Abolition: One Critical Genealogy

• In Event: Lessons in Liberation: Growing Movements Through Abolitionist Praxis

Abstract

This essay traces the genealogy of current wins such as the Illinois Governor Pritzker proclaiming in July 202 the end of the state’s juvenile prison system: “The 150-year-old punitive model simply doesn’t fulfill its mission.” While critiquing the matter in which the state co-opted the language and vision of previous grassroots organizing which serves as an example of the state’s deft ability to absorb, incorporate, and reorient our demands, the author situates this moment as a result of decades of radical organizing. The author argues that this is a win, however complicated and short-term, that abolitionists should claim.
Highlighting the centrality of a long haul orientation to abolitionist organizing within and outside of schools, the author traces the previous twelve years of organizing that are invisibilized with dominant discourses. The author points to the network of radical Chicago collectives that were growing— and yes, feeling— its way into an abolition practice, comprised particularly of feminists: The Young Women’s Empowerment Project; Project NIA; INCITE! Women, Gender Non-Conforming, and Trans People of Color Against Violence; Transformative Justice Law Project; and Visible Voices. In classrooms, in street actions, and in innumerable workshops, this beloved community— notably overwhelmingly made up of women, queer folks and/or people of color— gathered to learn and often to practice ways of responding to harm without prisons and policing, transformative justice and community accountability, and other forms of anti-racist, queer liberation.

This research argues that this political moment creates new opportunities for those working for justice in schools, and yet it requires caution. Not only does facets of this current wave organizing that challenges this nation’s investment in “mass incarceration” often sidestep a rigorous and transparent analysis of the key investments that naturalized the buildup of the US systems of policing and imprisonment, white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy (Gilmore, 2007; Muhammad, 2010; Smith & Stanley, 2011), but reforms advanced by stakeholders across the political spectrum have often expanded, not contracted, the footprint and the underlying logic of our carceral, or punitive, state.

Work Cited
Gilmore, R. W. (2007). Golden gulag: Prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Muhammad, K. G. (2010). The condemnation of blackness: Race, crime, and the making of modern urban America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Smith, N., & Stanley, E. (Eds.) (2011). Captive genders: Trans embodiment and the prison industrial complex. Oakland, CA: AK Press.

Author

• Erica R. Meiners, Northeastern Illinois University