 Material from May 2020 | |
| Formation | May 2020 |
|---|---|
| Purpose | Police and prison abolition |
| Website | 8toabolition |
8 to Abolition is a police and prison abolition resource created during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 following the murder of George Floyd. [1] [2] [3]
8 to Abolition was created in response to the 8 Can't Wait campaign created by Campaign Zero. [4] [5] [6] The co-authors are Mon Mohapatra, Leila Raven, Nnennaya Amuchie, Reina Sultan, K Agbebiyi , Sarah T. Hamid, Micah Herskind, Derecka Purnell, Eli Dru, and Rachel Kuo. [1]
8 to Abolition states that they believe the 8 Can't Wait campaign is "dangerous and irresponsible, offering a slate of reforms that have already been tried and failed, that mislead a public newly invigorated to the possibilities of police and prison abolition, and that do not reflect the needs of criminalized communities." [1] [7]
The eight points of 8 to Abolition are as follows: [1] [8]
Sing Sing Correctional Facility, formerly Ossining Correctional Facility, is a maximum-security prison operated by the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision in the village of Ossining, New York. It is about 30 miles (48 km) north of New York City on the east bank of the Hudson River. It holds about 1,700 inmates and housed the execution chamber for the State of New York until the abolition of capital punishment in New York in 1977.
John Richard Kasich Jr. is an American politician and author who was the 69th governor of Ohio from 2011 to 2019, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1983 to 2001, and a Republican candidate for the presidential nomination in 2000 and 2016.
The prison abolition movement is a network of groups and activists that seek to reduce or eliminate prisons and the prison system, and replace them with systems of rehabilitation and education that do not focus on punishment and government institutionalization. The prison abolitionist movement is distinct from conventional prison reform, which is intended to improve conditions inside prisons.
Campus police or university police in the United States and Canada are sworn police or peace officers employed by a college or university to protect the private or public property of the campus and surrounding areas and the people who live, work, and visit it. In instances where they are not technically police officers, they are often known as campus safety or campus security.
The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights is a non-profit strategy and action center based in Oakland, California. The stated aim of the center is to work for justice, opportunity and peace in urban America. It is named for Ella Baker, a twentieth-century activist and civil rights leader originally from Virginia and North Carolina.
California Proposition 6, also known as the Safe Neighborhoods Act and The Runner Initiative, is a statutory initiative that appeared on the November 2008 ballot in California. This proposition was rejected by voters on November 4 of that year.
Bradford S. Lander is an American politician, urban planner, and community organizer who currently serves as the New York City Comptroller. A member of the Democratic Party, Lander is a progressive politician, and has been described as "one of the most left-leaning politicians in the city."
Criminal justice reform seeks to address structural issues in criminal justice systems such as racial profiling, police brutality, overcriminalization, mass incarceration, and recidivism. Reforms can take place at any point where the criminal justice system intervenes in citizens’ lives, including lawmaking, policing, sentencing and incarceration. Criminal justice reform can also address the collateral consequences of conviction, including disenfranchisement or lack of access to housing or employment, that may restrict the rights of individuals with criminal records.
Campaign Zero is an American police reform campaign launched on August 21, 2015. The plan consists of ten proposals, all of which are aimed at reducing police violence. The campaign's planning team includes Brittany Packnett, Samuel Sinyangwe, DeRay Mckesson, and Johnetta Elzie. The activists who produced the proposals did so in response to critics who asked them to make specific policy proposals. Subsequent critics of Campaign Zero and of their 8 Can't Wait project point out that some of the policies it recommends are already in place as best practice policies at many police departments. Some of these include the Milwaukee policing survey and the PRIDE act. However, a 2016 study by Campaign Zero found that only three of the eight policy recommendations were adopted by the average police department and that no law enforcement agency had adopted all eight.
Linda Sarsour is an American political activist. She was co-chair of the 2017 Women's March, the 2017 Day Without a Woman, and the 2019 Women's March. She is also a former executive director of the Arab American Association of New York. She and her Women's March co-chairs were profiled in Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People" in 2017.
Criminal justice reform seeks to address structural issues in criminal justice systems such as racial profiling, police brutality, overcriminalization, mass incarceration, and recidivism. Criminal justice reform can take place at any point where the criminal justice system intervenes in citizens’ lives, including lawmaking, policing, and sentencing.
Jacob Lawrence Frey is an American politician and attorney who has served as the mayor of Minneapolis, Minnesota since 2018. A member of the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party, he served on the Minneapolis City Council from 2014 to 2018.
Carceral feminism is a critical term for types of feminism that advocate for enhancing and increasing prison sentences that deal with feminist and gender issues. The term criticises the belief that harsher and longer prison sentences will help work towards solving these issues. The phrase "carceral feminism" was coined by Elizabeth Bernstein, a feminist sociologist, in her 2007 article, "The Sexual Politics of the 'New Abolitionism'". Examining the contemporary anti-trafficking movement in the United States, Bernstein introduced the term to describe a type of feminist activism which casts all forms of sexual labor as sex trafficking. She sees this as a retrograde step, suggesting it erodes the rights of women in the sex industry, and takes the focus off other important feminist issues, and expands the neoliberal agenda.
The police abolition movement is a political movement, mostly active in the United States, that advocates replacing policing with other systems of public safety. Police abolitionists believe that policing, as a system, is inherently flawed and cannot be reformed—a view that rejects the ideology of police reformists. While reformists seek to address the ways in which policing occurs, abolitionists seek to transform policing altogether through a process of disbanding, disempowering, and disarming the police. Abolitionists argue that the institution of policing is deeply rooted in a history of white supremacy and settler colonialism and that it is inseparable from a pre-existing racial capitalist order, and thus believe a reformist approach to policing will always fail.
In the United States, "defund the police" is a slogan that supports removing funds from police departments and reallocating them to non-policing forms of public safety and community support, such as social services, youth services, housing, education, healthcare and other community resources. Activists who use the phrase may do so with varying intentions; some seek modest reductions, while others argue for full divestment as a step toward the abolition of contemporary police services. Activists who support the defunding of police departments often argue that investing in community programs could provide a better crime deterrent for communities; funds would go toward addressing social issues, like poverty, homelessness, and mental disorders. Police abolitionists call for replacing existing police forces with other systems of public safety, like housing, employment, community health, education, and other programs.
Sandy Hudson is a Jamaican-Canadian political activist, writer from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She is the co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement presence in Canada.
Derecka Purnell is an American lawyer, writer, and organizer. She is best known for her 2021 memoir Becoming Abolitionists, which received positive reviews from Boston Review, PEN America, Kirkus, The Guardian, and others.
The police abolition movement gained momentum in the U.S. city of Minneapolis during protests of the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and culminated in the failed Question 2 ballot measure in 2021 to replace the city's police department with a public safety department. The measure would have removed minimum staffing levels for sworn officers, renamed the Minneapolis Police Department as the Minneapolis Department of Public Safety, and shifted oversight of the new agency from the mayor's office to the city council. It required the support of 51 percent of voters in order to pass. In the Minneapolis municipal election held on November 2, 2021, the measure failed with 43.8 percent voting for it and 56.2 percent voting against it.
JusticeLA is a coalition of organizations and individuals committed to stopping the expansion and growth of the Los Angeles County Jail system and replacing that system with an infrastructure of community-based care and treatment. L.A. County has the largest jail system in the world.
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