Decolonial Journey 13 – Abolition

Abolition

Of the three, I’ve written far less about abolition than Mutual Aid and LANDBACK. In part, because when I was growing up, abolition referred to the abolition of ‘chattel slavery’, which was the idea of the complete ownership of a human being.

It took a while to understand

• that modern policing is an extension of the ‘slave patrols’, that protected the economic ‘property’ of slave ‘owners’
• the abolition of slavery via the 13th Amendment in 1865 was incomplete due to its exception clause: “except as a punishment for crime”
• this loophole enabled the rise of convict leasing and, over time, the development of the modern prison-industrial complex (PIC)
• the capitalist economic system is economic slavery for those without wealth
• police are required to enforce capitalist economic policies which distribute wealth to the already wealthy and disenfranchise everyone else
• our armed forces enforce our economic system globally

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Systemic Blowback

What has changed is that this system of Christian colonial capitalist violence has begun to fail those who had been doing alright with the capitalist system until recently.

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My life didn’t get off to a good start regarding police and prisons as I faced a felony conviction and imprisonment for my decision to be a draft resister.

But thinking back to that time, the late 1960s, I also remember there was almost no police presence. This was especially true of rural Iowa, where I grew up. Even when I moved to Indianapolis in 1971, there was little noticeable police presence.

That changed dramatically with the first images I remember seeing of militarized police and equipment on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, in response to the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014.

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Western Friend

I contributed my story related to abolition and mutual aid in an article about the Quakers for Abolition Network by my friends Mackenzie Barton-Rowledge and Jed Walsh in the Western Friend, Sept/Oct 2021

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