voices

On the Eve of Abolition is dedicated to Albert Woodfox, Krystal Clark, Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu Jamal, Pitt Panther and all political prisoners.

Throughout the play, we have incorporated audio recordings and original text written by political prisoners in the U.S. Below you’ll find transcriptions of audio sourced during the live performance.


prologue – mumia abu jamal, recorded by prison radio:

“The quest for abolition: How do we arrive at this place we call abolition? What are the roads to such a destination? We arrive for the almost lost lessons of history shaped by generations of ancestors who struggled their whole lives for that rare breath of freedom, and yearned with all their hearts that we, their prodigy will one day breath free air, for abolition stands for the long hard struggle against slavery, abolition meant the destruction of that system and the beginning of freedom. For a brief moment in time, freedom dawned over the land, but it was a mirage, a lie served by the greater lie of white supremacy, which plunged people into the darkness of terror and death, in fact, slavery by another name. Those unholy origins lead  to the specter of mass incarceration. The greatest incarceration of juveniles in global history. The systems of white supremacy, of ruthless capitalism and labor exploitation, led to the monster now before us, what activists rightly call DBI, Death By Incarceration or lifeless sentences of life, forever.The presence and threat of prisons doesn’t create, it doesn’t treat, it doesn’t help, It feeds, it harms, it cripples, and yes it kills, it is the institutionalization of meanness, plain and simple. Prison abolitionist and noted scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore stated: ‘Abolition requires we change one thing, which is everything.’ Now is the time. With Love, not fear. This is Mumia Abu-Jamal”. 

voice of prisoner – except from poem by leonard peltier: 

“Sometimes in the shadowed night I become spirit.

The walls, the bars, the gratings dissolve into light

and I unloosen my soul

and fly through the inner darkness of my being.

I become transparent,

a bright shadow,

a bird of dreams singing from the tree of life.”

text at the end – original artwork and text by pitt panther

“Abolition is not a phoenix rising from the ashes.

It is a butterfly, a brilliant metamorphosis into a new reality.”