In March and April 2020, Critical Resistance (CR) created an abolitionist platform for COVID-19 emergency response as a roadmap to support freedom, health, and collective care, and actively resist the prison industrial complex (PIC) in all its forms during the pandemic and beyond.
The abolition of the PIC is about dismantling cages and oppressive structures while building up the resources, practices, and institutions that support healthy and self-determined communities. It requires all of us.
As Ruthie Gilmore noted during Los Angeles for Abolition: Dismantling Jails and Building Liberation (Sept. 2019), “abolition is a practical program of radical change cobbled together from the work that people do in disparate struggles every day.”
Through this platform, we uplift calls for life-saving measures to address the needs of prisoners and loved ones, people facing housing and food insecurity – long term or with the loss of work now, and people who are targeted for arrest and detention. These are real, clear, and concrete steps for stemming the pandemic now among millions of the most vulnerable and changing the social and political structures that guarantee that vulnerability.
How we address this crisis will determine what our society looks like after it passes. We are committed to seeding a more abolitionist future.
Read and download the platform in English and Spanish here.