Dear Friends,
Do you need tools to unpack current national discussions on political reforms? Confused that all sorts of folks are talking about the “crisis of mass incarceration” now? Anxious that police reform is becoming staple and friendly headline for your town’s newspaper? Looking for resources to use in your fall classes to help unpack this moment, to build shared abolitionist analysis, to create tools for intervention in your space, and to continue the fight to dismantle the PIC?
Issue 26 of The Abolitionist is here and we invite you to subscribe! This issue, “Obstacles and Opportunities,” pushes us to take a critical look at our movements to eliminate policing, imprisonment, and the rest of the prison industrial complex (PIC). We hope that this issue is a timely one and can help us to sharpen our shared struggles toward a world free of the PIC.
Our prison nation—a plank in what historian Saidiya Hartman has termed the “afterlife of slavery”— is at another critical juncture. In some spheres, reform is on the table. Congress is debating the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, and many states are embracing risk assessment in sentencing reform: In Illinois, Republican Governor Bruce Rauner seeks to reduce the state prison population 25% by 2025. Yet, does this move us closer to the world that we want and need?
With reports from the front lines across the US, the latest issue of The Abolitionist gives us tools to build our movement. Now.
Subscribe here to get your copy. (Select “The Abolitionist newspaper” as the Designation on the donation page.)
Onward!
Erica Meiners
Critical Resistance member & Abolitionist Educator, Chicago
P.S. Already a subscriber? We’ll be getting your paper in the mail next week. In the meantime, would you share this email with a friend, post it to your networks, school list-serve, or social media, and encourage people to join you? Every subscription counts. Thank you!
Subscribe now to get your copy fresh off the press. (Select “The Abolitionist newspaper” as the Designation on the donation page.)
Your subscriptions enable imprisoned people to receive this valuable political resource for free. Our prisoner subscriptions have grown exponentially, so we need your support:
- $15 gives you three issues and supports one prisoner with a free subscription for a year;
- $30 supports three prisoners with a free one-year subscription.
- $60 supports seven prisoners with a free one-year subscription.
- Shoot for the moon! $200 goes a long way. Are you at a school? Ask your library, student center or Department to subscribe!
Over 5,000 imprisoned people across the U.S. subscribe to The Abolitionist:
