What is prison abolition?
In the 1960s and
1970s, groups like the U.S. Prison Research Education Action Project
and the Norwegian Association for Penal Reform advocated for a world
without prisons. Instead, incarceration boomed, growing in the United
States from about 200,000 prisoners to unprecedented 2 million and
more. Now, a movement to abolish prisons has returned, with
grassroots movements and critical research converging on an
uncompromising critique of the regime of mass incarceration.
This book provides a
trenchant guide to prison abolition, explaining why the solution to
the criminal justice crisis is ending policing, imprisonment, and
mass surveillance, and building a society that creates alternatives
to punishment and carceral solutions to social contradictions. The
book details and evaluates abolitionist projects throughout North
America that provide alternative models, and reveals what it means to
work for abolition today, what are ways to "de-carceralize"
society.
