Life Harvester #20: Prison Abolition
Life Harvester is written by Colin Hagendorf and edited by Rebecca Giordano. This is the email version of a print publication available for low-cost individual subscription on Patreon or via Paypal. Life Harvester subscriptions are free to prisoners. If you know an incarcerated person who would like to receive a newsletter every month, get in touch with me directly and I’ll take care of it.
IT’S HOT OUT HERE
I’ve been sleeping fitfully every night and waking up agitated most mornings. Becca pointed out that our pitbull, Rubi, gets anxious if she doesn't get enough exercise and suggested that I might be feeling the same way. Pent up. Every day since I swear I'll do a few pushups, and every day I don't. Yet the gears of summer grind on. This wretched earth forever turns. Happy birthday to Roscoe Mitchell, Beenie Man, Jeanette Winterson & Marsha P. Johnson.
PRISON ABOLITION
I got a text from my old friend Clancy the other day that said, “Where do I start with abolitionist literature?” I was honored to be seen as a resource, but it forced me to admit that though I have a committed abolitionist viewpoint, I haven’t done much reading on the subject. My belief that police and prisons cannot be fixed or reformed but must be abolished evolved slowly and organically. First introduced to the notion through punk rock provocation, my position grew from my engagement with anarchist and anti-capitalist movements and was sharpened through involvement in feminist organizing around sexual assault, which led me directly to the rich intellectual tradition of the many Black feminist scholars of the contemporary abolition movement.
I believe that United States history, part of the global history of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, is a history of violence—the ongoing genocide of the Indigenous people of this continent, the Atlantic slave trade and its legacy, the murderous quelling of the labor movements of the 1800s, our perpetual pursuit of imperialist dominance around the globe. There are too many instances to list. I believe that our culture and economy were built and are maintained through the blood and labor of enslaved Black populations and their descendants and the colonization of lands outside US borders. I believe that despite countless attempts to reform our racist society, Black communities in the US have been repeatedly denied the opportunities granted to others in this country, that this denial of rights has not been a flaw that just needs to be ironed out, but is fundamental to how our society is organized. Through systemic injustices (redlining, school defunding, predatory military recruiting, the rollback of social welfare programs, and on and on), many Black people and communities have been deliberately kept as a racialized underclass on whose backs much of this system operates. I believe that this system harms everyone but the wealthiest. It is necessary for all of us, if we want lives for ourselves and our loved ones, to fight the criminalization of Blackness in this country. Police and prisons maintain this order through violence. We cannot change anything without completely dismantling these institutions and building new ones from scratch.
Although my beliefs are strong today, there was a time in my life when these concepts were new to me, when the notion of a world without prisons or police seemed impossible. In this moment, as the abolitionist stance is receiving more mainstream attention than it has at any point in my lifetime, as other people who once considered a world without police or prisons anathema are beginning to rethink their opinions, there may be a utility in tracing that trajectory.
I grew up in a wealthy, liberal family. My parents hated Republicans, but believed that “the system,” as we called it when I was an adolescent, was mostly fair. Like many white children of immigrants of their generation, they believed that the world was divided into good people and bad people. Good people were honest, hardworking, ethical. Bad people were criminals, scam artists, white supremacists. We, of course, were good people. They were of a generation of ethnic whites who had previously faced discrimination. Jewish and Irish, respectively, my father and mother had succeeded in upward mobility where prior generations of their families had been hindered by poverty and antisemitism. They believed this was possible because the American Dream was accessible to all, not because their people had been granted the privileges of whiteness.
My introduction to the idea that certain criminalized behaviors shouldn’t be punished came, embarrassingly enough, from the LES Stitches song “NYC Is Dead,” in which Mick Stitch whines that he “can’t drink on the street or even take a leak,” and continues to lament that “this higher standard of living is working against us. This ‘quality of life’ is to get rid of us.” The ‘us’ he was talking about was a coterie of mostly white punks, many of whom were not native to New York City, whose lifestyle had been collateral damage in Rudy Giuliani and the NYPD’s war on poor communities of color.
As a teen, I aspired to be one of these people, and worked diligently towards that goal. Every weekend I took the train into Manhattan to drink 40s and smoke dusted blunts at ABC No Rio, a squatted community center. My friends and I watched political punk bands scream about oppression and no one, as far as I can remember, talked about gentrification, despite the hordes of white tweens who descended on the mostly working class, Puerto Rican Lower East Side from Westchester, New Jersey, and Long Island, as well as wealthier parts of Manhattan and the boroughs.
The closest to critical engagement I can recall was one instance when I was 15. My best friend, a working class Mexican-American kid from the same suburb as me, decried the hypocrisy he perceived at No Rio. “Look at all these rich white kids pretending to be poor. See that girl with the back patch that says Keep Warm Burn the Rich? Her dad’s in charge of Virgin Records America.” That didn’t stop us from going. Hypocritical or not, I was exposed to so many radical political concepts for the first time in that space. No Rio didn’t just host hardcore matinees. Many unaffiliated activist groups called the space home—Books Through Bars, Food Not Bombs, Riot Grrrl NYC, among them. The collective I was later part of, Support New York, met in the kitchen for years.
At the same time as I was going to No Rio, I was getting into political rap groups like Black Star and Dead Prez. Their two albums, 1998’s Mos Def and Talib Kweli Are… and Let’s Get Free, respectively, introduced me to strains of radical Black thought I had previously been unaware of. In New York City, the punk & hip hop scenes intersected in activism to overturn the death sentence of Mumia Abu Jamal, a Panther journalist from Philadelphia who was framed for the murder of a cop. Though as I was quick to point out to my parents or the conservative classmates in my suburban high school, his guilt or innocence was moot since his trial had been such a sham. At that point, while I believed in an end to the death penalty, the notion that someone could get locked up for their entire life as a punishment didn’t bother me. I believed that Abu Jamal had been denied a fair trial on the basis of his race and his political involvements. In essence, I mirrored my parents liberal worldview almost exactly—the system was not inherently flawed, but broken and thus fixable.
I was 18 on 9/11. Afterwards, I watched the Feds and the NYPD baldly decide who the criminals were—Middle-Eastern Muslims, or anyone who looked like them to a racist. The construction of a potential terrorist class was so blatant, it led me to further rethink my acceptance of the pervasive idea that poor Black and Brown communities were more policed because they were more prone to crime. I still believed that the problem wasn’t the existence of prisons or police, but that these structures were tainted by racist politicians and individual corrupt officers. I knew that prisons needed to be changed. I learned from my peripheral involvement in the anti-sweatshop labor movement that prisoners were often forced to work for private corporations, stamping Taco Bell & KFC packaging for pennies a day. That seemed clearly wrong to me at the time, though the idea of forced labor as punishment was not something I opposed. I believed that prisoners should be paid minimum wage to do constructive labor to benefit society.
At 19, I got a part-time job teaching pre-GED math at Fortune Society in Manhattan. Fortune Society offers resources (from transitional housing to job training) to people straight off the bus from Riker’s Island. This was my first experience interacting with a substantial number of formerly incarcerated people. Which isn’t to say I didn’t know anyone who had been in jail, or had been touched by the carceral state. My dad had a cousin who did some time at Leavenworth for drug trafficking, the older kid who held a gun in my face when I was in 10th grade and told me he was gonna kill me right then and there had gotten out of jail earlier that same day, S****’s grandpa was locked up for life for a mafia-related homicide, and A***’s dad was in maximum security for 8-20 for dealing heroin.
The conventional wisdom adhered to by just about everyone I interacted with was that prison was something that happened to criminals. My friends and I—a startlingly multi-ethnic and cross-class group of people, looking back—certainly participated in an abundance of low-level crime (vandalism, shoplifting, doing drugs, selling weed), but we naively believed that we were simply partaking in the cultural legacy of teenage mischief. Kids making harmless trouble, not real criminals. A naive view of the world that went unchallenged because no one ever got caught for anything serious and we never had to contend with the full weight of the fact that the trivial crimes we were committing would have only been viewed as innocent when perpetrated by the white kids in our crew.
By my early-20s I was deeply enmeshed in an anarchist milieu and had begun working with Support New York, a sexual assault survivor support collective. It was through this work that I received most of my abolitionist education. SNY had sprung from what we perceived as a need within our circle of friends to support survivors of sexual, emotional, and intimate partner violence in their healing processes. Within a few years, our scope expanded to include attempts at community accountability for those who had been accused of violence. Doing this work I first encountered explicitly abolitionist practices.
I want to reiterate that evolution of thought for those who are inclined to whine, “but what about rapists?” when considering approaches to a prison-less future. My introduction to abolitionist work grew from direct-service activism on behalf of rape and assault survivors, and the direction it took was a survivor-led initiative. When I first began my work with SNY, the idea that a survivor wouldn’t simply “go to the police,” was astounding to me. This was what police were for. Real crime.
It quickly became clear that there were a number of reasons why a given survivor might not choose that path. I learned about the statistics on rape prosecution; that few cases actually went to trial, and fewer still led to conviction. I learned that the investigative process was frequently retraumatizing; that more often than not, survivors weren’t believed. I learned that the legal definitions of rape and assault were severely limited. There was a feminist intervention to empower women who had suffered violence did not measure up to the standards set by the state to seek accountability outside the legal system. Furthermore, SNY worked within radical communities and sometimes the survivor, the perpetuator*, or both had outstanding warrants for political actions or tenuous citizenship status and felt apprehensive about involving the cops in their affairs in any way. Finally, I learned that some survivors simply didn’t believe in police or prisons, believed that we could one day live in a world without them. I was immensely inspired by these women (in my time with SNY nearly all of the survivors we worked with were women) who rejected punishment as the mechanism for justice even in their time of greatest distress.
Working on accountability, we discovered that our work fit within the already existing framework of transformative justice. INCITE Collective, a Black feminist group who originated in California in the year 2000, had an analysis that identified violence against women as a combination of “violence directed at communities, such as police violence, war, and colonialism, and violence within communities, such as sexual and domestic violence.” In a 2002 zine, they advocated for “a society based on radical freedom, mutual accountability and passionate reciprocity. In the society safety and security will not be premised on violence or the threat of violence. It will be based on a collective commitment to guaranteeing the survival and care of all people.” If their attempt to deal with one form of violence directly reinforced the other, what good was it? Carceral logics were out, and a system of acknowledgment of harm done while also acknowledging that all parties involved were wounded by racist hetero-patriarchy and deserved healing was in. Much of their written work has been collected in a single volume, Color of Violence: the INCITE! Anthology.
Also formed in California in the year 2000, Generation FIVE are a transformative justice collective who seek to end all child abuse within 5 generations. Their model is based on the notion that in order to address endemic problems like child sexual abuse, we need to address broader systems of violence as well. They argue that these forms of violence are, in fact, inextricable: “Systems of oppression and child sexual abuse have an interdependent relationship: a power-over system that benefits some at the expense of others. This system uses violence, creates the conditions for child sexual abuse (i.e. gender inequality, class exploitation, racism, violence…), while in turn the prevalence of child sexual abuse fosters behaviors (obedience to authority, silence, disempowerment, shame) that prevent people from organizing effectively to work for liberation, healing and change [to] systemic forms of violence.” Generation FIVE’s 2007 Transformative Justice Handbook (available for free on their website) was crucial in honing the ideas we were developing in SNY.
In my decade working with Support New York, my notion that policing and prisons as we know them are primarily sites of exploitation developed into full fledged abolitionism. Through my work alongside more established abolitionist organizations and people more directly affected by the oppression and harassment of modern day policing, I learned about the racist history of policing and prisons in the United States. I learned that we incarcerate more people per capita than any other nation. I learned that police forces as we know them directly evolved from runaway slave patrols, that their purpose has always been to protect “property” at the expense of Black lives, not the public. I learned about the intense racial disparities in incarceration, that the prison labor I already opposed (by now I had grown to see all prison labor as unjust) was a clear extension of slavery. I had believed that slavery had been abolished, when in fact, it persisted insidiously on a technicality.
Of course getting older involves constant change, not always for the better. In 2012, in the final issue of my zine Slice Harvester, I published the sentence, “I don’t even hate all cops anymore,” as a way to explain that I had begun to consider other perspectives. At the time, I was finishing up a multi-year project that had gotten much more attention than any project I had worked on previously. I was frequently written up in the Daily News. Suddenly I was getting all these emails from Staten Island moms questioning my assertions that all cops were bad. I felt, in part, like I could only engage in dialogue with these people if I met them partway. I also think I bought into a kind of faux-equitable both sidesism that made it feel like nuance to change my perspective.
In retrospect, while I regret that the one month of my adult life where I decided to be more generous to individual cops is preserved in amber like that, ultimately, my brief flirtation with centrism only served to strengthen my abolitionist beliefs. The personal lives of individual police officers are irrelevant. They may be loving parents or spouses when they’re off the clock, (though it’s worth noting that the domestic violence rates among police officers are STAGGERING), but that doesn’t matter, because the institution of policing is racist. There is no changing it from within because there is no changing it.
In the 8 years since, my beliefs have only been strengthened as calls for abolition have gained more traction and I’ve been made aware of voices in the movement I hadn’t previously been familiar with. Prison abolition isn’t just about getting rid of police and prisons, it’s about what we can do once we’re no longer spending such a huge portion of our local tax dollars arming a militarized force to occupy our communities. It’s about moving away from punitive models of justice to preventative models of community care, and transformative justice when the need arises.
As for Clancy’s original question, I pawned that off on the resident scholar in my household, my girlfriend & the editor of this paper, Rebecca Giordano. She compiled a list of resources, which I passed on. She was careful to include suggestions for podcasts and lectures as well as books and websites. “Oftentimes when people say they want to read about something, what they mean is that they want to learn about it and not everyone learns best from reading.” For books, she suggests The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, as well as Are Prisons Obsolete and Abolition Democracy by Angela Davis. She recommends Prison Culture as a clearinghouse of accessible information, and 8 to Abolition for a good explanation of why reforms won’t work.
For those of us, like me, who experience persistent non-fiction induced narcolepsy, she recommends the podcast AirGo, and also suggests looking for lectures by Mariame Kaba, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Kelly Hayes. I would add Angela Davis to that list. I saw her speak for the first time a few years ago and not only was she brilliant, but her voice is incredibly soothing and her New York accent is just right.
We’re living in a wild and scary time, undoubtedly. But it’s my hope that those among us who have committed our lives to building a world without oppression have a real opportunity to push things forward. This moment is lightning in a bottle. As our movement gains momentum, we need to stay firm in our resolve, despite the rising swell of criticism that will accompany our successes. We need to talk to our friends who don’t get it. Talk to our family members who aren’t on board. Talk to our neighbors who are skeptical of us. We need to show them that a better world is achievable in our lifetimes, that there’s no limits but our own imaginations.
*In our accountability curriculum, Support New York chose to refer to those who had committed acts of harm as “perpetuator,” as in “perpetuator of violence,” rather than “perpetrator,” to avoid mirroring the carceral language of the state and “to draw attention to the fact that interpersonal violence is pervasive and cyclical.”