Mariame Kaba is an organizer and educator whose work focuses on restorative justice, advocating for youth, ending violence, and dismantling the prison industrial complex (PIC). She has long been vocal in the movement to abolish police and prisons, a movement that gained notoriety in 2020 after the death of George Floyd at the hands of police officers and the subsequent protests.
“As a society, we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm,” she wrote in an essay for the New York Times last summer. “People like me who want to abolish prisons and police, however, have a vision of a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation.”
Kaba is also the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration, and the co-founder of Survived and Punished as well as other organizations like the Chicago Freedom School, the Chicago Taskforce on Violence Against Girls and Young Women, the Chicago Alliance to Free Marissa Alexander, and the Rogers Park Young Women’s Action Team (YWAT). The work she does helps ensure a brighter future for Black youth, women, and everyone.
