Kaba, Mariame, Tamara K. Nopper, and Naomi Murakawa. _We Do This ’til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice_. Abolitionist Papers. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021. # Progressive Summary Mariame Kaba asks the question, "Can we really get rid of pirsons and policing altogether?" And her answer is, yes. We can. We must. We are. # Key Points Prison-Industrial Complex (PIC) abolition is a constructive project. It is about "building a society where it is possible to address harm without relying on structural forms of oppression or the violent systems that increase it." Policing is not the most effective way to reduce crime. Tackling poverty is a more effective way. There are four necessary parts of an abolition strategy: - Transform ourselves, so that we don't replicate the systems of oppression we are trying to abolish. - Imagine new structures that allow us to resolve conflicts collectively. - Reduce contact between people and the criminal legal system, so that we can divest from the system completely. - Change everything else, because it's all intersectional. # Resonances # Oppositions # Questions / Comments # Quotes > Some people may ask, “Does this mean that I can never call the cops if my life is in serious danger?” Abolition does not center that question. Instead, abolition challenges us to ask “Why do we have no other well-resourced options?” and pushes us to creatively consider how we can grow, build, and try other avenues to reduce harm. Repeated attempts to improve the sole option offered by the state, despite how consistently corrupt and injurious it has proven itself, will neither reduce nor address the harm that actually required the call. We need more and effective options for the greatest number of people. > All that is criminalized isn’t harmful, and all harm isn’t necessarily criminalized. For example, wage theft by employers isn’t generally criminalized, but it is definitely harmful. > A world without harm isn’t possible and isn’t what an abolitionist vision purports to achieve. Rather, abolitionist politics and practice contend that disposing of people by locking them away in jails and prisons does nothing significant to prevent, reduce, or transform harm in the aggregate. It rarely, if ever, encourages people to take accountability for their actions. Instead, our adversarial court system discourages people from ever acknowledging, let alone taking responsibility for, the harm they have caused. At the same time, it allows us to avoid our own responsibilities to hold each other accountable, instead delegating it to a third party—one that has been built to hide away social and political failures. > None of us has all of the answers, or we would have ended oppression already. But if we keep building the world we want, trying new things, and learning from our mistakes, new possibilities emerge. > First, when we set about trying to transform society, we must remember that we ourselves will also need to transform. Our imagination of what a different world can be is limited. We are deeply entangled in the very systems we are organizing to change. White supremacy, misogyny, ableism, classism, homophobia, and transphobia exist everywhere. We have all so thoroughly internalized these logics of oppression that if oppression were to end tomorrow, we would be likely to reproduce previous structures. Being intentionally in relation to one another, a part of a collective, helps to not only imagine new worlds, but also to imagine ourselves differently. > Changing everything might sound daunting, but it also means there are many places to start, infinite opportunities to collaborate, and endless imaginative interventions and experiments to create. Let’s begin our abolitionist journey not with the question “What do we have now, and how can we make it better?” Instead, let’s ask, “What can we imagine for ourselves and the world?” If we do that, then boundless possibilities of a more just world await us.