Defunding police, jails, and prisons and reinvesting funds into community-based safety strategies is just one front of abolitionist struggles. Decriminalization is a critical strategy to reduce the power, resources, and legitimacy of police and the carceral state — that’s why it’s one of the core pillars of our 6Ds Until She’s Free framework. 

This semester we also ask ourselves, as we work to divest from criminalization, what do we need to build instead? As we do so, we also explore how people and institutions beyond cops, courts, and prisons engage in and collaborate with criminalization, and how to expand our analysis and actions to interrupt criminalization in the context of care — whether its abortion care, trans health care, or substituting coercive medical interventions for more overtly carceral responses.

Check out our recent Building Coordinated Crisis Response Report and Mapping Community Ecosystems of Collective Care Toolkit to support your efforts to map what already exists in your community, and to identify gaps and places where additional investments would help build out your ecosystem!

READ:

• What is Driving the Criminalization of Women and LGBTQ People?

• Shoplifting: Corporate Copaganda

• “No More Courts” by Rachel Foran and Zohra Ahmed

• Beyond Courts (including Esther’s story)

• Building Black Feminist Visions to End the Drug War (short) (long) (chart) (graphic notes)

• We Must Fight in Solidarity With Trans Youth

• Resisting Criminalization of Reproductive Autonomy Infographic and Resisting Criminalization of Reproductive Autonomy: Policy Dos and Don’ts

• Abortion Decriminalization is Part of the Larger Struggle Against Policing and Criminalization

• Beyond Do No Harm Discussion Guide

• Cops Out of Care

• Lessons from the Building Coordinated Crisis Response Learning Space

LISTEN / WATCH:

• 6Ds Until She’s Free

• The Missing Story of #MeToo 

• Safe, Not Sexualized: Protecting Black Girls and Gender Expansive Youth from School Police Sexual Violence 

• Pride Means Fighting Criminalization: We Must Fight in Solidarity With Trans Youth

• No Soft Police

• Abortion Access and the Fight Against Criminalization

• Beyond Do No Harm Release event

• Beyond Do No Harm — Stories of Health Care Providers Interrupting Criminalization

• Cops Out of Care (Session 1 and Session 2)

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION:

• What are the top 5 arrest charges for women in your jurisdiction? How can you work to decriminalize the things that bring women, queer and trans people into contact with the criminal punishment system?

• How might you address the rampant copaganda about shoplifting in your community and work to reduce criminalization of poverty?

• Look at the chart of reforms in Building Black Feminist Visions to End the Drug War.

  • What reforms are being advanced in your community? Which are you championing or supporting? How do they measure up on the chart?

  • How might you shift your strategy based on what you learned?

• Courts are a key cog in the web of criminalization — check out our beyondcourts.org web resource. 

• What kinds of court reforms are being advanced in your jurisdiction? What did you learn about them on the site?

• It’s an election year and there’s no doubt a lot of talk about progressive prosecutors — read “There’s No Such Thing as Progressive Prosecutors”

• What kind of interventions might you make around prosecutorial, judicial, and sheriff elections that are aligned with abolitionist values and practices?

• How might you use Pride month (June) and beyond to highlight increasing criminalization of trans and queer people in your community? 

• What are some hidden sites of criminalization in your community? How might you interrupt criminalization that takes place in multiple institutions, and particularly those where people go to seek care and support? 

• Where do you see criminalization of reproductive, gender, and sexual autonomy on the rise in your community or state?

• Which criminalizing institutions could you target?

• What interventions does the infographic suggest for your sector?

• Which of the policies described in the “dos and don’ts” are moving in your community? How might you interrupt them?

• Which of the Beyond Do No Harm principles are most critical for the constituencies you work with? How might you partner with health care providers to make them real?

• Where are cops stationed in health care facilities in your community? How might you partner with health care workers and people accessing care to push them out?

• Are you or a group in your community building a coordinated crisis response?

  • What lessons have you learned since you started? What conditions have shifted?

• How are you navigating the questions raised in the Building Coordinated Crisis Response Learning Space report?