I hear a lot of reformers/liberals/carceralists say “Abolitionists are overly idealistic and think everyone’s just gonna get along if we got rid of prisons and police, they have no plan other than unfounded optimism!” I wanna talk about that a bit :

It’s not that abolitionists think people are perfect angels who don’t commit *acts of harm* and thus don’t need checking and minding, it’s that we understand the carceral system we have is
1. Much more harmful than any one individual
2. Not about ending harm, but for punishment

I was intentional btw about using the phrase “acts of harm” vs “crime” bc the latter is a construct and something abolitionists should endeavor to also do away with, and I’ll get into that with this anecdote:

Like earlier today I saw this sticker on a car that was of a hand holding a g*n pointing at you and saying “Nothing in here is worth losing your life over” and in my head I was like “???? Then nothing is worth killing someone over!”

But in this world most would agree without hesitation that a shitty fucking truck or whatever is in it is worth more than a human life, that breaking in is a “crime” and the owner had the right to kill someone over it.

That’s a constructed dynamic and it’s fucking bullshit.

“WHY SCARE QUOTES AROUND CRIME BRIANA BREAKING AND ENTERING IS LITERALLY WRONG” because if a cop did it it would be legal. Lol. They’re allowed to. Or if a person with $$$ to beat the case did it, well, then no crime. It’s not always considered wrong. We choose when it is

And also, even as I can agree that it is an invasion and not cool go into people’s things and take them for yourself, does it merit criminalizing and death? No! So how can we choose to address it?

For me I wanna know why would a person break into a car? Is there something we can do to mitigate that situation altogether before it gets that far? We should do that instead.

Killing or incarcerating someone who is not allowed to commit an act we then call a crime is not inevitable. We have chosen to constructed this world of defense, force, punishment and aggression especially around the state and private property, like this.

We have chosen to construct concepts of good vs evil, of crime and guilt vs law abiding and innocent that don’t have shit to do with ending harm bc people with power have authority to commit these acts, around settler Christian morality, slavery genocide and colonialism.

Is that good to you? Is that OK? Is that actually stopping harm or violence? Bc we have info telling us it doesn’t. It doesn’t make communities safer or heal people. So why stick with this structure if it doesn’t do what you claim it does?

The abolitionist challenge is to the deep violent lie of inevitability of this cruel, carceral, moralizing white settler world bent on subjugating the slave and pretending it’s actually about Crime and Punishment.

The abolitionist question is what are the real ways we can be in relationship and construct our world to eliminate and address harm, violence w/o white settler systems and concepts of punishment and criminality that are inherently capitalism, settler, statist and anti-Black?

It’s not easy or utopian in the slightest. But *unlike* what we currently have, it is actually centers addressing harm, not creating a whole intricate system of who can commit crime vs who can’t and who do we exploit and kill through incarceration that pretends to care.

Some continued thoughts on this thread for those interested: https://twitter.com/brujacontumbao/status/1385673665472122883

Thanks for folks who have rt’d and given tips, it is much appreciated. Especially if you’re asking for me to break down every single aspect of a world without police and prisons over Twitter, consider doing the same, cash handles below xx https://twitter.com/brujacontumbao/status/1385735871198990337