Mariame Kaba

Mariame Kaba is an organizer, educator, and author whose work has been instrumental in building the contemporary prison abolition and transformative justice movements. Born in New York City in 1966 to Guinean immigrant parents, Kaba was raised in a household that emphasized collective responsibility and mutual aid. She began organizing as a teenager and has spent over three decades building organizations, campaigns, and curricula focused on ending the violence of the prison-industrial complex. Kaba founded Project NIA in 2009, a grassroots organization focused on ending youth incarceration, and has been involved in numerous campaigns including the successful effort to end the practice of shackling incarcerated women during childbirth in Illinois. She co-founded Survived and Punished, an organization that supports criminalized survivors of gender-based violence, and has been a key figure in campaigns against police violence in Chicago. Her book "We Do This 'Til We Free Us" (2021) collected her essays and interviews on abolition, making the case that the criminal punishment system does not deliver safety and that communities must develop their own approaches to harm and accountability. Kaba co-authored "Fumbling Towards Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators" (2019) with Shira Hassan, providing practical tools for transformative justice processes. She has also created curricula and educational materials used by organizers nationwide. Kaba's approach is distinctive for its emphasis on practice over theory, its insistence that abolition is not an abstract goal but a daily practice of building alternatives, and her famous dictum that "hope is a discipline." She argues that we cannot reform institutions designed to cage and punish — we must replace them with community-based systems that actually address harm and prevent violence. Kaba deliberately avoids celebrity and centers collective organizing over individual leadership, often describing herself simply as "an organizer."