Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom

One of the New York Times' 6 New Paperbacks to Read

Now in paperback and with new material, a 2021 Kirkus Best Book of the year in both Nonfiction and Current Events, the book Naomi Klein called: "a triumph of political imagination and a tremendous gift to all movements struggling towards liberation."

For more than a century, activists in the United States have tried to reform the police. Millions of people continue to protest police violence because these "solutions" do not match the problem: the police cannot be reformed.

In her critically acclaimed first book Becoming Abolitionists, Purnell draws from her experiences as a lawyer, writer, and organizer initially skeptical about police abolition. She saw too much sexual violence and buried too many friends to consider getting rid of police in her hometown of St. Louis, let alone the nation. But the police were a placebo. Calling them felt like something, and something feels like everything when the other option seems like nothing.

Purnell details how multi-racial social movements rooted in rebellion, risk-taking, and revolutionary love pushed her and a generation of activists toward abolition. The book travels across geography and time, and offers lessons that activists have learned from Ferguson to South Africa, from Reconstruction to contemporary protests against police shootings.

Here, Purnell invites readers to envision new systems that work to address the root causes of violence. Becoming Abolitionists shows that abolition is not solely about getting rid of police, but a commitment to create and support different answers to the problem of harm in society, and, most excitingly, an opportunity to reduce and eliminate harm in the first place.

Author: Derecka Purnell
Publisher: Astra House
Published: 10/04/2022
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.00w x 1.00d
ISBN13: 9781662601668
ISBN10: 1662601662
BISAC Categories:
- Political Science | Law Enforcement
- Political Science | Corruption & Misconduct
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | American | African American & Black Studies

About the Author
Derecka Purnell is a human rights lawyer, writer, and organizer. She received her JD from Harvard Law School, and works to end police and prison violence by providing legal assistance, research, and training to community-based organizations through an abolitionist framework. Her work and writing has been featured in the New York Times, NPR, The Atlantic, the Boston Globe and many other publications. Derecka is currently a columnist at the Guardian.