What is the Prison Abolition Movement?

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The prison-abolition movement is a collection of people and groups who, in many different ways, are calling for deep, structural reforms to how the government and the general public handle, and think about crime in the United States. Abolitionists believe that incarceration, in any form, harms society more than it helps. 

As abolitionists argue, prisons are obsolete because they exacerbate societal harms instead of fixing them. The “movement” thus operates with affinity groups and various NGOs working in prisoner support, prisoner advocacy, political advocacy, or community education.

The History

The prison abolition movement began in the 1980's after the War on Drugs, when leaders of the movement argued that too many non-violent offenders were being sent to prison. Prison abolition has decades of antecedents, led by political activist figures like Angela Davis, championing the case of black prisoners in the 1960s, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a prominent abolitionist and prison scholar. More recently, the abolition movement has been embraced by younger Americans who grew up amongst the peak in violent crimes, and has helped kindle some fundamental rethinking in the mainstream.

Abolitionists argue that criminality in states like the US is inherently anti-black, anti-queer, or anti-people of color, and was constructed to serve the white power structure. American violence as always been “legal”, from indegenious genocide, to slavery, to Vietnam, to school shootings, to daily police executions. The American state holds a monopoly on violence.

The Opinions

The three pillars of abolitionism—or the “Attrition Model” as the Prison Research Education Action Project calls it in their “Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists”—are: moratorium, decarceration, and excarceration.

Prison Abolishment isn’t just about closing prisons. It’s a liberal theory about bringing development through social change; it aims to reshape our society as a whole. On a global scale, states are not doing nearly enough to address the root causes of poverty, addiction, homelessness, and mental-health crises, abolitionists highlight, and criminalizing poverty through debt regulation; criminalizing addiction through drug laws; criminalizing homelessness by conducting sweeps of people sleeping in parks; and criminalizing mental illness by turning prisons into de facto psychiatric hospitals is all treating the symptom instead of the disease. 

The main concern arises amongst those acts of extreme violence, the question of considering what to do with people who have committed rape or murder. How can truly harmful transgressions be handled without prisons? According to abolitionists, the solution may be a process called restorative justice. 

Through restorative justice, offenders are expected to fully account for their behaviors in dialogue with the individual and communities affected by their actions. They must then work with those parties to develop actions to try to repair the damage done as much as possible.” The process is restorative because the goal is to restore the victim, their community, and the offender, to how they were before the transgression occurred.

In contrast to this, the Conservative right argues for a complete transformation of prison regimes. From their perspective, ignoring reality and arguing for the total abolition of prison is a utopian goal that undermines the credibility of sovereign reformations. This is one of the key differences between reform and abolitionism: The former deals with managing the pain, and the latter with addressing the deep rooted source of the pain.

The Conclusion

Abolitionists, therefore, share a vision, as opposed to a belief, a future in which fundamental needs like housing, education, and health care are addressed, allowing people to live safe and fulfilled lives—without the need for prisons.

While prison, in its theoretical roots, was intended as a civilized alternative to brutality or execution, it has become a defined feature of contemporary politics, one that is not recognized for its morality, even by its advocates and administrators. Just in the United States, there are now more than two million incarcerated people, a majority of them black or brown, virtually all of them from poor communities. As abolitionists believe, prisons not only have violated human rights and failed at rehabilitation; it’s not even clear that prisons deter crime or increase public safety.

Therefore the philosophy of abolitionism is about much more than prisons themselves. It's about resolving social tensions, acknowledging why people turn to police, and attempting to break states’ self-perpetuating cycle of violence and imprisonment. 

Although this goal sounds idealistic, tearing down prisons and restructuring society can be hard as the idea of incarceration is deeply embedded in today’s political landscape. With states such as the Netherlands shutting down prisons and highlighting the effectiveness of alternative sentencing, the abolition of prisons is a movement of radical optimism and societal reconstruction.