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Abolition Revolution
An introductory guide to the roots and contemporary context of, and resistance to carceral politics in Britain
George Floyd's murder in Minneapolis triggered abolitionist shockwaves. Calls to defund the police found receptive ears around the world. Shortly after, Sarah Everard's murder by a serving police officer sparked a national abolitionist movement in Britain. But to abolish the police, prisons and borders, we must confront the legacy of Empire.
Abolition Revolution is a guide to abolitionist politics in Britain, drawing out rich histories of resistance from rebellion in the colonies to grassroots responses to carceral systems today. The authors argue that abolition is key to reconceptualising revolution for our times - linking it with materialist feminisms, anti-capitalist class struggle, internationalist solidarity and anti-colonialism.
Perfect for reading groups and activist meetings, this is an invaluable book for those new to abolitionist politics - whilst simultaneously telling a passionate and authoritative story about the need for abolition and revolution in Britain and globally.
George Floyd's murder in Minneapolis triggered abolitionist shockwaves. Calls to defund the police found receptive ears around the world. Shortly after, Sarah Everard's murder by a serving police officer sparked a national abolitionist movement in Britain. But to abolish the police, prisons and borders, we must confront the legacy of Empire.
Abolition Revolution is a guide to abolitionist politics in Britain, drawing out rich histories of resistance from rebellion in the colonies to grassroots responses to carceral systems today. The authors argue that abolition is key to reconceptualising revolution for our times - linking it with materialist feminisms, anti-capitalist class struggle, internationalist solidarity and anti-colonialism.
Perfect for reading groups and activist meetings, this is an invaluable book for those new to abolitionist politics - whilst simultaneously telling a passionate and authoritative story about the need for abolition and revolution in Britain and globally.
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320 pages, Hardcover
First published November 20, 2022
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September 20, 2024
Today’s politics of prison and police abolition are dominated by voices from the United States, such that some on the Left believe abolition to be a provincial movement, born of the exceptional brutality of American police and mass incarceration that stands in for the afterlife of slavery. This view not only localizes the problem of these institutions, but construes it as a matter of excess rather than essential function. When the problem of the prison-industrial complex is imagined as an exclusively American problem, faced by a more-or-less exclusively Black American population, the practical realities of prisons everywhere and their historical development globally fall away. American abolitionists will tell you all this, but you don’t have to take them at their word. Aviah Sarah Day and Shanice Octavia McBean’s Abolition Revolution is a fantastic overview of and clarion call for abolitionist politics in Britain. This work both resonates with the refrains of American abolitionists and proves a wholly original and sorely needed contribution to abolitionist internationalism that demands to be read on both sides of the Atlantic.
Though the book focuses on the carceral systems of Britain, it foregrounds an analysis that casts those systems as functionaries of empire and racial capitalism to manage crisis and control transnational movements of labor and capital. Committed to nothing short of global revolution, Day and McBean demonstrate how carceral and police power hold working class and oppressed people hostage to violent domination - and how withdrawing our consent to these institutions is but one step towards liberation. What’s remarkable about this book is that it balances an ambitious scope with approachable, concrete arguments. This book achieves a shocking amount in a short space, carrying the reader through narratives of political organizations, campaigns, and direct actions; analyses of recent trends in both police practice and media discourse; histories of class struggle against police and prisons in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; and critiques of both neoliberal policy and colonialist exploitation of migrants. The authors somehow manage a digestible work that shafts neither theoretical argument nor historical detail, governed by clear, propulsive prose.
Abolition Revolution is split into sixteen theses, followed by a Q&A symposium of anti-canceral activists from several UK organizations. This organization is part of what allows the book to cover so much ground in a short space. The first two theses contextualize the erupting abolitionist movement in Britain following the global BLM protests of 2020 and narrate the story of Sisters Uncut, the abolitionist organization to which Day and McBean belong. What’s clear is that the UK movement does not simply tail the viral media spectacle of American police violence but responds to its own conditions and histories. If anything, the moment of George Floyd brought in clearer focus the horrors of British police, followed not long after by the rape and murder of Sarah Everard and the “Kill the Bill” campaign against the Police, Crime, Sentencing, and Courts Act in 2021. The story of Sisters Uncut starts earlier, in 2014, when the organization began as a group of survivors against cuts to domestic violence services. Only with experience did Sisters Uncut come to realize that carceral and policing solutions fail to serve survivors and in fact put them at greater risk by design. The model tends to lock up survivors either instead or alongside their abusers; uses the pretext of domestic violence for greater surveillance over Black communities; and arranges police to protect state prerogatives of austerity. Sisters Uncut transformed their reformist advocacy for a resurrected welfare state to a broader rejection of state violence, focused on efforts to curb expanding police power in tandem with efforts to secure housing for homeless survivors.
The chapters that follow expand the case for abolition’s urgency in the UK. One thesis tracks British policing’s dependence on racism and another women’s experiences of state violence. Day and McBean cleave to materialist understandings of race and gender. They foreground race’s function to divide the working class and produce consent for state domination among a significant chunk of ordinary people, who may themselves “become Blackened” by their own defiance of the capitalist state. They track women’s exposure to violence and changes in feminist forms of resistance through analysis of economic changes, especially the professionalization and sterilization of radical feminist activity after the 1970s financial crisis.
The book provides brief, impactful histories that gesture towards a longer tradition of British prison abolition. The authors read the anti-Catholic Gordon riots of 1780 as initially misplaced ethno-religious rage that was turned towards the establishment and Bow Street Runners (early forerunners of the police), linking the event to the London riots of 2011 and the Bristol riots of 2021. They draw from British Marxist historians an understanding that modern centralized police forces were tested against the colonized of Ireland and India at the end of the 18th century before being brought to the metropole as everyday worker organization was becoming criminalized in the beginning of the 19th century. They argue convincingly that policing is a response first and foremost to the organizing power of the working class, rather than to harm between community members, which has only served to legitimate policing in retrospect. The lineage of police violence from the 19th century to today is made astonishingly clear, as Day and McBean note how the Vagrancy Act of 1824 that criminalized homelessness was repurposed to target Black communities for random stop and search (what we call stop and frisk in the US).
Day and McBean do a great job surveying a variety of constituencies impacted and political phenomena imbricated by British policing and incarceration. Claiming the centrality of youth radicalism, they place the 2011 London riots in context with cuts to funding in higher ed, increased police presence in schools, and the deteriorating sense of future for young people (of color and in general) as partly fuelling the rupture triggered by the police murder of Mark Duggan. Especially helpful is their review of the colonial-capitalist forces that drove the Windrush generation of Caribbean immigrants to the UK, a need for the post-war welfare state to gather a reserve army of exploitable workers during a labor shortage. Such a “welcoming” environment for immigrants turns hostile when they are no longer needed to manage economic crises–hence the 2018 Windrush crisis, the tightening of legal controls of immigration, and the targeting of immigrant workers such as Deliveroo drivers for criminalization and union busting. I learned much about how the so-called “War on Terror” was experienced by Muslims in the UK as absurd racial profiling through the program Prevent and the expansion of police power to the public itself. And I found the analysis of policing faced by Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller (GRT) communities extremely enlightening in the way it opens up connections of solidarity between Black and GRT victims of stop and search, for instance.
Beyond these histories, perhaps the greatest insight of Abolition Revolution for those already familiar with American abolitionist discourse is that the British abolitionist movement cannot uncritically adopt American slogans. Day and McBean argue that British policing has largely been defunded by austerity, unlike in the States. But this has meant that the functions of policing and its violence have been transferred to other professionals and much of the general public. For example, teachers have been heavily recruited to report students to Prevent on the slightest whims. The final symposium throws the challenges ahead of both the British and global movement for abolition in stark relief–the need for unglamorous collectivizing of reproductive labor, the traps of hyperlocalisms, the lack of time workers have to develop community–but this book’s articulation of these roadblocks and commitments to revolutionary discipline make it a valuable tool to orient one’s political horizon.
Though the book focuses on the carceral systems of Britain, it foregrounds an analysis that casts those systems as functionaries of empire and racial capitalism to manage crisis and control transnational movements of labor and capital. Committed to nothing short of global revolution, Day and McBean demonstrate how carceral and police power hold working class and oppressed people hostage to violent domination - and how withdrawing our consent to these institutions is but one step towards liberation. What’s remarkable about this book is that it balances an ambitious scope with approachable, concrete arguments. This book achieves a shocking amount in a short space, carrying the reader through narratives of political organizations, campaigns, and direct actions; analyses of recent trends in both police practice and media discourse; histories of class struggle against police and prisons in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; and critiques of both neoliberal policy and colonialist exploitation of migrants. The authors somehow manage a digestible work that shafts neither theoretical argument nor historical detail, governed by clear, propulsive prose.
Abolition Revolution is split into sixteen theses, followed by a Q&A symposium of anti-canceral activists from several UK organizations. This organization is part of what allows the book to cover so much ground in a short space. The first two theses contextualize the erupting abolitionist movement in Britain following the global BLM protests of 2020 and narrate the story of Sisters Uncut, the abolitionist organization to which Day and McBean belong. What’s clear is that the UK movement does not simply tail the viral media spectacle of American police violence but responds to its own conditions and histories. If anything, the moment of George Floyd brought in clearer focus the horrors of British police, followed not long after by the rape and murder of Sarah Everard and the “Kill the Bill” campaign against the Police, Crime, Sentencing, and Courts Act in 2021. The story of Sisters Uncut starts earlier, in 2014, when the organization began as a group of survivors against cuts to domestic violence services. Only with experience did Sisters Uncut come to realize that carceral and policing solutions fail to serve survivors and in fact put them at greater risk by design. The model tends to lock up survivors either instead or alongside their abusers; uses the pretext of domestic violence for greater surveillance over Black communities; and arranges police to protect state prerogatives of austerity. Sisters Uncut transformed their reformist advocacy for a resurrected welfare state to a broader rejection of state violence, focused on efforts to curb expanding police power in tandem with efforts to secure housing for homeless survivors.
The chapters that follow expand the case for abolition’s urgency in the UK. One thesis tracks British policing’s dependence on racism and another women’s experiences of state violence. Day and McBean cleave to materialist understandings of race and gender. They foreground race’s function to divide the working class and produce consent for state domination among a significant chunk of ordinary people, who may themselves “become Blackened” by their own defiance of the capitalist state. They track women’s exposure to violence and changes in feminist forms of resistance through analysis of economic changes, especially the professionalization and sterilization of radical feminist activity after the 1970s financial crisis.
The book provides brief, impactful histories that gesture towards a longer tradition of British prison abolition. The authors read the anti-Catholic Gordon riots of 1780 as initially misplaced ethno-religious rage that was turned towards the establishment and Bow Street Runners (early forerunners of the police), linking the event to the London riots of 2011 and the Bristol riots of 2021. They draw from British Marxist historians an understanding that modern centralized police forces were tested against the colonized of Ireland and India at the end of the 18th century before being brought to the metropole as everyday worker organization was becoming criminalized in the beginning of the 19th century. They argue convincingly that policing is a response first and foremost to the organizing power of the working class, rather than to harm between community members, which has only served to legitimate policing in retrospect. The lineage of police violence from the 19th century to today is made astonishingly clear, as Day and McBean note how the Vagrancy Act of 1824 that criminalized homelessness was repurposed to target Black communities for random stop and search (what we call stop and frisk in the US).
Day and McBean do a great job surveying a variety of constituencies impacted and political phenomena imbricated by British policing and incarceration. Claiming the centrality of youth radicalism, they place the 2011 London riots in context with cuts to funding in higher ed, increased police presence in schools, and the deteriorating sense of future for young people (of color and in general) as partly fuelling the rupture triggered by the police murder of Mark Duggan. Especially helpful is their review of the colonial-capitalist forces that drove the Windrush generation of Caribbean immigrants to the UK, a need for the post-war welfare state to gather a reserve army of exploitable workers during a labor shortage. Such a “welcoming” environment for immigrants turns hostile when they are no longer needed to manage economic crises–hence the 2018 Windrush crisis, the tightening of legal controls of immigration, and the targeting of immigrant workers such as Deliveroo drivers for criminalization and union busting. I learned much about how the so-called “War on Terror” was experienced by Muslims in the UK as absurd racial profiling through the program Prevent and the expansion of police power to the public itself. And I found the analysis of policing faced by Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller (GRT) communities extremely enlightening in the way it opens up connections of solidarity between Black and GRT victims of stop and search, for instance.
Beyond these histories, perhaps the greatest insight of Abolition Revolution for those already familiar with American abolitionist discourse is that the British abolitionist movement cannot uncritically adopt American slogans. Day and McBean argue that British policing has largely been defunded by austerity, unlike in the States. But this has meant that the functions of policing and its violence have been transferred to other professionals and much of the general public. For example, teachers have been heavily recruited to report students to Prevent on the slightest whims. The final symposium throws the challenges ahead of both the British and global movement for abolition in stark relief–the need for unglamorous collectivizing of reproductive labor, the traps of hyperlocalisms, the lack of time workers have to develop community–but this book’s articulation of these roadblocks and commitments to revolutionary discipline make it a valuable tool to orient one’s political horizon.
May 8, 2023
Very important read that clearly explains the history of the police force, and why the police will never serve as protectors of the people, and instead serve as state reinforcers.
January 24, 2023
An energising, galvanising, skidding read. Aviah and Shanice probably aren't aware of how much the both of them shaped my political consciousness, through from (fairly) early days Sisters Uncut to Kill the Bill and Copwatch more recently, but, with this book, they have provided a culmination of years of political activity and thinking that the two of them have generously shared and built with so many others. A culmination but also a stepping stone towards, they hope, a wider and more powerful movement.
The rhetoric of the book emerges from exactly that milieu and energy as well. Multiple sections end in the various chant and meeting refrains, like 'from the [xxxx] to the [xxxx],' and tricolon clause structures. Expressions common in activist analysis abound: 'sharp end of [state brutality/capitalism/sexism, etc],' 'we had them at Millbank,' and emphatic statements of what 'we must' do at the close of numerous chapters. Interwoven with this are the intermittent acknowledgements of Aviah and Shanice's personal investment in and experience of both the forces they militate against and the organising that does this pushing back. It was in these moments that I was least satisfied by the book. The mentions of personal involvement went almost entirely unanalysed and unexplored, other than to establish a type of credential as seasoned activists (completely deserved and no shade on all the work both do, here and in organising!). I was waiting for one of these mentions to develop into an analysis of something they witnessed but, more often than not, it was a glancing mention of their presence and then onto the next point in their argument. Sisters Uncut's political development was the primary exception to this; they take their significant political experience in that space and use the analysis of it to develop a wider argument on abolition and its trajectory/role in recent history. As somebody who has largely watched on from the sidelines as Sisters Uncut grew from a quite social democratic messaging (albeit with plentiful abolitionist thinking coming from Shanice and Aviah) to an explicitly abolitionist network of groups, this analysis was familiar yet still clarifying. The role of Doncaster Sisters in introducing 'movement elders' and the experience of the Hackney occupation in informing Sisters Uncut's politics were new to me, and electrifying. I'd seen these events on social media, having detached from Sisters Uncut as an organisation some time prior, but, from a distance, the analytical and causal relationship between events like these and later political stances looked more like a plodding sequence, rather than what they were: a curve of collective political learning through solidarity and action.
The optimism in these accounts is present throughout the book. Despite addressing some of the grimmest forms of state power and interpersonal harm, Aviah and Shanice maintain a strident belief in the possibility of change and the kernels of revolution that exist already in the present. It is this belief in positive possibility that I think both comes from and is needed to feed political organising. Few things can combat the malaise of capitalist realism better than working together with others towards truly transformative change (and few things reinforce that malaise more than the inevitable set backs along that process). The rhetoric, then, serves a purpose. It galvanises. The book is a call to arms, emerging from and contributing to an expanding base of agitators.
But it's not all just rhetoric and inspiration. Shanice and Aviah are serious about their political history and draw together such an array of history and explanatory links that it left me near-dizzy with excitement. Some nights I struggled to go to sleep because I was so engrossed (a rare experience in my reading life!). There's a synoptic quality to the book, emphasised by the speed with which they jump between events and analytical claims, but it is rarely short of lucid and compelling. (I suppose, though, that this may not feel the case to the same extent for those whose political education wasn't shaped by the two writers. For now, however, I imagine that their readership is going to be dominated by people with some relationship to abolitionist politics. In time I hope it will be otherwise!) This lucidity ensures that the points they make, even at the pace of a big rally's keynote speech, remain convincing. There were few things I disagreed with, even when there were vast number of things I wanted to know more about or have explained to me in more detail. This sympatico feeling between my own political outlook and the book made those moments where I wasn't convinced starker, however, and I was struck by a small number of areas where the analysis didn't quite hang together. In particularly, their analysis of remittances (p.141). They argue that harder border regimes are in part a response to the flow of remittances away from imperial metropoles and towards the countries of origin of migrant workers located in the metropole. Such capital flight ($440 billion in 2010) is anathema to imperial capitalism and, as such, Aviah and Shanice argue that (post-)imperial states harden their borders to prevent this wealth leaving their nations. On the surface, this solidly Marxist analysis feels reasonable, but then I remember that hard borders are very rarely for capital but, rather, hard borders for labour. And, similarly, it occurs to me that the sending of remittances means that migrant workers in imperial metropoles are having their already suppressed wages even further depleted, thus aiding labour discipline that benefits the capitalists who employ them. And I feel uncertain... Moments like this threw me out of the book, as the pace with which it moves implies such a confidence in its claims sometimes unearned by the density of analysis on the page (by necessity! they have so much ground to cover), but then the connections drawn overall are of such political use, as well as mostly analytically sound, that I hardly wish to complain.
What it indicates - what all this indicates: the rhetoric, the speed of analysis, the scope of phenomena covered - is that this book is a very explicit political tool. This is not an academic tome for people who prefer to pontificate not protest, it is written as a gift to the abolitionist movement. Its ideal reader isn't the person who wants to produce analysis for an essay (or review, lol) but the person who produces analysis to serve action; to usher in revolution. The authors say it themselves in the prefacing note on structure:
'Each thesis is a self-contained argument that can be read on its own. This means they can be easily used for reading groups, activist meetings, skill shares, workshops, etc.'
And, then, they end with a conversation of this kind; they 'step back to hear from other abolitionist organisers.' Shanice and Aviah recommit to their ongoing and (I don't say this glibly!) inspiring commitments to the collective project of liberation. I can't wait to discuss it in a reading group this Sunday, at a talk at the Working Class Movement Library (fingers crossed), on picket lines, and in organising meetings. La lucha continua, in no small part thanks to both these people!
The rhetoric of the book emerges from exactly that milieu and energy as well. Multiple sections end in the various chant and meeting refrains, like 'from the [xxxx] to the [xxxx],' and tricolon clause structures. Expressions common in activist analysis abound: 'sharp end of [state brutality/capitalism/sexism, etc],' 'we had them at Millbank,' and emphatic statements of what 'we must' do at the close of numerous chapters. Interwoven with this are the intermittent acknowledgements of Aviah and Shanice's personal investment in and experience of both the forces they militate against and the organising that does this pushing back. It was in these moments that I was least satisfied by the book. The mentions of personal involvement went almost entirely unanalysed and unexplored, other than to establish a type of credential as seasoned activists (completely deserved and no shade on all the work both do, here and in organising!). I was waiting for one of these mentions to develop into an analysis of something they witnessed but, more often than not, it was a glancing mention of their presence and then onto the next point in their argument. Sisters Uncut's political development was the primary exception to this; they take their significant political experience in that space and use the analysis of it to develop a wider argument on abolition and its trajectory/role in recent history. As somebody who has largely watched on from the sidelines as Sisters Uncut grew from a quite social democratic messaging (albeit with plentiful abolitionist thinking coming from Shanice and Aviah) to an explicitly abolitionist network of groups, this analysis was familiar yet still clarifying. The role of Doncaster Sisters in introducing 'movement elders' and the experience of the Hackney occupation in informing Sisters Uncut's politics were new to me, and electrifying. I'd seen these events on social media, having detached from Sisters Uncut as an organisation some time prior, but, from a distance, the analytical and causal relationship between events like these and later political stances looked more like a plodding sequence, rather than what they were: a curve of collective political learning through solidarity and action.
The optimism in these accounts is present throughout the book. Despite addressing some of the grimmest forms of state power and interpersonal harm, Aviah and Shanice maintain a strident belief in the possibility of change and the kernels of revolution that exist already in the present. It is this belief in positive possibility that I think both comes from and is needed to feed political organising. Few things can combat the malaise of capitalist realism better than working together with others towards truly transformative change (and few things reinforce that malaise more than the inevitable set backs along that process). The rhetoric, then, serves a purpose. It galvanises. The book is a call to arms, emerging from and contributing to an expanding base of agitators.
But it's not all just rhetoric and inspiration. Shanice and Aviah are serious about their political history and draw together such an array of history and explanatory links that it left me near-dizzy with excitement. Some nights I struggled to go to sleep because I was so engrossed (a rare experience in my reading life!). There's a synoptic quality to the book, emphasised by the speed with which they jump between events and analytical claims, but it is rarely short of lucid and compelling. (I suppose, though, that this may not feel the case to the same extent for those whose political education wasn't shaped by the two writers. For now, however, I imagine that their readership is going to be dominated by people with some relationship to abolitionist politics. In time I hope it will be otherwise!) This lucidity ensures that the points they make, even at the pace of a big rally's keynote speech, remain convincing. There were few things I disagreed with, even when there were vast number of things I wanted to know more about or have explained to me in more detail. This sympatico feeling between my own political outlook and the book made those moments where I wasn't convinced starker, however, and I was struck by a small number of areas where the analysis didn't quite hang together. In particularly, their analysis of remittances (p.141). They argue that harder border regimes are in part a response to the flow of remittances away from imperial metropoles and towards the countries of origin of migrant workers located in the metropole. Such capital flight ($440 billion in 2010) is anathema to imperial capitalism and, as such, Aviah and Shanice argue that (post-)imperial states harden their borders to prevent this wealth leaving their nations. On the surface, this solidly Marxist analysis feels reasonable, but then I remember that hard borders are very rarely for capital but, rather, hard borders for labour. And, similarly, it occurs to me that the sending of remittances means that migrant workers in imperial metropoles are having their already suppressed wages even further depleted, thus aiding labour discipline that benefits the capitalists who employ them. And I feel uncertain... Moments like this threw me out of the book, as the pace with which it moves implies such a confidence in its claims sometimes unearned by the density of analysis on the page (by necessity! they have so much ground to cover), but then the connections drawn overall are of such political use, as well as mostly analytically sound, that I hardly wish to complain.
What it indicates - what all this indicates: the rhetoric, the speed of analysis, the scope of phenomena covered - is that this book is a very explicit political tool. This is not an academic tome for people who prefer to pontificate not protest, it is written as a gift to the abolitionist movement. Its ideal reader isn't the person who wants to produce analysis for an essay (or review, lol) but the person who produces analysis to serve action; to usher in revolution. The authors say it themselves in the prefacing note on structure:
'Each thesis is a self-contained argument that can be read on its own. This means they can be easily used for reading groups, activist meetings, skill shares, workshops, etc.'
And, then, they end with a conversation of this kind; they 'step back to hear from other abolitionist organisers.' Shanice and Aviah recommit to their ongoing and (I don't say this glibly!) inspiring commitments to the collective project of liberation. I can't wait to discuss it in a reading group this Sunday, at a talk at the Working Class Movement Library (fingers crossed), on picket lines, and in organising meetings. La lucha continua, in no small part thanks to both these people!
January 22, 2026
This is a great book that way way more people should read. It is not just that Day and McBean provide an analysis of the need for police and prison abolition rooted in British policing (and radicalism), although this is a welcome reminder that the police are not just an American problem. What makes this book great is the focus the authors place on on the ground resistance. There are a lot of books where the political theory is clear but you are left to draw your own connections to everyday life and to what people are doing to resist the structures that oppress them. In contrast this book reminds you all the time that policing is never abstract. It only exists in the lives of those who are stopped and searched, held in immigration detention, whose encampments are destroyed, who are arrested and imprisoned again and again. This is a really ambitious book which moves fast and connects a huge number of struggles so sometimes you have to pause and let yourself dwell on one point before dashing on to the next paragraph. Worth reading slowly and soaking in the authors' years of experience as activists and clear eyed thinkers.
September 28, 2025
Enjoyed it, good mix of theory / history with practical examples. Very accessible too, I was familiar with a lot of the concepts but even if you are completely unfamiliar it’s still easy to pick up. Read for the Read Against the Machine Book Club @ Bàrd Books
November 24, 2025
Global solidarity requires learning about police systems and abolitionist movements across different countries. Prior to reading this book, most of my foundational knowledge was of North / South American abolitionist movements (specifically American, Canadian, and Brazilian). This book is a great resource for building an understanding of the British problems, struggles, and the historical background of its prison and carceral systems.
Interesting to learn how the British police system is already effectively defunded in many areas (although, as noted on page 164, multi-million pound contracts for domestic violence programs are still awarded to them, even though those very programs have since been strangely cut). This reality calls into question the stance of some people I met in the UK who advocate for defunding the police? Is it really a misunderstanding of their own system & the generic co-opting of North American calls? Theory without practice is empty, practice without theory is blind.
Interesting to learn how the British police system is already effectively defunded in many areas (although, as noted on page 164, multi-million pound contracts for domestic violence programs are still awarded to them, even though those very programs have since been strangely cut). This reality calls into question the stance of some people I met in the UK who advocate for defunding the police? Is it really a misunderstanding of their own system & the generic co-opting of North American calls? Theory without practice is empty, practice without theory is blind.
October 5, 2024
It’s the way I accidentally rated so now I have to read it soon to give it a proper rating
Read
August 24, 2025A highly insightful and pleasingly accessible analysis of the need for police/prison abolition that ultimately falls short on offering concrete and actionable next steps towards this essential goal.
December 22, 2022
Aviah and Shanice are great. This book joined some dots for me and has added greater depth to my understanding.
July 23, 2024
Clearly written book containing several digestible, self contained essays that come together to analyse the UK carceral state, one which is rooted in empire and neoliberalism
Puts forward an understanding of abolition that grounds abolitionist politics in a revolutionary vision in bridging the gap from the abstract to the concrete, as illustrated by the symposium chapter that ends the book
Through understanding capitalism as a system that organises the means of survival around private property, tying our reproduction to the often violent defence of property relations, the book clarifies how capitalism ensures the vast majority of the global working class compete, under increasingly precarious conditions, for scarce resources, thus it should be no surprise that people turn to carceral systems and police power to defend the meagre crumbs they have to sustain themselves
Capitalism organises human relations in such a way that those who are the primary targets of coercive police power - the exploited working classes who have hte most to gain by shaking free of state control - are also forced to be committed to its existence, which is why abolition cannot be anything other than a revolutionary, anti-capitalist project.
Reflexive approach that highlights the growth of their organisation (Sister Uncut) starting with their uncritical support for state-based solutions to social problems, which reflected the politics of the wider social justice movements. This limited approach espoused by radicals is a direct consequence of the post-Thatcherite context that had annihilated worker and liberation movements. However class consciousness grew under the boot of austerity and the political became understood to be personal as domestic violence was not simply private or interpersonal, but a result of patriarchal social relations, reproduced by the state, that create the conditions for domestic violence. As the group's grew to include more working class, Black, trans and disabled women the group's core anti-austerity politics expanded towards broader anti-capitalism
Metropolitan London Police operates on a policing-by-consent model that requires policing duty to feel like an extension of civic duty and thereby also making it important for police to look like the populations they dominate. Then the concept of withdrawing public consent to policing is recommended as bridging the gap between reformist and abolitionist demands
Retelling how colonisers recruited police officers from one region or tribe to police a different region or tribe, thereby exploiting language and cultural barriers to decrease the likelihood of collectivised revolt. A practice that continues in many former colonial states including Nigeria and the Philippines, thus tensions and divisions manufactured under colonial rule are perpetuated in the strategies of social control today
Also found interesting the discussion on Priti Patel's insidious PCSC Act that targeted protesters, migrants, travellers and Black folk in a single blunt legislation, but in doing so also enabled the possibility, albeit a challenging one, of solidarity between oppressing groups, which culminated in the Kill the Bill coalition.
This stands in contrast to the usual carceral state tactic of dividing and conquer that fractures anti-racist movements along racial lines e.g. Asian community resistance focusing on migrant justice and Black communities confronting police violence. The pressure to prioritise and deliberate fracturing led to this narrowing of focus and lack of opportunity to share methods of resistance, coalition and solidarity
Highly recommended to anyone interested in UK carceral politics
Puts forward an understanding of abolition that grounds abolitionist politics in a revolutionary vision in bridging the gap from the abstract to the concrete, as illustrated by the symposium chapter that ends the book
Through understanding capitalism as a system that organises the means of survival around private property, tying our reproduction to the often violent defence of property relations, the book clarifies how capitalism ensures the vast majority of the global working class compete, under increasingly precarious conditions, for scarce resources, thus it should be no surprise that people turn to carceral systems and police power to defend the meagre crumbs they have to sustain themselves
Capitalism organises human relations in such a way that those who are the primary targets of coercive police power - the exploited working classes who have hte most to gain by shaking free of state control - are also forced to be committed to its existence, which is why abolition cannot be anything other than a revolutionary, anti-capitalist project.
Reflexive approach that highlights the growth of their organisation (Sister Uncut) starting with their uncritical support for state-based solutions to social problems, which reflected the politics of the wider social justice movements. This limited approach espoused by radicals is a direct consequence of the post-Thatcherite context that had annihilated worker and liberation movements. However class consciousness grew under the boot of austerity and the political became understood to be personal as domestic violence was not simply private or interpersonal, but a result of patriarchal social relations, reproduced by the state, that create the conditions for domestic violence. As the group's grew to include more working class, Black, trans and disabled women the group's core anti-austerity politics expanded towards broader anti-capitalism
Metropolitan London Police operates on a policing-by-consent model that requires policing duty to feel like an extension of civic duty and thereby also making it important for police to look like the populations they dominate. Then the concept of withdrawing public consent to policing is recommended as bridging the gap between reformist and abolitionist demands
Retelling how colonisers recruited police officers from one region or tribe to police a different region or tribe, thereby exploiting language and cultural barriers to decrease the likelihood of collectivised revolt. A practice that continues in many former colonial states including Nigeria and the Philippines, thus tensions and divisions manufactured under colonial rule are perpetuated in the strategies of social control today
Also found interesting the discussion on Priti Patel's insidious PCSC Act that targeted protesters, migrants, travellers and Black folk in a single blunt legislation, but in doing so also enabled the possibility, albeit a challenging one, of solidarity between oppressing groups, which culminated in the Kill the Bill coalition.
This stands in contrast to the usual carceral state tactic of dividing and conquer that fractures anti-racist movements along racial lines e.g. Asian community resistance focusing on migrant justice and Black communities confronting police violence. The pressure to prioritise and deliberate fracturing led to this narrowing of focus and lack of opportunity to share methods of resistance, coalition and solidarity
Highly recommended to anyone interested in UK carceral politics
June 20, 2023
Combines activist experience with theoretical and historical engagement. Makes a strong case for how to challenge coercive institutions both in the here and now and as part of a longer term, abolitionist project.
June 12, 2024
the best UK-centric book on prison abolition to date
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