"Emergent strategy suggests that we must work hard at getting abolitionist practice functional at a small scale so that large-scale abolition and transformative justice are more visible, rootable, possible."
"These teachers brought me to transformative justice, the work of addressing harm at the root, outside the mechanisms of the state, so that we can grow into right relationship with each other."
"We need to flood the entire system with life-affirming principles and practices, to clear the channels between us of the toxicity of supremacy, to heal from the harms of a legacy of devaluing some lives and needs in order to indulge others."
"As Maurice Moe Mitchell said, we have to have a low bar for entry and a high bar for conduct."
"In the longest term vision I can see, when we, made of the same miraculous material and temporary limitations as the system we are born into, inevitably disagree, or cause harm, we will respond not with rejection, exile, or public shaming, but with clear naming of harm; education around intention, impact, and pattern breaking; satisfying apologies and consequences; new agreements and trustworthy boundaries; and lifelong healing resources for all involved."
"Where winning is measured not just by the absence of patterns of harm, distrust, and isolation, but by the presence of healing and healthy interdependence."
"... I feel so much possibility on the horizon around how we get good at conflict and turn and face the harm and abuse rampant in our movement communities, learn to be in the complex work of abolition and survival, and actually transform the systems that hurt us into systems that hold us and allow us to heal."
"In a nutshell, principled struggle is when we are struggling for the sake of something larger than ourselves and are honest and direct with each other while holding compassion."
"Contradictions can be handled by widening our perspective, acknowledging that these oppositional truths co-exist."
"I think everyone chooses each day to move towards life or away from it, though some don't realize that they are making the choice. Capitalism makes it hard to see your own direction."
"I want us to let go of the narrowness of innocence, widen our understanding of how harm moves through us. I want us to see individual acts of harm as symptoms of systemic harm, and to do what we can do collectively to dismantle the systems and get as many of us free as possible."
"Not already beyond harm, but accountable for doing our individua land internal work to end harm and engage in generative conflict, which includes actively working to gain awareness of the ways we can and have harmed each other, where we have significant political differences, and where we can end cycles of harm and unprincipled struggle in ourselves and our communities."
"How do I hold a systemic analysis and approach when each system I am critical of is peopled, in part, by the same flawed and complex individuals that I love?"
"Demonizing is more efficient than relinquishing our world views, which is why we have slavery, holocausts, lynchings, and witch trials in our short human history. 'Why?' can be an evolutionary question."
"What I want to know is: What can this teach me/us about ho to improve our humanity?"
"What will learn to set and hold boundaries, communicate without manipulation, give and receive consent, ask for help, love our shadows without letting them rule our relationships, and remember we are of earth, of miracle, of a whole, of a massive river - love, life, life, love."
"We may not have time, or emotional capacity, to walk each path together. We are all flailing in the unknown at the moment, terrified, stretched beyond ourselves, ashamed, realizing the future is in our hands. We must all do our work. Be accountable and go heal, simultaneously, continuously. It's never too late."
"But, when we are able to discern between what our triggered bodies say and what our grounded bodies do, we can build the kinds of systems and practices we need to align our leadership and our movements."
"Everyone has worked this earth as we have walked it. While all harms are not equal, even the most heinous require a way home."
"Black people comprise 13 percent of the US population but roughly 30 percent of the arrested, 35 percent of the imprisoned, 42 percent of those on death row, and 56 percent of those serving life sentences."
"Refusal: because we cannot collaborate with the prison-industrial complex, as 'only evil will collaborate with evil' (June Jordan). Care: because 'care is the antidote to violence' (Saidiya Hartman). Collectivity: because 'everything worthwhile is done with others' (Moussa Kaba)."
"PIC abolition is a vision of a restructured society in a world where we have everything we need: food, shelter, education, health, art, beauty, clean water, and more things that are foundational to our personal and community safety."
"PIC abolition is a positive project that focuses, in part, on building a society where it is possible to address harm without relying on structural forms of oppression or the violent systems that increase it."
"Moreover, crime and harm are not synonymous. All that is criminalized isn't harmful, and all harm isn't necessarily criminalized."
"First, when we set about trying to transform society, we must remember that we ourselves will also need to transform."
"Second, we must imagine and experiment with new collective structures that enable us to take more principled action, such as embracing collective responsibility to resolve conflicts."
"Third, we must simultaneously engage in strategies that reduce contact between people and the criminal legal system."
"Fourth, as scholar and activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore notes, building a different world requires that we not only change how we address harm but also that we change everything."
"Let's begin our abolitionist journey not with the question 'What do we have now, and how can we make it better?' Instead, let's ask 'What can we imagine for ourselves and the world?'"
"We need to change our demands. The surest way of reducing police violence is to reduce the power of the police, by cutting budgets and the number of officers."
"We live in a society that has been locked into a false sense of inevitability."
"If I'm making my stand in the world and that benefits my particular community of people, the people I designate as my community, and I see them benefiting by my labor, I feel good about that. That actually is enough for me."
"I don't believe in self-care: I believe in collective care, collectivizing our care, and thinking more about how we can help each other."
"I don't see the world the way that people do here. I don't agree with it; I think capitalism is actually continuously alienating us from each other, but also even from ourselves, and I just don't subscribe."
"Even when the system ensnares a non-Black person, the prion-industrial complex remains a structurally anti-Black apparatus, firmly rooted in the United States' ongoing reliance on the financial exploitation and social control of Black people."
"The reparations framework outlines five elements - repair, restoration, acknowledgment, cessation, and non-repetition."
"Abolition, for me, is a long-term project and a practice around creating the conditions that would allow for the dismantling of prisons, policing, and surveillance and the creation of new institutions that actually work to keep us safe and are not fundamentally oppressive."
"I hope to illuminate the terror of the mundane and quotidian rather than exploit the shocking spectacle."
"We must accept that the ordinary is fair for an extreme to be the problem."
"Sadly, their circulation seems to demonstrate, as Frank Wilderson puts it, that 'taxonomy can itemize atrocities but cannot bear witness to suffering.'"
"Once things are actualized into the world and exist, you can't imagine how the world functioned before it. It's like we develop amnesia."
"How are you going to make life livable for people living in unlivable circumstances?"
"You can have security without relationships but you cannot have safety - actual safety - without healthy relationships."
"Part of what this necessitates is that we have to work with members of our communities to make violence unacceptable."
"In the ed, a practice of abolitionist care underscores that our fates are intertwined and our liberation is interconnected."
"Let's be clear though: advocating for someone's imprisonment is not abolitionist. Mistaking emotional satisfaction for justice is also not abolitionist."
"The criminal legal system, for example, focuses on punishing or disempowering individual 'offenders' who have done harm. PIC abolitionists, however, consider the larger social, economic, and political context in which the harm occurs."
"The fact that sexual violence is so incredibly pervasive should tell us that it's not a story of individual monsters. We have got to think about this in a more complex way if we're really going to uproot forms of sexual violence."
"Transformative justice takes as a starting point the idea that what happens in our interpersonal relationships is mirrored and reinforced by the larger system."
"It's so complicated. Sometimes our feelings aren't actually aligned with our values."
"In part that's why we're supposed to have a community that can hold when these things are happening so that our feelings don't end up governing how we're going to live in the world - for everybody, how all of us are going to be governed together."
"'Vengeance is a lazy form of grief.'"
"Because we need time and space to grieve when hard things happen, when bad things happen to us."
"And so it was that my community held EV in her humanity while seeking to hold her accountable for her actions."
"And also, boundaries are usually a negotiation between what you want and what other people want. It's not like a firm, set thing. You have to get really good at being able to negotiate. And the only way to do that is to know who you are."
"Everything that is worthwhile is done with other people."
"I believe that when we are in relationship with each other, we influence each other. What matters to me, as the unit of interest, is relationships."
"Angela Davis says this perfectly, she's like knowledge is built through struggle. It isn't just built through somebody theorizing an idea. But through struggle, together, we come up with new concepts and ideas: that's the best thinking."
"Ella Baker's question, 'Who are your people?' when she would meet you is so important. Who are you accountable to in this world? Because that will tell me a lot about who you are."
"Mary Hooks has that right - that you have to be willing to be transformed in the service of the work and the struggle."
