I've been thinking about abolition and the ways that I can incorporate it into the classroom and my work with my colleagues. I am currently in a book club with my colleagues who read Dr. Bettina Love's book, We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Teaching. I feel energized reading the book and have been on a deep dive into abolitionist work. One of the most prominent scholars and activists who deepens and challenges my thinking is Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. She also has a forthcoming book that I've pre-ordered, Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition. In this post, I've outlined some of the most salient points that I have learned from her work. It is no way exhaustive and there is still so much to learn.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore's plan is simple: "We only have to change one thing, and that's everything." She is an abolitionist who is a professor of geography in the Earth and Environmental Sciences graduate program at the City University of New York (CUNY). You may assume that geographers only study maps -- and she does that -- but she also studies the reasons why certain events, movements, and organizations exist within certain places. She wonders if we can use our political imagination to make freedom with what we currently have and organizations that already exist; she works to uplift the movement, not necessarily lead it.
The New York Times feature, "Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind" by Rachel Kushner was the first piece that I read about her last year. Kushner documents the efforts and successes in preventing the building of new prisons with Gilmore's organization, the California Prison Moratorium Project, and Kushner writes about the abolition work with Gilmore's other organization, Critical Resistance (co-founded with Angela Y. Davis and Rose Braz). She is no stranger to the idea of intersectionality, for her discipline as a geographer allows her to focus on place-based liberation struggle. She looks at the vulnerabilities of areas, and instead of instigating contempt against the current system, she cultivates activism for abolition and refuses to give up.
I've listed some of the main ideas from her work that have altered and deepened my thinking that I have done on prisons and the prison-industrial complex. Instead of making ideas and issues more complicated, she really works to make them more simple, a practice that feels intellectual and simultaneously people-smart while also attesting to the breadth and depth of her knowledge. I suggest investigating her work on your own if you are interested in abolitionist work (or, perhaps, arguing against abolitionists).
Change everything. Gradualism is absurd. Abolition is not absence, but presence.
Gilmore, like so many others right now, believes that reform is costly low hanging fruit. The money that has been historically funneled into police reform could be invested into greater social projects that do not require the policing of people. She suggests that abolitionists decide what they want and to not concede or give in until their demands are met.
She looks around the world and to history to inform her imagination. She cites W.E.B. DuBois's book, Black Reconstruction, to argue that entire societies can be built from the wildest dreams. When Black people were freed from slavery, freedom was not just the absence of slavery, but the presence of political, social, and economic relationships that emerged in the form of independent banks, public education, and universal voting. When we use our imagination to build the society that we want, we consider all of the supports that we want present to replace the ones that do not serve us.
Gilmore balks at the reforms in the last half of the 20th century and cites the work of Naomi Murakawa (author of The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America) to highlight the failures of community policing built into two of the largest and most sweeping crime reform bills: the 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Street Act and Clinton's 1994 Crime Bill. The 1968 Lyndon B. Johnson Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Street Act created the Law Enforcement Administration with a hefty $10 billion dollar bill that did not work to repair relationships between the police and their communities, it doled out money in the form of public relations efforts for police departments across the country to improve their appearance, but not their practices. 1994 Clinton Crime Bill created the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services within the Justice Department with a $9 billion dollar price tag spread out over six years that has carried a lot of blame for the way we see and understand crime in the United States (more on crime later).
Although Gilmore does not endorse prison or police reform, Gilmore does endorse the idea of a "non-reform reform" which is any change that happens in the effort towards abolition that does not expand the reach of the prison-industrial complex. Gilmore believes that the discussion around the military-industrial complex (MIC) parallels the growth and our understanding of the prison-industrial complex (PIC). When people think of the MIC, their minds might turn directly to war, but as they extend their thinking further, they understand the intellectual careers, engineers, machinery-based careers, and civilians that are also employed in the contracts that are devoted to the MIC. Similarly, the PIC is enlivened by a number of jobs beyond just the jobs that exist within the prisons.
Abolition is the politics of life and death and not a politics of style. Gilmore has an open and kind demeanor and calls herself "shy," but she speaks with conviction when she states that she will not argue with people about their attitudes towards the topic of abolition. She also scoffs at the politicians across the United States who have leeched political power off of the prison-industrial complex, both Republicans and Democrats. Attitudes and feelings for abolition distract from the urgency to act on behalf of the people whose lives are at stake.
The prison industrial complex includes all prisons, public and private.
In the New York Times piece, she and Angela Davis discuss Davis's role in the documentary, 13th, that follows US history, politics, and policies from slavery to mass incarceration as of 2016. Davis comments that she wishes she would have used her time in the documentary to speak more about the need to abolish all prisons and not just demonize private prisons.
80% of the prisons in the US are currently publicly funded prisons, so private prisons are part of the problem, but eliminating them does not get to the root of the issue of mass incarceration which is incarceration. Kushner writes, "By now it has become almost conventional wisdom to think that private prisons are the 'real' problem with mass incarceration. But anyone seriously engaged with the subject knows that this is not the case. Even a cursory glance at numbers proves it: Ninety-two percent of people locked inside American prisons are held in publicly run, publicly funded facilities, and 99 percent of those in jail are in public jails. Every private prison could close tomorrow, and not a single person would go home. But the ideas that private prisons are the culprit, and that profit is the motive behind all prisons, have a firm grip on the popular imagination. (Incidentally, it isn’t just liberals who focus their outrage on private prisons; as Gilmore points out, so do law-enforcement agencies and guards’ unions, for whom private prisons draw off resources they want for themselves.)
Davis noted the 'mistake,' as she put it, in the film 13th, by Ava DuVernay, in sending a message that the main struggle should be against private prisons. But, she said to Gilmore, she saw the popular emphasis on privatization as useful in demonstrating the ways in which prisons are part of the global capitalist system.
Gilmore replied to her longtime comrade that private prisons are not driving mass incarceration. 'They are parasites on it. Which doesn’t make them good. Which doesn’t make them not culpable for the things of which they are culpable. They are parasites.'"
We can see this in many of the current fights for incarcerated people in local jails, too. Often times, in these publicly funded institutions, the institution is allowed to set the price for items at the commissary and have contracts with private technology companies that charge and profit from video calls and communication. In the times of COVID-19, this is even more urgent and pressing for private companies to not have a hold on the service provided by these public institutions, as in-person visits have been muted. Video calls, a part of the visits that many incarcerated people receive, should be cost-free. Incarcerated people should not have to suffer from price-gouging of basic hygienic products, either.
Further, Kushner also asks Gilmore to debunk some of the commonly held ideas about mass incarceration, including the parallels to slavery and the disproportionate number to Black people incarcerated compared to white people. Gilmore worries that comparing incarceration to slavery is the only way to get people to feel anything towards the incarcerated and that it limits the understanding of who is in prisons and jails. This causes Gilmore to double-down on her belief in abolition. She claims that the focus on Black people, makes people argue for the release of "low-level" or "non-violent" drug offenders when it is impossible for anyone to accurately evaluate and name someone as "no-risk" "low-risk" or "high-risk" and that in doing so, we think that we are accurate predictors of human behavior when often, we are not. She argues this further by the distinction of "violent" versus "non-violent" offenders. When we only distinguish people by these labels, it implies that the person is violent, not the act they committed, and that violence is a fixed characteristic of their existence. Instead of looking and judging who would be "best" to be released, she believes that we should instead think about ways to shorten sentences (if we have them at all) because most people in prison will one day see the outside world again, and also figure out ways to reintegrate these people back into society while reducing and preventing the amount of interpersonal harm by getting to the root of why they caused harm in the first place.
Gilmore's most salient point for me is that when people advocate for "Black Lives Matter" they understand that BLM operates amidst the steady curtain of racism. Police kill other people too, and if we can stop the killing of black people, the killing that is most acceptable and the most justified (through the Supreme Court case of Graham v. Connor, 1989 which set the legal precedent for a police officer to be able to defend acts of aggression and violence with the defense that he was afraid), then we will reduce or eliminate the killing of all people in the process.
Organized abandonment and organized violence are twin evils of COVID-19 and contribute the mass incarceration.
Gilmore reimagines crime by redefining it as interpersonal harm. This harm often is the effect of organized abandonment and organized crime. Gilmore defines organized abandonment as abandonment by the state and abandonment by capital. She frames this in our current circumstances of COVID-19: People are currently abandoned by because the support and protection against the virus are not guaranteed for all people, all households, and all communities. If we also look closely at the way the CARES Act spent the $1 trillion dollars that Congress approved, much of the money was given not directly to the people. If it were, the people would most likely spend the money that they were given and put it back into the economy to make it hum. Instead, it was given to corporations and the wealthy, while the individual was left with $1200 of one-time financial support (if they met all of the qualifications).
Since we exist in a capitalist society, we also experience organized abandonment by capital, large and small. Workers are abandoned when they are forced into jobs that are dedicated to luxury development (as a limb of gentrification) and tourism capital that emphasizes service jobs as the most accessible. Although we, as a society, often think of crime as something done by the individual, these acts that literally rob people of a fair wage, fair working conditions, and fair opportunities should also be considered a crime.
These forms of abandonment, coupled with organized state violence (overt and covert) cause and create interpersonal harm and crime. Gilmore wonders about people who commit crimes and believes that these corporations and larger, systemic structures are as guilty of causing harm as the people who commit individual acts.
Capitalism requires inequality; racism enshrines that inequality; Gilmore wants abolitionists to dismantle both.
Abolition means abolition of crime and punishment, and not revenge.
Gilmore was always anti-capitalist and grew up with parents who fought for labor unions and family members who were part of the Black Panthers. The story that she describes that brought her to abolition was the death of her cousin, a member of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense who was shot to death by police on UCLA's campus in 1969.
She is not naive and knows that the desire for revenge and the feelings of anger are and were very real for her cousin's killing. But, if she were to ask for the imprisonment of those who killed her cousin, she acknowledges that it will not bring her cousin back, and it, in fact, perpetuates a cycle of harm and "killing" of problems that does not repair the harmful the conditions of society.
Gilmore challenges us with our current calls to lock-up the police officers who murdered of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd to think about better ways that retribution, repair, and justice could happen beyond incarcerating more people. Similarly, Mariame Kaba, another well-known abolitionist, has commented that she was brought to abolitionist work through her work with domestic abuse survivors. She knew that sending those people to jail or prison would not fix the harm that was happening on a social, political, and economic level within the communities that she was working. For some people, seeing the cops arrested and charged to the fullest extent of the law is their vision of justice, but for Ruth Wilson Gilmore the impulse to punish is deeply rooted in our ethos as Americans, and how much good has that done for us so far?
This call of abolition to reject our, what we mistakenly call natural, propensity to commit harm to those who have done harm is hard. Christian Cooper, the man who was bird watching in New York City and had Amy Cooper (no relation) call the cops on him when he requested that she leash her dog, is the most recent example of the noble behavior of abolition. When charged by the city of New York, he publicly stated that he did not think she should be charged or convicted, and he refused to comply with any investigation.
It isn't just the police, but policing, too.
Incarceration and punishment and probation still cause more harm; they cause people to be stripped of their money and time.
Gilmore spoke about the circumstances of George Floyd's death and the way that the cashier who called the police had been "deputized" by his job. Gilmore wonders about the conditions of our working environment and ways that other people have been "deputized" through their jobs to "police" people. It makes me think about my role as a teacher. Most incarcerated people had been seen by the "system" at some point in their life prior to causing harm that lands them in jail. I know I have contributed to this every time that I sent a student to the principal's office (or threatened them with it) or every time that I have filed a CPS report as a mandated reporter. I practiced due diligence, but I wonder how much harm happened in the process? I wonder if better questions of students could have pointed them in a different direction to get the resources they needed? I wonder why those resources are so obscured and how to make them more visible moving forward? I wonder if principals took the responsibility to incorporate anti-racist, abolitionist policies, then would they have more time to pursue their vision of education instead of worrying about discipline? Ultimately, it has made me realize that when my students come to school, that for some of them, it is a miracle.
I hope that reading Gilmore's considerations has inspired a number of questions within you and that read her work and listen to her speak.
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