Abstract

Excerpted From: Paul Butler, Sisters Gonna Work it Out: Black Women as Reformers and Radicals in the Criminal Legal System,  121 Michigan Law Review 1071 (April 2023) (66 Footnotes) (Full Document)

Review:

Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom. By Derecka Purnell. New York: Astra House. 2021. Pp. 288. Cloth, $28. Paper, $18;

Progressive Prosecution: Race and Reform in Criminal Justice. Edited by Kim Taylor-Thompson and Anthony C. Thompson. New York: New York University Press. 2022. Pp. 312. $45.,

Black women are guiding the future of the American criminal legal system. They are leaders of two divergent movements, one focused on reform and the other on radical transformation. Two recent books suggest the potential and limits of these movements--and the tensions between them. Each book centers the vital work of Black women, who too often are the unsung heroes of social justice movements.

In the essays compiled by Kim Taylor-Thompson and Anthony C. Thompson in Progressive Prosecution: Race and Reform in Criminal Justice, scholars and elected district attorneys make the case that prosecutors are integral to ending the racialized mass incarceration famously described by Michelle Alexander as “the New Jim Crow.” Derecka Purnell's Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom is part autobiography and part manifesto for a country without prosecutors and police.

Both books were published during a time of significant attention to racism in the U.S. criminal legal system. The murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man killed in 2020 by Minneapolis police officers, set off a national reckoning on race (Taylor-Thompson and Thompson, p. 1). But women of color had already done much of the theorizing, organizing, and activism that laid the ground work--most notably, Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Ayo Tometi, the founders of the Movement for Black Lives. By the time of Floyd's murder, Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, published in 2010, had become one of the best-selling and most influential books on race of all time.

The fact that Black women stand ready to lead change in the criminal legal system does not mean that they all agree on what that change should be, and how to accomplish it. The Black women whose stories we learn in Progressive Prosecution and Becoming Abolitionists appear to fall along traditional Left fault lines: liberal reformers versus radical disrupters, civil rights versus critical race theory, and Barack Obama versus Ta-Nehisi Coates. Thus, in Progressive Prosecution, reformers like the legal scholar Angela J. Davis and Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx advocate for conviction review units and ending punishment for drug possession crimes. Purnell, in contrast, calls for the abolition not only of police and prosecutors, but also of capitalism.

Likewise, the diverse organizations and activists who make up the Movement for Black Lives have sometimes embraced strategies that can seem inconsistent. For example, the platform of the Movement for Black Lives states, “We believe we can achieve complete abolition and reimagination of current systems.” It calls for “an end to all jails, prisons, immigration detention, youth detention, and civil commitment facilities.” But some BLM chapter leaders have endorsed “progressive prosecutors” in local district-attorney elections.

This Review explores ways of reconciling these apparent tensions through a Black feminist politics. It proceeds in three parts. Part I heralds the significance of Progressive Prosecution and Becoming Abolitionist for their respective social justice movements and critiques each for not doing even more. Part II highlights apparent tensions between the two books and more generally between the reformist and abolitionist movements. It then points to shared ground between the two books--the role of Black women and their lived experience in leading both movements. Part III draws on the history of Black feminist movements, particularly the Combahee River Collective, to imagine the potential of Black women leading the transformation of the American criminal legal system.

[. . .]

A Black feminist approach centers the experiences of Black women, which has the effect of transforming both the progressive prosecutor and abolition projects. The Combahee River Collective Statement lists several “Black Feminist Issues and Projects,” including organizing workers at a factory that employed women of color, and addressing welfare and daycare concerns. Significantly, the criminal justice projects the statement describes include establishing “a rape crisis center in a Black neighborhood” and addressing the concerns of women survivors of domestic violence. This stands in contrast to the focus on police brutality (and, since the statement, mass incarceration) as the primary subjects of activism, and for which the experiences of Black men command the most attention.

The prosecutors and abolitionists featured in Progressive Prosecutors and Becoming Abolitionists understand that the criminal legal system reflects larger forces of subordination, such as white supremacy and patriarchy, and until those forces are defeated the problems will remain. The genius, and profound potential, of Black feminism is its insight that “the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of [Black women's] own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody's else's oppression.” When Black women work first to free themselves, everybody wins.

Albert Brick Professor in Law, Georgetown University Law Center.