Gina Dent

Angela Y. Davis

Erica R. Meiners

Beth E. Richie

As a politic and a practice, abolition increasingly shapes our political moment — halting the construction of new jails and propelling movements to divest from policing. Yet erased from this landscape are not only the central histories of feminist — usually queer, anti-capitalist, grassroots, and women of color - organizing that continue to cultivate abolition but a recognition of the stark reality: abolition is our best response to endemic forms of state and interpersonal gender and sexual violence. Amplifying the analysis and the theories of change generated from vibrant community based organizing, Abolition. Feminism. Now. surfaces necessary historical genealogies, key internationalist learnings, and everyday practices to grow our collective and flourishing present and futures.

Abolition. Feminism. Now.

“Childhood has never been available to all.” In her opening chapter of For the Children?, Erica R. Meiners stakes the claim that childhood is a racial category often unavailable to communities of color. According to Meiners, this is glaringly evident in the U.S. criminal justice system, where the differentiation between child and adult often equates to access to stark disparities. And what is constructed as child protection often does not benefit many young people or their communities. Placing the child at the heart of the targeted criminalization debate, For the Children? considers how perceptions of innocence, the safe child, and the future operate in service of the prison industrial complex. The United States has the largest prison population in the world, with incarceration and policing being key economic tools to maintain white supremacist ideologies. Meiners examines the school-to-prison pipeline and the broader prison industrial complex in the United States, arguing that unpacking child protection is vital to reducing the nation’s reliance on its criminal justice system as well as building authentic modes of public safety. Rethinking the meanings and beliefs attached to the child represent a significant and intimate thread of the work to dismantle facets of the U.S. carceral state. Taking an interdisciplinary approach and building from a scholarly and activist platform, For the Children? engages fresh questions in the struggle to build sustainable and flourishing worlds without prisons.

Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State

For the Children?

Judith Levine

In the era of #MeToo and mass incarceration, The Feminist and the Sex Offender makes a powerful feminist case for accountability without punishment and sexual safety and pleasure without injustice. With analytical clarity and narrative force, The Feminist and the Sex Offender contends with two problems that are typically siloed in the era of #MeToo and mass incarceration: sexual and gender violence, on the one hand, and the state’s unjust, ineffective, and soul-destroying response to it on the other. Is it possible to confront the culture of abuse? Is it possible to hold harm-doers accountable without recourse to a criminal justice system that redoubles injuries, fails survivors, and retrenches the conditions that made such abuse possible? Drawing on interviews, extensive research, reportage, and history, The Feminist and the Sex Offender develops an intersectional feminist approach to ending sexual violence. It maps with considerable detail the unjust sex offender regime while highlighting the alternatives we urgently need.

Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence

The Feminist and the Sex Offender

With analytical clarity and narrative force, The Feminist and the Sex Offender contends with two problems that, despite their inextricable linkages, are typically siloed in the era of #MeToo and mass incarceration: sexual and gender violence, on the one hand, and the state's unjust, ineffective, and soul-destroying response to it. Levine and Meiners ask if it's possible to confront the culture of abuse, to hold harm-doers accountable, without recourse to a criminal justice system that redoubles injuries, fails survivors, and retrenches the conditions that made such abuse possible. Drawing on personal experience, reportage, and history, The Feminist and the Sex Offender develops an intersectional feminist approach to ending sexual violence. It maps with considerable detail the unjust sex offender regime while highlighting the alternatives we urgently need.

The Feminist and The Sex Offender

Therese Quinn

This groundbreaking book provides examples of on-the-ground organizing and academic activism, drawing attention to the militarization of public schools, the erasure of queer lives at private institutions with anti-gay «lifestyle» statements, and the failure of professional educational organizations to act for social justice. Flaunt It! offers a constructive and timely analysis of the local, felt impact of neoliberal policies on the lives of those most marginal in schools and in communities.

Queers Organizing for Public Education and Justice

Flaunt It!

In Right to be Hostile, scholar and activist Erica Meiners offers concrete examples and new insights into the "school to prison' pipeline phenomenon, showing how disciplinary regulations, pedagogy, pop culture and more not only implicitly advance, but actually normalize an expectation of incarceration for urban youth. Analyzed through a framework of an expanding incarceration nation, Meiners demonstrates how educational practices that disproportionately target youth of color become linked directly to practices of racial profiling that are endemic in state structures. As early as preschool, such educational policies and practices disqualify increasing numbers of students of color as they are funneled through schools as under-educated, unemployable, 'dangerous,' and in need of surveillance and containment. By linking schools to prisons, Meiners asks researchers, activists, and educators to consider not just how our schools’ physical structures resemble prisons— metal detectors or school uniforms— but the tentacles in policies, practices and informal knowledge that support, naturalize, and extend, relationships between incarceration and schools. Understanding how and why prison expansion is possible necessitates connecting schools to prisons and the criminal justice system, and redefining "what counts" as educational policy.

Schools, Prisons, and the Making of Public Enemies

Right to Be Hostile

Maisha T. Winn

The United States of America is in possession of the largest prison population in the world, with 2.3 million people currently behind bars. This number is predominantly and disproportionately made up of communities of colour and poverty. Between 1987 and 2007, the U.S. prison population tripled; the direct result of various ‘tough on crime’ public policies. Organizers and scholars use the term prison industrial complex (PIC) to name the structure that encompasses the expanding economic and political contexts of the detention and corrections industry in the USA. The PIC is a network that sutures capital, communities and the State to a permanent punishment economy. The term ‘the PIC’ aims to capture the range of material and ideological forces that shape the growth of detention: the political and lobbying power of the corrections officers unions, the framing of prisons and jails as a growth industry in the context of deindustrialization, the production and sales of technology and security required to maintain and expand the state of incarceration, and the naturalization of isolation as a logical response to harm. Education and Incarceration highlights the significance of centering agency and autonomy, and documents scholars who work to be accountable to justice movements and communities, not simply to academic disciplines or to research. Additionally, as emerging scholars committed to challenging the PIC, these authors struggle to build multi-layered analytic and material tools for resistance within and beyond the walls of schools, jails and prisons. This book provides snapshots of practices in motion: activist scholars working to engage, to be accountable to families, communities and larger justice movements, and to build abolition democracies. This book was originally published as a special issue of Race Ethnicity and Education.

Erica R. Meiners

Books

Your next favorite book is out there