The image shows a collage with images of Maria and other elements such as tape, ripped paper and drawings
Image credit: Naomi Gennery

Pages for Changes

3 min read time

Published Jul 13, 2026

Maria Thomas on Care, Not Criminalisation

Building a world where everyone can access care free from carcerality and harm

Maria Thomas Written by Maria Thomas
Ann Arbor, US

The Pages for Changes reading lists offer personalised and curated reading recommendations from key creatives, authors and thinkers.

Organiser and artist Maria Thomas, curates a reading list of texts and resources about the necessity of interrupting the criminalisation of people seeking and providing healthcare.

My life has been marked by multiple displacements. My family has crisscrossed the globe between South India, the so-called Middle East and the US — traversing so many checkpoints and imaginary lines drawn in blood. This repeated uprooting has given me a particular understanding of who gets to belong and why, and shown me the tools autocrats use to consolidate their power and quash dissent. 

The same consolidation of power is being played out in the US where I currently live. And authoritarians here are relying on the same well-worn playbook of scapegoating, violence and *criminalisation.

This dragnet of criminalisation is expanding in healthcare settings, with public health and healthcare workers being rapidly conscripted to criminalise those marked as ‘other’ or ‘surplus’ — by reporting patients without papers, through abortion and trans health care bans and more. I’ve spent years fighting this tide alongside so many beautiful, brave compadres, as Interrupting Criminalization’s Beyond Do No Harm fellow and in my current work at Health in Partnership.

This reading list helps illustrate the long history of healthcare as a site of surveillance, punishment and control for marginalised communities. My hope is that readers will come away with an understanding of criminalisation as a primary tool used by fascists, of public health and healthcare as key sites of struggle, and that they feel inspired to defend bodily autonomy and fight criminalisation. 

*a social and political process by which society determines which actions or behaviours—and by who—will be punished by the state (from The Crisis of Criminalization, by Andrea J. Ritchie and Beth Richie). Criminalisation reinforces existing relations of power. This explains why apartheid, slavery, colonialism, etc. were all legal, while the movement of emancipated Black people in the US was criminalised through Black codes and Indigenous water protectors at Standing Rock were also criminalised.

Seven books that changed my perspective

  • Book jacket: Saving Our Own Lives: A Liberatory Practice of Harm Reduction

    Saving Our Own Lives: A Liberatory Practice of Harm Reduction

    by Shira Hassan

    (non-fiction)

    Shira Hassan carefully gathers the stories of Black, Indigenous and People of Colour, street youth, queer, trans, sex-working, drug-using and disabled organisers. Through their deep commitment to loving and protecting each other from the harms of carceral systems, we are shown how they created the principles and practices of liberatory harm reduction. 

    This is a book about what it truly means for communities most targeted by policing and criminalisation, to practice collective care and fight for our survival and liberation. It is a reclamation of harm reduction history — from the distortions public health and social work have inflicted on it — recounted with fierce love for the communities who taught us how to save our own lives.

  • Book jacket: Your Money or Your Life: Debt Collection in American Medicine

    Your Money or Your Life: Debt Collection in American Medicine

    by Luke Messac

    (non-fiction)

    Poet, scholar, prison abolitionist and multimedia artist, Jackie Wang teaches us that “Debt is a carceral instrument.“ When you don’t have the money to pay for care, either medical debt ensnares you in a carceral net or you must forgo care – at the cost of your health or life. 

    In this gripping book Luke Messac, a US-based emergency physician and historian, lays bare the impossibly cruel choice a capitalist healthcare system presents us with. Through personal narrative, patient stories and political and historical analysis, Messac explains how medical debt collection has become a multibillion-dollar industry.

  • Book jacket: Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072

    Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072

    by M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi

    (fiction)

    A creative and defiant book with healthcare workers sabotaging billing systems, House Mothers, drug users, rave DJs and students telling their stories of how — through insurrections and experiments in creating new social institutions and relations — they changed everything. It felt like a love letter to organisers, taking us by the hand, revealing a vision of the future and inviting us into a world where our blood, sweat, tears and organising efforts have paid off.

  • Book jacket: A Tropical Rebel Gets the Duke

    A Tropical Rebel Gets the Duke

    by Adrianna Herrera

    (fiction)

    I love fiction, but this past decade the non-fiction pile on my nightstand has consistently towered over my fiction pile. I know reading fiction makes us more human, more creative, more connected to ourselves and each other, and so last year a group of my friends (mostly organisers with a bottomless capacity for confronting the hard and horrific, in text and in life) started a “Reluctantly Joyful” fiction reading group.  

    Molly, my historical romance enthusiast friend, introduced us to this series. The protagonist, Aurora Montalban, runs an underground women’s clinic in 1880s Paris providing … criminalised care. The stakes, the risks and the decisions that drive the story feel so resonant to the moment we’re in. This book was fun, escapist, racy, while also being deeply feminist and unexpectedly moving.

  • Book jacket: Health Communism

    Health Communism

    by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant

    (non-fiction)

    This book by the co-hosts of the Death Panel (a podcast for our times) was clarifying for me. It skillfully deconstructs the political economy of healthcare and I found the idea of extractive abandonment of “surplus” communities especially useful. 

    “Cure,” the chapter on SPK — Sozialistisches Patientenkollectiv (“Turn illness into a weapon!”) was a sobering reminder of what the state will do when nurses, doctors and patients act in radical solidarity with each other and are a threat to the capitalist order. Razor-sharp in its analysis, it has so many lessons for what is to be done.

  • Book jacket: All This Safety is Killing Us: Health Justice Beyond Prisons, Police and Borders

    All This Safety is Killing Us: Health Justice Beyond Prisons, Police and Borders

    by Ed. Carlos Martinez and Ronica Mukerjee

    (non-fiction)

    This book is a much-needed intervention, gathering contributions from workers within public health and medical fields who see how their professions are used to police and criminalise people seeking care, and who refuse to be complicit in upholding carceral logics. Their stories are interwoven with interviews with abolitionist and health justice scholars, as well as art, mini-zines and drawings by community activists, current prisoners and survivors of state-sanctioned violence.

  • Book jacket: Viral Justice: How We Grow The World We Want

    Viral Justice: How We Grow The World We Want

    by Ruha Benjamin

    (non-fiction)

    Through personal memoir and social analysis, transdisciplinary scholar, educator and cultural worker Ruha Benjamin excavates how racial capitalism and carceral structures squeeze the life out of our bodies and communities — while also telling the stories of movements prefiguring the worlds we yearn for. 

    Above all, it’s an invitation into seeing our own place in remaking the world and seeding alternative futures through our repeated, insurgent acts of justice.

Online and on the go

  • Infinite Vision

    by Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy (Documentary)

    The summer I turned 19, I took a train to the temple city of Madurai in South India to visit my dear friend Pavi, and volunteer at her family’s eye hospital. I was transformed by the experience.

    Founded by Pavi’s great uncle, Dr. V, in 1976, Aravind is now the largest eye hospital in the world. No one is turned away and everyone receives the same high standard of care, regardless of ability to pay. When I think about the care we dream of and what we could build, I think of Aravind; and I hope you’ll be as moved and inspired by their story as me.

  • Movement Memos Interview

    by Kelly Hayes with Monica Cosby and Alan Mills (Website and Podcast)

     

    I love this interview because it speaks to the many ways I understand care, not criminalisation. It shows us how: 

    People inside the torture chambers that are prisons care for each other in acts of daily rebellion, choosing care as the antidote to the violence of criminalisation.

    Criminalisation and imprisonment is antithetical to care. As abolitionists say “You can’t get well in a cell” and “The only treatment is freedom.”

    Excarceration (diverting people away from police contact) is a central principle of abolition. We have to invest in upstream solutions (housing, universal income) and better mental health care outside, rather than caging people with unmet mental health needs.

  • For the People’s Health

    by Cristian Farias (Article)

    This is an invigorating article about the countless organisers, networks and formations that are fighting for care, not criminalisation. 

    Organisers are embracing a diversity of tactics — they are throwing sand in the gears of harmful practices and systems; organising healthcare workers to interrupt criminalisation; organising governmental public health organisations to centre racial justice and uplift movement demands; using policy and legislative levers to advocate for a moratorium on new prison and jail construction projects; and politicising new generations of medical and public health students to join the struggle. 

    As Mariame Kaba often says “People are in motion everywhere”, and that is cause for hope.

The image shows a collage with images of Maria and other elements such as tape, ripped paper and drawings

Image credit: Naomi Gennery

Musings and more

  • What is the book you've gifted the most?

    Let This Radicalize You by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba. It’s such a useful, grounding, practical book for young, old, new and wizened organisers alike.

  • What is your favourite bookshop?

    DC books in Thiruvanthapuram, Kerala. It’s not a particularly pretty bookstore, but I find the most eclectic treasures there. I have fond memories of going there with my father and picking up slim volumes of Malayalam poetry including a Balachandran Chulikaad poem (“To the Medical Student”) whose lines (translated by me, below) describing a fierce and irreverent bodily autonomy still rattle around in my head: 

    You will cut into my throat 

    But it will refuse to give up my song 

    You will hack my loins in two

    But you will be denied an encore performance of

    the many grand celebrations it has known

  • If you could go on a walk with one author, who would it be and why?

    My friend Snigdha who I miss every day. I’d burst into her house and yell “throw over your man and we’ll…dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads — They won’t stir by day, only by dark on the river. Think of that. Throw over your man, I say and come.”

  • Written by Maria Thomas

    Maria Thomas

    Maria Thomas is a South Asian artist, poet, and organiser based in the US. She works on issues of racial, gender and social justice, the violence of carceral systems and their impact on communities and public health. As a multiply displaced immigrant, an internationalist and anti-imperialist commitment lies at the heart of her work and politics. Her work over the last two decades has spanned health care systems, grassroots collectives, global health organisations.

  • Illustrated by Naomi Gennery

    Naomi Gennery

    Naomi is a UK-based graphic designer and illustrator working at the intersection of creativity and social impact. Her work is colourful, playful, and often rooted in collage, crafts, and DIY culture. Exploring themes of culture, identity, and social change, she hopes people see their own thoughts, ideas, or experiences reflected in her work. Combining design and illustration, Naomi aims to make big ideas feel more approachable and human.

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