❓WHAT HAPPENED: The Democratic Party’s newly minted candidate for New York City Mayor, Zohran Kwame Mamdani, has a history of campaigning to defund the police and “abolish” the prison system.
👤WHO WAS INVOLVED: Zohran Kwame Mamdani, Democratic Party voters, New York City electorate.
📍WHEN & WHERE: New York City, over the course of Mamdani’s political career.
💬KEY QUOTE: “As socialists, we believe people should not have to endure the violence & coercion of a criminal-legal system that props up the exploitation of the market by surveilling, caging & killing those fighting to survive under capitalism. We can abolish that system.” — Zohran Mamdani.
🎯IMPACT: Mamdani’s victory signals growing momentum within the modern Democratic Party for radical criminal justice policies, including prison abolition and police defunding.
Zohran Kwame Mamdani, the “progressive Muslim immigrant” who won the New York mayoral primary for the Democratic Party overnight, wants to “decarcerate” the city’s prisons and jails, arguing that “our prison system relies on dehumanization and brutality, so the goal must be to abolish this exploitative system entirely” in a 2021 social media post.
The Queens assemblyman has made “decarceration” a key theme of his political career, having also stated the previous year that, “We can’t reform a system working exactly as designed – to control Black, brown & poor New Yorkers. We need to defund the police, get them out of matters they have no business in, free the thousands locked up unjustly & invest the savings in those most impacted by state violence.”
He continued: “As socialists, we believe people should not have to endure the violence & coercion of a criminal-legal system that props up the exploitation of the market by surveilling, caging & killing those fighting to survive under capitalism. We can abolish that system.”
This activism continued into 2022, with Mamdani telling the LGBTQ-oriented Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club, “I will… work to dismantle mass incarceration in New York by opposing the construction of new state prisons and jails, divesting from our $3 billion/year carceral system, and investing in jobs, services, and restorative justice approaches… I also support the abolition of felony disenfranchisement, including for incarcerated New Yorkers, as we work toward full decarceration of our state.”
In office, Mamdani has backed policies to end cash bail, release prisoners in their fifties, give prisoners the vote, and decriminalize prostitution.
He also argues that “Defunding the police is a feminist issue” because “Women, especially trans women, are disproportionately impacted by police violence & the violence of incarceration.”
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