Repositories of Failure: Creating Abolitionist Archives to Project Past the Punishment Paradigm

This talk will speculate on the following questions: to what extent and in what ways might communities use archives as avenues to abolish police and prisons in the United States? How can archivists, organizers, and resource allocators use the archive as a means and a method to envision a world without police and prisons, thereby assisting in the construction of a society that relies on new sets of relationships to promote justice? Drawing on historical research and narratives from A People’s Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland, Jarrett Drake will explore the term ‘abolitionist archives’ and describe how they constitute a critical component to the constellation of alternatives to imagine a societal landscape free from our present punishment paradigm.