Abolition
Abolition
Abolition argues that the carceral state — prisons, police, courts as instruments of punishment, the surveillance apparatus that feeds them — cannot be reformed into justice. The system does what it was built to do: manage populations rendered surplus by racial capitalism, contain the consequences of social abandonment, and maintain a social order organized around property and racial hierarchy. Reform adjusts the mechanism. Abolition dismantles it and builds alternatives.
The tradition draws on the Black radical tradition’s analysis of the prison as a continuation of slavery and Jim Crow, on Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), on Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s geographic analysis of how prisons absorb surplus labor, surplus land, surplus capital, and surplus state capacity in Golden Gulag (2007), and on Mariame Kaba’s insistence that abolition is not absence but presence — the building of the social infrastructure that makes caging people unnecessary.
Abolition is not a utopian endpoint. It is a practice: each act that meets a need without recourse to punishment is abolitionist. Each structure that provides safety without surveillance is abolitionist. The question is not “what do we do with the dangerous people?” but “what conditions produce danger, and how do we change those conditions?”