who’s left- Mariame/Prison Abolition
by Flynn Nicholls
[image description: a comic titled “Who’s Left: Prison Abolition.” It opens with a black woman wearing glasses, beaded earrings and a headscarf. She says, “I’m Mariame Kaba, director of Project NIA and prison abolitionist.” Someone off screen asks, “is prison abolition a hard thing to explain to people?” Mariame says, “I get the same questions. ‘What about bad people? What about rapists?’ I don’t answer those questions anymore.”
Next panel is of an ominous city skyline, split diagonally into a street scene where a white businessman is looking terrified among people of color moving about their lives. Text reads: “These are posed as questions about safety but are mostly based in fear of the other. Safety for whom? And from what?” Next panel says, “It doesn’t make sense to answer because there are bad people who have not been incarcerated.” There’s a closeup of a corner of a newspaper, showing a smiling man with the text: “dog murderer net worth $1.5 million, cleared on all charges.”
Next panel shows blue silhouettes of police and cameras and Mariame’s text says, “I’d rather talk about having justice without police or surveillance.” Next panel shows Mariame being asked, “Why abolition? Why not reform?” and she replies, “The prison system is harmful!” Her words appear over stylized prison bars: “there is rampant violence, rape and deaths in custody.” On a panel of a whip with an arrow pointing to a prison, she says, “the prison itself was a reform of corporal punishment.” Next panel shows a couple Quakers looking anxious outside a prison and says, “When prisons first came into use in the late 1700s, Quakers pushed for reform. Why continue centuries of rounds of unsuccessful reforms?”
Next panel says: “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.” Beneath that, three cranes with heavy chains are lowering a hospital and a home, and lifting away a prison with cracked walls as someone watches. “You need to create structures to address harm and hold people accountable. People think abolitionists minimize harm but we take it very seriously.” Beneath that, eight people are drawn, four sitting atop the others’s shoulders and holding hands above their heads to form a bridge. Underneath that it says, “Safety is a collective action.”
Next panel says: “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.’” On the left side of this panel, there’s a person trying to flip a switch on the side of a prison. The switch is labeled “Prison industrial complex” and is flipped to “on.” On the other side is a drawing of Ruth Gilmore. Next panel is a white spiderweb on a black background with a pink prison in the center, and text around the web reads: “The prison system sits at the intersection of multiple forms of oppression and facets of society, and when you map it out, we’re all in that web.”
Next panel shows Mariame smiling and holding a clipboard, saying, “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 25 to life sentence.” Beside that is Bresha Meadows, a teenager with a somber expression. A caption in front of her reads: “Bresha Meadows was arrested at 14 for fatally shooting her abusive father in self-defense.”
Next panel shows a complex web of prison walls, topped with barbed wire, separating individuals from each other. The text reads: “Some people ask how feasible abolition is. Security is about putting up gates and walls and weapons between you and other people. How feasible is it to continue a violent system? For people to live in fear?” Next panel zooms in on one of the people within the web, and reads: “The prison system is a recent development and not as permanent as people think.” The wall in front of the person is knocked down by a person behind it, revealed to be a cardboard cut-out.
The next panel shows similar cranes as before lifting all the cardboard prison walls, and reads: “I don’t know what a world without prisons will look like.” The last panel shows a line of people of different body types, abilities and ethnicities, most looking upward at text that reads: “But it will fundamentally transform our relationship with other people.”]
