One of the most common misconceptions about prison abolition is that it’s “unrealistic.” However, in Rachel Herzing and Justin Piché’s new book, How to Abolish Prisons: Lessons from the Movement Against Imprisonment, they show not only that abolition is an eminently practical project, but also that it is already happening. Organizers are practicing abolition in large and small ways, every day, as they work toward a future when prisons and policing no longer exist.

In her foreword to the book, Mariame Kaba writes, “The stories and campaigns featured in this book are examples of hope in action.” Indeed, this book is about the action, the doing, rather than focusing on theory or hypothetical scenarios. What makes How to Abolish Prisons hopeful is its emphasis on the nuts and bolts of organizing, with deep attention to the stories of specific organizations building coordinated campaigns in the United States and Canada. The book shares key histories of abolitionist efforts that have shifted culture, policy, practices and conversations — and freed people from cages. How to Abolish Prisons shows what is possible when we imagine expansively and put those ideas into collective practice. I was thrilled to have this conversation with Herzing and Piché about why and how they wrote this necessary book.

—Maya Schenwar

Maya Schenwar: Why did you decide to write this book about the how of abolishing prisons?

Justin Piché: I won’t say the “how” of getting to abolition has been totally absent in the literature, but we thought it was something that needed to be fleshed out more. How do we dismantle, and how do we build? What’s the space in between? One constant critique that gets leveled against prison abolitionists is that this is just pie-in-the-sky, that it’s utopian; that abolition is impractical. Our book, I think, demonstrates that it’s very practical. People are doing it every day. They’re organizing and working toward decarceral futures every day. In our book we talk about five pathways to prison abolition.

There are groups involved in anti-expansion efforts, such as Critical Resistance, that are organizing to stop the construction of new prisons because we cannot get to abolitionist horizons if the capacity for human caging is growing. These organizers are also working to close existing sites of confinement.

There are groups, such as Black and Pink and the Prisoner Correspondence Project, that work in solidarity with imprisoned people through corresponding with them to build relationships across prison walls, as well as identify issues that are of immediate concern to address in the short-term, like gaining access to gender-affirming health care while working toward the ultimate goal of liberation.

We take steps in the direction of abolition that give us the best chance of gaining the most ground on it. That means we do what we can to delegitimate it.

Art and cultural work also play a role in prison abolitionist struggles. For example, Termite Collective is a group comprised of incarcerated and non-incarcerated people in Quebec, engaging in political education on both sides of prison walls. Such work is critical in passing on knowledge about past and on-going efforts to expose and organize against the brutality of the prison industrial complex (PIC), like Prisoners’ Justice Day.

In this struggle, we cannot forget that there are human beings who are being caged and subjected to draconian conditions of confinement in jails, prisons and penitentiaries, both old and new. They are people who need to be freed through diversion and decarceration efforts. Such organizing often involves the kind of legal advocacy that Justice Now did with incarcerated women in California to challenge the use and harms of imprisonment in the courts.

The punitive criminal legal system is held together by a number of public policies that too need to be dismantled, and so policy advocacy is also a pathway that is utilized to work toward decarceral futures. For instance, even as the Chicago Community Bond Fund was raising money to post bail for people, they were also engaged in the Coalition to End Money Bond to secure legislative change that would see an end to cash being a consideration when the courts consider whether to release someone or hold them in pretrial detention.

As these examples highlight, prison abolition is a praxis and many are doing this work in various ways to weaken the structure of the PIC that will one day crumble to the ground.

Rachel Herzing: As Justin’s examples highlight, and as we explore in detail in the book, we don’t have to start from scratch. We were interested in amplifying the fact that people have been trying this for a long time already, putting these politics in motion. This is not some newfangled thing that is only ideological, where we have to start from scratch to make it go. There’s decades of organizing history to draw from.

Schenwar: I like that while the book is radical — it’s aimed at this expansive vision of abolition — you’re also looking at how these movements and organizations are making changes and providing support to benefit human beings in the here and now. When people are new to abolitionist work, they sometimes think about it as all or nothing, as if you have to be actually dismantling all of the prison system or it’s not abolitionist. Could you share a little bit about how organizing for things like improvements to conditions or mutual aid are part of the abolitionist struggle?

Piché: As abolitionists, sometimes we do engage in non-reformist reforms: reforms that don’t accept the inevitability........

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