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Reading List June 19, 2020

Abolition Isn’t Only About Police

We also need to abolish prisons—as well as put an end to counterterrorism. An abolitionist reading list. 

As Minneapolis agrees to disband its police force and Denver votes unanimously to remove police from its public schools, police abolition has entered the public consciousness with full force and considerable support.

Today’s reading list looks at the current state of policing, with classic archival essays including Daniel Geary’s send-down of the Kerner Report and Derecka Purnell’s passionate explainer What Does Police Abolition Mean? They are joined by some of the eight new essays we published this week alone on the 2020 uprisings, including law professor Jocelyn Simonson’s argument for why police reforms will fail, and Gili Kliger’s review of a new book that interrogates Chicago’s decades-long history of police torture.

But our writers recognize that police abolition can’t occur in a vacuum, with Atiya Husain arguing that we must also demand an end to counterterrorism, and other writers explaining why mass incarceration must be abolished too. As Garrett Felber writes in his new, viral essay: “Without police, there would be no one to fill prisons and jails. Without prison and jails, the police could not serve their current purpose. Put most simply, the two are locked in a mutually dependent relationship: to serve capital, and protect themselves.”

Sarah A. Seo

Before the mass adoption of the car, most communities barely had a police force and citizens shared responsibility for enforcing laws. Then the car changed everything.

Jocelyn Simonson
Reform efforts will fail. Only a power shift to communities can improve public safety.
Atiya Husain
At a moment when the call to abolish police and prisons is louder than ever, we should also demand an end to counterterrorism, which functions largely to ensnare people of color.
Gili Kliger
Police brutality is not isolated and exceptional. As Chicago’s decades-long history of police torture illustrates, it is built into the systemic nature of racial violence.
Garrett Felber
Prison and police abolition were key to the thinking of many midcentury civil rights activists. Understanding why can help us ask for change in our own time.
Derecka Purnell
Abolition is not about transforming the police, it is about transforming the nation.
Daniel Geary

Bad police were not simply a symptom of racism. They were often its agents.

Dan Berger
Jalil Muntaqim, a Black Panther imprisoned since 1971, is one of thousands of elderly prisoners the United States has refused to free during the pandemic.

Our weekly themed Reading Lists compile the best of Boston Review’s archive. Previews are delivered to members every Sunday. Become a member to receive them ahead of the crowd.

In the wake of the 2020 uprisings in the United States following the murder of George Floyd, demands for democratic power over policing—including police and prison abolition—have entered public consciousness with full force and considerable support. Alongside select archival essays, this special project imagines what a just future for policing looks like and how to get there, featuring activists, lawyers and legal scholars, historians, social scientists, and more.

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