How to Abolish Prisons: Lessons from the Movement against Imprisonment
by Rachel Herzing and Justin Piché
Foreword by Mariame Kaba
An incisive guide to abolitionist strategy, and a love letter to the movement that made this moment possible.
Critics of abolition sometimes castigate the movement for its utopianism, but in How to Abolish Prisons, long-time organizers Rachel Herzing and Justin Piché reveal a movement that has made the struggle for abolition as real as the institutions they are fighting against.
Drawing on extensive interviews with abolitionist crews all over North America, Herzing and Piché provide a collective reconstruction of what the grassroots movement to abolish prisons actually is, what initiatives it has launched, how it organizes itself, and how its protagonists build the day-to-day practice of politics. Readers sit in on the Winnipeg rideshares of Bar None and the meetings of the Chicago Community Bail Fund as they assess the utility of politicized mutual aid. They follow the campaigns and coalitions of Critical Resistance in Oakland and San Francisco and Survived and Punished in New York City, and learn about the prisoner correspondence projects that keep activists behind bars and outside them in constant coordination.
Abolitionist campaigns are constructing on-the-ground initiatives across North America to deconstruct carceral society and build resistant communities.Through the words, deeds, and personalities of this beautifully peopled movement, How to Abolish Prisons emerges as a stunning snapshot of a movement’s thinking in motion
“The global carceral regime is a genocidal, antiblack, colonial beast that will only be abolished through a proliferation of the creative forms of collaboration and revolt examined in How to Abolish Prisons. Rachel Herzing and Justin Piché offer a gift to anyone who is serious about stoking, deepening, and critically informing their abolitionist commitments and curiosities. I am profoundly grateful for the incitement and seriousness of this book.”
—Dylan Rodríguez, author of the Frantz Fanon Award-winning White Reconstruction: Domestica Warfare and the Logics of Genocide
"How to Abolish Prisons is filled with discerning analyses and reflections from leading organizers and intellectuals of the prison abolition movement in Canada and the United States. Offering crucial examples of strategy and tactics, unpacking thorny issues of reformism, capacity, and tension, and asking instructive questions about solidarity, scale, victory, and defeat, Rachel Herzing and Justin Piché provide urgent insights into the rigorous praxis, principled political education, and radical vision that constitute the unfinished struggle for abolition."
—Judah Schept, author of Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia
“How to Abolish Prisons is a needed text by and for movement organizers. This book skillfully embodies the abolitionist spirit of imagination, practice making different, and generating wisdom through collective victories and challenges. By focusing on both why and how prison abolitionists fight, this book offers a treasury of gems on abolition as a practical politics of refusal, revolution, and relationality.”
—Harsha Walia, author of Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism
Book & Study Guide from Haymarket Books
