The Antidote to Criminalization is Abolition

When acronyms abound in your workplace jargon, you notice their absence. It stands out in reading No More Police, Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie’s late tome, that they seldom categorize groups of people under broad umbrellas, avoiding now commonplace shorthands like BIPOC. They name those to whom they refer as the target of structural harm: trans and nonbinary people, Black people, Indigenous people, Brown people, people who use drugs, immigrants, refugees, and asylees, people who engage in sex work, people with disabilities, and, indeed, people experiencing homelessness (one hesitates to conclude a sequence like this with etc.) It takes time and space, and the reader notices how the authors’ choice signals care for those they describe. But the writers know it is untenable to include a long list every time, so they do occasionally opt for the term criminalized people.

Students of Kaba and Ritchie continue unsurprised by the descriptor since one of their most recognized projects is Interrupting Criminalization. The word does something similar to terms like oppression or marginalization but more precisely names the carceral state as the enforcer of imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy (I borrow again from bell hooks). It means what it sounds like: demarcating something a crime, someone a criminal. In reference to homelessness, criminalization describes laws that prohibit everything that must exist in public when one has no shelter, such as sleeping and eating, which functionally positions people who are homeless as criminals themselves. Read from Clarissa Rojas and Nadine Naber:

“Criminalization is the process whereby “US” empire’s white supremacy, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy converge to turn people’s everyday living (e.g., cultural practices, ways of being, and surviving in the world) into a crime. What gets called a crime and who gets framed as a criminal is a function of racial and heteropatriarchal colonial strategies to surveil, police, and confine Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian people, cultures, and resistance.” (Abolition Feminisms, p. 50).

As they suggest, criminalization includes but transcends the legal code: it addresses the web of supremacist belief systems harbored by individuals, to be sure, but more acutely felt in their entanglement in our cultural norms and institutions. These beliefs delineate who deserves wellbeing and prosperity and to whom belong anguish and labor. It tells us who is disposable, whom to remove from society in service of elite power. And people without homes top the list of the undeserving poor both because their utility under capitalism is deemed underproductive and because homelessness itself represents the product of other interlocking systems of oppression, each rooting their origins in colonization and slavery. Abolitionist leaders, Kaba and Ritchie know this: in their text on policing, homelessness shows up on nearly every page.

Photo from the National Homelessness Law Center via LinkedIn

Individuals comprising the movement to end homelessness in the United States are speaking of criminalization now more than in any other moment of my tenure in this work because on June 28th, the Supreme Court effectively codified the disposability of unhoused people. To be sure, in an alternative reality in which Gloria Johnson and the other plaintiffs had won their suit - which would mean the Supreme Court considered fining, ticketing, and arresting people for sleeping in public despite an absence of shelter beds to be cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the 8th Amendment - municipalities would have continued to criminalize people without homes. Carcerality simply contorts to endure. But the decision remains demoralizing all the same. Like my comrades in the sector, I write this with grief lodged in my throat. We are wounded.

Within hours of the Supreme Court’s decision, I’d read a dozen statements from national organizations decrying its cruelty. Despite some public-opinion polling discouraging us from using the word (an unfamiliar term to the layperson that inadvertently associates homelessness with crime), most of these statements mourned criminalization and the bigotry its legal manifestations represent (though too few named racism in particular). Like other students of abolition, I imagine, these statements read like jokes that stop before the punchline. To speak of criminalization without naming the prison industrial complex (PIC) or carceral state, much less the strategy by which we dismantle it, feels like writing a biography without a central character. Moreover, the sentiments smack of appropriation, deploying a concept abolitionist activists have tended with intention, study, and lived experience without crediting their analysis. We’re pretending to rally together in the face of a hurricane at the expense of the only lifecraft that will ferry us to safety. If criminalization is the venom, abolition is the antidote.

In response to another abolition-related piece, a family member recently expressed their disagreement with “abolitionist” as an identity. Notwithstanding whether they concur with the policy positions associated with PIC abolition, they took issue with identifying with a deconstructive concept. Indeed, abolition stems from the Latin abolere, meaning to "destroy, efface, annihilate.” This criticism makes sense to me. I feel similarly about the term atheist as an identity: better to identify with a constructive vision rather than against something you criticize. But I defend the term for several reasons, chiefly because I perceive PIC abolition as a continuation of the movement to abolish chattel slavery in the United States. This movement necessarily endured after the 13th Amendment because slavery only mutated to fit the evolution of capitalism, which is how colonization became more palatable as the economy itself. I wonder if, in the mid-19th century, slavery abolitionists received similar critique: “why do you identify with such a negative idea? Why so divisive? What’s your alternative?” Twenty-first-century retrospect regards this sentiment as absurd: we would abolish slavery regardless of any adverse consequences to economics or alternative schema for mass agricultural production. Because I consider the prison industrial complex and every manifestation of carcerality to be enslavement masquerading as safety, I have no qualms identifying with its destruction.

While the term connotes a negation, the same people who identify as abolitionists are also the most creative people I know. Another Kaba project, One Million Experiments collects hundreds of ways of cultivating genuine safety and preventing and reducing harm by meeting people’s needs outside of carceral and capitalist structures. Activists of her ilk include not just legal-system experts but also artists and storytellers who dream up fictions that might serve as north stars. Abolitionists don’t mind burning cop cars, but they spend most of their time imagining a more loving world.

Perhaps surprisingly, when we speak of imagination, here I have compassion for the mayors and other elected officials who struggle with a perceived dearth of options. I trust my own mayor, for example, as much as any politician, anyway. As homelessness rises in Nashville as everywhere else, he knows sweeping encampments does nothing positive, but building sufficient affordable housing seems too gargantuan or at least too slow. He and certainly less empathetic mayors nationwide reach for an arsenal of torture devices mislabeled a toolbox.

Capitalism exacts a crisis of imagination. The ethics of domination and exploitation inherent to this system are so enmeshed in our minds and bodies that we can scarcely speculate on the characteristics of a society where everyone’s needs were met no matter what. In a recent meeting processing the implications of the SCOTUS case, for example, a well-meaning colleague suggested we focus our energy on training police departments on trauma-informed care, addiction, and homelessness 101. Might we also imagine educating slaveholders on slavery 101? The hydra of human domination has deluded us into believing we have only the weapons of oppression to resist the oppressor. And indeed, as Joerg Rieger pointed out to me in Solidarity Circles, it is easier for most to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

Debates about PIC abolition repeat themselves. In response to the critique that it’s just unrealistic, a naive and utopian waste of time, the boilerplate retort argues that it is unrealistic to believe that anything other than the removal of oppressive systems will end oppression. I don’t pretend to know what’s realistic. As I have written elsewhere, hope for a future without violence and exploitation does not fuel my dedication to the movement; love does. But I practice hope in this moment. As we grieve and heal in the days and weeks to come, I hope we find ourselves galvanized. I hope we identify a shared path forward. Along the way, I hope we treat each other with more respect and gentleness than ever. I hope we step away to tend to our injuries as they inevitably plague us, but that we then return. I don’t really care if the movement embraces abolition as its theory of change so long as we cultivate ways of being that embody something closer to the beloved community. At that point, we may notice criminalization withered en route.

Soon after I heard the news about Grants Pass, I hurried my children to the stablest place I know: the woods. We planlessly followed a shallow creek upstream, noticing minnows and tadpoles as they fled our toes. My kids found themselves in an imaginary game that animated rocks as characters as my mind wandered. We forgot the misery of 95 degrees. As we painted our stomachs in mud, time stretched and collapsed. I remembered that nature is not something apart from humanity; rather, I am a creature same as the crawdads. That which is me is that which is you and everything else. And while suffering abounds, our collective body will heal.

The Antidote to Criminalization is Abolition

Read more about abolition:

Death by Dissolution (A Poem)

The Delight and the Danger of Bothness: Embracing Contradictions in Nonprofit DEI Work