Abolition of police and prisons
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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Prisons seem to be a feature of all modern authoritarian systems. Gulags in the former Soviet Union were known for separating people from their communities and shipping them to remote areas of the territory. They were famously described as an archipelago due to their isolation from Soviet society and their island-like separation from each other. While Siberian labor camps existed under the Russian Empire, they were expanded under Stalin's regime to be the primary form of punishment for political dissent. Their purpose has been adapted and enlarged under the Russian Federation with the introduction of western market reforms. Along with 'free-market' changes, prisons in population centers were revitalized and now operate in tandem with Siberian work camps as a single Federal Penitentiary Service.
The state of California holds more people captive than the Soviet Union at its most oppressive, and holds an even larger portion of the population. Over half of California prisons and 80% of prisoners are located more than 50 miles from major population areas, often in places called 'prison towns' where the biggest employer is the CDCR. These modern gulags are designed to sever the ties between incarcerated people and their communities, and impose exorbitant costs on families of the victims to maintain proximity. People are shuttled between these remote prisons to undermine friendships and alliances they form inside prison communities, with the intention to undermine political organization within prisons.
The prison system is structural to capitalism, and a testament to its authoritarian nature. If prisons and police were abolished, capitalism would collapse like a building under demolition. Prison is a load bearing structure in the pyramid of all authoritarian systems.