Abolition is the political framework that demands the elimination — not the reform — of carceral and punitive institutions: prisons, police, immigration detention, the death penalty, and the broader apparatus of criminalization. Abolition holds that these institutions do not fail when they produce harm; they succeed. They function as designed: to manage populations rendered surplus or threatening by the political economy of racial capitalism through containment, punishment, and premature death.
The genealogy runs from the abolition of chattel slavery through the recognition that slavery was not abolished but restructured. The Thirteenth Amendment’s exception clause (“except as a punishment for crime”) enabled the convict lease system, chain gangs, and the contemporary prison-industrial complex. Angela Davis, in Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), argued that the prison is a continuation of the plantation: a racial institution that extracts labor, controls movement, and destroys social bonds along lines of race and class. Ruth Wilson Gilmore grounded this analysis materially, showing in Golden Gulag (2007) how California’s prison expansion emerged from specific surpluses — of land, labor, capital, and state capacity — organized through the racial geography of organized abandonment. Mariame Kaba insists that abolition is not a position on what should be destroyed but a practice of building what should exist: the social relations — care, accountability, material security — that make punishment unnecessary.
Abolition is therefore not only against prisons. It is a demand for the conditions under which carceral institutions lose their function: housing, healthcare, education, food sovereignty, conflict resolution grounded in mutual aid rather than punishment. This connects it to prefigurative politics: abolition must be practiced in the present, through the creation of non-carceral responses to harm, rather than deferred to a future moment of institutional reform.
Related terms
- Ruth Wilson Gilmore — key theorist of abolition geography
- Organized abandonment — the condition abolition responds to
- Racial capitalism — the system that produces the need for carceral management
- Mutual aid — the practice of meeting needs without institutions of punishment
- Prefigurative politics — building abolitionist relations in the present
- Settler colonialism — the structure that carceral institutions maintain