Prison Abolition was hard for me too..

I understand why prison abolition is so hard to grasp. Trust me I do. When I see Black people killed by the police my immediate thought is to lock them up. Those thoughts are natural and normal. But I know realistically we have a prison industrial complex that locks up Black and Brown bodies at higher rates than any other race. For that practice to cease, prison abolition must happen. There is no rehabilitation or reform happening in our prison system for Black and Brown bodies. We don’t receive the same level of care by far and jails and prisons are modern-day slavery, let’s be real. There are people experiencing incarceration fighting fires in California right now for less than a $1 an hour. Prison labor is used in most prisons by large corporations like Victoria Secret, Sprint, Walmart, Verizon Wireless, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Starbucks. Companies do this knowing they don’t have to provide health insurance or realistic wages, and once these people experiencing incarceration are released they can’t go and apply for the jobs they were just doing.

Memphis Police Officer Connor Schilling murdered Darrius Stewart in cold blood. He collects $3,000 a month of our tax dollars for the rest of his life, and that’s just unacceptable. Why are police officers still being rewarded every month after committing murder? We all know they shouldn’t be. No matter how much I want to see police officers thrown in jail, I also accepted that there are other ways to negatively affect them beyond a jail cell. For me, punishment for Brett Hankinson, Jon Mattingly, and Myles Cosgrove looks like firing them from the police force and snatching their pensions. We can’t continue to push for these criminals to be put into the same system we want to be dismantled. Period.

Black and Brown bodies are exploited and thrown to the waste side in jails and prisons. They don’t receive the same resources and access to prevent recidivism. The latest research from the US Department of Justice released in 2019, stated over nine years the recidivism rate was 87% for Black people. It’s obvious that prisons and jails aren’t working for everyone, so we need to abolish them. We constantly hear arguments that “All Lives Matter”. If all lives really mattered we wouldn’t have such high recidivism rates among the Black community. “All” should include those with felonies, those currently impacted by incarceration, and those who are targeted by police in their over-policed neighborhood but it currently doesn’t. Because I believe Black people impacted by incarceration matter I will continue to push for abolition, and educate myself on abolition practices. When doing this self-work I’m often reminded of Angela Davis and her work starting over 50 years ago on abolition.

“Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages” - Angela Davis

This isn’t easy work, and honestly, it’s quite mentally taxing. The idea of “punishment” is engrained in us from birth. The concept of punishment and its practical application and justification during the past half-century have shown a marked drift away from efforts to reform and rehabilitate offenders in favor of retribution and incarceration. We can clearly see that in the rising rates of Black and Brown bodies incarcerated in our country.

The main message I hope you grasp from reading this is:

You don’t get rewarded for murder, so stop giving cops pensions when they violently kill Black People.