How can we achieve urgently needed decarceration for the millions of people caged in jails, prisons, and immigration detention centers?

Abolitionism doesn’t just say no to police, prisons, border control, and the current punishment system. It requires persistent organizing for what we need, organizing that’s already present in the efforts people cobble together to achieve access to schools, health care and housing, art and meaningful work, and freedom from violence and want.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at CUNY Graduate Center. A co-founder of California Prison Moratorium Project and Critical Resistance, she is author of the prize-winning book Golden Gulag: Prison, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Her forthcoming Haymarket Books title, Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition, is the inaugural book in the new Abolitionist Papers book series, edited by Naomi Murakawa.

Naomi Murakawa is an associate professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She studies the reproduction of racial inequality in 20th and 21st century American politics, with specialization in crime policy and the carceral state. She is the author of The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America.

Til Victory is Won: 400 Years of Making Revolution and Inventing Utopia

Co-curated by Brian Tate with cultural advisors from Weeksville Heritage Center; the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College; Kimberly Peeler-Allen, co-founder of Higher Heights, a national organization building the political power and leadership of Black women; Columbia University; Harvard University; and the 400 Years of Inequality Committee.

Nikole Hannah-Jones is an award-winning investigative reporter covering segregation and racial injustice for The New York Times Magazine Shawnda Chapman is an Activist and an experienced research and Policy Professional Kimberly Peeler-Allen has been working at the intersection of race, gender and politics for almost 20 years. Kimberly is the Co-founder of Higher Heights, Demita Frazier, JD, is an educator, thought leader, Writer and lifelong radical Political Activist, commited to social justice. Gregory Tate Greg Tate is a Writer, Musician and Cultural provocateur

Abolition is Liberation: Confronting Harm and Dismantling State Violence

On Saturday, November 23, 2019, over 200 community members joined Critical Resistance at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art for an evening of political conversation, food, music, and celebration, called Abolition is Liberation: Confronting Harm and Dismantling State Violence. The event featured a dialogue between movement leaders Marbre Stahly-Butts (Law 4 Black Lives) and CR co-founder Rachel Herzing (Center for Political Education), moderated by CR Portland's own Cory Lira.

Set amidst the powerful installation of the 5th annual Sex Workers' Art Show, curated by our comrades at STROLL PDX, the night opened with a powerful welcome from firebrand local organizer Alyssa Pariah (Jobs with Justice, Don't Shoot PDX, DSA) and spoken word performances by folks from the Morpheus Youth Project, and a closing performance by the House of Flora! We are grateful to have been joined by hundreds of community members and local organizers, a number of whom were able to engage in a more intimate strategy session the next day.

In this video, Decolonize PDX discusses why they felt forming was so necessary, what Decolonize PDX means to the collective, occupy and people of color, and prison abolition. If this video interest you, we urge you to pass it around to friends and family!

On Nov 12, Spade will be joined by anti-violence organizers Mariame Kaba and Ejeris Dixon to discuss mutual aid as an abolitionist project.

Why is mutual aid key to practicing abolition? How does mutual aid relate to transformative justice and other anti-violence frameworks and practices? How can mutual aid help us to reimagine responding to harm and violence without relying on police? Mutual aid is a key part of building a world in which we keep each other safe, a world in which we build collectively to meet each other’s needs. Join us on November 12 to celebrate the publication of Mutual Aid and for a conversation exploring its role in abolition, transformative justice, and addressing harm.

A workshop on the relationship between settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and imperialism that ties the threads of Black and Indigenous resistance through abolition of the PIC.

A conversation with Bettina Love, Gholdy Muhammad, Dena Simmons and Brian Jones about abolitionist teaching and antiracist education.

K Agbebiyi is a macro social worker and organizer currently based in New York. They organize with Survived and Punished's New York Chapter, along with several other abolitionist formations across the city including #FreeThemAll4PublicHealth. They are one of the co-creators of 8toabolition.com

Woods Ervin is a Critical Resistance member who began organizing with the Critical Resistance Oakland chapter in 2010 through the Stop the Injunctions Coalition. Their organizing contributed to significant victories such as the full elimination of gang injunctions in Oakland (Stop the Injunctions Coalition), the halting of jail expansion in San Francisco (No New SF Jail Coalition), and the end of the largest SWAT team training in the world (Stop Urban Shield). Woods also helped seed the Oakland Power Projects, an alternative to policing initiative and trained CR’s first Anti-Policing Healthworkers Cohort. With CR members and in movement spaces, they have facilitated hundreds of political education workshops and trainings to help the Left sharpen its’ praxis of prison industrial complex abolition.

Mariame Kaba is an educator and organizer based in New York City. She has been active in anti-criminalization and anti-violence movements for over 30 years. Mariame is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots abolitionist organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. She is also the co-founder of Survived and Punished, a grassroots group focused on freeing criminalized survivors of domestic and sexual violence from jails, prisons and detention centers through mutual aid, organizing and policy advocacy.

Dean Spade has spent over two decades in social movements working to end prisons, borders, poverty, and war and support people trying to survive right now. In 2002, Dean founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a non-profit collective that provides free legal services to transgender, intersex and gender non-conforming people who are low-income and/or people of color. He is the author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of the Law, and the director of the documentary, "Pinkwashing Exposed."

Kamau Walton joined the Critical Resistance Oakland chapter in 2010 after meeting CR members at the US Social Forum in Detroit. From 2010 to 2015, they helped led outreach and community education in the Stop the Injunctions campaign, supported the 2013 California Prisoner Hunger Strikes efforts to end solitary confinement, and helped seed the Stop Urban Shield campaign. Their organizing helped secure the full elimination of gang injunctions in Oakland (Stop the Injunctions Coalition),and end of the largest SWAT team training in the world (Stop Urban Shield). As a CR member, Kamau continues to bring PIC abolition to Left movement spaces.

Amidst mounting calls to defund and abolish policing and prison systems it is crucial that we ground our activism in theories of struggle. To that end, this workshop will push activists, organizers, scholars, and accomplices to engage with the following questions:

What is abolition? What are its historical roots, its political imperatives, what is an abolitionist demand? What is the relationship between reform and abolition? How does abolition intersect with race, class, gender, and various forms of state sanctioned, extra-legal, intra-communal, and interpersonal violence? What is an abolitionist approach to harm and harm reduction? Why do we need abolition now?

Orisanmi Burton is a husband, father, and assistant prof at American University. He is a long time abolitionist scholar and organizer and a member of the Abolition Collective.

House Representative Adriano Espaillat, who has just introduced legislation to abolish the federal death penalty, as well as the attorney for Lisa Montgomery who was executed on January 13, 2021, Kelley Henry, death penalty journalist Liliana Segura, psychotherapist Susannah Sheffer, mother of Joseph Nichols who was executed in Texas in 2007, Lee Greenwood, and death penalty attorneys Alexis Hoag and Bernard E. Harcourt to discuss the trauma of executions on families of the condemned and the abolition of the federal death penalty.

Beyond Criminal Justice Reform

Conversations on Police and Prison Abolition NYU Review of Law & Social Change.

A series of important and necessary conversations on how we can move beyond "criminal justice reform" as an endpoint and build viable alternatives to policing and incarceration. Speaker: Marbre Stahly-Butts, Deputy Director of Racial Justice at Center for Popular Democracy

Bryan Stevenson: We need to talk about an injustice

Bryan A. Stevenson is an American lawyer, social justice activist, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative and a clinical professor at New York University School of Law. Stevenson has gained national acclaim for his work challenging bias against the poor and minorities in the criminal justice system.

Stevenson has assisted in securing relief for dozens of condemned prisoners, advocated for poor people and developed community-based reform litigation aimed at improving the administration of criminal justice. Mr. Stevenson spoke at TED2012 in Long Beach, California. Following his presentation, over $1 million was raised by attendees to fund a campaign run by Stevenson to end the practice of putting children in adult jails and prisons. Spoke at Deleware University Graduation on May 28th 2016. Stevenson is the author of the critically acclaimed Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. It was named by Time magazine as one of the " Best Books of Nonfiction" for 2014. It won the 2015 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the 2015 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Nonfiction.