Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair by Danielle Sered. New Press, 305 pp., $26.99
Nearly two decades ago, the activist and scholar Angela Davis observed that prison abolitionists were “dismissed as utopians and idealists whose ideas are at best unrealistic and impracticable, and, at worst, mystifying and foolish.” Today this is no longer the case—the prison abolition movement has gone mainstream. The recent killings by police officers of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade—among many others—have sparked a national reckoning about the entire US justice system that has reached news outlets, city governments, and boardrooms. In Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed, the school district has terminated its contract with the police department. A majority of the city council, which controls the budget, voted in…