i am trying to be a good role model for my sisters

who’s left- Mariame/Prison Abolition

In the first panel, a black woman says: I’m Mariame Kaba, director of Project Nia and prison abolitionist. Is prison abolition a hard thing to explain to people? I get the same questions- “What about bad people? What about rapists?”. I don’t answer those questions anymore.

The text in the following panels reads: These are posed as questions about safety but are mostly based in fear of the other. Safety for whom? And from what? It doesn’t make sense to answer because there are bad people who have not been incarcerated. I’d rather talk about having justice without police or surveillance. The images depict menacing figures alongside a group of people walking down the street; a newspaper with a headline that reads “Dog Murderer, net worth 1.5 [one point five] million dollards, cleared of all charges.”; silhouettes of police officers and cameras.

In the next panel, Mariame answers the question: Why aboltion? Why not reform? She replies: The prison system is harmful!

The text over the following panels reads: There is rampant violence, rape, and deaths in custody. The prison itself was a reform of corporal punishment. When prisons first came into use in the late 1700s [seventeen hundreds], Quakers pushed for reform. Why continue centuries of rounds of unsuccessful reforms? This text is accompanied by images of a cell; an arrow pointing from a whip to a prison; and two Quakers in conversation.

The text continues: So we have to create the conditions that decrease the demand for police and surveillance. You need jobs, healthcare, housing, people need to be able to live their lives. You need to create structures to address harm and hold people accountable. People think abolitionists minimize harm but we take it very seriously. There are images of a hospital, a house and an office building being dropped on the ground by a crane arm, and after that, four sets of people who hold others on top of their shoulders; the people on top have their arms connected to each other.

The text continues: A lot of people think abolitionists want to close prisons tomorrow when we didn’t get there yesterday. Ruthie Gilmore says “abolition is about presence, not absence. It’s about building life-affirming institutions.”. A drawing of Ruthie looks on as a figure tries to flip a switch that’s labeled “prison industrial complex” off.

The text continues: The prison system sits at the intersection of multiple forms of oppression and facts of society, and when you map it out, we’re all in that web. the image shows a prison in the center of a spider web.

The text continues: I am the director of Project Nia, an organization focused on ending youth incarceration. I also work with Survived + Punished, a project dedicated to the release of survivors of domestic + gendered violence imprisoned for survival actions. Survived and Punished’s Free Bresha campaign successfully managed to Keep Bresha Meadows in the juvenile system rather than being tried and sentenced as an adult, and transferred to a mental health facility before finally being released, avoiding a 26 [twenty six] to life sentence. There is an image of Mariame talking, and of Bresha, with text that reads: Bresha Meadows was arrested at 14 [fourteen] for fatally shooting her abusive father in self-defense.

The text continues: Some people ask how feasible abolition is. Security is about putting up gates and walls between you and other people. How feasible is it to continue a violent system? For people to live in fear? The prison system is a recent development and not as permanent as people think. I don’t know what a world without prisons will look like, but it will fundamentally transform our relationship with other people. There are images of people separated by walls. These walls come down, and are taken away by crane arms. The final image is of a group of people walking towards each other.