Statement of Values 

The Abolition in Special Collections Working Group, which includes archivists, librarians, and memory workers, is organized autonomously and collectively around a shared belief that safety derives from healthy relationships with other people, meeting community needs, and pursuing transformative justice when harm is caused. We believe that safety and security can be achieved through dismantling racist, colonial, and carceral systems which disenfranchise the communities where we live and work. 

As a group, we take up and amplify Critical Resistance’s definition of abolition of the prison industrial complex as a “political vision with the goal of eliminating prisons, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment.” [1]

Following the work of other abolitionists, we recognize the pervasive implications of the prison industrial complex as so defined on everyday life. Further, we align ourselves with the belief that no true justice can exist in such a system that relies on the oppression of others. 

Many of our fellow workers question the relevancy of abolition to our profession broadly; they ask what archives have to do with prisons and policing. As scholar and activist Angela Y. Davis reminds us, this is exactly the ideological function of the prison system: it allows us to imagine an “abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers.” [2] We strive to reimagine the world of archives in relation to the prison industrial complex: not as two distinct worlds that remain unaffected by one another but as one community. In doing so, we center the losses created by the prison industrial complex and their impact on archives and special collections. When we turn a critical eye toward the presence of the prison system in our daily lives, it is possible to see the influence of carceral logic on our labor. 

We envision abolition in archives and special collections as a way to acknowledge our responsibility to fundamentally engage with the public whose stories we collect, care for, maintain, promote, and provide access to. We model our engagement with abolition on the work of human rights lawyer Derecka Purnell, who explains abolition as “an invitation to create and support lots of different answers to the problem of harm in society.” [3]

When we speak about engaging with abolition in the context of archives and special collections, we seek to confront the ways that our policies and practices have replicated and reproduced the logics of the prison system and have consequently inflicted harms upon the communities with which we engage.

As Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminds us, “Abolition is about presence, not absence. It’s about building life-affirming institutions.” We desire for archives and special collections to become life-affirming spaces that acknowledge the presence of the individuals and communities affected by mass incarceration and policing.

When we critique these practices and policies, we do so not because we want to damage or malign the work of our peers but because we believe fundamentally in the role that archives and special collections must play in contributing to the work of scholars, activists, individuals, and organizations seeking transformative justice in our communities. We can do better. Our institutions can do better. We can both imagine and enact a future for archives and special collections that divests from oppressive structures like policing and surveillance, and instead invests its resources into community-centered initiatives.  

As a group of archivists, librarians, and memory workers, we find ideas, systems, and language that devalue and seek to ostracize community members based on the perception of those individuals as undesirable (i.e., “criminal,” [4] “mentally unfit,” or “illegal”) prevalent in our everyday practices. We grapple, for example, with policies that promise or valorize the security of objects and collections at the expense of potential users and staff, including policies that require users to provide documentation or identification for access, promote the use of carceral technologies like surveillance, or advocate for police intervention to deal with so-called “difficult” patrons. Ultimately, we find that in acknowledging the presence of these and other carceral logics, we are able to better understand how racism, capitalism, and ableism often work hand in hand to marginalize members of our communities. 

Core Values of Abolition in Special Collections

Prisons are sites that proliferate and reproduce harm. By prioritizing material objects over people, archives and special collections multiply the harms of white supremacy, capitalism, and colonialism. When we call for abolition in special collections, we call on ourselves and the broader profession to confront and dismantle the oppressive systems within our institutions that link our work to the prison industrial complex. In doing so, we prioritize the following core values, which we further define in our glossary of terms: 

1. Social and Structural Justice

2. Restorative and Reparative Labor Practices

3. Trust, Transparency, and Accountability

4. Equitable and Inclusive Treatment

5. Innate Value of Individuals, Communities, and Laborers 

Call to Action

We encourage our colleagues to consider how the incarceration of 2.3 million individuals (including their physical presence, histories, voices, and knowledge) is anything but a grave loss to our society. We need to reimagine our policies and practices, to welcome these individuals, and all members of our communities, into our spaces. 

Because abolition is a process, as much as it is a practice, rather than providing a proscriptive list of actions for institutions to take, we offer a series of reflections to help special collections and archival institutions unpack, confront, and dismantle their carceral logics. We welcome you to begin asking these questions and to join us in our ongoing work together.

Collection Development

• Following the work of Lae’l Hughes-Watkins, how has your institution created a “holistic approach” to “normalize acquisitions of the oppressed, advocate, and utilize primary resources that reflect society and that can provide a means to disengage with and prevent recordkeeping that systematically removes or intercepts the voices of the ‘other’”? [5]

• Do you regularly conduct inclusivity audits of your collections and collection development policies? Who is represented and who is missing?

• Does your institution hold collections related to policing or the prison industrial complex? If so, how do those relationships with police and/or the prison industrial complex frame the scope of collecting? 

Access

• How do you ensure or uphold that creators, donors, and subjects, especially those who identify as formerly incarcerated people and people directly affected by the prison industrial complex, have agency and authority over their own records? How do you ensure that these same communities experience equitable access to their records? 

• Does your institution actively employ surveillance tactics such as maintaining security cameras and/or alarms, staffing security officers, and/or conducting routine bag checks for both patrons and workers? How do you communicate those practices to users and seek user feedback? How do you evaluate the efficacy of these tactics against alternative practices?

• What credentials does your institution require to access materials, and why? Who is excluded by these requirements? 

• Whose safety are your policies meant to protect and whose safety do they infringe upon?

• How is the privacy of users upheld? What mechanisms do you have in place to protect users from law enforcement surveillance in your spaces?
  
  

Community Relations

• Do the communities both within and beyond your institutional walls have involvement in decision making and representation?

• Does your institution recognize that it is on land that more often than not was forcibly claimed from other people? If so, how does this recognition extend to action?

• Does your institution recognize both the privileges and responsibilities of occupying and owning lands within its broader community?

• Does your institution consider individuals either experiencing incarceration or affected by mass incarceration to be a part of its community?

• What reparations and equity work does your institution pursue? 

Institutional Advocacy

• Does your institution prioritize social justice? If so, how does your institution reconcile its own role and investment  in the prison industrial complex? Does your institution have a divestment plan? 

• How are hiring and labor policies within your institution working toward equitable practices? In what ways do you support or exclude formerly incarcerated individuals or those otherwise targeted by the prison industrial complex? 

• How does your institution support efforts that allow for community members’ ability to insist upon their own dignity in oppressive systems (i.e.,organized labor, unionization, and work that acknowledges the needs, priorities, safety and care of workers)? 

• What actions are you taking to prevent structural injustice more broadly? How does your institution connect its efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion with concrete policies that address issues of social justice?  

References

1. Critical Resistance. (2004). The CR Abolition Organizing Toolkit. Critical Resistance. http://criticalresistance.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/CR-Abolitionist-Toolkit-online.pdf 

2. Davis, Angela Y. (2003). Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press. 

3. Purnell, Derecka. (2020 July 20). How I Became a Police Abolitionist. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/how-i-became-police-abolitionist/613540/  

4. Berkeley Underground Scholars. (2019 March 6). The Underground Scholars Language Guide. Berkeley Underground Scholars. https://undergroundscholars.berkeley.edu/blog/2019/3/6/language-guide-for-communicating-about-those-involved-in-the-carceral-system 

5. Hughes-Watkins, Lae'l. (2018). Moving Toward a Reparative Archive: A Roadmap for a Holistic Approach to Disrupting Homogenous Histories in Academic Repositories and Creating Inclusive Spaces for Marginalized Voices." Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies, 5(1). https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol5/iss1/6/  

This statement of values was authored by Aza Babayan, Jeremy Brett, Courtney Dean, Sandy Enriquez, Shannon O'Neill, Caitlin Rizzo, Lydia Tang, Jennifer Wachtel, and other Abolition in Special Collections members. 

For a stable URL for citation, and for past versions of the values as we update them over time, please visit https://osf.io/hsf73/