How to Abolish Prisons is not a book that is interested in providing a roadmap for abolition. Instead, it is focused on spotlighting organizations doing the work and demonstrating all the expressions that work can have, from grassroots organizing to legal strategies, to artist-led campaigns. Becuase of this, it is not prescriptive, but it is deeply empowering and actionable. How to Abolish Prisons focuses on movement work, led by prisoners, rooted in the principles of mutual aid (not charity). It situates prisons, not as sites of rehabilitation, but as sites of harm, designed to oppress the poor, Black people and other communities of colour, as well as activists, especially those who agitate against the state.

At the core of the book is a deep focus on organizing rooted in abolition, and a deep critique of the way that prison reforms, and other organizing efforts can be co-opted to go against these aims. The book, and the organizers that it highlights, are always on the lookout for actions that might further entrench prisons and emprisonment (rather than eliminating them), and offers strategies for evaluating the difference. It’s in this discussion that I think the book is especially powerful, as it demonstrates how diverse a movement abolitionism is, with differing opinions on how to be most effective and avoid retrenchment of carceral systems. It doesn’t offer one path to abolition, and invites the reader to examine their own ideas and approaches to abolition.

How to Abolish Prisons is also deeply concerned with eliminating hierarchies in our approach to abolition, specifically hierarchies that prioritize the “innocent” over the “guilty”. Core to the organization work in the book is an approach that believes there should be no conditions to care, that no one deserves to be in a cage.

Where this book is limited: it examines one aspect of the prison industrial complex, prisons and emprisonment. This is intentional, to limit the scope of the book and provide focus, but if you are new to abolition, don’t forget that abolition includes all the institutions that support imprisonment, like policing, and the structures of our justice systems.

Where this book rocks: This book focuses on organizations in Canada and the US, expanding the usual focus of books about incarceration to demonstrate that, while Mass incarceration exists on a larger scale in the US, it is a problem in all western countries.

Overall, I think this is an absolutely excellent introduction to abolition to those who are new to the movement, and a strong resource for more experienced abolitionists to expand their ideas and strategies. I absolutely recommend.

I used to read a lot of celebrity memoirs, and I don’t anymore. I find they often lack the vulnerability and personal insight that I think makes a strong memoir, and wealth and privilege rarely give people a nuanced understanding of the wider context that surrounds their lives. At it’s core, this is my issue with Geisha, a Life.

This memoir offers insights into the reclusive world of the Geishas of Japan (or more accurately Geiko), but that insight comes from someone who exists at the very pinnacle of wealth and privilege within this world. She lives an incredibly sheltered life, from early childhood, when she is taken in by an okiya and trained to be their heir. From the first moment she is set apart, special. Even with big questions that take up a large part of the book, like why a family may give their daughter to an okiya, there is no real examination of the nuanced decision-making or complexities, because, even as an adult the author lacks the insight or interest to be able to tell that story. The narrative feels guarded rather than vulnerable. This might be due to the context in which this narrative exists: to correct the misconceptions about the culture of the Geisha that was represented in Memoirs of a Geisha, a fictional and highly sensationalized book that became a bestseller. This is an unfair burden to place on any narrative, to stand in for an entire culture. This may be why many of the personal anecdotes felt, to me, like the curated responses you may give in an interview, always determined to make a good impression.

There are rare moments of vulnerability in the book where we get a glimpse of a lonely life with incidents of extreme trauma, but these moments are overwhelmed by anecdote after anecdote about how Minkeo worked harder than everyone else, was rejected by her peers for her success and was consistently number one. There are also clues that everything may not be as straightforward as it seems, through the brief glimpses we get of Minko’s elder sister who was also given to the okiya, and has a confrontational relationship with her family, the okiya and Mineko herself. But any nuance in this relationship exists only in subtext, and is never explored. 



At it’s core, this book made me question what it means to be the only first hand account from a Geiko. As a single narrative in an ecosystem of first-hand accounts of the world of the Geisha/Geiko this could be great. As the sole narrative I have very complicated feelings about it.