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mass incarceration
Why Abolition Matters in This Moment
The crises of our generation demand a holistic approach that acknowledges the interconnectedness of systems of oppression and the need for a collective movement that dismantles state violence at all levels.
Oct 22, 2025
It feels like the world is spinning out of control as militarized violence, climate chaos, economic inequality, and authoritarianism escalate. At the same time, I've been inspired by an expanding sense of global solidarity, epitomized by the thousands who traveled to Egypt for the March to Gaza this past June and the millions who watched in real time as the Global Sumud Flotilla attempted to break Israel's siege this month. Amid escalating violence, the repression of civil rights, and the incarceration of peaceful protesters worldwide, there is a growing people's movement for transformative action that connects the dots between militarism, corporate capitalism, and the climate crisis.
In this context, I've been planning the logistics for World BEYOND War’s annual global #NoWar2025 Conference on October 24-26 with the feeling that this year's theme of abolition is especially timely. The crises of our generation demand a holistic approach that acknowledges the interconnectedness of systems of oppression and the need for a collective abolition movement that dismantles state violence at all levels. Abolition invites us to reimagine safety and security beyond punishment, control, and state violence.
Abolition is a project of liberation, a collection of goals, ideas, practices, strategies, campaigns, and movements aimed at abolishing institutions and forces of violence—from police and prisons to war and colonization. It’s an act of refusal, a rejection of the violent status quo. And a commitment to build something much better, together.
Admittedly, abolition can be a daunting concept. And in the face of encroaching state violence and authoritarianism, there can be an impulse to play it safe—to appease, or to attempt to reform. But the systemic issues we face necessitate a rethinking of the system itself, a paradigmatic shift away from the corporate capitalistic framework that fuels the inequities of our time. This starts first with daring to imagine what an abolitionist future could look like. The work of World BEYOND War challenges us to make that mental leap. Otherwise, we can get stuck in cycles of piecemeal reforms that never address root causes and upend the institutions that perpetuate violence.
The #NoWar2025 Virtual Conference on October 24-26 will be a key moment to come together across borders and movements to explore abolition as a visionary and necessary approach to dismantling systems of violence.
Importantly, dismantling violent and oppressive systems does not mean that society is left in a vacuum without support. On the contrary, abolition necessitates creating community-led nonviolent systems that center common security, meaning, “No one is safe until all are safe.” These models already exist and can be learned from and replicated.
Costa Rica abolished its military. South Africa ended apartheid (but work continues for reconciliation and reparations). Many Indigenous peoples around the world have long employed ancestral and liberatory practices beyond prisons, policing, and punishment while other communities are trying new models of violence interruption programs, nonviolent deescalation, community self-policing, court diversion, restorative and transformative justice, and much more right now.
Beyond a failure of imagination, a key impediment to abolition is the misuse of billions of our tax dollars. When we call for defunding the police and slashing the military budget, those funds must be adequately redirected toward meeting people’s basic needs and establishing robust systems for common security. To discount frameworks like unarmed civilian defense, violence interruption programs, and restorative justice processes as being unfeasible at scale overlooks the fact that most of these programs are grassroots driven with little funding. Imagine what we could achieve with the $1 trillion per year currently spent on the US military alone.
The #NoWar2025 Virtual Conference on October 24-26 will be a key moment to come together across borders and movements to explore abolition as a visionary and necessary approach to dismantling systems of violence, including police, prisons, militaries, and borders, while cultivating communities rooted in justice, care, and collective well-being. Join us.
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Stop Gov. Healey’s $360 Million Prison Plan
Local organizations are imploring the Massachusetts governor to “truly invest in building up people, not prisons, and improve safety and well-being for all of us.”
Aug 07, 2025
On the last day of June, the Healey-Driscoll administration shocked community leaders, stakeholders, and residents across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts with their announcement of their $360 million proposal to build upon the MCI-Framingham prison site. This came as a surprise to many politicians and constituents alike, as the administration had been nearly radio silent about any developments concerning the MCI-Framingham project since November 2024.
The Healey-Driscoll administration has failed to be transparent with Massachusetts constituents regarding this plan. Information requests made by constituents and organizations about the status of this plan were ignored. This is especially concerning given the fact that many of these inquirers have been deeply involved in the Free Her Campaign—a movement and policy platform focused on criminal justice reform in the state.
Organizations such as Families for Justice as Healing and the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls (the National Council) have been leaders of this campaign since its inception and argue that this proposal only takes away from legitimate efforts that prevent incarceration. In their statement addressing the governor’s proposal, the organizations implored the Gov. Maura Healey to “truly invest in building up people, not prisons, and improve safety and well-being for all of us.”
Talks of designing a new women’s prison at the MCI-Framingham site have been going on since 2019, with the original price tag being around $50 million dollars. However, with a new cost that is nearly eight times more expensive than before, communities and organizations around the state are rallying together to fight against this proposal.
As opponents of warfare and violence, we must understand how the very institutions that perpetuate war abroad on behalf of the United States also wage war against her citizens at home.
Although there has been significant pushback against new prisons in the state, the Healey-Driscoll administration has spun the construction of a renovated MCI-Framingham site as innovative given that it will be “trauma-informed” and able to provide mental health resources to its inhabitants. Opponents of prison expansion including currently and formerly incarcerated individuals argue that there is no such thing as “trauma-informed” prisons, and they only further the cycle of trauma and abuse that led a majority of the women in MCI-Framingham to incarceration in the first place. They argue that what many of the women need is clemency, and to be brought home to gain access to the medical and mental health resources that they need to survive.
The architect of the proposal is HDR—an architecture and engineering consultancy firm that has helped build over 275 prisons and jails in the U.S. and was the architect in designing previous Massachusetts projects such as the Middleton House of Correction.
HDR is a large military defense contractor for the U.S., and has received over $2.02 billion to date for its special services in military infrastructure design. In exchange for a Department of Defense contract worth over $360,000, HDR helped design a shooting range under the project name “NEGBA FIRING RANGE.” Given the title, this shooting range was either in or near Israel’s Negba settlement. Located in the Naqab desert, the Negba settlement is only one piece in Israel’s greater effort to expand military infrastructure in the very desert which many Palestinian Bedouins call home. These communities suffer the environmental and material consequences for Israel’s militarization of the region.
As opponents of warfare and violence, we must understand how the very institutions that perpetuate war abroad on behalf of the United States also wage war against her citizens at home. Although seemingly separate, U.S. foreign policy and the internal carceral system are inherently tied together by consulting firms such as HDR, which carry out the will of the state at the expense of U.S. citizens in both civil and economic terms.
With this understanding, women affected by the proliferation of these policies continue to push back. On May 13, incarcerated women from MCI-Framingham delivered powerful testimony in favor of The Jail and Prison Construction Moratorium, an act that imposes a five-year pause on any new prison or jail construction in the Commonwealth. This is just one of four bills currently in the state legislature supported by Massachusetts Peace Action and the Free Her Campaign alike.
In the upcoming weeks and months, the National Council and Families for Justice As Healing will be holding several events such as phone banking sessions and canvassing events to further inform Massachusetts residents of this proposal, and demonstrate public support against it.
To get involved in the campaign and learn more about the supported bills, visit the National Council’s website for more information around actions you can take to stop Healey’s plan.
This piece was originally published on the Massachusetts Peace Action website.
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This Juneteenth, America Must Choose to Live Up to Its Founding Documents
When we limit conversations about our complex past, we not only lose historical accuracy but also our capacity for growth and the honest reckoning that could finally help us fulfill our founding promises.
Jun 19, 2025
In 1796, 22-year-old Ona Marie Judge became one of America's most wanted fugitives. Born into slavery and held by President George Washington, Judge escaped from Philadelphia and fled north to New Hampshire. Washington immediately began hunting her, placing newspaper advertisements offering rewards for her return. For over 50 years, she would live as a fugitive, knowing that bounty hunters could appear at any moment to drag her back into bondage. Her story of survival reveals tensions that we're still grappling with today.
Judge's escape revealed the America we rarely acknowledge in our founding stories. As efforts to silence discussions of race and history spread nationwide—from federal agencies barring recognition of Black History Month to more than 44 states, including my home state of New Hampshire, limiting how schools can discuss racism—her story demands our attention.
Judge's escape laid bare the America we rarely acknowledge in our founding mythology.
The paradoxes Judge witnessed still define us. Washington was not the infallible moral leader of our imagination, but a flesh-and-blood man who owned other human beings and spent years trying to recapture the woman who dared seek freedom. New Hampshire was not removed from slavery's horrors—Portsmouth had been a major slave trading port since the 1600s.
Judge's escape laid bare the America we rarely acknowledge in our founding mythology. These tensions were the defining forces that shaped America's first century and continue to do so today. Judge's story illuminates how deeply slavery was woven into the fabric of the entire nation, connecting Black and white lives in ways our history books have long worked to hide. Understanding her experience becomes essential to understanding ourselves, especially as movements to obscure these complexities grow stronger.
The Pattern of Progress and Backlash
This current backlash against Black history education shouldn't surprise us—it follows a persistent American pattern. Every period of racial progress has triggered fierce resistance designed to roll back gains and rewrite the past. After Reconstruction brought Black political participation and civil rights, the country allowed Jim Crow laws to flourish and KKK terror to reign while Confederate monuments were erected across the South to rewrite the Civil War as a noble struggle rather than a fight to preserve slavery. The rise of the war on drugs and mass incarceration of Black Americans followed the 1960s civil rights laws. The election of the first Black president, Barack Obama, triggered the Tea Party movement and birtherism campaigns designed to delegitimize his presidency.
Today's attacks on how we discuss race and history represent the latest iteration of this cycle. When we limit conversations about our complex past, we not only lose historical accuracy but also our capacity for growth and the honest reckoning that could finally help us fulfill our founding promises.
Why Local Stories Matter
This ongoing struggle is why the work happening in New Hampshire—a politically purple state where Black residents make up just 2% of the population—offers constructive lessons for the rest of the nation. If honest conversations about Black history can flourish here, they can do so anywhere; however, success requires understanding what we like to use as a guideline: the rule of thirds. One third will support, one third will be persuaded, and one third will oppose. The progress is determined by the persuadable middle. We've seen how we can make real change by reaching that crucial middle group in New Hampshire.
Look no further than our annual July 4 readings of Frederick Douglass' "What to the Slave Is Your Fouth of July" speech, which has grown from one participating town to 22, with communities reading simultaneously across the state. From synagogues to rural town halls, people gather simply to hear Douglass' words—no discussion required, no positions demanded. This creates space for reflection and connection without the political battles that often shut down conversation before it begins.
Judge's legacy calls us to specific action: Resist erasure wherever we encounter it—in our children's schools, local libraries, state legislatures, and national debates.
Building unexpected alliances has proven equally powerful. Working with the Daughters of the American Revolution to install historical markers honoring Black Revolutionary War heroes demonstrates that historical truth enriches rather than threatens our understanding of patriotism. We've now placed nearly 40 markers throughout the state, each one making visible stories that were always there but rarely acknowledged.
This success stems from focusing on education and storytelling rather than confrontation, allowing facts and local narratives to speak for themselves. New Hampshire residents hunger for authentic stories about their own communities, even when those stories complicate their narratives about the past.
From resistance to Reckoning
The power of personal narrative will be on full display this Juneteenth, as Portsmouth hosts an unprecedented gathering where direct descendants of America's founding fathers and the people they enslaved come together to explore our intertwined histories. Shannon LaNier, the ninth-generation descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, will join Laurel Guild Yancey, descendant of Portsmouth's Prince Whipple, a Black man who fought in the Revolutionary War while enslaved by Declaration of Independence signer William Whipple. In a profound twist of history, the Whipple family would later become the very people who provided sanctuary to Ona Judge when she sought refuge in Portsmouth—the same family line that had owned Prince Whipple would become her protectors, demonstrating how the arc of justice sometimes bends through the most unexpected transformations.
When descendants sit together sharing these narratives, they reveal how the stories of America's founding fathers and the people they enslaved have been inseparably linked across generations. These family histories, passed down through centuries, offer living proof that our nation's racial past isn't separate and distinct, but intimately woven together from the very beginning. Their gathering in Judge's adopted hometown creates a bridge across time, connecting her story of resistance to our current moment of choice.
After all, her choice to flee slavery, knowing the dangers ahead, required extraordinary courage. She lived in poverty, often depending on charity, and had outlived her three children and husband when she died in 1848. Yet she chose uncertainty over oppression, a fugitive's life over bondage, never abandoning her claim to freedom despite facing consequences far more severe than anything we encounter today.
The free Black families in Portsmouth who risked everything to shelter her further demonstrate that resistance has always been collective work, requiring people to see their own freedom as incomplete while others remained in chains. Their courage offers a template for our current moment, when we need that same spirit of collective action.
Judge's legacy calls us to specific action: Resist erasure wherever we encounter it—in our children's schools, local libraries, state legislatures, and national debates. Speak up when school boards attempt to ban books that tell the full story of American history. Engage with the persuadable middle in our communities, attend town halls, and vote for leaders who understand that historical truth strengthens, rather than weakens, our democracy. Most importantly, discover the complete stories of all who have lived in your community—Indigenous peoples, Black families, immigrants, and others whose experiences have been overlooked—and support those working to bring these histories to light.
This Juneteenth, as conversations unfold in the place where Judge found refuge, her story asks us to choose: Will we allow fear to silence these essential truths, or will we find the courage to engage in the honest reckoning needed to fulfill the promises of equality our founding documents made to all Americans?
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