Prison Abolition

Prisons, jails, and detention facilities, by definition, are designed to isolate and separate people from their communities. To challenge and upend carcerality requires not just dismantlement, but radical revisioning, a building – of flourishing, free and caring communities. Collectively developed responses and resources for people and ecosystems, led by those with lived experience of oppression, are the foundation for a world without prisons.

Delving behind Canada’s veneer of multiculturalism and tolerance, Policing Black Lives traces the violent realities of anti-blackness from the slave ships to prisons, classrooms and beyond. Robyn Maynard provides readers with the first comprehensive account of nearly four hundred years of state-sanctioned surveillance, criminalization and punishment of Black lives in Canada.

While highlighting the ubiquity of Black resistance, Policing Black Lives traces the still-living legacy of slavery across multiple institutions, shedding light on the state’s role in perpetuating contemporary Black poverty and unemployment, racial profiling, law enforcement violence, incarceration, immigration detention, deportation, exploitative migrant labour practices, disproportionate child removal and low graduation rates.

Emerging from a critical race feminist framework that insists that all Black lives matter, Maynard’s intersectional approach to anti-Black racism addresses the unique and understudied impacts of state violence as it is experienced by Black women, Black people with disabilities, as well as queer, trans, and undocumented Black communities.

A call-to-action, Policing Black Lives urges readers to work toward dismantling structures of racial domination and re-imagining a more just society.

Penal abolitionism is a radical style of thinking which acknowledges that there are many different ways of interpreting and understanding problematic behaviours, troubles and human conflicts and that when it comes to prison sentences it is often more about the person who breaks the law than the illegality that has been perpetrated. Penal abolitionists question the very assumptions of the criminal law and argue that rather than providing a solution, the criminal law is much more likely to create new social problems.

Informed by decolonial feminism, this article explores a transformative justice approach to relationship violence and campus sexual assault in the aftermath of the Larry Nassar case at Michigan State University. The article considers how the emphasis on liability and Title IX compliance as the only response available for dealing with gender-based violence within university settings can function to silence survivors, particularly survivors of color and queer, gender nonbinary, and trans survivors, while also denying them precious access to resources for healing. In so doing, the author raises key questions that help illustrate the difference between current approaches that mimic a criminal justice system response, that fails to support a broad range of survivors, and a transformative justice approach that is attentive to the intergenerational impact of settler-colonial histories, ongoing state-sanctioned violence, and the coloniality and racialization of gender.

This essay argues that field analyses of social movements can be improved by incorporating more insights from Pierre Bourdieu. In particular, Bourdieu’s concepts of logic, symbolic capital, illusio, and doxa can enrich social movement scholarship by enabling scholars to identify new objects of study, connect organizational- and individual-level effects, and shed new light on a variety of familiar features of social movements. I demonstrate this claim by delineating the contours of one such field, the “social justice field” (SJF). I argue that the SJF is a delimited, trans-movement arena of contentious politics united by the logic of the pursuit of radical social justice. Drawing upon existing scholarship, as well as my own research on the prison abolition movement, I argue that the competitive demands of the field produce characteristic effects on organizations and individual activists within the field. I conclude by considering how a Bourdieuian approach can provide fresh insights into familiar problematics within the social movements literature.

This tells the story of prison abolition in New Zealand (Aotearoa) and considers whether the country is emerging from a dark punitive era. First by setting the scene in regard to penal populism and its influence on high numbers of incarcerated people, especially those of Maori and Pacific decent. Then moving on to provide a historical overview of abolitionist perspectives that have influenced todays activists. This will include extensive consideration of Moana Jacksons work as well as that of People Against Prison Aotearoa (PAPA) and JustSpeak. Finally, consideration is given to the possibility of abolitionists’ goals flourishing in the recent move towards reform in Aotearoa.

ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies

Vol 14, No 4 (2015)

Table of Contents

Themed Section:
The Sexual Politics of Austerity

Introduction: The Sexual Politics of Austerity
Cesare Di Feliciantonio, Gavin Brown
http://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1259/1109


Marriage and the Spare Bedroom: Exploring the Sexual Politics of Austerity
Gavin Brown
http://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1098/1121


Low Income LGBTGNC (Gender Nonconforming) Struggles Over Shelters As Public Space
Michelle Billies
http://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1125/1123


The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism and Austerity in an ′Exceptional′ Country: Italy
Cesare Di Feliciantonio
http://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1104/1122


Queer Responses to Austerity: Insights from the Greece of Crisis
Konstantinos Eleftheriadis
http://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1159/1128



Themed Section:
Geographies of Capital Punishment in the United States: The Execution of Troy Davis

Introduction: Geographies of Capital Punishment in the United States - The Execution of Troy Davis.
Joshua F Inwood
http://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1082/1129


If I am Troy Davis, I Failed Troy Davis: Abolishing the Death Penalty through an Antiracist People’s Geography
Nik Heynen
http://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1084/1130

Bare Life, Dead Labor, and Capital(ist) Punishment
James Andrew Tyner, Alex Colucci
http://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1155/1131


Life and Death in the Racial State: Collateral Consequences and the Execution of Troy Davis.
Joshua F Inwood, Melanie Barron
http://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1083/1133


Justice versus justice: Geographies of the Death Penalty and Place-Based Activism in the Troy Davis Case
Audrey Kobayashi
http://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1072/1135



Research

Reframing urban controlled spaces: Community gardens in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv-Jaffa
Efrat Eizenberg, Tovi Fenster
http://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1161/1136


Latin America’s Large-Scale Urban Challenges: Development Failures and Public Service Inequalities in Lima, Peru
Antonio Ioris
http://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1189/1138


Palestinian, Arab, American, Muslim: “Looping Effects” of Categories and Meaning
Anna Mansson McGinty
http://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1156/1139


With the Current, Against the Wind: Constructing Spatial Activism and Radical Politics in the Tel-Aviv Gay Center
Chen Misgav
http://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1160/1140


For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University
Alison Mountz, Anne Bonds, Becky Mansfield, Jenna Loyd, Jennifer Hyndman, Margaret Walton-Roberts, Ranu Basu, Risa Whitson, Roberta Hawkins, Trina Hamilton, Winifred Curran
http://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1058/1141


Making Space for Critical Pedagogy in the Neoliberal University: Struggles and Possibilities
The University of Kentucky Critical Pedagogy Working Group, Carrie Mott, Sandra Zupan, Anne-Marie Debbane, R. L.*
http://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1296/1143


Inner-Suburban Neighbourhoods, Activist Research, and the Social Space of the Commercial Street
Heather McLean, Katharine Rankin, Kuni Kamizaki
http://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1295/1144


„Naturgesetze der Kultur“: Die Wiener Geographen und die Ursprünge der „Volks- und Kulturbodentheorie“
Norman Henniges
http://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1076/1146

On February 8, 1971, Michel Foucault announced the formation of Le Groupe d’information sur les prisons (the Prisons Information Group [GIP]), a group of activist intellectuals who worked to amplify the voices of those with firsthand knowledge of the prison—reflected in their motto, “Speech to the detainees!” In highlighting and circulating subjugated knowledges from within prisons, the GIP not only pursued political and material interventions, but also called for epistemological and methodological shift within intellectual labor about prisons. This essay turns to the work of the GIP, and philosophical reflection on that work, as a resource for contemporary theological methodology. Counter to the optimistic and positive trend in theological turn to practices, this essay draws on Foucault’s work with and reflection on the GIP to argue for a negative theology of practice, which centers on practice (those concrete narratives found in any lived theological context) while, at the same ti...

To speak the ‘language of state violence’ is for penal abolitionists to insist that irrespective of the conditions, architecture, or general resources available, the prison will always be a place that systematically generates suffering, harm and death.  Understanding prisons as a modus operandi of state violence may help abolitionists gain political momentum, for it leads to focus on both ‘institutional’ and ‘structural’ violence.  Ultimately Speaking the language of state violence provides a name for penal abolitionists to mobilise around and makes connections between the prison and social inequities.

Dieser Artikel will einige von der Tradition der Strafrechtskritik ausgehenden Impulse wieder aufnehmen. Dafür sollen im ersten Teil die zentralen Argumente für eine Abschaffung des Strafrechts in Erinnerung gerufen und mögliche Alternativen angedeutet werden. Im zweiten Teil will ich hieraus Konsequenzen für die internationale Ebene ziehen: Wenn staatliches Strafen schon im nationalen Rahmen nicht die gewünschten Effekte hat, warum sollte es dann im internationalen Maßstab funktionieren? Andere Perspektiven könnte die Forderung nach Einrichtung eines Internationalen Zivilgerichtshofes eröffnen, wie sie von einigen NGOs erhoben wird.

This paper argues that debates regarding legal protections to preserve the privacy of data subjects, such as those involving the European Union's right to be forgotten, have tended to overlook group-level forms of epistemic asymmetry and their impact on members of historically oppressed groups. In response, I develop what I consider an abolitionist approach to issues of digital justice. I begin by exploring international debates regarding digital privacy and the right to be forgotten. Then, I turn to the long history of informational asymmetries impacting racialized populations in the United States. Such asymmetries, I argue, comprise epistemic injustices that are also implicated within the patterns of racialized incarceration in the United States. The final section brings together questions regarding the impact of such epistemic injustices on incarcerated peoples and focuses specifically on the public availability of criminal histories in online search databases as a fundamental issue within conversations regarding digital justice. I thus conclude by building from the work of contemporary abolitionist writers to argue that the underlying concerns of an individualized right to be forgotten should be transformed into a collective effort to undermine societal carceral imaginaries.

Last summer, the New York Times reported that the George Floyd Uprising was the largest set of protests in U.S. history. Data indicates that nearly 25 million people took part in protests across the country. For incoming students, perhaps no topic is as important as the national policing crisis. In this course we will examine the deep history of police institutions and the part they have played in political life. Our study of the politics of the police will be theoretical and historical, but also attuned to the ways that theory and history allow us to better understand current events. We will read classic texts, primary sources, academic articles, position papers, and government reports. This course will put current debates into context by exploring critical approaches to police reform and the role of social movements in building pressure for change and developing alternatives. After completing this course students will better understand the causes that contributed to the current policing crisis and will be able to defend their own perspectives on contemporary debates.

According to Statistics Canada, in 2016/2017 Indigenous peoples accounted for 28% of admissions to provincial/territorial prisons and 27% for federal prisons, while representing only 4.1% of the Canadian adult population. The majority of analyses drawn from these statistics continue to follow a similar line of interpretation. They begin by pointing out a pattern between the racial make-up of Canadian society and its prison population. Conclusions are then drawn between ‘over-representation’ and racialization in Canada’s prisons and tacit or overt condemnation of this system is offered. The predominant lack of acknowledgement or engagement, however, with the histories and contemporary relations of colonialism is not simply a matter of unintended ignorance or passive forgetfulness. These analyses reinforce dominant national narratives; (mis)represent Canadian governing practices and policies as fair and just embodiments of the democratic will of the people; and suspend the state’s culpability in creating and maintaining a criminal in-justice system that produces such an abhorrently racialized demographic. I counter these narratives by rooting my analysis of the Canadian prison system in its colonial legacy and ongoing settler-colonial project, which is undercut by a certain set of logics that require the obfuscation of Indigenous presence(s). This informs my contention that, contrary to popular belief, the prison system is in fact not broken, but continues to perform the exact function it was designed to perform in the first place: the ongoing dispossession of indigenous bodies and lands, as well as a suppression of their claims to sovereignty. Overall, I am to situate the state, rather than indigeneity, in its criminality, by showing how the universalism of Canada’s sovereign ideal is constituted by the particularism in the presumptions it makes about its Self, a Self that depends on an impossible singularity.

Antiprison activists have often turned the federal court system to reduce the violence of the carceral state. However, such reform attempts have too often had the unintended conse‑ quence of fortifying the penal system. In this article, I interrogate one such intervention—a federal court order that encompassed the Louisiana Department of Corrections from 1975 to 1998. I argue that while the lawsuit was declared a success in reforming Angola, the federal court's intervention buttressed and legitimated the growth of the Louisiana penal system. This paradox was produced through the limits of liberal reform ideology that failed to recognize the structural violence of incarceration. Rather, the federal courts located violence with prisoners instead of the punitive power of the state and racial capitalism. This framework not only led to an increase in punitive practices within Angola, it came to underpin penal expansion as the primary solution to cyclical overcrowding. In the summer of 2016, the New Orleans city jail was in the spotlight yet again. Just over 8 months after the opening of the shiny new " Orleans Justice Center " 1 the jail was already marred in a lawsuit filed by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and a number of incar‑ cerated people (Mustian 2016b). The lawsuit charged the Orleans Parish Sheriff Office (OPSO) with violating the constitutional rights of prisoners through significant misman‑ agement and routinized violence. Central to the plaintiffs' suit was a request for the jail to be taken out of the hands of Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin Gusman and placed under fed‑ eral receivership. This request while heralded by several local prison reform organizations was fiercely contested by not only Gusman and the powerful Louisiana Sheriffs' Associa‑ tion but also a number of local leaders who argued that placing the jail in federal receiver‑ ship would amount to the disenfranchisement of the voters of Orleans Parish that elected

Carceral spaces—such as neighborhood zones of police surveillance and plantation prisons that exploit incarcerated labor—reflect and reproduce systems of oppression that are also present in the food system. The state regularly polices poverty instead of addressing how racial capitalism perpetuates the lack of access to basic needs like healthy food. Conversely, the food system relies on carceral practices to secure sdisciplined labor by weaponizing the possibility of deportation and wielding the threat of violence to maintain control over racialized undocumented workers. But there are also seeds of struggle for the abolition of penal logics and institutions by incarcerated people and their allies on the outside. These include efforts to transform eating and food work in prison, reimagine food justice as an anti-carceral social movement, and use resistance tactics like hunger strikes. In this special issue introduction, we address these connections and set the stage for all the articles by asking: What does carcerality offer to theorizing and understanding the food system, food cultures, and food relations? And, what does a critical look at food offer toward understanding—and eventually abolishing—carceral systems? We offer theoretical touch points that connect food justice work to long-standing prison abolition organizing while introducing the major themes and contributions of each article included in the issue. We end with a reflection on our aspirations for the future of food studies.

A response to Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow's “Beyond Story: A Community-Based Manifesto,” this article provides a historical perspective on how the feminist assertion "the personal is political" shaped the valorization of "story" in radical documentary film practice in the 1970s and the subsequent development of neoliberal practices within the Non-Profit Industrial Complex that has served as the economic infrastructure for documentary film in the US for decades. This, I argue, is the context out of which documentary film begins to be dominated by the logic of the market that finds its chief expression in documentary films that focus on individuals and depict experience within "three-act" narrative structures. Conceptualizing documentary as a terrain of political and economic struggle -- the article supplements Juhasz and Lebow's aesthetic critique of "story" with an explicit call to connect the need to transform the infrastructures for film funding, production, and circulation with other calls and movements to dismantle and replace the structures of racial capitalism.

Reimagining Crisis Support: Matrix, Roadmap and Policy aims to shift the conversation about personal crisis from one based in mental health discourse to one based in a social model of disability and human rights.

The book's primary thesis is that crisis support can be reimagined as support for decision-making and maintaining an independent life in the community - as provided for under Articles 12 and 19 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.  Community-based, non-discriminatory conflict resolution and violence prevention are complementary to crisis support but are distinct as they involve more than one person's needs and interests at the same time.

The book explains its key premises and sets out some elements of decision-making support for personal crisis, then explores the Matrix of rights and implementation measures set out in the Convention that provide a scaffolding for a social, human rights-based approach to crisis support.

It then provides a Roadmap of aspirational transformations and strategies that are needed to create the conditions in which reimagined crisis support can be meaningfully realized.  These range from large-scale social justice aims such as Democratize Knowledge and Strengthen Communitarian Practices to Tools such as 'Pilot projects' and 'Evaluate existing support practices'.

A section on Policy addresses key issues for translating the model presented into national policy.  This should be read in conjunction with the chapter on Implementation: Legislative Reform that is included in the Matrix section.

This book is intended for diverse audiences from policymakers to grassroots activists.  It is grounded in both a US context (inevitably as the personal informs the political) and wider perspectives from global networking. 

ISBN 978-1-7377370-2-5
To order paperback or epub version see https://www.reimaginingcrisissupport.org

New York City’s Rikers jail complex is gripped by a crisis of legitimacy.
Following a series of investigations, it has been denounced as a major symbol of criminal justice dysfunction, with calls for its closure and replacement with new smaller “state of the art” jails. Yet, when it opened, Rikers was hailed as a “model” facility, at the cutting edge of prison design and prisoner rehabilitation. To elucidate the present situation, we provide a focus on the under-explored history of New York City’s penal institutions.

When a U.S. resident is arrested by immigration authorities, significant financial losses immediately begin to accumulate to themselves and to their immediate family. Drawing on a survey of 125 households in Pima County, AZ, this paper examines the scope of these financial losses; the strategies that household members deploy to absorb and manage these losses; and their downstream repercussions for those activities and infrastructures associated with everyday and generational household social reproduction. Attention to these issues foregrounds the collective dimensions of harm-e.g., how the destabilizing effects of arrest, detention and/or deportation are never experienced by any individual in isolation, but rather multiply across those persons and relationships of dependency, care and support to whom these individuals remain connected over time. Given the disproportionate concentration of U.S. immigration policing on communities of Latin American origin, these outcomes carry important implications for the articulation of everyday conditions of labor, inequality and accumulation under racial capitalism. At the same time, people respond to the disruption of relationships of home and family through new practices, relationships and institutions of mutual aid, solidarity and struggle. What results is movement: novel patterns of collective life that transform the very communities whose members the state is attempting to violently separate. By exploring this latter dynamic, the paper contributes to emerging literatures on carceral and abolition geographies, connecting everyday conditions of social reproduction and the production and circulation of value to a broader dialectic of community resistance against state violence and material dispossession.

The building of a new ‘super prison’ in Wrexham, North Wales has begun amidst a wider expansion of the penal industrial complex. Campaigns are mobilising nationally and locally against the project. This article examines the concerns surrounding what will become the United Kingdom’s largest prison and argues that its construction is a symptom of a wider ideological attack on marginalised groups while also examining the case against prison expansion.

This essay introduces a special issue of ACME focused on the "carceral-police continuum." We use this phrase to highlight three important concepts in policing and carceral geographies scholarship. The first is the imminence of coercive state power, and its uneven distribution. The second is the tangled and expansive web of relationships through which carceral logics and practices operate. The third are the ways attention to these conditions can contribute a conceptual framework to abolitionist praxis. After first offering some additional commentary on each of the problem areas identified above, we then describe how each of the papers collected here advances our understanding of these issues. We conclude by identifying several directions for continuing development, including a need for ongoing conceptual and methodological innovation that supports efforts toward collective forms of organizing, mitigation and redress directed at various forms of state violence, carceral power and their repercussions.