Abolition of police and prisons

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Abolish is to flourish! Against the prison industrial complex and for transformative justice.

See Critical Resistance's definitions below:

The Prison Industrial Complex

The prison industrial complex (PIC) is a term we use to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems.

Through its reach and impact, the PIC helps and maintains the authority of people who get their power through racial, economic and other privileges. There are many ways this power is collected and maintained through the PIC, including creating mass media images that keep alive stereotypes of people of color, poor people, queer people, immigrants, youth, and other oppressed communities as criminal, delinquent, or deviant. This power is also maintained by earning huge profits for private companies that deal with prisons and police forces; helping earn political gains for "tough on crime" politicians; increasing the influence of prison guard and police unions; and eliminating social and political dissent by oppressed communities that make demands for self-determination and reorganization of power in the US.

Abolition

PIC abolition is a political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment.

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 both a practical organizing tool and a long-term goal.

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Yes, what about the rapists?

Here's some resources that can help you on your journey to understand this oft-asked question on abolition further,

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At least 72.3 per cent of inmates at the Edmonton Institution for Women identify as Indigenous, according to data from CSC

“It’s really a continuation of the colonization project that is Canada,” she added.

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Hurricane Helene saw North Carolina prisons lock incarcerated men in cells with their own feces and no contact with the outside world.

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Originally found here. It seems that cops in California entered a still unexplored abyss of incompetence. Fortunately nobody was hurt, so it can be considered comic relief - except by the medical company whose MRI machine they cooked.


Officer Kenneth Franco drew on his "twelve hours of narcotics training" and discovered the facility was using more electricity than nearby stores, the lawsuit said.

"Officer Franco, therefore, concluded (the facility) was cultivating cannabis, disregarding the fact that it is a diagnostic facility utilizing an MRI machine, X-ray machine and other heavy medical equipment -- unlike the surrounding businesses selling flowers, chocolates and children's merchandise," the suit said.

After bursting into the diagnostics center in October last year, the SWAT team found only offices, a single employee and medical devices, including a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machine, a diagnostic tool that uses high-powered magnets to create detailed scans of a patient's body.

Disregarding a sign warning that metal objects should be kept well away, one officer wandered near the machine "dangling a rifle in his right hand," the lawsuit said.

"Expectedly, the magnetic force of the MRI machine attracted the LAPD officer's loose rifle, securing it to the machine," the suit said.

Instead of seeking expert advice on how to retrieve the weapon, one officer decided to activate the emergency shutdown button.

"This action caused the MRI's magnet to rapidly lose superconductivity, leading to the evaporation of approximately 2,000 liters of helium gas and resulting in extensive damage to the MRI machine," the suit said.

The officer then retrieved his gun, but left a magazine full of bullets on the floor of the MRI office, the suit says.

The suit, which was filed in California last week, seeks unspecified damages and costs.

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Over the last five years, over 80 multimillion-dollar Cop City-like facilities have quietly rolled out across the US.

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In this Q&A with Prism, the Appalachian Prison Book Project’s Lydia Welker discusses the barriers prisons place on books and why access is worth fighting for

August 28th, 2024

For two decades, the Appalachian Prison Book Project (APBP) has mailed books to people in prisons and jails across six states in Appalachia. More than 70,000 reference, nonfiction, and fiction books have reached people behind bars who would not have otherwise had access to them.

Lydia Welker is the digital communications coordinator for the project, which is run by an all-volunteer team in Morgantown, West Virginia. In 2021, the Appalachian Prison Book Project expanded by creating a pen pal program, facilitating book clubs, and supporting an associate’s degree program at a prison in Pennsylvania. In December 2024, the organization will publish a book of art and letters by incarcerated people with West Virginia University Press.

On the 20th anniversary of the project, Prism’s Ray Levy Uyeda spoke with Welker by phone about the work that has—as she said—changed her perspective on everything she encounters and her outlook on her “entire life.”

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Ray Levy Uyeda: What does it take to send a book to someone in prison?

Lydia Welker: Sending anything—especially books—to people who are incarcerated is extremely difficult. Federal, state, and county governments each have different rules about what can be mailed inside. Individual wardens also have a say, and then it often comes down to the discretion of someone working in the mail room.

The Appalachian Prison Book Project keeps very detailed records about different prisons and jails in the region that we serve. We keep careful records about what books have been rejected and why. Most prisons won’t accept hardback books and won’t accept books that aren’t in “good” condition. If a book has a ripped cover, torn pages, pencil or pen marks, it will get rejected. There are also content-based reasons for rejection. We’ve learned that violence, nudity, and maps are all reasons books won’t be accepted, which can include action books or art books like Michelangelo’s David.

What’s in the package is just as important as what’s on the outside. You have to include the person’s name and their ID number and then their mailing address, and then inside we include a note that says, “This book is free and yours to keep.” That is a very important language that we have to include in each package so it’s not seen as an exchange where someone would need to pay us for that book.

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cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/24046152

Today, the 22nd of August 2024, marks 100 days since army lawyer David McBride was imprisoned in Canberra for exposing war crimes committed by Australian forces in Afghanistan.

David stood up for truth and integrity, yet now he endures death threats and solitary confinement, while those responsible remain free.

This is not how we should treat our whistleblowers in Australia! ⚖️

Demand justice! 📢 Take Action:

  • Contact Mark Dreyfus or your local MP today to express your support for David.

  • Create and share a social media post or a short video using the hashtag #SpeakUp4McBride to spread the word.

  • Donate to support David’s legal appeal to help get him out of jail: https://chuffed.org/project/davidmcbride

  • Hang the provided poster in a high-visibility location, take a photo, and share it online to encourage others to join the movement.

  • 👍 Like, 💬 comment, and ↪️ share this message!

#FreeMcBride. #Justice4Afghanistan.

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Continuing a discussion on an old thread, perhaps we can ask: "Will there be police and prisons under socialism?"

I'm sure there will be a number of different answers from socialists, but this is c/abolition, so of course the answer would be no.

But wait, one might say, weren't and aren't there police and prisons in "actually existing socialism"? Yes, but for varying reasons, the "socialism" of these projects was merely the political ideology of their ruling parties, not in terms of their mode of production. All of these countries had wage-labor, proletarianization, money, commodities, et cetera—all features of a capitalism. Because they had these features of capitalism, these state socialist projects necessarily needed police and prisons to enforce the rule of state capital.

When Marx talked about socialism, he most clearly outlines it in his Critique of the Gotha Program where he uses the term "lower-phase communism" that Second International Marxism and later pre-Bolshevized Comintern Marxism interpreted as "socialism." In socialism or lower-phase communism, the state is already abolished because classes are already abolished. In doing so, we can necessarily expect the cruelest features of the state like police and prisons are necessarily also abolished.

Police and prisons are historically contingent to class society. They serve as a mode of upholding class society. Across Europe and North America during the development of capitalism, police and prisons were used to enforce the rule of wage-labor and force previously non-proletarian peoples into proletarianization. These institutions would drive people off their land, enclose the commons, and then impose regimes of terror to enforce class society.

But how about, a socialist might ask, the enforcement of class rule of the proletariat? The dictatorship of the proletariat? First, it is important to note that the dictatorship of the proletariat is not yet socialism. It is the transition period to socialism. Second, the dictatorship of the proletariat is indeed a class dictatorship, just like the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie we currently live under. Third, the class dictatorship of the proletariat cannot look like previous modes of class dictatorship because it is a class dictatorship for the transition from a class society to a classless society, not a transition from a class society to another class society. Previous modes of class dictatorship used the terror of police and prisons to transition from a monarchist system to a republican system, or the class dictatorship of the aristocracy to the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The proletarian class dictatorship is different in that it is a class dictatorship that abolishes class distinctions, the most important of which is proletarianization. Logically, if proletarianziation needs police and prisons to be enforced, then the class dictatorship to abolish proletarianization likewise does away with police and prisons, simply because one cannot use the enforcement of proletarianization to do away with proletarianization.

However, the crucial feature of class dictatorship is its dictatorship, the ability for a class to enforce its will on all other classes. We have previously noted here that previous modes of class dictatorship does this using police and prisons. How is proletarian class dictatorship supposed to do this without police and prisons? Very simply, the power of a proletariat as a class-for-itself does not come from the barrel of a gun or a ballot box, but by their ability to subvert what they are as proletarianized beings. This does not mean that there will be no violence, far from it, but that this violence is ordered towards subversion of class society rather than reproducing it. Commonly, Second International Marxism, especially as embodied by Lenin in State and Revolution, advocates for a whole armed proletariat as opposed to special bodies of armed force (e.g. police and prisons). For whatever reason, Lenin disregarded this when the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, thus reproducing class society and all that that entailed, leading the Soviet Union down a path of an unambiguous class society where the proletariat continued to be proletarianized.

Abolition communism means moving beyond this failure to abolish police and prisons under a transitional period and forwarding abolition and communization in its place.

So no, there would not be police and prisons in socialism nor in the transitional period to it, unless of course that transitional period was not transitioning to socialism at all but back to capitalism.

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