A little more than a year ago, The New York Times ran a profile of the geographer and prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Written by the novelist Rachel Kushner, the piece was an expansive portrait of Gilmore’s life and work that also served as a mini-course in abolition, a political vision of the end of prisons that has remained a fringe position even as “criminal justice reform”—one of those wonderfully mealy-mouthed terms that can mean anything from eliminating cash bail to the obscenities of for-profit probation—has become mainstream consensus. In the Times, Gilmore narrates the work of abolition in what I can only describe as sumptuous language. Her theory is inviting.
 
Early on, Gilmore recalls telling a group of children who were skeptical of her ideas that in Spain, the average time served for murder is seven years. They were incredulous—only seven years?—but soon softened to her.
 
The piece continues:
 
“Sitting there listening to the kids stopped my heart,” Gilmore told me. “Why? Abolition is deliberately everything-ist; it’s about the entirety of human-environmental relations. So, when I gave the kids an example from a different place, I worried they might conclude that some people elsewhere were just better or kinder than people in the South San Joaquin Valley—in other words, they’d decide what happened elsewhere was irrelevant to their lives. But judging from their presentation, the kids lifted up the larger point of what I’d tried to share: Where life is precious, life is precious. They asked themselves, ‘Why do we feel every day that life here is not precious?’ In trying to answer, they identified what makes them vulnerable.

I reread this a month or so ago and again experienced the pleasure of Gilmore’s descriptions of a world where physical prisons and the political and social landscapes they engender no longer exist. She also plainly maps the ways in which racial capitalism has created a system that reproduces prisons beyond their physical walls. “Under austerity, the social-welfare function shrinks; the agencies that receive the money are the police, firefighters and corrections,” Kushner writes of this analysis. “So other agencies start to copy what the police do: The education department, for instance, learns that it can receive money for metal detectors much more easily than it can for other kinds of facility upgrades.”

Abolition here also describes a process of de-emphasizing police and the many roles they are asked to play in our communities, from mental health crisis responders to pet retrievers, and seeks to replace them with people and programs better suited to those things. These are urgent responsibilities, because policing as a response to the problems it is asked to solve—poverty, desperation—creates real violence, particularly for black people, Indigenous people, and other people of color. It then in turn further reproduces those initial conditions in an endless loop of self-justification.
 
But there’s no single moment—what the Minneapolis-based abolitionist collective MPD150 this week called the “Thanos snap”—in which prisons or policing disappear. Instead, abolition is an immediate program for political change—demands to begin defunding police departments and redirect that money to programs that feed, house, and sustain people—and a horizon of anti-violence and community. Getting closer to that requires this big cracking open of how we live and how we conceive of what we’re due and what we owe others. It’s a long walk.
 
So when I think about abolition like that, and it still is in many ways hard for me to think about, as someone whose encounter with these ideas is abstracted through real privileges and racism, I feel the same sense of relief I experience in a long conversation with a friend or a good organizing campaign. That thing of not feeling alone in something that I can’t quite see the end of, even as I am drawn
toward it.
 
Which I also hope, in my conversations with other white family and friends who do not share my politics or even this feeling, can help us to find some space of shared concern where we can better see each other. That I can tell them the future I want—justice and safety for black people, a state that feeds communities rather than starves them—is being collectively articulated and built in the protests happening across the country right now, but that I am also scared, too. “We know we won’t bulldoze prisons and jails tomorrow, but as long as they continue to be advanced as the solution, all of the inequalities displaced to crime and punishment will persist,” Gilmore and the author and activist James Kilgore wrote last year, in a brief comment on this work. “We’re in a long game.” Which means that we will have some time to get used to each other as we move, a little blinkered, toward where we’re going.

—Katie McDonough, Deputy Editor