Dis-epistemologies of Abolition

Geographies of capital punishment: New directions and interventions

“…In the broadest terms, I suggest two complimentary ways forward in providing a foundation for studying the political geographies of capital punishment. These are: to focus on capital punishment through the lens of the dialectics of violence (Tyner & Inwood, 2014), and abolition politics (Ben‐Moshe, 2018a, 2018b; Gilmore, 2011, 2017; Heynen, 2015). Considering violence dialectically suggests that “violence must be theorized as not having a universal quality” but rather as something that is “produced by, and producing, sociospatially contingent modes of production” (Tyner & Inwood, 2014, p. 771).…”

“…Adopting a perspective of the dialectics of violence directly compliments efforts in geography and other disciplines to advance the notion of abolition. Indeed, Tyner and Inwood (2014, p. 781) write that their “argument is born out of a frustration that current concepts and understandings of violence do very little to transform the fundamental social relations that undergird society.” Likewise, abolition, in this context, is not used to mean the destructive erasure of something, but rather fundamental transformation that generates new conditions of social relations (Ben‐Moshe, 2018a). When focused on violent practices like capital punishment, an abolitionist approach is not focused merely on ending capital punishment, but rather transforming social relations and producing social space in which its existence is not possible.…”

Cripping criminology

“…To date, criminology has not invited crip people, scholars, and activists to be part of its endeavours, let alone invited it into its home (one need only look at the absence of crip issues in leading criminological journals). Some have tied crip criminological issues to critical criminology (see Ben-Moshe, 2018, and the Griffith Law Review ’s 2014 special issue ‘Disability at the Peripheries’), while others have avoided the criminological canon completely and pursued social science journals, including Disability & Society and Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies . It may make sense for crip criminology to be situated within critical criminology given its focus on crimes of the powerful and concern for structures of power that constitute people in particular ways.…”

Queering Smart Decarceration: Centering the Experiences of LGBTQ+ Young People to Imagine a World Without Prisons

“…Building on the notion that no one is disposable, abolitionists argue that the continued existence of prisons and jails necessitates that certain groups of people must be constructed as dangerous, deviant, or disposable and that these constructions are rooted in white supremacy, heteronormativity, genderism, classism, ableism, and other forms of oppression (for a discussion, see Gossett et al, 2014). For abolitionists, imagining a world without prisons includes imagining solutions to these and other social problems (Ben-Moshe, 2018). Importantly, reforming or abolishing prisons without addressing the root causes contributing to the mass incarceration crisis would likely lead to other systems of surveillance and punishment taking their place, a critical arena for social workers to consider as the field embarks on smart decarceration initiatives designed to redress the multiple harms wrought by incarceration.…”

“…In recent years, scholars have done just this by applying an intersectional, queer theory lens to prison abolition scholarship and organizing to examine how the state constructs “normative” gender and sexual identities and then uses surveillance, policing, and punishment to enforce those norms against any group who deviates from heteronormativity, for example, single black mothers and people living with disabilities and mental illness (Ben-Moshe, 2018; Cohen, 1999). Richie (2005) writes,queering the antiprison project requires that we remember that in the most general sense, antiprison work has been a project attempting to look critically at how deviance and, by extension, criminalization have been socially constructed to serve people in power…Simply put, because prisons require prisoners, criminals must be produced.…”