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Police abolition has entered the public consciousness with full force and considerable support.
Alongside select archival essays, this special project features lawyers, activists, historians and more responding to the demands of the 2020 uprisings. They not only boldly imagine an abolitionist future without police and prisons, but outline the steps needed to get us there.
We need to reckon with police lies not only as a form of individual misconduct but as a matter of political speech.
Cities must empower historically marginalized communities to shape how public funds are spent.
The authors of Abolition. Feminism. Now. discuss why racialized state violence and gender-based violence have to be fought together.
An interview with Derecka Purnell about her new book Becoming Abolitionists, how we should think about the systems that produce violence, and, ultimately, the resources that will allow people to live safely.
Effective responses to violence—preventing it, interrupting it, holding people accountable, and helping people heal—already exist. We need to learn from and invest in them.
Abolition is not only about eliminating the police, but imagining new systems that work to ensure a fair, equal society where there is no place for racism, ableism, or state violence.
Studying the social world requires more than deference to data—no matter the prestige or sophistication of the tools with which they are parsed.
As a culture of protest took hold in 1960s LA, communities of color also prioritized a radical tradition of care, emphasizing mutual aid, community control, and the transformative power of art and politics.
Instead of deterring sexual violence, criminalization has empowered policing and punishment. To prevent both sexual and state-inflicted abuse, we must embrace restorative justice.
Forms of gender-specific violence are baked into the structure of law enforcement. Reform efforts will fail until we eliminate police discretion over women’s bodies.
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