On Property: Policing, Prisons, and the Call for Abolition | Rinaldo Walcott

96 pages | Biblioasis | 5.25.21

From plantation rebellion and Indigenous land theft to prison labour's super-exploitation, Walcott examines the relationship between policing and property. That a man can lose his life for passing a fake $20 bill, when we know that our economies are flush with fake money, says something damning about the ways in which we've organized society. At the nexus of the current discourse on policing and violence is the unavoidable fact that criminal codes value property more than human life, and thus substantive change isn't possible until we rethink the very idea of private property itself.