Abolition asks: what if no one were disposable? What if healing required care, not cages? All This Safety Is Killing Us is a blistering, brilliant response to these questions—a collection of essays and visual art that rejects the myth of safety through surveillance and exposes the carceral scaffolding propping up American healthcare. Edited by Carlos Martinez and Ronica Mukerjee, and peer-reviewed by its contributors, the anthology reimagines what it means to be healthy in a world obsessed with punishment.

From ER trauma bays to prison infirmaries, from mandated reporting to border militarization, these essays speak with clarity and fire. Contributors—clinicians, organizers, incarcerated activists—trace how policing, prisons, and the family policing system (FPS) not only fail to create safety but actively produce harm, disease, and death. This is health justice work rooted in abolition, where care is not conditional and survival is not up for debate.

Mihir Chaudhary’s standout piece on the presence of police in trauma bays captures the dissonance between healing and surveillance. Her observations—clinical yet gutting—detail how law enforcement disrupts care, violates patient confidentiality, and deepens trauma. In another standout, Naomi Schoenfeld and Jenn Heresteen interrogate carceral psychiatry, revealing how even “non-police” crisis responses often replicate the same punitive logic.

The essays are as intersectional as they are uncompromising. Leroy F. Moore Jr.'s reflections on disability justice, and the critical work by Jenna Heath, Elizabeth Hur, and Nicole Mitchell Chadwick on the FPS and criminalization of pregnancy, lay bare the racialized, gendered, and ableist foundations of the carceral medical system. Again and again, we are asked: how can anyone heal in a place built to punish?

What emerges is a call—not just to dismantle, but to dream. Abolition here is not absence, but presence: of mutual aid, of trust, of systems that love instead of surveil. All This Safety Is Killing Us is not just a book I’ll recommend—it’s a manifesto I’ll press into the hands of every healthcare worker I know. Urgent, visionary, and devastatingly clear, this collection is abolitionist medicine, healing justice, and harm reduction at their most necessary.

📖 Read this if you love: abolitionist frameworks in healthcare, radical critiques of carceral systems, or the works of Mariame Kaba, Dorothy Roberts, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.

🔑 Key Themes: Carceral Medicine and Medical Racism, Disability Justice and Reproductive Autonomy, Policing and Public Health, Abolition as Healing and Care.