by Alia, Ayla, Charity, Erica, Erin, Jasmine, Shannon, Shawn, Van, and Alexis

The family policing system is an expansive web of carceral institutions historically rooted in chattel slavery, the settler colonial kidnapping of indigenous children, ableism, and cisheteropatriarchy. While the field of education has begun to interrogate the school-prison nexus, it has insufficiently grappled with the centrality of family policing to the carceral violence children face in and beyond schools, and the role that teachers, social workers, and other school employees play as mandated reporters who bring the family policing system into their students’ lives. In this conversation, beautifully transformed into a zine by Alexis Nicole Neely, organizers in the movement to abolish family policing explain how the system works and what people have been doing to dismantle the system and build just futures. Their abolitionist feminist visions will ground and inspire educators, scholars, students, parents, and organizers alike. We invite you to listen to their conversation or read their zine.

Notes on Contributors

Alexis Nicole Neely (@pizzagirllex) is an illustrator, animator, and does a little video, too! Her journey began at the University of Mississippi, where she majored in journalism with a minor in African-American studies. She later attended American University, where she graduated with an MFA in Film and Media Arts. She loves visual media and telling our stories with it. Alexis likes to think of herself as “creating art that moves,” because she is also an alum of the Center for Third World Organizing’s Movement Activist Apprenticeship Program. It was a unique experience where she received training in grassroots organizing and movements for social change, and it gave her a deeper understanding of the role of art in movement. In her spare time, when she’s not creating, she enjoy cozy gaming, karaoke, walks, HIIT workouts, endless Pinterest scrolling, and YouTube binges.

Alia Russell (they/them) is a student of psychology, sociology and the social dimensions of health. With this knowledge, they aspire to earn their PhD in psychology to treat peripartum and postpartum parents. They are a directly impacted survivor of the family regulation system and hope to build a future where policing is replaced with robust care.

Ayla Gelsinger is a current graduate student in the department of community and applied developmental psychology at the University of Illinois – Chicago. She received her MSW from the Columbia School of Social Work where she focused on family, youth, and children’s services. She is a first-generation college student and recently graduated from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas with degrees in Communication Studies and Psychology. During her undergraduate career, Ayla published independent research, participated in various research labs, and presented her work at multiple conferences. Ayla was a Court Appointed Special Advocate for four children in the foster care system and volunteered with children that experienced trauma in various capacities. Ayla is interested in studying new methods of trauma detection in grade school and hopes to one day implement policy that will identify trauma earlier in life. Ayla is also interested in developing community-based restorative programs for teenagers that have experienced sexual abuse. Ayla has been a part of the Oral History and Disability Justice Initiatives.

Writer, educator and organizer, Erica R. Meiners’ current books include For the Children? Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State (University of Minnesota 2016), a co-edited anthology The Long Term: Resisting Life Sentences, Working Towards Freedom (Haymarket Press 2018); the co-authored Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence (Verso 2020); and the co-authored Abolition. Feminism. Now. (Haymarket 2022). A Distinguished Visiting Scholar at a range of universities and centers – Erica has published articles in a wide range of publications including In These Times, Social Text, Radical Teacher, Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Advocate, Boston Review. The Bernard J. Brommel Distinguished Research Professor at Northeastern Illinois University, Erica is a member of her labor union, University Professionals of Illinois, and Erica teaches classes in education, gender and sexuality studies, and justice studies. Most importantly, Erica has collaboratively started and works alongside others in a range of ongoing mobilizations for liberation, particularly movements that involve access to free public education for all, including people during and after incarceration, and other queer abolitionist struggles. A member of Critical Resistance, the Illinois Death in Custody Project, the Prison+Neighborhood Arts / Education Project, and the Education for Liberation Network, Erica is a sci-fi fan, an avid runner, and a lover of bees and cats.

Erin Miles Cloud is a senior attorney at the Civil Rights Corps. She was a founding co-director of Movement for Family Power, an abolitionist movement hub and incubator, cultivating and harnessing community power to end family policing and build a world where all families can thrive. She has also been a supervising attorney and team leader at the Bronx Defenders, a holistic public defense office located in the South Bronx, where she specialized in family defense and represented adults entrenched in the child welfare system. She has published articles and given lectures on the racial disproportionality of the child welfare system and its impact on Black and Brown women and children. In collaboration with the greater fight for reproductive justice for all women of color, she works with Black Mamas Matter to increase equity in maternal outcomes for all Black women. She is a graduate of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and Fordham Law School.

Jasmine Wali, MSW, is the Director of Policy & Advocacy at JMACforFamilies, a nonprofit working to replace the child welfare system with better support for families. She manages JMAC’s city, state, and federal policy advocacy, and projects around mandated reporting and Know Your Rights outreach. She was a Fisher Cummings Policy Fellow at the federal Office on Trafficking in Persons in DC and served on the Title IV-E Prevention Services Clearinghouse project committee to make program eligibility recommendations for federal funding. She is also a practicum instructor at Columbia School of Social Work.

A founding member of the Accountable Communities Consortium, Shannon Perez-Darby is a queer, mixed, Latina, anti-violence advocate, author, activist, and consultant working to create the conditions to support loving, equitable relationships and communities. With nearly 20 years of experience Shannon Perez-Darby centers queer and trans communities of color while working to address issues of domestic and sexual violence, accountability, criminal legal system harms and prison abolition. Her work on these topic can be found in the The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities and Friendship as Social Justice Activism: Critical Solidarities in a Global Perspective, among other publications.

Shawn Koyano is a Black queer mother, survivor, and advocate for survivors and families seeking community, belonging, and healing from violent systems. She was raised by a Black single mother who worked to instill in her the value of her own life, perseverance and the will to thrive. Her work is centered and grounded in Black feminist radical care, abolition, and dreaming of possibilities for families to be safe and whole. Shawn has worked in nonprofit management for 20 years and values supporting families in community. She has served as Program Director of Families of Color Seattle (FOCS) and is a student in the dual MSW/MEd in Human Sexuality program at Widener University and strives to work with parents of color and birth giving folks to heal sexual trauma. She is an advocate for families in the public school system and has worked to implement equitable practices in parent involvement and teacher hiring. She is a member of Mandatory Reporting is Not Neutral (MRNN) and the Duwamish Solidarity Group. Shawn enjoys spending time with her family, reading, acquiring and caring for her new plants, being on the water, and growing food.

Van is passionate about the abolition of the Family Regulation, specifically for the sake of adoptees and children everywhere. They graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park with a degree in Public Policy. During their time at UMD, they researched family policy and education policy, later leading to an internship about underaged marriage in the United States and another with their local government Department of Community Resources and Services. This prompted them to seek out opportunities surrounding how children and families are treated, the institution of parenting, and how the government responds to people they label to be in crisis.Van started working with Movement for Family Power in 2020 as a summer intern, assisting with operations and research. There, they received vital political education explaining the depths of violence caused by family policing and re-contextualizing their own lived experience as an adoptee. That following fall, starting a social work master’s program proved to be in conflict with their values. They left their program and rejoined MFP in the summer of 2022 as a Team Coordinator and spent time early in 2023 as a Research Assistant for a project on mandated reporting.

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