Now is the time to #DefundthePolice and abolish prisons to create the more just and more loving feminist world we deserve.
As a result of the uprisings happening around the country, the decades long strategic organizing of Black feminist movement builders and theorists, and the clear articulation of a platform of demands by The Movement for Black Lives, we are living through a historic moment of possibility around reimagining safety and justice in this country. We believe that defunding the police and abolishing prisons is not only possible, it is a necessary step towards creating a feminist vision of health, safety, and security for all people in this country, but especially for Black people who are overwhelmingly the victims of police and prison violence. Many people have not yet had the opportunity or the cause to think about alternatives to police or prisons and so this concept may sound outlandish or terrifying. This list of resources and books is not only about divestment (pulling resources away from policing and prisons) but also investment (redirecting the majority of the massive police, prison, and military budgets at every level of this country to proven alternatives that increase safety--including better physical and mental healthcare, equitable free education, sexual abuse and sexual violence education and prevention, housing programs that help people stay in their homes and aquire safe housing, drug and alcohol programs that support the wellness of individuals instead of criminalizing behavior, reproductive care for people across the spectrum of their lives and their choices about building families--just to name a few).
Some people fear that divesting from police and prisons will make people more likely to be victims of crime or will make those who have already experienced harm even more vulnerable. One way to begin exploring alternatives to police and prisons is to consider the concept of Transformative Justice, which encourages a process where all the stakeholders affected by an injustice have an opportunity to discuss how they have been affected by the injustice and to decide what should be done to repair the harm. Transformative Justice also considers the individual in relation to societal factors that influence behavior and seeks pathways for resolution that also make society as a whole more just. To be clear, this is a long term shift of values, funding, and priorities in which new systems must be built to create containers of safety and accountability for harm. One of the ways we can begin to create the world that we want to inhabit is to open our minds and hearts to what actual justice might look like and feel like outside a retributive or "eye for an eye" model.
Suggested Reading Online:
If you have not yet read The Movement for Black Lives full policy platform we encourage you to do so, but especially the platform on police and prisons so you can better understand the demands we are fighting for.
We love this well sourced and researched article from lesbian/queer magazine, Autostraddle, it's a great explainer and introduction to these concepts: Police and Prison Abolition 101: A Syllabus and FAQ
Suggested actions in your personal sphere:
Talk to friends about not calling the police. (Need more ideas about what this could look like? Read this and this.)
Encourage your school, church, gym, or other institution to cancel its contract with the police or private security.
Get rid of your Ring doorbell camera or other devices that are frequently used to profile Black people. Here's the ACLU's position on this.
Delete your "Next Door" account or commit to actively interrupting every instance of profiling you see on your neighborhood list. If you aren't interrupting you are condoning. Here's more info about NextDoor's long game.
Delete your Amazon account (yeah yeah this is self-serving because Amazon is our #1 nemesis for many reasons but you should know what your money supports.) How Amazon's Ring works with Police. Amazon is the backbone of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) which is still caging children and adults at the U.S. border.
We encourage you to explore this list of books. On this list you will find books about the history of policing--its roots in slavery--and why it is an inherently anti-Black institution that cannot be reformed. You will find feminist critiques of the police and prison systems. You will find first person accounts by Black activists on the harms of policing and prisons and the necessity of abolition. Finally, you will find a wealth of books on the roots of Transformative Justice--ideas that come from many places including Black Feminist theory, Reproductive Justice, the Christian Left, Disability Justice Movements, and Queer Kin and Accountability Networks. As feminists we believe it is not simply our duty to tear things down, it is primarily our duty to imagine a more beautiful, healthy, and life-affirming future for all people. We hope you will consider these resources and begin thinking about actions, large and small, that you can take to divest from police and prisons in your life.
Transformative justice seeks to solve the problem of violence at the grassroots level, without relying on punishment, incarceration, or policing. Community-based approaches to preventing crime and repairing its damage have existed for centuries. However, in the punative atmosphere of contemporary criminal justice systems, they are often marginalized and operate under the radar.
With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable.
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“A passionate, incisive critique of the many ways in which women and girls of color are systematically erased or marginalized in discussions of police violence.” —Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow
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LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER
Illuminates the threats Black women face and the lack of substantive public policy towards gendered violence
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This vital addition to carceral, prison, and disability studies draws important new links between deinstitutionalization and decarceration
Prison abolition and decarceration are increasingly debated, but it is often without taking into account the largest exodus of people from carceral facilities in the twentieth century: the closure of disability institutions an
A comprehensive, readable analysis of the key issues of the Black Lives Matter movement, this thought-provoking and compelling anthology features essays by some of the nation’s most influential and respected criminal justice experts and legal scholars.
Fumbling Towards Repair is a workbook by Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan that includes reflection questions, skill assessments, facilitation tips, helpful definitions, activities, and hard-learned lessons intended to support people who have taken on the coordination and facilitation of formal community accountability processes to address interpersonal harm & violence.
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In the era of #MeToo and mass incarceration, The Feminist and the Sex Offender makes a powerful feminist case for accountability without punishment and sexual safety and pleasure without injustice.
2020 Lambda Literary Award winner for best LGBTQ anthology
A crucial indictment of widely embraced alternatives to incarceration that exposes how many of these new approaches actually widen the net of punishment and surveillance
But what does it mean--really--to celebrate reforms that convert your home into your prison?
--Michelle Alexander, from the foreword
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An indispensable contribution to the movement for racial justice in "postracial" America.
In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world.
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With race and policing once more burning issues, this classic work from one of America’s giants of black radicalism has lost none of its prescience or power
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING MICHAEL B. JORDAN AND JAMIE FOXX • A powerful true story about the potential for mercy to redeem us, and a clarion call to fix our broken system of justice—from one of the most brilliant and influential lawyers of our time.
Practical tools and theoretical frameworks for understanding the fight for reproductive rights, from pregnancy to parenthood and beyond.Expanding the social justice discourse surrounding "reproductive rights" to include issues of environmental justice, incarceration, poverty, disability, and more, this crucial anthology explores the practical applications for activist thought on this ever-u
Profound meditations on life, death, freedom, family, and faith, written by radical Black journalist, Mumia Abu-Jamal, while he was awaiting his execution.
In this collection of essays, Lambda Literary Award-winning writer and longtime activist and performance artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores the politics and realities of disability justice, a movement that centers the lives and leadership of sick and disabled queer, trans, Black, and brown people, with knowledge and gifts for all.
"A powerful — and personal — account of the movement and its players."—The Washington Post
“This perceptive resource on radical black liberation movements in the 21st century can inform anyone wanting to better understand . . .
Explores accountability as a framework for building movements to transform systemic oppression and violence
Many feminists grapple with the problem of hyper-incarceration in the United States, and yet commentators on gender crime continue to assert that criminal law is not tough enough. This punitive impulse, prominent legal scholar Aya Gruber argues, is dangerous and counterproductive.
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A renowned journalist and legal commentator exposes the unchecked power of the prosecutor as a driving force in America’s mass incarceration crisis—and charts a way out.
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This provocative account of our immigration system's long, racist history reveals how it has become the brutal machine that upends the lives of millions of immigrants today.
A revelatory account of the misdemeanor machine that unjustly brands millions of Americans as criminals.
Punishment Without Crime offers an urgent new interpretation of inequality and injustice in America by examining the paradigmatic American offense: the lowly misdemeanor.
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A groundbreaking new vision for public safety that overturns more than 200 years of fear-based discrimination, othering, and punishment
The award-winning "radically original" (The Atlantic) restorative justice leader, whose work the Washington Post has called "totally sensible and totally revolutionary," grapples with the problem of violent crime in the movement for prison abolition
From an award-winning civil rights lawyer, a profound challenge to our society's normalization of the caging of human beings, and the role of the legal profession in perpetuating it
Misdemeanorland: Criminal Courts and Social Control in an Age of Broken Windows Policing (Paperback)
"An eye-opening account of the criminal justice system's often overlooked creaky gears."--Sam Roberts, New York Times
As Nora Samaran writes, "violence is nurturance turned backwards." In its place, she proposes "nurturance culture" as the opposite of rape culture, suggesting that models of care and accountability--different from "call-outs" rooted in the politics of guilt--can move toward dismantling systems of dominance and oppression.
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An enraging, necessary look at the private prison system, and a convincing clarion call for prison reform.” —NPR.org
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A narrative-driven exploration of policing and the punishment of disadvantage in Chicago, and a new vision for repairing urban neighborhoods
Since the civil rights era, the doctrine of nonviolence has enjoyed near-universal acceptance by the US Left. Today protest is often shaped by cooperation with state authorities--even organizers of rallies against police brutality apply for police permits, and anti-imperialists usually stop short of supporting self-defense and armed resistance.
Essays on the contemporary continuum of incarceration: the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory policing, the political economy of fees and fines, and algorithmic policing.
What we see happening in Ferguson and other cities around the country is not the creation of livable spaces, but the creation of living hells.
Named one of the most important nonfiction books of the 21st century by Entertainment Weekly' Slate' Chronicle of Higher Education' Literary Hub, Book Riot' and Zora
NOW IN PAPERBACK The elegant but harrowing (San Francisco Chronicle) collection of writing from solitary confinement that lifts the veil on this widespread modern-day form of torture
"A must-read for anyone interested in social justice and inequalities, social movements, the criminal justice system, and African American history. An excellent companion to Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow and Ava DuVernay's documentary 13th."--Library Journal, Starred review
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Praised by The New York Times; O, The Oprah Magazine; Bitch Magazine; Slate; Publishers Weekly; and more, this is “a bracing corrective to a national mythology” (New York Times) around the civil rights movement.
The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (Paperback)
The Revolution Starts at Home is as urgently needed today as when it was first published. This watershed collection breaks the dangerous silence surrounding the "secret" of intimate violence within social justice circles. Just as importantly, it provides practical strategies for dealing with abuse and creating safety without relying on the coercive power of the state.
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How policing became the major political issue of our time
There was a time I believed prisons existed to rehabilitate people, to make our communities safer. . . . When I saw for the first time (but not the last) a mother sobbing and clutching her son when visiting hours were up, only to be physically pried off and escorted out by guards, I knew nothing about that made me safer. This is the heart of this country's prison system.
Pathologized, terrorized, and confined, trans/gender non-conforming and queer folks have always struggled against the prison industrial complex. Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith bring together current and former prisoners, activists, and academics for a new understanding of how race, gender, ability, and sexuality are lived under the crushing weight of captivity.
Let's begin with the basics: violence is an inherent part of policing. The police represent the most direct means by which the state imposes its will on the citizenry. They are armed, trained, and authorized to use force. Like the possibility of arrest, the threat of violence is implicit in every police encounter. Violence, as well as the law, is what they represent.
Winner of the 2017 Frederick Douglass Prize
A groundbreaking history of abolition that recovers the largely forgotten role of African Americans in the long march toward emancipation from the American Revolution through the Civil War
Received historical wisdom casts abolitionists as bourgeois, mostly white reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conserva
In one form or another, slavery has existed throughout the world for millennia. It helped to change the world, and the world transformed the institution.
Changes in the American religious landscape enabled the rise of mass incarceration. Religious ideas and practices also offer a key for ending mass incarceration. These are the bold claims advanced by Break Every Yoke, the joint work of two activist-scholars of American religion.
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An eye-opening account of how and why evangelical Christian ministries are flourishing in prisons across the United States
On May 2, 1973, Black Panther Assata Shakur (aka JoAnne Chesimard) lay in a hospital, close to death, handcuffed to her bed, while local, state, and federal police attempted to question her about the shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike that had claimed the life of a white state trooper. Long a target of J.
The searing, visionary memoir of founding Black Panther Huey P. Newton, in a dazzling graphic package
This timely special edition, published on the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party, features a new preface by the authors that places the Party in a contemporary political landscape, especially as it relates to Black Lives Matter and other struggles to fight police brutality against black communities.
In Oakland, California, in 1966, community college
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A graphic novel memoir from Frank “Big Black” Smith, a prisoner at Attica State Prison in 1971, whose rebellion against the injustices of the prison system remains one of the bloodiest civil rights confrontations in American history.
FOUR DAYS IN 1971 CHANGED THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY.
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Revelations about U.S policies and practices of torture and abuse have captured headlines ever since the breaking of the Abu Ghraib prison story in April 2004. Since then, a debate has raged regarding what is and what is not acceptable behavior for the world’s leading democracy.
New York Times Bestseller • Notable Book of the Year • Editors' Choice Selection
One of Bill Gates’ “Amazing Books” of the Year
One of Publishers Weekly’s 10 Best Books of the Year
Longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction
An NPR Best Book of the Year
Winner of the Hillman Prize for Nonfiction
This groundbreaking historical expose unearths the lost stories of enslaved persons and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude shortly thereafter in “The Age of Neoslavery.”
Winner of the 2020 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award
Drawing on personal stories, research, and historical events, an esteemed educator offers a vision of educational justice inspired by the rebellious spirit and methods of abolitionists.
For the first time, the four most popular restorative justice books in the Justice & Peacebuilding series—The Little Book of Restorative Justice: Revised and Updated, The Little Book of Victim Offender Conferencing, The Little Book of Family Group Conferences, and The Little Book of Circle Processes—are available in one affordable volume.
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"Do not underestimate the power of the book you are holding in your hands."
--Michelle Alexander
One out of every hundred adults in the U.S. is in prison. This book provides a crash course in what drives mass incarceration, the human and community costs, and how to stop the numbers from going even higher. This volume collects the three comic books published by the Real Cost of Prisons Project. The stories and statistical information in each comic book is thoroughly researched and documented.
During the 1970s, grassroots women activists in and outside of prisons forged a radical politics against gender violence and incarceration. Emily L.
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From broken-window policing in Detroit to prison-building in Appalachia, exploring the expansion of the carceral state and its oppressive social relations into everyday life
Prison Land offers a geographic excavation of the prison as a set of social relations—including property, work, gender, and race—enacted across various landscapes of American life.
Winner of the 2013 John Hope Franklin Book Prize presented by the American Studies Association
A necessary read that demonstrates the ways in which certain people are devalued without attention to social contexts
IVP Readers' Choice Award
Outreach Magazine Resource of the Year
In Policing the Womb, Michele Goodwin explores how states abuse laws and infringe on rights to police women and their pregnancies. This book looks at the impact of these often arbitrary laws which can result in the punishment, incarceration, and humiliation of women, particularly poor women and women of color.
This book explores the dramatic evolution of a feminist movement that mobilised to challenge a women's prison system in crisis.
From intimate relationships to global politics, Sarah Schulman observes a continuum: that inflated accusations of harm are used to avoid accountability. Illuminating the difference between Conflict and Abuse, Schulman directly addresses our contemporary culture of scapegoating.
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The editors and contributors to Color of Violence ask: What would it take to end violence against women of color? Presenting the fierce and vital writing of organizers, lawyers, scholars, poets, and policy makers, Color of Violence radically repositions the antiviolence movement by putting women of color at its center.
Have you ever heard the phrase “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission?” Violating consent isn’t limited to sexual relationships, and our discussions around consent shouldn’t be, either. To resist rape culture, we need a consent culture—and one that is more than just reactionary.
Does the criminal justice system actually help victims and offenders? What does justice look like for those who have been harmed? For those who have done harm? Twenty-five years after it was first published, Changing Lenses by Howard Zehr remains the classic text of the restorative justice field.
"I learned that the problems were much deeper than a flawed criminal justice system, and that our work needed to begin in our relationships with each other and the natural world, and most importantly, with ourselves." (from the preface)
Create a Culture of Belonging!
The world around us is a wreck. When there's so much conflict around the country and around the corner, it's easy to feel overwhelmed, powerless, and helpless. What can one person do to make a difference?
A scathing and original look at the racist origins of psychiatry, through the story of the largest mental institution in the world
Today, 90 percent of psychiatric beds are located in jails and prisons across the United States, institutions that confine disproportionate numbers of African Americans.
Powerful, provocative narratives of people surviving the devastating affects of life in long term incarceration.
Over 170,000 copies sold! Restorative justice argues that crime destroys people and relationships. Justice, then, must repair and rebuild people and relationships. This is true for men and women that are incarcerated as it is for victims.
The more than 2.3 million incarcerated individuals in the United States are often regarded as a throw-away population.
In our era of mass incarceration, gun violence, and Black Lives Matters, a handbook showing how racial justice and restorative justice can transform the African-American experience in America.
This timely work will inform scholars and practitioners on the subjects of pervasive racial inequity and the healing offered by restorative justice practices.
This book introduces Coming to the Table’s approach to a continuously evolving set of purposeful theories, ideas, experiments, guidelines, and intentions, all dedicated to facilitating racial healing and transformation.
People of color, relative to white people, fall on the negative side of virtually all measurable social indicators.
An essential tool for healers, therapists, activists, and trauma survivors who are interested in a justice-centered approach to somatic transformation
Cindy Crabb provides a DIY tour of the promise and perils of sexual relationships in Learning Good Consent. Building ethical relationships is one of the most important things we can do, but sex, consent, abuse, and support can get complicated. This collection is an indispensable guide to both preventing sexual violence and helping its survivors to heal.
Support encourages everyone to take a step back, listen, think, and talk about sex, consent, violence, and abuse. If you or someone you know have ever been assaulted or victimized, how to be an ally can be confusing. These words and the connection they offer can help.
Shawna Potter has been a touring musician for over twenty years--and has been sexually harassed for just as long. Here's her DIY guide to fighting back.
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It doesn’t take firsthand experience to learn the meaning of “pain compliance” or “rough ride”
An urgent, compact manifesto that will teach you how to protect your rights, your freedom, and your future when talking to police.
No Choirboy takes readers inside America's prisons and allows inmates sentenced to death as teenagers to speak for themselves. In their own voices—raw and uncensored—they talk about their lives in prison and share their thoughts and feelings about how they ended up there.
The young adult adaptation of the acclaimed, #1 New York Times bestseller Just Mercy--now a major motion picture starring Michael B. Jordan, Jaime Foxx, and Brie Larson and the subject of an HBO documentary feature!
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PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • The definitive history of the infamous 1971 Attica Prison uprising, the state's violent response, and the victim's decades-long quest for justice. • Thompson served as the Historical Consultant on the Academy Award-nominated documentary feature ATTICA
A brilliant overview of America's defining human rights crisis and a "much-needed introduction to the racial, political, and economic dimensions of mass incarceration" (Michelle Alexander)
2021 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine
Shows how reproductive justice organizations' collaborative work across racial lines provides a compelling model for other groups to successfully influence change
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What if there were no prisons? Alternative approaches to dealing with crime are underway around the world to explore how victims, offenders, and communities can heal rifts and repair damage. It's often called restorative justice. It's a way to think about the deeper reasons behind crimes, and suggests that by building more caring communities, it's possible to change our societies--and ourselves.
An Invitation to Community and Models for Connection
An expert in the field offers a mindfulness-based approach to nonviolent action, demonstrating how nonviolence is a powerful tool for personal and social transformation
While the Civil Rights Movement is remembered for efforts to end segregation and secure the rights of African Americans, the larger economic vision that animated much of the movement is often overlooked today. That vision sought economic justice for every person in the United States, regardless of race.
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The first comprehensive work to turn a “queer eye” on the criminal justice system, providing an eye-opening study of LGBTQ+ rights and equality.
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR GENERAL NON-FICTON
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEWS' 10 BEST BOOKS
LONG-LISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
FINALIST, CURRENT INTEREST CATEGORY, LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZES
THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER.
New York Times Editor’s Pick.
Library Journal Best Books of 2019.
TIME Magazine's "Best Memoirs of 2018 So Far."
O, Oprah’s Magazine’s “10 Titles to Pick Up Now.”
Politics & Current Events 2018 O.W.L. Book Awards Winner
The Root Best of 2018
A manifesto from one of America's most influential activists which disrupts political, economic, and social norms by reimagining the Black Radical Tradition.
What is the reality of policing in the United States? Do the police keep anyone safe and secure other than the very wealthy? How do recent police killings of young black people in the United States fit into the historical and global context of anti-blackness?
Finalist for the 2018 National Council on Crime & Delinquency's Media for a Just Society Awards
Nominated for the 49th NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work (Nonfiction) A 2017 Washington Post Notable Book A Kirkus Best Book of 2017
Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond (Paperback)
Named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews
A New York Times Editor’s Choice
Nautilus Award Winner
“A worthy and necessary addition to the contemporary canon of civil rights literature.” —The New York Times
From one of the leading voices on civil rights in America, a thoughtful an