How to Abolish Prisons: Gender as Analytic

“From sexual violence on the plantations to forced sterilization in state prisons and ICE centers, punishment in this country has always been gendered and racialized.”

Join us for a conversation with scholar-organizers on the multiple and compounded ways in which social difference has been foundational to the prison industrial complex and has manifested in the disproportionate criminalization of women of color. The conversation will bring together Dr. Sarah Haley (Department of History and ISSG, Columbia University), Rachel Herzing (Executive Director, Center for Political Education), and Derecka Purnell (lawyer, writer, and organizer). Guiding the discussion will be an abolitionist feminist framework, which emphasizes the heteronormative white supremacist order at the root of both gendered and state violence. Speakers will touch on abolition feminism as a theoretical framework in their research and as a method and a set of practices in their organizing against prisons and advocacy for anti-carceral alternatives. Cookies and tea will be provided.

Sarah Haley (she/her/they/them) is the author of the award-winning No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (2016). Her research highlights how the ‘gendered-racial-sexual order’ both produced the carceral regime of the late 19th and 20th centuries and was reinforced by it. Haley has worked with political prisoners at Green Haven Correctional Facility and, more recently, in organizing against efforts to build a “feminist jail” in Harlem. A 2024 Freedom Scholar, she is the Director of the Institute for the Study of Sexuality & Gender and Associate Professor of History and Gender Studies at Columbia.

Rachel Herzing (no preference) has had extensive experience as an organizer and as a researcher documenting efforts at practicing prison industrial complex abolition, including experiments with non-policing public safety and accountability models. Herzing was previously co-director of Center for Political Education; Co-Director of Critical Resistance, a national organization advocating against prisons and policing and for investing in social services instead; and Director of Research and Training for Creative Interventions, a project that developed approaches to interrupting, preventing, and stopping interpersonal harm. Herzing is currently Director of Yarrow Institute for Organizing and Analysis, an organization providing support and accompaniment to organizers fighting for prison industrial complex abolition. She is the co-author, with Justin Piché, of How to Abolish Prisons: Lessons from the Movement Against Imprisonment (Haymarket 2024).

Derecka Purnell (she/her) is a lawyer, writer, organizer, and author of Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom (2021). Becoming Abolitionists combines memoir with history to trace Purnell’s turn towards abolition as a result of personal experiences with policing, organizing work, and learning about abolitionist social movement history. Purnell works to end police and prison violence by providing legal assistance, research, and training in community based organizations through an abolitionist framework. As a Skadden Fellow in 2017, she helped to build the Justice Project at Advancement Project’s National Office, which focused on consent decrees, police and prosecutor accountability, and jail closures. She was a 2021 Fellow for the Social Justice Initiative’s Portal Project at the University of Illinois-Chicago, a Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar in 2022, and a Scholar-in-Residence at Columbia Law School from 2021-2024.