«Prison abolitionists are dismissed as utopians and idealists whose ideas are at best unrealistic and impracticable, and, at worst, mystifying and foolish. This is a measure of how difficult it is to envision a social order that does not rely on the threat of sequestering people in dreadful places designed to separate them from their communities and families. The prison is considered so «natural» that it is extremely hard to imagine life without it.»
Angela Davis, ‹Are Prisons Obsolete?›
The prison abolition movement is made up of a broad network of activists and scholars in favor of the total elimination of prisons from society. They seek to replace prisons with vital systems of rehabilitation, repair, and justice operating outside of the punishment paradigm.
At its core, abolitionist thought and praxis questions the tendency in the United States to attempt to resolve or redress instances of violence by means of more violence; to direct public resources to effects instead of root causes; to tacitly accept a system in which the annihilation of human potential through caging and confinement is passed off as a reasonable mode of rehabilitation. It hinges on the basic acknowledgement of prisons as fundamentally hyper-violent spaces in which freedoms and liberties are revoked, basic bodily and psychic safety is constantly and continually violated, and innumerable futures are destroyed. Incarceration, carceral power, the prison – all are constitutive of the myriad ways in which criminalized populations become objects of state-sanctioned civic and actual death. Since the 1970s, when the movement began in earnest, abolitionists have questioned the fundamental premises of punishment and carcerality in our society, mobilizing around the imagining of an alternative.
In 1911, Emma Goldman writes that «Society might with greater immunity abolish all prisons at once, than to hope for protection from these twentieth-century chambers of horrors.» In the twenty-first century, groups like Critical Resistance, the Prison Activist Resource Center (PARC), Black & Pink, and the Human Rights Coalition have lead struggles both to decrease the hold of carceral power on society and to unsettle our naturalized acceptance of punishment – the fallacy that prisons make us safer.
Abolitionism
Abolitionism is often misunderstood as an absolute or unconditional demand for the end of prisons. It does indeed contain such a demand, though the the movement is based equally on the active work of collectively conjuring and implementing alternatives. Abolition work has inaugurated both a model for praxis and a positive proposal for radical reform: a program of divestment from the prison industrial complex that is inextricable from a program of reinvestment in the social where punishment no longer has any currency. How might the focus on abolitionism as a negative absolute be re-tooled to acknowledge the other necessary side of the movement: ensuring that good education, jobs, housing, and healthcare are made available to all, so that all are capable of meeting the most basic requirements of productive and non-violent lives? Abolitionists answer: the work is as much about imagining the speculative absence of prisons as the speculative presence of new forms of social investment – of filling absences in the communities affected most by the evisceration of the welfare state and the continued vitality of structural racism.
«Moratorium. The immediate end to all prison and jail construction. Decarceration. To decrease the population currently behind bars. Excarceration. To keep as many people out of contact with the carceral system as possible & to free individuals and communities from carceral control»
«The three main goals of abolitionism.» As outlined in Quaker prison minister Fay Honey Knopp’s ‹Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists› (1976)
Statistical humanism & institutional dehumanization
News about the declining rates of violent crime in American cities abound. Ritualized statistic dumps encourage us to relativize our pessimism about the present and compare today’s crime statistics positively with those of an even more brutal past. Psychologist Stephen Pinker appeals to liberal-humanist reason to argue that the world is a far-less violent place today than it was, say, during pre-history, the Middle Ages, or the crack epidemic. In 1990, New York City had 2,245 homicides. In 2018, there were 289, a record low, and the NYPD credited this decline to its improved community engagement in problem boroughs, on the one hand, and the introduction to the force of advanced «de-escalation» techniques, on the other. The optimism of these claims, which attribute such statistical successes to the steady moral evolution of the human race (Pinker) and/or to advances in techniques of policing (the NYPD) conceal, what in the magazine n+1 journalist Chris Glazek calls «the most shameful lie in American life»: that the crime rate hasn’t fallen, but only shifted. Over the course of the last few decades, as the streets American cities have purportedly gotten much safer (for whom?), violence has been re-concentrated and amplified behind prison walls. An alternative statistic: before 2011, the federal government had never even attempted to estimate the number of rapes occurring annually in prisons, leading to a statistical void which necessarily distorts our ability to take the statistics for truth.
Reformism for whom?
Recent efforts to expose the moral catastrophe of our prison system have enjoyed considerable success. Both Michelle Alexander’s book, ‹The New Jim Crow› , and Ava DuVernay’s documentary film, «the 13th», for example, help elucidate the structural racism of our criminal justice system and gesture to many of its disturbing continuities with previous systems of mass racial oppression. Popular critiques of the mass imprisonment of non-violent drug offenders continue to circulate, prompting new discussions at the policy level about the moral necessity of criminal justice reform. (Kim Kardashian’s efforts on behalf of Alice Marie Johnson, which led to a widely-publicized meeting with the president about sentencing, are a case in point.)
Reformist policies such as the bipartisan «First Step Act», signed into law by President Trump late last year, have responded to the widespread acknowledgement of the hellish quality of prison life in this country, but access to the majority of benefits have been reserved to non-violent offenders. The notion of who constitutes a «violent» offender in this country has gone through a long and politically-charged process of semantic and legal transformation, gradually expanding to include criminal offenses in which no direct physical harm is caused, including possession of a firearm. Fewer than one-in-five prisoners are now incarcerated for non-violent offenses, a number that has been somewhat inflated in the popular imaginary following the mass successes of Alexander’s ‹The New Jim Crow›, which takes as its primary focus the calamitous effects of the war on drugs on sentencing law for non-violent drug offenders.
While no one should discount the important work being done by Alexander, who persuasively tracks the ingrained racial prejudices so essential to the form and function of our criminal justice system, several abolitionists have pointed to the ways in which this focus directs our empathy to the «relatively innocent» (Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s term) and away from the majority population incarcerated for violent crime. Abolitionists ask: what effect does the empathetic centering of the non-violent offender as the primary suffering subject have on our ability to expand our notion of radical reform to include violent offenders?
If not prisons, then what?
Many, including myself, see cause to celebrate in the rollout of prison reforms such as «First Step», which, along with the partial restoration of basic civic and human rights to incarcerated Americans, has effected a gradual decline in the total prison population. A drop in the total number of incarcerated, however, doesn’t necessarily mean that our society is any less organized around carceral power a recalcitrant logic of punishment. In last year’s brilliant ‹Carceral Capitalism›, Jackie Wang observes how reformist campaigns directed towards nonviolent offenders have sometimes effected an «increase in punitivity for «violent» convicts, as it has become expedient for politicians to increase the length of prison sentences for «violent» offenses to compensate for the shortening of sentences for nonviolent offences», which effectively means that «the reformist emphasis on nonviolent offenders can actually bolster the penal system».
Debates about abolitionism often hinge on the looming example of the so-called «worst of the worst», those violent offenders whose incarceration is tacitly approved of via forms of social consensus predicated on the assumed civilizational necessity of prisons. Instead of questioning the structural legitimacy of organized state violence, we debate the relative deservedness of certain individuals to be categorized as criminal actors, and thus to receive punishment. Our collective imaginary is suffused with tragic-heroic stories of the unjustly accused and imprisoned, dramatis personae that shift debates about the rule to the cataloging of exceptions. We become squeamish about the means while eliding the more difficult, and ever-increasingly urgent conversation, about the primary end: the moral imperative to abolish prisons.
«The prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers. This is the ideological work that the prison performs – it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.»