Abolition: A New Paradigm for Reform

Abstract

The catastrophic failure of the prison system in the United States has prompted a shift in criminal punishment system rhetoric and policy toward reform. Numerous programs and initiatives facilitate reentry for the hundreds of thousands of individuals coming out of prison every year, but these and other reforms remain problematic. They do little to improve the social and material conditions of those attempting to reintegrate. By failing to question the social, historical, political, and economic conditions of criminal system problems, they reproduce the oppressive social conditions that they are intended to address. This article diagnoses several major issues with conventional reform efforts in rehabilitation and reentry scholarship and praxis and argues that what is needed is not further attempts to improve these reforms but, rather, an approach that considers these problems through an abolitionist lens. An abolitionist frame, I suggest, is particularly useful in articulating suggestions for change. I apply an abolitionist analysis to an examination of reentry, illustrating how abolitionism helps to diagnose problematic reentry reforms and how an abolitionist approach to reentry can address these issues in a more effective, profound, and enduring way.

Reckoning With Racialized Police Violence: The Role of I-O Psychology

“…We want to acknowledge that we are not suggesting these changes take place in the absence of other structural or systemic changes and argue that both should be considered in tandem. Additionally, these recommendations can be leveraged in efforts to reform police departments but can also inform ways that new systems of community protection can be crafted in the future (Bell, 2020). Finally, we want to note that although we use law enforcement and police interchangeably throughout the manuscript, we are broadly referring to many types of policing (e.g., local police, highway patrol, deputy sheriffs) and believe our recommendations are broadly applicable across different types of law enforcement.…”

“Everything I Believe In Is Rooted in Love”: Women and Non-binary Activists of Color Fighting for the Practice and Promise of Abolition

“…Now abolition is gaining more momentum in crossing from movement spaces to academia. Some scholars have explored how an abolitionist approach might be pursued to transform and dismantle the criminal legal system contemporarily (Beardall, 2020;Bell, 2021;Clair & Woog, 2021;Vitale, 2018), as well as exploring abolition's place within traditional academic disciplines and feminisms (Brown & Schept, 2017;Whalley & Hackett, 2017). Other more recent academic and academic-adjacent abolitionist work includes research foregrounding an abolitionist analysis like Savannah Shange's (2019) conceptualization of an "abolitionist anthropology;" an academic journal, Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics, focused on "research, publishing, and study that encourage us to make the impossible possible, to seek transformation well beyond policy changes and toward revolutionary abolitionism;" and Abolition for the People, a 30-part series produced by Colin Kaepernick and LEVEL (a subsidiary of medium.com).…”

“…Put differently: it matters who is, and who is not, in the room" (Dilts, 2017, p. 60). Ultimately, pursuing an abolitionist framework in social science requires us to move beyond testable solutions to allow our imagination to play a more central role in rethinking the existence of the criminal legal system (Bell, 2021;Kaba, 2021), as well as pursue only those reforms that do not reinforce the current structure, but rather move toward a fundamental transformation and dismantling of it (Gilmore, 2007;Schenwar & Law, 2020).…”

Reckoning with racialized police violence: The role of I-O psychology

“…We want to acknowledge that we are not suggesting these changes take place in the absence of other structural or systemic changes and argue that both should be considered in tandem. Additionally, these recommendations can be leveraged in efforts to reform police departments but can also inform ways that new systems of community protection can be created in the future (Bell, 2021). Finally, we want to note that although we use law enforcement and police interchangeably throughout the manuscript, we are broadly referring to many types of policing (e.g., local police, highway patrol, deputy sheriffs) and believe our recommendations are broadly applicable across different types of law enforcement.…”