On Property: Policing, Prisons, and the Call for Abolition

Field Notes #2

by Rinaldo Walcott

From plantation rebellion to prison labour's super-exploitation, Walcott examines the relationship between policing and property.

That a man can lose his life for passing a fake $20 bill when we know our economies are flush with fake money says something damning about the way we've organized society. Yet the intensity of the calls to abolish the police after George Floyd's death surprised almost everyone. What, exactly, does abolition mean? How did we get here? And what does property have to do with it? In On Property, Rinaldo Walcott explores the long shadow cast by slavery's afterlife and shows how present-day abolitionists continue the work of their forebears in service of an imaginative, creative philosophy that ensures freedom and equality for all. Thoughtful, wide-ranging, compassionate, and profound, On Property makes an urgent plea for a new ethics of care.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Race, Sociology, Theory, Economics, Research

105 pages, Paperback

First published February 2, 2021

About the author

Rinaldo Walcott is a Professor in the Women and Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto, author of Queer Returns: Essays on Multiculturalism, Diaspora, and Black Studies, and coauthor of BlackLife: Post-BLM and the Struggle for Freedom.

Reviews

[Enid Wray · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! A perfect little primer. I could say so much, but really all that needs to be said is that this is an absolute must read title. One of the things I appreciated most about it is that the author consciously chose to make this accessible - to not make it read like an academic treatise - and that he included a brilliant selection of resources - links to articles and more - that anyone surfing the free web can avail themselves of, without running head on into paywalls and subscription only access.

The author very clearly and articulately lays out the case for abolition - in the contemporary context - and how we might move to a future where: our priority must be mitigating further or continued harm (p42); and, we are collectively engaged in creative approaches to social organisation that transform how we live together (p66).

It will not be an easy path, and this total societal transformation will not occur overnight. As he points out, it has taken hundreds of years to build the current system, and it will take time to dismantle it and replace it with another that places ‘the sanctity of human life at the centre of how we care for each other’ (Ruth Wilson Gilmore, p 76).

Clearly those taking part in the struggle, and those who consider themselves allies, will be keen to read this… and there is much to learn even for them (like myself). My only concern is that not everyone will be ready to read this… but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t share it with all. Certainly it will provoke conversations, and that’s a good place to start.

[Andrea McDowell · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of my clearest memories of my undergrad days is reading Ursula le Guin's The Dispossessed for an elective anthropology course (yes, even then I was a book nerd). In one scene that relates the protagonist's childhood in an anarchist colony, his preschool teacher tells his parents that the main character has been saying "mine!" and not sharing things a lot.

In this society, there is no property; everything is shared. So nothing the kid claims is "mine!" is actually his.

"We're so sorry," his parents say; "We don't know where he picked this up." "No worries," says the preschool teacher. "They all go through this phase. He'll grow out of it."

Words cannot express how much I love The Dispossessed or how formative it was for me (see: I have clearer memories of reading this book than I have of frosh week, and I don't drink), and I was so excited to pick up Rinaldo Walcott's On Property, as it promised to be a non-fiction exploration of the effects of the concept of property on crime and incarceration and how we could address societal ills by abolishing the concept of property.

It did not live up to my hopes or expectations, and I can't promise that my disappointment is unrelated to how high those hopes and expectations were. I really, really wanted this to be life-changing, and it fell short. It's probably not a fair standard. Still, I have serious concerns with this book.

First of all, Walcott doesn't begin to explore property abolition in any detail until page 86 of a very slim 103 total pages. Up until then, he analyzes race data on crime and incarceration and police brutality. These are critical, obviously, but I've read up on them quite a bit already and didn't want to spend 85 pages going over it all again; I didn't learn anything here that I hadn't already read elsewhere.

Worse, his stance is abolitionist. And I don't say "worse" because I necessarily think that stance is incorrect, but that it is for me deeply triggering and borderline retraumatizing. As a member of an under-incarcerated community, when I read about abolition (of prisons specifically) what I hear is, "these people who abused and violated you, and who have never faced serious consequences for their crimes because of their race/body form & function/class/gender, will forevermore become templates for how we deal with all such crimes. Hurray!" Such arguments typically do a lot of hand-waving and make vague gestures in the direction of transformative justice, but transformative justice doesn't sound all that transformative to me, at least not in the descriptions I've read; it sounds mostly like exactly the same kind of enabling hand-holding patient explanations of harm to psychopaths who view such conversations as an attack worthy of retaliation that I've seen close up already for my entire life, and which has had--clearly--no impact on behaviour.

And there is a lot of such handwaving and gesturing in this short book: violent crimes are rare! We don't need to worry about them! Also, transformative justice!

The ultimate impact of these arguments is to push me farther and farther from prison abolition. I just cannot support eliminating all prisons with a proposal that cannot and will not work with all offenders. ALL. Including the so-called 'rare' violent offenders, which, in a world in which 1/3 women are victims of sexual assault and 86% of Ontario disabled women are victims of SA or domestic violence, isn't fucking rare, Walcott. And those crimes place women in psychological prisons. I find it frankly disturbing that he'd rather women be imprisoned by rape culture than that 'rare' violent offenders be literally imprisoned.

Ultimately I guess such advocates are considering only the criminals who are products of poverty and harm, and don't consider the criminals who are products of power and wealth, and given my own circumstances, it's the latter I have more experience with and I don't want them all wandering around, viewing the world as an endless buffet of women's bodies (or what have you) to exploit and violate, without even the possibility of consequences.

Do you want Harvey Weinstein out of prison? Wouldn't the world be better if Trump were in a cell? Yes, I suppose it would unfortunate for him, but I'd rather put that one man in a cell than see him endlessly constructing cells for refugees etc.

Which ties nicely into the main reason I no longer consider myself an anarchist and strenuously disagree with Walcott's characterization of "small-c communism": it contains no method to constrain the ambitions or activities of psychopaths. In its contention that "most people want to do good," it entirely obscures the fact that you only need a small number of people who believe they are entitled to cause harm to cause an enormous amount of harm (see: 1/3 women are sexually assaulted, but only a small number of men rape). What's happened on a state level, when such ideological proposals are actually enacted, is that psychopaths obtain power very very quickly and there are no mechanisms to hold them in check. Then you get the USSR, China, Korea, and so on. Small c or big C, you need to acknowledge the existence of people who believe that they are above other people and have no empathy, compassion or remorse.

So: Up to page 86, in the seemingly unrelated arguments in favour of prison and police abolition, what you actually have are some arguments leading in the direction of prison and police *reform.* (I haven't got to the police argument yet, where I tend more towards abolition, but even there: what kind of institution would there be that would investigate/deal with, say, hostage taking, homicide, etc.? Yes, it's 'rare,' but it's still going to happen, and someone will have to be empowered to deal with people who are willing and able to use violence and force to achieve their ends. And until you have a police-replacement proposal that DOES work for violent crime, you do not have an argument for abolition, you have an argument for reform.)

Unfortunately, the property arguments were also full of holes (though at least I didn't get panic attacks from reading them, so hurray for that, I guess).

The central argument is that since most crime is crime of property, why not just abolish property? Then property crimes disappear. Also, alternatives to private property, such as communal land management, have other important benefits, particularly for the environment.

And again, it's not that this is wrong, it's just that it's incomplete.

"Property" is never defined in the book, but it sounds to me like he really means all privately owned goods, from real estate and cars right down to socks and underwear. You can see that there is maybe a line in which private ownership makes some sense (do we want to be sharing our undies? How about the tools of your trade?). Even societies in which there was no formal private property had some goods or items that were associated with one person or a small group's entitlement to access and use (eg; a household that makes clothing would 'own' its needles and fibres, whether as formal private property as we have or as a traditional entitlement that amounts to much the same thing).

Even land commons, as he references favourably in the book, aren't a free for all. People have particular entitlements of use and obligations based on class, caste, family, tradition, and so on. Ecologically they can be remarkably effective but they aren't without potential social consequences. This is entirely glossed over.

But mostly: getting rid of the concept of private property, which generally I'm supportive of, doesn't actually eliminate the possibility of using things to harm people. I recall a description Sarah Blaffer Hrdy gave in one of her earlier books about hierarchy among female chimps, in which they would reduce competition for their own offspring by systematically starving low-caste mothers in order to cause their milk to dry up and their babies to starve, and yes, that's chimps, but that's precisely my point: no one OWNS that food, chimps have no concept of theft (or police, prisons, etc), but they can still cause each other a lot of harm through things. If anything, humans are only more inventive. If you don't own the food in your kids' hands, are you allowed to complain if someone comes along and takes it? If not, how do you ensure your kid gets enough to eat? If so, how, and to whom? What is the redress? You still need rules and regulations and enforcement mechanisms, which--because we're human beings and humans often suck--will still be vulnerable to bias and bigotry and escalation.

These are complicated questions, and he barely acknowledges them, let alone tries to resolve them. In a 103 page book that might not be realistic, and it surely doesn't help when you only get to the central thesis on page 86. But the outcome for me is that I ended up annoyed, sleep-deprived from panic attacks, and less convinced of is argument than I was before I read it despite it being an ideal I was wholly prepared to be enthusiastically supportive of.

But it does make me want to reread The Dispossessed.

[Jane Mulkewich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ever since going to law school when I was in my 40s and sitting in Property Law class, I have wanted to write on property, and of course I was excited to read Rinaldo Walcott's take on this topic. It is a small, short book, written in the genre of a pamphlet, reviving the tradition of those pamphlets written by the great abolitionists of slavery. Walcott traces the history between those who called for the abolition of slavery, to those who are today calling for the abolition of police. He writes about Haiti which is known as being the site of the first successful slave rebellion, and says: "Taking one's freedom is a tremendous act of abolition, and while the term abolition is not often used in reference to revolution, because the latter term seems to our ears more radical, abolition is nevertheless a revolutionary idea and practice since it demands a much deeper and newer commitment to all that it seeks to replace". This is a radical book; radical in the sense of going to the root of the problem, and that is property (his first chapter is titled "Property is a problem"). This is a book that should be the start of a conversation and of many conversations and actions, and those of us in Hamilton will have that opportunity in April when Rinaldo Walcott will be at GritLit (and because it is online you don't have to be in Hamilton!) - I have already signed up.

[Ben Truong · Rating 4 out of 5]

On Property: Policing, Prisons, and the Call for Abolition is a non-fiction book written by Rinaldo Walcott. Walcott, a professor of gender studies at the University of Toronto, delivers a clear-eyed assessment of the links between property, policing, and the subjugation of Black people. It has been shortlisted for the 2021 Toronto Book Awards.

Taking inspiration from the Rastafarian example of transformation can happen in the midst of ongoing forms of subjection and suffering, Walcott draws parallels between calls to defund the police in the wake of George Floyd’s death and the 19th-century abolitionist movement, and notes that the earliest specialized police forces were established to police slaves in his native Barbados in the 17th century.

Walcott also claims that the war on drugs in the 1990s gave rise to a prison industrial complex that disproportionately imprisons Black people while providing jobs for whites displaced by deindustrialization. He also asserts that police reform efforts, including hiring more minority officers and establishing outposts in underserved neighborhoods, fail because they only further cement the position policing occupies in our lives.

The answer, Walcott contends, is to redirect resources currently earmarked for caging people to education, health care, and other social programs that have been gutted by neo-liberalism. Though he offers little practical discussion of how to achieve defunding, Walcott's analysis of the ways in which white supremacy is baked into the legal systems of North America is stimulating.

On Property: Policing, Prisons, and the Call for Abolition is written and research rather well. Walcott concludes his case by asking for a new ethics of care and economy that does not keep feeding into the incarceration system – a system rigged to continue Black suffering.

All in all, On Property: Policing, Prisons, and the Call for Abolition is a thoughtful, wide-ranging, compassionate, and profound dissertation for new ethics on policing.

[Ryan Bell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely essential reading!

Only the last 20-25 pages are specifically about property but the theme is laced throughout, from the first pages.

Walcott shows how prison and police abolition are inextricably linked to the ownership, as property, of Black bodies, by white plantation owners. He paints a positive vision of an alternative way of living together and convincingly shows that no police or prison reform efforts will ever address the root causes of mass incarceration, the prison-industrial complex, and racist policing, for the simple fact that policing and prisons are built upon this racist foundation.

Walcott insists that our criminal punishment system, and indeed the whole arrangement of private and public property, needs to be dismantled and a new one built in its place. This will be a long and often painful process, but Walcott reminds the reader that the system we current have was created and we can create something different if we want to.

[JC · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this. A beautifully written pamphlet that was a joy to read. A very accessible tract that connects the anti-slavery abolitionist politics of previous centuries to the abolitionist movements of today (calling not only for the abolition of carceral institutions but also property itself). This text is not intended to be a carefully structured argument that pre-emptively deals with all the nuances and complexities of how such a future is to be realized, but it draws important connections between the logics of enclosure and that of slavery. It is the Black experience of being treated as property that illuminates how the entire logic of property is continually reproducing violence in the form of police brutality and carceral institutions. Walcott writes of George Floyd:

“That a Black man could be openly killed in the streets by state-sanctioned authority for passing a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill was not surprising to me.”

As Walcott puts it:

“…the Black enslaved person literally had no autonomy or control over either their body or biological kin: the child followed the condition of the mother and thereby became at birth the white master’s property. This fact has informed Black people’s relationship to property ever since… Having once been property ourselves, we as Black people perhaps understand more than most the stakes of an abolition politics and the reasons why it is necessary. The African-American cultural critic and MacArthur fellow Fred Moten, in his critique of Karl Marx’s conception of the commodity, writes about ‘what Marx couldn’t even imagine, the commodity who shrieked.’”

Walcott goes on to describe the continuity from the plantation overseer to the local officer today:

“Policing is central to all abolitionist claims. As a people who have been “policed” from the plantation straight through to the present moment, Black people have such an intimate understanding of what policing looks like in all its forms that imagining a world without police is only logical, often urgently so. That there was ever a world without police should not surprise anyone, though I also know it will. But there is a beginning to everything, including the police, which is another way of saying that there was a time when things could have been different.

…Katherine McKittrick, the Black feminist geographer, argues that the plantation remains the primary model for modern ideas of service, how cities are organized, who is valued, and so much more. McKittrick believes that the plantation has not gone away but has rather been diffused, shaping innumerable aspects of modern life… One of the most significant ideas to flow from the plantation is the logic of possession, and how it extends all the way from property to various cultural practices and who possesses the power and authority in all manner of social relations in our culture.”

Carding is another practice Walcott connects directly back to the travel passes of the slave plantations. There are some really interesting first-hand accounts Walcott mentions of his own experiences protesting on the streets, and he connects various modern uprisings in a moving way to the slave uprisings led by people like Nat Turner (who I first encountered in Assata Shakur’s autobiography). There are important cases he mentions involving Peel Police officers, like the murders of Jermaine Carby and Michael Wade Lawson, and I definitely need to read more about this history as it’s the very police force I’ve lived under for most of my life.

Just wanted to conclude with some interesting commentary Walcott shares regarding both communism and Marxism, which I sometimes diverge from, but I think they touch on important issues and are framed in interesting ways:

“At this essay’s beginning I mentioned the work of Saidiya Hartman, and I return to her now. Hartman is ambivalent about Black agency—since agency is most often associated with the idea of a free person, even an emancipated Black person cannot be understood as being free in the way agency usually implies—and anyone who knows anything about Marxism knows that agency is central to its tenets and particularly to how the working classes can overthrow those who own and control the means of production. In recent years we have seen Black people, influenced by the Movement for Black Lives, attempt not to take over the means of production but rather to share in them both at the material and ideological level… questions about agency, or the lack thereof, point to a stalled freedom for Black people, now rearticulated as abolitionist politics and desire, because we are forced to contend with what freedom is or might be, not just for Black people but for everyone.”

“…a broader abolitionist politics is influenced by the history of communism; put in Gilmore’s terms, it is a small-c communism without a party. The abolition of property undergirds a Black understanding and reworking of what communism is and means, but it is also part of a philosophy that takes the idea of the commons, meaning the collective ownership of the earth’s resources by all of us, seriously again. Policing and criminal punishment continue to further strip our relationship to the commons, replacing it with private property and heavily circumscribed and policed public property. If we return to an order of knowledge of collective ownership, as the commons previously suggested prior to capitalism, in which we are collectively responsible for managing the natural and social resources that make human life possible, then we will have a different kind of society.”

[warren · Rating 4 out of 5]

read this for an AWESOME class im in,, great short book. a lot of it is classic police/prison abolition content, but the lenses and modes of analysis hes using are profound and they very beautifully and critically expand what abolition is:

1) he clearly and deeply links policing and prisons to the plantation, enslavement, and colonization,, drawing on the work of Christina Sharpe and Saidiya Hartman to great effect.

2) following this^, his analysis is about policing as a GLOBAL mechanism of controlling Black people and protecting property. uses barbados, kanada, and amerika all throughout his analysis as well as discussing nigeria, france, and south africa. i learned so much and i wish more abolitionist texts had this grounding.

3) of course the emphasis on the necessary abolition of property. he explores both the relationship between policing & property and between Blackness & property. he talks about the increasing privatization of everything in life that policing enforces,, and the ways that Black life is still brutally structured by the original social position the west forced onto it, which is that of being property, or breathing & working commodities as he puts it.

i also love how he ties today's riots and uprisings to the long and steady legacy of global Black revolt against enslavement. 4 stars just bc it felt like he repeats himself sometimes and some other random things abt his writing style that weren't my cup of tea.

[Pooja · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.4. good primer tracing the relationship between the abolition of slavery and modern day abolition, however, doesn’t go into a ton of detail about the history of property and its contribution to violence. there was also definitely more to say about colonial conceptions of property in general and how it creates dispossession on a broader scale at many levels but that seemed to be glossed over a bit.

[J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic - reading this book feels like learning from that incredibly perceptive and effective teacher who just knows how to make sure you "get it" on a deep level. Very worthwhile reading!

[annie · Rating 3 out of 5]

i was expecting more on property, but the concept of property came in at the very end of the book. it wasn't convincingly threaded with the rest of the arguments on policing and prisons, so that was quite unfortunate ! but the book did a good job as an introduction to abolitionism and policing in canada.

[Sherry · Rating 5 out of 5]

A 5 just bc it changed my mind. When I started this I was like there’s no way I’m going to agree to communes and abolishing private property?? By the end of this I was like fuck they’re right it’s the only way

[Seamus · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent introduction into abolitionist politics. Rinaldo does a fantastic job at clearly outlining the relationships between people, property, and the carceral state, and how this relationship creates an economy that values material assets over human lives.

This topic is extremely complex, and there is much more to say about it than is mentioned in this book. Still, it provides a great base, and also provides great resources for further exploration.

Abolition should not be a scary word–it simply means accepting that all things can be learned and unlearned, and that what is now does not have to always be.

[Marlowe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was a bit disappointed by how little time the book spends on property. There's a mention at the beginning about Rastafarian communal ownership, and then nothing until the final 10 pages. The bulk of the book is a perfectly good summary of the abolition (police and prison) movement, complete with lots of name dropping to build a further reading list with. I was also glad that it had a broader North American focus, with many of its examples and statistics coming from Canada (with some mentions of Paris and South Africa, as well). It was a broader focus that I usually get to see.

But I've already read a lot of the books quoted, and what I wanted was a better understanding of how property fits into it. I did get a taste of that at the very end, with some brief mentions of how so many of the crimes that disproportionately affect Black and Indigenous people are property crimes, not violent crimes, and how property crimes are highly correlated with poverty. But the connection from there to changing the way we think about *property* wasn't spelled out in a way I could grasp. To me, the argument lends itself more to saying that we need to rethink how we deal with property crime, and that we need to prevent it altogether by investing in our communities.

One takeaway from the book that will stick with me is the idea that Black people in North America have a different relationship with property, having *been* legally considered property in the recent past. That's an idea I haven't seen spelled out like this before, and I'll be mulling it over.

[William Robison · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Abolition is about choices- social, economic, and cultural- and that it places the sanctity of human life at the center of how we care for each other."

If the center of abolition is choice, then the central thesis of this book revolves around imagination, and the (in)ability we have to find creative alternatives to policing and property. While the author, and most of the cited examples, view abolition through a Black lens (appropriately), there is a lot of wisdom in living in the world creatively and innovatively; that is, the profoundest wisdom to be gained in living with a deep desire to honor the sanctity of human life is to imagine a world in which policing is not the primary tool of the state to protect us.

Much like The Dawn of Everything, the reader is called to leave behind internalized notions of what "safety" and "security" really mean, especially the untenable idea that in order to maintain peace and wellness on a large scale, we must have a strong police presence. Walcott connects this harmful idea to the growth of individualism, especially in the U.S., since the 1980s, and an increased understanding of property as relating to merely individual affairs, disconnected from any communal context. Since everything is seemingly so accessible now, those on the margins are increasingly forgotten, excluded, and, consequently, policed.

No wonder bills like SB 197 in Indiana, penalizing (or, more accurately, criminalizing) homelessness are even considered. While it was (thankfully) voted down, laws like this are the natural outcome of a state-sponsored movement away from providing for those in need, and instead questioning their presence (i.e. existence) even in what used to be communal places like squares, sidewalks, and parks.

I love this book for how much it packs in so few pages. It is extremely accessible, driven by anecdote and vulnerability. It is engaging, with countless sources referenced to argue the underlying themes while not over-explaining points the author considers to be obvious (at least from the Black experience). It is real and doesn't pull punches.

Anyone anxious about how America seems to be moving further towards the far-right, and worried that we may be losing something deeply compassionate in our collective, public life should read this book.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

So I'll start with this in case anyone else didn't notice, but this book is quite short! It's an extended essay, roughly a hundred pages long. I think this is a great primer, written in the aftermath of the 2020 protests in the wake of George Floyd's murder. Rinaldo Walcott makes not only a succinct case for police and prison abolition, but more importantly, demonstrates the connection between policing and property. The notion of property is something I've been thinking about a lot lately, particularly how most of our notions about property - especially here in the U.S. - stems from John Locke, who was a major stakeholder in a Trans-Atlantic slave-trading enterprise. I think about the hypocrisy of that often, that we hold Locke's views in such high regard without considering how compromised his morality was. 400 years later, Walcott articulates where that narrative has wound up today, exposing police for what they really are: the protectors of property for the propertied only. The last thing I'll add is Walcott focuses on his home country and city of Canada and Toronto, but also looks at other countries like the United States and France. Definitely worth the short amount of time it'll take you to read it.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great primer on the abolition of policing, prisons, and property. Walcott explains the ideas very clearly and concisely and makes a great case. This isn't my first work from Walcott, I also read and learned from BlackLife: Post-BLM and the Struggle for Freedom, and this exceeded expectations for me. While this may not be the first book I've read on abolition, this is the first I've read that features a Canadian perspective, and it was great to see some of the ideas I had read about before applied more directly to Canadian life and politics.

I also loved going through his sources, which feature many accessible works online (I read many of the articles linked in the book as I went along), books I've previously read, books I've been wanting to read, and books I hadn't been familiar with before but have a great deal of interest in now.

Overall a great primer, I'm looking forward to spending more time with the sources for a deeper understanding, and I look forward to any future works from Walcott. I definitely recommend it for anyone looking for a primer on abolition, especially Canadian readers.

[Stoffia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Walcott propose l'abolition comme programme politique. De la police, des prisons, de la propriété. C'est un programme qui n'est pas pour me déplaire.

Je m'attendais donc, de la part d'un chercheur universitaire, à un livre fouillé, bourré de références et qui apporte des réponses aux contre-arguments martelés chaque fois que quelqu'un murmure qu'il faudrait abolir la police.

Ce n'est pas ce que fait On Property qui, au final, est plus un pamphlet de 80 pages qu'un argumentaire étoffé. Ce n'est pas mauvais en soi, ce n'est simplement pas ce que je cherchais. J'ai écouté des podcasts qui abordaient les sujets qu'amène Walcott avec plus de profondeur.

Le principal apport de ce livre est d'apporter une perspective canadienne à un enjeu que l'on perçoit trop souvent avec une lentille américaine.

En d'autres mots : je lirais sans problème un autre livre de l'auteur, sur le même sujet, mais qui aurait quelques centaines de pages de plus.

[Xylia · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you like Angela Davis’ ‘Are prisons obsolete?’ or Desmond Cole’s ‘The skin we’re in,’ this book is for you!

Walcott does not believe that Black liberation is possible without the abolition of the “criminal punishment system” (as he calls it), the police, and more radically, private property.

Walcott is a professor at the University of Toronto, so a great amount of the writing is centred around past and present racism in Canada. Two really interesting pieces of information about racism in Canada that I learned are: (1) South Africa modelled parts of the apartheid system after our ‘Indian Act,’ as well as the Canadian residential school system, and (2) ‘sundown towns.’ My father-in-law, who is Black, told me a few years ago about a town an hour away that had a law stating that Black folks couldn’t be in town after dark. I had no clue that the law was so widespread or that these towns had a specific name.

[Keegan Webster · Rating 3 out of 5]

Typical police abolition fare, that makes reasonable points about the lack of feasibility of abolishing the police without abolishing the system that they are built to maintain. Reading this kind of point, I try to accept it for what it is, but it can be difficult as it really struggles to advocate a positive political program that makes any sense to me. I try my best to be respectful of abolitionists as having their own political history and philosophy, but sometimes the anarchist alarm starts going off when they try and explain how to implement their theory (No party? No organization? Pure vibes). In this guys case, he also sounded like a social democrat at times as well, mostly due to his invocation of the Nordic countries. Also, if you want to call it a pamphlet, it has to be free and you have to hand it out, you can't sell it for 14.95 CAD at Chapters. Either be an anarchist or don't.

[Michael Skora · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very solid for the most part, but “On Property” looked toward Scandinavian social democracies in a rather flattering (albeit not idealistic) light, which felt as though Walcott’s idea of abolition had not entirely refused the reformist paradigms. Further, the author’s framing of abolition did not seem to stress how essential an international anti-neocolonial movement toward revolution would be. There was very little discussion on how an abolitionism within Western, white-dominated countries would reshape its extraction from and oppression over the Global South in unequal trade relations (although Walcott does indict some of the dynamics in the Caribbean such as the tourist industry). I believe that if more time were dedicated to explaining his argument in favor of abolishing property, this absolutely necessary topic could have been covered.

[Anton Wood · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall a really great, accessible read on what abolition looks like present day and the recent history of how property has shaped policing, criminalization, etc.

I found the use of Indigenous knowledge and world views overall lacking in this piece. I don’t know a ton about communism, and especially not compared Walcott and other thinkers he references throughout this, but the inclusion of communism was a bit troubling. Communism included the removal and erasure of Indigenous nations across it’s area of origin, and I see the echoes of this continued when Indigenous ways of being, All My Relations, are barely mentioned, and in place a call for communism and communal ways of being cited from those methods instead.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Another wise thief calling thief. Look there, how bad! When, in fact, the working people have to pay taxes to build the nice office for Walcott, to hire him with a way above minimal wage. And Walcott expects when he is going to stop working the same poor and exploited to pay their dues to give him a generous pension for not bothering to go to the office, by than hold by another paper pusher. And, in time, Walcott expects to hire also for above minimal wages some nieces and nephews to help him churn more papers and more diplomas and more certificates if possible.

[Jessica B · Rating 5 out of 5]

I waffled between a 4 and a 5, mostly because it didn’t always feel like a super tight read, but in the end, when I thought back on how many passages I had highlighted, and how many times I had to stop and readjust as the author pointed out a subtle way to reinterpret the world (relabelling riots as revolutions for example), I knew it had to be a 5. Any book that leaves me reevaluating my perception of the world deserves a 5. I also appreciated that it was short and concise - to the point, no need to drag it out. Definitely recommend if you want deeper insight into abolitionism!

[Carie Gall · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was more an essay than a book, so not always the easiest read. Brought up some very interesting points relating the concept of the ownership of property (both land AND people in the times of slavery) and how everything relates back to protection of property. Significant discussion of the inequitable rates of policing of black people and how that leads to greater incarceration rates. Definitely makes you think about the argument about investing in social services to decrease inequities which might decrease crime...

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

At one point he calls this a pamphlet and it is indeed a pretty short cursory look at abolition, though I like the angle of the abolition of private property as an important aspect of the abolition of the criminal justice system. That feels new, sort of. Though even though he spends a lot of time showing how private property and the cj system are connected -- and so why they need to be abolished together -- he doesn't spend a ton of time showing how -- just that it needs to happen. But that might be the kind of knowledge that can only be discovered as people try to enact it.

[Ariel C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

the prison industrial complex in america has been a topic i’ve developed a keen interest in ever since i took one class and the lecture topic was policing. i think reading this book has made me more critical and empathetic as a budding academic. it has been devastating yet enlightening to learn more about the deeply embedded structures of racism and capitalism linked to incarceration. i think this is a powerful read even if you don’t have much knowledge on the subject matter (the magnetic prose is magical!) 10/10!!!!

[Kathleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Walcott ties together abolition with other themes quite well but I didn't find anything new in this essay. Also I disagreed with his portrayal of feminists as having mastered transformative justice in order to make a clean and simple case for it as an alternative to carceral systems. I admire his elaboration on abolition to involve the abolition of property; it is helpful to guide us in these current times of the trending defund the police movement.

[Cindy · Rating 3 out of 5]

For a book called “On Property” there is very little depth into… the subject of property. There are some good points made (pg. 49 - violence begets violence, except when it comes to the police of course!) and ties b/t looting and plantation rebellion (pg. 61), but the argument that “property is at the nexus of our freedom” (pg. 96) seems underdeveloped which is kind of a bummer to me as someone who already leans toward abolitionist politics.

[amyleigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rinaldo Walcott's pamphlet on abolition as it ties to policing, property, and Black existence and survival is sharp and succinct but holds so much. Walcott names the ties between plantation slavery and policing, between white supremacy and property, and offers an opening toward what abolition dreams of making and unmaking. This as a necessary act.

[Dennis Wong · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reviewers before me have criticized Professor Walcott's logic, both in cohesion and trajectory. I share similar concerns. However, what makes this book worthwhile is its energetic message of abolition - in many ways, this book is the written equivalent of a "riot" as defined therein. Riots may not seem logical, but they can capture our attention in ways that more docile acts cannot.

4/5