Google searches for the term abolition spiked in the weeks following George Floyd's murder.

Until May 2020, most people understood the term as historical, a reference to the abolition

of slavery in the early 19th century.

All very recently, concepts of police and prison abolition certainly ideas as unthinkable

as family abolition were mostly confined to academic and activist circles.

With the murder of George Floyd and one year later of Sarah Everard, abolition and its

attendant demands, defund the police, kill the bill, exploded into the discourse.

Voted a number of books on the subject, with both radical and mainstream publishers

pumping out literature on policing, its colonial beginnings and hoped for end.

Yet some might say this vogue in abolition is a mixed blessing.

For as with the mainstreaming of queer politics in the last two decades, the growing popularity

of abolitionism risks neutering its radical potential.

Issues allowing the state and corporate apparatus to co-opt our movements and nicks their

most potent demands.

Others point to a parallel risk of creeping reformism, the consumption of activist energies

within unending legal battles, government inquiries and independent reviews, such that we drown

in a sea of recommendations and protocols and statistics until we forget what kind of

world we wanted to create.

Thankfully, there are a number of people wise to this threat and who are writing against it.

Two of them are Shanice McBean and Avia Day, women who have been at the forefront of the

recent wave of abolitionist organizing and yet have somehow found the time to write a book about it.

Abolition Revolution was published last November by Pluto Press and in a series of 16

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