The USAmerican carceral state is inseparable from its fundamental hostility to black people and migrants. If every USAmerican government official became Lenin, i would absolutely want them to abolish the policies of solitary confinement, V-coding, children being kept in dog cages, slave labor, mandatory minimum sentencing, the criminalization of drugs, and civil asset forfeiture. i’m sure i could list more tortures and cruelties. The fact that MLs advocate for state socialism does not mean a red coat of paint on the old, bleeding machinery. Any revolutionary government that would continue sentencing trans women to sex slavery, separating children from families, or performing no knock raids would deserve to be overthrown. The settler colony occupying most of Turtle Island is indistinguishable from its tools of coercion. The budget draining petty fiefdoms of every county police force and intelligence agency are the enemy, full stop. There is no seizing the police from the inside and improving them; every person who has ever worked as a prison guard or a cop or DHS or anything needs to be barred from ever holding power over anything larger than an irrigation ditch.
In what world do police take care of any crimes? Less than half of all crimes are reported, and less than half of those cases are ‘closed’. Not solved, just administratively closed out. 80% of the municipal budget and military equipment on the streets are justified by the idea that cops are “handl[ing] real crimes ordinary people care about”. Meanwhile, if you get robbed half the time the cops can’t even be bothered to give you the information you need for insurance. They are thugs of capital who exist to protect private property and bourgeois laws. Abolition means rejecting and dismantling the system of colonial, patriarchal, and racist violence. Conflating the fact that a state would need some organized body to keep public order with the reality of USAmerican policing is one of the widest reaching motte-and-baileys i have seen in my life.
Punishing people and expecting them to get magically better is obviously a terrible idea. In the current moment, the police and the carceral state actually exist to generate a labor force and crack down on dissent. The fact that there’s a fig leaf lie over all of that suits their purpose. A revolutionary state, presumably interested in justice and rehabilitation, would have no need for monuments to chattel slavery and American white supremacy. Punishing people for arbitrarily long times in arbitrarily cruel conditions is not any kind of revolutionary justice. Saying the system where prisoners are charged from their slave wages to access books or phone calls needs to be rebuilt after the revolution is heinous, and arguing that it needs ‘reforms’ is comic understatement. If you think the current state of affairs can be made moral and just through “far-reaching reforms”, you can go vote for the Democratic Party like the rest.