Steps Toward Abolishing Police and Prisons

I’d like to present some steps toward police and prison abolition. These proposals assume three overriding principles: first, do no harm; second, make progress sustainable; third, follow the golden rule.

Start by understanding we can make things worse. If we eliminate a large part of the police force and end up with a greater role for private security, we will certainly have made things worse; private security doesn’t answer to anyone but the people who write their salary and expense cheques. However bad the police and justice system today, at least in theory they answer to the whole public and not only to the wealthy.

Nobody, no party or coalition and no political program can guarantee uninterrupted progress toward liberation. Ground one government gives their opponents will try to reclaim. To make reforms sustainable, we have to make them work, we have to make sure they take root in our communities, and we have to make certain we make, and keep, the public aware of their benefits. That means, always, making sure each change we make responds effectively to the actual needs of people and communities. It means making each step sustainable on its own, so if our progress suffers a check we have the least risk of going backward.

Finally, follow the golden rule. We still have no more effective guide to moral decision making than reciprocity, asking ourselves what we would think, feel, or do in the other person’s position. That means taking the obligation to listen to the concerns of other people seriously. It means both respecting other people’s pain and anger, and not working in such a way as to inflict more pain.

Based on these principles, I offer the following suggested steps. Many of these can take place at the same time; some must take place at the same time. All of these steps will prove difficult, one way and another. If we could easily live without police, we would not have police. I have listed the goals I consider most urgent and most immediately achievable first.

1. Build mental health and conflict resilience into local communities. That can’t wait; contact between people in mental health crisis and armed police officers have the greatest potential for fatal outcomes, and people of colour face the greatest risks. To change this situation, we need to provide resources: training and social support for conflict transformation and dealing with mental health and substance use crises.

2. End the war on drugs. That means pushing for a rapid and complete transition from a punitive to a therapeutic model for dealing with harmful drug usage, free pardons (with support for reestablishing themselves in society) for everyone whose only offence consisted of having or conveying an illegal substance, and a truth and reconciliation process to cover the process by which politicians promoted, and others profited from, the criminalization of a large number of people and communities.

3. Deal with the special problems of private automotive transportation. Again, the urgency in this arises from the immediate risk people of colour face when stopped by the police while driving. Plenty of potential solutions for this problem exist; which one we choose will involve serious disagreements, because the decision any person supports will depend on whether, like me, they see the automobile as fundamentally a technology of oppression, or whether, like some others, they experience the automobile as a tool of liberation. Whatever we choose to do about cars, we must do something because stops for “driving while Black” constitute a pervasive and sometimes lethal form of oppression.

4. Stop street harassment by the police or any armed agents of government. That means eliminating all “stop and frisk”, “street checks” and “carding”. It also means eliminating “quality of life” offences, and erasing fines and records arising out of these laws.

5. I believe we must stop punishing people. The current system, with its monstrous rates of incarceration underlies the entire system of oppression, and the people who built this system built it on a desire to punish. If we take this desire on, as we do all to often with “cancel culture” and similar habits, we take the logic of the oppressor into the heart of our movement, and I believe it will destroy us. If we want meaningful freedom we must cut ourselves loose from bond of anger between ourselves and those who have wronged us. I don’t mean we should not feel, and express, our anger. I don’t mean we should not work, militantly, to change society and eliminate injustice. I don’t mean we should not defend ourselves. I mean we should not seek to hurt another person for the sake of hurting them. Causing one person pain or distress does not give another solace. Whatever our moral positions on punishment, if we do not restrain our desire to punish, we will find further reforms difficult if not impossible to achieve. Our justice system has many defects and failures, but in principle it keeps the inevitable violence within limits, coded in law, and it answers to the public. A system without these limits but with the impulse to punish, and the violence inevitable accompanying punishment, would have no restraints and would not offer anyone security. The principle of doing no harm makes this a bad idea.

6. Eliminate economic arrangements based on keeping workers insecure.

7. Integrate the public into community peacekeeping and peacemaking through dispute resolution and conflict transformation programs tailored to the needs of specific communities.

8. Reduce economic disparities. Eliminate disparities in opportunity.