Abolicious: Towards Presence

My life’s work is about dismantling punitive approaches to health. That work did not begin in academia or in my professional life as a public health practitioner. It began much earlier, in my adolescence, when in ninth grade, I came home from school to find that my house had been raided by the FBI. What followed was nearly a decade of watching my father move through a legal battle that would eventually send him to prison. That experience changed my family in ways I still struggle to fully articulate, but it also set something in motion within me: a lifelong need to understand punishment and power in the context of health. My father had diabetes, and while incarcerated, his medication was withheld as punishment, putting his health and his life at risk. He survived, but I carried that experience with me. Long before I had the language to describe carceral systems or understand how power moves through institutions and bodies, I had already witnessed what happens when health is weaponized.

My professional and academic pursuits eventually aimed to comprehend carceral systems: societies structured around punishment, confinement, surveillance, neglect, and control to extract racialized capital and profits. I grew interested not only in prisons themselves but also in the underlying question: Why does punishment seem like a reasonable solution to a problem? I examined how law, medicine, institutions, political economy, and interconnected systems of power organize life in ways that make certain forms of punishment seem necessary, inevitable, or even benevolent. I became particularly intrigued by how carceral logics extend beyond prison walls into areas that do not necessarily perceive themselves as punitive.

That movement of punitive landscapes between the macro and the micro has become increasingly important to me. Carceral logic operates at the level of states and institutions, but it can also live in the smallest spaces between people. Legal scholar Christy E. Lopez describes carceral logic as a punishment-oriented way of thinking that relies on retribution and control in response to perceived problems. That definition matters because it asks us to stop looking only for prisons and begin looking for the logic that makes prisons—and other punitive arrangements—possible.  The uncomfortable truth is that this logic can become so ordinary that we reproduce it while believing we are doing something entirely different. It is literally baked into us.

For instance, the emergence and rapid expansion of ICE, although appalling, is not surprising. Are we not astonished by how effortlessly the infrastructure for mass detention could be established—how swiftly individuals could be relocated, categorized, confined, and transported through an expanding network of detention facilities in a country that avoids addressing its past and simultaneously has the highest incarceration rates globally? The speed of this growth highlights a crucial aspect of carceral power: the necessary flows of capital, land, transportation, contracting, and institutional authority did not need to be built from the ground up. Much of the infrastructure was already in place, ready to be reorganized around confinement; and where physical space was insufficient, capital could swiftly create it. This is particularly evident now as the United States significantly expands its immigration detention infrastructure. Reports indicate that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is converting commercial warehouses, constructing large tent facilities, and developing a detention system capable of accommodating far more individuals than before, as the detained population has grown from about 39,000 to over 70,000. Plans to increase capacity to 100,000 or even 135,000 beds underscore a fundamental aspect of carceral geography: incarceration is not confined to places traditionally recognized as prisons. This is why I am drawn to the study of carceral geography. Punishment does not merely occupy space; it creates and reorganizes space, directing land, capital, infrastructure, and human movement based on political decisions about whose mobility should be restricted, whose bodies should be contained, and whose presence is deemed problematic. The expansion of immigration detention, therefore, signifies much more than an increase in beds. It reveals the spatial and economic conditions that make confinement scalable. Perhaps that is what is most unsettling: carceral systems do not require a prison to begin. They need a logic of confinement, the political power to enforce it, and the material capacity to transform ordinary spaces into places where certain individuals can be made capturable. As Ruthie Wilson Gilmore reminds us, all capital and institutional power are directed by humans. We have chosen this.

But if carceral spaces can be produced so quickly, then the deeper question is not only how they are built, but what makes them imaginable in the first place. A warehouse does not detain itself. Before walls are erected, contracts are signed, and space is annotated for bodies to be captured and trafficked, something invisible has already begun moving: a logic that makes confinement appear reasonable, even necessary. This is what I find most haunting about carceral power. It does not remain obediently inside the prison, the detention center, or the state. It maneuvers through institutions and policies, possessing people—through our fears, habits, desires, relationships, and instincts— animating us to work for what it is hiding when we believe ourselves to be outside of it. It whispers that control will make us safe, that separation will resolve harm, that punishment will restore order, that some people must be removed so that others can remain whole, a process that continues to leave us morally bankrupt as we feed the void in the next iterations of capital. The time, place, and names change, the institutions change, the bodies change, but the ritual remains remarkably intact. And at its altar we continue to offer human beings—their mobility, their health, their families, and life—while capital moves quietly through the borders, turning confinement into contracts, beds into revenue, bodies into numbers, and suffering into something that can be administered, expanded, and sold. This is what makes carceral power almost spectral to me. It does not only construct prisons; it possesses practices. It enters our language, settles into our fears, and teaches our bodies the choreography of punishment until we can perform it without remembering who taught us the steps or what it is rooted in. We pour its logic into concrete, fences, warehouses, borders, cages, policies, and procedures, but perhaps its most enduring architecture is the one it crafts within us.

In this sense, dismantling carceral space requires more than dismantling the buildings in which punishment takes material form. If, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore teaches us, organized abandonment and carceral power can be understood through the production of premature death, then the stakes of abolition are not simply whether someone is formally imprisoned. The deeper question is whether the worlds we build expose some people to conditions that shorten life, diminish health, fracture relationships, restrict possibility, and make suffering appear inevitable. Punishment becomes material through cages and detention centers, certainly, but also through abandonment, deprivation, displacement, withheld care, and the slow normalization of conditions in which some lives are permitted to become less livable. To dismantle carcerality, then, requires more than removing its architecture. It requires creating the conditions for life in its place.

Somewhere along the way, that possibility became Abolicious.

My husband came up with the word. When we met nine years ago, our conversations returned again and again to prisons, punishment, survival, and abolition. One day, on the way to the gym, I was deep into one of my passionate conversations about all of this when he playfully told me to calm down and nicknamed me Abolicious. I loved it immediately. He said it was something that was “good for you,” and beneath the humor was something I had been struggling to articulate for years. Abolition can feel heavy. In some spaces, even the word can feel intimidating, theoretical, or so closely associated with critique that we forget abolition is also asking us to create. Abolicious gave the word another texture. It could have flavor. It could carry humor and pleasure alongside rigor. It could be felt rather than merely argued. It could be experienced, digested, metabolized. If carceral power can inhabit us so deeply that we learn its rituals almost without noticing, perhaps abolition must also become something we take into ourselves—something we practice until another way of being becomes embodied. We do not simply dismantle what we have inherited; we begin, slowly and imperfectly, to bake ourselves into something else.

I have come to believe this because some experiences change us so profoundly that returning to who we were before them is no longer possible. I am not convinced that wholeness always means restoration to some previous, untouched self. Sometimes there is no going back, nor should going back necessarily be the goal. I think about this through the distinction between restorative and transformative justice: restoration can suggest repairing what has been broken, while transformation asks us to imagine what might be created beyond the conditions that produced the harm in the first place. Becoming whole, then, may not mean recovering who we once were, but allowing ourselves to become someone we have never been before. That kind of transformation has required more from me than intellectual understanding. It has required the spiritual, the embodied, the relational, and, at times, something I can only describe as more than human. By that I mean both the natural world that reminds us we have never existed apart from something larger than ourselves, and those experiences that seem to exceed our available explanations—the uncanny, the synchronous, the miraculous, those moments that arrive with such force that we know something has shifted even when language fails us. Perhaps transformation requires precisely this kind of openness: the willingness to release our attachment to returning to what was and to leave room for what we cannot yet know we are capable of becoming.

This is where M. Jacqui Alexander has become one of my greatest teachers. Her work gave me permission to take seriously something academic life so often teaches us to separate from rigorous thought: the sacred. Alexander refuses an easy division between the political and the spiritual, the intellectual and the embodied, the material and the invisible. In Pedagogies of Crossing, she asks what becomes knowable when we are willing to cross those boundaries—when memory is more than recollection, when the body is more than an object, and when the sacred is not positioned outside political struggle but understood as part of how we come to know ourselves, one another, and the worlds we are trying to create. Her invitation to consider what it means to make the invisible tangible has stayed with me because it unsettles the assumption that only what can be rendered visible through dominant systems of knowledge can be real or consequential.

That matters deeply to me because, like many radical traditions, I do not believe liberation can be contained entirely within the boundaries of what we already know how to measure. I believe in evidence. I have built a career in public health, and evidence matters enormously to me. But long before I was formally trained as a public health practitioner, I spent nearly two decades as a massage therapist, working with bodies and learning another kind of evidence. I learned the power of felt knowledge. I learned that bodies communicate, remember, brace, soften, withdraw, and respond before language necessarily arrives to explain why. I believe in what bodies know, just as I believe in memory, intuition, relationship, synchronicity, and those difficult-to-name moments when something passes between human beings that no spreadsheet can adequately contain. This does not require me to reject science; it requires me to resist turning science into a border around reality. Dominant institutions have taught us to distrust forms of knowing that cannot be easily categorized, controlled, reproduced, or quantified. Alexander's work helps me ask a different question: what if the invisible does not become unreal simply because our existing systems have not learned how to make it legible?

Perhaps this is why the supernatural belongs within Abolicious. I do not mean supernatural as an escape from material reality, nor as a substitute for evidence. I mean almost the opposite: an openness to the possibility that reality is more expansive than the systems we have constructed to contain and explain it. I mean refusing to allow dominant ways of knowing to police the borders of what we are permitted to feel, remember, imagine, intuit, or consider possible. There is something important to me in this contrast. Carceral logic depends upon borders: between innocent and guilty, deserving and undeserving, normal and deviant, legitimate and illegitimate, inside and outside. It classifies, contains, surveils, predicts, and seeks certainty because certainty makes control possible. The sacred troubles those borders. Mystery troubles them. Wonder troubles them. They ask us to remain present before we rush to classify what stands before us. Perhaps liberation therefore requires not only that we build different institutions, but that we recover our capacity to encounter what we cannot entirely know. If carceral power demands certainty in order to contain possibility, Abolicious leaves room for mystery so that possibility can remain alive.

I keep returning to M. Jacqui Alexander’s image of a fire at the center of the human being, a fire connected to a cosmos that holds what came before us, what is present now, and what has yet to come into being. I imagine that fire as the place where we can meet one another beneath the categories systems have given us—the diagnoses, titles, hierarchies, mistakes, identities, histories, judgments, and performances that make us legible to institutions but can never contain the fullness of who we are. It is from this deeper place that I can encounter another human being without needing to control who they become, confine them to a category, or decide in advance the limits of what is possible for their life. Presence, from here, becomes something far more profound than proximity. It becomes a quality of relationship fortified in heart matter—a way of being with another that is grounded enough to witness what is, loving enough not to reduce a person to what has been, and open enough to remain in wonder before what has not yet come into being.

Perhaps that is what I have been searching for all along. After years of studying punishment and the systems that reproduce it, I find myself increasingly less interested in becoming an expert on everything we need to destroy. Critique matters; we must be able to recognize the architecture of harm if we hope to dismantle it. But abolition asks something more difficult of us: What will we practice in its place? I want to understand what becomes possible when quality presence enters the very spaces where punishment would ordinarily take hold. What happens when curiosity interrupts judgment, when relationship interrupts isolation, when love does not replace accountability but transforms the conditions through which accountability becomes possible, when felt knowledge sits beside evidence rather than beneath it, and when wonder interrupts our certainty about what another human being—a community, an organization, or even ourselves—is capable of becoming? I do not believe we can build an abolitionist world without humility, because liberation will inevitably require us to work alongside, remain in relationship with, and sometimes struggle beside people whose choices, beliefs, or moral positions we do not share. That does not mean abandoning discernment, tolerating harm, or refusing necessary boundaries. It means resisting the comforting fiction that carceral logic belongs only to those people and could never possess us. Under different histories, pressures, fears, privileges, or circumstances, any of us may be more susceptible than we would like to imagine to the same seductions of certainty, control, punishment, and exclusion. Perhaps humility is the wisdom to recognize that capacity within ourselves while still knowing when presence is no longer possible, when a boundary must be drawn, and when love itself requires us to let go.

This is the work I am calling Abolicious. In the tradition of scholarship birthed by women of color, abolition is not only something theorized or argued; it is something felt, practiced, metabolized, and lived. It takes the brutality of punishment seriously without allowing punishment to determine the boundaries of our imagination. Abolicious does not ask us to deny harm, excuse it, or abandon accountability. It asks a harder question: Can we encounter harm without becoming possessed by a carceral logic? Can we respond to what has been broken without reproducing the conditions that broke us? Can accountability become a practice of justice that creates the possibility of transformation rather than another ritual of exile?

Maybe this is why presence matters so much to me. I have come to think of presence not as something singular or still, but as something relational—something made through the many forces, histories, bodies, memories, ideas, and energies that meet us and move through us. Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús helps me think about this in Electric Santería through her engagement with Karen Barad’s concept of diffraction. Diffraction describes what happens when waves of light or sound encounter one another: they bend, interfere, overlap, and produce patterns that neither wave could make alone. Unlike reflection, which returns an image of what is already there, diffraction draws our attention to what happens between and through things. Light can appear within darkness; shadows can emerge within light. What matters is not simply the individual force, but what becomes possible through the encounter.

I find something beautiful in thinking about presence this way. We are never simply one thing standing beside another thing. We are co-presences, continually moving through and being moved by one another. The people we have loved, the people who have harmed us, our ancestors, institutions, histories, landscapes, bodies, memories, theories, and systems of power do not remain neatly outside of us. They interfere and overlap. They leave traces. They participate in what becomes perceptible and possible. Even the scholars who have accompanied me through this work have become a kind of co-presence. Rather than reading them only reflectively, asking which theory best explains the world or where one scholar fails another, I want to read them diffractively—to allow Gilmore to move through Alexander, Alexander through Beliso-De Jesús, Barad through the embodied knowledge I carried long before I knew any of their names, and all of them through the experiences that brought me here. Their ideas do not simply sit on a page before me; they enter into relation with one another and with me, producing new patterns of thought, feeling, and possibility.

Perhaps there is something almost supernatural about co-presence understood this way. Not supernatural as an escape from the material world, but as an acknowledgment that we are always surrounded and constituted by more than what is immediately visible. Presence, then, is not simply being here. It is becoming attentive to the many co-presences already here with us—and developing enough discernment to recognize which ones we will allow to move through us.

That distinction matters because carceral power is also a co-presence. Punishment has histories. It has rituals, inheritances, architectures, habits, and ways of knowing that move through institutions and through us. It can enter an encounter before either person has spoken, teaching us who to fear, who to diagnose, who to control, who to remove, and who deserves our care. But if power moves diffractively, then no encounter is entirely predetermined by the forces that enter it. Something else can enter too.

And perhaps this is the work I have been trying to name all along. Abolicious does not imagine that we can somehow purify ourselves of every harmful history or escape the forces that have made us. It asks what we might become when those forces encounter other presences—care, memory, humor, embodiment, accountability, the sacred, curiosity, relationship, wonder. We cannot always choose what enters the room with us, but we can become more conscious of what we allow to move through us and what we choose to amplify. We can notice when punishment is trying to possess the encounter and introduce another possibility that gets to the root of the injustice.

That is Abolicious.