Criminology > Criminal Justice
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The prison abolition movements have reinvigorated debate on the left about the function of carceral estates in maintaining class and racial differences under late capitalism. In this chapter we argue that, viewed through a critical colonial lens, abolitionism is only meaningful if it engages with decolonizing, as well as abolitionist currents and impulses in the Global South. For Indigenous peoples, the carceral gulag has always been a ‘place of exception’ where penal and non-penal sites meshed together in the pursuit of colonial, rather than disciplinary, objectives. We maintain that prison in the contemporary colony should be viewed as part of an archipelago of camps existing to extinguish Indigenous sovereignty. We employ Agamben’s particular turn on the ‘camp’ – ‘the space that is opened up when the state of exception begins to become the rule’ (Agamben, 1998) to explore the ways in which its logic underpins settler colonial interventions across time and space to create dispossessed rather than simply ‘docile’ subjects in the Foucauldian sense.
The downturn of the influence of centralized media systems has led to a renewed resurgence in critical challenges to state power, including punitive power. Critical work on police and penal brutality as well as movements such as ‘defund the police’ are directly linked to the loss of power by the mass media. Counterhegemonic activism has rarely been as strong as it is today, and this strength brings institutional efforts to defend centralized meaning making. This chapter explores the labelling approach and social problems sociology, and the role of the media in them. While the classical labelling approach had conceptualized media as a tool to distribute social meaning, the decentralization of media has now become a target of major moral panics, hindering and denouncing activism and counterhegemonic strife.
This chapter introduces and contextualizes the rest of the book. It starts by introducing the concept of the abolitionist rhizome – that there are different roots of and routes to penal abolition. It then discusses the following 13 chapters in the four parts of the book. The first substantive section provides a discussion of the strategic importance of hearing the voices of people directly oppressed, introducing the first three substantive chapters (Chapters 2–4). It then considers the next four contributions in this volume, which highlight the development and diversity of penal abolitionist ideas (Chapters 5–8). Next, it reflects on the three chapters detailing the scope of oppression and abolitionist responses (Chapters 9–11) and then concludes with a consideration of the final three chapters of the book (Chapters 12–14), which are focused on the ongoing struggle for liberation and justice.
Why have so many radical thinkers advocated for the abolition of prisons and punishment? And why have their ideas been so difficult to popularise or garner the political will for change? This book outlines several different approaches to penal abolitionism and showcases their calls for the ending of legal coercion, domination, and repression.
This exciting and innovative edited collection shows how abolitionist ideas have continued topicality and relevance in the present day and how they can collectively help with devising new ways of thinking about social problems as well as suggesting alternatives to existing penal policies, practices and institutions.
This historical narrative outlines the development of not only Critical Resistance as a political movement, but also of Angela Davis as a scholarly activist who became an architect of contemporary abolition. This chapter offers a critique of Davis – noting the relative success of her campaigning and academic endeavours in the university and beyond, while not ignoring shortcomings and omissions embedded in contemporary abolition often led by academics and non-profits. This chapter charts a period which, as well as making enormous advances in progressivism, also created divisions and promoted well-funded narratives without publicly addressing contradictions that curtailed radical and diverse visions of abolition. The ideological diversity of the abolitionist movement reminds us of the necessity to work to address issues of class, ideology, funders’ influence, and political alignments that can divide or undermine and marginalize the critiques, analyses and narratives of non-elites and radicals who lack high profiles and popularity supported by liberal concepts. Participating in the wider fight for freedom from oppression remains a zone of contradictions as well as conflict and antagonism.
This chapter delves into Friedrich Nietzsche’s critical stance on punitive systems and his support for a therapeutic, nonpenal approach in addressing criminality. The author underscores Nietzsche’s disavowal of traditional moral and religious evaluations of criminal behaviour, advocating for the perception and treatment of offenders as individuals requiring medical intervention rather than punitive measures. Through comprehensive analysis of Nietzsche’s writings, the chapter illuminates his abolitionist perspectives, arguing for a therapeutic strategy toward criminal behaviour that prioritizes health and rehabilitation over retribution and guilt. It is rooted in Nietzsche’s extensive critique of Judeo-Christian morality and his envisioning of a new evaluative horizon, prioritizing the innocence of becoming and the advancement of health as fundamental elements.
Carceral and ecological harms go hand in hand. From the murder and brutalization of land defenders resisting extractivism globally (Global Witness, 2022), to the environmentally disastrous ‘boot print’ of contemporary police and military expansionism (Selwyn, 2022), to the greenwashing of new private mega-prison projects (Jewkes and Moran, 2015), to the traumatizing, sexual coercion of environmental activists by undercover police in the UK (Stephens-Griffin, 2020), it is vital that we understand struggles for ecological justice and liberation as deeply entwined with abolitionist causes. This chapter aims to do this by examining and reflecting upon the development of ‘abolition ecology’, an approach working to explore and resist racial capitalism and environmental racism as interlocking and mutually generative systems (Pulido, 2017; Heynen 2018). In so doing it examines the ‘Total Liberation’ perspective as a means of unifying diverse and disparate liberation movements under one coherent struggle for ecological and social justice. The chapter argues that in acknowledging and making visible the ecological dynamics of carcerality, we build the most solid foundations for emancipation in the future.
This chapter provides an overview of Foucault’s analysis of prisons and his arguments for prison abolitionism in Discipline and Punish. For instance, it explains Foucault’s arguments that prisons neither prevent crime nor make society safer, and that they are nevertheless functioning exactly as they are supposed to. It also provides an overview of the ways in which contemporary critical prison studies scholars have taken up Foucault’s canonical work and have expanded upon some of his central arguments. While Foucault made his arguments with respect to the oppressive class functions of the prison, contemporary scholars have analysed the ways in which the criminal punishment system furthers the political interests of racist, settler colonial, xenophobic, eugenic, ableist, homophobic and transphobic states. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the limitations of Foucault’s work for critical prison scholarship today.
This chapter examines the anarchist case for abolition by analysing Peter Kropotkin’s In Russian and French Prisons (1887), a well-known text that has escaped systematic study. Using themes of environment, culture and social relationships, I discuss his account, explain his scepticism about reform and explain why he concluded that the only sensible answer to the question ‘are prisons necessary?’ was ‘no’. The final section follows the two lines of Kropotkin’s abolitionist thesis in anarchist thought: the first ‘environmental’ strand focuses on the systemic injustices that incentivize wrongdoing and the second ‘ethical’ thread emphasizes the faultiness of the concept of crime. The argument is that the anarchist case for abolition rests on their interconnection.
