How should abolitionists respond to the coronavirus pandemic?

How can we achieve urgently needed decarceration for the millions of people caged in jails, prisons, and immigration detention centers?

Abolitionism doesn’t just say no to police, prisons, border control, and the current punishment system. It requires persistent organizing for what we need, organizing that’s already present in the efforts people cobble together to achieve access to schools, health care and housing, art and meaningful work, and freedom from violence and want.

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Haymarket Books is an independent, radical, non-profit publisher. Every dollar we take in from book sales and donations goes directly to support our project of publishing books for changing the world—a project has never been more necessary or more urgent. We need your help to continue to do the work. While all of our events are freely available, we ask that those who are able make a solidarity donation in support of our continuing to do this work.

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Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at CUNY Graduate Center. A co-founder of California Prison Moratorium Project and Critical Resistance, she is author of the prize-winning book Golden Gulag: Prison, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Her forthcoming Haymarket Books title, Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition, is the inaugural book in the new Abolitionist Papers book series, edited by Naomi Murakawa.

Naomi Murakawa is an associate professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She studies the reproduction of racial inequality in 20th and 21st century American politics, with specialization in crime policy and the carceral state. She is the author of The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America.

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For more, check out our reading list of Haymarket Books Against Mass Incarceration.



