MARIAME KABA
June 11, 2017
Community Safety Looks Like:
Transforming Justice and Our Relationships
Organizers Darian Agostini, Mariame Kaba (@prisonculture) and Reign Rolon host an immersive experience focused on imagining community safety and transformative justice. Participants discuss how the prison industrial complex devastates our communities and why we need to build a world without prisons, policing and surveillance.
Photography by Stephanie Orentas
Mariame Kaba is an American activist, grassroots organizer, and educator who advocates for the abolition of the prison industrial complex, including all police. She is the author of We Do This 'Til We Free Us (2021). Mariame Kaba was born in New York City to parents who had immigrated from Guinea and the Ivory Coast. She grew up in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and attended Lycée Français. As a child, she viewed the world through a black nationalist framework and looked for ways to help others. In 1995 she moved to Chicago to study sociology at Northwestern University. In Chicago, she founded the Chicago Freedom School, the Rogers Park Young Women’s Action Team (YWAT), Chicago Taskforce on Violence against Girls and Young Women, Chicago Alliance to Free Marissa Alexander, and We Charge Genocide (WCG). In 2009, Kaba founded the organization Project NIA, which advocates to end youth incarceration. Kaba views prison abolition as the total dismantling of prison and policing while building up community services and opposes the reform of policing. Her work has created the framework for current abolitionist organizations including Black Youth Project 100, Black Lives Matter Chicago, and Assata's Daughters.