation. In: Dixon E and Piepzna-Samarasinha LL (eds) Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement. Chico, CA: AK Press, pp.14-24.

Dixon E and Piepzna-Samarasinha LL (2020) Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement. Chico, CA: AK Press.

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Gilmore RW and Lambert Lo (2019) Making Abolition Geography in California’s Central Valley with Ruth Wilson Gilmore. The Funambulist, 21 (Jan/Feb). Available at: https://thefunambulist.net/making-abolition-geography-in-californias-central-valley-with-ruth-wilson-gilmore (accessed 17 April 2020).

Gilmore RW and Murakawa N (2020) Covid-19, Decarceration, and Abolition [Webinar]. In: Available at: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/blogs/128-ruth-wilson-gilmore-on-covid-19-decarceration-and-abolition (accessed 17 April 2020 Accessed).

Gossett R, Spade D and Dector H (2014) No One is Disposable: Everyday Practices of Prison Abolition. Bernard Center for Research on Women: https://bcrw.barnard.edu/no-one-is-disposable/.

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Moore DL (2019) Love Is a Reckoning. In: Simmons AS (ed) Love WITH Accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse. Chico, CA: AK Press, pp.3-5.

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[i]As Berger, Kaba and Stein describe non-reformist reforms are ‘measures that reduce the power of an oppressive system while illuminating the system’s inability to solve the crises it creates.’ For an example in relation to policing, see Critical Resistance (2020) Reformist reforms vs. abolitionist steps in policing [Abolitionist Reforms Chart]. Available at: http://criticalresistance.org/abolish-policing/ (accessed 1  May 2020).

[ii] For a definition of transformative justice, see: Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective (2013) Transformative Justice and Community Accountability. Available at: https://batjc.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/tj-ca-one-pager.pdf (accessed 1 May 2020).

[iii] See for example the work done by groups like Creative Interventions; Generation Five; INCITE: Women of Colour Against Violence; Project NIA, Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective; Sex Workers Advocacy and Resistance Movement; DIY Space for London, Transformative Justice Kollectiv - Berlin and the resource hub TransformHarm.org.