divestment from the police: why we say abolition over reform, a teach-in + reading

First of all, I just want to take a second to be thankful and hopeful. I am entering my fifth long year at UT Austin and have seen so many political ups and downs as an organizer. I never in my wildest dreams thought that a mainstream student leadership entity like Senate of College Councils would be so supportive of a teach-in about abolition, but they are, and they were immensely helpful at getting this teach-in off the ground in a handful of days. With my luminous friend Jordan Walters, I was able to teach a webinar about abolition and contextualize it to the current movement to divest from UTPD that is being led by BIPOC students. While divesting from the police is not the only demand we’ve made, it is the central one and it is the first on the list for a reason. Policing as an institution has done irreparable harm to Black communities and Indigenous communities especially and marginalized people at large. It must be abolished, not reformed. History has shown why reform does not work, and the only thing UT can do as an institution to begin to repair the harms done by its complicity in the prison industrial complex is advance towards the goal of abolition. To defund and abolish: it’s the only way forward.

These demands represent a collective imagination for a different way of living and existing. They are a culmination of decades and decades of organizing and work done by students who worked for a better future for the people who came after them. We, as student organizers, are cycled through quickly, graduating in 4–5 years, often never seeing the progress we worked so hard for, but it’s done because we know someone did it for us and we should do it for those who come next.

This is a very crucial moment for movement work as so many are discovering abolition and struggling through the education needed to digest an abolitionist framework. The demands and the current movement for abolishing policing has lit the way, but the need for political education on the difference between abolition and reform is still very much needed. In this teach-in, we explore root concepts and how student organizers and leaders can use abolitionist organizing tools in their work. The conversation was UT-centered so we could talk through the demands and what is needed specifically at our university, but non-UT folks are more than welcome to listen and engage with the resources, especially as we see more and more BIPOC students push for divestment and change at their universities. The video of the teach-in is below and further reading and resources will follow.

solidarity always.

sarah and jord ❤

teach-in: (starts at 11 minutes if you don’t want to listen to us talk about our breakfast and avatar: the last airbender)

further reading and resources:

• How to Grow Abolition on Your College Campus from Critical Resistance Abolitionist Educators
• Abolish Policing from Critical Resistance (if you had a question regarding the abolition of policing, this is the first place I would send you)
• #8toAbolition from trusted abolitionist organizers
• A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement by Alicia Garza
• Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police by Mariame Kaba (Ida's Disciple)
• Policing the Planet from Verso Books
• Making Abolition Geography in California’s Central Valley with Ruth Wilson Gilmore
• Meanwhile: Making Abolition Geographies- Keynote from Ruth Wilson Gilmore at Prison Abolition, Human Rights, and Penal Reform: From the Local to the Global at the University of Texas at Austin Law School (note: I was present at this lecture and this conference. it is easily the weekend that changed my life.)
• Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis (audiobook can be found here)
• Justice in America: Mariame Kaba and Prison Abolition podcast episode
• The Abolitionist, Issue 25: Policing, a Critical Resistance Publication
• Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement
• The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities, co-edited by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Ching-In Chen and Jai Dulani
• thread of toolkits and campaigns to abolish policing and prisons from Micah Herskind
• Beyond Prisons, a podcast
• Millennials Are Killing Capitalism, a podcast: interviews with many abolitionists including Mariame Kaba, the #8toabolition organizers, and more. they also integrate abolitionist principles into a lot of different discussion topics and constantly question reformist tendencies.
• transformharm.org: a resource hub about ending violence. It offers an introduction to transformative justice. Created by Mariame Kaba and designed by Lu Design Studio, the site includes selected articles, audio-visual resources, curricula, and more. (this is where I go when I have questions, especially good for transformative justice and discussions of interpersonal violence)