[How to kick our national addiction to prisons ]
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THE CARE(FUL) WORK OF ABOLISHING PRISONS  
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Amanda Alexander & Deanna Van Buren
February 27, 2023
Yes!
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_ How to kick our national addiction to prisons _

, pacific press

 

Our society is addicted to punishment. For the last 50 years, we have
expanded police forces
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criminalizing poverty
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and incarcerated people for longer and longer periods of time
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People returning from prison often find themselves shut out of housing
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higher education
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jobs
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public benefits
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and other opportunities for the rest of their lives. 

This investment in policing and prisons hasn’t made us safe.
According to a 2020 study published by the Bureau of Justice
Statistics
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only 40% of violent victimizations were reported to police that year.
As Danielle Sered writes in her 2019 book _Until We Reckon: Violence,
Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair_, “More than half of the
people who survive serious violence prefer _nothing _to everything
available to them through law enforcement.” We all deserve to live
in communities where our basic needs are met, where the conditions
that lead to violence are minimized rather than responded to by armed
police.

As Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis have taught us, abolition is a
project of creation
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To end criminalization, policing, and prisons, we need to build up
life-affirming practices, institutions, and infrastructure that
generate care and safety. 

We need to build care infrastructure on several levels: personal,
interpersonal, and communal. We think of these as concentric circles,
with the built environment—our homes, public spaces, schools,
etc.—as a container for all of them. What we build up at the core
radiates outward, and that, in turn, radiates back in, shaping new
possibilities. Each circle shares the same center: a new set of core
values. Unbuilding racist, patriarchal, ableist, and capitalist
systems rooted in punishment and control requires starting with care,
accountability, interdependence and connection, and an unshakeable
commitment to the idea that no one is disposable.

At the personal and interpersonal level, building care infrastructure
means developing new capabilities and practices. It’s learning how
to have restorative conversations, give better apologies, rebuild
trust after it’s broken, and move through conflict in constructive
ways. It involves healing from trauma in community with others. One
example of this is how the youth organization Detroit Heals Detroit
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for Detroit teens, creating space in schools for young people to heal
trauma through breaking bread, writing, conversation, therapy, and
song. 

It also means working with neighbors and co-workers to plan
alternatives to calling the police. Examples include pod-mapping
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created by the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective. Pod-mapping
involves mapping our own networks of care and discussing them with one
another. It can equip us to recognize the care and connection in our
lives (and gaps that might exist) and make plans for activating those
networks when we’re vulnerable. At the heart of these efforts is an
awareness that relationships, community, and care keep us safe. 

At the community level, we need to build up local ecosystems of care
through transformative and restorative justice networks; worker-owned
cooperatives; community fridges for food-insecure families; unarmed
response teams to support people with mental health needs; housing
co-ops, food co-ops, and farming collectives; community land trusts;
abortion and doula support; and mutual aid. There are many examples of
such community-led projects cataloged online by One Million
Experiments [[link removed]]. 

It’s inspiring to think about what’s possible when efforts like
these are knitted together at the neighborhood or city level. On
Chicago’s South and West Side, the Just Chicago
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coalition is creating a solidarity economy landscape of community land
trusts, worker-owned cooperative businesses, participatory budgets,
and public banks. They aim to replace racial capitalism and the
physical environment it has produced—shuttered buildings and vacant
lots—with a nonexploitative local economy and safe public spaces.

As part of the shifts required for abolition, we need to dismantle and
reimagine the physical world around us with a diverse range of
life-affirming spaces. Architects and developers such as Designing
Justice + Designing Spaces [[link removed]] in Oakland
are working with community organizers to create restorative justice
centers, youth spaces, specialized housing and education projects,
survivor spaces, mental health care and well-being centers, and
diversion and re-entry spaces. 

In Los Angeles, JusticeLA [[link removed]] successfully
blocked the county’s multibillion-dollar jail expansion
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and are working toward a shift in caring for people—rather than
incarcerating them—through backing projects such as Restorative Care
Villages [[link removed]] that
prioritize healing over punishment. 

As always, the best ideas and examples of where we need to go and how
we get there come from people who have borne the brunt of the violence
of our current system. The National Council for Incarcerated and
Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls
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across the country to advance an affirmative vision of the world we
need. They’re stopping the construction of prisons
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to end women’s incarceration state by state and build up co-ops and
collectives. 

Groups like Justice 4 Housing in Boston are imagining and planning
re-entry housing that allows individuals to heal from the trauma
experienced while incarcerated. Their housing policy centers on
dismantling an archaic public housing system rife with discrimination
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against court-involved and formerly incarcerated people and their
families. Justice 4 Housing is pushing local housing authorities to
mandate housing vouchers for people returning to their community after
incarceration, the first time a housing advocacy organization led by
formerly incarcerated people has led such a campaign. 

We need to use interdependent, multidisciplinary approaches to come up
with the life-affirming infrastructure we need. And we must fight to
align our resources—like public budgets—with this care
infrastructure. 

In cities such as Minneapolis
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Seattle [[link removed]], and Durham
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crafted “people’s budgets” that call for cuts to police
departments and for investments in life-affirming institutions that
put health first, prioritize people over profit, fund prevention
rather than punishment, and help communities thrive. 

Let’s follow their lead. Let’s build. 

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Deanna Van Buren
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architect, artist, and co-founder and executive director of Designing
Justice + Designing Spaces.
 

Amanda Alexander
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justice lawyer, historian, and founding executive director of the
Detroit Justice Center.

* Prison Abolition; Care Infrastructure; Angela Davis; Ruth Wilson;
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