Abolition for the People

Your #AbolitionForThePeople Resource Guide

A toolkit for the path forward

Here’s a non-exhaustive resource guide packed with articles, books, art, interviews, organizations, and campaigns that can provide you with further opportunities to extend your understanding of abolition and contribute to the movement for a future without policing and prisons. Abolition now. Abolition for the people.

Week 1: Police and Policing

Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color (2017) by Andrea Ritchie

States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (2002) Edited by Joy James

Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (2003) by Sally E. Hadden

Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (2016) by Jordan T. Camp

Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (2008) Douglas A. Blackmon

MIGRA! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (2010) by Kelly Lytle Hernandez

Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (2015) by Simone Browne

Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (2019) by Stuart Schrader

Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces (2014) by Radley Balko

“How Police Unions Enable and Conceal Abuses of Power” (2020) by Steven Greenhouse

“Community Compilation on Police Abolition” (2016) by Sarah-Ji and Monica Trinidad

Hacking/Hustling Collective

Week 2: Prisons and Carcerality

Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation (2012) by Beth E. Ritchie

Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (2011) by Eric Stanley and Nat Smith

The New Abolitionists: (Neo)Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings (2005) edited by Joy James