Talking About Abolition

blog — January 15

Excerpt: Talking About Abolition by Sonali Kolhatkar

Through these powerful interviews with scholars, organizers, and activists leading the movement to end policing and prison, award-winning journalist Sonali Kolhatkar presents a visionary outlook for a future rooted in liberation, freedom, and justice. 

Abolitionist thinkers have been envisioning police-free communities for decades, but only in the aftershock of the racial justice uprisings of 2020 have their radical ideas entered into mainstream discourse. In her book Talking About Abolition, Kolhatkar presents an inspiring collection of her conversations with scholars, movement figures, and activists who are leading the movement to end policing and prisons. From articulating the best counter-arguments to pervasive “copaganda,” to exposing the moral bankruptcy of reformism, each conversation connects the dots between past and present while imagining a collective future rooted in liberation, freedom, and justice.

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INTRODUCTION

The instinct to dial 911 in an emergency is embedded in the American psyche. However, Cat Brooks, an abolitionist organizer and community radio host, counters this. She notes, “Wide swaths of the Black and Brown community don’t call the police because we know that when we dial that number, it is very rarely help that actually comes. What comes is an institution, or agents of an institution, who are trained to suppress, control, and subjugate, as opposed to help.”

Studies consistently prove Brooks’s assertion to be true, including a 2023 survey by the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), which found that the majority of Black Americans are afraid of relying on police to help them in a crisis.[3] Meanwhile, the majority of white Americans are comfortable doing so. Gallup found that, from 2021 to 2023, confidence in policing among white Americans has hovered around seventy-five percent, despite the mass demonstrations against racist policing in 2020, in which many white Americans participated. [4]

The racial disparity over attitudes toward policing isn’t the result of a bizarre built-in bias against authority among Black folks. The entire US system of criminal justice—from police patrolling and surveillance to the legal system of courts run by prosecutors and judges, culminating in incarceration—is sharply tilted against Black people. Black people don’t trust the police because they face the existential threat of death or imprisonment during every interaction with a cop. Such conditions beg the question: has racial segregation truly ended?

In her powerful 2010 bestseller, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander makes the case that no, it did not end. “Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color ‘criminals’ and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind” such as slavery and segregation, writes Alexander in her book. [5]

In 2016, filmmaker Ava DuVernay expanded on Alexander’s work with her Oscar-nominated documentary 13th, which draws a direct line from the end of slavery to the modern-day criminal justice system, making a powerful case that policing and incarceration are merely extensions of the original racist institutions in the United States.

There have been many compelling treatises in recent years written by US scholars proving the moral bankruptcy of racist policing. “[N]o aspect of national life—from the economy to education to electoral politics—has been untouched by the scale and scope of racialized policing and punishment,” writes Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, in his 2019 book, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, for example. [6]

Muhammad’s book is part of a growing canon of work upending the notion that the American justice system is impartial. It’s no wonder then that George Floyd’s brutal murder at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis sparked a raging inferno of anger among Americans of every racial background. According to one study, an estimated 15 to 26 million people marched in 8,700 racial justice protests that took place across the country between May 25 and July 31, 2020. [7]

However, merely calling attention to the racism embedded deeply within systems of policing is clearly not enough. Indeed, every year since Floyd’s murder, police have progressively killed more people, with 1,347 people’s lives snuffed out at the hands of law enforcement in 2023. That’s more than 112 people killed per month, and ninety-six more than the previous year. Moreover, Black people are nearly 3 times more likely to be killed by police than white people. [8] Unless there is a serious intervention, we can expect the level of violence to continue to rise.

Similarly, it’s not enough to simply denounce the perverse number of people who remain incarcerated. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, over the past half century the number of people held in state and federal prisons increased by an unimaginable 700 percent, with Black people being much more likely to remain trapped behind bars. [9]

When I think about the profound damage the carceral system inflicts on people, families, and communities, I cannot help but think of my friend, Darrell “Dortell” Williams, who has been imprisoned in California for more than thirty years. Although we’ve been friends for about two decades, we’ve never met in person. To me—a non-Black American who has not had to suffer the pain of seeing a family member incarcerated—his indefinite incarceration is symbolic of everything that is wrong with our current justice system.

“Prisons are a failed experiment that has no social, societal, or penological validation,” writes Dortell in a letter to me from Chuckawalla Valley State Prison. For him, “the roots of crime” are “marginalization, poverty, and defunded zip codes,” and “prisons themselves perpetuate these same ills.” In using the word “defunded” to describe how vulnerable communities have been stripped of resources, Dortell references a solution to the violence of the system in which he remains trapped.

Alongside the protesters’ message of “Black Lives Matter” in 2020, was the more esoteric “Defund the Police.” Those latter three words hinted not only at the need to overhaul the American system of policing and prisons, but also at a reimagining of something entirely different as a means of enacting public safety.

Abolition Is an Evolving Idea

Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed, became the epicenter of the modern-day abolition movement in 2020. “We are actually building on decades of work from other organizers who have been doing abolition work and trying to move us towards a world in which abolition is possible,” [10] said Miski Noor, a leading organizer and activist with the Minneapolis-based Black Visions Collective. Noor cites the work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Andrea Ritchie as laying the groundwork for contemporary abolitionist organizing.

Indeed, there is a rich trove of abolitionist analyses available for those seeking to end policing as we know it. Angela Davis’s 2003 book Are Prisons Obsolete? was a foundational publication that powerfully made the case for ending the American system of incarceration. “[L]arger prison populations led not to safer communities, but, rather, to even larger prison populations,” writes Davis. [11]

In the late 1990s, Davis and Gilmore, together with scholar-activist Dylan Rodriguez, co-founded an abolitionist organization called Critical Resistance with an explicit focus on eradicating prisons, the carceral end point of policing. At around the same time, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) became embroiled in a scandal of epic proportions that made national headlines.

Starting in the 2000s, I interviewed Gilmore, Rodriguez, and other prison abolitionists on my daily drive-time radio program, airing on a community station based in Los Angeles called KPFK Pacifica Radio. During that period, I also covered street actions in downtown LA. I witnessed Angelinos protest the ugly corruption at the heart of the LAPD, particularly its Rampart Division. Hundreds of police officers were implicated in abusive and corrupt practices, which led to untold numbers of wrongful convictions.

Despite evidence of systemic failures, imagining a world without prisons—let alone police—was considered far more radical at that time than it is today. However, thanks to the last few decades of dogged work from largely Black activists and academics such as Gilmore and Noor, abolition has become a far more acceptable idea.

In 2019, the New York Times printed an extensive profile of Gilmore as a prison abolitionist. [12] In 2021, The New Yorker published Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s powerful piece titled “The Emerging Movement for Police and Prison Abolition.” [13] And in 2022, Harper’s Bazaar conducted an in-depth interview with Angela Davis and Gina Dent about their book, Abolition. Femnism. Now. [14]

It seems abolition is an idea whose time has come. This book is intended to connect the abolitionist work done in the 2000s and 2010s to the resurgence of interest in abolitionism since the 2020 uprising for racial justice. The wheels of abolition are already in motion. Many of those leading the change tell their stories here.

Enforcing and Preserving Racial Capitalism

“The United States is unlike any other place on the planet,” Gilmore said to me in a 2011 interview, “and the states that have the worst prison systems are also the ones that have the biggest gaps between rich and poor.” She added, “We as Americans have got to get serious about thinking of the ways that people are abandoned—we have immigrants locked up, people of color locked up, mentally ill people locked up, people with addictions locked up—and reconsider how it is that we should be in this world.” [15]

She deepened this analysis in a conversation we had in 2023, on which Chapter Two of this book is based. “Abolition,” says Gilmore, “lets us look at how people are struggling and understand the organized abandonment that characterizes so much of everyday life under capitalism.”

Our criminal justice system is deeply intertwined with our economic system. It’s no coincidence that the same society that embraces racist policing and imprisonment is also one where people of color, and Black people in particular, remain deeply disadvantaged compared to white people. [16] The system born from white supremacist ideals that enriched white enslavers and their progeny has largely maintained its socio-economic hierarchy in the modern world. And therefore, as Andrea Ritchie says in Chapter One, “What police are charged with doing is maintaining the existing social order.” They are the “muscle of racial capitalism.”

For decades, politicians have responded to the violence of policing by assuming it was a flaw that needed fixing, a few “bad apples” that needed expunging. But, as abolitionist attorney Noelle Hanrahan says in Chapter Four, “the system is designed to function exactly as it was planned. It is not broken. It is doing a service for the ruling class, the capitalist class, those who want to manage people who are demanding food, work, and bread, and humanity.”

Those who believe the police could be a force for good have backed many tiny (and expensive) tweaks to law enforcement. They respond to its inherent abusiveness with stricter protocols for physical interactions, body cameras, or diversity training. Such tweaks have not only preserved policing but relegitimized it again and again. “There is a kind of stubborn persistence, a stubborn loyalty to those things as forms of power that actually provide social work,” says Dylan Rodriguez in Chapter Three. He calls out the “almost religious loyalty” to policing as an “anti-Black and colonial power, as that which gives order to the world.” City budgets tell the story of such loyalties in cold hard numbers, as lawmakers direct jaw-dropping portions of tax revenue into their local police departments. This leaves public goods— including libraries, afterschool programs, job training, public transportation, and the like—to fight over the crumbs.

For example, according to the Vera Institute of Justice, the portion of the city budget spent on policing is twenty-six percent in Baltimore, Maryland; thirty-four percent in Wilmington, Delaware; thirty-seven percent in Chicago, Illinois; thirty-six percent in Houston, Texas; forty-one percent in Phoenix, Arizona; and a whopping sixty-four percent in Billings, Montana. [17] In attempting to reform police—which has turned out to be an exercise in futility—city and state officials have poured yet more public resources into systems designed to maintain racial injustice from their inception.

It’s not just police departments that are sucking up our precious tax dollars. Courts, jails, and prisons also extract resources at the expense of public safety and well-being. Ivette Alé-Ferlito, cofounder of the abolitionist organization La Defensa, calls courts “a line of production for incarceration” in Chapter Eight. They add that “the budgets for the judiciary have been climbing for the last twenty years, and the increases in judicial spending are reflected in the expansion of our criminal legal system and mass incarceration.”

This vastly expensive and patently anti-Black system of oppression preserves economic hierarchies along racial lines and has stubbornly persisted at the center of American civilization. It is, at its core, deeply uncivilized. So, what do we do about it?

Defund the Police = Invest/Divest = Care Not Cops = Care First, Jails Last

It is incumbent on governments to equalize wealth distribution. But the very resources that could do so via things like housing assistance, job training, small business subsidies and grants, and free college are diverted into funding the armed enforcers of inequality. Given this, the call to “Defund the Police” makes profound sense. However, liberal politicians and corporate media pundits, while embracing “Black Lives Matter” in 2020, rejected the idea behind the accompanying slogan of “Defund the Police,” [18] and maintained the big lie that there is no alternative to police, prisons, and the entire criminal justice system.

What if they—what if we—instead poured resources into those institutions that have actually been proven to promote public safety and well-being? Moving money out of policing, courts, and prisons and into public services is a straightforward idea, which the slogan “Defund the Police” attempts to capture. The same idea has been expressed in various other, perhaps less provocative, formations, such as “Invest/Divest,” “Care, Not Cops,” and “Care First, Jails Last.”

Regardless of the phrasing, the sentiment is the same: let’s invest resources into the things that keep us safe rather than policing. Such thinking has informed discussions around budgetary processes in various cities where abolitionists have been active. In Chapter Nine, longtime Black Lives Matter activist and California State University, Los Angeles professor Melina Abdullah lays out how cities can be pushed to enact participatory budgeting processes so that city residents can decide how to spend their tax dollars. By surveying those who are made aware of the extent of city police budgets, she finds that “people, regardless of political persuasion, tend to lean towards defunding the police.” She acknowledges that “simply having a participatory budgeting process is not abolition,” but “it pulls people in, so they begin to ask questions about why do we spend money here and not there?”

Abolition may feel too big and too complicated to achieve. In Chapter Five, Reina Sultan, who helped build the website 8toabolition.com in the summer of 2020 when interest in such ideas spiked, writes “It’s hard to imagine change when you’ve only known this way of living.” But it’s not really that complicated. Sultan articulates a handful of clear steps to achieving abolition, starting with “Defund the Police,” and ending with “Invest in Care, Not Cops.” The steps are a distillation of ideas articulated and put into practice in various ways and at various times by abolitionist activists and public intellectuals.

The idea of investing in community care over policing is popular, and why not? The M4BL survey conducted in 2023 found that “86% of Black people support creating a new agency of first responders who specialize in de-escalating violence and providing mental-health support and other social services that would take over these responsibilities from police.”[19] Well-funded social structures supporting public health and education; quality employment; living wages; and access to fair housing, clean air, and fresh, healthy food could diminish, if not entirely erase, the need for a criminal justice system.

Such projects are already underway in many US cities. As Eunisses Hernandez, the young abolitionist organizer who became an LA city councilmember, says in Chapter 7, “We have had a lot of success in moving money out of the carceral system into community, in moving money that was destined for jail construction into access to housing and care."

Hernandez coauthored Measure J, a citywide ballot measure passed in November 2020 which directs a chunk of LA’s budget into nonpolice public safety programs. The LA Times Editorial board called Measure J “the nation’s most lasting and consequential criminal justice reform strategy to arise from the social movements of 2020.” [20]

Black Futures and the Promise of a Multiracial Democracy

Cat Brooks says, “A world without police doesn’t mean a world without accountability. It means that what we’re doing right now actually doesn’t create safety for anyone.” Abolishing slavery and segregation were not enough to end the scourge of virulent racism infecting the heart and soul of the United States. If policing and prisons are merely extensions of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, then the original project of slavery’s abolition is incomplete.

The necessary next phase of abolition, then, is to eradicate policing, prisons, and the courts, while simultaneously building up structures that actually promote community safety and creating a future where a multiracial democracy can thrive. We can think of this as a grand unifying theory of abolition.

Turning that theory into practice is not an impractical prospect at all. Black women are at the forefront of realizing abolitionist ideals. Alongside Indigenous Americans, Black women in the US have faced the worst forms of violence and marginalization, historically and in the present day. [21] They have also led the most inspiring struggles for freedom and originated the most powerful and radical analyses of what is necessary for collective liberation. It is the reason why I, as a non-Black person of color, have taken my lead from Black women visionaries and why the majority of the interview subjects in this book are Black women.

In Chapter Twelve, Alicia Garza, one of three Black women who popularized the phrase “Black Lives Matter,” says “When we think about laws and policies that impact our lives, most of the time our communities are not involved in the development of those processes, but we certainly are impacted by them.” To that end, Garza, who founded the Black Futures Lab says, “We want to change that equation. We think that Black communities deserve to be the people who are making the rules, and changing the rules, that are shaping our lives every single day.”

This book, although by no means comprehensive, is a compilation of the ideas and views of twelve movement leaders, rule changers, and culture shapers who envision a future where both the unequal socio-economic order and the enforcers of that inequality are obsolete.

On the other side of abolition lies a beautiful world where quality education and libraries, food and housing, physical and mental healthcare, satisfying work, and good pay, are not just theoretical rights, but are available to all. It is a world where we can all thrive, especially those among us who have been historically excluded from the largesse of American wealth.

It’s never too early to begin visualizing and actualizing that future. Many are doing just that. In Chapter eleven, acclaimed food justice organizer and farmer Leah Penniman links abolitionist ideals of rebuilding new worlds to land, food, and farming, saying that “the food system is essentially incarcerated in corporate racial capitalism” and that the severing of Black and Brown people’s ties to the land goes hand in hand with policing and mass incarceration. Conversely, freeing land from corporate control, says Penniman, is central to freeing people from prisons and policing.

And finally, in Chapter Twelve, feminist abolitionist Gina Dent reminds us that “the carceral system is naturalized for us,” and that “we are taught over and over again that we need to rely on it.” Consequently, “that’s the only thing we can imagine.” Dent calls for a wholesale cultural transformation of the individualist mindsets and behaviors that drive incarceration, down to our personal interactions with one another.

This book is intended to weave the many disparate threads of abolitionist theory and practice into a coherent tapestry that can guide us into the future, applying a necessary sense of urgency. After all, the lives and dignity of our fellow human beings—like my friend Dortell Williams—are at stake. Some have survived the horrors of police abuse and incarceration. Far too many remain caged, suffering daily dehumanization. Many live in fear. Far too many have died already. Many more will be killed.

We have the power and the responsibility to transform this system.

“[I]t should be remembered that the ancestors of many of today’s most ardent liberals could not have imagined life without slavery, life without lynching, or life without segregation,” says Angela Davis in Are Prisons Obsolete. [22] The same historical throughline that connects chattel slavery to the contemporary system of policing and mass incarceration extends to abolition. Those who imagined a slavery-free future lifted the nation up to the path to freedom. Modern-day abolitionists are walking that same path in order to finish the task their ancestors began.

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SONALI KOLHATKAR is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the racial justice editor at YES! Magazine and the host of YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali, a weekly television and radio program that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica Radio stations and affiliates around the United States. Sonali is a senior correspondent of the Economy For All Project at the Independent Media Institute and the author of Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice. She has won numerous awards, including Best TV Anchor and Best National Political Commentary from the LA Press Club, and has been nominated for Best Radio Anchor four years in a row.

Sonali earned her MS in Astronomy from the University of Hawaii, and two undergraduate degrees in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin. She resides with her husband and two sons in Pasadena, California.