Scan barcode
Reviews
Abolition for the People: The Movement for a Future without Policing & Prisons by Colin Kaepernick
dinasamimi's review against another edition
3.0
Readable collection, though my interest waned at certain parts. The essays, either hit or miss, ran a bit short in length and detail. At times repetitive, at times a little elementary and disjointed. Was hoping for more.
morgancvtherine's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
lindseycmoore's review against another edition
1.0
Black women do not need to be the cover. Black women and girls are more likely to be victims of domestic violence, sexual abuse, and homicide. We need the police the most out of any other community. Using the rhetoric he uses, then putting a black woman on the cover does us no good. Colin is detached from the real world, and the real problems in the black community.
jdglasgow's review against another edition
5.0
I wanted to get THE 1619 PROJECT from the library to read over Juneteenth but, perhaps unsurprisingly, there was a waitlist for it. I therefore selected another book on my WTRs, Colin Kaepernick’s ABOLITION FOR THE PEOPLE. I was excited for this book as well. I do have a very negative view of police and policing, so the concept of abolition intrigues me, but I, like many I presume, was skeptical: how do we handle crime (murder in particular is the go-to) in a world without police?
Although that question was in the back of my mind, the book grabbed me from the very first page. In the introduction, it makes some powerful statements. “Neither prisons nor police keep people safe . . . efforts to reform police and prisons nearly always enhanced their power, reach, and legitimacy. Simply stated, police and prisons . . . are death-making machines that run counter to harm reduction and the possibility of authentic human flourishing.” Dang, ain’t that the truth? Then Angela Y. Davis joins to argue against the view that police abolition is a utopian but unworkable idea: “Abolitionist[s] . . . ask us to enlarge our field of vision so that rather than focusing myopically on the problematic institution and asking what needs to be changed about that institution, we raise radical questions about the organization of the larger society. For those . . . who still insist that these institutions are simply in need of deliberate reform, it might be helpful to reflect on the fact that similar logic was used about slavery. Just as there are those who want change today but fear that these institutions are so necessary to human society that social organization would collapse without them, there were those who believed that the cruelty of the ‘peculiar institution’ was not inherent to slavery and could indeed be eradicated by reform.”
Of course, at this moment I am thinking that if I weren’t so receptive to the idea of police abolition I might be inclined to scoff at the idea that policing shares any equivalence with slavery. But the book will soon provide facts and figures to support the view that policing is ultimately a net harm, as well as providing examples of the many ways that the carceral state terrorizes and impairs society—Black people in particular—rather than doing anything to quote-unquote “protect and serve”. For example, although Black people account for about 13% of the U.S. population they are 30% of those arrested (and 33.9% of youth arrests), 35% of those imprisoned, 42% of those on death row, and 56% of those with life sentences. Nearly half of people murdered by police have disabilities and they make up 85% of incarcerated youth despite being about 26% of the population. And trans women and men are 7x more likely than cisgender people to experience physical violence by the police.
The unjustifiable disparities in policing alone are an indictment of the system, but there’s so much more than that. Take, for instance, what Talia Lewis terms “civil disabilities” caused by incarceration, e.g. being barred from voting afterward. We take it for granted, but the result is social, economic, and physical marginalization of those society deems unfit. Or how about the way government polices Native people, conducting a “paper genocide”, as Morning Star Gali says, by requiring proof of blood quantum to prove ancestry, a system intentionally designed to limit Tribal enrollment and control the definition of who is and who is not considered to be a Native American person. Native people, incidentally, are incarcerated at 4x the rate of whites, despite being just 2% of the population. Or, more to the point, take the literal “acts of terror”, as Kaepernick himself bluntly writes, perpetrated by the police—the killings of Eric Garner, Tamil Rice, Kathryn Johnston. Or Breonna Taylor, who was killed in her own home without provocation and her death justified by her boyfriend’s mistaken belief that self-defense is a right that applies to Black people, as Kimberlé Crenshaw writes. The killers face no prosecution, her death “dismissed as just one of those things that happens: A no-harm, no-foul misfortune that counts among the acceptable costs of maintaining the anti-Black foundations of police and policing.” Or Mario Woods, whose mother is interviewed here and asks rhetorically: “You saw my child shot twenty-one times after posing not threat to all those police, and you don’t understand why Colin took a knee?” The people police surveil and harass are not seen by them as persons, which is to say specifically Blacks, Native, queer and trans people, and the poor. Incarceration forces those people into “conditions of squalor” (overcrowded, violent, lack of health care), according to Kenyon Farrow, “all intended to be part and parcel of the sentence itself”. It often takes lawsuits to get even basic sanitation in prisons, making them centers for disease… again, because those overseeing them see their population as expendable. As Ameer Hasan Loggins realized in Malcolm X’s statement “You are nothing but an ex-slave”— You are nothing. You are a thing.
Attempts to reform the police invariably embolden them. As Derrick Hamilton writes, reforms are often framed as a way to make the criminal legal system more fair and equal but really give police “the means to incarcerate more people without concern for justice itself.” When the police fail, says Stuart Schrader, they turn to the military for a model or order, but they don’t improve—they just become more dangerous, adopt a “martial mentality” that they are in hostile enemy territory. Or, as Derecka Purnell notes, reforms of the criminal legal system can “obscure its violence more efficiently” by moving the police into the homes, churches, therapy sessions, and workplaces of those it subjects to its chains. Naomi Murakawa, in my favorite essay of the collection, states it plainly: “Reform the police” usually means “reward the police”. The more police brutalize and kill, the greater their budgets for training, hiring, and hardware. Obama gave police $43 million for body cameras, which expanded surveillance powers. Both Trump and Biden in 2020, in spite of the protests against violent and racist policing, pledged to increase police spending—albeit one in the name of supporting the draconian acts and the other in the futile effort to “train” them out of their racist ways. Except racism “didn’t seep into policing via loopholes; they have explicit permission”—courts validate pretext stops, Miranda rights (RIP as of this week because of the fuckin’ right-wing Supreme Court justice) provides protection to cops by appearing as “proof of professionalism” even as they lie, intimidate, and confine to extract confessions. In the most striking portion of Murakawa’s essay, she describes how 16 died from chokeholds in L.A. in the 1980s, so chokeholds were banned; then Rodney King was beaten with batons, so now batons are not used (“apparently it was the baton—and not the police—that got a bad reputation for brutalizing Black people”); now Tazers are used to injure and kill… except “legally” people who die from being Tazed aren’t considered to have been killed because Tazing is allegedly non-lethal. Black people who die from being Tazed, Murakami writes, “die instead of suffering” as was intended.
The carceral state destroys families, doesn’t make communities safer, and intensified poverty. To quote Derrick Hamilton again, “As long as any member of society can be treated as a slave, there will be abuse of the power by the slave owner.” It is no accident that, as Bree Newsome Bass points out, “rampant violence, fraud, and theft [is perpetrated] by powerful figures in society with little to no consequence while massive amounts of resources are devoted to hyper-policing the poor for infractions as minor as trespassing, shoplifting, and turnstile jumping at subway stations.” This cannot be reformed into justice, it must be abolished entirely. The call for reform works “[o]n the assumption the system must remain intact—even as it produces asymmetrical misery, suffering, premature death, and violent life conditions for those targeted by it,” per Dylan Rodriguez. But Marlon Peterson makes a trenchant point when he asks: “Who taught you that prison was justice for any human?”
The question anybody has about abolition gets a response here, but not without Naomi Murakawa’s pointed rebuttal: “Why not ask how reform has worked? Decades of reform have built a deadly police force and the largest prison system in the world. It is reform that is a fantasy.” Indeed, nobody talks about the unworkability of the status quo. But the real answer to the question, as stated by Ruha Benjamin is that the key tenet of abolition is that caging people works against safety by failing to address the *underlying reasons* for crime, and “exacerbate the problem by making it harder to live, work, or make amends”. Instead of giving $100 billion annually to the police, including $1 of every $10 spent by towns and municipalities, abolition means investing in services that will decrease criminality in the long-term: education, health care, housing, employment assistance, food justice, violence prevention and restorative justice programs. Kids who do not attend preschool are 70% more likely to be arrested by 18; teens in summer jobs are 43% less likely to be arrested. Meanwhile, incarceration has minimal impact on crime rates. As Mariame Kaba stresses, “Economic precarity is correlated with crime.” The carceral state, an institution which disposes of people, is not achieving ends with preserving. To return to Kaepernick: “An institution based on social control instead of social well-being is an institution that needs to be abolished”.
All of these voices make a potent, compelling case for abolition. I do have a few small quibbles with the book, though. First, many of the essays seem to end just as they are building momentum; that is, they seem like primers in the issues they address without getting as deeply into them as I’d have liked. This problem lessens as the book goes along and I think that being a simple introduction to abolition *is* part of the book’s goal but nevertheless I found it frustrating to be getting invested in a particular writer or thought only for it to end in 4-5 pages. On a similar note, saying that we should reinvest from police to “community safety” or the like is all well and good, but *what does that look like*? It seems the answer is that we still need to figure that out. The nebulousness of what a world of abolition might become dampens things somewhat. Maybe it’s unfair to expect a point-by-point plan. Or maybe the plan is found outside of the book: it sounds like the BREATHE Act and INCITE! both have platforms for what a non-police state might look like. As is though, I don’t think this book does a great job of responding to the most obvious objection: what do we do about murderers? The issue is acknowledged but the response is that compassion and mentorship helped one convicted murderer to become a better person. Again, that’s great in the long-term but in the short term? It feels like *some* restraint is necessary, no?
I’m interested in reading more to figure out how abolitionist thinkers handle these issues. In fact, I already have Derecka Purnell’s BECOMING ABOLITIONISTS at home from the library to follow this up with. I think ABOLITION FOR THE PEOPLE m, despite some frustrations with the depths it does or does not plumb, is more often than not a persuasive, emotionally and intellectually riveting read. I was very impressed. 4.5 stars.
Although that question was in the back of my mind, the book grabbed me from the very first page. In the introduction, it makes some powerful statements. “Neither prisons nor police keep people safe . . . efforts to reform police and prisons nearly always enhanced their power, reach, and legitimacy. Simply stated, police and prisons . . . are death-making machines that run counter to harm reduction and the possibility of authentic human flourishing.” Dang, ain’t that the truth? Then Angela Y. Davis joins to argue against the view that police abolition is a utopian but unworkable idea: “Abolitionist[s] . . . ask us to enlarge our field of vision so that rather than focusing myopically on the problematic institution and asking what needs to be changed about that institution, we raise radical questions about the organization of the larger society. For those . . . who still insist that these institutions are simply in need of deliberate reform, it might be helpful to reflect on the fact that similar logic was used about slavery. Just as there are those who want change today but fear that these institutions are so necessary to human society that social organization would collapse without them, there were those who believed that the cruelty of the ‘peculiar institution’ was not inherent to slavery and could indeed be eradicated by reform.”
Of course, at this moment I am thinking that if I weren’t so receptive to the idea of police abolition I might be inclined to scoff at the idea that policing shares any equivalence with slavery. But the book will soon provide facts and figures to support the view that policing is ultimately a net harm, as well as providing examples of the many ways that the carceral state terrorizes and impairs society—Black people in particular—rather than doing anything to quote-unquote “protect and serve”. For example, although Black people account for about 13% of the U.S. population they are 30% of those arrested (and 33.9% of youth arrests), 35% of those imprisoned, 42% of those on death row, and 56% of those with life sentences. Nearly half of people murdered by police have disabilities and they make up 85% of incarcerated youth despite being about 26% of the population. And trans women and men are 7x more likely than cisgender people to experience physical violence by the police.
The unjustifiable disparities in policing alone are an indictment of the system, but there’s so much more than that. Take, for instance, what Talia Lewis terms “civil disabilities” caused by incarceration, e.g. being barred from voting afterward. We take it for granted, but the result is social, economic, and physical marginalization of those society deems unfit. Or how about the way government polices Native people, conducting a “paper genocide”, as Morning Star Gali says, by requiring proof of blood quantum to prove ancestry, a system intentionally designed to limit Tribal enrollment and control the definition of who is and who is not considered to be a Native American person. Native people, incidentally, are incarcerated at 4x the rate of whites, despite being just 2% of the population. Or, more to the point, take the literal “acts of terror”, as Kaepernick himself bluntly writes, perpetrated by the police—the killings of Eric Garner, Tamil Rice, Kathryn Johnston. Or Breonna Taylor, who was killed in her own home without provocation and her death justified by her boyfriend’s mistaken belief that self-defense is a right that applies to Black people, as Kimberlé Crenshaw writes. The killers face no prosecution, her death “dismissed as just one of those things that happens: A no-harm, no-foul misfortune that counts among the acceptable costs of maintaining the anti-Black foundations of police and policing.” Or Mario Woods, whose mother is interviewed here and asks rhetorically: “You saw my child shot twenty-one times after posing not threat to all those police, and you don’t understand why Colin took a knee?” The people police surveil and harass are not seen by them as persons, which is to say specifically Blacks, Native, queer and trans people, and the poor. Incarceration forces those people into “conditions of squalor” (overcrowded, violent, lack of health care), according to Kenyon Farrow, “all intended to be part and parcel of the sentence itself”. It often takes lawsuits to get even basic sanitation in prisons, making them centers for disease… again, because those overseeing them see their population as expendable. As Ameer Hasan Loggins realized in Malcolm X’s statement “You are nothing but an ex-slave”— You are nothing. You are a thing.
Attempts to reform the police invariably embolden them. As Derrick Hamilton writes, reforms are often framed as a way to make the criminal legal system more fair and equal but really give police “the means to incarcerate more people without concern for justice itself.” When the police fail, says Stuart Schrader, they turn to the military for a model or order, but they don’t improve—they just become more dangerous, adopt a “martial mentality” that they are in hostile enemy territory. Or, as Derecka Purnell notes, reforms of the criminal legal system can “obscure its violence more efficiently” by moving the police into the homes, churches, therapy sessions, and workplaces of those it subjects to its chains. Naomi Murakawa, in my favorite essay of the collection, states it plainly: “Reform the police” usually means “reward the police”. The more police brutalize and kill, the greater their budgets for training, hiring, and hardware. Obama gave police $43 million for body cameras, which expanded surveillance powers. Both Trump and Biden in 2020, in spite of the protests against violent and racist policing, pledged to increase police spending—albeit one in the name of supporting the draconian acts and the other in the futile effort to “train” them out of their racist ways. Except racism “didn’t seep into policing via loopholes; they have explicit permission”—courts validate pretext stops, Miranda rights (RIP as of this week because of the fuckin’ right-wing Supreme Court justice) provides protection to cops by appearing as “proof of professionalism” even as they lie, intimidate, and confine to extract confessions. In the most striking portion of Murakawa’s essay, she describes how 16 died from chokeholds in L.A. in the 1980s, so chokeholds were banned; then Rodney King was beaten with batons, so now batons are not used (“apparently it was the baton—and not the police—that got a bad reputation for brutalizing Black people”); now Tazers are used to injure and kill… except “legally” people who die from being Tazed aren’t considered to have been killed because Tazing is allegedly non-lethal. Black people who die from being Tazed, Murakami writes, “die instead of suffering” as was intended.
The carceral state destroys families, doesn’t make communities safer, and intensified poverty. To quote Derrick Hamilton again, “As long as any member of society can be treated as a slave, there will be abuse of the power by the slave owner.” It is no accident that, as Bree Newsome Bass points out, “rampant violence, fraud, and theft [is perpetrated] by powerful figures in society with little to no consequence while massive amounts of resources are devoted to hyper-policing the poor for infractions as minor as trespassing, shoplifting, and turnstile jumping at subway stations.” This cannot be reformed into justice, it must be abolished entirely. The call for reform works “[o]n the assumption the system must remain intact—even as it produces asymmetrical misery, suffering, premature death, and violent life conditions for those targeted by it,” per Dylan Rodriguez. But Marlon Peterson makes a trenchant point when he asks: “Who taught you that prison was justice for any human?”
The question anybody has about abolition gets a response here, but not without Naomi Murakawa’s pointed rebuttal: “Why not ask how reform has worked? Decades of reform have built a deadly police force and the largest prison system in the world. It is reform that is a fantasy.” Indeed, nobody talks about the unworkability of the status quo. But the real answer to the question, as stated by Ruha Benjamin is that the key tenet of abolition is that caging people works against safety by failing to address the *underlying reasons* for crime, and “exacerbate the problem by making it harder to live, work, or make amends”. Instead of giving $100 billion annually to the police, including $1 of every $10 spent by towns and municipalities, abolition means investing in services that will decrease criminality in the long-term: education, health care, housing, employment assistance, food justice, violence prevention and restorative justice programs. Kids who do not attend preschool are 70% more likely to be arrested by 18; teens in summer jobs are 43% less likely to be arrested. Meanwhile, incarceration has minimal impact on crime rates. As Mariame Kaba stresses, “Economic precarity is correlated with crime.” The carceral state, an institution which disposes of people, is not achieving ends with preserving. To return to Kaepernick: “An institution based on social control instead of social well-being is an institution that needs to be abolished”.
All of these voices make a potent, compelling case for abolition. I do have a few small quibbles with the book, though. First, many of the essays seem to end just as they are building momentum; that is, they seem like primers in the issues they address without getting as deeply into them as I’d have liked. This problem lessens as the book goes along and I think that being a simple introduction to abolition *is* part of the book’s goal but nevertheless I found it frustrating to be getting invested in a particular writer or thought only for it to end in 4-5 pages. On a similar note, saying that we should reinvest from police to “community safety” or the like is all well and good, but *what does that look like*? It seems the answer is that we still need to figure that out. The nebulousness of what a world of abolition might become dampens things somewhat. Maybe it’s unfair to expect a point-by-point plan. Or maybe the plan is found outside of the book: it sounds like the BREATHE Act and INCITE! both have platforms for what a non-police state might look like. As is though, I don’t think this book does a great job of responding to the most obvious objection: what do we do about murderers? The issue is acknowledged but the response is that compassion and mentorship helped one convicted murderer to become a better person. Again, that’s great in the long-term but in the short term? It feels like *some* restraint is necessary, no?
I’m interested in reading more to figure out how abolitionist thinkers handle these issues. In fact, I already have Derecka Purnell’s BECOMING ABOLITIONISTS at home from the library to follow this up with. I think ABOLITION FOR THE PEOPLE m, despite some frustrations with the depths it does or does not plumb, is more often than not a persuasive, emotionally and intellectually riveting read. I was very impressed. 4.5 stars.
caseythebookwitch's review against another edition
5.0
Other rating and comments here are exactly why this book is so needed and important. Seeing commenters ripping Kaepernick because he is biracial is exactly the system that needs to be dismantled. No more colorism, no more carceral systems, no more punitive establishments. If others would actually read this book they would understand. Instead people are committed to the narrative they were sold from the media circus surrounding Kaepernick.
Kaep, keep up the important and essential work. This book was so needed.
Abolition is the only way forward.
Kaep, keep up the important and essential work. This book was so needed.
Abolition is the only way forward.