Session 4: Abolition as Care
Key Questions
What does community mean?
How do we reimagine communities as central to the continuum of care?
How do we build care webs for ourselves and our community?
If you had the chance to develop your own care web and care programs what would it look like? What would you provide that isn’t currently available through our local/state/federal government?
What is mutual aid? How is it different from charity? What has it looked like in your life? What can you imagine it as?
What are the differences between restorative and transformative justice?
What do we understand as restorative? What has the potential to be transformative?
What is the difference between accountability and punishment?
Required Readings
Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete, “The Prison Industrial Complex” (AUDIO)
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, “Care Webs: Experiments in Creating Collective Access”
Supplementary Materials
Book: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, “Making Space Accessible Is an Act of Love for Our Communities”
Article: Dean Spade, “Solidarity Not Charity: Mutual Aid for Mobilization and Survival” (PDF)
Video: ASA Freedom Course, “ ‘Mutual Aid’ Is a People’s Movement”
Poem: Ross Gay, “A Small Needful Fact” (PDF)
Primary Source: Black Panther Party Free Breakfast Program, 168-170 (PDF)
Recommended Materials
Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, “The Mississippi Freedom Labor Union”
Mia Mingus, “Medical Industrial Complex Visual”
Saidiya Hartman, “The Death Toll”
Exercise
Pod mapping
The Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective developed an exercise called Pod Mapping, which is a powerful tool for visualizing the mutual aid practices that many of us already do: https://batjc.wordpress.com/pods-and-pod-mapping-worksheet/
As they explain, “during the spring of 2014 the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective (BATJC) began using the term ‘pod’ to refer to a specific type of relationship within transformative justice (TJ) work. We needed a term to describe the kind of relationship between people who would turn to each other for support around violent, harmful and abusive experiences, whether as survivors, bystanders or people who have harmed. These would be the people in our lives that we would call on to support us with things such as our immediate and on-going safety, accountability and transformation of behaviors, or individual and collective healing and resiliency.”
As a group, do the following pod mapping exercise:
Write your name in the middle grey circle.
The surrounding bold-outlined circles are your pod. Write the names of the people who are in your pod. We encourage people to write the names of actual individuals, instead of things such as “my church group” or “my neighbors.”
The dotted lines surrounding your pod are people who are “movable.” They are people that could be moved into your pod, but need a little more work. For example, you might need to build your relationship or trust with them. Perhaps you’ve never had a conversation with them about prisons or sexual violence.
The larger circles at the edge of the page are for networks, communities, or groups that could be resources for you. It could be your local domestic violence direct service organization, your cohort in nursing school, your youth group, or a transformative justice group.
Your pod(s) may shift over time, as your needs or relationships shift or as people’s geographic locations shift. We encourage people to have conversations with their people about pods and transformative justice, as well as to actively grow the number of people in their pod and support each other in doing so. Growing one’s pod is not easy and may take time. In pod work, we measure our successes by the quality of our relationships with one another and we invest in the time it takes to build things like trust, respect, vulnerability, accountability, care and love. We see building our pods as a concrete way to prepare and build resources for transformative justice in our communities.
Reading guide
Angela Davis argues that separating “crime” from “punishment” is crucial to understanding the social meaning of the prison. What do we typically assume as the relationship between crime and punishment? How does she ask that we complicate that relationship? What is the difference between crime and harm? Can you think of historical (or current) examples of punishable crime that were not harmful?
Make a list of the ways that the prison system is embedded in the global economy. Without conflating this to mean actual profit, what are some of the ways punishment is commodified?
According to Davis, how did commodification of punishment change from after the Civil War through the 21st century? What was the relationship between “public” and “private in these various economic arrangements? Compare concrete examples.
Davis ends her chapter on the prison industrial complex (PIC) by asking:
“How, then, do we accomplish this balancing act of passionately attending to the needs of prisoners--calling for less violent conditions, an end to state sexual assault, improved physical and mental health care, greater access to drug programs, better educational work opportunities, unionization of prison labor, more connections with families and communities, shorter and alternative sentencing--and at the same time call for alternatives to sentencing altogether, no more prison construction, and abolitionist strategies that question the place of the prison in our future?”
Make two columns. In the first, list some solutions to the first set of problems that do not reproduce the punishment system (these are often referred to as “non-reformist reforms”). In the second, list some proposed solutions which do in fact reproduce those structures of control (known as “reformist reforms”). When you’re done, you can look at your list in comparison to this one put together by Critical Resistance.
What are the two places that people have typically been forced to rely on care, according to Piepzna-Samarasinha? What are some of the examples she gives as alternative sources of care (historical and current) that have not been coupled with coercion, stigma, and punishment?
What are some examples of Care Work expanding our understandings of what constitutes prison/carceral systems beyond jails and prisons?
What does “solidarity not charity” mean in practice? What are examples that Piepzna-Samarasinha presents of this?
How is “collective care” different from individual access according to Piepzna-Samarasinha?