Abolition on emsenn.net

Abolition and Incarcerated Survival in Emergent Disaster Response

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Abolitionist Disaster Response

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Abolitionist disaster response is a current of disaster response that links survival in crisis to struggles against prisons, policing, cages, and other coercive institutions [@climatejusticeprison2018; @madrabout2025; @madrprinciples2020].

Within emergent disaster response, the term matters because disasters do not suspend carceral violence. They often intensify it. Mutual Aid Disaster Relief has explicitly tied climate justice to prison abolition, advocated for incarcerated prisoners during disasters, and framed liberatory disaster response as part of wider struggles against systems of domination [@climatejusticeprison2018; @madrabout2025].

Abolition

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.