The former NFL star turned social activist presents 30 essays from political prisoners, grassroots organizers and scholars such as Angela Davis and Dereck Purnell that focus on the police and incarceration abolition movement.

Editors' preface: A journey to safer futures /Colin Kaepernick, Connie Wun, and Christopher Petrella -- Foreword: Believe in new possibilities / Angela Y. Davis -- Introduction: A future worth building / Colin Kaepernick -- The Feds are watching: a history of resisting anti-Black surveillance / Simone Browne -- The myth of the good cop: pop culture helped turn police officers into rock stars--and Black folks into criminals / Mark Anthony Neal -- My son was executed by an ideal: a conversation with Gwendolyn Woods / as told to Kiese Laymon -- The truth about "Officer Friendly" / Tamara K. Nopper -- SWAT's paramilitary fever dream: when police play soldier, everybody loses / Stuart Schrader -- Disability justice is an essential part of abolishing police & ending incarceration / Talila A. Lewis -- Snaps!: collective (queer) abolition organizing created this moment / Erica R. Meiners -- Schools as carceral spaces / Tamara K. Nopper -- How abolition makes schools safer: funneling our children from classrooms to cages ends now / Kihana Miraya Ross -- We must center Black women: Breonna Taylor and bearing witness to Black women's expendability / Kimberlé Crenshaw -- Stolen freedom: the ongoing incarceration of California's Indigenous peoples / Morning Star Gali -- Queer & trans liberation requires abolition / Dean Spade -- Challenging e-carceration: abolition means no digital prisons / James Kilgore -- The carceral state / Tamara K. Nopper -- The fight to melt ICE: why we're fighting for a world without ICE / Cristina Jiménez Moreta and Cynthia Garcia -- The hidden pandemic: prisons are a public health crisis--and the cure is right in front of us / Kenyon Farrow -- The long grip of mass incarceration / Tamara K. Nopper -- My father deserves to be free: a son's fight for his father's freedom / Russell "Maroon" Shoatz and Russell Shoatz III -- We're all living in a future created by slavery / Ameer Hasan Loggins -- Reforms are the master's tools: the system is built for power, not justice / Derecka Purnell -- No justice, no freedom: criminal justice reform cost me 21 years of my life / Derrick Hamilton -- Police reform as counterinsurgency: how reformist approaches to police violence expand police power and legitimate the next phase of domestic warfare / Dylan Rodríguez -- The extent of carceral control / Tamara K. Nopper -- Three traps of police reform / Naomi Murakawa -- Putting a Black face on police agendas: Black cops don't make policing any less anti-Black / Bree Newsome Bass -- The new Jim Code: the shiny, high-tech wolf in sheep's clothing / Ruha Benjamin -- Change from the roots: what abolition looks like, from the Panthers to the people / Robin D. G. Kelley -- Casting off the shadows of slavery: lessons from the first abolition movement / Mumia Abu-Jamal -- Survivors at the forefront of the abolitionist movement / Connie Wun -- Who is being healed?: creating solutions is about answering questions prisons never asked / Marlon Peterson -- Ending the war on Black women: building a world where Breonna Taylor could live / Andrea J. Ritchie -- Bankrolling the carceral state / Tamara K. Nopper -- We can dismantle the system at the polls, too / Rukia Lumumba -- What is & what could be: the policies of abolition / Dan Berger and David Stein -- The journey continues: so you're thinking about becoming an abolitionist / Mariame Kaba.