We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice

Every summer, police step up their surveillance of young Black men, who are out of school and congregating in public spaces. Outside of Dallas, police once raided a pool party full of Black teenagers, even drawing guns on the teens. While some attribute these altercations to a lack of mutual understanding, Kaba argues that the police and Black people, especially young men, know each other all too well, and the police regard Black men as “disposable and dangerous mini-adults” (7). Kaba cites the example of Detroit police who in 1947 shot a 13-year-old boy named Beverly Lee; despite the boy’s age, the police later referred to Lee as a man, and no officer faced discipline. In addition to acts of violence, there are “daily indignities and more invisible harms” that include stopping and frisking people on the thinnest pretense, sexually assaulting young women, and stealing money under the pretext of a raid (9).

Police violence against Black and brown people is not new, and has long fueled outbursts of communal resistance, observes Kaba. Harlem rose up in revolt against police violence in 1935, and afterward the city of New York collected extensive research on the abuses police had long visited upon the people of marginalized communities. This has helped foster a stronger sense of “collective rights over our individual liberties,” within Black communities, as oppression brings about the realization that “it is impossible for us to exercise our individual rights within a context of more generalized social, economic, and political oppression” (12).

The only solution to this problem, argues Kaba, is to abolish the police. Working toward that goal includes steps such as reducing police budgets, ending the practice of cash bail, and developing community-based alternatives to policing. The problem is not that police departments are “broken” (13), which suggests that reforms might help them operate more effectively. They are doing exactly what they are supposed to do, which is terrorize marginalized communities.

While politicians talk about reforming the police, Kaba contends that the only way to solve the problem of racialized policing is to abolish the police. The police began in the US with the express purpose of catching fugitives from slavery and stamping out labor activism. Nowadays, when police are not brutalizing Black and other marginalized peoples, they are mostly responding to minor complaints, not solving major crimes as television shows would suggest. A useful first step would be to cut police budgets in half, thereby reducing the number of police capable of terrorizing the communities they are supposedly protecting.

Kaba notes that, for well over a century, police violence has been a leading cause of urban rioting, but so far there have only been superficial reforms, like the introduction of body cameras or an increase of anti-bias training. Police will ultimately run roughshod over these reforms, claims Kaba, because their purpose is to be violent. In addition to curbing this violence, decreased police budgets can reallocate funds to health care and other social services, thereby rendering police less necessary. A society without police would be one “built on cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation” (170). In closing, Kaba reiterates that moderate reform has failed too many times for it to provide a viable solution.

Kaba states that recognizing the harms done by systems of incarceration demands a reimagining of alternatives to take their place. It demands a world where people are not subjected to the cruelty of solitary confinement and a host of other violent and humiliating treatments, as was the case for Tiffany Rusher, who, after several months of solitary confinement, died by suicide at the age of 27. Such terrible stories are distressingly common, forcing an unsparing look at the violence society produces on a regular basis. Although opponents of abolition portray it as hopelessly naïve, Kaba observes that abolitionists have in fact achieved several practical successes, such as building alliances with prominent organizations and holding abusive officials accountable.

Kaba continues, stating that the purpose of the prison-industrial complex is not safety, but self-perpetuation, usually at the cost of public safety. People have been conditioned to think of prisons as “part of a natural order” (21), but mass incarceration has only spiked since the 1980s. People are further conditioned to excuse the violence of police, while cheering brutal punishment of criminals. This might be tempting when the perpetrator is accused of terrible crimes, but the punishment of an individual does nothing to change the underlying social conditions that give rise to theirs and other crimes.

Kaba examines how the law ends up reducing all kinds of people to the same legal category as the most notorious criminals on television, establishing notions of “predators” and “dangerous people” who in turn justify the existence and perpetuation of the carceral state (23). Politicians routinely respond with proposals for even harsher treatment of criminals, not because they think they will work, but because they want to distract from the hard task of addressing structural problems—which would place enormous responsibility on their shoulders—and in many cases, they may benefit personally.

Quoting Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Kaba says that the goal is

not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society (24).

Existing institutions cannot be reformed because they cannot be divorced from their essential purpose of robbing certain people of their humanity. For too long, hypothetical questions over minor details have limited the scope of inquiry into alternative structures, and Kaba argues that it is past time to begin a public inquiry into radically new possibilities.

Working in the field of prison abolition is often depressing and demoralizing, shares Kaba, but it is necessary to have an attitude of hope and to cultivate that attitude daily. The evidence does not always support an attitude of hope, but here it is all the more important to persist in hope anyway. Kaba adds that it is not up to one person to change the entire world, but if they can make a positive impact in their own communities, and enough people are doing the same within their communities, they can find a measure of satisfaction even if transformational change seems far away. Individual activists must not conflate themselves with the broader movement, so when “you understand that you’re really insignificant in the grand scheme of things, then it’s a freedom, in my opinion, to actually be able to do the work that’s necessary as you see it and to contribute in the ways that you see fit” (27). Working to improve the community is a form of self-care, Kaba claims, since empowering others allows them to help in return.