Becoming Abolitionists
Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom
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- ¥2,400
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- ¥2,400
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A NONAME BOOK CLUB PICK
Named a Kirkus Reviews "Best Book of 2021"
"Becoming Abolitionists is ultimately about the importance of asking questions and our ability to create answers. And in the end, Purnell makes it clear that abolition is a labor of love—one that we can accomplish together if only we decide to."
—Nia Evans, Boston Review
For more than a century, activists in the United States have tried to reform the police. From community policing initiatives to increasing diversity, none of it has stopped the police from killing about three people a day. Millions of people continue to protest police violence because these "solutions" do not match the problem: the police cannot be reformed.
In Becoming Abolitionists, Purnell draws from her experiences as a lawyer, writer, and organizer initially skeptical about police abolition. She saw too much sexual violence and buried too many friends to consider getting rid of police in her hometown of St. Louis, let alone the nation. But the police were a placebo. Calling them felt like something, and something feels like everything when the other option seems like nothing.
Purnell details how multi-racial social movements rooted in rebellion, risk-taking, and revolutionary love pushed her and a generation of activists toward abolition. The book travels across geography and time, and offers lessons that activists have learned from Ferguson to South Africa, from Reconstruction to contemporary protests against police shootings.
Here, Purnell argues that police can not be reformed and invites readers to envision new systems that work to address the root causes of violence. Becoming Abolitionists shows that abolition is not solely about getting rid of police, but a commitment to create and support different answers to the problem of harm in society, and, most excitingly, an opportunity to reduce and eliminate harm in the first place.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Human rights lawyer Purnell debuts with an idealistic and impassioned call for dismantling the police in order to address the root causes of violence and inequality. She tracks her own evolving attitudes toward the police from her childhood in a St. Louis neighborhood in the 1990s and early 2000s "where we called 911 for almost everything"; to college activism galvanized by the 2011 execution of Troy Davis for murdering a police officer, despite the case against him being "obviously flawed"; and her work as a public defender in a Harvard University legal clinic, where she realized "most of the ‘criminals' were actually just poor people." Purnell places abolition within a social justice framework that includes decolonization, environmental justice, and disability rights, and forcefully disputes the notion that more policing is necessary to stop "senseless violence," arguing that drug decriminalization and programs to address health care, housing, and income disparities would "undermine the conditions that lead to violence and police contact." Her vision of what abolition looks like features neighborhood councils, conflict mediation centers, and green teams to foster sustainability. Bold and utopian, yet grounded in Purnell's experiences and copious evidence of how reform efforts have fallen short, this is an inspiring introduction to a hot-button topic.
