I’ve got a new piece up at Defector today pushing back on Rachel Barkow’s critique of PIC abolition. Please take a moment and read it!
Funnily enough, this piece started as a more personal reflection intended for Substack. Unlike many other critiques of abolition, Prof. Barkow’s article reflects deep engagement with abolitionist scholarship and asks a few genuinely generative questions. So, I’d initially structured the essay as a combined counter-argument and account of why I started identifying as an abolitionist in the first place. The short answer: I’m an abolitionist because I think it is the most pragmatic and effective political framework to undermine the power of cops and corrections officers. This undermining is what will eliminate e.g. police violence (just one of many repulsive symptoms of criminalization, and one that’s on everyone’s mind this week).
I spent a long time with this, and it became a lot stronger during the editing process. Big thanks to Tom Ley and Laura Wagner for helping to sculpt my marble block of words – and thanks to anyone who reads it! I’d love to hear your thoughts, please feel free to leave a comment on Defector / on this post / on Twitter, etc. I have some unused pieces of writing from this process that might still make their way to Substack, so if it seems people are interested, they’ll be more likely to see the light of day.