SDG 9 aims to build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation. Browse books and journal articles relating to this SDG below and find out more on the UN Sustainable Development Goals website.
Goal 9: Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure
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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.
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.
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.
Jean-Marie Guyau (1854–1888) remains a forgotten figure in the history of legal thought. This chapter seeks to remedy this by proposing a reading of his seminal ‘Critique of the idea of sanction’ (1883), later published in his Sketch of Morality Independent of Obligation or Sanction (1885), revealing a pioneering contribution to the discussion of penal abolition. First, it shows how Guyau deconstructs the assumption that the moral merit of the will should entail happiness and pleasure, and its demerit pain and suffering. For Guyau, the tangible realm of the senses cannot be made accountable for the deliberations of the will. Thus, punishment should be considered to be both contradictory and immoral, never reaching its target while increasing the sum of evil in the world.
Second, this chapter shows how Guyau proposes an ethics based on secularised ideas of universal charity and grace, which undermine the normative foundations of punishment. It then goes on to show how Guyau’s position remains ambiguous: although founding an abolitionist ethics, he seeks to affirm the most progressive reformist position possible within the current development of society. The achievement of this social ‘evolution’ would be the elimination of prisons and a gradual disappearance of punishment.
Eugene V. Debs, five-times Socialist Party candidate for US president, internationally known labour union leader, advocate for prison abolition and reform, women’s suffragist and all-around radical is considered as influential a thinker as W.E.B. DuBois, as much an activist as Mother Jones and as charismatic a speaker as Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. His influence cannot be understated, yet his legacy is largely forgotten in the US. This chapter explores Debs’ contributions to American radicalism with a particular emphasis on prison reform. It interrogates the reasons behind his invisibility relative to his significance, arguing that the American popular imagination fails to embrace a structural, economically driven understanding of US history, given the predominance of the capitalist paradigm. As difficult as it is to confront racism in the US, it is even more difficult for Americans to reconcile the country’s economic inconsistencies. The ‘American Dream’ suggests that the US offers its citizens economic mobility, yet the existence of its permanent underclass reveals hard-and-fast, structurally based inequality. Debs’ prison writings highlight the confluence of racial and class-based structural inequality and provide a little-known window into 19th and early 20th-century radicalism more akin to that of Angela Davis over a century later.
The chapter discusses Tolstoy’s version of radical abolitionism. According to Tolstoy, the divinely ordained equality of human beings meant that no form of coercion could ever be legitimate, even, or rather especially, if is it based on law and legal procedures. Robbers and murderers acting at their own risk understanding that their acts are vile are more likely to repent and deserve more compassion than executioners or judges who send people to the gallows protected by the law and the repressive apparatus of the state. This chapter discusses Tolstoy’s personal experience of dealing with state violence, his theory of violence and his attitude to penal institution and penal abolition as revealed in his last major novel, The Resurrection.
Edward Carpenter’s penological views were most coherently expressed in his damning indictment of the modern prison system of his day. In Prisons, Police and Punishment (1905), Carpenter condemned the archaic laws and penal system of Britain. His criticism of them were threefold: they corrupted individuals and caused them to commit crimes; they were systematically directed against the welfare of the working classes, and they were preventing society as a whole from reaching its humanitarian ideal. However, unlike a number of his contemporaries within Britain’s utopian socialist and anarchist circles, Carpenter did not see absolute abolition as a reasonable action. His utopian ideals led him to think that the total eradication of the legal system may be possible when the Common Life had emerged, but Carpenter – for all his humanitarianism and moral philosophy – held a place for prisons in society, even capital punishment. I argue that Carpenter’s penological thought fits into the frame of ‘contingent abolitionism’ and advocates for a transitional penology with a ‘politics of bad conscience’ where imprisonment or punishment is the last resort, and must go hand in hand with radical sociopolitical transformation following a libertarian socialist ideal.
William Godwin, author, radical philosopher and proto-anarchist, was one of the most famous political theorists in Britain in the late 18th century. His political works and novels from the 1790s offer a profound critique of the kinds of punitive and reformative justice models that were emerging during this period. Godwin repeatedly claims that criminals are not born but made: he dissects the institution of the prison and the legitimacy of punishment from what would today be considered a penal abolitionist perspective. His support for a form of community-based justice, which seeks to repair harm done to victim and instil accountability in the offender, pre-dates yet aligns with contemporary models of restorative justice. However, the political philosopher’s pioneering ideas have been largely absent from any critical discussion of the history of these related movements. This chapter demonstrates how Godwin’s bold theories about the origins of crime and the use of punishment correspond with the principles of the present-day penal abolitionist and restorative movements. It suggests that understanding the precise nature of his prophetic ideas can, in turn, inform and strengthen contemporary discourse and practices.
Emma Goldman’s experiences with the criminal justice system were deeply problematic, from watching Russian police harass marginalized groups of citizens, to witnessing the unjust verdicts handed down in the Haymarket affair, to experiencing and observing US police harassment of everyone from free speech advocates to union organizers, to spending time in a US federal penitentiary; it is not surprising that she became a prison abolitionist. While she was considered a dangerous anarchist, she thought the real danger came from overzealous states that would stop at virtually nothing to enforce obedience and conformity to the law. She deemed prisons ‘a social crime and failure’ that were incapable of meaningful reform. This chapter examines both what Goldman’s own experiences in prison revealed to her about incarceration and about the carceral state, and the difference between calling prisons a ‘social crime’ and labelling them a ‘failure’. I argue that Goldman was not ‘ahead of her time’, in championing prison abolition, but that, instead, her critique of them was very much based on the prison realities of her time, which are, for the most part, still our realities. I leave the reader with a distinctly anarchist understanding of why prisons must be eliminated, and why they can be.
