About the books:

 

ABOLITION LABOR: The Fight to End Prison Slavery

https://orbooks.com/catalog/abolition-labor

 

Abolition Labor chronicles the national movement to end forced labor, much of it unpaid, in American prisons. It draws on interviews with formerly incarcerated persons in Alabama, Texas, Georgia and New York to give a more holistic picture of these work conditions, and it covers the new prisoner rights movement that began with system-wide work strikes involving more than 50,000 people in the 2010s.

Incarcerated people work for penny wages (15 cents an hour is not unusual), and, in several states, for nothing at all, as cooks, dishwashers, janitors, groundskeepers, barbers, painters, or plumbers; in laundries, kitchens, factories, and hospitals. They provide vital public services such as repairing roads, fighting wildfires, or clearing debris after hurricanes. They manufacture products like office furniture, mattresses, license plates, dentures, glasses, traffic signs, garbage cans, athletic equipment, and uniforms. And they harvest crops, work as welders and carpenters, and labor in meat and poultry processing plants.

Abolition Labor  provides a wealth of insights into what has become a vast underground economy. It draws connections between the risky trade forced on prisoners who hustle to survive on the inside and the precarious economy on the outside. And it argues that, far from being quarantined off from society, prisons and their forced work regime have a sizable impact on the economic and social lives of millions of American households.

 

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DEFUND: Conversations Towards Abolition

https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2292-defund

 

DEFUND is a collection of illuminating interviews with leading abolitionist organizers and thinkers, reflecting on the uprisings of summer 2020, the rise of #defund, and the work ahead of bridging the divide between reform and abolition. 

 

The 2020 uprisings against police violence launched a nation conversation about defunding the police and prisons, propelling the #defund movement into the spotlight. The backlash has been swift, beating back efforts to reallocate public funds away from police and other punitive carceral systems and into social welfare programs that provide care, stability, and community. 

 

But as Calvin John Smiley reveals through pointed conversations with academics, activists, and system-impacted individuals, #defund was always more than a brief moment; it is part of an ongoing struggle against white supremacy, capitalism, police state-sanctioned violence, and mass incarceration.

 

Through interviews with Marisol LeBrón, Dan Berger, Zellie Imani, and Olayemi Olurin, among others, Smiley considers how #defund can bridge the divide between reform and abolition, becoming a catalyst to help organizers realize abolitionist visions. Along the way, these rich conversations illuminate the long histories of systems of repression and protests against them; how policing serves as a colonial project in Puerto Rico and beyond; why creativity and music-making are essential to movement-building; and much more. 

 

Giving voice to those committed to abolitionist praxis, Defund is an essential tool for organizers as we imagine how defund goes from a hashtag to a movement to a reality. 

 

 

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