In 2020, “defund the police” and “abolish the police” became mainstream political terms. Notable prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore was profiled by The New York Times. To combat media coverage that was insisting that Black Lives Matter protesters were demanding police reform, Mariame Kaba wrote plainly for the Times that protesters are, indeed, calling for the abolition of police.
“They make excuses for cops to remain cops, for the state to remain the state, or for the prison industrial complex to remain the prison industrial complex.”
Now, even though scenes of BLM protesters marching in the streets have faded, protesters continue to demand that universities and public schools cut ties with police all together. Some of these efforts, such as the University of Minnesota’s pledge to reduce its contract with the Minneapolis Police Department, have been successful. At Northwestern, Columbia, and Georgetown, student groups have gathered thousands of signatures on petitions calling for their respective institutions to remove the police presence from their campuses.
But beyond the campaigns to kick cops out of schools, there’s also a movement by students in sociology departments to see police and prison abolition perspectives integrated into the curriculum.
In some cases, students say sociology departments actively cater to aspiring law enforcement officials, a move some students say does more harm than good by upholding institutionalized white supremacy and anti-Blackness. Adrie Rose, a sociology graduate student at a small Catholic university in Pittsburgh, believes that, while abolition is sometimes discussed, there will never be an entire course dedicated to this perspective in her department.
“Sociology tends to be pretty liberal no matter where you’re going. It’s always going to skew to the left of institutional stances,” Rose says. “Most faculty are definitely going to be pro-reform at least. Some are definitely pro-defunding.”
“We’re hearing about defunding the police, we’re hearing about decarceration and abolition, and some people don’t even know what that means.”
But even with abolition discussions in classrooms happening from time to time, Rose doesn’t see professors, even those with tenure, fully embracing abolitionism. “I sincerely doubt, at least in my time, that we’ll ever see outright calls for abolition in the classroom,” she says. “ I don’t think it’ll ever be wholesale endorsed by a professor or by a department or by an institution, certainly not in my time.”
Some sociology students are calling on their departments to completely cancel carceral curricula.
“What does it mean to study something that you think doesn’t need to exist?” asks Rahsaan Mahadeo, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of sociology at Georgetown University.
Mahadeo believes many sociologists have strong financial incentives to never get rid of a curriculum that he said advocates for policing and prisons.
“They make excuses for cops to remain cops, for the state to remain the state, or for the prison industrial complex to remain the prison industrial complex,” he says. “For a lot of sociologists, they can’t support [prison abolition] because then their jobs would be gone. They’d have nothing to study.”
Last June, Amber Hamilton, a candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota, wrote a series of tweets and a letter asking her professors to rethink how they talk about the prison industrial complex.
“On May 27, 2020, University of Minnesota President Joan Gabel announced that the University will cut ties with the Minneapolis Police Department in the wake of George Floyd’s murder,” Hamilton wrote. “As such, continued advertisement of courses as a path toward law enforcement and inviting law enforcement officers to our classroom represents a hypocritical disjuncture between the University’s stated policies and the practices of the Department of Sociology.”
Soon after, faculty and students hosted internal workshops to discuss how classrooms could implement readings about abolition.
“We’re hearing about defunding the police, we’re hearing about decarceration and abolition, and some people don’t even know what that means,” says University of Minnesota Ph.D. candidate Amber Joy Powell. “So there’s definitely a big push by grad students to say this should be more at the forefront of what we do.”
And the push isn’t only happening with graduate students.
For University of Minnesota sociology professor Michelle Phelps, the degree to which abolition views went mainstream didn’t surprise her, but she still had questions.
“I remember having conversations with my research team like, ‘What do we make of this moment? Is this really a turning point? Or is this like a flash in the pan that'll be buried over by the next crisis?’ ” she says.
Months after a pledge to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department disintegrated, the Minneapolis city council voted to divest only $8 million from a proposed $179 million 2021 budget.
Phelps says moves like this lean more toward symbolic accomplishments than any real abolition end goals. She fears the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol may even steer the conversation toward more funding for the police.
“There was a whole push to abolish police and prisons in the 1960s that got quite a lot of traction, and the response to that was, of course, mass incarceration,” she says. “There’s a lot of open questions as to where this leads.”
Phelps and her research team have spent the last four years studying policing, community perceptions of policing, police activism, police reform, and the pushes for police abolition. She taught multiple undergraduate courses this year, including Sociological Perspectives on the American Criminal Justice System. She said the end-of-the-semester surveys yielded some surprising results.
“I had more students at the end of that class than I’ve ever had in my life say ‘This class has made me an abolitionist, and I want to fight for abolition,’ ” she says.
The coursework in Phelps’s class includes readings from Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Mariame Kaba. Phelps says having a variety of perspectives makes for deeper class conversations.
“I include abolitionist voices in the conversation really explicitly,” Phelps says. “I talk at various points in the course about what a reformist vision of change looks like, and what an abolitionist vision of change looks like.”
Phelps would love for every sociology department to explore abolition and restorative and transformative justice, but she doesn’t think every professor is properly equipped to delve deeply into these perspectives.
“This is where the conversation gets sticky for me,” she says, “because I don’t know that we want people who haven’t thought deeply about racism and racial justice to be pushed to include things on their syllabus that they’re going to talk about in their class, either dismissively or without any kind of nuance, depth, and appreciation.”