Our growing Criminology list takes a critical stance and features boundary-pushing work with innovative, research-led publications.
A particular focus of the list are books that engage with our global social challenges, both on a local and international level. We aim to publish books in a wide range of formats that will have real impact and shape public discourse.
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.
This chapter aims to show how the writings of early socialist and anarchist thinkers can, and do, speak to present debates on abolitionism. It begins by situating socialist, anarchist and penal abolitionist praxis within historical context, detailing some well-known examples of anarchist and socialist-inspired penal abolitionism in the early 20th century. It then explores not only how ‘mainstream’, statist and democratic socialism has a mixed relationship with penal abolitionism, but also discusses the continuing significance of grassroots libertarian socialist and other penal abolitionist organizing today outside of the orbit of the state. The third section of the chapter explores the ‘libertarian socialist tradition’ by giving an overview of five key themes that are shared among anarchists, socialists and penal abolitionists: the critique of power; the critique of social and economic inequalities; the valorization of freedom; the importance of solidarity, mutual aid and cooperation; and a moral compass informed and evaluated by libertarian socialist ethics. Finally, it argues that socialists and anarchists working together is key to successfully challenging the penal rationale of the State in the future.
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 chapter explores Clarence Darrow’s major cases and his classic texts Crime and Criminals: An Address Delivered to the Prisoners in the Chicago County Jail and Crime: Its Cause and Treatment. Darrow had several experiences that transformed and propelled him to become a significant political force for social reform, working to abolish the death penalty and the prison system more generally. In particular, his move to Chicago and his encounter with John Altgeld (1847–1902) were consequential. Darrow was his protégé and then his successor, carrying the mantle of reform and calls for selective abolition. In Chicago, Darrow witnessed firsthand the injustices visited upon the poor and mentally ill as they became entrapped in the maw of the bloody system of policing and incarceration. Darrow lost only one capital case: his first. He spent the next five decades seeking to make the criminal justice system more humane and more restorative, and not about state-sanctioned incarceration and murder. This chapter concludes by exploring how the radical visions and pragmatic proposals of Altgeld and Darrow can provide inspiration for contemporary reformers and penal abolitionists.
This chapter investigates the deep theoretical and political justification behind the anarchist critiques of the criminal justice system and how they were shaped by Spanish libertarian thought in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. What is interesting for those engaging with the ideas and traditions of penal abolitionism, critical criminology or legal sociology is that aspects of anarchist abolitionist discourses were given in response to (or in continuous dialogue with) the strong discourses of positivist criminology and penology which constructed the anarchist as the enemy of evolution and progress. The chapter charts a journey through the philosophical-theoretical bases of criminological discourses and their configurations of the ‘anarchist problem’. It delves into prophylactic narratives to combat anarchism, while examining how these criminological discourses influenced the actual practices of the criminal justice system. Turning to the counterproposals, the chapter draws on libertarian media accounts to explore how criminal anthropology was received, discussed and contested, and how a distinct diagnosis of and solution to crime was proposed. It concludes by reflecting on how anarchist ideas and their encounter with criminological positivism informed the Spanish abolitionist tradition and its implications for abolitionist ideas and praxis in the present day.
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.
There is no easy dividing line between reform and abolition. The Howard League for Penal Reform was formed in 1921 from the merger of two bodies, the Howard Association, founded in 1866, and the Penal Reform League (PRL), founded in 1907. While the ideas of John Howard are still widely remembered and acknowledged, the Tolstoyan abolitionism that led to the foundation of the PRL and its principal inspiration and first chair, Arthur St John, is almost entirely forgotten. This chapter explores the writings of St John and his colleagues, and the networks of people and activities which they initiated. Characterized by idealism and often dismissed as utopian in aspiration, their actions were paradoxically pragmatic and collaborative, feeding not insignificantly into the Prison System Enquiry Committee of 1919 and ultimately to the publication of English Prisons Today. The biographical approach allows us to situate the analysis of penal systems within a set of larger ideas of social change concerning religious freedom, education, social norms, and social and economic justice, for example. Though Tolstoyan abolitionism is often closely intertwined with Quaker approaches or erased within Fabian narratives, it remains distinctive in its politics and vision.
