[...] Thanks to the Hollywood actresses of Me Too, these women can now appeal to the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund to sue if they are sexually harassed. But to whom should they turn when they need money to escape an abusive partner, or health care for a sick child, or when immigration comes to ask for their papers?70 Few if any feminists believe that harassment should be tolerated, that employers shouldn’t be sued, or that laws against sexual harassment haven’t done much to help working women, poor women included.71 But a feminist politics which sees the punishment of bad men as its primary purpose will never be a feminism that liberates all women, for it obscures what makes most women unfree.

The question—“If not the police, then who?”—also betrays a misunderstanding of the abolitionist tradition. For most abolitionist thinkers—most notably, among the feminists in this tradition, Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore—the proposal is not, needless to say, that the angry energies of those who are made to exist on society’s margins should be simply let loose. Abolitionists see that carceral practices substitute control for provision: that “criminalisation and cages” serve as “catchall solutions to social problems.”74 As Davis wrote in June 1971, sitting in a Marin County jail awaiting trial on charges of helping to arm black activists, “the necessity to resort to such repression is reflective of profound social crisis, of systemic disintegration.”75 What if, rather than relying on police and prisons to manage the symptoms of social crisis, that crisis were met head-on? As the legal academic James Forman Jr. puts it, abolitionism asks us to “imagine a world without prisons, and then … work to try to build that world.”76 What would that take? It would involve the decriminalization of activity, like drug use and sex work, whose criminalization is known to exacerbate rather than reduce violence.77 It would involve a restructuring of economic relations such that crimes of survival—food theft, border-crossing, homelessness—were unnecessary. (George Floyd was killed after using a counterfeit bill to buy cigarettes. He had recently lost his job.) It would involve putting in place the social and political arrangements to meet the needs that, when they go unfulfilled, produce interpersonal violence: public housing, health care, education, and childcare; decent jobs in democratically organized workplaces; guaranteed basic income; local democratic control of community spending and priorities; spaces for leisure, play, and social gathering; clean air and water. And it would involve creating a justice system that, wherever possible, sought repair and reconciliation. Abolition, Gilmore explains, “isn’t just absence … abolition is a fleshly and material presence of social life lived differently.”78