Abolitionist disaster response is a current within emergent disaster response that asks how people survive crisis without prisons, policing, and other coercive institutions, and how imprisoned people survive crises that those institutions routinely intensify [@climatejusticeprison2018; @madrabout2025].
Climate disaster and incarceration
Bring Climate Justice to Prison Abolition makes the connection
explicit by describing imprisoned people as exposed to chronic abuse by
extreme heat, cold, flooding, and other climate-related harms
[@climatejusticeprison2018]. This matters because disaster vulnerability
is not evenly distributed. Carceral institutions actively produce and
concentrate it.
Liberatory disaster relief
MADR’s About page describes its work as part of a liberatory disaster
response tradition that has included advocating for incarcerated
prisoners during disasters [@madrabout2025]. This makes abolition more
than a parallel politics. It becomes one site where emergent disaster
response decides whether it will reproduce or resist carceral power.
Mutual aid against coercive institutions
The guiding principles frame disaster as inseparable from capitalist, racist, colonialist, and patriarchal society [@madrprinciples2020]. In that frame, abolitionist disaster response is not only about prison conditions. It is about refusing the wider institutions of coercion that shape who is abandoned, who is caged, and whose survival is treated as disposable.
Significance
This current matters because it sharpens the political stakes of disaster response. If disaster work is organized as collective liberation, then it has to confront the institutions that magnify danger for caged and criminalized people instead of treating them as outside its scope.