the bitterest pill

an extremely bitter pill of believing in both police and prison abolition is this:

abolishing the carceral state means there are not arrests and convictions of abusive, racist, and violent police officers.

i'm definitely not the only person to end up here in the last few weeks, watching the weird interplay of calls to both abolish the police and arrest the police. we want justice - i want justice! but we don't get both. arresting the police is a reformist argument, it believes one hand can fix the other. (the tools, the house.)

to end incarceration, we have to give up the ability and desire to engineer personal, state-backed punishment for past actions. instead we need to invest in futures where those actions can't exist.

we can start to do this by dismantling the structures that allow abuse of power (eg, police departments) and removing individuals from positions of power from where they can do violence.

more importantly though, we do this by addressing the fundamental needs of the communities that are policed (through healthcare, welfare, reparations, mental health services, housing, food programs, real access to spaces, resources and education, all of it). we turn the systems of surveillance, control, and carceral power inside out and address need, not punish deviance.

what we cannot do is arrest the cops without making more cops.

to believe in total prison abolition is to believe that every person can find redemption and growth forward if given proper treatment and care, no matter how much they've harmed others, no matter the beliefs they hold, no exceptions. it is absolutely terrifying. i’m not even sure if it is right- there are days i’m pretty sure it isn’t. but without the core belief that nobody is irredeemable, what you need is a place for those who are irredeemable to go away. you need guards and walls. you make cages.

working for a world without prisons means guaranteeing that those who have caused immense harm have the same access to healthcare, social welfare, mental health services, resources, and education as i want for myself and those i love, no matter how i feel about them, even if i hate them. especially if i hate them.

working for this world means, yeah, absolutely ACAB, but even complete and utter bastards don’t go to prison. and, yes, it Absolutely Blows. it is extremely frustrating!!

but working for this world means a willingness to not pursue punishment,  especially when that punishment comes from a carceral system so absolutely grounded in everything we must tear apart. the alternative- the world we have now- is not a place i can believe in.