What do successful alternatives to policing, prosecution and prison actually look like? And how would they work? A group of Chicago’s leading public safety, health and justice innovators gathered at the DePaul Art Museum last summer to provide much-needed clarity on these crucial questions.
Artists, survivors of violence, organizers, entrepreneurs and business leaders, public defenders, policy experts, restorative justice practitioners and system-impacted people sat down for a series of conversations while exploring Remaking the Exceptional, a groundbreaking exhibition on torture and incarceration.
The conversations expose common myths about crime and punishment and explain a range of critical issues, including copaganda, pretrial detention and the criminalization of survivors. They also delve into powerful nonpunitive routes to addressing harm, such as restorative justice and violence interruption.
The following short film — the third in a series named after the exhibition and produced by Zealous, Truthout and Teen Vogue — focuses on the movement for abolition. It explains what abolition means; how abolitionists are confronting questions of harm, crime, punishment and justice; and how transformative solutions require a willingness to move beyond the status quo.
The film features Sharlyn Grace and Takenya Nixon, both from the Cook County Public Defender’s Office; artist and activist Bella BAHHS; Love & Protect member Chez Rumpf; and advocate and policy expert Briana Payton from the Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts.
Read more on abolition from Truthout and Teen Vogue.
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We’ve borne witness to a chaotic first few months in Trump’s presidency.
Over the last months, each executive order has delivered shock and bewilderment — a core part of a strategy to make the right-wing turn feel inevitable and overwhelming. But, as organizer Sandra Avalos implored us to remember in Truthout last November, “Together, we are more powerful than Trump.”
Indeed, the Trump administration is pushing through executive orders, but — as we’ve reported at Truthout — many are in legal limbo and face court challenges from unions and civil rights groups. Efforts to quash anti-racist teaching and DEI programs are stalled by education faculty, staff, and students refusing to comply. And communities across the country are coming together to raise the alarm on ICE raids, inform neighbors of their civil rights, and protect each other in moving shows of solidarity.
It will be a long fight ahead. And as nonprofit movement media, Truthout plans to be there documenting and uplifting resistance.
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