Nothing good arrives in a letter. Emails, yes. Phone calls, yes. But a letter? Nope.

A year ago, I received a letter that was so unsuspecting my immediate reaction was, “is this a joke?” In bold writing, headlined with ‘jury summons’, I held a mythological demand that I subconsciously believed was only reserved for ‘real adults’ or exciting courtroom-centred television shows. 

No one I know had ever been summoned for jury duty, and at a different time, I might have found watching a case interesting. But not now. How can I navigate this as a person who does not believe that the justice offered by carceral systems is real justice? How do I navigate this as someone moving towards abolitionism? 

In the UK, you can’t be excused from jury duty unless you have a good reason. You must swear an oath to make a judgement on the evidence shown in the courtroom alone. Although you can defer your summons for one year, I was eventually summoned into court to face my moral dilemma. 

I learnt about prison abolitionism from 2020 onwards, after the murder of George Floyd, the calls for abolishing the police and the connections to prisons and anti-Black racism, and I’m still learning.