Abolitionists are often asked to explain what will happen to people who commit murder or rape if police and prisons are abolished. Shehk responds with a similar question: “What are we doing now with people who commit those harms?” Some of the high-profile assault stories that surfaced during the #MeToo movement, including Chanel Miller’s rape at the hands of Brock Turner and Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony of her assault by Brett Kavanaugh, revealed that survivors of sexual harassment and assault aren’t being protected by this system. Instead, the criminal justice system protects and maintains agents of the patriarchy, including students like Turner, police officers, lawyers, Supreme Court justices, and presidents.
Since the United States locks people up at a higher rate than any other country, you’d assume this “would be the safest place, virtually free of harm or violence,” Shehk says, but that’s obviously not the case. The president of the United States and two Supreme Court justices have been accused of sexual harassment or sexual assault on multiple occasions. Less than 1 percent of rapes result in the incarceration of the perpetrator, while at least 89 percent of survivors face emotional and physical consequences. Often the rapes reported to police aren’t even investigated, considering the 200,000 rape kits the federal government estimates are sitting—submitted, yet unopened—in police storage. That’s not justice.
Murder clearance rates aren’t much better, with police reportedly solving only about 60 percent of murders. When the victim is Black—as the majority of homicide victims are—the clearance rate declines to the lowest of any other racial group. In communities that are particularly disenfranchised, those rates can be in the single digits. These figures don’t instill much faith in law enforcement’s efficacy. Believers Bail Out (BBO) is an organization hoping to combat this disparity. It’s a community-led effort to bail out Muslims who are being held in pretrial incarceration and ICE custody. BBO is also working to abolish the use of cash bail, which Dania Daoud, a Palestinian Muslim woman organizer with BBO, describes as an “incremental but necessary step to abolishing prisons overall.”
Daoud says we must “come to terms with the fact that the state, through police and prison perpetuates sexual harm. Not only are Black and Brown women, queer folks, and trans folks, vulnerable to sexual violence while in jail and prison, they’re also criminalized and imprisoned for escaping violent relationships under what’s known as ‘accountability laws.’” Prisons become sites of sexual violence, where people are violated every single day. Kristina “K” Agbebiyi, a social worker who also organizes with Survived & Punished, points out that incarcerated people “are assaulted daily by prison staff, medical professionals, and sometimes other people on the inside. This happens in blatant ways like rape but also more subtle ways like invasive strip searches, people being forced to shower in front of others, [and] even people being denied menstruation products.” How can we look at the prison system as just and fair when that very system perpetuates the harm it’s meant to stop?
We have to analyze the conditions that lead people to commit murder or rape and change those conditions to change the outcomes. As Vitale puts it, “serial killers don’t just fall out of the sky.” According to him, treating criminalization as the only option for deterrence is one of the reasons nothing is done to help children or teenagers who, despite the threat of prison, still exhibit violent tendencies. That violence might be prevented through robust social services, mental healthcare, and support systems. Shehk also lists “restorative and transformative justice practices, healing circles, or community accountability models” as examples of nonpunitive ways of addressing harm. “Rather than trying to cage away the problem, one key part of these models is an attempt to address the root cause of the harm and to change the conditions in which it occurred so that it doesn’t happen again,” he says. “Many of these are informed by Indigenous practices, and all of them seek to uplift the humanity of the parties involved.”
This type of change takes time, but that shouldn’t stop us from working toward it every day. In Washington, D.C., for instance, ordinary citizens can hold the city accountable for protecting the rights of the houseless population by personally overseeing houseless encampment cleanups. In New York City, you can participate in Swipe It Forward actions to protest the crackdown on fare evasion. You can circulate the phone numbers of mental-health services among your friends and family so they’re equipped to call for help if they see someone in crisis. No step is too small.
Some suggest that reforming the current system is a feasible alternative to abolishing it, but previous attempts have proven unsuccessful: In 2002, New York City famously augmented the stop-and-frisk program, which allowed the NYPD to target people who they deemed “suspicious”—mostly Black and Brown people. When they abolished the policy, crime fell, suggesting it wasn’t effective for anything apart from perpetuating racism. Though New York implemented policies to curb stop-and-frisk in 2013, the NYPD is still targeting Black and Brown people. There’s also been a recent push to abolish private prisons, but this doesn’t even begin to repair the damage created by the PIC. Less than 10 percent of all incarcerated people are held in private prisons, so abolishing private prisons isn’t nearly as effective as abolishing the entire system.
Prison abolitionists believe that dismantling the PIC is the only way forward because stop-and-frisk and private prisons are just a part of a larger system that surveils, polices, prosecutes, sentences, and incarcerates Black and Brown people. Shehk argues that we shouldn’t “improve a machine that was built to wage war on our communities by ‘fixing’ it through reforms.” Instead, abolitionists want to “break down the PIC until it’s completely dismantled.” Mass incarceration costs $182 billion a year, when considering policing, court costs, and the operating costs of prisons and jails—and it doesn’t even effectively deter crime, achieve justice for victims, or rehabilitate perpetrators. Rather than funneling money into the PIC, the United States could fund an education system that invests in mental-health services instead of policing and surveillance. We could use those billions of dollars to finance living accommodations for houseless people and provide them with mental healthcare and drug rehabilitation as needed. This money could be used to train crisis intervention teams or violence interrupters to deal with escalated situations.
The possibilities are endless, if we allow ourselves to dream bigger than criminalization and bondage. “Being an abolitionist is the most realistic position because it is based in statistics and logic along with empathy and respect for human dignity,” says Agbebiyi. To Daoud, “over-policing creates a system of engineered conflict and perpetuates harm. As such, she—and others at BBO—believes that abolishing prisons must be coupled with radically caring for your community in many forms, including cop-watching and bystander intervention. The dream of abolition is being realized every day by people working for a more equitable world. “If you’re doing work to advocate for a living wage, that’s abolitionist work. If you’re doing work to advocate against environmental racism, that’s abolitionist work. If you’re working to make sure folks have access to affordable healthcare, that’s abolitionist work,” Agbebiyi says. Moving abolition from a fantasy to a reality is going to happen incrementally, but we can certainly make it happen. Vitale confirms this, saying, “Abolition is embedded in tons of movements all over the country and it’s happening right now.”