A great overview of abolition, feminism, and intersectionality. 

One of my favorite call-outs from this one, specifically, is about how abolition is often sometimes seen as a utopian solution and how that makes even the organizing for it rather unobtainable. We're all human, we all make mistakes, and abolition is meant to support humans; so it's natural that the process of abolition itself might be wrought with trip-ups and tumbles. And maybe that's the point because in figuring out how to navigate the trip-ups, we learn valuable lessons about how to care for one another more deeply and start to build new systems and practices that become instrumental to a society that values freedom for everyone.

This was an okay intro to Abolition feminism but the language was very dense, dry, and the text felt very academic. Despite those complaints, I still learned a fair amount. Thought, I still have basic questions like, "if we get of prisons, what do we do with the repeat rapists and murderess? The repeat violent offenders?" At one point the text even says something like, hardcore abolitionist are always criticized and asked what should be done with police officers who are repeat offenders and there was no answer, so like? What do we do with them? 


Overall I liked what I read but I still have that one burning question left, I didn't get an answer that satisfied me unfortunately. 

Overall I'm giving this 4 stars out of 5
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I listened to this for free on the library app libbyapp.com

You can really tell this book was written by four professors. Example: They keep saying that their book has short chapters. It consists of three chapters which are FIFTY PAGES EACH.

Anyway, this book is probably great if you're doing a deep dive on the police/prison abolition movement, but this was my first book on the subject and it was a lot. Lots and lots of very academic language and references to specific movements, and not a lot of information on the how and why of abolition. Definitely don't start here. Learn from my mistake!

It's been a while since I read this book, but it's lovely.

I read this book because since 2021 I've been kind of using a lens of war rape culture to frame racial capitalist patriarchy. Whether I'm doing that well is another matter I don't know how to test yet. -- Point being, in contrast to that I have "consent culture", and as I've been getting educated the past couple of years it's become apparent that I want to work with an abolitionist framework. So this book was awesome, and it read so much quicker than I thought it would. I love the data tables at the back that have the 4 questions along with the various strategies because I remember wanting more specifics about the (prison) abolitionist activism profiled in the anthology "captive genders".

This isn't a negative of the book but this is my first nonfiction reading that isn't for a class, and I'm just realizing all nonfiction books are very repetitive.