Abolition Isn't What You Think

The Straw Man

Say the word abolition in most rooms and watch what happens. People picture a switch being flipped. Police vanish. Prisons empty overnight. Chaos descends. Someone inevitably brings up murderers, as if abolitionists have somehow never considered that violent people exist.

This tells you something important, not about abolition, but about how successfully its opponents have controlled the framing. The conversation always starts from the same premise: what do we remove? What do we eliminate? What disappears?

Abolition doesn't start there. It starts with a different question entirely.

The Actual Question

Mariame Kaba, one of the most important organizers and thinkers in the abolition movement, puts it plainly in We Do This 'Til We Free Us: abolition is not about tearing down. It's about building. The question isn't "what do we do without prisons?" The question is "what do we build so that prisons become obsolete?"

That reframing changes everything. Suddenly you're not defending the absence of a system. You're proposing the presence of better ones. What causes harm? What prevents it? What actually makes communities safer, and is it the thing we're currently doing?

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, the geographer whose work on the prison-industrial complex has shaped a generation of scholars and organizers, defines racism as "the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death." That's a mouthful. But sit with it. If the system we've built produces premature death along racial lines (and the data overwhelmingly shows that it does) then the system isn't malfunctioning. It's functioning exactly as designed. And reforming the design margins won't change the blueprint.

What's Actually Being Proposed

Let's get concrete, because abstract arguments are easy to dismiss.

CURE Violence (now called the Global Network on Community Safety) treats violence like an epidemic, because that's what the epidemiological data supports. They deploy "violence interrupters," people with credibility in affected communities, to mediate conflicts before they turn lethal. The model has been evaluated repeatedly by independent researchers. In implementation sites, shootings have dropped 40% to 70%. Not police reforms. Not tougher sentencing. Community members intervening in the dynamics that produce violence.

A study published in the Journal of Urban Economics by Sara Heller evaluated a Chicago youth jobs program and found that participants had a 43% reduction in violent crime arrests during the program period. Giving young people something to do and a source of legitimate income reduced violence more effectively than any policing strategy in the city's history.

Restorative justice programs in schools, where students who cause harm face structured dialogue with the people they've harmed rather than suspension or expulsion, have reduced suspensions by more than 50% in districts across the country. Oakland Unified School District saw a 87% reduction in expulsions after implementing restorative practices. These aren't kids "getting away with it." They're being held accountable in ways that actually change behavior instead of just removing them from the building.

These aren't thought experiments. They're operating programs with published evaluations and measurable outcomes.

The Failure We Accept

Here's what should bother you about the status quo: it doesn't work either. We just don't hold it to the same standard of proof.

The United States incarcerates more people per capita than any other country on earth, roughly 1.9 million people on any given day. We've been running the mass incarceration experiment for fifty years now. Recidivism rates hover around 44% within the first year of release and roughly 77% within five years, according to Bureau of Justice Statistics data.

Think about what that means. We're spending over $80 billion a year on a system where more than three-quarters of the people it processes end up back inside within five years. If any other public program had a 77% failure rate, we'd defund it immediately. But prisons get a pass because they satisfy something that has nothing to do with outcomes: they satisfy the desire for punishment.

Abolitionists aren't arguing against safety. They're arguing against a $80-billion-a-year system that demonstrably fails to produce it.

The Reform Trap

A common response is: okay, maybe prisons aren't great, but let's reform them. Better training. Body cameras. Oversight boards. Nicer facilities.

The history of reform is the history of absorption. Every major reform effort of the last fifty years has been metabolized by the system it was meant to change. Body cameras didn't reduce police violence; officers learned to turn them off, or departments learned not to release the footage. Civilian oversight boards were defunded, understaffed, or given no subpoena power. Training programs came and went. The fundamental dynamics stayed the same.

Gilmore calls this reformist reform versus abolitionist reform. Reformist reform tinkers with the machine without questioning whether the machine should exist. Abolitionist reform builds alternatives that make the machine unnecessary. The distinction matters because one approach keeps feeding resources into a failing system while the other redirects those resources toward things that actually work.

Consider: the annual cost of incarcerating one person in New York State is over $300,000. Per year. For that money, you could fund a full-time job, housing, mental health treatment, and substance abuse counseling, the things that actually reduce the likelihood of harm. We've chosen the cage instead. Not because it's cheaper, not because it's more effective, but because it feels like justice to people who've been told that justice means punishment.

Violence Is Not Random

The abolition argument rests on a foundational insight that our current system ignores: violence is not random. It's concentrated. It's predictable. And it's produced by identifiable conditions: poverty, housing instability, untreated mental illness, substance abuse, lack of economic opportunity, exposure to prior violence.

This isn't soft. It's epidemiological. Gary Slutkin, the physician who founded CURE Violence, spent a decade fighting infectious disease outbreaks in Africa before returning to Chicago and recognizing the same transmission patterns in gun violence. Violence clusters. It spreads through social networks. It follows exposure. And like any epidemic, you fight it by interrupting transmission and treating underlying conditions, not by quarantining people after the fact.

Policing and incarceration are almost entirely reactive. They respond to harm after it's occurred. They do very little to prevent it from occurring in the first place. The abolition framework is proactive. It asks: what are the conditions that produce harm, and how do we change them?

What We're Really Afraid Of

I think the resistance to abolition is less about safety and more about punishment. We've been so deeply conditioned to believe that justice means suffering, that someone who causes harm must experience pain in return, that any alternative feels like a moral violation.

But punitive justice doesn't heal the harmed person. It doesn't address the conditions that produced the harm. It doesn't make the community safer. It satisfies an emotional need for retribution and calls that satisfaction "justice."

Kaba again: "No one enters violence for the first time by committing it." The people who cause harm have, overwhelmingly, experienced it first. That doesn't excuse anything. It explains it. And if your response to harm ignores its causes, you're not solving a problem. You're performing a ritual.

The Build

Abolition is a construction project. More housing. More mental health services. More addiction treatment. More youth programs. More living-wage jobs. More community-based conflict resolution. More investment in the places we've systematically disinvested from for decades.

It's not naive. It's expensive, complicated, and slow. But so is the current system. The difference is that the current system costs $80 billion a year and makes the problem worse, while the alternatives cost less and make it better.

You don't have to be convinced overnight. You just have to stop accepting the premise that the only possible response to harm is a cage. Because once you look at the evidence (the recidivism rates, the cost-effectiveness studies, the community intervention evaluations) the cage starts to look less like a solution and more like a habit.

A very expensive habit we can't afford to keep.