Prison abolition movement in the United States
The prison abolition movement is a network of groups and activists that seek to reduce or eliminate prisons and the prison system, and replace them with systems of rehabilitation and education that do not focus on punishment and government institutionalization. The prison abolitionist movement is distinct from conventional prison reform, which is intended to improve conditions inside prisons.
Supporters of prison abolitionism are a diverse group with differing ideas as to exactly how prisons should be abolished, and what, if anything, should replace them. Some supporters of decarceration and prison abolition also work to end solitary confinement, the death penalty, and the construction of new prisons through non-reformist reforms. Others support books-to-prisoner projects and defend prisoners' right to access information and library services. Some organizations, such as the Anarchist Black Cross, seek the total abolishment of the prison system without any intention to replace it with other government-controlled systems.
Definition
Scholar Dorothy Roberts takes the prison abolition movement in the United States to endorse three basic theses:- "oday’s carceral punishment system can be traced back to slavery and the racial capitalist regime it relied on and sustained."
- "he expanding criminal punishment system functions to oppress black people and other politically marginalized groups in order to maintain a racial capitalist regime."
- "e can imagine and build a more humane and democratic society that no longer relies on caging people to meet human needs and solve social problems."
Legal scholar Allegra McLeod notes that prison abolition is not merely a negative project of "opening … prison doors", but rather "may be understood instead as a gradual project of decarceration, in which radically different legal and institutional regulatory forms supplant criminal law enforcement." Prison abolition, in McLeod's view, involves a positive agenda that reimagines how societies might deal with social problems in the absence of prisons, using techniques such as decriminalization and improved welfare provision.
Like Roberts, McLeod sees the contemporary theory of prison abolition as linked to theories regarding the abolition of slavery. McLeod notes that W. E. B. Du Bois—particularly in his Black Reconstruction in America—saw abolitionism not only as a movement to end the legal institution of property in human beings, but also as a means of bringing about a "different future" wherein former slaves could enjoy full participation in society. Similarly, on McLeod's view, prison abolition implies broad changes to social institutions: "n abolitionist framework", she writes, "requires positive forms of social integration and collective security that are not organized around criminal law enforcement, confinement, criminal surveillance, punitive policing, or punishment."
The abolition of prisons is not only about the closure of prisons. Abolitionist views is also a way to counter the hegemonic discourse, and gives an alternative ways of thinking. It is a way to reconceptualize basic notions like crime, innocence, punishment etc.
Historical development
Anarchism and prison abolition
Many anarchist organizations believe that the best form of justice arises naturally out of social contracts, restorative justice, or transformative justice.Anarchist opposition to incarceration can be found in articles written as early as 1851, and is elucidated by major anarchist thinkers such as Proudhon, Bakunin, Berkman, Goldman, Malatesta, Bonanno, and Kropotkin.
Personal experiences in prison because of revolutionary activity prompted many anarchists who were “deeply affected by their experiences” to publish their criticisms. In 1886, the trial of eight anarchists following the Haymarket riots brought state repression to public attention. Lucy Parsons, an anarchist and wife of one of the Haymarket eight, embarked on a speaking tour through 17 different states speaking to a total of almost 200,000 people. A single rally in Havana, Cuba, to support the families of the eight accused anarchists raised nearly $1000. Speaking at his trial, in a widely disseminated speech, one of the co-accused, August Spies, stated:
It is not likely that the honorable Bonfield and Grinnell can conceive of a social order not held intact by the policeman's club and pistol, nor of a free society without prisons, gallows, and State's attorneys. In such a society they probably fail to find a place for themselves. And is this the reason why Anarchism is such a "pernicious and damnable doctrine?"The Anarchist Red Cross, a prisoner support group and the precursor to the Anarchist Black Cross, was founded roughly in 1906. By that year, groups existed in Kiev, Odessa, Bialystok, and trials of its members, led to its spread across Europe and North America. A 2018 guide to starting an Anarchist Black Cross group states that "we need to destroy all the prisons, and free all the prisoners. Our position is an abolitionist stance against the state and it’s prisons."
In 1917, the Anarchist Red Cross would disband and members joined the revolution in Russia. Following the February revolution, political prisoners were released from Russian jails, in a massive wave of amnesties. The Anarchist Red Cross reorganised in 1919 as the Anarchist Black Cross, with some members joining the anarchist insurgent, Nestor Makhno.
Makhno, a Ukrainian anarchist who was freed in 1917 from a life sentence in prison, organised a revolutionary insurgent army along anarchist principles that would come to control a territory of seven-and-a-half million people. Upon taking control of a town, Makhnovists would destroy “all remnants and symbols of slavery: prisons, police and gendarmerie posts were blown up with dynamite or put to the torch.” Prisoners in battle who were not officers were typically welcomed into the ranks of Makhnovists or freed. The Makhnovist revolutionary insurgent army adopted a declaration in 1919, stating
we are against all rigid judicial and police machinery, against any legislative code prescribed once and for all time, for these involve gross violations of genuine justice and of the real protections of the population. These ought not to be organized but should be instead the living, free and creative act of the community. Which is why all obsolete forms of justice—court administration, revolutionary tribunals, repressive laws, police or militia, Cheka, prisons and all other sterile and useless anachronisms—must disappear of themselves or be abolished from the very first breath of the free life, right from the very first steps of the free and living organization of society and the economy.The Anarchist Black Cross was reconstituted in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and Anarchist Revolution. The pressure from the number of anarchist prisoners in need of aid led to the closing of “most of the chapters in the United States and Europe.” Alternative groups, such as the Alexander Berkman Aid Fund and the Society to Aid Anarchist Prisoners in Russia would take their place. Another resurgence was felt in 1967, and, again, in 1979 owing to the efforts of Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, whose writings on prison and anarchism are credited as having spread and been foundational to Black anarchism.
Anarchists agitation against prisons in Canada has included Bulldozer, an anti-prison anarchist project founded in Toronto in 1980. Bulldozer was closed after being raided and charged with sedition. The End the Prison Industrial Complex was formed in 2009, and Anarchist Black Cross projects emerged throughout the 2000s. Anarchists and abolitionists within Québec organise yearly noise demonstrations outside of prison facilities on New Year's Eve. A campaign to stop the construction of a migrant prison involved anarchists unloading thousands of crickets into the offices of an architectural firm in 2018.
Campaigns to free anarchist prisoners have served as the basis for calling for freedom for all prisoners. June 11, 2011, international solidarity actions for anarchist prisoners Marie Mason and Eric McDavid triggered the start of an international day and week of solidarity with all anarchist prisoners in 2015. 2022's week of solidarity included actions in Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Uruguay, Greece, the UK, and other countries. The 2022-2023 hunger strike of anarchist prisoner Alfredo Cospito led to police skirmishes with protesters in Rome, a Turin cell tower being lit on fire, and a letter with bullets was sent to a newspaper stating "if Alfredo Cospito dies judges will all be targets, two months without food, burn down the prisons." International actions to free Cospito, included the burning of a Strabag excavator in Germany. The Italian placed their embassies on "alert" in response to mobilizations.
The Rojavan Revolution, which many have considered illustrative of, and rooted in, anarchist theory, involved the mass liquidation of prisons and freeing of political prisoners and nonviolent offenders. Neighbourhood based "peace committees," composed of elected community members with, largely, no formal legal education, were created to resolve conflicts using a model of consensus and restorative justice.
Prison abolition and the New Left
traces the roots of contemporary prison abolition theory at least to Thomas Mathiesen's 1974 book The Politics of Abolition, which had been published in the wake of the Attica Prison uprising and unrest in European prisons around the same time. She also cites activist Fay Honey Knopp's 1976 work Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists as significant in the movement.Eduardo Bautista Duran and Jonathan Simon point out that George Jackson's 1970 text Soledad Brother drew global attention to the conditions of prisons in the United States and made prison abolition a tenet of the New Left.
Liz Samuels has observed that, following the Attica Prison uprising, activists began to coalesce around a vision of abolition, whereas previously they had endorsed a program of reform.