The Creative Abolitionist | Vol. 1

We’re constantly bombarded with visuals of policing, prisons, and punishment. Entertainment, the news, our schools. There is virtually no aspect of modern-day life untouched by propaganda aimed at normalizing these human-designed, oppressive systems as mandatory components of our past, present, and future. 

The physical expression of these systems also conveys values through design. White concrete walls for containment. Narrow hallways for crowd control. Entire buildings without windows. Bright, harsh, fluorescent lighting for better surveillance. Clinical waiting rooms for families with barriers to quell physical connection. 

We can’t ignore the ways systems physically show up in our communities or in our minds. Oppression is consistent, stubborn to adapt, and hellbent on maintaining the status quo. This has created a reality where prison abolition appears in people’s minds with visuals of destruction, burning buildings, and apocalyptic streets of duress. 

This, too, is by design. But it couldn’t be further from the truth. The world we’re working towards looks like former youth prisons transformed into opportunity centers, neighborhood grocery stores providing free food and thriving wages to system-impacted young people, or organizations working to transform responses to harm by providing access to mental health support for survivors. 

As a politic, abolition hinges on collaboration, like most creative endeavors. It requires imagination beyond what you see, like a blank canvas or primed wall. It’s about forming relationships with each other that sustain and inspire to the point where we are deeply invested in the health and safety of our friends, neighbors, and strangers so that no one is disposable.  

Oppressors don’t want us to imagine a future where we all belong, void of harmful systems and filled with grace, care, and thriving futures. But that visualization is a crucial element in our movement. We need artists, organizers, and cross-issue collaboration to make a case for abolition irresistible and urgent. We all need to be able to see the world we’re building, not just the one we’re leaving behind.