MASS LIBERATION SCHOOL: WEEK 8 Abolition: Visioning Towards the Future Facilitator: Kris Henderson, Amistad Law Project

“Rather than thinking of abolition as just getting rid of the police, I think about it as an invitation to create and support lots of different answers to the problem of harm in society, and, most exciting, as an opportunity to reduce and eliminate harm in the first place.” - Derecka Purnell

Abolition sounds scary because it involves fundamentally changing the society in which we live, and it involves changes that we all know can’t happen overnight. Because some of these changes are further away, and because it can be difficult to imagine exactly what those changes will look like, sometimes that uncertainty makes people question abolition itself. 

In this session, we’ll learn about how the changes that we want to see are in fact achievable, and about the models we have for how to get there. We will discuss what it means to take the shorter-term abolitionist reforms from last week’s class and apply that thinking over a longer time period to ultimately abolish police and prisons.

Helpful Resources:

• How I Became a Police Abolitionist, 

• Enough is Enough (pages 29-35, “Where We’re Going”)

• Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police

• What Would an Open Borders World Actually Look Like

• Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind

• Video: How Do We Prepare for Abolition?