How to End Family Policing by Erin Miles Cloud

Author:Erin Miles Cloud
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books

EMC: That’s incredible. Annie, what about you? How do we keep going?

AC: We keep going by saying the words that I say all the time. “I’m not tired yet. We keep going.”

Say it: Are they tired? No! Are they tired of abusing people? No! Are they tired of killing people? No! Are they tired of starving children and not educating them? No!

So I’m not tired either. No, I’m not tired.

10

Change Everything?

Notes on Abolitionist Strategies

Erica R. Meiners

“Change everything” is the charge from the powerful scholar, mentor, organizer Ruth Wilson Gilmore.1 Abolition involves rethinking all the structures of power that make our lives: everything.

I admit: This feels daunting.

My response to this charge is often to state what I believe: The enormity of the prison industrial complex means that there are always possibilities and places for collective engagement. Also, I remind myself that many of our demands should be common sense: decouple health care from policing, fund schools not jails! Yet when faced on the daily with this push to change everything, I can feel stuck. My everyday work is often reactive and intimate, two arenas that I find both hard and relatively easy to change.

In this political moment—another era of border-fortification, deportations, targeted criminalization of brown and Black lives, and frontal attacks on queer and trans bodies—I return to Gilmore’s charge as I and others wrestle with survival, strategy, and organizing. Issue- and identity-based organizing are often the frameworks forced on us by the state and violent systems—fighting reactively to challenge a component of the prison industrial complex or for trans lives in the face of an emergent and harmful policy—and these moves may provide some temporary relief. But “change everything” must also mean rethinking how we organize.

In particular, this charge is resurfacing as I think and work alongside those with decades of fierce organizing to challenge the family policing system. Why has this work been often sidelined and yet is so critical? Despite the wealth of organizing and scholarship highlighting how child welfare systems are an integral part of the prison industrial complex, abolitionist mobilizations—including my own—always seemed to struggle to prioritize the family policing system. Fighting projects such as a proposed new prison for migrants, or new punitive technologies of policing and surveillance, always emerges as urgent. Mobilizing against proposed legislation, such as attempts to criminalize co-sleeping, did not. Books challenging policing felt timely, while texts and reports highlighting resistances to the foster care system rarely surfaced on reading lists for study groups. Organizing against the family policing systems was often erased or marginalized because the campaigns and projects I am connected to are often reactive, stemming from the need to push back on threats and violence, usually from the state.

However, after decades witnessing this deprioritization, I also believe that fundamentally, family policing is also viewed as less critical, less vital, both because of lingering sentiments and mythologies surrounding children and child protection and, perhaps most potently, because those most harmed by these systems are often women, usually Black or Indigenous, and often poor.

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