Having not read any books (or any lengthy articles) about abolition before, I found this book to be a great introduction to the idea. Purnell presents a strong argument for why abolition is a necessary mindset and tool for creating a better, more just, society. Her writing is very approachable, and I enjoyed how the first section of the book is really structured as a memoir and follows Purnell as she moves closer and closer to the idea of abolition in her life. There is a bit of a jump from more a memoirist approach to a manifesto around 35% of the way through, and that felt a bit jarring.

However, I think that if you have already read a lot about abolition, this book could prove to be a bit repetitive and lacking. Even as a beginner to this idea, I felt that the book started to get more and more repetitive as it goes on. A lot of the general underlying societal issues that Purnell points out are repeated throughout each section, often using similar phrases that don't really add anything new to the argument. I understand that these issues inform almost every aspect of how our society functions (or not functions), but I thought the repetitive phrases didn't really add anything or deepen my understanding that much.

I also think that the structure of this book is a bit confusing. While there are sections that focus on different topics, I felt that within each section, the writing was rather disjointed and didn't connect the guiding topics together very well. Purnell jumps from story to story and from topic to topic very frequently, and there isn't a strong thread to tie it all together. I also felt that we were pulled away from some narratives/ideas too quickly, and I was left wanting more. It felt rather incomplete at times, which is unfortunate.

Generally, I think this book is a great introduction to the ideas of abolition and how it can be applied to activist work and our general lives now. I feel like this book was really written for a more commercial/wider audience, and thus doesn't delve as deep as I would have liked into certain topics. Even so, I did find it to be quite helpful, and I really enjoyed Purnell's voice and how she introduces readers to abolition. So I would definitely recommend this as a first book to read about the idea, before you dive into more complex writing!

Thank you to Astra House Books and Netgalley for the digital advanced copy!

In her debut nonfiction book, Dereka Purnell, an organizer, lawyer & writer, offers a bold & provocative stance: Ending police and prison violence through an abolitionist framework. Purnell addresses this hot-button topic with historical assessment and her own activist experiences.

Purnell's passionate about her believes, but also honest about how they originated. What's refreshing about Purnell is how, through reading and experience, her own critical assessments of our country and its justice system have changed over time. While controversial, Purnell's beliefs are rooted in her own experiences on the ground in Ferguson, MI during the post-Michael-Brown protests and her extensive travel around the globe to learn how other countries address justice. She doesn't just say, "Don't do this," or "Let's end this." After discussing the history of police violence against Black people and their mass incarcerations, she also assesses how the "fixes" our government has implemented--police dept. reform (and its cost to taxpayers), the jailing of police (when it actually does happen), and use of body cameras--work..or don't. All in all her suggestions--and the process through which she came to them--are very detailed, supported, and intriguing. Her writing is conversational yet her passion for this subject absolutely comes through.

If you're interested in reading about bold ideas about and historical assessment of social justice issues, this book is a great resource.

A must-read for anyone seeking to become more educated on the issues surrounding policing and prisons in the United States. Derecka Purnell expertly intertwines her own experiences with a policy evidence base building her case for abolition. **Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review**

In her new book, Derecka Purnell, lawyer and activist, outlines a compassionate stance for abolition. Part memoir, part exposition, part action plan, this should be the next anti-racist book you pick up. Since George Floyd’s murder in 2020, you have probably seen or heard of protestors demanding to “Defund the Police.” Becoming Abolitionists provides background on the issues at hand like over-arrests, wellness checks that turn into raids, violence by police who are already trained to de-escalate and don’t. In many ways it picks up where Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow leaves off from eleven years ago with more current events. It outlines the more public face of violence against Black people that we’ve seen since the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Freddie Gray in Baltimore and also the more private face of the evictions of residents from low-income housing and police arresting residents on loitering charges while they hang out outdoors to escape the heat.

As an organizer, Purnell spends time one on one with people, often answering the questions “What about the murderers? What about the rapists?” She answers those questions here, both with statistics and with personal and public stories. She breaks down myths with discussions of bodily autonomy, explaining the damages to a community of prison sentences for drug related crimes, and even challenges the legal framework for determining criminality.

Purnell’s action plan is eminently rational and, more importantly I think, achievable. In her conclusion she outlines five major points for community engagement. Community accountability is also an easy phrase to throw around, but Purnell insists that reallocating resources to promote healthy communities will make a radical difference. For example, instead of the state spending money to put a child in foster care, redirect that money to community programs to help families and children flourish. The idea of abolition is not just to be anti-racist, but to promote supportive growth, well-rounded communities, and address concerns of the climate crisis on poor communities.

Most of all, what I loved best about this book is Purnell’s transparency about change and growth. As a young person, she and her family relied on the police for everything. They had to, because the police were their only option in an area devoid of healthcare, locksmiths, social workers and maintenance workers. But events and conversations over a lifetime lead to change, and she knows that even today this book is only a starting point and that her views will continue to adapt and evolve.

This one is important. It’s more than anti-racist. It’s an action plan to heal communities wrecked by violence, broken families, and climate change. I cannot recommend it enough, especially if you aren’t sure what abolition in our contemporary era could look like.

I love this book! I think the structure of interweaving Derecka's personal experience of becoming an abolitionist along with lots of history, sharp analysis, and anecdotes works really well. I also liked that individual chapters focused on issues like gender, disability, and climate.

By far my favorite aspect of the book is the clear anti-capitalist framework and analysis that Derecka carries through it. It was new for me to think so clearly about how the police create and manage inequality, and how they create classes/groups of marginalized workers by policing race, class, gender, disability, etc. I especially loved her analysis of how sexual violence creates a group of easily exploited workers in women, especially women of color and migrant women. This frame of anti-capitalism allows Derecka to easily turn a lot of commonsense ideas about policing on their head--police protect the capitalists and their interests (which means extracting labor from workers easily and at a low cost), not the people. So, the police are actually functioning exactly as they are designed to when they murder people and enforce racial hierarchies. As Derecka concludes, this simply means that we have to abolish the police and the oppressive systems that they uphold.

I think Derecka does an excellent job of discrediting many common objections to abolition and some common ideas in left-leaning social movements today, particularly the idea that sending murderers and rapists to jail is "justice" and that reforming police will help (it will just give them more money and power).

I will say that I don't know how well this book will function as an introduction to abolition for someone who is completely new to it. Since it covers so much ground, I'm not sure that I would be convinced by some of Derecka's points if I weren't already primed to agree with her because she has so many points in the book that she can't take the time to unpack them all thoroughly. Some of the scholarship she cites is also quite difficult (particularly Moten, but also some of the Davis), and I don't know how readers would interpret this without having previously read those scholars.

My main substantive critique of the book is focused on the chapter about disability, in which Derecka appears to mostly stick to the medical model of disability instead of the social model. Although she notes that policing and capitalism physically disable people (through violence) and how capitalism excludes disabled people from the workplace, she maintains the idea that disability is located in an individual's body, rather than the society that is only built to work for certain bodies. She uses the language of "accommodation" rather than universal design. This oversight seemed just a bit out of line given how strong her linking of policing, marginalization, and capitalism was in other chapters. The social model of disability could help illustrate how capitalism creates disability not physically but as a category (just like how race, gender, and class are socially constructed through capitalism).

A final critique is the lack of mentioning food justice, specifically veganism. Derecka hints at food a few times in the chapter on climate, but she does not take on the fact that most people in the US live on a diet that is founded on violence against animals (which is also violent against workers in the industry). This seems like another oversight given her goal of living in peace/abolishing violent systems, and given the intellectual history of Black feminist veganism.

Derecka Purnell generously and urgently takes the hand of the reader to guide them on an extremely important journey to answer the question of what would it truly mean to abolish a society that could have/could need police and prisons?
Purnell directly answers the wider calls from last years uprising of what does defund and abolishing the police mean, what is the scholarship and organizing work behind these calls, and how did she arrive to this political understanding.
She relentlessly guides you through the political education and organizing work that informs her and highlights the ways that abolishing the police is tied up in so many other systems of oppression today. This isn’t the first abolitionist text I’ve read but I still found new and important connections in what she discussed. Especially important in this summer of flooding, wildfires, drought, and record temperatures is the connection of the police to climate change. We should all be wary of the ways that police, prisons, and the military will be used to manage the climate crisis without addressing the route cause and challenging the power of fossil fuel corporations.
I would categorize this as both a fantastic read for people hoping to learn the first thing about abolition and people that have studied it already, to remind them of the other work going on and perhaps new connections they had not considered before. I hope so many people pick this one up and I’ll be recommending it to everyone I know.