Starting a Dialogue: From Radical Criminology to Critical Resistance

Kurti, Zhandarka

doi:10.5195/jwsr.2021.1051

Cited by 1 publication

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“…We are reminded of how in the 1960s and 1970s anti-prison activism and scholarship was deeply connected to feminist, queer, Black, Latinx, and Red power movements. As Tony Platt has argued, political organizing and movement work was an integral part of the rise of radical criminology in the late 1960s and 1970s, as scholars and activists worked side by side on issues related to policing, prisons, and wider questions of state violence and created spaces that supported radical intellectual and political work which challenged mainstream social science approaches to social problems (Kurti, 2021). These efforts were quickly marginalized as radical social movements were criminalized by the state; criminology and criminal justice departments were institutionalized via state funding across universities (Kitossa and Tanyildiz, 2022; Schept et al, 2014); and the punitive turn gained wider legitimacy in American political life; all of which had profound implications for the transformation and reorganization of the American state as well as the capacity for intergenerational dialogue about the lessons learned.…”

Section: The George Floyd Rebellion and Abolitionist Praxismentioning

confidence: 99%

Carceral reckoning and twenty-first century US abolition movements: Generational struggles in the fight against prisons

Kurti

Brown

2023

Punishment & Society

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The spectacle of racist state violence in the middle of a global pandemic was the spark that ignited one of the largest Black led and multiracial protest movements in recent history. The George Floyd rebellion propelled abolitionist politics from the margins to the mainstream of American political life. In the span of a few months, abolitionism supplanted liberal visions of reforming the carceral state. While important academic work continues to highlight the social and historical context that produced such widespread resistance to the American punishment regime, very little attention has been paid to how and why abolitionism gained such mainstream acceptance. We argue that the successful mainstreaming of the twenty-first century abolitionist response to the crisis of the carceral state is due to generational and intergenerational experiences of mostly Black and Brown organizers fighting against policing and incarceration. As new abolitionism forces reckonings with the carceral state and its major institutions, through important shifts, methodologies, and newly imagined forms of freedom, these movements necessitate new questions in the study of punishment: What are the tensions and contradictions that twenty-first century abolitionists are contending with as they build intergenerational movements against policing and prisons? How does the abolitionist legacy inform the work that we do as scholars and activists? How does the carceral reckoning realign political education and struggle?

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Section: The George Floyd Rebellion and Abolitionist Praxismentioning

confidence: 99%