I think that transformative justice is something that happens at an in — Adrienne Maree Brown

"I think were in this really important, beautiful phase where were learning so much can happen even at a distance. But its a double-edged sword because so much of what is happening is happening on platforms that were not necessarily designed for us to use them to foment change and to bring down systems of harm. They were designed to serve capitalism, which means they want as many clicks and likes and as much engagement as possible. And what gets a lot of engagement is drama."

"Im thinking about abolition all the time, trying to understand how we bring it to pass: How do we defund policing? How do we defund the prison system? How do we actually break those patterns in ourselves in order to break them in the larger world? So a lot of it for me is connected to that."

"This pandemic has unveiled for a lot of us just how small our reliable communities are, and how much we need to deepen those relationships so that they can hold change and conflict and differences."

"The first interactions I had with the ideas of abolition work were around the system of slavery. [For people living during that time,] it felt impossible that that system could end and there could be some other way of functioning that didnt rely on Black people being enslaved. And I think were in a similar moment now. Its impossible to imagine what our societies would do, what cultures would do, what communities would do if we didnt have prisons."

"Mariame Kaba has given incredible talks about this, that weve had 250 years of this well-funded prison system experiment. And it hasnt stopped rape. It hasnt stopped robberies. It hasnt stopped drugs. It hasnt stopped anything at all. All of those things that we think of as harm, they continue without the responses they need...One of the other things that Mariame points out—what would it look like if the experiment of transformative justice was as well funded as the experiment of prison? We have no idea what things could look like at scale because weve never actually had the resources to even experiment at any kind of scale. We’ve had to argue over every penny."

"how do we start to retune our attention towards things that are solution-oriented, things that help us build? And this is a hard time for that. Weve been immersed in a culture of destruction for such a long time."