In the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen tremendous movement to defund the police and move into communities and economies of care across the country. This is long, long, overdue, yet we notice some real resistance from those who are just beginning to get involved with this work when it comes to imagining a world without the police. However, at this point, can any of us look to the world and feel confident that the police care about us? We know you’ve seen the countless videos of protestors being violently assaulted, the news of Chantel Moore’s murder in New Brunswick, and the police’s confiscation of thousands of masks intended to protect protestors during a global pandemic, to name a few. 

Black, Indigenous, and brown relatives across this country and the next have always been violently targeted, abused, and murdered by the state, but recognition is not enough. This week we’re re-releasing our episode with Mariame Kaba on Moving Past Punishment. Mariame joins us for an expansive conversation on Transformative Justice, community accountability, criminalization of survivors, and freedom on the horizon. When we engage with these issues and shape our actions out of a commitment to removing violence at its core, we are working to transform our world beyond recognition into something teeming with possibility, beauty, and life. 

We invite you to take a listen to this episode this week as a resource to feel empowered to further conversations on abolition, the movement to defund the police, and the violent history and origins of policing, as well as to hopefully find the organizations in your community that have been doing this work since the beginning.

Mariame Kaba is an organizer, educator and curator who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice. She is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. She has co-founded multiple organizations and projects over the years including We Charge Genocide, the Chicago Freedom School, the Chicago Taskforce on Violence against Girls and Young Women, Love and Protect and most recently Survived and Punished.

As a Researcher in Residence at the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW), Mariame Kaba works with Andrea J. Ritchie, fellow Researcher in Residence, on a new Social Justice Institute (SJI) initiative, Interrupting Criminalization: Research in Action.

Mariame is on the advisory boards of the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, Critical Resistance and the Chicago Community Bond Fund. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications including The Nation Magazine, The Guardian, The Washington Post, In These Times, Teen Vogue, The New Inquiry and more. She runs Prison Culture blog. Mariame’s work has been recognized with several honors and awards.

♫ Music by Wyclef Jean, Jason Marsalis & Irvin Mayfield

Episode References

Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America by Brett Story

Community Safety Looks Like…

A Green New Deal for Decarceration by Brett Story and Seth J. Prins

INCITE!

Are the Cops in Our Heads and Hearts? By Paula X. Rojas

“The Sexual Politics of the New Abolitionism” by Elizabeth Bernstein (coining of Carceral Feminism)

A New of Life Re-Entry Program

Reading Recommendations

Until We Reckon by Danielle Sered

Are Prisons Obsolete by Angela Davis

Missing Daddy by Mariame Kaba

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