New abolition,criminology and a critical carceral studies

Abstract

Criminology has been slow to open up a conversation about decarceration and abolition in comparison with other disciplines, including history, geography, and gender, race, and critical ethnic studies. Scholars from these areas and actors on the ground—close up to confinement—have done most of the organizing against mass incarceration and theorizing of alternative possibilities. Why those experiences—and the theoretical traditions that inform their work—have been less recognized and developed in criminology is of pivotal concern as more criminologists move forward with the political project of decarceration. The extent to which criminology can sustain an alternative or abolitionist politics remains an open question. Amid growing conversations about decarceration and shifting rhetorics on punishment, we address some of the obstacles that limit criminology as a site from which to engage the abolitionist project, asking where criminologists might turn for interventionist models that move away from imprisonment and the violence of the carceral state. In this article, we advocate for and discuss the contours of critical carceral studies, a growing interdisciplinary movement for engaged scholarly and activist production against the carceral state. We discuss the imperatives for criminological engagement with critical carceral studies and sketch some of the terrain on which the discipline can contribute to the project, including important work to counter criminological discourses and knowledge production that reify and reproduce carceral logics and practices.

Keywords

abolition carceral state criminology critical carceral studies decarceration

Depending on one’s understanding of criminology, the rise of the carceral state remains a peculiar failure or success of unprecedented proportions for the discipline. If one sees in criminology’s managerialist benevolence both an intention toward and exercise of reform, then the unforeseen historical possibility and structural dimensions of the carceral state’s scope and scale truly indicate a failure on the part of the discipline to anticipate the punitive turn. If, however, one sees in criminology’s positionality an historical approach to reform that has always expanded and stabilized the very systems it purports to change, then the rise of mass incarceration marks, in fact, the discipline’s continued success, offering important credibility to the expansion of police power and imprisonment.

Importantly, this latter position is not an endorsement of some conspiracy between the discipline and the state. Rather, it is steeped in an historical examination of the patterns of imprisonment across centuries, performed by scholars and activists concerned with the ways that criminology has rescued the carceral state from crises of legitimacy (American Friends Service Committee, 1971; Foucault, 1980; Murakawa, 2014; Rothman, 1980). In the context of the United States, a burgeoning research literature in the sociolegal and sociological study of punishment takes racial injustice and the criminalization of poverty and everyday life as its primary frame for understanding criminal justice (Alexander, 2012; Beckett, 2000; Beckett and Herbert, 2009; Muhammad, 2010; Murakawa, 2014). This work occurs alongside a wave of anti-racism movements focused upon US criminal justice that challenge mass incarceration, police violence, and the historical frames of criminology. Such a moment demands the discipline come to terms with its past and consider ways forward that align its supposed intentions with the material and theoretical work necessary to realize them.

This article uses the present moment of carceral crisis as a point of departure to critically engage with the project of criminology, a discipline, particularly in the US context, at once both intimate with the state’s most violent tendencies and home to a storied, if uneven, legacy of radical work. We first consider criminology head on, arguing for the importance of internal struggle within criminology, centered in part on the ideological and practical work necessary to disrupt the foundational keywords of the discipline. Destabilizing criminological common sense in this way, we argue, can bring abolition into the realm of discussability. We then look to the rise of what we call critical carceral studies, an interdisciplinary location home to inspiring and insurrectionary work against police and imprisonment, for guidance in materializing criminology’s abolitionist and radical potential. We end with a discussion that seeks to make productive the contradictions of the current political moment through and toward abolitionist research and practice with an eye for global alliances.

A number of key questions materialize along the way: Why the historical omission (or marginalization?) within criminology of discussions of decarceration and alternatives to prison and punishment? What institutional and disciplinary forces circumscribe our imagining of non-penal possibilities? And what work has occurred elsewhere—among activist scholars, theorists, and the actors most impacted by the carceral state (people of color and those subject to various forms of vulnerability)—to guide our discussion? As omissions in knowledge are always performative enactments of structures of power, we ask what obstacles criminologists face, at the level of discourse, practice, and epistemology, in moving forward on a path of social justice against and beyond the carceral state. Finally, we ask how do we make visible—to ourselves and others—the questions and experiences that challenge the discursive control and appeal of carceral regimes, those systems of state governance, institutions, organizations, commercial enterprises, and nonprofits built around and upon not simply the project of mass imprisonment but organized classed and racialized premature death (Gilmore, 2007).

Criminology

Criminology, perhaps surprisingly, does not stand wholly in opposition to abolition. The discipline is made and remade through engagements with its own internal contradictions. Of course, criminology has often played an active role as an intellectual prosthesis for the state, providing both material and ideological support and legitimacy for expansions and exercises of police power and mass imprisonment (Cohen, 1988; Foucault, 1980; Schept et al., 2015; Seigel, forthcoming). But part of criminology’s genealogy also includes lines of radical and activist scholarship even as we must admit that this lineage is uneven, interrupted, and derivative of the metropoles of White Western masculinist thought, as Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School (1978) remind us. First, criminologists active in the 1960s and 1970s were shaped by the social movements surrounding them and of which they were a part. Entire departments coalesced around radical political commitments (Social Justice, 2014; Linnemann and Martinez, 2017; Myers and Goddard, forthcoming). Foundational work on abolition (Hulsman and De Celis, 1982; Mathiesen, 1974) and decarceration (Scull, 1977) emerged during this period alongside broader engagements with police power and capital (Hall et al., 1978; Platt et al., 1977; Quinney, 1978; Taylor et al., 1973). In addition, criminologists became involved early on and throughout the ensuing three decades in the International Conference on Penal Abolition, which brought together academics, former prisoners, activists, and journalists into a “conference-movement” (Piché and Larsen, 2010: 391) occurring biennially in a variety of places such as Toronto, Belfast, Lagos, and Bloomington, Indiana. Since the late 1990s, a number of edited volumes connected to the discipline have emerged engaging abolition specifically (Carrier and Piché, 2015; Coyle and Schept, 2017; West and Morris, 2000) as well as visions of transformative justice (Bierria et al., 2010) alongside entire monographs engaging abolition and decarceration (Miller, 1996; Ruggiero, 2010; Schept, 2015).

European criminologists have played a special role in the mainstreaming of abolition discussions in critical criminology, followed closely by contemporary Australian scholars. Much of this work on abolitionist thought emerges out of radical forms of Christian liberation theology, Marxist and materialist critiques, and post-enlightenment forms of reasoning that trace utopian thinking within the arc of Western liberal ideologies (Christie, 1981; Hulsman, 1991; Hulsman and De Celis, 1982; Mathiesen, 1974; Ruggiero, 2010). Its themes, including transformation over reform through long-term structural change; the problems of institutional cooptation and neutralization; the persistence and violence of the prison; and the refocusing of harm over crime, all, at first glance, bear much in common with US abolition (Carlen, 2013; Hillyard, 2015; Ryan and Ward, 2015; Scott, 2013; Scraton and McCulloch, 2008). Similarly, in the Australian context, important attention to settler colonialism and intersectionality in relation to abolition has found a foothold, but largely in terms of a critique of justice system reform efforts (Baldry et al., 2012; Cuneen and Tauri, 2015; Russell and Carlton, 2013).

Criminological engagement with abolition has allowed for a reflexive critique of the discipline itself. Such critique can be found in Foucault’s work, where he refers to criminology’s “garrulous discourses,” full of “endless repetitions,” and “indispensability” (1980: 47–48) in grafting intellectual credibility onto juridical or political power, as well as in the work of historians (Muhammad, 2010; Seigel, forthcoming) and philosophers (Neocleous, 2000, 2011). But several critics internal to the discipline have also staked notable positions. Jock Young noted the “elective affinity” between positivist criminology and the state, both in the discipline’s supply of necessary technocratic data but also in the form of “shared notions of ontology and of social order,” a position shared by many others operating from within the discipline (Agozino, 2003; Morrison, 2004: 343; Loader and Sparks, 2010: 771; Piché, 2016; Polsky, 1998: 23; Schept et al., 2015).

Still, these efforts have occurred alongside of a much more politically empowered form of mainstream criminology, with greater access to state funding, policy making, institutional support, and knowledge production. Importantly, the policy recommendations around reentry and justice reinvestment initiatives have extended carceral logics, state intervention, and surveillance through the constructs of justice reform (Gottschalk, 2014; Maruna, 2011; Schept, 2015; Story, 2016). While a small group of dedicated largely White activists and academics in criminology have maintained a steady and decidedly empirical critique of carceral regimes, this is not enough. Largely missing from these discussions, as with all of criminology, are the subjugated and subaltern knowledges of Black feminist, intersectional, queer, indigenous, critical race, and anticolonial activist scholarship, which, in the US, form the foundational work of the new abolitionists (although see Agozino, 2003 and Saleh-Hanna, 2015).

New abolitionists and critical carceral studies scholars show little interest in a public sociology or criminology dedicated to questions of abolition’s political tenability in policy discussions. Rather, their work emanates from experiences, practices, and movement-generated theories grounded in survivability: the urgent pursuit of liberation from the threat of captivity, torture, and social death, from generational histories in the continuous shadow of conquest, settler colonialism, slavery, Jim Crow, and the carceral state. The history, scale, and scope of the neoliberal carceral state makes evident the long omissions and marginalization from the criminological canon of work against White supremacy, colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and racial capitalism as well as the epistemologies of vulnerability. At stake in these debates and contradictions are the very terms upon which the discipline has over-relied. A critical carceral studies in solidarity with the project of abolition and meaningful decarceration requires us to rethink the keywords of criminology in order to understand if abolition is a project to which criminology can contribute. We offer the following as a way in which to take up that problem and begin the work of reimagining our relationships and commitments to the carceral lexicon and logics that define us.

New abolition meets criminology

Criminology has been a key site, in its varied forms, for the reproduction of the very carceral logics we aim to dismantle. The ways in which we assume, write, and lecture about carceral and police power play an important role in carrying the regime forward, reproducing—reforming—its logics, training the next generation of its players and, in the process, further calcifying its legitimacy (Schept et al., 2015). Abolition of the materiality or edifice of the prison industrial complex will require the abolition—the dismantling, changing, and building anew—of the normative discourses and vocabularies, the ways of thinking and being, that constitute the conditions of the prison–industrial complex’s (PIC) possibility and which derive their legitimacy in part from criminology (Foucault, 1980). One key contribution of new abolitionist work is the interruption of dominant understandings of crime, law, punishment, safety and accountability, and justice, and the generation of alternative vocabularies and analyses from which to begin to work our way out of the carceral state. This work brings the undiscussable into the discussion, asking us to reconceptualize violence, victims, perpetrators, rehabilitation, safety, and accountability through the affective and emotional lives of the actors closest to and locked within the PIC. To take seriously the embeddedness of carceral logics as well as the lived experience of carcerality produces epistemological engagements that necessarily and foundationally destabilize the keywords of criminology. Such work goes far to ensure that survivability and precarity become visible as political events within the structural context of US criminal justice. This pursuit is one avenue by which to create the conditions for the legibility of everyday racialized state violence (Martinot and Sexton, 2003) and its attendant oppressions out of which may come a transformative set of questions and possibilities about the nature of injury, harm, and accountability. We introduce this possibility through the systematic dismantling of a series of criminological keywords, a disruption that, if central to our foundations, analysis, and practice, might open up transformative spaces within our training, pedagogy, and practice.

Crime

Mass incarceration—and the US “system” of criminal justice—depends upon criminalization. While this is problematic in and of itself for those who value understanding the structural conditions that create harm (and acts defined as “crime”), mass incarceration in the carceral era depends upon the production of vulnerability through forms of neoliberal dispossession and its consequent criminalization at an unprecedented scale. This assemblage is apparent in the criminalization of poverty, addiction, homelessness, and mental illness (Beckett and Herbert, 2009; Wacquant, 2009); children and youth (Rios, 2011); women (Richie, 2012); migrants (Moran et al., 2013; Mountz and Loyd, 2014; Weber and Pickering, 2011); race (Alexander, 2012); sexuality (Spade, 2011; Stanley and Smith, 2011); and disability (Ben-Moshe et al., 2014), to name a few categories, creating a vast swathe of new carceral subjects. To be clear, the carceral subject is a form of life that inhabits states of precarity continuously and is thus dedicated to projects of survivability. Criminologists must contend with the reality that the discipline’s interdependency with the state agencies that comprise “criminal justice” is what produces (and reproduces through reformation) criminalization and the carceral (Morrison, 2004). Normative treatments of violence as fundamentally interpersonal, individualized, and natural deny the multiple forms of structural violence inflicted by the neoliberal state through its prosthetic institutions (policing, prisons, detention, etc.), legislative and administrative policies (dismantling of welfare, criminalizing of poverty, perpetual wars), and collusions with corporate power to secure accumulation and divest from the social wage. Without an understanding of these structural relations, most efforts to respond to crime reproduce configurations of violence. A move away from criminalization means an effort to reconceptualize crime and address violence without sole reliance (or, in some cases, any reliance) upon criminal justice, specifically law enforcement or imprisonment. In the US, these efforts are increasingly prevalent across cities where organizers share training, curricula, and workshops that emphasize emergent strategies in pushing back against community violence, school-to-prison pipelines, imprisonment, and police violence. As Dean Spade writes of abolition in his visionary and definitive treatment of the killing effects of administrative law upon transgender persons,
Across the country, racial- and economic-justice–centered feminist, queer, and trans organizations are developing methods of addressing violence that do not involve the police or criminal courts. This work has been taken up in different forms and with different areas of focus. Groups working on these strategies in recent years include Safe OUTside the System (SOS Collective) of the Audre Lorde Project in New York City; For Crying Out Loud! and Communities Against Rape and Abuse (CARA) in Seattle; The Northwest Network of Bisexual, Trans, Lesbian and Gay Survivors of Abuse, Creative Interventions in Oakland, Community United Against Violence (CUAV) in San Francisco, Philly Stands Up!, Project NIA in Chicago, and generationFIVE and Generative Somatics, among many others.
Indeed, both authors are active in such nascent community groups in the more remote contexts of urban Appalachia, where regional organizers are trained by and/or study the curricula of national leaders and key organizational centers in racial justice and abolitionist efforts. Abolition, in this sense, is again familiar in that it is about understanding more fully—across time and space—that we cannot talk about the “root conditions” of crime, violence, and precarity unless we are talking about health (Loyd, 2014), education (Meiners, 2007), economy (Aviram, 2015; Schept, 2015; Wacquant, 2009), and other forms of racial and social justice at the local and national level, with an understanding that these discussions and modes of organizing have been ongoing historically outside of and unrecognized by criminology. Following Davis (2003) and Gilmore (2007), we must resist the urge to envision abolition as an alternative metaphorical and material edifice that can fill the footprint of the prison (Davis, 2003: 107). Rather, seen as a set of relationships, abolition and abolitionist reforms focus on building up health, education, housing, jobs, and alternative approaches to harm as they also dismantle the prison. In this manner, abolition is predicated upon the nature and possibility of freedom and emancipated forms of life. A key lesson for criminologists in this pursuit is the acknowledgment of criminal justice as foundational to the exercise of violence and one of our largest obstacles in the pursuit of social change. Criminology must ask what it offers in terms of an understanding of the needs of survivability and its contribution to life-extending, liberating work.

Law

In American jurisprudence, the subject of the law is only legible as a rights-bearing individual. Notions of individual culpability and responsibility justify the exertion of police and carceral power; notions of a free will compromised through addictions, mental illness, or prior victimizations might mitigate the severity of the state’s response but still create an individualized subject prone to coerced incapacitation and treatment by the state. Groups who have suffered violence at the hands of the state—racial minorities, LGBTQ communities, immigrants, and refugees, as a small sample—do not gain the kind of recognition through law and rights claims that supports structural transformation. Reliance upon the law as a space for claims to dignity (Christie, 1981; Simon, 2014) too often risk reproduction of these liberal formations. The vast majority of policy reform efforts in American criminal justice begin at the compromised locus of law and the individualized neoliberal subject. A critical carceral studies is attuned to the confluence of liberal legal constructs with neoliberal penality’s reliance on responsibilization and governance through risk (Harcourt, 2010).

Critical carceral studies increasingly takes up a nuanced approach to law, critically examining reification and even reliance on law in pursuits of social justice while considering the efficacy of legal strategies to secure certain “non reformist reforms” (Gorz, 1967), such as increased environmental justice victories, decriminalization, and decarceration strategies that shrink the carceral net, and minimum wage or guaranteed employment campaigns (Stein, 2014). Non-reformist reforms aim to prevent additional harms such as economic displacement and racialized social control. While the logic of visibility and inclusion is one of the main attractions of rights claims, abolitionists are, in general, wary of legal reforms that have created more insidious ways to entrench carceral practices (Murakawa, 2014). In the colorblind era of contemporary US politics, the persistence of exclusion, discrimination, and inequality alongside the so-called bi-partisan consensus on prison reform reveals the ways in which law normalizes, obscures, and reproduces the sexism, racism, and anti-queer and transgender politics constitutive of racial capitalism. Hate crime, victims’ rights, rape elimination acts, and anti-discrimination laws are avenues that have also served to individualize the production of harm, isolate victim survivors, reproduce the tools of punishment and exclusion, and expand the carceral regime. Expressing a deep skepticism of law’s promises, critical race and queer theorists have long insisted that a political project that seeks inclusion in a framework that sustains state violence and inevitably reproduces other forms of exclusion cannot be transformative (Bell, 1992; Brown 1995; Muñoz, 2009; Spade, 2011; Thuma, 2015). Given that abolition has largely been a pursuit of women of color, queer and feminist women and men, and trans and gender-diverse people, their focus has been on the struggles with power that underlie law reforms as the site for transformation. As Meiners (2007: 170) writes, the horizon of abolition in the contemporary US invokes a “both/and” necessity where efforts to pursue administrative and legal reforms and reduce immediate suffering in the confines of the carceral state are everyday work on the one hand, but always in connection to efforts to “place, understand, and connect this labor to a larger movement” and historical struggle for freedom, without which cooptation is imminent.

Punishment

The key way in which criminology and abolition challenge the foundational legitimacy of punishment is in the historical prison–crime disconnect (Garland, 2001; Mauer, 2006). This remains a disconnection that requires uncoupling in popular thinking and public discourse. While there is nothing novel about pointing out that state punishment is reserved for poor people (Reiman and Leighton, 2015) and people of color (Alexander, 2012; Mauer, 2006) in the carceral era, punishment is still undertheorized by criminologists as criminogenic in its own right, having produced social, psychic, political, and economic harms of unprecedented proportions that are the conditions for current abolitionist projects. Nonetheless, the violence of the state and capital is barely recognized as such, let alone subject to the kinds of sanctions that the criminal law metes out to those in violation of its most minute provisions. The rise of the debtor’s prison, the criminalization of everyday life through regulatory infractions that fill municipal budgets, and the uprisings in Ferguson, Baltimore, and other American cities are distinctive ways in which to understand this carceral project in the current US (Kilgore, 2014c; Shapiro, 2014).

We also should pay attention to the terms we deploy to label such political projects. While the term “mass incarceration” undoubtedly draws attention to the sheer volume of people under forms of penal control, terminology like the “carceral state,” “prison nation,” and “PIC” are able to locate mass imprisonment in the political economic and sociocultural changes of divestment and austerity—deindustrialization, the loss of jobs, the retreat of the welfare state, privatization and the fortification of police power and security, the ongoing project of racialized criminalization—that have produced and characterize the carceral era. This broader treatment extracts the prison from its narrow place in the popular imagination as being just about crime and punishment and instead relocates it in conversations about employment, economies, imperialism, racial justice, uneven development, public health, climate change and environmental justice, land use, and neoliberal ideology. This more acute, historicized discussion can begin to apprehend the complicated and even contradictory nature of punishment: its centrality to mass imprisonment (Clear and Frost, 2014), the cultural work it performs outside of the edifices of the prison (Brown, 2009), and, crucially, the ideological ways it operates, particularly within criminology, to obscure the broader social forces that sustain the carceral state. Indeed, it is telling that as a bipartisan consensus animated by the Right walks back some of the punitive rhetoric and policy characteristic of the rise of mass incarceration, there is good evidence that the carceral state simply shifts to accommodate this change in the “market” (Californians United for a Responsible Budget, 2013, 2015; Kilgore, 2014a, 2014b; Schept, 2015). Punishment, in other words, is both a reliable racial logic for the sustainability of the carceral state and located as but one, alongside treatment, rehabilitation, saving, and others, on which the state relies to secure its social order. Criminologists risk reification of these very processes chronically in their ability to lend permanence to “mass incarceration” as a concept, to actuarialism and risk assessment as programming strategies, and to recidivism-driven evidence-based research as the gold standard of the evaluation of justice.

Safety and accountability

The ultimate shared question for criminology and abolition may be one of safety. Whereas criminologists refer to this as the mandate of crime control, abolitionists see the desire for safety as emergent at the level of everyday experience, without the borders or boundaries of criminological frames. They ask: How can we create safe, healthy communities, and flourishing lives? What kind of community (world) do we want to live in—do we envision? Mass incarceration is a failed project in establishing safety for a host of reasons, but the primary one is of deadly significance: the life disruptions of criminal justice shorten existence for its subjects, their families, and communities. And its markers are so normalized as to be largely overlooked: the carceral separation of families, especially parents and children; the individual and collective loss of family members to violence and prisons; school- and cradle-to-prison pipelines that foreclose children’s lives in custody and suspension (Meiners, 2007); the chronic stress diseases and premature deaths of loved ones who engage in the exhausting daily work of job, home, and justice, attempting to bring public attention to carceral conditions and maintain contact with their loved ones in confinement (Gilmore, 2007); and the mortal entropy of labeling social problems as criminal offences. In these contexts, the resourcing of criminal justice trumps and actively expropriates from education, health care, employment, and, ultimately, safety. Rendering life less livable and more precarious through criminalization and incarceration does not reduce harm or future harm and is at cross-purposes with stopping abuse and violence. For abolitionists and critical carceral studies scholars, safety is a product of structural transformation and is collective at its core; for criminology, both the neoliberal construct of the individual at the crux of crime and criminal justice limit both the conceptualization and actualization of safety. Safety, then, is not simply about those who have harmed or been harmed, but a movement beyond disciplinary neoliberal frames of responsibilization and internalization to community and state accountability, a kind of insurrectionary safety (McDowell, 2016) operating within an abolitionist habitus (Schept, 2015). In rendering visible structural violence—the conditions that produce what are named in public discourse as private and individualized harms—this kind of community accountability is “the groundwork for the obsolescence of policing and prisons” (Oparah, 2014: 137).

Abolitionists do not assume that we will ever exist in harm-free spaces; rather, they emphasize that vulnerability is bound up with the human condition, that the pursuit of total security is a life-damaging pursuit, and that there are ways to better address, collectively, the harms we face and produce. To that effect, queer and feminist activist scholars from the anti-violence movement have produced important interventions in dominant approaches to problems of violence that all too often extend violence—state violence—into the very lives of victims and survivors on whose behalf advocates had reached out to police. Intervening in the traditional notion that the state provides safety, these authors argue against what they call “carceral feminism” and for approaches to gender and sexual violence that can bring safety through addressing harms while transforming the structural conditions that produced them (Braz, 2006; Law, 2014; Musto, 2013; Richie, 2012; Thuma, 2015).

Justice

Like their conceptualizations of law, criminology, and American opinion more broadly understand justice as fundamentally equating to individual rights, responsibilities, culpability, and retribution. This construct is affirmed as it circulates heavily through cultural production, reproducing itself as much in courtroom and police dramas as it does in actual courtrooms and police stations (Brown, 2009). But the hegemony of this narrow understanding of justice has been subject to trenchant critique, theorization, and mobilization from community organizers and scholars developing and practicing transformative justice, a vision that places interpersonal harm and accountability in the context of and inseparable from structural harm and state accountability. As Generation Five, one of the early authors of the term, describes it, “Transformative justice [is] a liberatory approach to violence . . . [which] seeks safety and accountability without relying on alienation, punishment, or State or systemic violence, including incarceration or policing” (2007: 5). If notions of justice are severed from state punishment and instead understood as fundamentally social—joined inextricably to individual and collective safety from all violence, including the violence of precarity and the violence of the state—then we may begin to imagine new ways of addressing our needs. In this way, we transform our situations as we also un-imagine the contemporary criminal justice system, an abolitionist project that is both political and epistemological (Armstrong, 2013; Carlen, 2013).

We must also remember, as new abolitionists and the historical record of fugitivity that they pull from insist, that justice is about urgent needs—the very specific needs of survivability. Reframing the key concerns of criminology, like abolition, is less about foreclosure and more about opening up possibilities for life. It is an empirical project that asks what people are doing otherwise to deal with harm and violence and to produce flourishing lives and communities: to build health, education, and employment in terms that both respond to the conditions of violence and harm and limit violence on as many levels as possible. That local and everyday project is how we might more fully theorize justice and a world beyond prisons. Such work is distinctive from alternative justice forms that rely on mediation, conciliation, restorative justice, interpersonal peacemaking, and reintegrative strategies without a corollary political project directed at the structural conditions of survivability. Similarly, reform efforts to co-opt the actuarial, biopolitical language of “what works” and “evidence-based” research in order to display the brutality of policing, the numbers of people killed by the system, the failures of some of the most historically well-funded public agencies and program in US history must be brought perpetually into a larger dialogue about transformation. While “reform” often suggests progressive, if incremental, change, the word also can mean “restructuring” or, more obviously for new abolitionists, that haunting post-emancipation clause “re-formation.” When Gilmore (2011: 263) writes, “Organize. Infiltrate what already exists and innovate what doesn’t,” she provides a principle that allows us to better conceptualize the form of state and criminal justice critique that might view alternatives as its primary disposition—to rigorously think through and continuously counter the appropriation, cooptation, and oppositional deactivation of abolitionist transformation through the liberal frames of law and justice.

Critical carceral studies: Studying the lessons and experiences of the new abolitionists

Critical carceral studies remain distinctive from current arenas of criminological thought in important ways. The empirical record and lived experience of capture and confinement, quite formidably, exceed the frames of what we have historically conceived of as punishment. Prison-like conditions, the criminalization and segregation of everyday life, and the reliance upon exclusion and containment at borders, in urban centers, and across poor and racialized communities and societies, extend beyond traditional treatments of punishment (Beckett and Herbert, 2009; Beckett and Murakawa, 2012; Loyd et al., 2012; Hannah-Moffat and Lynch, 2012; Story, 2015). The carceral subject of a critical carceral studies complicates and exceeds categories of criminality, penality, and victimhood. Instead, this subject is an actor subjected to intersecting contemporary social forces and penal histories, whose identity is produced in the course of navigating dispossession, oppression, and the production of social suffering (Brown, 2014). The carceral subject is distinctive in that they are precisely a mode of surplus life created by forces of governance under global neoliberal capitalism, the inhabitant criminalized precisely because they live in conditions of precarity, included within different forms of carceral confinement. Consequently, studies of the carceral state foreground analyses of late capitalist political economies, racialized regimes of state power and multilevel explications of state violence in examinations of criminalization, political resistance, and crime (Camp, 2016; Gottschalk, 2015; Murakawa, 2014). Work that engages the important structural relations between intimate violence, police violence, and incarceration (Kelly, 2011; Kim, 2009, 2011; Richie, 2012; Smith et al., 2006; Smith, 2015) refuses a singular focus upon any one kind of violence and instead indicts the normative reliance upon police and imprisonment to provide safety and accountability for the individuals, families, and communities most hard hit by interpersonal harm, addiction, and economic despair—an account of interpersonal, state, and structural violence.

Critical carceral studies are also distinct from criminology in its epistemological groundings and ontological categories. Committed to trenchant interdisciplinarity across historical, cultural, political, and social study, critical carceral studies foregrounds the operations of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, hetero-patriarchy, and ableism in its understanding of the carceral state. It builds historically from subjugated knowledges and, in the US context, a deep legacy of fugitive abolition studies. Many of its scholars emerge from and self-identify as members of the communities targeted by the carceral state and omitted in the criminological canon, thus creating a tacit imbrication of lived experience and intellectual training in the face of a deep skepticism of criminology’s projects, even in its most leftist forms. Finally, the principles of critical carceral studies are predicated upon an understanding and acknowledgment of how institutional forms of knowledge and their political claims reproduce carceral regimes via frameworks of reform, presumed benevolence, and unchallenged carceral logics. It does this all in an effort to lay the conceptual groundwork for a radical critique of the everyday from the everyday, directed at the transformation of social life and the social order.

Critical carceral studies both derive from and reproduce abolitionist praxis. The meaning of abolition itself is subject to various kinds of frames and cultural assumptions. In the popular imagination of Americans, abolition seems an impossible vista of a world free of prisons, one that allows for harm, violence, and impunity to continue via liberal visions of the world that are unrealistic and utopian. Much of the work of new abolition, in fact, suggests something far different, more historicized, more carefully theorized, and more practically mapped than many criminologists might suspect. In the United States, new abolitionists rely upon not only scholarly and historical analyses of incarceration but also of slavery (Patterson, 1982), including the work of Frederick Douglass and Ida B Wells-Barnett, and the reformation politics of emancipation and post-Civil War reconstruction (Du Bois, 1935). This work points to the liberal fictions of racial democracy in which postwar penal reforms simply transmuted, culminating in more extensive racialized carceral practices, including chain gangs, the convict prison lease system, gendered violence, sexual terror, Jim Crow law, lynchings, and, now, the carceral state (Alexander, 2012; Haley, 2016; Hernández et al., 2015; Lichtenstein 1996). As critical race theorist Saidiya Hartman (1997) argues, a form of emancipation specific to the racialized logics of law and democracy produced new forms of carceral subjection and oppression, a reminder of the manner in which reformist orientations and undertheorized conceptions of freedom and democracy have historically enabled penal logics, extending back to slavery and conquest and forward to mass incarceration. Abolition scholar Joy James points out that within these practices and the historical records produced about them, an unprecedented US archive of abolitionist writings developed, including a little known but voluminous history of resistance, insurrection, rebellion, flight and fugitivity, underground and secret organizations, and rights advocacy, all along a “continuum of repressive ideologies and practices surrounding penal sites and the ‘free world’” (2005, loc 86).

A contemporary politics of abolition directed at the dismantling of the PIC has been consistently organizing out of these histories and alongside of the rise of mass incarceration. For us, it is this work that has offered important preparation for, productive tension with, and an important corrective of our engagement with criminology through our own research, including fieldwork in carceral settings, engagements with communities impacted by the carceral state, and organizing efforts against the prison state as activist scholars. Work emerging out of the tension between state repression and social movements in the early 1970s observed the role of the prison as a locus for both the violence of the state and resistance to it (Honey-Knopp, 1977; Jackson, 1970; see also Camp, 2016; Saleh-Hanna and Omowali-Alston, 2006). An important set of foundational grassroots gatherings crystallized the formation of some of the pioneering US abolitionist organizations of the carceral era: Critical Resistance, the most visible prison abolition organization, organized conferences in 1998, 2001, 2003,and 2008; Incite! Women, Gender Non-Conforming, and Trans People of Color Against Violence in 2000 with their most recent gathering occurring in Chicago in 2015; and numerous chapters, allies, and other antiviolence organizations have gathered in the years since. In this manner, a small group of feminist and queer women of color activist scholars have established a national presence across the last three decades, feeding forward into the foundations of Black Lives Matter and other contemporary racial justice movements (Thuma, 2015). A number of practices and principles guide their work. They have sought to position radical feminists of color at the center of movements, as those most omitted in discussions of harm and violence, and yet most directly impacted by various configurations of interpersonal, structural, and state violence. Envisioning their work as alternative knowledges to academic scholarship, including criminology, organizers have made intensive use of new and alternative media environments, providing free resources, toolkits, curricula, zines, reports, websites, and videos. These efforts are directed at providing a community-based education and history of organizing, providing tools to think about both criminalization and racism, and promoting abolitionist and alternative configurations of justice. They pursue this in a multitude of ways: community organizing, direct action events, workshops, conferences, education and freedom schools, and local political projects and campaigns. The founders of these organizations constitute a prodigious academic presence in the interdisciplinary study of punishment and the theorization and practice of abolition, including the body of work by Davis (2003, 2005, 2012), Gilmore (2007), Richie (2012), Smith (2005), Sudbury (2005), and others. A host of contemporary abolitionist scholars build from their work (Adelsberg et al., 2015; Berger, 2014; Camp 2016; Loyd et al., 2012; Meiners, 2007; Rodriguez, 2006; Spade, 2011).

This work extends north to Canada’s “Idle No More,” “No Borders,” “No One Is Illegal,” and “No exceptions” movements, whose mission, for instance, in the case of No Borders “is not to seek reforms, but rather to call for the abolition of migration controls, detention centers and other punitive measures that punish mobility and create precarity” (Burridge, 2014: 465; Loyd et al., 2012). Abolition without conditions, as these movements conceptualize it, requires a thoughtful visionary reworking of the ways in which we live with harm, violence, and oppression. As Black studies scholars Fred Moten and Stephano Harney (2013: 114) write, “What is, so to speak, the object of abolition? Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society” (see also Han, 2014). Abolition, as an epistemological limit concept, is understood as processual, long term, and without end as abolition prefigures a movement that utterly upends our way of thinking about crime, law, and punishment. However, in the current era, it requires positioning grounded in forms of political “discernment” that are central to reframing and questioning the assumptions that reform, rights inclusion, and post-enlightenment, progressive aims of justice are enough to address the foundational violence of carceral regimes. Furthermore, this discernment is required only in so far as to identify other ways of inhabiting social life. For new abolitionists, dismantling the prison is first and foremost a collective conversation about the conditions of possibility for safer, healthier, flourishing lives, and communities, one that interprets and acknowledges its current place in order to envision otherwise the complex relationships of oppressors and oppressed.

Advocates simultaneously emphasize that abolition is already and has always been everyday, reflecting a set of currently existing practices and tactics that are omitted and erased in public and criminological discourse. In a distinctive theorization of the so-called dark figure of crime, abolitionists point to the fact that most people are already dealing with crime in improvised and deeply varied ways (some good, some bad) that do not rely upon criminal justice, pursuing instead what McDowell calls “insurgent safety” (2016). As community organizer and Project NIA director Mariame Kaba (Berlatsky 2015) states of recent efforts to rely on the criminal justice system to respond to police violence and killings, reliance upon prosecution, conviction, and punishment for injustices may be necessary but “there are other ways to imagine and think about justice too.” These range from financial compensation, to education in schools about specific historical and contemporary events, free education for the community, and the establishment of free community centers focused upon mental health and vocational counseling for survivors and their communities, constitutive parts of what philosopher Sarah Tyson calls “noncarceral communities” (2014). Restitution, in this form, means responding to community needs as a part of accountability practices, as institutional actors discuss with community members what happened, acknowledge their role in this violence, and respond alternatively to community needs (Berlatsky, 2015).

Abolitionists, like Kaba, insist we already have options and should practice to imagine, expansively, what those forms of alternative justice might be within our local contexts. That process includes developing a set of guiding questions that do not reify crime control but instead take seriously the expansive ways in which we might respond to issues of fear, safety, and harm: How can we organize our communities to be safe? What should we do when various kinds of harm, with different kinds of needs, occur? What are the collective ways and forums in which we can pursue this work? From the Vera Institute of Justice’s highly successful Common Justice program to Project NIA and We Charge Genocide’s achievement of reparations for victims of police torture in Chicago, abolition commitments in the US span a continuum of restorative and transformative justice possibilities and increasingly materialize in local and national contexts.¹ Protean, long-term, intentional and visionary, new abolitionists have insisted upon shared analysis; the pursuit of dynamic, messy, and sometimes-failed experimentation; all within flexible, local, and collective modes of organizing. In a space that values movement-generated theory, these activist scholars offer an alternative epistemology of everyday life and survivability, committed to transformative visions of people’s current lives and social realities.

Conclusion

Among the many disastrous lessons of the rise of the carceral state is a foundational one for criminology. Criminologists have underestimated the crisis of credibility that the US criminal justice system now faces. As sociolegal scholar Jonathan Simon argues, “Beyond the numbers, the quantitative story of mass incarceration, we as a society know shockingly little about what this far-from-natural disaster has wrought, the qualitative story of mass incarceration” (2014: 3). The “depth of depravity” that we and Simon express astonishment at, of course, exceeds the violence done to the daily lives of prisoners (Simon’s focus) and extends into the lived experiences of their families, loved ones, and communities—the culture from which new abolitionism arises. As one starting point, attention must be given to the affective life of pain and suffering that the communities hardest hit by incarceration experience (Brown, 2012). In that pursuit, we must study the knowledges that experience has produced, a rich subaltern history of fugitivity, abolition, and transformation. We encourage criminologists to assume what abolitionists in the US have always known: the likelihood of penal persistence, asking how carcerality may expand and morph under politically bipartisan neoliberalism and fiscal crisis in the US (Aviram, 2015; Schept, 2015) and beyond. As anti-prison activists and scholars have been careful to show, efforts to reform—even efforts to abolish—prison have been incorporated into a “carceral humanism” and enabled the PIC to expand (Kilgore, 2014b; Law, 2014; Musto, 2013; Schept, 2015).

A critical carceral studies is required to intervene in dominant criminological narratives about the carceral state in order to broaden and sharpen abolitionist analytical vantages. We offer an abolitionist perspective as a mode of analysis, a way in which to meaningfully disrupt our foundations and to retrieve the invisible histories of subjugation and freedom that criminology was built intentionally without. Such unsettling disturbs the prison’s naturalized place in American physical landscapes, cultural discourses, lived experiences, and moral economies as well as in the intellectual landscape and knowledge production of criminology. It asks what could have been there instead as well as what was always there and unacknowledged. It asks how conservative and liberal discourses played and continue to play primary roles in the production of this space and the formation of the carceral state. It insists criminologists give attention to the racialized social suffering and devastation that mass incarceration has produced across generations, and the incredible survivability of the abolitionists that have risen out of this experience. Against these contexts, the keywords and dominant discourses of criminology may be productively destabilized.

And while this article has focused upon the unprecedented circumstances of the United States in relation to both mass incarceration and abolition, we are not suggesting that the modes of analysis specific to the prison industrial complex and new abolition are generalizable. The global project and epistemologies of abolition require careful historical and contextual work. We are in need of new frameworks that will allow us to recognize the specific forms of carcerality that materialize in multiple contexts planet-wide and the freedom and emancipatory struggles they engender. As Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, UK, and European scholars have made clear, anti-carceral critiques develop out of the specific historical structures of cultural context. What we offer comes from a unique historical conjuncture symptomatic of the United States. We look forward to new and innovative histories and modes of analysis born of abolition, ways to pursue what Davis (2016: 139) names as “the possibility of political alliances that will move us in the direction of transnational solidarities” from Ferguson to Palestine, Christmas Island to Lampedusa.

Criminology has been an important contributor to the empirical narrative of how the state became “carceral,” that is how the powers to police and punish drive the boundaries and borders of everyday life. The challenge that remains is to work with and learn from those in the crucible of carceral experience in order to move through critique to the rigorous, promising work of envisioning and practicing a world otherwise. In that sense, the project of abolition remains an invitation—an open question—for criminologists.

Footnotes

Note

Michelle Brown is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Tennessee. She is author of The Culture of Punishment (NYUP, 2009) and coeditor of the journal Crime, Media, Culture and the forthcoming Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology.

Judah Schept is an associate professor of justice studies at Eastern Kentucky University. He is the author of Progressive Punishment: Job Loss, Jail Growth and the Neoliberal Logic of Carceral Expansion (New York University Press, 2015).

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