Introduction
You live in a world defined by systemic state violence, mass incarceration, and pervasive global capitalism. When you look at recurring police murders and overcrowded prisons, you often see isolated incidents rather than interconnected crises.
The central idea is that freedom is an ongoing collective struggle rather than an individual achievement. You must recognize that local uprisings and international movements share the same root causes.
The book proceeds through four distinct parts. You will examine the pitfalls of capitalist individualism, the power of intersectional solidarity, the necessity of mass movements against state violence, and the radical legacies of abolitionist futures.
- How do historical freedom movements inform current struggles?
- Why must you connect local anti-racism with global liberation?
- What does it take to abolish the carceral state entirely?
1. Progressive Struggles and Capitalist Individualism
Progressive struggles against systemic issues like racism and poverty are doomed to fail unless they actively resist the pervasive ideology of capitalist individualism. Global capitalism and neoliberalism promote individualism. This worldview historically manifests in media attempts to sanitize and isolate historic figures like Nelson Mandela or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from the collective mass movements that actually drove change. Resisting this depiction allows you to recognize your agency as part of an expanding community of struggle rather than waiting for heroic individuals.
Resisting Capitalist Individualism
The media presents history through single leaders. You must reject this framing. Mass actions create real transformations.
The Prison-Industrial Complex
Private security corporations profit from state repression, racism, and technologies of punishment on a global scale through the expanding prison-industrial complex. G4S has insinuated itself into prisons, border walls, and security apparatuses globally. Operating as a massive multinational employer, it derives profit from political incarceration in Palestine, apartheid walls, South African prisons, prison-like schools in the US, and the US-Mexico border wall.
G4S is the third-largest private corporation in the world after Walmart and Foxconn, the largest private employer on the continent of Africa, and operates sexual assault centers in Britain.
Prisons function as a false solution that deflects attention from underlying social problems like racism, poverty, unemployment, and lack of education.
The booming prison-industrial complex demonstrates the destructive tendencies of global capitalism, where the most profitable sector of private prisons consists of immigrant detention centers. True reform only creates better prisons and expands surveillance, whereas prison abolition seeks to dismantle these structures by addressing root social failures. There are two and a half million people behind bars in the United States.
The three largest psychiatric institutions in the United States are jails located in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles: Rikers Island, Cook County Jail, and L.A. County Jail.
2. Intersectionality and Transnational Solidarity
The Power of Intersectionality
Black feminism provides a critical framework for understanding that race, gender, class, sexuality, nation, and ability are inextricably intertwined in our social worlds. Historically, Black women were asked to choose between the Black movement and the women's movement, a false dichotomy rejected by Black feminism. Today, intersectionality must evolve beyond individual bodies and experiences to connect social justice struggles across national borders, such as linking local anti-racism in the US with Palestinian solidarity.
Black feminism and intersectionality provide essential frameworks for connecting local anti-racism with global struggles like Palestinian solidarity.
Organizations like the Third World Women's Alliance in New York in the late 1960s and 1970s published the newspaper Triple Jeopardy to address racism, sexism, and imperialism. Modern antiracist politics must expand beyond narrow frameworks to incorporate gender struggles, LGBTQ+ rights, immigrant rights, and anti-Muslim racism. The Black radical tradition must recognize intersectionality because Black freedom cannot be achieved in isolation from class, nationality, and gender. The rise of a Black middle class or individual Black political leaders does not automatically transform the material conditions of marginalized populations.
Solidarity with Palestine
Solidarity with Palestinian resistance and participation in the BDS movement are essential components of any global social justice agenda. The mainstream narrative frequently demands that the oppressed ensure the safety of their oppressors, obscuring the root causes of colonial violence. Isolating Israel politically and economically through boycotts, divestment, and sanctions can pressure the state to end the occupation and halt massive financial and military backing from Western governments.
A delegation of indigenous and women of color feminist scholar/activists traveled to Palestine in June 2011, leading to successful resolutions urging academic and cultural boycotts within organizations like the American Studies Association and the Modern Language Association. In Chile, approximately 60 percent of the wealthy Palestinian community supported the dictator Pinochet because he was a neoliberal who protected their wealth, showing how class and economic interests can supersede collective solidarity. That community includes 450,000 Palestinians living in Chile alongside other global populations facing state violence.
There are five thousand Palestinian prisoners currently in Israeli jails. Since 1967, eight hundred thousand Palestinians have been imprisoned by Israel, representing 40 percent of the male population. This system operates alongside $8 million a day in US support of Israel. You can counter these injustices through direct action:
- Encourage constituencies to join the BDS movement.
- Intensify campaigns for a free Palestine and incorporate solidarity into progressive agendas.
- Pressure the US government to cease its financial support of Israel.
3. State Violence and Mass Movements
The police response to protests in Ferguson highlights the dangerous militarization of local law enforcement through equipment, technology, and training derived from the war on terror. When local police departments are equipped with military arms and trained like soldiers, it mirrors the militarization seen in contexts like Israeli policing in Gaza. This state violence is deeply embedded in institutional structures originating from slavery and colonization rather than being merely the fault of individual bad actors.
Systemic police violence and the carceral state can only be dismantled through organized grassroots mass movements rather than superficial reforms.
Militarized Policing and Systemic Change
Focusing solely on punishing individual police officers after killings is insufficient because systemic racism and police violence are structural features that persist even when indictments occur. Treating police killings as rare exceptions ignores their constant reality. Even when grand juries indict officers, such as in the case of Jonathan Ferrell in North Carolina, it does not guarantee genuine institutional transformation or an end to racial profiling.
The grand jury refused to indict police officers for the killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in New York. Yet even in cases where officers were indicted like Jonathan Ferrell, systemic change did not automatically follow.
Racial profiling and stereotypes linking Blackness to criminality are deeply rooted historical constructs dating back to the era of slavery. Frederick Douglass documented how white people could commit crimes without suspicion simply due to their race, whereas Black individuals faced an ideological link between their skin color and criminality. This historical dynamic persists today through modern racial profiling and everyday social biases.
During a trending Twitter conversation about criming while White, a white person described being arrested alongside a Black friend for stealing a candy bar. The cop gave the candy bar to the white person while the Black friend faced severe sentencing.
The Historical Power of Mass Movements
Transnational security corporations like G4S drive the global expansion of the prison-industrial complex by privatizing prisons, warfare, checkpoints, and education. G4S acts as the world's third-largest private corporation, embedding itself into state repression by providing security, checkpoints, and technology for the Israeli apartheid wall, operating private prisons globally, and managing alternative youth academies that blur the boundary between schools and jails.
G4S operates the Central Pasco Girls Academy in Florida as an alternative public school for at-risk teenage girls while simultaneously providing equipment and services to Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank and Gaza blockade terminals. This corporation profits directly from 8.5 million dollars daily in US military aid to the Israeli occupation.
Immigrant detention and deportation represent the most profitable and violent sectors of the global prison-industrial complex, frequently resulting in fatal abuses during transit. Private security contractors handle immigrant removal with extreme physical force and dangerous restraint techniques that silence detainees and violate basic human rights during forced deportations.
Jimmy Mubenga died at the hands of G4S guards during a forced deportation flight from the UK to Angola. Guards used a prohibited restraint technique known as carpet karaoke to press him against a seat and muffle his vocal protests for 40 minutes before receiving first aid. This occurs while 2.5 million people remain locked in US jails, prisons, and detention centers on any given day.
4. Abolitionist Futures and Radical Legacies
Historical Continuities and False Closures
Mainstream historical observances of the Black freedom struggle often create false historical closures. They frame progress as an ultimately triumphant democracy while justifying modern military interventions and state violence.
Abolishing policing, prisons, and carceral technologies requires recovering the unfulfilled radical demands of historical liberation movements.
Anniversaries like the 50th commemorations of the Birmingham Church bombing and the March on Washington risk reducing complex radical histories to feel-good milestones. They ignore ongoing structural oppressions. Davis argues that commemorations of civil rights milestones are frequently used to present the United States as a model for the world. This serves as a justification for military incursions and the use of drones in the war on terror, resulting in massive casualties particularly in Pakistan.
State-sponsored ideological labeling serves to criminalize resistance movements. On May 2, 2013, exactly 40 years after being shot and falsely accused of murder by New Jersey State Police, Assata Shakur became the first woman on the FBI Most Wanted terrorists list. A $2 million reward was offered for her capture. She faced 10 separate legal proceedings, resulting mostly in acquittals, hung juries, or dismissals, before being controversially convicted as an accomplice to murder. She had her hands in the air when she was shot in the back by New Jersey State Police, resulting in temporary paralysis of the arm she would have needed to pick up a gun. Angela Davis herself was placed on the FBI Ten Most Wanted list 43 years prior and labeled a terrorist by President Richard Nixon.
Toward Abolitionist Futures
Trans women of color frequently experience targeted violence, institutional harassment, and denial of necessary medical treatments while being housed in male prisons. Miss Major, a Black transgender elder and veteran activist of the Stonewall Rebellion, leads the Transgender, Gender Variant, Intersex Justice Project, which fights against the harassment and criminalization of trans women by law enforcement. CeCe McDonald was sentenced to 3.5 years in a men's prison in Minnesota after defending herself against racist, homophobic, and transphobic slurs.
True safety and justice require moving beyond superficial reforms to completely abolish policing and imprisonment as the dominant modes of punishment and security.
When presented with deceptive solutions that simply call for better police and prisons, abolitionist movements counter by demanding the reimagining of security. You must engage with systemic change through concrete operational steps:
- demilitarize the police
- disarm the police
- abolish the institution of the police as we know it
- abolish imprisonment as the dominant mode of punishment
Private security corporations and security firms monetize human punishment and torture, establishing a global strategy that treats populations of color and immigrants as disposable. The private security firm G4S profits from the incarceration and torture of Palestinian prisoners through its subsidiaries. The state of Israel utilizes separation walls and US prison-derived carceral technologies to control Palestinians.
Activist networks link local struggles against police violence with international resistance. Palestinian activists tweeted tear gas advice from the West Bank and Gaza to Ferguson protesters because they recognized the exact same canisters used against them in occupied Palestine.
10 Key Ideas
- Progressive struggles against systemic issues like racism and poverty are doomed to fail unless they actively resist the pervasive ideology of capitalist individualism.
- Black feminism and intersectionality provide essential frameworks for connecting local anti-racism with global struggles like Palestinian solidarity.
- Private security corporations profit from state repression, racism, and technologies of punishment on a global scale through the expanding prison-industrial complex.
- Immigrant detention and deportation represent the most profitable and violent sectors of the global prison-industrial complex, frequently resulting in fatal abuses during transit.
- Solidarity with Palestinian resistance and participation in the BDS movement are essential components of any global social justice agenda.
- Systemic police violence and the carceral state can only be dismantled through organized grassroots mass movements rather than superficial reforms.
- Transnational security corporations like G4S drive the global expansion of the prison-industrial complex by privatizing prisons, warfare, checkpoints, and education.
- Abolishing policing, prisons, and carceral technologies requires recovering the unfulfilled radical demands of historical liberation movements.
- Trans women of color frequently experience targeted violence, institutional harassment, and denial of necessary medical treatments while being housed in male prisons.
- True safety and justice require moving beyond superficial reforms to completely abolish policing and imprisonment as the dominant modes of punishment and security.