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

As a self-described abolitionist, Kaba is dedicated to the dismantling of the prison system and the establishment of an entirely new social order, which, among other things, must do away with capitalism. Kaba notes that prisons were originally meant as a reform, an improvement on capital and corporal punishment, but it has since become a dumping ground for social undesirables. Since the end of the Civil War, Black people in particular have relentlessly been targets of the prison system; Kaba claims that this is due to the fact that Black people have been considered incapable of enjoying their newfound freedom responsibly.

The expansion of the prison system in the late 1960s coincided with the rise of the Black Power movement and a series of urban uprisings against police brutality and other social injustices. Even the immigration system largely targets Black migrants, especially Haitians who incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, before it became infamous as a prison for terrorism suspects. Kaba observes that the incarceration of Haitian refugees at Guantanamo Bay happened under the administration of Bill Clinton, who also instituted a series of so-called reforms that vastly expanded the rate of Black incarceration. Under President Obama, there was a new wave of urban rebellions against high-profile murders of young Black men, and Kaba sees this as part of a “long freedom struggle that has gone on in this country for as long as Black people have been here” (75).

In many schools across America, students (mostly Black) have been treated like criminals for extremely minor infractions, often setting them on a pathway known as the “school-to-prison pipeline” (76). In this process, students are set up for failure in school, justifying their placement within the prison system. Even as crime rates went into decline starting in the 1970s, police increased their presence in schools across the US, introducing a “punishment mindset” not dissimilar to that which prevails in prisons (77). The number of suspensions skyrocketed, and Kaba adds that students who receive suspensions are far more likely to drop out. Unsurprisingly, such punishments disproportionately fall on Black students, who are often arrested for misdemeanor offenses. Kaba also clarifies that the term “disproportionately,” while statistically true, is often used “to mask the central roles white supremacy and anti-black racism play in shaping ideas and practices surrounding school discipline” (77).

According to Kaba, hanging policies in schools might help, but eliminating the prisons at the other end of the pipeline is far more important. Furthermore, an emphasis on testing rather than a holistic education causes many students to become disengaged or they are phased out if they can’t help raise their school’s test scores. Kaba adds that a social contempt for teachers (especially female teachers) also feeds the idea that police must come in to impose a discipline that would otherwise be lacking. Schools need to become “restorative and transformative spaces” (79), which first means investing in schools rather than prisons. Organizations in cities across America are working to push such changes, which include providing inclusive environments for LGBTQ+ students, migrant students, and other groups likely to become victims of the carceral state.

Mainstream media outlets are finally paying attention to the hyper-militarization of police forces in the United States, especially in the wake of the uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri, as a result of Michael Brown’s murder. Coverage focuses on shocking scenes of weapons of war being used against protestors, but Kaba says that people should not lose sight of the more ordinary violence visited against Black communities on a daily basis. Police militarization accelerated in the wake of the Vietnam War, where a vast expansion in military equipment and trained personnel coincided with urban uprisings in several American cities. Militarization is indeed a problem, but it is not the problem, since this idea “suggests it is the excess against which we must rally” (83). This idea is flawed, Kaba argues, because, by drawing attention when the body count is especially high, the weapons especially large, the cruelty especially egregious, more ordinary violence and cruelty goes unacknowledged.

If militarization of the police is the problem, then Black suffering is implicitly acceptable so long as it comes at the hands of ordinary police officers. We should not notice the suffering of Black people, says Kaba, only when it bears a plausible connection to the suffering of other peoples around the world, such as the victims of the War on Terror; rather, the suffering Black people endure should count on its own. Kaba describes how people say things like, “I thought I was looking at pictures of Iraq but I was looking at America!” (86), and she observes that this implies that the US is ordinarily safe and terrible things only happen elsewhere, an attitude that implicitly permits the daily suffering of Black and other marginalized communities.

Kaba’s remarks begin with a quotation from a young Black man from Chicago, who talks about how every move he makes is scrutinized, whether by the police while driving a car, by owners while shopping in a store, or by gang members while just walking down the street. Kaba then wonders what the differences are among the three groups of watchers. All three “see criminality as inscribed his body, in his being” (89). Another young person in Chicago talks of having a police officer stop him and demand access to his phone, which had a sticker of a marijuana plant on it. When the young man refused, the same police officer apprehended him later and dropped him in known gang territory, clearly hoping that he would be killed.

 Such stories, despite being common, were typically ignored until a Department of Justice report corroborated the frequency of such occurrences. According to Kaba, policies like “stop-and-frisk,” where police halt and search people without probable cause, are simply reminders to young Black people that they are being watched with suspicion and often hostility. Such practices draw little outcry from the broader public, and the beginning of abolition politics is to point out the fundamental injustice of the current system and demand its dismantlement. The challenge is that “liberation under oppression is unthinkable” because that which is oppressive is considered normal (91). Showing how this seemingly normal condition is in fact appalling is the first step toward imaging a genuine alternative.

Kaba says that Donald Trump’s presence in the White House is not significant insofar as the prison system has always been rooted in white supremacy, and Trump is simply recycling policies that have been around a long time. The election did however shift Kaba’s attitudes about organizing. She shares that she had overestimated the ability of a complex machine like the Democratic Party to fend off Trump’s enthusiastic but chaotic campaign. When Democrats were in office, some activists were tempted to rely on the Department of Justice to regulate local police, and now that that clearly won’t happen under Trump, Kaba says that she expects new ideas to take form.

Prison abolition must confront the fact that prisons make a large majority of people feel secure (not safe, an important distinction for Kaba), that the “scary, awful, monster people are kept at bay by those institutions” (94). People accordingly cling to the police to protect them from something terrible, even as the police contribute to social violence. Kaba notes, even for activists, it can sometimes be difficult to accept that prisons and the police are not capable of reform, and the project of abolition may make them feel like their task is so large and comprehensive as to be unachievable.

Kaba holds that incremental reform can be meaningful, so long as the ultimate goal of abolition remains in sight. “Non-reformist reforms” will not abolish prison in one fell swoop (95), but will take meaningful steps toward dismantling the punishment system. Other reforms, however, such as abolishing the death penalty and instead sentencing all death-row inmates to life without parole, do away with one formal aspect of the system while reproducing its basic logic.

When Kaba first made a public statement on prison abolition (“Police Reforms You Should Always Oppose”) many dismissed her ideas out of hand as fanciful, but others saw it as a pithy and powerful piece that could help mobilize communities into demanding accountability from the police. Yet the ultimate goal should be communities where there are no police and no need for them. This in turn requires a fundamentally different set of social structures where people hold one another accountable without the fear of violent escalation that justifies reliance on the state.

Kaba observes that there are already communities, mostly white and wealthy, who already have no need for police, and so it is not fanciful to imagine similar protections extending to other peoples. There are encouraging examples of community-based activism, but Kaba notes that it will be a great challenge to secure the funding and organizational resources to scale those actions. There is also a great paradox in needing to rely on the mechanics of a capitalist system in order to bring about a postcapitalist future. Right now, the organizations at work are not capable of meeting the vast need for their services, but they will not compromise their mission for financial benefit.