ABOLITION
EVERYDAY SH!T: THE PILOT ISSUE
Content Notice: family separation, family policing, racism, trauma, state violence.
“Abolition teaches us that healing isn’t linear, that love isn’t always tidy, and that relationships shaped by systemic harm will never thrive on punishment or perfection.”As a little girl, I tried to piece together my father’s face by studying the features my mother didn’t give me. I would stare into my eyes in the mirror's reflection to search my own face for the parts that belonged to him, thinking I could find someone else in there if I looked deep enough. I used to wonder if he ever thought about me too, if he could miss someone he had never met. I knew that kind of missing was possible, because I experienced it.
What I didn’t know as a child was that for the first ten years of my life, my father was incarcerated. He first found out about me from a friend inside. Upon first sight, a friend who’d been incarcerated after him excitedly blurted out that he had a daughter—a little girl on the outside who looks just like you. From that moment my father joined me in my wondering and missing. From behind bars, we separated by more than will. We were separated by an entire system that has always built its power on breaking Black families apart. The carceral state infusing its bars between us became the first barrier to our love story.
When I was born, neither of my parents could care for me. As a result, the child welfare system, more critically described as the family policing system, prevented my biological mother from taking me out of the New Jersey hospital where she gave birth. The state became my legal guardian, the ultimate authority on where my “permanent” home would be. During this process, my biological mother elected her grandmother, my great-grandmother, to care for me. What was intended as a short-term arrangement became something far more lasting and she raised me for the first nine years of my life. I called her “Mommy” because that’s who she was, and still is, to me. Finally, when I was nine years old, I was officially adopted into what became my permanent family. Just a few years later, at twelve years old, my mommy passed away. By the age of twelve I had already lost two mothers. And still, through all these big life transitions and losses, the question of ‘who was my father?’ remained with me.
Partially as a result of my textured childhood, coming into the prison abolitionist tradition felt like finding home. The carceral state is not just a concept to me, it is woven through the fabric of my life experiences. Like many Black people, I never needed to be told the police were not here to protect us. I felt it. I knew, instinctively, the sinister nature of the “injustice” system, understood before I had words to articulate and argue how prisons and jails were instruments of harm. As I continued learning about the interwoven and historical lineages of incarceration, family policing, and all the interlocking systems of oppression; I was confronted with the realities of my life story in a new way. I began to name the structural conditions and resource inequities that shaped my story and created the material realities that limited my parents’ ability to care for me. As a result my healing and compassion deepend and my abolitionist convictions strengthened. These revelations echoed with new weight when I finally began a relationship with my biological father at twenty one, having to reckon with the vast and aching absence that existed between us, spurring from his incarceration.
Our relationship began over sushi, at a random restaurant on my Rutgers University campus, with a CVS box paternity kit. The moment we had both longed for, yet never imagined would happen was suddenly here. The usual pleasantries and light conversation filled the space but did nothing to cut through the thickness of anxiety lurching in my stomach. In a swift moment, it happened. Cheeks swabbed. Samples sealed. It was done. A simple act, seconds in length, but carrying the weight of lifetimes. It felt like television but it was my life. And that thirty second test altered it forever. When the test results came back, confirming what we both had already known but had to prove, the polarities and contradictions that framed this space between us were thrust into sharp focus. Everything we had lost and everything we had gained existed in parallel in this very complicated web. The cavernous wound of time between us, those twenty-one years, remained, but now, we had forever ahead of us. We had no shared memories. No language. No inside jokes. Only bonded through blood. The prison system had taken the most formative years from us and left behind the rubble. Now it was on us to build something from scratch.
I could end the story here, right? A neatly tied bow, the prelude to an expected happy ending. But making something from the mess this settler colonial carceral state has made for us is never easy, and certainly never pretty. After we met, I graduated and moved across the country to California, putting 3,000 miles between us. Another barrier. That distance wasn’t just physical, it mirrored the emotional distance between us. We lost not just time, but all the moments in between, and most importantly, the chance to build intimacy—to practice and exercise our love for one another. Now, we’re on a journey of building a relationship backwards, across time zones and trauma, trying to close a gap the system never meant for us to bridge. So when I saw the call to describe the everydayness of abolition, I thought of my father and me. I thought of how, in the pursuit of this difficult relationship, I am guided by my abolitionist principles to pick up the pieces left for us by the carceral state.
To pick up these pieces is also to hold the jagged edges—to speak through silence, to reach across the ache. My father is an immigrant from the Caribbean and the cultural differences we navigate sometimes create barriers to our communication. When I feel uncomfortable, I struggle to express myself because forming familiarity and intimacy with parental figures are not things that come easily to me. Additionally, the pain of abandonment as an adopted, system-impacted kid, unfortunately does not just disappear. There are days when I feel like my father didn’t do enough to find me or fight for me after he was released from prison. And then there are days when I just see him as one of many Black men, criminalized by politicians who labeled them “super predators” and found a way to lock them away for their own gain. In reality neither is true on their own, so I must not be afraid to hold both of these truths at once, amongst many others as I navigate our relationship.
For example, when he struggles to communicate in healthy ways, I choose to stay and try again. In a world that often encourages us to sever ties at the first sign of discomfort, I reject the idea that relationships, especially those shaped by histories of separation and survival, are disposable. However, it must be acknowledged, a core principle of abolition is addressing harm and maintaining accountability. In my relationship with my father this means that as I refuse to place him in “relational” jails, even when our relationship triggers deep wounds, I still ensure I am never in positions of danger or choose to endure unacknowledged harm. I strive to keep our communication open, making space for conflict resolution—though this has not always been easy or successful. There is a fear that if I say the wrong thing, or if I trigger him, he might decide never to speak to me again.
In these harrowing moments, one principle I turn to is Mariame Kaba’s teaching that hope is not just a feeling but a discipline. When we experience hopelessness about our situations or grief, which she says is the opposite of indifference, we can recognize that we are sad because we care but our pain is not the end. Instead, through revolutionary love, we can create more moments of joy that sustain us. Even in the hardest moments, I hold on to that belief.
Another barrier that I have had to navigate are the expectations between my father and I that sometimes go unnamed. When we first connected I didn’t know what to want from him. I had spent so much time sitting with the void that I hadn't practiced imagining what it would mean to fill it. This is something I remain unsure about, but I do know that in every relationship I need accountability, honesty, and direct, loving communication in order for it to thrive. These practices are not easy, but are even more difficult to give and expect with a budding relationship that is also by nature meant to be extremely close. The dichotomy of one of the closest people to you being the strangest can be confusing and emotionally intense for us both.
I know he carries his own expectations too. I wonder if sometimes when I visit New Jersey and can’t split myself evenly between all the people who want time with me if I am disappointing him unintentionally. I wonder if, in his eyes, I am still the daughter he missed or the stranger who doesn't care to try. The truth is, we both hoped the bond would be easier, more natural, that maybe love would rush in to fill the space time had hollowed out. But that’s not what happened. What we have is slower. More delicate and bumpy.
Trying anyway is, in itself, a practice of abolition. Not soft, theoretical or distant, but raw, and daily. It demands I work to keep coming back when it’s easier to walk away. It means I hold space for both our wounds and our wants, even though they clash. It means resisting the urge to see him only as what he wasn’t for me, and instead choosing, over and over again, to meet him in the complexity of who he is now. Abolition teaches us that healing isn’t linear, that love isn’t always tidy, and that relationships shaped by systemic harm will never thrive on punishment or perfection. So I practice, imperfectly, offering grace without erasing my boundaries and being honest without abandoning tenderness. I remind myself that we are not broken people, just people forced to build connections in broken conditions. And when it gets hard, I return to the belief that love, like justice, is something we co-create. Not owed. Not assumed. But made, moment by moment.
I will always love my father. Loving him has taught me to love myself more deeply. I love him not just for what he has endured but for all the possibilities that still lie ahead of us. I understand now that love shifts like seasons, that some will be more painful than others, and that growth will come with its own aches. When anger rises, I process it in my body allowing myself to feel the fullness of my emotions while holding space for myself in all its forms. Then redirect it—not at him, but at the state that created the conditions we are forced to navigate. And I press on, through my organizing, finding strength in my friends, my principles, and, most importantly, my therapist. I pray for those like me and my father who are still fighting for the right to keep our families whole, that we may find peace, love, and a future where that fight is no longer necessary.
Shantell Missouri, originally from New Jersey, is PhD candidate in Human Development and Psychology at UCLA, where she explores how Black youth resistance to punitive and carceral systems shapes their development. She is also an active member of the Police Free Schools Coalition in Los Angeles, which advocates for the abolition of police in LAUSD and the reallocation of resources to improve students' access to the care they deserve. Her work, both personal and professional, is grounded in the belief and practice that the imperialist project of the United States must be dismantled in order to build a world free from carcerality, colonization, and capitalism. Shantell aspires to create podcasts and documentaries that provide public access to information and promote critical, communal political education. In her free time, she enjoys reading, traveling, writing, having existential crises, and watching documentaries.