In June of 2020, I arrived at a secret address in Chicago with what remained of my belongings and no money in my bank account, a newly minted statistic among women in my age bracket who’d been subjected to harm in an intimate relationship. I was a few months out from the final two acts of violence that led to the abrupt end of my marriage and the conclusion of my time in graduate school, barely able to make rent at my new apartment and beginning the long walk back to whatever remained of myself. Truth be told, there was little left of me. I was at the midpoint of what became a yearlong apology tour of my friends for disappearing on them for the preceding six years. And I did not know anyone in Chicago, nor did I know whether this experiment in self-actualization would be a better life than what I had just left. All I knew was that I did not want to involve the law. Out of a range of possible outcomes, most ended with police, and the option I had chosen was the only version in which I walked free.
I was afraid of the sound of footsteps outside my door for the first two years I lived here. In those early months, I woke before sunrise every morning with wet eyes and a scream halfway out of my throat, too afraid to return to sleep. Like previous generations of women writers, I began to use those predawn mornings to write, and the poems from that period ultimately became the cornerstone of my book Les Portes (Autumn House Press), released earlier this year. Les Portes, French for the doors,explores intimate partner violence and non-carceral responses to harm by examining instances of harm against women and femmes in my family and beyond. The book came out of the realization that I was one of at least a dozen women in my family who had divorced their spouse due to abuse. Not one of us had involved the police; all of us could tell a story of a woman who was arrested by the help she called for.
Throughout the subsequent years I spent writing and refining Les Portes, I sought to understand where to put the harm we’d all received and what true justice would feel like without the threat of incarceration. I was fortunate that upon arrival in Chicago, I stepped into a job that I cared about and a community that welcomed me. For my first three years here, I was a fellow at the Illinois Humanities Council on their Envisioning Justice initiative, which funds projects and creates opportunities for artists and humanities practitioners working against the carceral state in Illinois. Through this work, alongside teaching inside jails and prisons and volunteering on abolitionist campaigns, I entered the complex, multifaceted conversation around mass incarceration and the abolition of the prison industrial complex in my city. Because, after three years of volunteering, collaborating with organizers and policymakers, and teaching poetry in carceral facilities, Chicago was finally my city. And I had healed enough — though perhaps not all the way — to begin to put language to my experience with harm in my relationship and my adamant refusal to invoke the law for my own so-called protection. I knew then as I know now that the police only come after the crime has happened, and that I was only as safe as the friends and communities I had around me.
Perhaps the greatest benefit to my time in Chicago has been its status as a key incubator for the school of abolitionist thought that most directly considers the overlapping issues of violence against women and non-carceral responses to harm, known as abolition feminism. In her introduction to Les Portes,Erica Meiners defines abolition feminism as “our collective experiments that demand the world do the work to end forms of impersonal violence without deepening the carceral state.” In their book Abolition. Feminism. Now., luminaries Angela Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners, and Beth Richie further describe abolition feminism as “a dialectic, a relationality, and a form of interruption: an insistence that abolitionist theories and practices are most compelling when they are also feminist, and conversely, a feminism that is also abolitionist is the most inclusive and persuasive version of feminism.” As the theoretical underpinning to Les Portes — alongside the texts Arrested Justice by Beth Richie, Queer Injustice by Joey Mogul et al., and The Feminist War on Crime by Aya Gruber — abolition feminist thought has provided strategies for reconceptualizing my understanding of abuse within the broader context of the criminal legal system and non-carceral responses in instances of harm against women and queer people. It has taught me every day the ways in which abolishing the carceral state means working toward a world in which harm is the exception and not the norm, and how every effort toward that goal needs to begin with asking the right questions.
Too often we’re taught to rely on the tools and metrics that we’ve inherited from preceding eras, a phenomenon that abolitionists call carceral logic. Carceral logic is that part of our brain that has been trained to jump to police and incarceration as a solution for any social problem. It is how teenagers end up dead after the police are brought in on a domestic violence call. By relying on carceral logic, we unlearn the skillset of asking the questions that would yield better results than the status quo.
As with any system of injustice throughout history, there will come a day when police and prisons — both descended from the institution of slavery in the U.S. — will seem similarly regressive and appallingly barbaric, a weapon wielded by far less advanced people. And, as with slavery, many of us already recognize that abolishing this devastating institution is the only just solution, and that the short-term reforms of which politicians are so fond are a patch job on a leaky ship. Indeed, Michel Foucault argues in Discipline and Punish that because prisons began as a criminal justice reform in the wake of the era of public executions and torture, they exist in a constant state of reformation that is never fully able to improve on a fundamentally flawed design.
But to reach a future in which prisons are no longer considered necessary, and to radically change public opinion, we must be able to identify what about our current era produces conditions of harm so ubiquitous that every woman you know can tell a story of a time she or a loved one was abused, assaulted, followed, coerced, or any number of other examples of gendered violence. With the right questions, we can begin to repair the damage done to us so that future generations won’t have to bear it.
My poem “Abolition,” which begins the final section of Les Portes, attempts to capture many of the core questions that fuel abolition feminist thought throughout much of the book:
Abolition
What should walk behind harm
when it arrives at our door?
Who receives the mark
by which we know the victim,
the perpetrator, the witness?
Who decides which can earn
redemption and which cannot,
what face justice will wear
long after the act has occurred?
How must we respond
when someone we love does harm
to another, to us, when someone
we love has been harmed?
Where is the path forward
that ensures no recurrence?
What wall is built purely for good?
Why is our only recourse
permanent exile? Can any words
ever be unsaid, any loss repaired,
any wound stitched closed?
What words can I use
before the one who wronged me
to express the life she cleaved
in two? What could she possibly say
in return? Does anyone change
when they understand the damage
they’ve wreaked? Do we have
any choice but to enact
further violence in response
to violence? Why does harm
touch every inch of this earth?
What else can we do
but break apart, shatter,
melt down the very machinery?
My work in this field, from teaching in carceral facilities to working with local government agencies to implement sustainable plans toward decarceration, means existing in a constant state of not-knowing despite nearly two decades of engagement with and struggle against the carceral state. What I do know is this: The overwhelming majority of women incarcerated in prisons and jails today are there for charges related to domestic violence, mental illness, addiction, and poverty. 58% of those women are mothers, and one-third of them are queer. I know that a crime is not the same thing as a moral failing, that, as Mariame Kaba writes, “crime and harm are not synonymous. All that is criminalized isn’t harmful, and all harm isn’t necessarily criminalized.” And I know, above all, that states of abolition already exist in affluent neighborhoods in the United States: neighborhoods in which police presence is unnecessary, in which basic needs are met, and in which young people are supported to thrive in whatever they choose to do. And still, even under these supposedly ideal conditions, that does not preclude the presence of abuse in everyday life, which can happen to anyone making any amount of money and with any education level.
Beyond this, I do not know every aspect of what it will take to get us to where we need to go. This is the uncertainty, the not-knowing, in which abolitionist thought dwells. Take, for instance, a question I pose in a sonnet in Les Portes:
Most days the same question: How must we love those among us
who’ve harmed someone irretrievably? Not with torches blazing
at their front door, not police cars skulking through the dark,
sometimes not even with open arms when they’re found, years later…
One individual alone cannot answer every question abolitionists pose on behalf of all Americans. Rather, achieving a future free of the carceral apparatus means that these are the questions we all need to be asking and answering together, for ourselves and each other.
I’ve been in Chicago for six years now, and I will not live anywhere else if I can help it. This is the epicenter of the conversations I want to be having, and the safest I have ever been. But even here, I have not lived free of harm. This risk is the price we all pay to live and work in community with others. We deserve a world in which it is exceptional and rare to experience or commit an act of harm, and in which, as Kaba writes, violence becomes “unthinkable in our culture.” It is our existential imperative to learn how to do better with every generation so that humanity only ever moves toward a just future.
