UPDATE: Thanks to Haymarket Books we will be able to accommodate more people for this event. We have reopened registration.

We are in a historic moment brought on by the consistent exertion of people power across the country and around the world. This has brought us to a place where our communities are poised to win significant victories against the violence of policing on a large scale. To guide us in this moment, we need to hold central that Abolition is both a vision and a political strategy. Part of this strategy is recognizing and actualizing that we cannot call for reforms that further entrench and legitimize policing in any form as a solution to social, economic or political problems. As prison industrial complex abolitionists, the reforms we call for in our demands must be aimed at diminishing the political power of policing.

How can we assess which proposals to support or to oppose in our organizing? What are some abolitionist proposals? Join Dean Spade, Woods Ervin & Kamau Walton from Critical Resistance, K Agbebiyi from Survived and Punished NY and Mariame Kaba from Project NIA and Survived & Punished to discuss these questions and more. Join us for this conversation to deepen our shared analysis and to discuss how we use abolition as a politic, practice and framework to move us toward liberation and self-determination.

IMPORTANT NOTE: We are offering this virtual event at no cost to participants. However, the event is not free. Everyone involved is donating their labor to make this happen. If you can sign up for a DONATION-based ticket, please do. This is particularly true right now if you are a white person with access to resources. Please redistribute those resources to people who need them. DO NOT REGISTER FOR BOTH A FREE AND A DONATION TICKET. SELECT ONE OR THE OTHER. If free tickets are no longer available, check to see if donation ones are.

The funds raised will be donated to the Mutual Aid 4 Youth Project: https://map4youth.com. We invite everyone to join us in helping this project to meet its $40,000 fundraising goal.

ACCESS: We will have ASL interpretation. Please email jjinjustice1@gmail.com with any questions.

Co-sponsored by Critical Resistance, Project NIA, Survived and Punished, Reclaim the Block, and Black Visions Collective.

Short Biographies

K Agbebiyi is a macro social worker and organizer currently based in New York. They organize with Survived and Punished's New York Chapter, along with several other abolitionist formations across the city including #FreeThemAll4PublicHealth. They are one of the co-creators of 8toabolition.com

Woods Ervin is a Critical Resistance member who began organizing with the Critical Resistance Oakland chapter in 2010 through the Stop the Injunctions Coalition. Their organizing contributed to significant victories such as the full elimination of gang injunctions in Oakland (Stop the Injunctions Coalition), the halting of jail expansion in San Francisco (No New SF Jail Coalition), and the end of the largest SWAT team training in the world (Stop Urban Shield). Woods also helped seed the Oakland Power Projects, an alternative to policing initiative and trained CR’s first Anti-Policing Healthworkers Cohort. With CR members and in movement spaces, they have facilitated hundreds of political education workshops and trainings to help the Left sharpen its’ praxis of prison industrial complex abolition.

Mariame Kaba is an educator and organizer based in New York City. She has been active in anti-criminalization and anti-violence movements for over 30 years. Mariame is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots abolitionist organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. She is also the co-founder of Survived and Punished, a grassroots group focused on freeing criminalized survivors of domestic and sexual violence from jails, prisons and detention centers through mutual aid, organizing and policy advocacy.

Dean Spade has spent over two decades in social movements working to end prisons, borders, poverty, and war and support people trying to survive right now. In 2002, Dean founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a non-profit collective that provides free legal services to transgender, intersex and gender non-conforming people who are low-income and/or people of color. He is the author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of the Law, and the director of the documentary, "Pinkwashing Exposed."

Kamau Walton joined the Critical Resistance Oakland chapter in 2010 after meeting CR members at the US Social Forum in Detroit. From 2010 to 2015, they helped led outreach and community education in the Stop the Injunctions campaign, supported the 2013 California Prisoner Hunger Strikes efforts to end solitary confinement, and helped seed the Stop Urban Shield campaign. Their organizing helped secure the full elimination of gang injunctions in Oakland (Stop the Injunctions Coalition),and end of the largest SWAT team training in the world (Stop Urban Shield). As a CR member, Kamau continues to bring PIC abolition to Left movement spaces.

Art by Monica Trinidad

** A Zoom Link will be emailed to you on Thursday evening to join the event.

On the Road With Abolition: Assessing Our Steps Along the Way