The bold voices and inspiring visions of today’s revolutionary
abolitionist movement.
Beyond border walls
and prison cells—carceral society is everywhere. In a time of mass
incarceration, immigrant detention and deportation, rising forms of
racialized, gendered, and sexualized violence, and deep ecological
and economic crises, abolitionists everywhere seek to understand and
radically dismantle the interlocking institutions of oppression and
transform the world in which we find ourselves. These oppressions
have many different names and histories and so, to make the
impossible possible, abolition articulates a range of languages and
experiences between (and within) different systems of oppression in
society today.
Abolishing
Carceral Society presents the bold voices and inspiring visions
of today’s revolutionary abolitionist movements struggling against
capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism, ecological crisis, prisons, and
borders.
In the first of a
series of publications, the Abolition Collective renews and boldly
extends the tradition of “abolition-democracy” espoused by
figures like W.E.B. Du Bois, Angela Davis, and Joel Olson. Through
study and publishing, the Abolition Collective supports radical
scholarly and activist research, recognizing that the most
transformative scholarship is happening both in the movements
themselves and in the communities with whom they organize.
Abolishing
Carceral Society features a range of creative styles and
approaches from activists, artists, and scholars to create spaces for
collective experimentation with the urgent questions of our time.
Through essays,
interviews, visual art, and poetry, each presented in an accessible
manner, the work engages with the meaning, practices, and politics of
abolitionism in a range of historical and geographical contexts,
including: prison and police abolitionism, border abolition,
decolonization, slavery abolitionism, antistatism, antiracism, labor
organizing, anticapitalism, radical feminism, queer and trans
politics, Indigenous people’s politics, sex worker organizing,
migrant activism, social ecology, animal rights and liberation, and
radical pedagogy.