This story is part of Reframing Crime Narratives, a 10-part series about public safety by The TRiiBE to create space for community conversation about crime in Chicago.
The series is supported in part by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Envisioning Justice grant by Illinois Humanities.
More often than not, when people hear the word “abolition,” they imagine a society without prisons or jails, a society where there’s lawlessness and no justice or accountability for people who cause harm. However, abolition in its fullest form and in practice is much more expansive.
Abolition, according to #LetUsBreathe Collective (LUBC) co-director Jennifer Pagán, is a daily practice and a political commitment that, on the one hand, calls for divestment in the carceral system — such as jails, prisons, surveillance and policing — but also investment in nourishing institutions that support and care for people’s everyday needs.
“Abolition is how we speak to each other every day. It’s how we support each other in meeting our needs. It’s how we ask for what we need,” said Pagán, who is also a shamonic reiki practitioner, yoga instructor, educator and liberatory organizer. “It’s how we deal with conflict and violence and how we share space, stories and create art together.”
Although Pagán is a founding member of the organization and has been a co-director of the LUBC since 2020, she plans to step down from her leadership position in mid-December. In preparing for her transition out of leadership, Pagán shared that she’s selected E’Mon Lauren, an artist and educator, as the new co-director who’s been working under her since May and has also brought new programming to the #BreathingRoom Space in her role as co-director of programming and operations. LUBC will formally announce the leadership change later this month.
Now in its 10th year, the LUBC is an alliance of artists and activists who, through organizing, are imagining a world without prisons and police. Through its work, LUBC teaches educators, healers, and organizers to love and transform themselves, their families, communities, and their cities through radical imagination and healing.
“We’re not working to create another institution that replaces police and prisons. We’re working every day to change our daily actions and our relationships with each other, the world and ourselves,” Pagán said.
In celebration of the 10-year milestone, Pagán spoke with The TRiiBE about her introduction to abolition and how it informs the way she navigates the world. She also reflected on the Freedom Square movement, what abolition requires, and what it looks like in practice.
The 2014 uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri, along with the Freedom Square encampment in 2016 on Chicago’s West Side, were transformative for Pagán, who grew up on the North Side.
At the time of 18-year-old Michael Brown’s killing by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in 2014, Pagán was entering her senior year at the University of Missouri in Columbia, just two hours away from Ferguson. She was involved in student organizing efforts demanding justice for Brown. Both movements shaped her understanding of abolition and what it looks like in practice.
“I naively thought about abolition as, like, an end goal, or like this space that we get to once police and prisons aren’t here,” Pagán said.
The foundation of LUBC was built through mutual aid and its support of the organizing efforts in Ferguson, including its relationship with Lost Voices, an intergenerational organization based in Ferguson that formed to demand justice for Mike Brown, protest unjust laws targeting demonstrators, and also launched a tent encampment.
Other founding LUBC members, such as Kristiana Colón and Damon Williams, organized a GoFundMe for the Lost Voices encampment. They traveled back and forth to Ferguson from Chicago to support their organizing efforts.
“The beginnings of Let Us Breathe was through mutual aid, essentially before we had the language of mutual aid, and through care, and by building deep and trusting relationships with folks on the ground in Ferguson,” Pagán said. “That was the real genesis of the Let Us Breathe Collective, and then that led to us doing work from Chicago to Ferguson with Lost Voices.”
This collaboration between the two organizations also influenced LUBC and other Chicago organizers, such as BYP 100 (Black Youth Project), to join forces in 2016 to launch Freedom Square, a 41-day occupation in opposition to Homan Square, a Chicago Police Department black site where, as Pagán explained, “police took people to torture them against their will, without lawyers or family knowing.”
Freedom Square began with seven or eight tents, symbolizing the investments in the community that organizers hoped to build when divestment from the police occurs in the future.
The experience in Ferguson and Freedom Square deepened Pagán’s commitment to abolition and furthered LUBC’s work and programming. It also laid the groundwork for the organization’s South Side campus, known as the #BreathingRoom Space, LUBC’s hub for arts, healing, and organizing. Within the campus, there’s also Liberation Landing, which is stewarded by a coalition of organizations and is a sanctuary for solace, community, and opportunities for those impacted by systemic racism.
Read our Q&A with Pagán below.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
The TRiiBE: What was your earliest introduction to abolition?
Jennifer Pagán: When Mike Brown was murdered, it was the first time that I even really heard the word abolition and really had seen it in practice, specifically in the ways that people were caring for each other, in the ways that folks were creatively making space and holding space, especially with the Lost Voices encampment. It was the first time I had ever even participated in a protest.
A lot of my first exposure, or just experiences with abolition, started in 2014 after the Ferguson uprising. I was going into my senior year of college at the University of Missouri at Columbia when Mike Brown was murdered on Aug. 9.
So, I was coming back down for school, and we were gathering outside at Speakers Hall or something like that. But it was essentially a gathering space where folks were trying to figure out how we would respond to this moment, support our people and what made the most sense with the container that we were in, which was a college campus.
We made the decision to come together to form a coalition called MU for Mike Brown [MU4MikeBrown]. And so it was essentially a coalition of organizations. So we were all coming together essentially to demand justice for Mike Brown and also, more largely, to call for an end to police violence. We hosted activations and protests across our college campus, including a die-in at the Student Center. We had a full program of performances, professors, poets, and different folks just sharing art, their experiences, and how they were processing the moment.
Can you describe how that experience of working alongside the organizers in Ferguson shaped your involvement in Chicago’s organizing movement and the early years of the #LUBC’s work?
It transformed the way that I see the practice of family and community and how much I value it, particularly as a tool for change. A lot of that work with BYP 100 was super transformative and then led us directly into just the Freedom Square encampment in 2016.
It was essentially an invest, divest-like platform. So we had these seven tents, some represented arts, mental health, education and quality schools, healthcare and food. So we had a first aid tent, a free store, a library, a kitchen, etc. And so we essentially began running this 24/7 summer camp, where we were practicing abolitionist values.
We held that space for 41 days, and we gathered around a campfire, having to speak through and dialogue through really hard questions about how we keep each other safe and how we keep each other well and protected. So, just being a part of that space, I had seen it in Ferguson. I had seen it when we were protesting there. But here [in Chicago], it became something I was living every day. For me, abolition transformed into a daily practice and political commitment.
Organizers from Lost Voices helped us set up tents. They even stayed at the encampment for a period of time. They were essential to our Freedom Square Encampment. A lot of the tents that we were setting up, a lot of the space making that we were doing, was really in the legacy of the encampment in Ferguson that Lost Voices started back in 2014, and so it wouldn’t have been possible without them.
What does abolition look like for you as a daily practice?
For me, it is reconnecting with my body for a long time. The processes of colonization and oppression literally creates dismemberment, or it feels like we are disconnected and separate from our core.
So, every day, [abolition] is a commitment to connecting with my body, to honor where it’s at, and to offer it the care that it needs. So that’s been my most throughline commitment to either working to be a part of communities where I can foster that consistent practice or committing to doing that each day because it has supported me.
Also, just being able to recognize my triggers, how I’m responding to people, or how I’m holding or not holding space. [Abolition] is building a relationship with my body that supports me in sustaining work and presence here.
The Defund Movement went mainstream in 2020 following the police murder of George Floyd, but since then, we’ve seen a backlash to those calls to defund the police. What does this current moment represent, and how do you keep hope alive?
We’re witnessing the ends of empire in ways that we haven’t seen before. [We are] being exposed to death and the violence of empire. I’m thinking about Palestine, Sudan and the Congo. The defund movement came out of a legacy of Black liberation and Black radical tradition and moving in a global framework and perspective.
In the documentary One Million Experiments, Damon [Williams] explains the defund movement as a divest and invest platform. That’s where the language of #DefundCPD came from. (Reporter’s note: One Million Experiments is an exploratory documentary film that showcases how society defines and creates safety without police or prisons produced by Respair Production and Media, Interrupting Criminalization and SoapBox Productions and Organizing).
We’ve said this thing clearly already: we should be divesting from the police and we should be investing in the community, but y’all not getting it.
#DefundCPD was a provocation to push for defunding these police departments and institutions and provoke people to think about what a future without them will look like and demand that on the streets every day. We’ve grown as a movement, and our legacy has expanded over the past decades to get to this point where there are students across the country and the world building encampments that are rooted in abolitionist values and abolitionist practice. For me, that’s what I think about to keep the hope of the discipline alive.
When it comes to abolition, critics often ask, “OK, you want to end this system, but what comes next?” How do you respond to those criticisms?
I think about the film, One Million Experiments, when I think about an answer to that question. People ask, “OK, you say you want to get rid of police and prisons, but what’s gonna replace them?” I don’t know that there’s an answer to that. It requires us to continue to experiment. It requires us to study and continue to be practiced. There’s not one answer.
We’re not working to create another institution that replaces police and prisons. We’re working every day to change our daily actions and our relationships with each other, the world and ourselves. At the same time, we’re organizing against certain policies or laws while also organizing protests, marches and acts of civil disobedience to disrupt those systems we’re attempting to build and fight against. It’s about deepening our relationships and practicing abolition with one another.
How can people interested in abolition implement abolitionist practices in their everyday lives on a smaller scale?
Find a community of people or go to events, whether it’s topics related to abolition or just the work that happens around it; try to find community. I feel like once I began to practice community and not just be like, “oh, I’m just organizing with these people,” it is something that supported me in experiencing connection in a way that shifted my commitment.
Go to events, find your community, find an organization, find your people. It could be as simple as that. Pod mapping is a practice we try to do here, and I just try to do it in my everyday life.
That’s an easy way to get into abolitionist practice, getting to know your neighbors, getting to know what their needs are, having them get to know what your needs are, making safety plans for each other, or just like wellness and protection plans. For example, “if I’m triggered, or if this happens, this is the type of response that I want or need, or if I’m in this type of situation, this is the type of support I need.” Doing that work with people you’re in the community with is a simple way to ease into abolitionist practice.
LUBC recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, and attendees learned that you’ll be stepping down from your role as co-director. Why did you decide to step down, and what’s next for you and LUBC?
It’s fair to say it’s a sabbatical, but I don’t know that I see myself returning to leadership at Let Us Breathe. I could see myself coming back to curate full-service programming or continue to hold spaces as a healing and care practitioner, but I do not imagine a future for myself where I am holding the labor that I’ve been holding for the past three to four years.
I’m going to rest, and I’m going to grieve and emerge as slowly as I need to. Ideally, I want it to be a space that I can return to and heal. I hope it becomes a space where people can heal and repair while organizing and doing other work that is a part of a movement constellation and ecosystem.
Liberation Landing is a movement hub and sanctuary. It’s a healing home that’s led and stewarded by Black or Indigenous people and by members of that community. I hope that Liberation Landing continues to be a space where liberatory work happens, where we practice embodiment, where we honor grief, where we seek refuge and retreat.
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