Penal abolition and the state: colonial, racial and gender violences

The present issue of Contemporary Justice Review constitutes the first of three issues on the topic of penal abolition, assembled by us in an effort to bring the history and current character of penal abolition research to readers both familiar with and new to such work. The focus of this issue is ‘Penal Abolition and the State: Colonial, Racial and Gender Violences,’ and it is followed by another two issues, themed on ‘Penal Abolition Praxis’ (Critical Criminology 2018) and ‘Penal Abolition: Challenging Boundaries’ (Social Justice 2018).

The historical and social production of ‘crime’ has fabricated a theory, a set of practices, and a dominant discourse that collectively is understood as the paradigm of ‘criminal justice’ (Coyle, 2013; Hulsman, 1997; Mathiesen, 2015). This paradigm recognizes a trifle of the transgressions humans complete, labels these chosen transgressions as ‘crimes,’ and names their chosen actors ‘criminals’ (Bohm, 1986; Coyle, 2010, 2016; Hulsman, 1986). In time, a sprawling ‘criminal justice’ system has been produced, and it is recognizable as the penal process through which a ‘criminal’ traverses: from law, to police, to courts and finally to prisons. This historic rise has important genealogies and justifications, from the enclosing of the commons (Linebaugh, 2014) to the necessity of reinforcing racial capitalist social order following reconstruction (Blackmon, 2009; Oshinsky, 1996) to the rise of the neoliberal carceral state in response to the multiracial struggles for freedom in the 1960s and 1970s (Camp, 2016).

Alongside these institutions have developed intellectual disciplines rationalizing and promoting theories of ‘crime’ (Criminology) and responses to it (Criminal Justice). This way of seeing, this paradigm, and all the work done in its name, produces an interpretation, or better yet, a logic: the ‘criminal justice’ logic (Coyle 2018). The power of this logic is considerable: it overwhelmingly dominates intellectual circles concerned with transgression (‘crime’), conservative as well as progressive political ideology, and consequently, social policy (Brown & Schept, 2017). As is everywhere observable (in news media, entertainment formats, and public discourse), the shadow of ‘criminal justice’ logic is almost complete. Thus, our age is one of the carceral society, characterized both by the ‘anti-state state’ (Gilmore & Gilmore, 2008), that is, a state organized around police and penal power, as well as the broader circulation of the logic of law, police, courtrooms and prisons.

Against this society stands another imagined one, the post or non-carceral society (Tyson, 2014), which much like the slave-free society of antebellum America that existed only in imagination before the abolition of slavery was accomplished, is neither formed nor known. It is still emerging and displaying its commitments. It is one that refuses to ignore that history lives in the present, in that white supremacy, settler colonialism and racial capitalism are inextricable from the origins, logic and practices of ‘criminal justice’ (Davis, 2005; Gilmore, 2007). It is one that gives full consideration to the empirical reality that law breaking is a ubiquitous human behavior that elicits selective responses contingent on historical forces and social order regimes. Finally, it is one that holds ‘criminal justice’ logic accountable for its utopias: its naïve interpretation of people (that they are mostly ‘good’), its idealized account of justice institutions (that law, police, courts, and prisons effectively address transgression, public safety and justice), and its romantic construal of our society (that we have achieved democracy, distributive justice, and a meaningful, shared, community life) (Coyle, 2018).

The guiding logic, praxis and discourse of this non-carceral society is penal abolition, which is an insistent and insurgent argument to abandon ‘criminal justice’ logic and practice (Berger, Kaba, & Stein, 2017; Coyle, 2014; Davis, 2003; Davis & Rodriguez, 2000). Penal abolition rejects the ‘criminal justice’ paradigm in the total sense that slavery abolitionists rejected the slavery paradigm. Penal abolition insists on the central importance of ‘criminal justice’ to the ongoing work of white supremacy, colonialism, and racial capitalism, contests that the raison d’etre of ‘criminal justice’ is public safety and justice, rejects its essentialist assumptions about human beings, and on empirical grounds repudiates the claim that its practices are effective in responding to human transgressions (‘crimes’) or promote a society in the interest of all (Coyle, 2019). Abolition is a capacious political position, which can include both a focus on community self-determination and the importance of leveraging or taking state power in order to build an abolition democracy (Davis, 2005; Du Bois 1975/1935; Story & Schept, 2018). In sum, all these produce an interpretation, or better yet, a different logic: the penal abolition logic (Coyle 2018). The power of this logic is strong in reason and evidence, and negligible in manifestation: it is not known (or worse, deeply misunderstood) in intellectual circles concerned with transgression (‘crime’), is considered naïve and utopian by many, including some on the left (Lancaster, 2017) and is consequently not considered seriously in the domain of social policy. With that said, there is evidence of increasing attention to abolition, as demonstrated by debates about it in major periodicals (Berger et al., 2017; Lancaster, 2017), academic conferences organized around it (Society for the Study of Social Problems 2018), investigative journalists writing about it (Bernish, 2017), and organizations like the Black Youth Project 100, the Movement for Black Lives, We Charge Genocide, and others, whose work for reparations, Black freedom and life itself, is grounded in abolitionist theory and practice.

In addition, abolition is both the horizon toward which we work and a framework within which steps toward that horizon can be analyzed and evaluated, taken or discarded. As the abolitionist Rose Braz has argued, ‘Abolition defines both the goal we seek and the way we do our work today’ (Bennett, 2008). Indeed, following Braz and the work of the abolitionist movement that she and others stewarded, abolition is both a goal and a very practical application of non-reformist reforms (Gorz, 1967) aimed at continuously shrinking our reliance on the penal system and building truly democratic capacities grounded in decarceration, a robust social wage, and distributive and transformative justice. When understood as such, we can begin to appreciate that abolitionist work is, in fact, occurring all around us.

As the editors of the three volumes, we see our work as curatorial rather than prescriptive. We want to provide an intellectually capacious space for diverse epistemological, methodological, and disciplinary approaches to abolition. Taken together, the three issues contribute significantly to the abolitionist project through the cutting edge work of the authors featured within them. Articles across the three issues further problematize common sense discourses on the left that unwittingly work against abolition; further delineate what abolition could look like for particular classes of prisoners, including youth, people with mental illness, asylum seekers, and those convicted of sex offenses; further explicate the relationships between the carceral state and abolition with racial capitalism, settler colonialism, white supremacy and patriarchy; study and analyze abolitionist pedagogy; and consider abolition democracy at various scales of the carceral state’s expression, including in places where it has heretofore been understudied.

The six articles in this initial volume disturb and enliven our abolitionist imagination. In the first paper of this issue, Bronwyn Dobchuk-Land demonstrates the connections between ‘criminal justice’ logic and settler colonial logic in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She details how a state-led strategy of ‘crime prevention’ programming created policing efforts aimed primarily at Indigenous-majority communities. Despite official claims of a ‘caring’ improvement, Dobchuk-Land finds that settler colonial governance is reproduced through the governance of crime and argues for the importance of abolitionist politics to learn from decolonial strategies. In the second essay, Viviane Saleh-Hanna argues for an abolitionist theory on – rather than of – ‘crime,’ insisting on the importance of theories that further deconstruct, rather than prolong, the notion of ‘crime.’ Saleh-Hanna uses case studies and media accounts to complete post-mortem examinations of the criminalization of Black and Indigenous murder victims of policing. In doing so she outlines how ‘crime’ emerges from the structures of ‘R.I.P,’ or Racist Imperialist Patriarchy.

In the third article, William Calathes examines the connections between racial capitalism and the philosophy and practices of punishment. His analysis highlights how individual social-psychological theories, the historical and current practices of punishment, and an absence of revolutionary consciousness sustain white capital accumulation and white privilege that together work to block prison abolition. In the fourth paper, Elizabeth Whalley and Colleen Hackett rely on their fieldwork with rape crisis centers and gender-responsive programming for criminalized women, in order to engage the terrain between carceral feminism and abolitionist feminism. The authors demonstrate how white liberal feminists collude with ‘criminal justice’ institutions, in effect decreasing the safety and self-determination of women of color and perpetuating white supremacy, economic exploitation and colonialist notions of progress.

In the fifth essay, Micol Seigel writes against the grain of common sense discourses of justice, problematizing the notion of racial profiling by demonstrating how its usage can unintentionally recuperate the police. Seigel argues that the term implicitly suggests the redeemability of the police, as if racism can be excised from police power and practices that, as she notes, are racial in their essence. Seigel’s article insists on abolition as the necessary anti-racist framework for stopping police violence. Finally, in the sixth article, Joshua Price considers three cases with which he has both political and personal familiarity to argue about the psychic and affective wages invested in the racial and gendered violence of state power. Specifically considering the incarceration of people with mental illness in the context of recent bipartisan efforts for prison reform, Price argues for an abolitionist vision and politics that stretches beyond the prison to include the other carceral institutions – the school, the university, social services – through which state violences are enacted and granted legitimacy.

Taken together, these authors expand abolitionist discourse and politics, pointing out existing analytical limitations and exciting new directions. This penal abolition issue and the two that follow it (Critical Criminology 2018 and Social Justice 2018) are an invitation to engage in further conversation and action.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.