We mean exactly that. Police and prisons are both oppressive and unnecessary institutions and we should do away with them altogether. As Critical Resistance says in their essay “What is Abolition?“:
We take the name “abolitionist” purposefully from those who called for the abolition of slavery in the 1800’s. Abolitionists believed that slavery could not be fixed or reformed. It needed to be aboli
shed. As PIC [Prison Industrial Complex] abolitionists today, we also do not believe that reforms can make the PIC just or effective. Our goal is not to improve the system; it is to shrink the system into non-existence. This might sound to you like an impractical or idealistic idea. Often, people see the name of our group, and imagine a world like the one we live in now, where all the prisons and police are suddenly removed, with no organization, and with all of our current social/economic arrangements kept as they are now. This leads them to imagine a fantasy where all sorts of horrible things happen, with rapists, m**h dealers, and serial killers overrunning communities and creating mayhem, fear, and death with nobody there who is empowered to stop them … but this scenario is not what abolitionists are suggesting at all. What we are actually saying is this:
(a) Prisons are cruel, inhuman forms of torture which completely fail at deterring or preventing violent crime in our communities. The United States has more people in prison than any other country on earth, but we still have enormous amounts of murder, r**e, drug addiction, etc. in our society. Prisons are clearly not making these problems go away. No matter how many people we lock up, the problems will not go away until we address the root social causes of violence. We need to develop alternatives to mass incarceration to deal with social problems. (b) Police do little to protect our communities, and primarily serve as instruments of social control for the wealthy. They bring violence and intimidation into our communities, assaulting and murdering citizens without accountability. Violence in our communities is real, and we need to confront it, but we do not believe that police are the answer (they, in fact, are one of the primary means by which violent systems of oppression are kept in place). We need to develop alternatives to police. (c) We believe that violence and other behaviors that harm our communities (including the ecological communities we are a part of) are caused by social problems such as economic exploitation, racism, sexism, and militarism. Real solutions to violence in our communities should be centered on addressing these causes of social violence, rather than thinking that if we just punish people brutally enough, if we just give the police enough assault rifles and body armor, that it will all go away. In the words of Erica Meiner:
Working towards abolition means creating structures that reduce the demand and need for prisons. It is ensuring that communities have viable, at least living-wage jobs that are not dehumanizing. It means establishing mechanisms for alternative dispute resolution and other processes that address conflict or harm with mediation. It means ensuring that our most vulnerable populations, for example, those who are mentally ill or undereducated, do not get warehoused in prisons because of the failure of other institutions such as healthcare and education. It means practicing how to communicate and live across differences and to rely more on each other instead of the police. (d) We believe that alternatives to police and prisons exist, and that it is possible to start implementing them right now. Building a world without prisons and police will take a lot of time and effort, but we should start now by building concrete community alternatives such as such as community self-defense groups, crisis centers, and mediation/conflict-resolution groups. Instead of seeking justice through revenge and punishment, we should seek justice through community actions that work to heal the damage caused by their actions. Instead of warehousing millions of people in prisons, and spending billions of dollars arming cops like military troops, we need to find ways to constructively deal with the problems in our community, and we need to start implementing them right now, in the present. The effect of this will be to steadily move us towards a society without cops and prisons. That is, we are asking the question: What would a world without cops and prisons look like? What types of social changes would need to be made for this to be possible? What kinds of projects can we undertake in the present to prefiguratively start creating this world? We are trying to answer these questions at ACAP, and make a contribution towards implementing community-based solutions to violence here in Olympia — solutions that we hope will make cops and prisons a thing of the past.
