Introduction to Abolition
What is abolition?
“… abolitionist critique concerns itself with the greatest and least detail of these arrangements of people and resources and land over time. It shows how relationships of un-freedom consolidate and stretch, but not for the purpose of documenting misery. Rather, the point is not only to identify central contradictions—inherent vices—in regimes of dispossession, but also, urgently, to show how radical consciousness in action resolves into liberated life-ways, however provisional, present and past.”
Defining the Prison Industrial Complex
Learn about the prison industrial complex.
Abolitionist Principles
Understanding key principles of abolition is crucial to abolitionist organizing.
Frequently Asked Questions
We don’t have all the answers—but we can start a conversation and educate each other on abolition.
Mariame Kaba
states that abolition is “a political vision, a structural analysis of oppression, and a practical organizing strategy. While some people might think of abolition as primarily a negative project — “let’s tear everything down tomorrow and hope for the best'' — PIC abolition is a vision of a restructured society in a world where we have everything we need, food, shelter, education, health, art, beauty, clean water, and more things that are foundational to our personal and community safety … PIC abolition is a positive project that focuses, in part, on building a society where it is possible to address harm without relying on structural forms of oppression or the violent systems that increase it.”
Transformative Justice Law Project of Illinois
“Prison abolition is a movement to create lasting alternatives to punishment-based institutions such as prisons, jails, juvenile, immigrant, and military detention centers to actualize community safety. Instead of consenting to this false and fear-based need for prisons, we as abolitionists invest our energy in community empowerment, community-led education, radical activism, transformative justice, and liberation as necessary alternatives to the prison system and as methods to make prisons obsolete.”
From where we are now, sometimes we can’t really imagine what abolition is going to look like. Abolition isn’t just about getting rid of buildings full of cages. It’s also about undoing the society we live in because the PIC both feeds on and maintains oppression and inequalities through punishment, violence, and controls millions of people. Because the PIC is not an isolated system, abolition is a broad strategy. An abolitionist vision means that we must build models today that can represent how we want to live in the future. It means developing practical strategies for taking small steps that move us toward making our dreams real and that lead us all to believe that things really could be different. It means living this vision in our daily lives.
Abolition is a political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment.
Abolition is both a practical organizing tool and a long-term goal.