Abolition of police and prisons
Abolish is to flourish! Against the prison industrial complex and for transformative justice.
See Critical Resistance's definitions below:
The Prison Industrial Complex
The prison industrial complex (PIC) is a term we use to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems.
Through its reach and impact, the PIC helps and maintains the authority of people who get their power through racial, economic and other privileges. There are many ways this power is collected and maintained through the PIC, including creating mass media images that keep alive stereotypes of people of color, poor people, queer people, immigrants, youth, and other oppressed communities as criminal, delinquent, or deviant. This power is also maintained by earning huge profits for private companies that deal with prisons and police forces; helping earn political gains for "tough on crime" politicians; increasing the influence of prison guard and police unions; and eliminating social and political dissent by oppressed communities that make demands for self-determination and reorganization of power in the US.
Abolition
PIC abolition is a political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment.
From where we are now, sometimes we can't really imagine what abolition is going to look like. Abolition isn't just about getting rid of buildings full of cages. It's also about undoing the society we live in because the PIC both feeds on and maintains oppression and inequalities through punishment, violence, and controls millions of people. Because the PIC is not an isolated system, abolition is a broad strategy. An abolitionist vision means that we must build models today that can represent how we want to live in the future. It means developing practical strategies for taking small steps that move us toward making our dreams real and that lead us all to believe that things really could be different. It means living this vision in our daily lives.
Abolition is both a practical organizing tool and a long-term goal.
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So I never really got into the Watchmen show that aired for a season on Amazon. Bear with me; I'm going somewhere with this...
If anyone remembers that show, there are two scenes that always stuck with me. One was of course the Tulsa massacre. I had never heard of it and it was just chilling to me. That's a whole other discussion, but it's not the scene that directly applies here.
The other scene is (IIRC) literally the first scene of the show, where the cop is at a traffic stop, he gets the persons information and goes back to his car to run it. It comes out that there's something sketchy about the guy (I don't remember what), and he has to call in to a civilian observer explaining the situation and asking them to unlock his gun if they decide that it's warranted...
Anyway, that idea (regardless of how feasible it may or may not be in reality) has been literally burned into my brain from two minutes of a show that I remember literally nothing else about.