NLG Students: Week of Abolition - National Lawyers Guild

Following the NLG #Law4thePeople Convention in 2015, NLG membership adopted a resolution on prison abolition calling for “the dismantling and abolition of all prisons and of all aspects of systems and institutions that support, condone, create, fill, or protect prisons.” In 2020, NLG membership passed a resolution supporting the abolition of policing.

In honor of these political resolutions, NLG updated the annual student Week Against Mass Incarceration to the Week of Abolition (WOA) to reflect the Guild’s commitment to finding alternatives to current systems of incarceration and policing.

Week of Abolition 2025 will be held March 3-7
“Practicing Everyday Abolition”

For the 2025 Week of Abolition (March 3-7), NLG law school chapters will be organizing events and actions related to the abolition of prisons and police, with a special focus building alternatives in our everyday lives, relationships, and institutions. We are guided by these words by abolitionist organizer and thinker Ruth Wilson Gilmore:

“Abolition is not absence, it is presence. What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities. So those who feel in their gut deep anxiety that abolition means knock it all down, scorch the earth and start something new, let that go. Abolition is building the future from the present, in all of the ways we can.”

For more, please read this chapter from Abolishing the Police: An Illustrated Introduction: “Practicing Everyday Abolition.”

Ways To Participate in WOA 2025

In past years, NLG students have organized interactive workshops, community discussions, film screenings, tabling, letter writing campaigns, banner drops, visits to incarcerated youth, and panels on topics such as solitary confinement, the school to prison pipeline, immigration detention, transformative justice, and alternatives to incarceration and policing.

In 2025, we encourage NLG members to organize both in person and virtual events that highlight the ways that the framework of abolition can inform their everyday experiences. These can include panels and workshops, letter writing events, social media campaigns, research projects, tabling, and more! To help with your organizing, check out our NLG Scholars Network and see the list of resources below.

Check out student events from WOA 2024 at this link!

The Guild engages in numerous initiatives to promote an end to mass incarceration nationally and locally. The NLG’s national Mass Incarceration Committee (MIC) aims to to disrupt and abolish carceral systems and all iterations of carceral systems, including raising awareness and support of jailhouse lawyers and political prisoners. The NLG, in conjunction with the Center for Constitutional Rights, processes tens of thousands of requests received from people in prison annually for either the Jailhouse Lawyer Handbook or NLG membership. NLG’s biannual publication, Guild Notes, is sent to all jailhouse lawyer members and includes writing, poetry, and art sent in by our incarcerated members. NLG members are involved in various initiatives opposing policing, criminalization, solitary confinement, capital punishment, and new prison construction.

Please email NLG Director of Research and Education Traci Yoder at traci@nlg.org to share the events you are organizing! Everyone should post flyers, pictures, and event invites on your chapter social media pages and join the conversation using #WOA2025. Tweet to us @NLGnews!