Prisons don’t work. The evidence is overwhelming. Imprisonment doesn’t make communities safer. It doesn’t rehabilitate people. It doesn’t deter crime. It breaks people and their families, strips them of housing and employment prospects, returns them to the world with fewer resources than they entered with, and concentrates them in the communities already facing the most severe economic deprivation.
Everyone knows this. The system keeps doing it anyway.
Mariame Kaba isn’t asking for better prisons. She’s asking: if the prison doesn’t work, what do we build instead?
Abolition as a positive project
The word abolition stops people. It sounds like destruction — like removing something without replacing it. Kaba’s argument, developed across decades of organizing in Chicago and nationally, is the opposite: abolition is a project of construction, not demolition. The question is not how to get rid of prisons. The question is what you have to build in order to make prisons unnecessary.
The answer requires tracing what prisons actually do. What social functions does imprisonment serve? It removes people from communities, temporarily or permanently. It punishes harm. It incapacitates people who are considered dangerous. It signals to the community that certain behaviors have consequences. It provides a response to victims who want to see something happen.
Each of these functions, Kaba argues, could be served differently — and in many cases is served better differently. The removal of dangerous people doesn’t require a cage; in societies with adequate mental health infrastructure, many of the people who end up in cages would have received treatment instead. The punishment function is contested: whether punishment prevents harm is empirically unclear, and the punishments actually administered bear no consistent relationship to the harm caused. Incapacitation has effects measured in decades but the situations that produce violence are measured in years — by the time the incapacitated person returns, everything has changed.
The present tense of abolition
The abolitionist tradition Kaba draws on is long. The original abolitionists were demanding the elimination of an institution — chattel slavery — that had existed for centuries and that society claimed was economically necessary and socially stabilizing. The argument that slavery could not simply be abolished — that you had to have something to replace it, that the economy would collapse, that freed people would starve, that society would become unmanageable — was made by people who benefited from slavery, and it was wrong.
The same structure of argument is now made about prisons. We can’t simply abolish them — what would we do with dangerous people, how would we address harm, how would society function? Kaba’s response: these are real questions, and abolition requires building answers to them, not just declaring prisons bad. The point is not to open all the doors tomorrow. It is to stop building new cages and start building the institutions that make cages unnecessary.
What are those institutions? Mental health infrastructure. Housing. Employment. Restorative justice processes. Transformative justice processes that address the actual relationships within which harm occurs — that bring the person who caused harm and the person who was harmed into contact with a community that can hold both of them accountable without removing either of them from the community. Community-based conflict resolution. Domestic violence infrastructure that doesn’t require calling the police — which in many cases escalates rather than resolves the situation. Drug treatment that treats addiction as a health issue rather than a moral failure.
None of these are alternatives to dealing with harm. They are better ways of dealing with harm — better in the sense of actually reducing it, rather than warehousing it.
What happened in Chicago
Kaba’s work in Chicago produced specific examples. The Girls’ Court was an intervention in the juvenile justice system that diverted girls away from incarceration and toward community-based support — addressing the specific circumstances (sexual abuse, domestic violence, family instability) that drove girls into the system in the first place. The results were demonstrable: lower recidivism, better life outcomes, lower cost.
Project NIA, the organization Kaba co-founded, developed community-based restorative justice processes that brought together people who had caused harm, people who had experienced harm, and community members — creating structured dialogue in which the harm was named, responsibility was accepted, and a plan for repair was developed. The processes are slower than prosecution, more demanding of everyone involved, and more likely to produce outcomes that actually reduce future harm.
The point is not that these are perfect or that they work in every situation. The point is that they exist, that they’ve been tried, that the evidence supports them, and that they require a different theory of what the response to harm is supposed to accomplish.
Monday morning
The title of Kaba’s most important book is We Do This ‘Til We Free Us. The ‘til is the critical word. Abolition is not a destination you reach by argument. It is a direction you move in, by building. Every time you build the institution that makes the cage less necessary — every mental health crisis team, every restorative justice process, every community land trust that removes the housing precarity that drives people into desperate situations — you have moved in the direction of abolition.
This connects directly to the book’s larger argument. The commons is not what we build after the revolution. The commons is what we build now, with the people we have, in the conditions we’re actually in. Abolition is not the removal of prisons. It is the construction of the world in which prisons are no longer necessary. Those two things are the same project.
What do we do on Monday? We build.