Abolition for the People: The Movement for a Future Without Policing & Prisons
Edited by activist and former San Francisco 49ers super bowl quarterback Colin Kaepernick, Abolition for the People is a manifesto calling for a world beyond prisons and policing.
Abolition for the People brings together thirty essays representing a diversity of voices-political prisoners, grassroots organizers, scholars, and relatives of those killed by the anti-Black terrorism of policing and prisons. This collection presents readers with a moral choice: "Will you continue to be actively complicit in the perpetuation of these systems," Kaepernick asks in his introduction, "or will you take action to dismantle them for the benefit of a just future?"
Powered by courageous hope and imagination, Abolition for the People provides a blueprint and vision for creating an abolitionist future where communities can be safe, valued, and truly free. "Another world is possible," Kaepernick writes, "a world grounded in love, justice, and accountability, a world grounded in safety and good health, a world grounded in meeting the needs of the people."
The complexity of abolitionist concepts and the enormity of the task at hand can be overwhelming. To help readers on their journey toward a greater understanding, each essay in the collection is followed by a reader's guide that offers further provocations on the subject.
Newcomers to these ideas might ask: Is the abolition of the prison industrial complex too drastic? Can we really get rid of prisons and policing altogether? As writes organizer and New York Times bestselling author Mariame Kaba, "The short answer: We can. We must. We are."
Abolition for the People begins by uncovering the lethal anti-Black histories of policing and incarceration in the United States. Juxtaposing today's moment with 19th-century movements for the abolition of slavery, freedom fighter Angela Y. Davis writes "Just as we hear calls today for a more humane policing, people then called for a more humane slavery." Drawing on decades of scholarship and personal experience, each author deftly refutes the notion that police and prisons can be made fairer and more humane through piecemeal reformation. As Derecka Purnell argues, "reforms do not make the criminal legal system more just, but obscure its violence more efficiently."
Blending rigorous analysis with first-person narratives, Abolition for the People definitively makes the case that the only political future worth building is one without and beyond police and prisons.
You won't find all the answers here, but you will find the right questions--questions that open up radical possibilities for a future where all communities can thrive.
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"This collection is certain to be an invaluable organizing tool, hopefully leading to widespread change."
--Booklist"Abolition is persistence. Abolition for the People combines examples and interpretations to show how people can and do achieve extraordinary change. We do so by combining analysis with socially powerful--organized--human energy. Such energy is renewable because we build on the past while inventing as we go. At the end of the day what matters is not what we say but what we do and do again: take a knee, build a movement, strengthen communities, share practices and resources, and fight for a world in which life is precious."
--Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag
"This book brings clarity to the centuries-old systems of racialized policing and carceral control, and the impact of these systems on our lives now, and in the future. The short, rich essays in Abolition for the People are vital for the education of young people."
--Ericka Huggins, Restorative Justice Practitioner and Facilitator
"Carefully curated, incisively conceptualized anthologies like Alain Locke's The New Negro and Toni Cade Bambara's The Black Woman can transform worlds. Abolition for the People is in this tradition. Kaepernick has assembled a community of visionary thinkers who unequivocally show that the path to freedom requires abolition."
--Barbara Smith, Co-founder, the Combahee River Collective
"Colin Kaepernick has assembled many of the most important writers and activists in the growing movement to abolish prisons and the police, and has produced a book that holds the promise of educating and inspiring a new generation of abolitionists to build a new world without police and prisons through struggle, solidarity, and imagining our society anew."
--Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation
"Abolition for the People is an invitation to transform our communities into places where conflict, harm, and violence are addressed with collectivity, care, and holistic accountability--not the brutality and empty justice of policing or prisons. Each contributor guides us through the challenging work needed to radically change how we relate to each other as people under the heels of global capitalism, patriarchy, and anti-Blackness. A reflection of decades of organizing and intellectual work shaped by Black feminism, this book is a necessary love letter to our people that delivers uncomfortable truths alongside a compassionate, realistic approach to building abolition in our lifetimes."
--Charlene A. Carruthers, Cultural Worker and author of Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements
"Abolition for the People is a necessary and urgent blueprint for a world where all Black people are safe, healthy, and free. The essays in this volume answer the most common questions about abolition--What is abolition? Why not reform? What next?--while also shining light on the new systems of safety and justice that people are building in real time. The voices of political prisoners, grassroots organizers, scholars, and the family members of people killed by the police join together to call us into the work of imagining and building a world without police and prisons. Its brilliant use of essays, reading guides, and infographics makes Abolition for the People both a textbook and touchstone for people who are coming to abolition for the first time, those who ...
