‘This is the first time we are seeing … a conversation about defunding, and some people having a conversation about abolishing the police and prison state. This must be what it felt like when people were talking about abolishing slavery.’
— Patrisse Cullors, Black Lives Matter
Mainstream representations of police as protectors, and the legal system as one of justice, are wildly out of sync with history, and the lived reality of many.
Abolition is, fundamentally, a struggle for collective liberation: a transformative vision of a safer world, in which communities live free from exploitation on a thriving planet.
The current abolitionist movement exposes the tensions between current policing and criminal justice on the one hand, and values like freedom, equality, and democracy on the other. Abolition reveals how our criminal justice system has been critical in constructing today’s profoundly unequal and crisis-ridden social order.
This event will unpack why we might want to abolish police and prisons, what abolishing them would involve, and how it might be achieved.
Our speakers invite you to explore what it will take to dismantle structures of oppression, and to imagine the future we can rebuild together—brick by brick.
We’ll engage with concrete alternatives for preventing and responding to harms (such as sexual abuse and intimate partner violence—which police claim to deal with but in fact further entrench) in ways that move beyond the logic of crime and punishment and towards visions of justice that are both social and transformative.
Speakers include Chelsea, a member of Cradle Community, authors of Brick by Brick: How We Build a World Without Prisons; Koshka Duff, co-editor of Abolishing the Police; Tanzil Chowdhury, co-founder of the Northern Police Monitoring Project; and MJ, a queer, South Asian chav organising with Community Action on Prison Expansion (CAPE). The event is chaired by Leah Cowan, author of Border Nation.
This event is hosted by Lighthouse Bookshop for Edinburgh’s Radical Book Fair 2021: Futures Worth Fighting For. Click to view more from this festival.