politic & priorities

Abolition

We are an abolitionist group. This means we believe there should be no system of policing as it currently exists and that no people should be incarcerated. The description below from Critical Resistance helps describe this politic:

[Prison Industrial Complex] abolition is a political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment.

From where we are now, sometimes we can’t really imagine what abolition is going to look like. Abolition isn’t just about getting rid of buildings full of cages. It’s also about undoing the society we live in because the PIC both feeds on and maintains oppression and inequalities through punishment, violence, and controls millions of people. Because the PIC is not an isolated system, abolition is a broad strategy. An abolitionist vision means that we must build models today that can represent how we want to live in the future. It means developing practical strategies for taking small steps that move us toward making our dreams real and that lead us all to believe that things really could be different. It means living this vision in our daily lives.

Abolition is both a practical organizing tool and a long-term goal.

Critical Resistance, criticalresistance.org, What is the PIC? What is Abolition? Accessed 7/9/2019. http://criticalresistance.org/about/not-so-common-language/

Campus Context

Like city police, campus police operate with great powers to regulate the behavior and restrict the freedom of the citizenry. Campus police may detain, arrest, and harm and they do so with less oversight even than city police and county sheriffs. Discussions about police generally must include discussions about campus police in particular. They are an immediate existence in all campus life.

We are concerned with not just how policing has come to control so many campus functions, but how the military industrial complex is very much a part of the PIC, and both contribute to how academia (and possibilities for studies) has evolved and is evolving.

We are a racial liberation group, both to our values and as abolition requires. We recognize that policing functions as an oppressive metric that disproportionately harms people of color. This means we aim to center BIPOC voices and experiences, particularly those of QTBIPOC, disabled people of color, im/migrants, and other targeted peoples. As a majority white group in a majority white union and predominantly white institution, we are working to be accountable to communities of color.

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