How the Shared Goals of Prison Abolition and Parenting Can Shape New Futures

Police and prison abolitionists often emphasize how community care and providing resources for one another can both stave off harm and — if and when harm does occur — help us meet it with accountability as opposed to punishment, violence, and social exile. So, it makes sense that abolition and parenting might be symbiotic and have something to offer one another in their shared goals of shaping new futures. In We Grow the World Together, an anthology of essays and interviews edited by journalist Maya Schenwar and artist, writer, and organizer Kim Wilson, the relationship between parenting and abolition takes center stage and is explored from varying perspectives. From letters shared between incarcerated parents and their children, to interviews with writers and activists, over 30 pieces featured in the book provide offerings on topics such as collective caregiving, navigating copaganda, and reflections on how abolitionists can learn from and be inspired by children’s innate ability to dream up new worlds.

Prism reporter Tamar Sarai spoke with Wilson and Schenwar to discuss the origins of the anthology, how parents might think anew about discipline and accountability, and how the relationship between abolitionist politics and caregiving have shown up in their own lives.

This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Tamar Sarai: I’d love to learn about how this book first came about and your initial thinking around it.

Maya Schenwar: The idea kind of emerged when I was the parent of a very young child. I’ve been writing and organizing around abolition for many years and then suddenly had this infant in my life and was not able to go to the marches, was not able to be at all the meetings, all of those things. But at the same time, I felt a connection to abolitionist values in a way that I actually had not before so strongly. You know, I’ve been calling myself an abolitionist for many years, but now I had this situation where there was somebody in my life who I was prioritizing above myself. The values of connection and collectivity, like the seeds of collectivity, felt even stronger and more important to me. And also all these questions emerged for me about, how do you parent in an abolitionist way when there’s this inherent power dynamic in relation to a child that’s pretty hierarchical? And so I started throwing this idea [of a book] around. I also felt very unqualified to write a book about it. Parenting is so specific to the individual child and the community and circumstances, and nobody ever does it perfectly. Because no one is an expert, this needed to be an anthology, and I wanted a co-editor who had a broader experience, who had a deep, deep analysis around both abolition and parenting and the intersection, and somebody incredibly smart, and so of course, I reached out to Kim, who has been writing and thinking and speaking about these topics with such a keen analysis for so many years, and has a much broader experience of parenting in relation to these systems and with an abolitionist ethic. I’m so lucky she said yes.

Kim Wilson: I have three adult children: Two are currently incarcerated, and so I have the lived experience of being a parent who has much older children than Maya does, and also brought in not just the lived experience, but an analysis of the lived experience. I think that those two things combined really complemented what Maya brings to the table. Parenting and abolition intersect with so many different things [so we thought about] who could we bring in? It just couldn’t be a thing where it was just the two of us talking about our own experiences, and we felt really strongly about that. We didn’t give any of our contributors topics, we didn’t assign topics, we just let them go for it, and I’m so glad that that’s what we did because what we got back was so much richer, deeper, and more complex and layered.

The book touches upon how parenting is a space where punitive logics can appear. How can parents be mindful of how they think about discipline, especially when they’re in the thick of their everyday lives and that impulse to reach for discipline is often just rooted in a desire to just keep your children safe?

Wilson: [In his essay], Dylan Rodriguez talks about discipline and kind of gets us to shift the way that we think about discipline from being a negative thing to being a thing that we need. He said discipline need not be conflated with carceral power. In fact, it may be an indispensable tool for building strong, principled self-nourishing abolitionist communities. I think that one of the powerful things about the book is that we’re not like a how-to-guide for parents. It’s [a set of] offerings and invitations for people to think more deeply about their parenting practice. This is a collective responsibility, not an individual one, as much of the parenting talk [like] traditional parenting, or even gentle parenting is [in its focus] on a kind of hyper-individualistic American ethos. So the book moves us away from that and takes us in a very different direction. One of the things that I’ve been quoting very often is Dr. Gabor Mate, who talks about parenting as a relationship rather than a role. So moving us away from this idea that you have this authoritarian role as a parent and you have all of the power, to getting us to think about the relationship of parenting.

How can new parents maintain their abolitionist politics even as they struggle against a perhaps natural impulse to prioritize their children and “make do” with the world as it currently exists.

Wilson: I don’t think that there’s an easy answer. Sarah Tyson’s essay offers an analysis around raising white, middle class children who are never going to necessarily experience the harms of incarceration. We don’t all assume the same risks.

That tendency to want to protect your child is a natural one, but it’s also one that is manufactured by the fact that we live in a capitalist society that pushes us to [think] that it’s everybody against everybody else; that if we’re not protecting our kids then all these horrible things can happen. I think that that’s part of the rhetoric of fear and why copaganda exists and really resonates with a lot of parents. [But] if you have the money, if you have access, if you have the social capital, and the means to be able to remove your children from those situations where they may come into harm, it doesn’t guarantee that they won’t.

Schenwar: There are all kinds of experiments happening around the country and around the world trying to collectivize caregiving. So Nadine Naber and Stacey Austin talk about this project that they undertook, Parent University, where they were bringing their kids together and trying to do parenting in a way that was different and more collaborative. Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers talk about that in relation to this collective child care that they did when their kids were small and the kinds of things that they were able to teach in bringing together different people’s experiences. Mariame Kaba in her interview talks about what would happen if every family or every grouping that has a kid [receives] a whole bunch of stuff for that kid. It’s talking about a society in which people are actually getting the things they need so they don’t have to operate as much through that fear based, scarcity mindset. Like, what would happen if people had universal free childcare? What would happen if we collectivized care in ways that people didn’t have to work so hard for? And what would happen if adults had more free time because there didn’t just have to be one primary caregiver?

Is there an essay or interview in the book that really stuck with you or that surprised you in any way?

Schenwar: I love all of them and how they work together, so it’s hard to choose just one. I think that the one thing I would uplift is that even though a lot of what people are putting forward in the book are these inspirational ideas and imaginations of what abolition can look like in relation to parenting, a lot of the book is also painful, and we’re talking concretely about incarceration in relation to parenting and how it has these direct impacts. One essay that I would really encourage people to read is Erika Ray’s essay, which is a letter to her daughter, and she’s talking about parenting from inside prison, which she’s done for many, many years, and she’s talking about keeping the light of abolition alive, even from behind bars. I know that I came most powerfully to this work because my sister was incarcerated and separated from her baby.

Relatedly, there’s an essay by Heba Gowayed about parenting and genocide, and of course, that’s another form of state violence that intersects with carcerality. Heba ties the resistance to the genocide to abolition in a really powerful way, and she challenges us to imagine not only an end to the genocide and to occupation, but a free Palestine

Wilson: It’s hard to pick one essay. One that I would uplift is by Dr. Kaitlin Noss, and she uses Claudia Jones as a touchstone to think about the work that parent-led groups are doing currently to fight against what she calls the anti-state state — political actors who denounce the government and defund and delegitimize state institutions that redistribute wealth and well being. So, we think about Ron DeSantis or Trump as anti-state state actors. [Noss] offers examples of parent-led groups around the country who have organized to push back against these horrible policies, whether it’s anti-trans bills in Florida or book bans all over the country. So, it’s moving from a lot of the things that are happening in the home or on the playground, to thinking in terms of public policy.

We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition is available for pre-order via Haymarket Books and comes out November 19.

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