This is a first in a series of articles by Abolitionist Law Center’s Executive Director Robert Saleem Holbrook on the day to day practices of Abolition and the influences of the Black Radical Tradition on Abolitionist practices within the Pennsylvania prison system.
“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” — Audre Lorde
I was struck by Audre Lorde’s quote a couple days ago during a conversation around decarceration and abolition. I came to abolition by necessity, not by choice. When I was 16-years-old, was arrested and subsequently sentenced to life without parole. A death by incarceration sentence. My…
The End of Cash Bail: Statement from ALC Court Watch
We seek the abolition of cash bail in Allegheny County — and everywhere else in the US colonial project.
We believe cash bail contributes to a violent system of apartheid policing and punishment, and exacerbates economic precarity and poverty by governance thru debt.
We recognize cash bail as a feature of racial capitalism that benefits white people, the ruling class, and state power thru parasitic exploitation and dispossession of Black people and poor community members — not as a legitimate pretrial condition for securing one’s appearance in court.
We observe the wild inconsistencies of how cash bail is imposed among magistrates, revealing a crisis of legitimacy in their courts; since there is no standard, the financial and carceral fates of community members are merely entropic.
We reject the use of surveillance, algorithmic violence, and predictive policing, which rely on risk assessment “formulas” that are inherently anti-Black; these practices are often offered up as “alternatives” to cash bail thus co-opting initial abolitionist demands.
We situate our objective of abolishing cash bail within our larger protracted goals of ending state violence and transitioning from a punitive paradigm to one that centers healing, accountability, and community power.
– ALC Court Watch, January 6, 2021
by Dolly Prabhu, Staff Attorney for The Abolitionist Law Center
A shortened version of this article appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s op-ed section on January 3, 2021.
On Friday December 18, 2020, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Editorial Board published an article criticizing activists for calling to defund the Pittsburgh police. It claimed that we actually need more police, and that decreasing the police budget would result in less public safety and increased crime — assertions that were backed by the following pieces of evidence: “Duh” and “Duh, squared.”
If the Editorial Board had bothered to actually research this issue, it perhaps…
by William Lukas for The Abolitionist Law Center
When we mourn for Aaliah Denise Johnson, Nina Pop, Tony McDade, Riah Milton, Dominique Rem’mie Fells, Mia Green, and every Black Trans life taken this year, we are reminded that prior to the Atlantic slave trade and New World organization of racial capitalism thru colonization, christianization, chattel slavery, and gendered labor division, Black Trans people existed and thrived in tribes across Africa and the Global South.
We are reminded that Black Trans people were part of the first rebellions against slaveowners and plantations against white mobs and police during Reconstruction and the…
Today we are collectively mourning the life of Walter Wallace Jr.
Walter was murdered by the Philadelphia Police Department in West Philadelphia, yesterday October 26, 2020.
Walter was among our many vulnerable community members in need of help, but instead of being met by crisis intervention and support, Walter was struck by almost a dozen bullets by police.
In front of his mother and West Philly residents who plead the cops not to shoot.
The residents of West Philadelphia took to the streets last night in an act of rage and resistance against the racist police and state violence that claimed Walter Wallace’s life. …
by Maya Nojechowicz
As the coronavirus pandemic persists and spreads in prisons across the world, calls have grown nationally and in Pennsylvania for the release of high-risk incarcerated people, including those over sixty, all pregnant women, and those with serious medical conditions. Where the state should be acting quickly to save lives, its response has been lackluster and rife with delays. Nowhere is this more apparent than at SCI Fayette, a prison near the southwestern Pennsylvanian town of LaBelle that was built in 2003 on millions of tons of coal waste, next door to a coal ash dump.
TO ENDORSE OUR DEMANDS, VISIT:
The following text was written by an incarcerated person currently held captive in the state of Massachusetts, US. The author wishes to remain anonymous.
During these crazy times of COVID-19, life has been turned upside down. People are watching their loved ones die of this insidious disease, watching their livelihoods evaporate, wondering if they’ll be able to pay their rent, feed their families, or having to make the hard choice between eating or lifesaving medications. This leaves me to feel like what I have to say just might not be that important, but this is what being a prisoner is…
“I may be doomed to the stake and the fire, or to the scaffold tree, but it is not in me to falter if I can promote the work of emancipation.”
– David Walker, 19th Century Radical Black Abolitionist
The Abolitionist Law Center extends our unqualified support to those in the struggle against police terror and state violence. We support the rights of our community members rising up in rebellion in the name of Black Liberation. At a time when the government cannot protect the health of the people in the US, when mass death is ravaging Black communities, while corporate and political elites seek an ever-larger sacrifice population to keep the profits flowing — we support revolt. …
by Abolitionist Law Center and Amistad Law Project
As poor communities and communities of color continue to wade through a gauntlet of crises, it is encouraging to see movements and organizations building and seeking solidarity to wage a concerted rescue. It is for this reason that we must now, at this moment in our people’s historical arch of resistance and struggle, extend a last ditch lifeline to our movement’s political prisoners who are on their last legs and in many cases literally their last breath; and who as seniors constitute the most vulnerable among us. …
Abolitionist Law Center
ALC is a nonprofit law firm fighting to protect prisoners, and a community organizing project aiming to build a world without prisons. abolitionistlawcenter.org
