Abolition cannot wait: visions for transformation and radical world-building

Abolition is presented here not simply as the removal of police and prisons, but as the sustained work of building life-supporting systems capable of preventing harm and responding to it without relying on punishment as the default.

The framework begins by distinguishing abolition from reform. Its advocates argue that training, technology and procedural changes can leave the underlying reach of policing intact or even expand it. They instead call for a shift in public priorities: away from institutions centered on surveillance, detention and force, and toward housing, education, healthcare, food access, mediation and other foundations of community wellbeing.

This position draws on a long intellectual and organizing tradition, particularly Black feminist analysis of policing and imprisonment. It treats contemporary campaigns as part of a history of resistance to institutions shaped by enslavement, colonial occupation, racial exclusion and economic inequality. In that account, abolition is both a critique of existing systems and a practical method of creating alternatives.

Beyond reform as the final horizon

Reform proposals often promise restraint through revised rules, body-worn cameras, new training or expanded data systems. Abolitionist critics caution that these measures can increase budgets and institutional capacity while leaving communities exposed to similar patterns of harm. The relevant test, they argue, is not whether a reform sounds progressive but whether it reduces the power, scale and reach of punishment-centered systems.

That test extends beyond police departments. Schools, hospitals, welfare agencies and housing systems can all incorporate punitive forms of monitoring and enforcement. A systemic approach therefore asks where social needs are being treated as security problems and where public funds could instead support voluntary, accessible care.

An anti-imperial and anti-militarist analysis

The article places domestic policing within a wider history of military occupation, border enforcement and the international exchange of security tactics. Equipment, training methods, surveillance tools and risk-scoring systems move between local agencies, federal institutions, private companies and military settings. This circulation complicates attempts to address one department or one technology in isolation.

Abolitionist discernment describes the practice of identifying these shared structures and asking how they reinforce one another. The concept directs attention to research institutions and technology companies as well as uniformed agencies. It also emphasizes international solidarity: a restriction in one city has limited value if the same tools or tactics are simply transferred elsewhere.

An anti-capitalist account of public safety

The economic argument focuses on how poverty, unemployment, housing insecurity and lack of care are produced and then policed. Under austerity, communities August lose social infrastructure while budgets for enforcement continue to grow. Fees, fines, court costs, communication charges and private contracts can add debt to punishment, extending its impact to families and neighborhoods.

The public-health emergency of 2020 made these tensions especially visible. Officials frequently relied on enforcement even as many communities lacked adequate healthcare, safe housing and income support. Rather than treating that moment as current, this archive analysis reads it as a case study in how governments choose between care and coercion during crisis.

From this perspective, reducing police budgets is a transitional strategy rather than an endpoint. The proposed destination is a public system where crisis response does not automatically bring armed intervention and where resources are redirected to services that can prevent instability before it becomes an emergency.

Ending white supremacy requires structural change

The original intervention emerged amid nationwide protests after the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery. It argued that these events should not be treated as isolated failures. Instead, they revealed longstanding patterns in which Black communities and other marginalized groups experienced disproportionate surveillance, criminalization and state violence.

Abolitionist analysis connects those patterns to histories of racial hierarchy, Indigenous dispossession, segregation, border control and gendered violence. Its response is not a request for a more polite version of the same structure. It asks what institutions would look like if Black life, queer and trans life, disabled life and the lives of poor and working-class people were treated as inherently valuable.

World-building as a present-tense practice

Radical world-building can sound abstract, but the framework is deliberately local and material. It asks organizers to examine municipal, state and federal budgets; challenge expansion of punitive institutions; and create community resources that make those institutions less central. It also asks movements to develop forms of accountability that support survivors and address harm without reproducing abandonment or retaliation.

No single platform resolves every question about safety, serious harm or institutional transition. The significance of the abolitionist framework is that it changes the starting point. Instead of asking how punishment can be administered more efficiently, it asks what people need in order to live safely and how society can build those conditions now.

The central claim remains urgent: transformation cannot be postponed until perfect alternatives exist. Alternatives are created through sustained investment, experimentation, democratic accountability and the daily practice of care.