[“If our examination of the prison regime constantly leads us to the conclusion that particular populations, bodies, places, and communities are not meant to thrive or survive existing institutional arrangements, then what political practices can we conceive that directly deal with this condition as a state of emergency? This leads to the second major aspect of my politicization toward abolition, and that’s the sometimes undervalued activist work of focused study, research, and analysis. Anybody who wants to contact me can ask me for my personal bibliography, and I’ll be happy to send it—too many books, essays, articles, poems, and stories to name here. But let me expand on this dimension just a bit: Many of us, as activists, who are otherwise constantly thinking about and critically analyzing what we’re doing, far too frequently ignore or abandon radical intellectual work as if it was an unaffordable luxury that’s best taken up by academics, lawyers, and artists. I think this intellectual underdevelopment kills radical movements and empowers the liberal-to-conservative political circuitry that would like to see this condition of (proto-)genocide managed, reformed, and controlled rather than destroyed and transformed.
(….) I’ll spend anything from many minutes to many hours (depending on who I’m talking to and working with) illustrating how the formation of the prison and policing regimes are inseparable from the apparatuses of racial genocide on which the United States is based. How is the prison a paradigmatically anti-black genocidal institution? Where do we find the connections between policing and the land displacement, cultural genocide, and geographic incarceration of native and indigenous peoples in and beyond North America? What is the concept of “civil death” and how does it shape a society in which 2 million people are locked up by the state? What’s the critical difference between an activism that addresses “police brutality” and one that addresses “police violence” or even domestic warfare? If we ask—and begin to answer—questions like this, we can demystify the prison’s apparent normalcy and political invincibility, and build a different set of historical and political assumptions that recast our understanding of the prison regime as a focal point of a collective, radical political creativity—abolitionism—that takes seriously the monumental challenges of freedom, liberation, self-determination, and anti-violence.
I’ll put it another way: If one is willing to commit to an unapologetic, rigorous analysis of what prisons are, where they come from, and what they do, in a way that respects and challenges the intellect and sensibilities of the person or people one is engaging, the abolitionist position makes more sense than not. This is not to say that we don’t need to engage in simultaneous conversations about how to deal with repressive, oppressive, and exploitative forms of structural violence that would not simply disappear with the abolition of the prison regime. Rather, it’s to say that simply establishing the abolitionist concept as something that’s grounded in a historical analysis and political logic results in different sets of urgent questions that no longer presume the existence of policing, imprisonment, or even the militarized nation-state itself.”]
Dylan Rodriguez, Abolitionist Imaginings: A Conversation with Bo Brown, Reina Gossett, and Dylan Rodríguez, from Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, edited by Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith, AK Press, 2011
