We Do This ‘Til We Free Us

Summary, part 3 & 4

Part 3: The State Can’t Give Us Transformative Justice

The next three high-profile cases are very different, but Kaba believes that they all showcase that transformative justice is not possible as long as the prison industrial complex exists. 

Transformative justice, as Kaba defines it, is “a community process developed by anti-violence activists of color, in particular, who wanted to create responses to violence that do what criminal punishment systems fail to do: build support and more safety for the person harmed, figure out how the broader context was set up for this harm to happen, and how that context can be changed so that this harm is less likely to happen again” (p. 59). 

Some of the arguments she makes can be challenging to understand, particularly because they go against the Western pro-punishment system we are used to, but Kaba recognizes this and encourages the reader to be open-minded and imaginative. 

Case 1: Darren Wilson

Darren Wilson was the former police officer who shot Michael Brown. Kaba makes it clear that, in this case, she does not want Darren Wilson's guilt and imprisonment to be used as a sign of the justice system working for those who need it. She also does not believe killer cops should walk free and face no consequences. Instead,  she wants to use this case as a recognition that these indictments mean nothing for an oppressive system of policing because the system is still rooted in anti-Blackness, social control, and oppression (p. 55). 

Case 2: Larry Nassar

Larry Nassar is the former doctor of the USA gymnastics team who went to trial when over 100 victims came forward and accused him of grooming and sexual assaulting during treatment. Nassar was ultimately given over 100 years in jail, with the judge presiding over the case famously stating at the end of the trial “I just signed your death warrant.” Kaba challenges how successful this trial really was, and argues that even when the system finds someone like Nassar guilty, it does not take away from the fact that the criminal justice system is a fundamentally anti-Black institution. 

Case 3: Breonna Taylor

Breonna Taylor was a Black woman who was shot in her home during a botched drug raid on her apartment. The murder had national and international outrage. Kaba notes how calls for arrests and justice often lead to disappointments and dead ends and how ultimately, the system that killed Breonna is also not set up to provide her justice. Instead of focusing on arresting killer cops, Kaba argues for the direction of energies to go towards “collective strategies that are more likely to be successful in delivering healing and transformation and to prevent future harms. Families and communities deserve more than heartbreak over and over again each time the system declines to hold itself accountable” (p. 65). 

All three of these cases feel like a singular “win,” but still feed into a toxic system that doesn’t serve, and instead repeatedly hurts, those communities. As long as the criminal justice system exists as we know it today, this individualization of stories is not helpful in the fight for abolition, as they provide nothing for the collective transformative and restorative justice-focused restructuring of society.

The Transformative Model

So, what would an alternative transformative and restorative justice-focused system look like? Kaba challenges punitive impulses and instead argues for a shift to healing and repair. In a case like Nassar’s, healing and repair would mean:

1. Believing the survivors the first time they spoke up,

2. Seeking to understand what it is that caused the acts of violence in the first place,

3. Maintaining the humanity of the perpetrator,

4. Getting to the root of the issue such as critiquing the way the USA gymnastics team handled allegations and dismantling the misogyny and sexism that lead to sexual assault. 

Abolitionists are not pro-rapist or anti-justice, they merely recognize that a singular moment of “justice” is not justice at all. The system places the perpetrator in jail, where more violence is likely to occur and the system of pain and violence will continue to uphold oppressive systems and institutions. This is why a transformative model is necessary. Although there is no direct road map or plan for what this would look like “we must also acknowledge that we simply do not know, and cannot know, what the occurrence, prevention, or resolution of harm could look like in our society under more just conditions” (p. 61).

Part 4: Making Demands: Reforms For and Against Abolition

This section covers a wide range of topics in varying essays and interviews. The main concepts Kaba covers are a historical background in prison abolition, the school to prison pipeline, spectacle, and surveillance. 

Historical Background

In an interview entitled “A People’s History of Prisons in the United States,” Kaba briefly covers some historical background to demystify why prisons were set up in the first place and explores why knowing this history can ground current BLM and abolitionist movements. 

• Prisons did not always exist and they were something that was created, which means that new systems of justice can be created as well. 

• It isn’t necessarily crime or punishment that Kaba seeks to demystify, but the way Blackness has become synonymous with criminality. 

There are numerous examples of state violence against Black people (See, Nixon’s War on Drugs or Clinton’s Welfare Reform) and this is part of why abolition is so crucial; the state has built a system based on a history of anti-Blackness and oppression and there is no way to reform such a system. 

School-to-prison Pipeline 

The school-to-prison pipeline is “generally used to refer to interlocking sets of structural and individual relationships in which youth, primarily of color, are funneled from schools and neighborhoods into under- or unemployment and prisons” (p. 76). 

This criminalization of student behavior particularly rose with a handful of high-profile school shootings in the 1990s, which led to increased metal detectors, security guards, and punitive punishments. This has done little to nothing to decrease school shootings and instead has led to the implementation of practices that disproportionately affect Black students. Punishment in schools focuses not on violent fighting or bringing a dangerous weapon to school, but instead on disrespect or other minor disruption. 

Additionally, the growth in high-stakes testing programs encourages a drill and test program which often replaces sports, arts, and music in schools. This in turn means “many students, finding the curriculum increasingly irrelevant, disengage and are subsequently pushed out of school” (p. 78). Again, this supports the need for a complete overhaul in how schools function and are managed in today's society.  

Spectacle 

Another notion that Kaba challenges is the militarization and “spectacle” surrounding the police. Focusing on the “spectacle” as a route to empathy requires atrocities to become more severe and more frequent in order to get people to continually care (p. 85). 

The media and social media are constantly bombarding viewers with violent images of abuse and murder of Black people. This constant exposure to spectacles can be numbing. The part that is particularly disappointing is the need to create a spectacle of these deaths in order to generate concern or empathy for Black people. Black people should not be violently suffering in order to gain sympathy from the rest of society. 

Surveillance 

In “I Live In A Place Where Everybody Watches Where You Go,”  Kaba investigates the impact of surveillance on Black communities. This surveillance comes from the cops who are always patrolling Black neighborhoods, store owners who always assume that young Black people are going to steal something, and even from community members who want to seek out and identify gang members. All of these measures of surveillance have become commonplace and come from the assumption that Blackness and criminality are synonymous. 

Often technology, particularly body cameras, are used as evidence of reforms that hold police accountable. In actuality, they do not keep police from breaking the rules and often just place the Black and LGBTQIA+ community at the dangerous intersection between data, technology, surveillance and police brutality. This concept goes hand in hand with the “spectacle” discussed above, because this surveillance is an everyday occurrence for people in the Black community––one that does not very often have any spectacle associated with it. Kaba stresses “That’s the politics that we should be focused on, a politics that attends to the grievances that people have in their day-to-day life. The every day. The mundane. Not the spectacular or the excess'' (p. 92).