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Abolition is a reorientation to the world. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2022) writes, "Abolition requires that we change one thing: everything". We understand this applies to all our institutions — not just prisons but the culture that brings prisons into being. To end the prison, we must end punishment and our vindictive desire for punishment. To end punishment, we must think about who we punish and why. To do that, we must think about housing and who doesn't have it and who is hassled by the police when they do not have it. We must think about land and our relation to it, and why settler colonialism sees land as something to extract from. We must think about power and control. And we must think about ourselves, how we benefit from these systems and how we want those benefits for ourselves.

— Abolitionist Intimacies by El Jones (Page 195)

[John P.] McKendy performs discourse analysis on the stories of the men, identifying the ways they interrupt themselves to cut off stories of their own trauma or other exculpatory factors to insert the CSC-approved rhetoric of guilt and choice. He suggests that these demands may impede the desired rehabilitation, as it forces men's experiences into contours of shame, culpability, and "badness" that might prevent them from coming to terms with their harm in healthy ways. Even their speech has been colonized and infiltrated, and in turn they lose access to the language to name themselves, their own stories, and their own lives.

[...]

The fiction of crime produces the fiction of a criminal, which in turn produces the fiction of prisons as a place for bad people, which then demands that those inside agree with their own categorization: to be criminalized is to be forced to agree that you are a criminal.

— Abolitionist Intimacies by El Jones (Page 120 - 121)

Abolition in this philosophy is not just eliminating material structures of incarceration and punishment such as prisons and police; it is more deeply about shifting our relationships to land, to capitalism, to each other, and to ourselves. As Moten and Harney (2013) ask,

What is, so to speak, the object of abolition? Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society. (42)

Abolition is also the shifting of knowledge hierarchies away from the idea that justice is the province of a few highly trained law experts and academics. Instead, we know the work of abolition lives in our communities every day, including our refusal to abandon or dehumanize those living inside its walls.

— Abolitionist Intimacies by El Jones (Page 81)