Interrupting Criminalization

One Million Experiments Exploring snapshots of community-based projects that expand our ideas about what keeps us safe.

If you're looking for inspiration for some ways you can take action in your community, our One Million Experiments website has so much great info—snapshots of community-based projects, zines, and more podcast episodes exploring how we can build experiments grounded in transformation, not punishment!

REP Founded in the Twin Cities in Minnesota in 2020, amidst the uprising that occurred after the murder of George Floyd, REP is a “node in an interconnected network of projects created by communities to m...

We've previously visited REP and shared about the great work they do on both the podcast, and a zine about how they were created/launched. You can check these out on our One Million Experiments website: millionexperiments.com/zines/rep

CRISIS Part 1 - Relationships Evolving Possibilities (REP) in Minneapolis Podcast Episode · One Million Experiments · 07/31/2025 · 1h 15m

This season on the podcast, we'll be digging deep with three different experiments to learn how we can better show up in moments of communal and structural crisis.

On this 1st episode, we welcome back organizers from REP (Relationships Evolving Possibilities) in Minneapolis. Tune in:

One Million Experiments Society & Culture Podcast · Updated Monthly · One Million Experiments is a podcast showcasing and exploring how we define and create safety in a world without police and prisons. Through longform inte...

Want to listen to something good this weekend? The 1st episode of season 3(!) of our One Million Experiments podcast with @respairmedia.bsky.social—a podcast showcasing and exploring how we define and create safety and reduce harm without cops and prisons—is out now, wherever you get your podcasts:

What are you already doing?

What else can you do?

What are you doing together with others?

"[T]his [One Million Experiments] resource ... can be used by any group who wants an introduction to core abolitionist concepts: the prison industrial complex, different forms of justice, community safety, and strategies for imagining and building a punishment and police-free world."

Stories are an “arrow in a quiver” How movement journalists share strategy and inspire action.

"The kinds of articles that really help people are not PR releases for organizations but real breakdowns of tactics that have and haven’t worked, real descriptions of the ins and outs of a given strategy or approach. With stories like these, we don’t need doomscrolling." — @lewispants.bsky.social

The cover of a resource, featuring "Criminalizing Librarians: Threats and Realities" in black text on a pale grey background and a black-and-white line drawing of three people holding signs that together read "The People & the Library." In the bottom right corner is the logo for Interrupting Criminalization, and the URL bit.ly/CriminalizingLibrarians

Collage featuring stylized type-writer text, a yellow library book check-out slip, and a black-and white photo of a group of Black women (and one man) around a table at a library, surrounded by books that have been tinted green. The text on the library slip reads: "Title: Arrested at the Library. Policing the Stacks. Author: By Mariame Kaba, Interrupting Criminalization (2025)."

As attacks on libraries, books, and library patrons and workers continue to rise, here are two free resources from our co-founder @prisonculture.bsky.social about criminalization of and in libraries, that we hope can offer context and inspiration for protecting and defending our public libraries:

Cardboard box on a rock in a garden that says free plums & propaganda. Inside the box are French plums and postcards by Marc Fischer that say Losers Attack Our Libraries, Fight for Librarians

Free plums and propaganda.

FYI if you are interested/planning to seek appointment or run for your local library board in the near future, sign up to receive info about our forthcoming 2026 cohort: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

One way that we can work to protect all members of our community from harm and violence is to try and reduce and prevent people's interaction with law enforcement—more of us can and must be building coordinated community crisis response teams:

Join @detentionwatchnetwork.org's relaunched #CommunitiesNotCages campaign, which amplifies local community organizing, demands the closure of ICE detention facilities, and fights to shrink the detention system.

And sign their petition to stop ICE detention expansion: bit.ly/BlockICE

Keep sharing and spreading Know Your Rights information (www.muslimsforjustfutures.org/blog/immigra...), while also working on safety strategies and showing up—develop a community defense strategy, take trainings, and fortify your mutual aid and legal response networks.

Cops lie!! + A reminder that when media repeat police statements or narratives unchecked, they are spreading copaganda! Same goes for when media uses criminalizing language to describe protest or passive language to describe police violence.

Doing stenography for cops/the state is not journalism.

DHS has arrested two medical personnel at a surgical center in California for demanding that the officers trespassing in their building identify themselves & provide a warrant, accusing them of another.... wait for it... ASSAULT. The case shows how DHS lies relentlessly to violate the Constitution

Distinguishing the "crimes" of people "dressed like ICE" from "real ICE" reflects that ICE/ federal agents conducting immigration sweeps are not doing anything different. Same-same.

No One Can Tell Who’s a Cop Anymore Masked criminals are impersonating ICE agents and police, preying on an already terrorized public.

These stories really highlight how policing has always been a way to justify racial violence by making the system appear "race neutral." (A bipartisan project)
nymag.com/intelligence...

Police don't keep keep us safe. No matter how much money, power, and resources we throw at them, the fact remains that police cannot and will not ever deliver safety.

Cop’s Don’t Stop Violence — Interrupting Criminalization Combating Narratives Used to Defend Police Instead of Defunding Them

Cops enjoy huge discretion with respect to who and what they focus their attention on and how, and what they choose to enforce. Every time they decide this, they are essentially helping construct “crime” or what is considered criminal, and what or who is out of order.

We talk more about this here:

Wall Street Journal headline and deck: "New York Shooting Puts Mamdani on the Spot Over Policing Views: The killing of four people in a Midtown office building rattled a city where mass attacks are rare and violent crime has declined."

It's really weird to demand accountability from a NYC mayoral candidate for a deadly NYC shooting rather than the current NYC mayor, an ex-cop who campaigned on a "tough on crime" platform and promptly got indicted for crimes

What is ironic about digging up a politicians support of defunding the police as some sort of trap, is that police have given you chapter and verse since then on how reasonable that position was and is. Its like digging up a politicians support of universal healthcare.

ICE wants prison beds. Gov. Katie Hobbs may have just provided 500 Arizona sold an empty prison to a private company for $15 million just as ICE is looking for more places to house immigrants.

Arizona sold an empty prison to a private company for $15 million just as ICE is looking for more places to house immigrants.

Trump’s mass deportation machine depends on sheriffs & local police acting as force multipliers, and their jails acting as holding facilities. Here’s how deep the collaboration goes 👇

The People Being Arrested By ICE That No One’s Talking About The Trump administration’s deportation machine is detaining immigrant women at record numbers — and they've become invisible targets.

"They called the police for help, but local law enforcement turned them over to ICE."

www.huffpost.com/entry/ice-de...

Bloodied Faces, Sobbing Children: Immigration Officers Smash Car Windows to Speed Up Arrests We’ve documented nearly 50 incidents of immigration officers shattering car windows to make arrests — a tactic experts say was rarely used before Trump took office. ICE claims its officers use a “mini...

"He can either give us a license... or we’ll smash the fucking window out and drag him out.”

That's not just any ICE officer saying that. His name is Matthew Elliston and he now oversees ICE field operations on the East Coast.

Graph showing that between 2001 and 2019, after a three-day heatwave, all causes of death in state prisons increased by 7.4%, suicide increased by 15% and heart disease-related by 7.6%

Prisons cannot hold up against sweltering heat – most of these facilities lack AC & are basically concrete coffins that will only become more inhospitable for people who are locked up.

Scorching cells How heat threatens lives in America’s prisons

www.reuters.com/graphics/USA... - this is torture

Eight prisons in VA currently have no AC. For the people locked up in them, that means there's nothing but the oppressive heat.

"We go to sleep in sweat and wake up in sweat twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, with no respite until the summertime heat departs for the fall season."

Workshops — Workshops 4 Gaza

Donate to the Sameer Project, which continues to do crucial mutual aid work in Gaza: linktr.ee/thesameerpro...

And join and support upcoming workshops that @workshops4gaza.bsky.social runs to benefit the Sameer Project. Writers, artists, and educators can also submit a proposal to teach a workshop:

Here are more on-the-ground mutual aid groups in #Gaza that you can support, amplify, and follow: