By Sriya Shrestha

This past May, days after the devastating attack on Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, there was an active shooter in an apartment complex near my home in Seaside. The police evacuated all the residents of the building and blocked off access to the area. They negotiated with the shooter until he agreed to put down his arms and go with the police. Afterward, the community showered accolades of appreciation on the Seaside Police Department. 

Like many of my neighbors, I felt enormous relief that the volatile situation diffused without the loss of life. But, as an abolitionist, I also immediately became curious about how the incident began and who the shooter was. According to news reports, the shooter initially opened fire on the police when they came to his apartment to serve an eviction notice. His neighbors noted that the mental health of the generally friendly veteran who lived on his own had deteriorated over the years. With a troubling rise in gun violence and mass shootings, an abolitionist vision asks us to consider not how we can better police these crimes but how to eliminate the conditions that lead to such acute distress and brutal violence. In this instance, they include (at least): a lack of affordable housing and mental health services, militarization, and social isolation. 

In recent years, there has been rising interest in the long-standing calls for police and prison abolition. Often controversial and, at times, divisive, the concept of abolition feels new to many. However, the roots of police and prison abolition are long and deep, reaching back to the movements for the abolition of racialized, chattel slavery. While the dominant majority simply accepted slavery as, at best, a necessary evil or, at worst, a reasonable, benevolent system, abolitionists refused to retreat from the ethical impetus to name and directly oppose this brutal institution. Using various means, they sought to challenge the ignorance and complacency that made slavery seem tolerable and inevitable while simultaneously disrupting the system's workings. Enslaved and formerly enslaved people, always at the forefront of abolitionist movements, along with their supporters, wrote and distributed pamphlets, smuggled enslaved people to freedom, and incited rebellions. In the end, the system of slavery that abolitionists opposed came to an end. 

Many contemporary prison and police abolitionists would argue, however, that the global capitalist economy supported by slavery, colonialism, and racial thinking has yet to be fully unraveled. As such, the movement to abolish police and prisons continues the work of earlier abolitionists by seeking to address the continuation of past systems of racialized violence, dehumanization, and exploitation in new forms. This work includes a demand for radical visioning, a necessary tool when seeking to challenge a system deeply ingrained in a society's economic, political, and social life.

The work of radical visioning begins with the facing of hard truths often obscured or erased altogether. This erasure gives the impression that things are, in fact, not that bad. For this reason, those with the clearest understanding of the harms, injustices, and failures of the current system of policing and prisons are people who have suffered its deepest cruelties and are often at the forefront of abolitionist struggles. This includes exemplary individuals like Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mariame Kaba, and Patrice Cullors, as well as countless others: parents of children killed by both gang and police violence, LGBTQ homeless youth, feminists of color fighting domestic violence, and immigrant justice groups. People who know firsthand that those who are most vulnerable in society are too often not protected by police but rather targeted by them.  

Radical visioning is this: to face the hard truths of our present system to devise, imagine, grow, and work towards the alternatives and social transformations these truths demand. Contemporary abolitionist movements relentlessly expose the hardest truths of policing and prisons: that the United States has the largest prison population in the world; that a disproportionate number of incarcerated people are Black and other people of color, and that nearly all of them are poor and working-class people; that conditions of abuse, neglect, and torture are rampant in US prisons; that a great deal of the most harmful actions and behaviors are not addressed by policing, from domestic and sexual violence to corporate crimes. In so doing, they lay bare the degree to which policing and prisons operate more as a system of racialized and classed social control than they do as a means of addressing harm.

In this sense, prison abolitionists do not deny that violence and harm happen in society, but they question the ability of punishment – particularly policing and prisons – to meaningfully address rather than simply perpetuate those harms. This requires radical visioning of how we achieve what prisons and police are supposed to do: reduce harm to create safe, thriving communities. We must ask ourselves deeper questions about what it would mean to live in a world where prisons are unnecessary and where people’s basic needs are met, including physical and mental health care. And also where people have the capacity to take greater responsibility for the problems they face in their communities, including interpersonal conflicts. Building this capacity, among other things, requires altering the conditions of life and work that leave so many of us feeling burnt out, exhausted, and with far too little time to care for ourselves and one another.

The times we live in demand radical visioning. The current systems for organizing society, established centuries ago and rooted in white supremacy, racial capitalism, and colonialism, are no longer tenable. To seek solutions through established methods or within the parameters of what is ‘realistic’ within the current social order will only lead to despair. The greatest hope in the present is in the imagination. Imagination that springs from facing hard truths, including the needs that we see around us in our positions as employees of the university and the myriad other communities we are a part of at home; collectively envisioning what it would really mean to address those needs; and working with others to allocate the resources we have access to in our homes, our neighborhoods, and our workplaces towards that vision.