Mariame Kaba | |
---|---|
Born | 1987 New York City, New York, U.S. |
Education | McGill University (BA) |
Occupation | Organizer |
Notable work | We Do This 'Til We Free Us |
Mariame Kaba is an American activist, grassroots organizer, and educator who advocates for the abolition of the prison industrial complex, including all police. [1] She is the author of We Do This 'Til We Free Us (2021). The Mariame Kaba Papers are held by the Chicago Public Library Special Collections. [2]
Mariame Kaba was born in New York City to immigrant parents. [3] Her mother emigrated from the Ivory Coast; [3] her father was involved in the independence struggle in Guinea. [4]
Mariame grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and attended Lycée Français. [5] As a child, she viewed the world through a black nationalist framework and looked for ways to help others. [6] Kaba received a B.A. in Sociology from McGill University in 1992. [7] In 1995 she moved to Chicago to study sociology at Northwestern University. [3] [8] She completed her master's degree in Library and Information Science at Pratt Institute. [9]
In Chicago, she founded the Chicago Freedom School, [10] the Rogers Park Young Women's Action Team (YWAT), [3] Chicago Taskforce on Violence against Girls and Young Women, [11] [12] Chicago Alliance to Free Marissa Alexander, [13] and We Charge Genocide (WCG). [14] In 2009, Kaba founded the organization Project NIA, which advocates to end youth incarceration. [15] [16]
Kaba views prison abolition as the total dismantling of prison and policing while building up community services and opposes the reform of policing. [17] [18] Her work has created the framework for current abolitionist organizations including Black Youth Project 100, Black Lives Matter Chicago, and Assata's Daughters. [6] She also helped found the organization Survived and Punished, an abolitionist organization that seeks to end sentencing for victims of intimate partner violence who defend themselves. [19] This project grew out of efforts to free Marissa Alexander. [20]
Kaba maintained a blog, "US Prison Culture," beginning in 2010. She has been active on Twitter under the account @prisonculture. [21] [22]
In 2012, she wrote Resisting Police Violence in Harlem, a historical pamphlet detailing the policing and violence in Harlem. [23]
In March 2018, she wrote Lifting As They Climbed: Mapping A History Of Black Women On Chicago’s South Side with Essence McDowell. Started in 2012, the book is written as a guidebook that maps the history of the influential Black women who contributed to the development of Chicago during the 19th and 20th centuries. [24] [8]
In 2021, she published We Do This 'Til We Free Us with Haymarket Books. It debuted at number nine on The New York Times bestseller list for non-fiction paperbacks. [25] In a review for the Chicago Reader , Ariel Parrella-Aureli described it as “a collection of talks, interviews, and past work that can serve as an initial primer on the PIC [prison-industrial complex] abolition and community building rooted in transformative justice.” [26] Kaba was reluctant to write the book, but the mass protests in the summer of 2020 persuaded her, in the interests of lending her tools for collective action to newly activated organizers. [26]
Transformative justice is a series of practices and philosophies designed to create change in social systems. Mostly, they are alternatives to criminal justice in cases of interpersonal violence, or are used for dealing with socioeconomic issues in societies transitioning away from conflict or repression. Other fields of practice have adopted transformative justice, including to address groups' work on other social issues and climate justice.
The prison abolition movement is a network of groups and activists that seek to reduce or eliminate prisons and the prison system, and replace them with systems of rehabilitation and education that do not focus on punishment and government institutionalization. The prison abolitionist movement is distinct from conventional prison reform, which is intended to improve conditions inside prisons.
Black anarchism is a term applied to a group of people of African descent who identify with the principles of anarchism. These people include, but are not limited to, Ashanti Alston, Kuwasi Balagoon, Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, Greg Jackson, and Martin Sostre. Critics of the term suggest that it broadly eclipses important political differences between these multi-varied thinkers and incorrectly presents them as having a shared theory or movement. Black anarchism has had a major influence on the anarchist movement, black anarchists have a 100-year history in black-led anti-fascist and anti-racist history.
Non-reformist reform, also referred to as abolitionist reform, anti-capitalist reform, revolutionary reform, structural reform and transformative reform, is a reform that "is conceived, not in terms of what is possible within the framework of a given system and administration, but in view of what should be made possible in terms of human needs and demands". On the other hand, reformist reforms essentially maintain the status quo and do not threaten the existing structure. These have been described as reforms that rationalize or "fine-tune the status quo" by implementing modifications "from the top down", but that fail to address root causes of the issue. As described by philosopher André Gorz, who coined the term non-reformist reform, non-reformist reforms in a capitalist system are anti-capitalist reforms, or reforms that do not base their validity and their right to exist "on capitalist needs, criteria, and rationale", but rather on human ones.
Beth E. Richie is a professor of African American Studies, Sociology, Gender and Women's Studies, and Criminology, Law, and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) where she currently serves as head of the Criminology, Law, and Justice Department. From 2010 to 2016, Richie served as the director of the UIC Institute of Research on Race and Public Policy. In 2014, she was named a senior adviser to the National Football League Players Association Commission on domestic violence and sexual assault. Of her most notable awards, Richie has been awarded the Audre Lorde Legacy Award from the Union Institute, the Advocacy Award from the US Department of Health and Human Services, and the Visionary Award from the Violence Intervention Project. Her work has been supported by multiple foundations including Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Institute for Justice, and the National Institute of Corrections.
Project NIA is an American advocacy organization that supports youth in trouble with the law as well as those victimized by violence and crime, through community-based alternatives as opposed to formal legal proceedings. The organization was founded in 2009 by activist and educator Mariame Kaba, with the project aiming to end juvenile incarceration. NIA comes from a Swahili word for "with purpose".
In the United States, abolitionism, the movement that sought to end slavery in the country, was active from the late colonial era until the American Civil War, the end of which brought about the abolition of American slavery for non-criminals through the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
In May 2012, 31-year-old Marissa Alexander was prosecuted for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and received a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years in prison. Alexander said that she fired a warning shot after her husband attacked her and threatened to kill her on August 1, 2010, in Jacksonville, Florida.
Assata's Daughters is an American black power organization of young radical African-American women and girls in Chicago, which operates through a Black, queer, feminist lens, that focuses on political education, organizing, and revolutionary services. The group is dedicated to radical liberatory activism in the tradition of Assata Shakur, a former member of the Black Liberation Army (BLA). The organization is often criticised for this connection, as Assata Shakur was convicted of first-degree murder, armed robbery, and other crimes in 1977 in the murder of a New Jersey State Trooper.
Andrea J. Ritchie is a writer, lawyer, and activist for women of color, especially LGBTQ women of color, who have been victims of police violence. An abolitionist, her activism consists of demand for the elimination of police and prisons. She is the author of Invisible No More, a history of state violence against women of color, and co-author of No More Police: A Case for Abolition with Mariame Kaba.
Gina Dent is an associate professor of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz. She is associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion for the Humanities Division at UC Santa Cruz. She co authored the 2022 book Abolition. Feminism. Now. with her partner, Angela Davis; Erica Meiners; and Beth Richie.
Survived and Punished is an American national volunteer-run organization that campaigns for the abolition of custodial sentences for victims of abuse who defended themselves from their attacker. The organization focuses on preventing the imprisonment of victims of assault, estimated to comprise almost 90% of women in United States' prisons, of whom most are arrested for defending themselves from domestic and intimate partner violence.
Carceral feminism is a critical term for types of feminism that advocate for enhancing and increasing prison sentences that deal with feminist and gender issues. The term criticises the belief that harsher and longer prison sentences will help work towards solving these issues. The phrase "carceral feminism" was coined by Elizabeth Bernstein, a feminist sociologist, in her 2007 article, "The Sexual Politics of the 'New Abolitionism'". Examining the contemporary anti-trafficking movement in the United States, Bernstein introduced the term to describe a type of feminist activism which casts all forms of sexual labor as sex trafficking. She sees this as a retrograde step, suggesting it erodes the rights of women in the sex industry, and takes the focus off other important feminist issues, and expands the neoliberal agenda.
Janetta Louise Johnson is an American transgender rights activist, human rights activist, prison abolitionist, and transgender woman. She is the Executive Director of the TGI Justice Project. She co-founded the non-profit TAJA's Coalition in 2015. Along with Honey Mahogany and Aria Sa'id, Johnson is a co-founder of The Transgender District, established in 2017. Johnson's work is primarily concerned about the rights and safety of incarcerated and formerly-incarcerated transgender and gender-non-conforming people. She believes that the abolition of police and the prison industrial complex will help support the safety of transgender people, and she identifies as an abolitionist.
Decarceration in the United States involves government policies and community campaigns aimed at reducing the number of people held in custody or custodial supervision. Decarceration, the opposite of incarceration, also entails reducing the rate of imprisonment at the federal, state and municipal level. As of 2019, the US was home to 5% of the global population but 25% of its prisoners. Until the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. possessed the world's highest incarceration rate: 655 inmates for every 100,000 people, enough inmates to equal the populations of Philadelphia or Houston. The COVID-19 pandemic has reinvigorated the discussion surrounding decarceration as the spread of the virus poses a threat to the health of those incarcerated in prisons and detention centers where the ability to properly socially distance is limited. As a result of the push for decarceration in the wake of the pandemic, as of 2022, the incarceration rate in the United States declined to 505 per 100,000, resulting in the United States no longer having the highest incarceration rate in the world, but still remaining in the top five.
The police abolition movement is a political movement, mostly active in the United States, that advocates replacing policing with other systems of public safety. Police abolitionists believe that policing, as a system, is inherently flawed and cannot be reformed—a view that rejects the ideology of police reformists. While reformists seek to address the ways in which policing occurs, abolitionists seek to transform policing altogether through a process of disbanding, disempowering, and disarming the police. Abolitionists argue that the institution of policing is deeply rooted in a history of white supremacy and settler colonialism and that it is inseparable from a pre-existing racial capitalist order, and thus believe a reformist approach to policing will always fail.
In the United States, "defund the police" is a slogan that supports removing funds from police departments and reallocating them to non-policing forms of public safety and community support, such as social services, youth services, housing, education, healthcare and other community resources. Activists who use the phrase may do so with varying intentions; some seek modest reductions, while others argue for full divestment as a step toward the abolition of contemporary police services. Activists who support the defunding of police departments often argue that investing in community programs could provide a better crime deterrent for communities; funds would go toward addressing social issues, like poverty, homelessness, and mental disorders. Police abolitionists call for replacing existing police forces with other systems of public safety, like housing, employment, community health, education, and other programs.
Derecka Purnell is an American lawyer, writer, and organizer. She is best known for her 2021 memoir Becoming Abolitionists, which received positive reviews from Boston Review, PEN America, Kirkus, The Guardian, and others.
The Light of Truth: Ida B. Wells National Monument is a bronze and marble public sculpture by artist Richard Hunt. Located in the Bronzeville neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, the sculpture takes its name from a quote by civil rights activist and investigative journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931): "The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them". It was unveiled in 2021 by the Ida B. Wells Commemorative Art Committee.
Abolition Feminism is a branch of feminism that calls for the elimination of the prison industrial complex. The term was coined by thinkers Angela Y, Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie in their book Abolition. Feminism. Now. Abolitionist Feminist thinkers promote the idea of prison abolition, and embrace an anti-racism, anti-capitalist, anti-violence feminism. Abolition Feminism is in opposition to carceral feminism. Abolitionist Feminist reject carceral solutions to gender-based violence and propose models of transformative and restorative justice.