have failed and they will continue to fail as ‘more than a century of experience proves this beyond reasonable doubt’ ( Maher, 2021 , p 96). The lack of police reform together with the extent of police powers and police violence has impacted on growing calls inside and outside of academia for police abolitionism. This encompasses a campaign to disband, disempower and disarm the police ( McDowell and Fernandez, 2018) . The police abolition movement is a political movement that is mainly located in the US. However, due to police abuse of power in the UK, together with
Mathiesen’s local experiences and theory building in Norway are tied to contemporary international social movements. I would like to take this chance to reflect on the importance of his theories for researchers and activists working towards social justice and against structural and institutional violence. I will address how Mathiesen’s insights can be inspiring and guiding for new generations of abolitionist researchers and activists, and his theories’ relevance for central issues of contemporary penal abolition, transformative justice and police abolition, even though
time there, Mathiesen had been an active participant, member, contributor, and a key epistemological influence on the workings of the Group and in particular, its engagement with and development of abolitionist perspectives and the problem of imprisonment. Although Mathiesen’s earlier works such as The Defences of the Weak ( 1965 ), The Politics of Abolition ( 1974 ), Law, Society, and Political Action ( 1980 ), and Prison on Trial ( 1990 ), made significant contributions to knowledge on imprisonment and prison abolitionism, it is fair to say that texts
policies change when capitalist interests, such as the need for unemployed people to be incentivised to labour, do not. This is particularly pertinent in the case of the wage stop, the abolition of which was being discussed in the 1970s when unemployment was high compared to the 1950s and 1960s ( Hatton and Boyer, 2005 ). This article, therefore, explores the reasons why the wage stop was abolished at a time when maintaining labour discipline through financial work incentives was still a pertinent policy issue. To do this the author examined the content of 75 files
redistributive social policy ( Tomaney and Pike, 2020 ). In the following section, we explore what abolitionist praxis has to say about the limitations of statutory responses to harm, including the role of social workers, outlining where this literature presents opportunities to think about communities and harm reduction in ways that are less state-centric and more transformative. Abolition and social work In recent years, conversations have emerged, largely within the US, that apply an abolitionist lens to social work. The tradition of abolitionism questions the role of
, dismantle carceral systems and invest in community care and mutual aid ( Choosing Real Safety, 2021 ). Where the pandemic created more and exacerbated already existing carceral controls, it also amplified abolition politics that continue to be developed into new conversations internationally ( Afary and Al-Kateb, 2020 ; Moran, 2020 ). In this article, we consider how the pandemic has shone a spotlight on the perils of carcerality, with a specific focus on the prisons in the colonised lands now known as Canada and Australia. Having outlined the impacts of the pandemic
Policy and Politics vol 24 no 2 FULL STEAM AHEAD TO A WORKFARE STATE? Analysing the UK Employment Department's abolition Mortin Jones InJuly 1995 the British government announced that the Employment Department was to be abolished and its functions redistributed throughout Whitehall. This article analyses the reasons for this abolition, presenting an argument that is intended to act as a stimulus for further research and policy debate. The article argues that the Employment Department's demise must be seen as part and parcel of a continued restructuring in state
Introduction The history of the ‘child welfare’ system in the United States, as is true of the history of most government systems following the abolition of human chattel slavery, centred on maintaining and preserving the system of White supremacy upon which the US was founded. Since its earliest origins, the ‘child welfare’ system has been designed to maintain the superiority of White Americans while maintaining the oppression of Black Americans, first through intentional exclusion of Black families when services focused largely on poverty relief, and
Michael J. Coyle and David Scott (eds) (2024) The Routledge Handbook of Penal Abolition Routledge 504 pp Hardback: ISBN 9781138354098, £140.00 eBook: ISBN 9780429425035, £27.99 This new Routledge Handbook , edited by two of the world’s leading contemporary scholar-activists in abolitionist thought and praxis, could not be more timely. Bringing together 52 contributions from academics, activists and people entangled in the penal system across the globe, it connects abolitionist struggles against the prison industrial complex in its manifold
penal crisis lies not in the politics of liberal reform’ ( Sim, 2019 : 1) but within the praxis of abolition. In developing this argument for abolition, the article highlights the failure of the state to ensure the safety, protection and wellbeing of children, and the need to move beyond persistent liberal reform. The youth secure estate: key issues and concerns As Stern ( 1998 : 157) argued ‘prisons for children and young people are given a variety of names… the names are intended to show that these are not prisons, but places of good intent, where the previous
