What do we mean when we talk about transforming violence and oppression? Over the next few weeks, CPT will bring you a series of articles and reflections centred on the theme of abolition – dismantling the police and the prison system. The first of these is a reflection from CPT Reservist Chuck Wright, who previously served on the Indigenous Peoples Solidarity Team. In My journey towards abolitionism, Chuck describes the eye-opening experiences of working with criminalized people, many of whom were “Indigenous and people of colour, or poor, white working-class folks”.
Chuck’s story is shared by many in CPT. In the contexts in which we work, the criminal justice system is one of the many walls caging in the communities with whom we stand. Just read the news from our teams this week: in the West Bank a man was shot by settlers while protecting his own land, waking up in hospital chained to a bed while his assailant walked free.
During my time with CPT in Lesvos, the priorities of the criminal justice system were beyond doubt. Migrants were systematically incarcerated en masse in sham trials. Sometimes they were criminalized for the way in which they had entered the country. Sometimes they were racially profiled and arbitrarily arrested in the backlash to outbursts of resistance to the camp’s lethal and undignified conditions. Meanwhile, police treated them as potential insurgents – to be corralled, monitored, coerced into behaving “well” – and deemed their lives unworthy of protection. Alongside a network of migration managers, they cultivated conditions of neglect, creating fertile ground for acts of senseless violence perpetrated by those, often kids, who had themselves been degraded by months or years of abject life in detention.
Still, it is here in the spaces abandoned by the state, among subjects under attack, where alternatives are forged. The journey has its contradictions and there are no easy answers. We invite you to join us in asking difficult questions about safety, accountability, and freedom.
