Growing Strong
Abolition Is Not Synonymous With Destruction, But With Transformation By Jazz Breen
to allow communities to thrive. The systemic issues acknowledged by abolition are rooted within the violent processes of colonialism, capitalism and imperialism. Prison abolition is thus inherently anti-colonial, anti-capitalist and anti-imperial. This means acknowledging how states control and police marginalised groups, perpetuating cycles of violence. It also means how white Western cultural hegemony undermines the importance and value of non-Western ways of understanding health, justice and community.
This article was first published in 2021. I would like to preface this article with an acknowledgement that the concepts in this text are the result of an accumulation of knowledge over decades, with key contributors being Black women. I could not hope to fully explain abolition within this article, so I have listed a number of texts at the end which I recommend as further reading. The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement on a global scale in 2020 brought with it increasingly popular calls to ‘defund the police’ and ‘abolish the prison industrial complex’. Abolitionists, activists and hyper-policed communities around the world welcomed this, as the broader public openly discussed the ideas of abolition for the first time. Within Australia, Indigenous activists organised some of the largest demonstrations against police brutality in decades, highlighting that over 470 Indigenous people have died in custody since 1991. However, as is natural with social change, increased discussion of new topics brings about misleading information and active opposition. This article is an attempt to counter this by providing an explanation of the core ideas of abolition.
Abolitionist thinking also acknowledges that those who commit what is seen as crime are not experiencing violence or injustice for the first time.
What is abolition?
Alongside calls for the abolition of prisons and police have been calls for carceral reform. If the goal was to fix a broken system then these might be good ideas. But the carceral system is not broken. It is working in the exact way it was planned to work.
Experiences of trauma, poverty, and exploitation are not fixed by locking up those who react negatively within their environmental circumstances. The underlying causes of violence and harm do not disappear once someone has been relocated into a prison cell. Considering that 46% of Australian prisoners return to prison within two years of being released, it is clear that the current system does not adequately end cycles of violence and harm. Why not reform?
The basic premise of abolition is that the use of carceral control and surveillance to address systemic social issues exacerbates violence and harm. The abolitionist argument is that resources must instead be re-allocated towards dismantling systemic sources of violence and harm. Abolition is not an argument for ignoring social unrest and violence. It is an argument for addressing the root causes of these issues. Rather than punishing people, we need to radically transform the negative environmental circumstances which lead to antisocial behaviour and harm. Abolition means not only abolishing the existence of prisons and police, but developing processes of transformative justice
The carceral system is intrinsically tied to the processes of capitalism and colonialism. The first police forces were invented to serve the interests of slave owners and capitalist bosses. Even if police themselves were unbiased, they would still exist as an arm of the state which works to uphold laws designed to protect the economic interests of the rich.
17
