Introduction
Prisons are hyper-productive factories of injustice, oppression, immiseration and violence. For more than one hundred years, criminal justice researchers, and officials have been aware of the inability of prisons to address harm, and of their perverse social consequences. For more than fifty years, prison abolitionists have been researching and campaigning for the end of imprisonment. However, for much of the last fifty years, prison populations across the world have ballooned, as tough-on-crime law and order policies have been implemented alongside neoliberal economics and austerity.
In recent years, however, mobilisations of millions of people across the world in support of Black Lives Matter, and related social movements, have spurred interest in abolitionism as a part of the response to racial injustice. This flood of public and academic interest in abolitionism has also exposed some of the shortcomings of abolitionism as a viable political project. Despite some important wins, abolitionists have not yet been able to capture this political moment. This is, in part, because of limitations within abolitionist scholarship and activism.
Based on the experience of the abolitionist movement in Aotearoa/New Zealand, this paper analyses the limitations of abolitionist thought and suggests some ways forward. It argues that abolitionist scholars and activists have failed to seriously engage with alternatives to prisons. This is a fundamental issue. If we are committed to the abolition of prisons, then we must engage rigorously with how to reach that goal. Indeed, without a serious account of what could come after prisons, we limit the possibilities of a community-led, activist, scholarly and political movement.
The state of abolitionist thought
Prison, penal, carceral abolition
Although many Christian abolitionists trace their understandings of abolitionism to the teachings of Christ, in the modern era the term “prison abolition” gained currency with the publication of Thomas Mathiesen’s The Politics of Abolition in 1974. Early definitions of prison abolition involved a moral, political, and pragmatic commitment to ending or significantly reducing the use of imprisonment as a response to social harm. In context of the United States, prison abolition is often interpreted as a commitment not only to ending imprisonment, but also to ending the conditions that make prisons possible. For abolitionists such as Angela Davis, this means that prison abolition is also a feminist, anti-racist, anti-oppressive, decolonial and, ultimately, democratic socialist project.
Outside of the United States, much of the scholarship developed from a concern with prison abolition to a broader focus on penal abolition, with the largest prison abolitionist academic conference changing its name from the International Conference on Prison Abolition to Penal Abolition in 1987. Collected works and journal special issues have also, outside of American activist literature, tended to use the term “penal abolition”. Penal abolition is broader in scope than prison abolition. It refers to the abolition of punishment per se. Rather than simply opposing prisons as a mechanism for punishment, penal abolitionists argue that it is immoral and ineffective for the state to deliberately inflict punishment on its citizens. The term “penal abolition” appears less often in American than in European literature.
Some abolitionist scholars advocate for movements and scholarship to refocus on “carceral abolition”. Carceral abolition refers to the ending of all forms of control and deprivation of liberty by the state, increasing its focus to include immigration detention, coercive detainment in mental health facilities, and other forms of state control and surveillance.
The distinctions between prison, penal, and carceral abolition are not just a matter for academic interest. They also have implications for political strategy and action. Whereas prison abolition is primarily concerned with the material practices of an institution that can be undone through campaigning for the demand for legislative and regulatory changes, penal abolition requires an equally important, but somewhat more abstract, task of adjusting social morality toward punishment. Carceral abolition requires the transformation of a greater number of institutions of oppression.
I am primarily concerned with prison abolition, rather than penal or carceral abolition. I have decided to focus on prison abolition specifically because the prison is one of the state’s single most effective means of oppression. Although I am committed to the moral sentiment of penal abolition, I find it more difficult to analyse how such an ideal could be concretised in terms of policy and practice. It is that desire for material, rather than simply intellectual, change that makes prison abolition a more logical way to frame this text.
Idealist abolitionism
A significant portion of abolitionist literature is idealist. By idealist, I mean that this literature is primarily concerned with ideas rather than material conditions. This distinction between materialism and idealism is not absolute, but I use it to describe tendencies present in the literature, which may be simultaneously present in some texts.
Penal abolition is a form of idealism, concerning itself less with material practices of imprisonment, for example, and more with the concepts underpinning justice systems. Penal abolition has, as its end goal, a change in the way people think about and approach justice and punishment.
In other ways, idealist abolitionism envisions a perfect world without prisons or punishment – but no way to get there. The Abolitionist Demands, for example, insists that Aotearoa/New Zealand be transformed into a society that is a post-capitalist, decolonised utopia, devoid of police, courts, and prisons. As interesting as these demands may be, they remain in the realm of ideas because no clear way to achieve them is outlined.
In addition, some idealist abolitionists outright oppose the proposition of alternatives to prisons because to do so would be to accept a less than perfect ideal. The moral commitment to the abolition of punishment requires a condemnation of any justice alternatives to prison that involve punishment. While one can certainly imagine alternatives to prisons, many of these alternatives, such as day fines, home detention or even restorative justice may amount to punishment. The penal abolitionist perspective, therefore, places considerable limits on possible justice alternatives.
The question remains: how do we achieve abolition? The answers to that question from idealist forms of abolitionism remains unclear.
The category of “idealist abolitionism” is not a judgement of the quality of the literature. Texts such as Ruggiero’s Penal Abolitionism: A Celebration provide a rigorous and insightful analysis of the philosophical underpinnings of abolitionist thought. However, Ruggiero outlines only a limited analysis of existing social conditions and possibilities for transformation. Idealist abolitionism does not grapple with how to transition from mass or hyper-incarceration to a society without prisons.
Linguistic abolitionism
As a subset of idealist abolitionism, linguistic abolitionism, found particularly outside of critical criminological scholarship, is primarily concerned with how language can be used to undermine or underpin the project of abolition. For example, Brown and Schept argue that prison abolitionism must abolish “normative discourses and vocabularies, the ways of thinking and being that constitute the conditions of the prison–industrial complex’s (PIC) possibility.” In another example, Lemaster and Mapes argue, in the classroom context, that “carceral logics” are reproduced by
the strategic deployment of discursive constructions like “civility” and “criminality” to distinguish “good” from “bad” students. Carceral logics are further embedded, for example, in the public speaking course that relies upon—as it asserts—a hierarchy of speaker and audience intelligibility informed in and through US-centric whiteness.
Such scholarship is more commonly found in humanities journals and tends to promote an abolitionist project that changes how we talk about prisons, harm, and justice.
The most useful example of this form of abolitionism was commissioned by JustSpeak, a New Zealand-based criminal justice reform organisation. “How to Talk About Crime and Justice” is an insightful study of how specific messaging can be used to convince New Zealanders of the need for justice transformation. It is, however, an exception in that its recommendations of linguistic tactics are based on primary data sourced from human research methods. Unfortunately, much of the rest of the recommendations of linguistic abolitionist literature are more abstract, with no engagement with how language can be used to convince. Instead of a praxis-oriented approach to language, it promotes the use of precise language because of its scholarly accuracy or presupposed political implications.
Language is essential to the social construction of the material world. For this reason, our use of language must be interrogated and refined. However, a politics of transformation requires more of us than to simply be “at war with phrases.” Consequently, this article is more concerned with changing material practices than changing words. Of course, changing language and changing thinking will be necessary to politically achieve abolition. Linguistic prison abolitionism is most useful in its engagement with tactics for persuasive political communication, rather than academic jargon-mongering.
Anarchist abolitionism
Anarchism and abolitionism have substantial degrees of political and philosophical overlap. Indeed, many leading abolitionist scholars are anarchist-inspired. This analytic overlap has led some scholars to describe abolitionism as simply a specific site for anarchist struggle against the state.
In order for prison abolition to be achieved through purist anarchist praxis, the entire state would need to be replaced by localised structures of mutual aid and community justice. Prison abolition, from this perspective, should not allow for state involvement, or “co-option”, in the creation of an alternative justice system. Instead, abolition would occur by crowding out the state with alternative, community-led responses to harm. This theory of change, in its purist form, sees no role for the state in ensuring that community justice upholds human rights and does not devolve into vigilantism. It also cannot envision a role for the state in creating transitional programs and practices that could be used to reduce incarceration now, rather than in a nebulous anarchist future. Indeed, if prison abolition is only possible once the state has been abolished, abolition will have to wait until the completion of an anarchist revolution. If this is the case, the abolitionist project is substantially greater and more difficult than simply removing and replacing the prison system. I contend, on the contrary, that abolition is only possible if the state’s power and resources are used to democratically create alternatives to prisons.
At its least useful, the anarchist concern with all forms of power and coercion leads to indiscriminate conclusions such as that “prisons are also institutions such as schools, nursing homes, jails, daycare centers, parks, zoos, reservations, and marriage, to name a few”. I would counter-argue that the conflation of the state violence of imprisonment with the existence of parks is offensive to the survivors of prison violence. Specificity around what is to be abolished – the prison – is required.
Much of the existing literature on abolitionist alternatives, and transformative justice in particular, is underpinned by anarchist or anti-state philosophy. However, these alternatives, such as the mutual aid system of housing homeless people during the height of the COVID-19 crisis in Minneapolis in 2020, are intentionally hyper-local and do not contest power through other democratic processes.
In this way, much of this anarcho-abolitionist organising for alternatives to prisons is what Srnicek and Williams describe as “folk politics,” which
aims to bring politics down to the “human scale” by emphasising temporal, spatial and conceptual immediacy. At its heart, folk politics is the guiding intuition that immediacy is always better and often more authentic, with the corollary being a deep suspicion of abstraction and mediation.
They argue that the left’s tendency to focus on local struggles, at the expense of wider structural issues, means that the structural sources of political issues are not addressed. With regard to anarcho-abolitionism, the transformative change needed to enact abolition seems unlikely to occur. Structural transformations of state-based justice systems are required to address the injustices of prison system at its roots.
Punitive materialism
In the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement, there has been substantial public and academic interest in police and prison abolition. Interestingly, this has encouraged the engagement of liberal and even conservative-minded legal academics and non-critical criminologists with abolitionism. Writing from the perspective of the criminal justice establishment in the United States, these scholars aim to achieve prison abolition using existing alternatives that maintain, or even expand, punitive logics.
This is a fascinating, but concerning, new trend. It includes a full-throated defence of retributionism, as well as a call for electronic decarceration, which would electrocute “criminals” who fail to comply with release orders, such as leaving a designated area.
The strength of this literature is that it engages earnestly with the material conditions at hand and the currently existing alternatives. It also provides a nuanced critique of existing literature, particularly its failure to meaningfully engage with alternatives to prisons. However, the proposals coming out of this literature could entail a drastic expansion of authoritarian state tendencies. Granting the state the power to electrocute people remotely for failing to comply with orders could simply lead to a new form of pain being inflicted on the bodies of hyper-criminalised communities. Deliberately inflicting pain as a form of punishment or coercion to behave in a certain way could also amount to torture under the United Nations Convention Against Torture.
By maintaining the current criminal justice system, but switching out prisons for electronic incarceration, this approach also presupposes an individualistic ontology of crime: that there are bad individuals in prison who need to be locked up. By assuming a logical coherence to the current system, this literature does not recognise that harm is pervasive across our societies and that a miniscule subsection of people who harm others ever face consequences, let alone imprisonment, for their actions.
If the purpose of these supposed alternatives is to have a “realistic” approach to crime and harm, they would fail to address the much greater scale of harm caused by the powerful. Crimes of the powerful cause much greater harms in terms of the number of people killed or injured and the economic cost. For example, an estimated 1.9 million people die annually from workplace-related accidents and diseases, while an estimated 8.7 million people die annually due to fossil fuel pollution. Contemporary justice systems tend to be woefully inadequate at addressing these forms of harm. Justice alternatives that fail to address this much greater source of death and destruction can never be a “realistic” approach. Therefore, beyond serious human rights concerns, justice alternatives that simply transfer existing prison populations to new forms of punishment are insufficient to address harm more broadly in society.
Activist literature
Prison abolitionism is not limited to scholars. As a companion to abolitionist scholarship, and sometimes in tandem with it, activist movements around the world have also produced some important interventions in abolitionist thought. Activist-abolitionist literature tends to focus on practical steps that activists and citizens can take to address harm and or build the abolitionist movement. Some of the richest work in the United States comes from Critical Resistance. Critical Resistance has written a series of toolkits about prison and police abolition and has clarified the difference between “reformist reforms” and “abolitionist reforms”. On the one hand, Critical Resistance sees reformist reforms as changes that uphold, increase power or funding, or provide legitimation to the system. On the other, abolitionist reforms are those which undermine, defund, or remove its most repressive elements. An abolitionist approach to reform envisions a role for addressing inhumane prison conditions, such as solitary confinement, even if efforts such as these are not the abolition of prisons itself.
Organisations such as Generation FIVE and No Pride in Prisons (now People Against Prisons Aotearoa) have written handbooks on how to run transformative justice processes. These organisations see transformative justice as a viable alternative to the criminal justice system for dealing with serious harm within communities. Transformative justice seeks to understand and address underlying structural issues at the source of harmful behaviour and, instead of simply restoring relationships, transform the relationship that perpetrators of harm have to themselves, their victims, and their community. There has been active engagement with transformative justice in activist literature. However, scholarly engagement and assessment of transformative justice is less forthcoming. Where scholars have engaged with transformative justice, the work has tended to be more descriptive than evaluative, meaning that the effectiveness or lack thereof of transformative justice practice is in need of further assessment.
Straddling the line between activist and academic scholarship is the 1976 text Instead of Prisons, written by the Prison Research Education Action Project. This text is a materialist argument for prison abolition, outlining the problem with prisons and what we can about them. The work details an “attrition model” of controlled phasing away from prisons and the eventual abolition of prisons within ten years. While the authors’ goals have not been achieved, their text remains a cornerstone of abolitionist thought and activism.
Activist literature tends to be more concerned than much of the academic literature with making convincing political arguments and engaging with the material conditions at hand. In general, its strength lies in its understanding of criminal justice systems, often from first-hand accounts. Its limitations are the lack of critical and evaluative research on transformative justice and other justice alternatives.
Materialist abolitionism
By materialist abolitionism, I refer to abolitionist scholarship and activism that is concerned with concrete practices and the material conditions experienced by people involved in the criminal justice system. To establish materialist abolitionist alternatives to prisons, scholars investigate what is possible based on currently existing material conditions and justice technologies, as well as what is not currently possible, but could or should be.
In The Politics of Abolition, first published in 1974, Mathiesen grapples with the material struggles of prisoners and their allies for abolition in Scandinavia. Mathiesen has made a substantial contribution to abolitionist thought and politics, with changes to the criminal justice systems in Norway, Sweden, and Finland, in particular, stemming from his intellectual and political interventions.
Despite Mathiesen’s unparalleled contribution to abolitionist praxis, there are some limitations to his work. Although Mathiesen is not wholly opposed to “negative reforms” (reforms that address gross human rights violations), he argues that the primary aim of reforms should be toward “shrinking” the system. Based on his experience of the net-widening effects of “alternatives” to prisons such as probation, he argues that the abolitionist movement should be wary of “planned” alternatives, unless they are introduced alongside a concerted legislative effort to reduce the prison population.
Mathiesen further argues that abolition is, necessarily, an “unfinished” project. The goal of abolitionist movements throughout history, such as slavery abolitionism, has been to address gross injustice and oppression. Mathiesen argues there can be no end to abolitionist history, as we cannot today adequately forecast what oppression or injustice may occur in a post-prison society. This argument may be taken to mean that abolitionists should not propose “finished” plans for what abolition could look like and therefore should not propose concrete alternatives at all. However, such an argument misunderstands Mathiesen’s concept of the “unfinished”. Mathiesen argues strongly in favour of having goals and plans, which are open to change. Indeed, a recognition of the inevitability that humans will never live in a utopia does not consequently require the rejection of all necessarily imperfect measures that could bring society closer to that ideal. Instead, the present project understands Mathiesen’s concept of the “unfinished” as a call to experiment, to propose imperfect solutions, but continue to adjust and evaluate with the goal of abolition in mind.
Another materialist abolitionist, Angela Davis, has made a unique contribution to abolitionist scholarship and movements. Since the publication of Are Prisons Obsolete?, Davis has been regularly cited across abolitionist literature of all themes mentioned above. Davis’s work is inspiring and speaks to multiple audiences with a success that other abolitionist scholars have not achieved. This general appeal means that scholars tend to pick and choose the elements of her work that support their arguments, with Davis acting almost as a placeholder for abolitionist “correctness”. Consequently, there is limited critical engagement with her work within abolitionist scholarship.
I argue that Davis is also a materialist abolitionist. This is not simply because of her continued commitment to Marxist analysis and democratic socialist politics, but because her analysis of the prison industrial complex (PIC) is historically informed and concerned with existing material conditions. This analysis leads Davis to contend that abolitionist alternatives to imprisonment must include broader social changes to address capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and other “structures of oppression”. For Davis, we must “imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions”, or
a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment-demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance.
Davis’s primary alternatives to prisons outlined in Are Prisons Obsolete? are changes to the American political economic structure that would ensure the universal provision of income, housing, education, health, and other basic services. While she recommends ‘reshaping systems of justice around strategies of reparation’ in the final pages of Are Prisons Obsolete?, these recommendations do not amount to a concrete outline of how such a justice system would operate. Davis comes to abolition not as a criminologist, but as a former political prisoner and a political thinker more broadly. Her Marxist feminist analysis, rather than being primarily concerned with the justice system alternatives, is more a case study of imprisonment as a symptom of the oppressive practices of global capitalism. My analysis here is not to undermine Davis’s longstanding commitment to abolitionist politics. Rather, it is to provide context for why the prison abolitionist alternatives that she proposes are more focussed on political economy and less justice-based.
There is, therefore, a gap in Davis’s contribution to materialist abolitionism. Material improvements to the standard of living of our most impoverished people is a core abolitionist alternative, but it is certainly not enough. The harm of the current criminal justice system is too great to wait to fix until after a socialist revolution, which would create programmes that ‘crowd out the prison’. Even if such a transformation occurred, conflict and social harm will still occur in such a society, as is inevitable in all human societies. As such, alternatives to prison cannot be simply political economic. Beyond values-based commitments to ‘restorative or reparative justice’, we also need to detail concrete justice alternatives. This project aims to extend Davis’s analysis to provide a materialist analysis of what justice alternatives to imprisonment could look like.
There is, however, one materialist abolitionist scholar whose analysis closely aligns with this project. Alex Vitale’s The End of Policing is a rigorous investigation of concrete alternatives to policing in the United States. Vitale provides an evidence-based analysis, assessing the effectiveness and social consequences of police alternatives. Throughout the book, he distinguishes between liberal reforms, such as police body cameras, and genuine alternatives to policing, such as housing-first homelessness policies and police disarmament. Vitale argues for police abolition by redundancy, by, for example, replacing policing functions like responding to mental health crises with a non-carceral civilian mental health support services. The End of Policing outlines, across multiple social problems such as drug abuse, homelessness, and gang violence, how the use of alternatives to police lead to better social outcomes. It also demonstrates the possible role non-abolitionist reforms could play in the expansion of the carceral net. This type of analysis is needed within prison abolitionist scholarship.
Extending abolitionist thought
Currently, abolitionist literature is not primarily concerned with what a future justice system without prisons could look like. Where alternatives are engaged, they are often hyper-localised, context specific, utopian, impractical, or even dangerous. Given the increasing popularity of abolitionism and recognition of the oppressive consequences of imprisonment, it is a pity that abolitionists have trouble outlining a coherent argument for what comes after or instead of prisons.
To make abolition a reality, we need more than just critique or hyper-local solutions. Abolitionist scholars and activists should be able to articulate an alternative vision for justice that can be adopted and campaigned on by social movements and democratic socialist parties. Without something concrete to fight for, abolitionists risk falling into the same pattern of reactive organising against the latest barbaric policy from the carceral state. While abolitionists have won some important concessions by this method of organising, the goal of prison abolition requires a broader political program that inspires social transformation, rather than stopping things from getting worse or reducing the size of the prison population. As Scott argues, this tension and need for a concrete plan for alternatives have haunted abolitionism for decades, with limited development.
In the rest of this text, I offer a framework from which we may be able to envision an entire replacement of the system. Rather than assessing a single alternative to replace prisons, the framework encourages an investigation of how numerous justice alternatives could interact and operate differently in a post-prison context.
Framework for abolition
In this section, I offer a way for abolitionist scholars and activists to assess prison alternatives, in order to encourage future scholarship and organising in this area. Any assessment of an abolitionist alternative to prisons will follow some kind of model or set of principles. It is a matter of whether those principles are implied in the analysis or explicit.
I favour an explicit outline of a framework of analysis for two reasons. First, an explicit framework provides greater opportunity for scholarly critique and refinement of this work. Imagining a post-prison future requires many people working together, honing our collective analysis. Leaving core assumptions unstated limits the potential for this debate and development of thought. Second, to the extent that this framework is useful for other scholars, I hope it will give more people the tools to assess and propose concrete abolitionist alternatives.
There needs to be substantial flexibility in the framework. Application of the framework cannot be a matter ticking boxes or reductive assessment. Rather the guiding principles outlined would enable a nuanced assessment of the alternatives. This nuanced assessment may require abolitionists to reconsider fundamental assumptions in our analysis or political sloganeering. For abolition to move beyond critique and toward building an alternative, we may need to embrace imperfect alternatives that, nonetheless, hold true to our values and replace the injustices of the prison.
The evaluative framework below is strongly influenced by Scott’s “abolitionist compass”. Although I developed my evaluative framework based on my scholarly and activist engagement with abolitionism independently from Scott, the overlap is considerable and noteworthy”. Scott’s compass outlines six principles to inform abolitionist alternatives: (1) “the protection of human dignity”; (2) “social justice”; (3) alternatives as contradicting or in competition with dominant systems; (4) “a genuine alternative to the criminal process”; (5) “legal safeguards and mechanisms of accountability”; (6) and that any intervention is “meaningful, relevant” and “constructive”.
Scott’s compass is a powerful guide that has subsequently informed his analysis of alternatives. The needle is pointing in the right direction, particularly in relation to social justice, procedural justice, respect for human rights and meaningful justice processes. However, the principles of contradiction with the dominant system and alternatives to the criminal justice system may be too restrictive. Implied in these principles are that 1) prison abolition is not possible in a capitalist mode of production and 2) there is no role whatsoever for a formal (criminal) justice system in a post-prison future. Although I have previously argued the case for both assumptions, I am no longer convinced that this analysis is correct.
First, prisons have emerged as the primary mode of punishment alongside the rise of capitalism. This is, in part, as Davis explains, because in an economic system where labour-time is the primary source of income for most people, punishment is expressed through a sentence of time. Capital also tends to benefit from a prison system that blames the poor for social problems while ignoring the greater scale of harm caused by the capitalist class. However, there is significant variability within capitalist societies in terms of the extent and scale of punishment and mass incarceration. There also have been moments in time, such as the early 1970s, when, given the impetus for criminal justice reform, prison abolition seemed inevitable and imminent, according to justice campaigners and officials. This variability suggests that we should approach the claim that abolition is impossible in capitalism with some scepticism. Because abolition has not yet occurred, we cannot definitively assert under which social conditions it may occur. Although we will not live in a just or fair society as long as capital is able to exploit and oppress, that is not to say that contradictions within the state could never allow for an evidence-based approach to criminal justice that transitioned away from prison. The point here is that abolition should not simply wait for perfect social conditions to call for abolitionist alternatives. Some alternatives will not be a fundamental threat to capitalism and that should not be a reason to forgo them. Rather than waiting for conditions to ripen, abolitionist praxis should involve organising and theorising for justice transformation, given our current conditions.
Second, it is premature to presuppose that there is no place, whatsoever, for a formal criminal justice system. There are undeniably numerous issues with formal justice systems, including their class and race biases, the alienation of victims and communities from justice processes, and their tendencies toward transactional and individualistic approaches to harm. However, some of the principles of formal justice, including the right to natural justice, a fair trial, and innocence until proven guilty, are important democratic safeguards. While they are often inadequately upheld, they should remain a component of how post-prison societies respond to harm. In addition, informal justice systems, where these basic rights may not be enforced by some kind of state or system of appeals, could facilitate vigilantism or grossly inequitable punishment. For these reasons, acknowledgement of the contradictions and limitations of both formal and informal justice systems requires abolitionists to be open to some role for a judiciary in a post-prison system.
Therefore, Scott’s compass, while useful, may be too limiting for an abolitionist strategy that is campaigning for the replacement of prisons in imperfect social conditions. Noting Scott’s contribution, I counter-propose the following framework:
First, any alternative must lead to more socially just outcomes. By this, I mean that negative social statistics around victimisation, impoverishment, health outcomes and educational achievements are alleviated or not worsened by the alternative. In addition, new adverse impacts of any potential alternative, which are likely in some cases, are not more damaging than the current justice system and do not exacerbate already-existing inequality.
Importantly, this principle assumes an abolition-and-replacement model, where the prison system no longer exists, or is rapidly reducing in size, while the alternative is being implemented. However, if the alternative being introduced alongside an existing prison system has more negative impacts, that contradiction would need to be examined. In some instances, an alternative may have a net-widening effect, increasing the number of people swept into the carceral justice system, if it is implemented alongside a system of mass incarceration. Abolitionists would need to be cautious about campaigning for such alternatives, where they are not tied to specific measures for decarceration.
Second, alternatives must address harm in a more meaningful way for victims. The purpose of this principle is two-fold. Primarily, the current system of incarceration does not achieve just outcomes for victims. Rather than being a core driver of justice processes, in criminal procedure, the victim can be reduced to a mere “witnesses” used by the prosecution in its case against an alleged perpetrator of harm. Victims often feel alienated from Court processes and can be “re-victimised”. Alternatives need to be assessed as to whether they provide recognition of harm for victims and the ability to achieve personal restitution, regardless of the relationship of the alleged perpetrator to the justice process.
Third, the purpose is to build a system that is better for everyone. The current prison system benefits few people, while causing oppression and immiseration, especially for socially and economically marginalised people. A system of alternatives that addresses these adverse consequences for hyper-criminalised communities without simultaneously addressing the failure of the current system to achieve justice for victims could undermine the moral and political legitimacy of an alternative. On the contrary, if alternatives can provide a vision for a justice system where people see themselves as being safer, the ability of reactionary groups to use fear-based messaging to undermine justice alternatives may be addressed.
Fourth, there must also be a likely reduction in social harm because of an alternative. If, for example, an alternative could lead to vigilantism or mob justice, or facilitate the production of further harm, it cannot be supported. Indeed, understanding the prison as a site for the reproduction of violence, alternatives should contribute to a reduction in violence, including interpersonal and structural violence. If an alternative could increase violence or social harm, it should not be adopted.
Fifth, an alternative should be assessed as to whether it could be used in an oppressive manner. Abolitionists should not recommend alternatives that provide new mechanisms of oppression that expand the carceral state. However, there is a need for nuance here. The perspective of some anarchist or idealist abolitionists is that any justice system that depends on the state is inherently oppressive of an individual and community’s right to determine justice on their own terms. I reject this assertion. Instead, I see a role for the state in upholding universal human rights against a completely devolved system of justice that is open to vigilantism. Any alternative must uphold the dignity of all people involved in a justice process. Alternatives must not contravene universal human rights standards.
Unfortunately, there will not be simple answers to or applications of these principles. For some alternatives, there will be insufficient data to evaluate. For others, there may be enough data to extrapolate findings, but uncertainty will remain. The point of this framework, however, is to offer a guide for how abolitionist scholars and activists could work to build a coherent set of alternatives and end the use of imprisonment.
Concluding questions for abolitionists
In this final section, I suggest some possible avenues for investigation that may be fruitful for abolitionists who are interested in developing an integrated system of alternatives to prison. I identify these areas not to give definitive answers, but to pose questions that abolitionists may need to consider.
First, for abolitionists organising in settler-colonial states, our work should begin by acknowledging pre-colonial legal systems and the role indigenous justice systems should play in the future. In Aotearoa/New Zealand, for example, abolition would require the devolution of power from the Crown to Māori to implement tikanga Māori (customs, laws, and protocols) processes to respond to harm. What role might constitutional change play in achieving abolition? What roles, relationships, and responsibilities do non-indigenous abolitionists have in ensuring that rights of indigenous peoples to self-determination are met in any future justice system?
Second, abolitionists should consider what role, if any, Courts, and the formal legal system could play in a post-prison society. In particular, we could return to the question of whether tort law could provide a viable alternative set of legal principles and procedures, as suggested by early abolitionist scholars. We also need answers to the question of how to respond to non-compliance with prison alternatives. How can this future justice system respond to harm-doers who are unwilling to participate in justice alternatives? To what extent should judicial coercion or compulsion remain in a justice system without prisons?
Third, there is a plethora of abolitionist and non-abolitionist literature on informal justice, restorative justice, and transformative justice. However, questions remain about how informal and restorative justice processes can be scaled and resourced, and how they can be democratically implemented. To what extent, if at all, do these alternatives need to be formalised and integrated into formal justice systems, counter to their anti-formalisation philosophies? How can a devolved justice system that places power in the hands of communities ensure that responses to harm are just and do not become vigilante justice?
Fourth, abolitionists should consider if there could be a role for financial penalties and compensations in a post-prison society. Where fines are not adjusted to the income of the fined person, they can be grossly inequitable and can punish the poor disproportionately compared to the wealthy. Is there, however, a role for day fines, or fines adjusted to the income of the fined person, in a post-prison society? When might fines be an appropriate response to harm and how could they be implemented, if at all, in an equitable way? As a corollary, abolitionists could investigate whether a victim insurance system, such as the Accident Compensation Corporation in Aotearoa/New Zealand, could be introduced or expanded to provide broader victim support. There is an emerging literature about insurance as an alternative to the justice system, which requires critical examination. How do we provide victims of harm with restitution and support, in every instance of harm, independently of any justice outcome for perpetrators of harm?
Fifth, electronic monitoring and community detention has a bad reputation in abolitionist scholarship, being seen as a net-widening tool that sweeps more people into the criminal justice system. Is there a way these technologies could be used in a non-oppressive manner and, if so, how? How can the use of such technologies be limited to exceptional circumstances, rather than used as a matter of course as a part of bail, parole, or probation? Is there a way to reconceptualise community detention to be limited to the smallest possible number of people who would otherwise be in prison, rather than an addition to the prison?
Sixth, for many abolitionists such as Davis, democratic socialism is a core element of our vision for a post-prison society. What could be the possible justice consequences of a state that guarantees a basic minimum standard of living through universal basic services, universal basic income, universal housing guarantees, or universal provision quality education? What role can poverty alleviation and the empowerment of working-class communities play in reducing social harm and achieving justice in a post-prison society?
If abolitionists can answer these questions, we may be in a stronger position to demand the transformative changes that are needed to end imprisonment. Abolitionists must propose a coherent set of alternatives to imprisonment. Many alternatives are already in place and have been working effectively for decades. What abolitionists lack, however, is a vision of an integrated system of alternatives that extends beyond hyper-local programmes. I offer a framework which, I hope, can be useful for my colleagues and comrades in the abolitionist movement. The road to abolition is long, but not impossible. With concerted effort, we can end the barbaric practice of imprisonment and create a more just, more equal, and safer world.
