prison abolition reading list and guide

I always said I wasn’t qualified enough to do my own prison abolition syllabus, but here I am. I’ve been getting a ton of questions about prison abolition and ending criminalization and I can only answer so many questions effectively in one minute TikToks. I am, unfortunately, not that concise when I’m explaining these concepts. Here are the writers and organizers that I’ve learned from, please feel free to keep asking me questions, but hopefully the readings, videos, toolkits, and podcast episodes will help.

Abolition: The Starting Point

• What is Abolition? from Critical Resistance
• Justice in America: Mariame Kaba and Prison Abolition: If you’ve been around awhile, you might be tired of me recommending this podcast episode, but, quite frankly, I do not care. I have tried to explain prison abolition to pretty much everyone I’ve ever met, but no piece of political education I’ve provided has ever been as effective as getting people to listen to this single podcast episode. Obviously, this is only the start but it answers a lot of the “what if?” and “what about?” questions I get daily, with the words of Mariame Kaba, who is definitely the person you want explaining abolition to you. Kaba made me a prison abolitionist and I think that’s true for a lot of us.
• Common Questions about Police and Prison Abolition and Responses from Dean Spade: extremely short and to the point answers to the most common questions we all get about abolition
• #8toAbolition from trusted abolitionist organizers: #8toAbolition was a resource forged in the throes of reformist erasure of abolitionist organizing and responses in the wake George Floyd’s death and subsequent uprisings. The organizers at #8toAbolition deeply understand the framework of abolitionist organizing and have laid it out in an easy to access, easy to read format. Please peruse their website if you’re wanting to understand what abolition as a framework means to organizers. I would also follow the writers/organizers in the collective on social media as I’ve learned a lot from their responses to reformist actions and how they provide analysis day-to-day.
• Are Prisons Obsolete? by Dr. Angela Y Davis (free audiobook): If you’ve been paying attention to reading lists and people trying to educate themselves around prison abolition in the last year or so, you’ve probably been recommended this book. I personally love recommending Dr. Davis’s books to people just dipping their toes in abolition because I think she lays out the landscape of prisons and abolition really well, in an accessible way, But as I’ve stated previously: this is the starting point. Don’t just stop here, don’t stop at political theory. Make sure you’re reading things written and developed by on the ground organizers, youth organizers, incarcerated people, the list goes on. I’ll try to include as many perspectives as possible in this syllabus.
• transformharm.org: Transformharm.org is a resource hub centered in ending violence. This has been an invaluable resources, especially as I organize with survivors of violence. As a prison abolitionist, the most common question I get is how we are going to achieve justice for survivors of sexual assault and gendered violence, and the answer to that question lies in two points for me: the system that exists now has never and will never be able to adjudicate real justice for survivors and communities that have never been able to trust the police have been working on this question for decades and we should listen to them. Transformharm.org has organized its website into helpful focus areas and includes everything from first person perspective from survivors themselves to audio/visual media to curriculum about ending violence in our communities. I highly recommend reading through the articles about carceral feminisms as well.
• The Abolitionist Toolkit from Critical Resistance: It’s important to center our abolitionist learning in the work of people who have always been doing the work, people who have learned lessons from abolitionist organizing in their communities. Critical Resistance is an organization you should absolutely be following and listening to. There are tons of resources on their website, but this toolkit is great if you’re looking for a long-form, complete explanation of the movement to abolish policing and prisons.

Book Recommendations:

In my bookshop, I have a long list of abolitionist books I recommend, with blurbs about what I got from their authors and the writing itself. Please read the blurbs as you peruse the list, because it will help guide you to the book you may be looking for. I tried to present a variety of perspectives on abolition, but I am still learning myself, as we all are, so I apologize for gaps in that list. (Also, I do earn 10% if you use my bookshop, but I understand if that makes you uncomfortable. I just use the money to buy more books for myself both for school and personal political education. I only ask that you do your best to purchase from independent bookstores, especially those who sell radical text. Bookshop allows you to choose what store you’d like the profit of the book to go to, which is why I like it.)

• Abolition Now: 10 Years of Strategy and Struggle Against the Prison Industrial Complex: Another recommendation from Critical Resistance, this book encapsulates a lot of thoughts from abolitionists I respect from a variety of perspectives. If you don’t want to read the whole book or can’t, I recommend glancing through the table of contents and picking chapters that might contain answers to questions you have. I also recommend looking at the other work of the writers included in this book as they have all been involved abolitionists for a good while.

Abolishing Policing:

• Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police by Mariame Kaba
• Reformist reforms vs. abolitionist steps in policing: THE MOST IMPORTANT GRAPHIC TO EVER EXIST. YES, THE ALL CAPS IS NECESSARY. Please go look at this. It’s a good way of putting the last decade of policing reform into perspective and understanding why abolitionists are critical of reformist actions.
• Abolishing Policing from Critical Resistance: resource list from an organization you should absolutely be following. probably the first place I sent most people when they were looking for specific resources about abolishing policing as “Defund the Police” entered into people’s vocabulary. Plenty of webinars, toolkits, etc to listen to and watch.
• Divestment from the Police: Why We Say Abolition Over Reform by Sarah Philips (that’s me, I apologize for this) and Jordan Walters: I really cringe at citing my own work, but I did lead this live teach-in about abolition and divesting from police from a university perspective last year and I can never go into this much detail in one minute TikToks unfortunately. There are some specifics about the work we were doing at my specific university, but having an example of a specific community is never bad, and a few other universities in Texas followed our model. For most of it, I am answering basic questions about abolition and talking about my perspective on it and Jordan brought in their perspective as a Black Studies student and organizer who worked directly with and organized Black students on campus. I also include more specific resources about organizing at universities from an abolitionist perspective at the end of this article.
• Mini Teach-In: Our Vision of a Community Without Cops from Communities of Color United: Coalition for Racial Justice: this teach-in is from some comrades in the community I organized in who have been working with the Defund the Police model for years. I just wanted to cite some of the people that I directly learned from in community and this teach-in was offered during the uprisings during the summer of 2020. Another example of abolitionist organizing, this time specifically in my community.

Audio/Visual Resources:

• Change: A World Without Prisons-Ruth Wilson in Conversation with Mariame Kaba: an hour of Ruth Wilson Gilmore talking to Mariame Kaba? I don’t know what to say about this except you really should watch it. Like you really should. These two people made me an abolitionist and any time they do anything together, it’s required viewing.
• The Red Nation Podcast: Hosted by Nick Estes and Sina, the podcast “features discussions on Indigenous history, politics, and culture from a left perspective” and often features talks with prison abolitionists, organizers, and scholars. When diving into prison abolition, it’s important to center that understanding in a politics of #landback and indigenous organizing. Everyone should be following Nick Estes’s work, writing, and content as well as the work of The Red Nation.
• Beyond Prisons: another podcast recommendation! If there is a question about abolition that you haven’t had answered, it is likely that there might have been an episode of Beyond Prisons that could answer your question. They have had a lot of abolitionists that I respect on to talk about their work and organizing, it’s a good way to get a purview of what abolitionist organizing and thought looks like.
• 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.

Listen to Dr. Ruth Wilson Gilmore talk: I don’t know how else to term this section. I talk about it a lot on TikTok, but I personally have learned so much from podcast episodes, teach-ins, lectures, conferences, and the like where I’m listening to Dr. Ruth Wilson Gilmore speak. She just has a way of speaking about both the micro and macro views of abolitionist organizing, always relating it back to organizing happening on the ground, while also forcing your imagination to expand, which really is a central tenet of being an abolitionist. We have never seen justice, but we can make a world without prisons and my favorite way of trying to keep this in perspective is listening to RWG talk about it.

• The Case for Prison Abolition: Ruth Wilson Gilmore on COVID-19, Racial Capitalism, and Decarceration: abolitionist perspective on the current pandemic, really short and to the point
• Geographies of Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore: understanding RWG’s definition of racial capitalism is extremely important and it’s explained in this short video
• Ruth Wilson Gilmore Makes the Case for Abolition (two-part podcast episode series): I will be honest, I listened to this while driving to Houston with my mom in the passenger seat and she might have fallen asleep, but I was locked in. I would recommend this maybe once you’ve familiarized yourself with the earlier links and want a slightly deeper perspective.
• Meanwhile, Making Abolition Geographies: Keynote from Dr. 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. I probably shouldn’t say this because it makes me look really dorky, but… I stood behind RWG at the vending machine and I’ll never forget it.)

Abolition as Disability Justice:

• National Lawyers Guild on Disability Justice and Abolition: a really good breakdown of why if you are a disability justice advocate and believe that liberation lies in an intersectional approach, you must dismantle the carceral state that disproportionately harms disabled people
• Cripping Abolition: The key to a deep understanding of abolition is understanding that the prison industrial complex is more than prisons and policing. Abolition understands that carcerality undergirds every structure we know of. Employing a disability justice perspective of abolition means understanding that social work systems are also carceral and not the “alternative” to policing that they’re portrayed as.

This list is a work in progress. I will be adding more links soon and as people ask for more specific resources, but I just wanted to get the barebones done as soon as possible. Thank you for being patient with me! I will be adding specific categories around the border and reproductive justice as soon as I am able. The best way to contact me with questions is through discord, my tag is #sarahephilips0644 or through Twitter DMs (@sarahephilips).