Unknown - Abolishing Carceral Society

Billy Allen (death row prisoner)

There are moments, though rare, when my emotions will escape from the prison in which Ive kept them prisoner. Their cries, some of pain, frustration, anger, and fear, will then erupt onto the canvas, paper, or whatever material thats been chosen as the arena for them to be heard. The colors scream of the emotions that I have longed to set free! The brush stokes, some calm, bold, others wildly controlled, leave an undeniable impression of a soul that has suffered, is somewhat shattered, not yet broken, but barely holding together!

My name is Billie Allen and my art is what I call Painting With Tears: The Art Of Innocence! It is the story that you never hear as one fights to hold on while trying to get the justice they have been denied! These pieces and more were created from a cell on Federal Death Row, where I fight to prove my innocence. To hear more about my story and to see more artwork, please feel free to visit freebillieallen.com and twitter.com/freebilliealle1.

Billie Allen 26901-044

P.O. Box 33

Terre Haute, IN. 47808

freebillieallen.com

ADVANCE PRAISE

Abolishing Carceral Society is an immense contribution to contemporary struggles for freedom. The pieces in this collection provoke new questions that inform resistance strategies, and deepen our understandings of the systems we are seeking to abolish and the social relations we are working to transform. This collection will be a profoundly useful tool in classrooms and activist groups. The conversation happening in Abolition is essential reading for those participating in the thorny, complex debates about how we dismantle structures of state violence and domination. The writers and artists whose work makes up the inaugural issue of Abolition, rigorously explore the most pressing questions emerging in liberation struggles.

Dean Spade, author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law.

Abolishing Carceral Society is a wonderful mix of provocative ideas married with art, to help us consider a world without prisons, policing, and surveillance. Many of the submissions, however, are less concerned with dismantling what exists than they are with taking seriously that abolition is a project interested in building and in practical organizing. This comes through particularly in David Turners essay, among others. Abolishing Carceral Society asks us some questions that we sometimes prefer to ignore, like What does it mean to transform human relations? This inaugural issue from Abolition pushes us to ask a number of questions that are important to moving us toward an abolitionist horizon.

Mariame Kaba, founder of Project NIA, and cofounder of Chicago Freedom School, Chicago Taskforce on Violence Against Girls & Young Women, and Love & Protect.

Abolition is a crucial contribution to radical social movements. While fighting against prisons and the death penalty as instruments of class rule, the journal amplifies the voices of the incarcerated, actively engages with organizers on the ground, and builds bridges across multiple movements. The first issue, Abolishing Carceral Society, presents incisive interventions in the current debates about prison abolition and abolitionism as a political principle. It is a bold beginning for what will become an essential forum for all insurgent thinkers.

Silvia Federici, author of Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and the Feminist Struggle and Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation.

From slavery to prisons, abolition has always been a project of courage and breadth. Abolishing Carceral Society brings to bear the reflective, transformative urgency needed to confront todays violent world order. Of the struggle, by the struggle, and for the struggle: this auspicious collection offers not answers but pathways down which contemporary abolitionists travel en route to a future freedom. Check out their words, scope their visionsheed their calls.

Dan Berger, author of Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era.

Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics continues the radical, democratic tradition started by abolitionists to speak truth to power. In these dismal political times, it is a matter of the greatest urgency to create and sustain a counter-public sphere and an alternative print culture to sustain and expand American democracy. This remarkable and inspiring advocacy journal is poised to do precisely that for democratic activists as well as the broader lay public.

Manisha Sinha, author of The Slaves Cause: A History of Abolition.

The Abolition Collective embodies the kind of work anybody interested in justice should aspire to reproduce. Astute, rigorous, and uncompromising, the collective seeks to bring radical perspectives to a wide readership within and beyond academe. With the publication of its inaugural issue we are treated to the very best of revolutionary analysis. Anybody interested in upending a carceral and colonial order will find plenty of inspiration here. Something we all need and do well to pass along.

Steven Salaita, author of Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine.

The Abolition Journal project offers a unique, revolutionary lens through which to view, analyze and fight against capitalism and patriarchy on the terrain of the prison-industrial complex. It aims to combine an abolitionist message with a democratic production process that prioritizes participation of those directly affected by incarceration. What a welcome and needed approach! I am confident the project will help intellectuals build ties of solidarity across race, class, gender, nationality, and other borders that block liberation and in its finest moments will help teach us, as Mumia says, to fight with light in our eyes.

James Kilgore, author of Understanding Mass Incarceration: A Peoples Guide to the Key Civil Rights Struggle of Our Time.

Abolition: Journal of Insurgent Politics is a bold journal mapping new roads out of the inferno in which we live. As the editors Manifesto tells us, abolition is a key strategy out of our carceral, slave-like societythe prison being the pivotal place for the perpetuation of an unjust political system. But the journal also sheds light on the many ways in which were imprisoned beyond the prisons walls. With scholarly articles, poems and artwork, in a beautifully designed text, it asks us to open our eyes and support a liberation struggle against jails and jailers.

George Caffentzis, author of In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and the Crisis of Capitalism and No Blood For Oil: Essays on Energy, Class Struggle and War, 1998-2017.

What is the most damage we can dogiven our biographies, abilities, and commitmentsto the racial order and rule of capital?

Adapted from Joel Olson

ABOLITION: A JOURNAL OF INSURGENT POLITICS

Abolition Collective, editors

The Abolition Journals publication working group for this first issue included: Kevin Bruyneel, Jaskiran Dhillon, Andrew Dilts, Paula Ioanide, Brian Lovato, Eli Meyerhoff, and Dylan Rodrguez. While the publication group worked hard as managing coeditors to facilitate review and conceptualize themes for the first issue, Eli Meyerhoff and Andrew Dilts offered critical leadership and disproportionate labor in making it come to life. The art working group who reviewed and selected the art for the journal included LJ Amsterdam, Jaskiran Dhillon, Eli Meyerhoff, and Amanda Priebe. Reviewers from within and beyond Abolitions editorial review board gave invaluable feedback on articles in the issue. We thank Michelle Beckett for her copy-editing expertise. Our editors at Common Notions, Malav Kanuga and Natsumi Paxton, have been wonderfully encouraging and patient. Thank you as well to Neelufar Franklin, Morgan Buck, Josh MacPhee, and Ash Goh at Common Notions.