Call Me Chronic

So, y'all got me, you've been asking me lots of asks about police abolition and restorative justice and prison abolition and honestly I have not read anything about any of this, I am not a sociologist or theorist of any kind, I'm basing it all on my learned experience and the bits and pieces I've picked up here and there and my fathomless imagination.

I've picked up a couple things to read on this topic.

Today I'm going to talk a little about my first impressions on A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete by Geo Maher. This truly is first impressions; I am not far in this book at all. But I think I have this book's number and I don't think it's going to surprise me.

This book was published in 2021, so perhaps it was a little ahead of the curve, but it seems to me it's mostly describing what was happening in 2020/2021 (and, in fact, to be fair, the book doesn't claim to be doing much more than that).

Let's look at the table of contents:

Introduction 1. The Pig Majority 2. Who Do You Serve? Who Do You Protect? 3. The Mirage of Reform 4. Breaking Police Power 5. Building Communities Without Police 6. Self-Defense and Abolition 7. Abolish ICE, Abolish the Border Conclusion: Democracy or the Police?

This is all very telling, and what it tells me is backed up in the introduction. It draws a line from slavery and abolition of slavery and the failure of Reconstruction through the formation of police departments and the alternate methods of slavery like sharecropping and prisoner rental, and then the line sort of fuzzes out and ends at the deaths of many people of color at the hands of police today. Policing is a hammer and every social problem is a nail. We've imagined ourselves into a box where policing is the necessary fix for all ills.

All of this is correct. And then you stumble on this further (again, correct) statement:

"Today, amid a torrent of mea culpas from a Democratic Party leadership complicit in jailing its own electoral base, there is little question that mass incarceration is a "crisis" in need of radical solutions."

And let's take a pause here.

Many things are true at once in this world. This statement is largely true, except for the fact that huge chunks of the electorate and the country do not believe mass incarceration is a crisis in need of radical solutions. But, put that aside.

Has the Democratic Party leadership historically been complicit in jailing its own electoral base?

Yes. Everyone fell for the dumbass "teenage superpredator" shit in the 90s. Everyone fell for Tough On Crime. Everyone fell for the War on Drugs. And don't tell me that we couldn't know better then; we might have all the research to back it up now, but I have a book from the actual 1970s called "Radical Noninterference" which states that hey, maybe the biggest damage done to kids in the juvenile justice system is in fact the juvenile justice system. Doctors knew that treating addiction like a crime is facially idiotic until that knowledge was essentially criminalized and driven out of medical schools. All the theory was there.

But now tell me: who, exactly, is this book written for?

Because in one stroke, the author has eliminated the biggest source of possible support for these ideas. Conservatives aren't even in Maher's field of view; establishment Democrats are complicit in mass incarceration. Every paragraph here is a joyous and furious condemnation of the system. For whose ears? For a future that you think will already agree with you? Congratulations on your nothingburger. For the people who already think your way? They didn't need it!

Who is going to make these reforms happen? In 2021 and 2022 in my state we managed huge reforms. I mean, sure, see above in the table of contents re: reform and mirage; I'm well aware that reform of a broken system is putting band-aids on gunshot wounds and broken limbs. But you know what? Those make a difference. Here's a couple factoids about my state in the last five years:

The death penalty was abolished.

While most states' prison populations were going up in the years after 2020-2022, as the perceived risk from COVID was over (I know it's not over), our state's prison population was going down because of laws about early release and time calculation and probation violations.

The death penalty was abolished.

A reform to jury trial procedure vastly reduced the sentencing exposure people got if a jury found them guilty. As a result, the public defender's office I was in at the time started scheduling so many jury trials that the local courts had to book them three per day. Do you know what this means? "Standard offers" went down. We started winning not guilty verdicts. The prosecutors got scared.

Who made those reforms?

Oh, that's right... An alliance of establishment Democrats. Who were convinced of the need and who knew how to write laws and get things done. If you're going to abolish police or prisons, you have to get them on board, and you don't get people on board by telling them they're complicit in jailing their own base.

Guess what, man? We're all complicit. Everything here is designed to make the underclass invisible and designed to make us believe that the underclass is "deserving" of what they got. Everyone's got Amazon Prime or gets stuff at Walmart or likes Starbucks or whatever.

I think texts with attitudes like this are self-defeating. They confine the knowledge and understanding to the people who already know and understand. They make it okay to hate everyone and, potentially, given the titles of the chapters, dismiss any efforts at reform as inherently illusory, pacifying for the crowd, inadequate for real change.

And, on top of that, they're missing the connection. Don't get me wrong, there is a direct line from slavery and Jim Crow to mass incarceration to police violence. But I don't think anyone outside the justice system understands how it works moment by moment. The honest to fuck ubiquitous and constant pressure of state violence on every single aspect of the system. This is why protestors (and people who are not normally in contact with the criminal justice system) get shocked when they come up against completely normal arrest and jail conditions which courts have already said don't violate any rights. There's no real understanding of how our legal rights have been dismantled already in the interest of the war on drugs.

Because of that, people writing these books can't explain to the uneducated how the road from slavery and colonialism connects to the cops that they see on TV helping people.

If capitalism didn't make it so the only option was "spend money at a business or don't exist in public" then a ton of people who don't have money to spend would have other places to go and be able to organize meet ups for free at those spaces.

Churches run on tithes, because they need money to maintain the building and services.

Ye olde pub still needed to sell drinks and food to stay open. This is true in 2026, and it was true in 1600.

To a lesser extent, public parks still need tax money. You don't pay at point of service, but the resources have to come from SOMEWHERE. Someone has to maintain the grass and walking trails and playground equipment.

Having to work a job under late capitalism just to buy food and shelter

Everyone gets their own home and garden and grows what they need

"Everyone gets their own home" and who's building the homes? What kind of homes? Just the bare necessities? Everyone gets a flat that has a bed, bathroom, and kitchen area?

"Grows what they need" from a garden? What are we, vegans???? Vegans who all have the skill and self-discipline to maintain a food garden???

What about the people who can't grow their own food? You expect someone who can't even walk to be out there working in a garden every day??

And what about things we don't need, but want? If I want a cake now, if I had a job, I could go to the store and buy one. Or buy the ingredients to make one.

I can't do that under what the question submitter obviously believes to be the better option.

In a weirdly utopic society where everyone is willing and able and happy to just survive with what they need, there'd be no disabled people, or lazy people(like me), or people with weird allergies like the sun or grass or bugs. We'd all eat vegetables and we'd all be FREEEEE from capitalism to spend our times tending to our gardens every day to make sure we have enough to eat.

The only positive is everyone gets a home, but even then, the houses would most definitely be absolutely shitty houses.

No ship/character negativity! <3

Propaganda and ship songs under the cut: