We Grow the World Together is a kaleidoscopic, groundbreaking new anthology, bringing together essays, educational resources and conversations at the intersection of caregiving and prison abolition. Edited by Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson, its contributors span parents caring for children in prison, children separated from imprisoned parents, queer organisers navigating the bonds of given and chosen family, writers, activists and educators. Here, all of them reflect on what it means to nurture children and relationships in a world that prioritises punishment and forcible separation as a solution to social problems.

I try to read the collection in the spirit in which I sense that it is offered. It’s not a text trying to present a grand unified political theory that will hold in all times and all places, but rather, a sharing of overlapping accounts of attempts to act on the world, in specific contexts and circumstances, by people who have found those attempts testing, surprising, difficult and rewarding. The book’s predominant locus is the US and its systems of policing, imprisonment and family separation. A number of threads throughout the collection emphasise anti imperial internationalism as a key tenet of abolitionist theory and practice – vividly encapsulated in a heartbreaking essay by Heba Gowayed on parenting, Palestine and genocide.

What really delights me about the book is what delights me about abolition as a theory and a practice: its demand that we transform how we relate to one another, in the here and now, in the smallest of our interactions, as well as in the governance of our society. So we hear from six-year-old EJ about why she wants to go to school: so that she can write letters to her dad in prison. We read about Harsha Walia’s halting attempts to practise abolitionist parenting with her child, and the discomfort and growth she experiences through that process.We learn the names of myriad abolitionist children’s books from Mariame Kaba – and find out that when she couldn’t find the books that the children in her life needed, she wrote them herself.

Keisa Reynolds reflects on how it has looked and felt to raise their child not as ‘Mom’ but as ‘Zaza’. Rania El Mugammar gives us some pointers on how to confront ‘copaganda’ (the promotion and normalisation of policing through positive depictions in children’s media). And Jennifer Viets walks us step-by-step through how to run our own family talking circles. This is not a book that preaches. It’s a book that extends a hand, and asks: do you feel like giving this a go?

Transatlantic reverberations

The Black Lives Matter uprisings of 2020 forced what felt like a watershed entry of abolitionist philosophy and organising into the US mainstream, encapsulated by Mariame Kaba’s New York Times op-ed: ‘Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police’. The movement landscape in the UK is very different. I return repeatedly to the question of how some of the book’s broader lessons and political analyses might land here, where abolition is still a topic of opacity and regrettable derision even among so called progressive voices.

In Britain, Victorian notions of charity and conservative Christian approaches inform the founding philosophies of many ostensibly progressive institutions, and liberal, reformist and litigation-heavy approaches to prisons and policing tend to dominate the landscape of social change. The UK’s carceral landscape is also different to that of the US. According to The Sentencing Project, the US imprisons approximately 355 people per 100,000, with a ratio of almost five black people incarcerated for every white person. In England and Wales, 134 people per 100,000 are imprisoned, and while race disproportionality is significant, it is marginally less stark: racially minoritised people make up 18 per cent of the population, but 28 per cent of the prison population. The UK also has its own system of immigration prisons, social services and places of detention such as care homes and mental health facilities, all of which generate specific and overlapping threats to people’s rights and freedoms, none of which can be strategised around by simply copy pasting approaches from the US.

What really delights me about the book is its demand that we transform how we relate to one another in the smallest of our interactions, as well as in the governance of our society

Despite these differences, the UK has its own vibrant abolition geography, even if its prominence in the mainstream isn’t as significant as in the US. It’s animated by rich and long-standing traditions of organising against racism and for disability justice, as well as anti-carceral working-class movements against excessive state power. As I read We Grow the World Together, I am reminded how much UK abolitionist campaigning centres on protecting the freedoms of young people. I think of the beautiful work of Kids of Colour to support the Manchester Ten, ten black boys sentenced to over one hundred years’ collective punishment because of text messages they exchanged in grief. I think of the fierce campaigning of No More Exclusions, opposing the disproportionate exclusion of racialised young people from school. I think of the Northern Police Monitoring Project’s campaigns against the deployment of police in schools, and the degrading strip-searching of children by police.

I also reflect on the UK abolitionist campaigns that are animated by visions of a world in which responses to harm and conflict centre on what people need to flourish: Inquest’s campaign for an end to preventable state-involved deaths; the call from Sisters Uncut to combat violence against women by ensuring funding for women’s refuges; and We Level Up’s strategy to end the imprisonment of pregnant women – no births behind bars. Our UK landscape is in some ways very different to the contexts in which the contributors to We Grow the World Together are writing, but we are deploying mutually supportive strategies in pursuit of a common aim. There is much that UK readers can take from the book.

Transgenerational power

Before I pitched this review, I wondered whether anyone else would be interested in hearing my childless millennial reflections on abolitionist parenting. But I read it at my grandmother’s kitchen table over Christmas, surrounded by the hum of conversation generated by a steady rotation of cousins, aunts and uncles. One of my cousins is going daily to hospital to support her friend, a new mother, who has recently given birth to a baby from whom she will be imminently separated on child welfare grounds because of her drug addiction. Another cousin engages me one evening for a couple of hours on the question of what children owe to their parents and what it means to raise them with values. We end up reminiscing together about the time our grandmother opened her home to a destitute, pregnant, asylum seeking woman, and what that taught us about who we might be in the world. On another day, I have the wind knocked out of me when my cousin’s five-year-old asks me out of nowhere, ‘Should I listen to my dad even though he’s dead?’ (In the end, I simply replied, ‘If you can hear him sweetheart, then yes.’) As I head home from my grandmother’s, something crystallises: I may not have given birth to my own children, but it seems that I have some.

Whether or not we have young people in our lives, we are all in the business of growing this world together. This book is a beautiful reminder of the shape we might give that world, if we try.

This article first appeared in Issue #247 The Last Issue? Subscribe today to support independent socialist media and get your copy hot off the press!