Against the Carceral State: A Verso Roundtable
Introducing this week's Verso Roundtable, analysing the movement for police and prison abolition a year on from last summer's protests.
A year ago, cities and towns, first across America and then the world, erupted in protest. Responding initially to the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor by police officers in Minneapolis and Louisville, the demonstrations also invoked the names of the countless others whose lives had been lost at the hands of the state.
The debate accompanying the protests soon expanded from critiques of policing to encompass discussion of prison abolition, and the form that justice would take in a society free from capitalism. Far from abating, these conversations and protests have continued in the months since last summer, fuelling responses to further acts of state violence across the world. Over the coming week on the Verso Blog, authors from the UK and USA reflect on the development in the left's critical responses to policing, incarceration, and related punitive and regressive social policies. Individually and as a series, we hope these articles suggest ways to act and organise against policing and the carceral state.
Part 1: More Policing Won't Stop Gendered Violence, by Katharine Jenkins and Koshka Duff
“New Bones” Abolitionism, Communism, and Captive Maternals by Joy James
