An Abolitionist Reading List

Abolition isn’t only about police. We also need to abolish prisons—as well as put an end to counterterrorism. This abolitionist reading list comes from The Boston Review, June 19, 2020:

1. The Struggle to Abolish the Police Is Not New, by Garrett Felber

“Both critics of abolition and recent converts often frame it as a radical new concept. This can have the effect, intended or not, of making it seem idealistic, naïve, or undertheorized. But while the mainstream prominence of abolition may be new, the premise is not.”

2.  What Does Police Abolition Mean?, by Derecka Purnell

“Oppressed people must give up the systems that harm them. Police are not public, nor good. Police officers are prison–industrial complex foot soldiers, and poor people are its targets. Disadvantaged communities should not ask for law enforcement to ensure safety any more than someone should ask for poisoned water to quench thirst.”

3. Power over Policing, by Jocelyn Simonson

“Living up to the demands of the moment requires looking beyond technocratic fixes and reckoning with more transformational possibilities. It requires listening to the longstanding call from movements for more power over policing, more investment in their communities—not just to defund the police, but to defund racism itself.”

4. What the Kerner Report Got Wrong about Policing, by Daniel Geary

“The most significant problem with the report is not how it characterized the uprisings, but rather its assumption that African American rioters were the main source of violence and disorder in American society. The report denounced white segregationists and Black Power leaders alike for creating a ‘climate of violence,’ but ignored the violence of the center, the violence of the state.”

5. Why Has COVID-19 Not Led to More Humanitarian Releases?, by Dan Berger

Jalil Muntaqim, a Black Panther imprisoned since 1971, is one of thousands of elderly prisoners the United States has refused to free during the pandemic. Even the most liberal of U.S. governors would rather risk their prisons turning into mass graves than offer the faintest of admissions that mass incarceration is a colossal failure and unnecessary for public safety.

6. Terror and Abolition, by Atiya Husain

“Incarceration and counterterrorism are two arms of the same state apparatus. This is driven home by the sight of police attacking citizens with surplus military weapons from the War on Terror, often using counterterrorism warfare techniques learned from the Israel Defense Forces and other counterinsurgency training abroad.”

7. The Pain Just Stays in Your Head, by Gili Kliger

“The flood of video images in recent years of African Americans killed at the hands of the state has broadcast the horror of anti-black violence in the United States. But reckoning with the scale of police brutality also requires confronting state violence that escapes the cell phone camera’s lens. One of the most insidious examples of such violence is Chicago’s decades-long history of police torture.”

8. How Cars Transformed Policing, by Sarah A. Seo

Before the mass adoption of the car, most communities barely had a police force and citizens shared responsibility for enforcing laws. Then the car changed everything.

 

Additional Reading