Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-2019

Abstract

For decades, police in Chicago chained people in their custody to the wall in dark, windowless rooms and subjected their captives to beatings, electric shocks, anal rape, and racial abuse. In July 2016, members of the #LetUsBreathe Collective, created in the aftermath of numerous police killings in Chicago and elsewhere, occupied vacant lots adjacent to the Chicago Police Department’s Homan Square facility — one of the locations where such abuse occurred. The Collective sought justice, not through recourse to the criminal courts or civil litigation, but instead by reconceptualizing justice in connection with efforts to end reliance on imprisonment and policing. The organizers redesignated Homan Square — which shares a name with the Chicago slumlord Samuel Homan — “Freedom Square.” The organizers’ idea was to begin to realize on a small scale what the scholar and activist Professor Angela Davis, echoing the words of W.E.B. Du Bois, has called “abolition democracy.”

Organizers in Freedom Square and across the city amplified the penal-abolitionist platforms of the Movement for Black Lives and Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100), demanding that the state divest from policing and imprisonment and invest in new forms of more equitable and just coexistence. Freedom Square was to be an experiment in which participants would “imagine a world without police,” a world where the 1.4 billion–dollar Chicago police budget would be directed away from detaining human beings and toward a democratic revitalization of public education, employment, restorative justice, mental health, housing, addiction treatment, arts, and nutrition. Before they disbanded, those engaged in the Freedom Square experiment provided meals to hundreds of people each day and offered educational workshops, clothing, books, and play spaces for neighborhood children.

Similar efforts took shape beyond Chicago, from New York City, where organizers launched a protest called “Abolition Square” that same summer, to Los Angeles, where Black Lives Matter activists occupied an area near police headquarters and issued calls to “decolonize City Hall.” Across the country, contemporary movements against the violence of policing have taken up the cause of penal abolition, denouncing caging and minutely controlling human beings while re-envisioning democracy in genuinely liberatory terms. Through these abolitionist efforts — from those of organizers in Chicago confronting the decades of torture perpetrated by police, to those of people struggling together to address the aftermath of sexual assault and homicide, to those of community members organizing to ensure greater economic well-being and security — a new conception of justice has begun to emerge.

Justice in abolitionist terms involves at once exposing the violence, hypocrisy, and dissembling entrenched in existing legal practices, while attempting to achieve peace, make amends, and distribute resources more equitably. Justice for abolitionists is an integrated endeavor to prevent harm, intervene in harm, obtain reparations, and transform the conditions in which we live. This conception of justice works, for example, to eliminate the criminalization of poverty and survival while addressing the criminality of a global social order in which the eight wealthiest men own “the same amount of wealth as” fifty percent of all people on earth. To approach justice in these terms requires what Professor Lisa Guenther, an abolitionist philosopher, describes as “collective resistance and revolution at the scene of ‘crime’ itself.” Such resistance begins by unmasking the illegitimacy of much of what is subject to criminalization — for instance, the prosecution of immigration offenses, which compose at present more than half of the U.S. federal criminal docket. Resistance at the scene of crime itself also entails working to eliminate existing punitive institutions while identifying meaningful forms of accountability and prevention to respond to actual violence and wrongdoing. Finally, such resistance involves addressing how mainstream economic practices and arrangements perpetrate violent theft every day in ways that can be thoroughly redressed only by democratizing political and economic institutions so as to prevent and respond to the highly unequal distribution of resources and life chances.

Publication Citation

Harvard Law Review, Vol. 132, Issue 6, Pp. 1613-1649.

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