An Abolitionist Platform Toward Healthy Communities
Now and Beyond COVID-19
Decades of organizing to end the prison industrial complex has prepared Critical Resistance and movements for liberation to respond to the COVID-19 emergency with a focus on putting people's immediate well-being first, tapping into communities' knowledges about how to build structures for support and mutual aid, and moving forward with a vision for long-term building. This platform is an offering to our movements, and we hope that it will inspire communities to continue articulating and using abolition as a powerful strategy in a time of uncertainty, hope, and solidarity.
As abolitionists, we believe that social structures, both formal and informal, need to support people's lives and ability to live. As a severe public health crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated abolitionist demands and practices as the most common sense and practical steps to ensure that we are as strong and healthy as possible.
The abolition of the prison industrial complex is about dismantling cages, borders, and oppressive structures while building up the resources, practices, and institutions that support healthy and self-determined communities. It requires all of us. As Ruthie Gilmore articulates, “abolition is a practical program of radical change cobbled together from the work that people do in disparate struggles every day.”
We are seeing this already in the massive movements to share resources, look out for each other, and build networks and structures for care across cities and towns, neighborhoods, and virtual communities. Here, we uplift calls for life-saving measures to address the needs of prisoners and loved ones, people facing housing and food insecurity—whether long-term and predating the pandemic or as a result of the loss of work now, and people who are targeted for arrest and detention.
How we address this crisis will determine what our society looks like after the immediate COVID-19 emergency passes. We are committed to seeding a more abolitionist future. We believe that imagining and enacting abolitionist frameworks and practices in response to COVID-19 will not only help us endure this pandemic, but help lay the building blocks for strong and self-determined communities as we come out the other side.
