Prison Abolition

Prison abolition is an organizational framework and political analysis aimed at eliminating the use of imprisonment, policing, and techniques of surveillance as a means for solving social, economic, and political problems. While some may dismiss the notion of a world without prisons as a utopian and even dangerous vision, abolitionists insist through rigorous historical scholarship and political analysis that the prison itself exists only by way of its historical contingencies and that the abolition of slavery was once subjected to the same dismissals.

Guided by an intent to reorient discussions of crime and crime control outside the dominant paradigms of criminal justice policy and discourse, prison abolition aims to demystify and subvert the underlying assumptions and myths that produce and sustain both criminalization and the common ...