This month, we’re revisiting Season One of the 1ME Podcast. Below, you will find an excerpt from our debut episode, “The Hypothesis,” with 1ME co-creator Mariame Kaba.
As we gear up for Season Two, we’ll be sharing highlights and discussion guides for our past episodes. Follow along on Instagram at @millionexperiments. Download the first discussion guide, a great way to bring the 1ME Podcast into classrooms and group discussions, or for anyone interested in activating their abolitionist imagination.
The Hypothesis with Mariame Kaba
In this lightly edited excerpt, Mariame discusses the driving ideas behind One Million Experiments, a growing encyclopedia of community-based safety projects designed to expand our ideas about what keeps us safe.
For a very long time, I've been asked, of course, because I'm an abolitionist, "Well, what do we replace prisons with, and what do we replace police with?" These are questions that I know are [usually] coming from a good place — a place where people are trying to grasp and understand ideas. What it suggests is that there's going to be one thing that's created that will replace death-making institutions.
I always say to folks when they ask me that question, "Well, nothing will. No one thing will." Part of why we're in the situation we're in right now is because we offer a one-size-fits-all response to every single possible kind of harm in the world through this criminal punishment system (which we're told is actually synonymous with justice). Instead of using a term — for example, like, so-called “alternatives” — let's actually say what we mean.
I think what people are asking, in my opinion, is, “What community-based safety strategies or what community-based responses to harm are we going to employ?” If that's true, I want to say that community-based safety responses and strategies are already the mainstream. That's already what we use.
The vast majority of people don't actually use the current criminal punishment system as their response when they are harmed or when harm occurs in their communities.
The issue is that community-based safety strategies and responses are unfunded. We should be calling it the unfunded responses. All the energy and all the resources are being put into a system that very few people actually use, and when people do use it, their satisfaction rates are abysmal.
They're horrendous on the side of the people who are harmed and they're horrendous on the side of the people who are being supposedly "held accountable." That's why I don't like terms like “alternative to prison,” or “alternative to police,” or “replacement” because oftentimes what it also does is it conditions us to keep prison and police constant in our minds.
Adding the word alternative in front of death-making institutions means that people will start from the question, "Don't we need police to be safe?"
Then what you think to yourself is, “What do we currently use prisons and police for that we now need to replace their use for?” We use prisons and police for a bunch of things that we shouldn't even bother to address, and we don't use them for other things that we should probably address.
I like to really start with the question, “What is safety for our communities? What are the conditions that will increase safety for everyone?” Abolitionists are always trying to ask generative questions that don't actually foreclose possibility and imagination.
I think if we don't start here, it's hard to go to "experiments." It's really hard to think outside of your current structures because those structures are what you're used to. That's the norm. Then to have to rethink everything when people use those terms? Well, how do you do that when you're swimming in the toxicity of the current systems? I think that's why I want us to try to figure out if we can stop holding the things constant that we actually want to destroy. These words have so much cultural meaning and so much social meaning.
The cops are in our heads and hearts, like Paula Rojas says. It's very hard. I want us, especially for this project, to start at the much more expansive level of what safety is for our communities, and then go from there.
We're always struggling over that. Abolitionists are really interested in generative questions. That's a huge part of our, not just our ethos, but our raison d'être. It's, “come up with better questions, come up with better questions” — not struggling all the time with having to come up with the perfect response.
We're asking questions all the time because those questions are what will lead us forward to figure out what we need to know and what we don't know. I always want to be like, "Are you asking yourself the questions all the time about whether you are trying to make reform your end or abolition your end?” That will orient you as to whether or not you're in the right direction of the work.
Also, actually, cooperating with law enforcement is not going to get us to the point where we're trying to go. Ultimately, we're just trying to dismantle that institution. How are you going to dismantle that institution when you're giving them legitimacy? It's one of the reasons why abolitionists shouldn't be on friggin’ panels with the cops. What are you arguing with them about? Like, "I think you shouldn't exist?" What is the actual point of doing that? I do think there are things that are NOs that are pretty strong.
That's different from looking at a community organization where some of what they're doing is collaborating with the police. They may be doing other programs that have abolitionist possibilities embedded within them. If you're partnering with those particular projects and programs as experiments, it’s because you want to learn from them to see what could be taken from them to apply more broadly, or taken from them to apply specifically to your context. You can always do that, absolutely.
This is a basic tenet of abolitionist thinking. When we say that somebody else's caging means we are caged too and that other people's freedom is integral to our freedom, we mean that. That's a core tenet of PIC abolitionists' work ambition, vision, and politics.
I don't understand how people are all like, "Well, I need to just care for myself and that is politics,” bullshit. That is not what Audre Lorde was telling you. Stop it. You're just saying it to squeeze all your fucking work onto other people and call it self-care.
I've been in community. I'm committed to struggling in community with other people. That's the only thing I can guarantee here. What is it that Morgan Bassichis said? The very systems were trying to dismantle live within us. That's why this shit is so hard. The very systems we're trying to dismantle live in our communities, everybody. Collective action, collectivizing care, matters a great deal if we are going to end capitalism and create worlds that focus on our livingness — actually be able to sustain a life that has meaning and isn't going to kill us.
We have got to lean into that. PIC abolition, to me, is a vision that we enact through ongoing struggle. It's not actually a blueprint, but it's another world in the making. We're going to make our way collectively through experimentation, organizing, and rebellion. We're always dismantling and we're always building.
I've learned so much over the years from Ruthie Gilmore's work. Ruthie has often said that “What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities.” That quote of hers is so important, and always resonated with me because I've spent the better part of my life making things. It's not surprising then that I would've found myself attracted to PIC abolition as a vision because abolition ultimately is also about making things.
I hope that people are going to — in their own communities, in their own spaces, in their hyper-local context — make a bunch of things. See what happens, try things out. Don't be afraid to do that. I'm not saying this to you as someone who writes about making things. I'm saying this to you as somebody who has made a lot of things.
You shouldn't be afraid to start new containers because new containers are needed. Organizations are dynamic and many of them need to die for new things to come in their place. These experiments are the same way. It doesn't matter if the experiment lasted a year — you learned something in that year. It doesn't matter if that experiment lasts ten years — you've learned some things, hopefully, in those ten years.
Download the discussion guide for this episode. Listen on our website or wherever you get your podcasts.
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