Abolition is Anti-Racist: Prison Abolitionism and the Black Radical Tradition
jadyn fauconier-herry
Jadyn is a recent graduate of New York University, where she earned her BA in Social and Cultural Analysis with a concentration in Race, Class, and Punishment. In her research and writing, Jadyn aims to honor the work of radical Black thinkers who have come before her and those that are organizing now. In her free time she likes to paint, read, and spend time with her cat, Gus.
Introduction: Foundations of Prison Abolitionist Politics and Praxis
Prison abolition, or the prison abolition movement, describes the collective of individuals and groups working to eliminate the use of incarceration as a response to societal problems. Unlike prison reformers who opt to make changes to the existing penal system, abolitionists maintain that prisons should be eradicated and replaced with rehabilitative and restorative responses to crime. In fact, the very concept of “crime” comes under question when understood from an abolitionist perspective. This is because abolitionists assert that most behaviors characterized as criminal are actually the outcome of deep-seated, societal issues and broader structural failures. Through this analysis, abolitionists place emphasis on the cycles of harm and violence that structures of inequity, such as racism and classism, perpetuate. By naming these root causes of crime, abolitionists recognize that responding to so-called criminal behavior with punishment and prisons ineffectively (and inhumanely) targets individuals in lieu of dismantling systems.
By complicating seemingly universal notions of law and order and justice and guilt, I believe abolitionist thinking challenges us to imagine new ways of living and living together. Beyond demolishing the physical space that is the prison, abolitionism is constantly engaged in the effort to build a more liberated world in its wake. By calling for a shift in our popular conception of crime and our relationship to retributive punishment, abolition uplifts practices of community support, reconciliation, and mutual aid. Consequently, prison abolitionism cannot be understood as a formulaic response with a singular correct solution but rather an open-ended, and never-ending project of bringing about a more liberated, supportive, and accountable world.
This broad philosophical ethic is even mirrored in the structure of the contemporary prison abolitionist “movement.” There is not one leading individual or specific group dictating how abolition will be realized. In fact, by recognizing crime to be a manifestation of various and varying societal problems, groups working to address issues such as housing insecurity or inadequate healthcare (while advancing alternatives to police and criminal legal intervention) can be understood as working within an abolitionist framework.
Yet, this is not to say that the movement is completely void of guiding structures. Writing at the inception of the modern movement for abolition, a collective of abolitionists known as the Prison Research Education Action Project (PREAP), acknowledged that, “[s]cores of groups focus on changing portions of the criminal (in)justice systems but few links exist between our efforts. We have no common ideology, language or identification of goals, no mechanism for a coalition. Yet the basis for an alliance is present.”[1] Considered the first ever handbook on prison abolition, PREAP’s 1976 book Instead of Prisons consists of nine chapters, with content ranging from political education materials, models for alternatives to incarceration, and artwork from both sides of the prison walls. It was here, within the handbook’s pages that PREAP began to sketch out a “basis for an alliance,” providing a comprehensive framework for the continued development of prison abolitionism as we know it today.
As the handbook explains, there are three interconnected pillars of prison abolitionism: moratorium, decarceration, and excarceration. Referred to by the handbook as the “Attrition model” after “Attrition’ [or] the rubbing away or wearing down by friction;'' these tenets for abolitionist praxis reflect “the persistent and continuing strategy necessary to diminish the function and power of prisons in our society.”[2] By dividing the project of abolition into these three pillars the members of PREAP were “[v]isualizing our long range goal of prison abolition as a chain of shorter campaigns around specific issues [in order to provide] us with the ‘handles’ we need on the overall problem.”[3] Not a catchall solution but rather “one example of a long range process for abolition.”[4]
The first pillar of the attrition model is a moratorium on all prison and jail construction. Identified as “the first and most important step towards systemic change,” moratorium campaigns demand an immediate halt to the building of “new cages.”[5] To abolitionists, a moratorium is necessary in order to create the mental and physical space needed to begin building a new world without prisons. Contemporarily, abolitionist coalitions such as No New Jails NYC (NNJ NYC), are dedicated to this first step of abolition.[6] Echoing Instead of Prisons’ understanding of a moratorium, NNJ NYC insists that an end to all jail construction in the city of New York is “an opportunity and an open door,’ for impactful change.”[7]
The second pillar of the attrition model is decarceration. Put simply, decarceration encompasses any effort to “[g]et as many prisoners out of their cages as possible.”[8] This goal is achieved through a series of “abolishing-type reforms.” According to PREAP, “abolishing-type reforms” to depopulate prisons and jails are “those that do not add improvement to or legitimize the prevailing system [such as] abolishing certain criminal law, abolishing bail and pretrial detention and abolishing indeterminate sentences and parole.”[9] Central to this push for decarceration is the abolitionist understanding that a majority of those imprisoned pose no threat to society. Prisoners who can be released immediately therefore include: “all pretrial detainees except those few who present a serious threat to public safety, those who have served their minimum sentences or are eligible for parole,” amongst other groups. Importantly however, abolitionist claims for the release of “non threatening” individuals are always scaffolded by the insistence that all forms of incarceration must be abolished. As a result, although the first wave of decarceration may include people that are legally innocent or convicted of non-violent crimes, prison abolitionism requires us to conceive of new ways to address even the most violent behavior and its harms that do not include incarceration or retributive punishment.
Finally, the third pillar of abolition known as excarceration encompasses strategies that divert people from prisons and jails in the first place. As with decarceration, abolitionists propose decriminalization of categories of crime as a helpful step towards keeping people out of prisons. Beyond this, however, excarceration calls on us to imagine new forms of conflict resolution and harm reduction as we turn away from policing and caging. Here, PREAP’s handbook offered an overview of potential, community-based dispute and mediation centers that function within an abolitionist ethic. PREAP proposed these community based mediation centers “be based on the ‘moot’ model, allowing both wrongdoer and wronged to be restored to lives of integrity and responsibility in the community.”[10] Unlike traditional court models of adjudication, the moot model of mediation avoids the dichotomy of innocent or guilty and instead works towards a mutually agreed upon compromise between all people involved. “The moot model for settling disputes is an excellent example of abolition ideology in practice,” the handbook explains, “[a] reconciliatory atmosphere is created in the setting where the conflict arose—the community—in order to encourage the disputants to express their differences, peacefully reaching a compromise.”[11] I believe the excaraceration pillar of abolitionist praxis highlights the ways in which the abolitionist theory of change extends beyond the demolition of prisons and jails. Instead, as the excarceration pillar shows, strengthening community ties, equipping individuals and groups with the resources to address interpersonal harms, and establishing the foundations for a future free of destructive criminal legal or law enforcement intervention is what’s centered in an abolitionist framework. By promoting local, community-based responses to harmful behavior in conjunction with widespread decriminalization and decarceration, abolition necessarily turns our attention to addressing the root causes of harm that are typically outsourced to (and exacerbated by) the criminal punishment system.
“This handbook is written for those who feel it is time to say ‘no’ to prisons,” wrote prisoner M. Sharon Smolick in the handbook’s preface, “for those open to the notion that the only way to reform the prison system is to dismantle it, for those who seek a strategy to get us from here to there.”[12] As we now know however, in the decades following Instead of Prisons’ publishing, the American prison system only grew. And, with the rise of racist and classist “tough on crime” policies and the advent of mass incarceration, the nation’s obsession with punishment only heightened. To date, America stands as the largest incarcerator in the world: about $182 billion is spent annually to imprison 2.3 million people.[13] Despite comprising only 13.4% of the nation’s population, Black people make up 37.5% of those imprisoned.[14] Across all races, low-income and poor people are more likely to be imprisoned—many solely for an inability to buy their freedom with bail money. Because of the preeminence of incarceration and punishment as the primary response to crime, systems of policing and imprisonment appear to many to be a necessary evil. Despite the efforts jump-started by PREAP and other abolitionists across history, such systems have been, and continue to be, prominent fixtures in American society. Even as more Americans became attuned to the devastations caused by the ever-expanding criminal punishment system, for many years the discourse of change has surrounded the question of prison reform, as opposed to prison abolition.
That is, of course, until now.
Across the nation we are currently witnessing an assertion of abolitionist sentiments into the mainstream. As COVID-19 outbreaks continue to spread within prisons, jails, and detention centers, the prison abolitionist demand to free those imprisoned within these facilities have gained more traction and appeal. Moreover, the resurgence of Black Lives Matter protests in response to the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor have brought the language and discourse around police abolition into the public lexicon. With this influx of attention and energy, the movement for abolition stands at a critical juncture.
How then, can we sustainably push the collective consciousness beyond the boundaries of reform and towards the radical possibilities of abolition? Especially in this current moment of uprising, how do we ensure that the discourse around police and prison abolition remain untainted by reformism and undaunted by opposition? I believe a sustained critical engagement with the theory and praxis advanced by prison abolitionists is one such way to do so. Here we can look to the mid-20th century during which the notion of prison abolition gained traction amongst radicals within the broader prisoners’ rights movement. In particular we can turn to two prolific abolitionist revolutionaries who contributed a wealth of sociopolitical theory to the movement: George Jackson and Angela Davis. Furthermore, using the work of Davis and Jackson as a broadening lens, we can see the ways in which the modern movement for prison abolition actually has roots that trace back further still. For example, as an inquiry into Jackson and Davis will show, prison abolition in the United States shares philosophical and theoretical ties with the tradition of radical Black liberation movements such as the movement to abolish chattel slavery. Ultimately, prisons and jails are an unnecessary evil that must be abolished. As the following analysis maintains, a wealth of Black theory, philosophy, and above all else, lived experiences, shows this to be true.
Abolition is Anti-Racist: Prison Abolitionism and the Black Radical Tradition
The following section analyzes the influence of the Black radical tradition on the development of prison abolitionism in the United States. Popularized by scholar Cedric Robinson, the term “Black radical tradition” refers to the historical legacy of Black resistance against racism and the oppression of Black peoples across time and place.[15] Stemming primarily from anticolonial and antislavery efforts, this tradition is a collection of intellectual, cultural, and action-based works by radical Black people to disrupt the social, political, and economic realities originating from anti-Black racism. Using the works of Jackson and Davis as a starting point, I will connect the theoretical contributions of Black radical thinkers such as Frederick Douglass and Fred Hampton to the development of prison abolitionist ideology. Through such an analysis I begin to highlight the rich archive of Black intellectual history and radical praxis that contemporary abolitionists can (re)turn to, learn from, and build upon. Furthermore, I trace the ways in which prison abolitionism as developed in the 1970s has foundations in Black radical movements, such as the movement to abolish chattel slavery and the Black Power movement. In doing so, I emphasize that contemporary calls for abolition are not unfounded or unprecedented, despite what the recent influx of mainstream attention may suggest. Instead, the movement for abolition exists within a longstanding continuum of radical Black action and organizing—a Black tradition of invaluable insights, perspectives, and lessons that we can invoke and extend as we struggle for change in our own time.
One of the most prominent ways in which prison abolitionists call upon the Black radical tradition in the formation of their anti-carceral politics is through a direct invocation of the American institution of slavery. Writing in the opening chapter of Instead of Prisons, the abolitionists of PREAP maintained:
Prison abolitionists arise from a living tradition of movements for social justice. Most especially is their connection with the 19th-century struggle against slavery. Imprisonment is a form of slavery—continually used by those who hold power for their own ends. And just as superficial reforms could not alter the cruelty of the slave system, so with its modern equivalent—the prison system. The oppressive situation of prisoners can only be relieved by abolishing the cage and, with it, the notion of punishment.[16]
Anticipating this conclusion by abolitionists, Jackson also insisted on an understanding of contemporary American prisons as an extension of slavery. Consequently, throughout Soledad Brother, Jackson’s first published text, Jackson both self-identifies as well as continuously refers to those imprisoned alongside him as slaves. “I don't want to raise any more black slaves,” insisted the revolutionary when describing the motivations for his politics, “We have a determined enemy who will accept us only on a master-slave basis. When I revolt, slavery dies with me. I refuse to pass it down again.”[17] For Jackson and his cohort of revolutionaries, linking the bondage of chattel slavery to the bondage of the prison was central in their anti-carceral critique.
This practice of connecting contemporary calls for the abolition of prisons to preceding efforts to abolish slavery achieves both rhetorical and practical ends. Rhetorically, such a move imbues prison abolitionism with profound moral weight. As historian Joy James notes in The New Abolitionists: (Neo)Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings, when anti-prison activists such as the ones at PREAP identify as “abolitionists” and imprisoned peoples such as Jackson identify as “slaves,” “[t]he moral suasion of old words (and the stench of old wounds), and antebellum memories” rise to the surface.[18] In a nation in which the popular imagination condemns slavery as a mistake of the past, rhetoric that argues the institution is alive and well forces individuals to reckon with their complicity in the racialized oppression of other human beings. It is with this knowledge, I believe, that Davis positioned the rousing rhetoric of James Baldwin as the first non-introductory section of her anti-prison anthology, If They Come in the Morning. “Dear Sister:'' writes Baldwin in “An Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis,” “One might have hoped that, by this hour, the very sight of chains on Black flesh, or the very sight of chains, would be so intolerable a sight for the American people, and so unbearable a memory, that they would themselves spontaneously rise up and strike off the manacles. But no, they appear to glory in their chains; now, more than ever, they appear to measure their safety in chains and corpses.”[19] Ultimately therefore, as was the case during the movement to abolish slavery, part of the project of abolishing prisons includes appealing to the morals or sympathies of the unchained masses.
Yet connecting prison abolition to the fight to abolish slavery is more than just a figurative move. And to suggest that Jackson and Davis invoked the legacy of slavery for purely rhetorical gains would be reductive. By linking the legacy of slavery to the reality of the prison system, they and their cohort of abolitionists were often literally maintaining that the two systems are in fact one and the same. Instead of being truly abolished, they argued, slavery was transformed into the contemporary American prison system. This argument draws on the way in which the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 outlawed slavery “except as punishment for a crime,” providing the framework through for which anti-Black oppression could thrive under the auspices of criminal “justice”.[20] Furthermore, the passage of Black Codes at the “end” of slavery and their expansion into the age of Jim Crow all facilitated the criminalization of blackness and legalized the express targeting of “free” Black people by the criminal legal system. In the years that followed the outlaw of chattel slavery, prisons became a site to punish, oppress, and warehouse Black and brown people. The police or “pigs,” to borrow Jackson’s language, were licensed to act as “instrument[s] of neoslavery.”[21] The courts were licensed to convict disproportionate numbers of Black people to the point that, as Davis explained in 1971, “[f]or the Black individual, contact with the law-enforcement-judicial-penal network directly or through relatives and friends, is inevitable because he is Black.”[22] Ultimately, as radical anti-prison activists argued, the ostensible end of chattel slavery simply heralded the birth of carceral slavery.
Recognizing this fact was a central component of both Davis and Jackson’s abolitionist praxis. In a 1970 letter to his lawyer Jackson explained: “After one concedes that racism is stamped unalterably into the present nature of Amerikan sociopolitical and economic life in general [...] and concedes further that criminals and crime arise from material, economic, sociopolitical causes, we can then burn all of the criminology and penology libraries and direct our attention where it will do some good.”[23] Elsewhere, as Davis notes, appeals to the historical and contemporary impact of anti-Black racism open up “occasions to link the immediate needs of the Black community with the forceful fight to break the fascist stronghold in the prisons and therefore to abolish the prison system in its present form.”[24] Endeavoring to awaken the general public to the way in which (neo)slavery was allowed to flourish in their allegedly free nation, prison abolitionism therefore seeks to fully recognize the demands for a nation free of slaves that their predecessors began centuries prior.
Turning more squarely to the ways in which blackness shaped the theoretical contributions of Jackson and Davis, in keeping with the Black radical tradition, both theorists ground their work in a profound ontological analysis of the Black experience. Beyond appeals to morality or correctives to history, their work insisted on communicating the Black condition in America and in American prisons. Inherent in this insistence was the forceful acknowledgment of the rightful dignity and oft-denied humanity of Black people. They wrote of the violence and destruction that characterized the Black reality in America and in doing so, solidified their own place within the Black radical tradition.
Angela Davis did this work notably through her seminal writings in the field of radical Black feminism. Troubled by the pervasive sexism she saw influencing the trajectory of the liberation movements that she was a part of, Davis researched, wrote, and published the 1971 essay, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves”—all whilst imprisoned in jail. In this essay, Davis rejects the historical myth of Black women as matriarchs or emasculating figures and provides a corrective to historiographies that marginalize or misrepresent the experiences of Black women during slavery. In doing so, as Joy James notes: “Davis offers one of the earliest analyses of the intersections of racism, sexism, and capitalism within the slave economy and one of the earliest essays on antiracist feminist theory contextualized in the black experience in the Americas”[25] In this text Davis introduces the concept of “deformed equality,” or the notion that Black women and Black men suffered equal exploitation of their labor under slavery. Such “equality” resulted in the disruption of traditional notions of femininity wherein Black women assumed both the feminine role of housekeeper within the slave household and the masculine role of laborer necessitated by her enslavement. As a result, although “the ruling class was male and rabidly chauvinistic, the slave system could not confer upon the black man the appearance of a privileged position vis-a-vis the black woman” and, the Black woman was required “to leave behind the shadowy realm of female passivity in order to assume her rightful place beside the insurgent male.”[26]
Throughout “Reflections” Davis insists on the profound revolutionary power of Black female labor during slavery. A power, Davis maintained, that Black women needed to recognize and reclaim in contemporary liberatory movements. Because she was dually relied upon by slave-masters for her labor and fellow slaves for her work in the home, the Black woman was “thrust by the force of circumstances into the center of the slave community.”[27] While traditional, masculinist interpretations of history focus almost exclusively on the violent rebellions of enslaved men against the institution of slavery, Davis maintains that it was the work of Black women that made such acts of rebellion possible:
Even as she performed her housework, the black woman's role in the slave community could not be identical to the historically evolved female role. Stripped of the palliative feminine veneer which might have encouraged a passive performance of domestic tasks, she was now uniquely capable of weaving into the warp and woof of domestic life a profound consciousness of resistance. With the contributions of strong black women, the slave community as a whole could achieve heights unscalable within the families of the white oppressed or even within the patriarchal kinship groups of Africa. Latently or actively it was always a community of resistance. It frequently erupted in insurgency, but was daily animated by the minor acts of sabotage which harassed the slave master to no end. Had the black woman failed to rise to the occasion, the community of slaves could not have fully developed in this direction. The slave system would have to deal with the black woman as the custodian of a house of resistance.[28]
Recognizing the unique sociopolitical power of Black women, Davis therefore characterized derogatory myths perpetuated against Black women in America as “an open weapon of ideological warfare” on behalf of a white supremacist and patriarchal society to keep Black people from recognizing the truly powerful possibilities of Black women.[29] Furthermore, by highlighting the unique ways in which Black women are oppressed by white supremacist heteropatriarchy, Davis’ insights anticipated the need for an intersectional understanding of race and gender within movements for abolition. Contemporarily, efforts such as the #SayHerName campaign and abolitionist groups such as Survived and Punished work to center gender alongside race and class in conversations of prison and police abolition.[30]
Through a reclamation of domesticity as rebellion Davis also points to the homes and communities forged by slaves as sights of profound insurrection:
If resistance was an organic ingredient of slave life, it had to be directly nurtured by the social organization which the slaves themselves improvised. The consciousness of their oppression, the conscious thrust towards its abolition could not have been sustained without impetus from the community they pulled together through the sheer force of their own strength. Of necessity, this community would revolve around the realm which was furthermost removed from the immediate arena of domination. It could only be located in and around the living quarters, the area where the basic needs of physical life were met.[31]
When understood through the lens of prison abolitionism, Davis’ recognition that such resistance was “improvised” suggests opportunistic spontaneity and gives credence to the power of grassroots, community-based efforts to dismantle systems. Furthermore I contend that her insistence on the revolutionary power of “nurturing” and “community” anticipated abolitionist demands for deinstitutionalized responses to crime. In recognizing that harm begets harm, and to move to a “realm which was furthermost removed from the immediate arena of domination,” abolitionists called for the establishment of “caring communities.”[32] Such a “caring, nonviolent community [could] provide resources, services, one-to-one relationships, peer group counseling opportunities and other restorative practices rather than penal punishment.”[33] Although slaves “were forcibly deprived of their humanity,” Davis identified how “the community gravitating around the domestic quarters might possibly permit a retrieval of the man and the woman in their fundamental humanity.”[34] I trace this idea to the abolitionist recognition that "[f]eeling loved, wanted and accepted’ translated into concrete social terms means a caring, nonviolent community.”[35] Ultimately, when faced with the task of abolishing oppressive systems rooted in anti-Black racism and gender-based violence, radicals across time and place, but particularly those within the Black radical tradition, have recognized that we must necessarily move outside of these systems, towards one another.
In keeping with the tradition of Black radicals before him, Jackson’s Soledad Brother took up the theme of imminent death as constitutive of the Black condition under enslavement. Rejecting the “standard black male defense mechanism” of attempting to forget one’s painful history, Jackson instead leaned into “part of the pitiful black condition that [makes] the really bad moments record themselves so clearly and permanently in my mind” to fuel his drive for revolutionary change.[36] Once again invoking the legacy of slavery he describes:
My recall is nearly perfect, time has faded nothing. I recall the very first kidnap. I've lived through the passage, died on the passage, lain in the unmarked, shallow graves of the millions who fertilized the Amerikan soil with their corpses; cotton and corn growing out of my chest, ‘unto the third and fourth generation,’ the tenth, the hundredth. My mind ranges back and forth through the uncounted generations, and I feel all that they ever felt, but double.[37]
Here, Jackson called upon the legacy of slavery not in the hopes of rousing sympathy or shocking the unchained masses of America, but rather, and more profoundly I contend, as a means of proclaiming and rendering visible his revolutionary Black mentality.
By allowing his “mind [to] range back and forth through the uncounted generations,” Jackson exemplified the kind of invocation of the Black radical tradition this essay seeks to promote. Although, like other abolitionists, Jackson identifies systemic overhaul as a prerequisite for social revolution, it is in filtering his anti-carceral critique through the distinct Black experience of and in imprisonment that I believe Jackson further extends abolitionism. For example, I contend that the abolitionist mentality of Jackson and other radical Black thinkers was uniquely informed by their intimate relationship with the prospect of imminent death. Therefore, when the revolutionary asserted that “[r]evolution within a modern industrial capitalist society can only mean the overthrow of all existing property relations and the destruction of all institutions that directly or indirectly support existing property relations”, Jackson did so with the intimate awareness that a revolution that is too closely “tied to dependence on the inscrutabilities of ‘long-range politics, cannot be made relevant to the person who expects to die tomorrow.”[38]
Jackson shares this perspective of death and politics with radical Black abolitionists that came before him. For example, it was Frederick Douglass who insisted in an 1857 speech that: “Negroes will be hunted at the North, and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages, and make no resistance, either moral or physical [...] If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.”[39] Elsewhere, it was such an acceptance of his own mortality lead Jackson to call upon the language of Black protest poet Claude McKay, insisting:
I must now start doing all that is humanly possible to get out of prison. I can see great ill forecast for me if I don't find some way to extract myself from these people's control. [...] “If we must die then let us nobly die, so that our precious blood may not be shed in vain. Then even the monsters we defy shall be constrained to honor us though dead. We kinsmen must meet the common foe, though far outnumbered, let us show us brave, and for their thousand blows, deal one death blow. What though before us lies the open grave, like men we'll face the murderous pack, pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back."[40]
“I don't mind dying,” Jackson concludes following his quotation of Mckay, “but I'd like to have the opportunity to fight back.”[41]
Even Jackson’s contemporary influences, actors who were similarly solidifying their place in the Back radical tradition, proclaimed the same revolutionary potential in light of an acceptance of death. In a 1969 speech it was prominent Black Panther leader Fred Hampton who professed:
If you're asked to make a commitment at the age of twenty, and you say, "I don't want to make a commitment," only because of the simple reason that, "I'm too young to die","I want to live a little bit longer." What you did is you're dead already [...] I believe that I'm going to be able to die high off the people. I believe that I will be able to die as a revolutionary in the international revolutionary proletarian struggle and I hope that each one of you will be able to die in the international proletarian revolutionary struggle or you'll be able to live in it. And I think that struggle is going to come. Why don't you live for the people? Why don't you struggle for the people? Why don't you die for the people?[42]
In the same year this speech was given, Fred Hampton would be assassinated at the age of 21.
I highlight the maintenance of such an ontology because I believe it was constitutive of the anti-reform posture that undergirds prison abolitionism. When one is constantly faced with the reality of imminent death as Jackson describes, why wait patiently for the systems that enact such violence to change? “Let me give you a word on the philosophy of reform,” professed Frederick Douglass in that same 1857 speech, “[p]ower concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”[43] Ultimately, just as the Black abolitionists during slavery had their anti-reform platforms bolstered by their lived experiences in the horrors of slavery, the Black abolitionists in the budding prison abolition movement developed an anti-reform platform through their lived experiences in the horror of imprisonment.
Although such visceral assertions of Black personhood are absent from the published work of the abolitionists at PREAP (most likely due to the white identities of the text’s principle authors) their praxis was still scaffolded by a commitment to anti-racism. For instance, the group identified the “violence of racism” as responsible for the “collective criminality” imposed upon Black and brown people and resulting in their disproportionate imprisonment.[44] Nevertheless, it is important to emphasize the influence of the Black radical tradition on the ideology and praxis of prison abolitionism because prisons in America have been, and continue to be, racist sites of anti-Black violence and Black death. To maintain the insistence that Black people are entitled to equitable treatment simply by virtue of being human beings delegitimizes the American prison system and its deeply racist history. By exposing the institution’s figurative and literal ties to slavery, heeding the calls of the institution’s most targeted individuals, and reckoning with our individual complicity in the face of overt and covert racism, prison abolition emerges as an extension of the Black radical tradition. Only by leaning into this radical tradition and dismantling such an institution may we truly begin to reckon with the legacies of chattel slavery, mass incarceration, and centuries of anti-Black racism in America.
[1] Fay Honey Knopp et al., Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists (Prison Research Education Action Project, 1976).
[2] ibid.
[3] ibid.
[4] ibid.
[5] ibid.
[6] “No New Jails NYC,” No New Jails NYC, https://www.nonewjails.nyc/.
[7] “Guide to Closing Rikers, We Keep Us Safe,” No New Jails NYC, https://www.nonewjails.nyc/no-new-jails-close-rikers-now-we-keep-us-safe-guide.
[8] Knopp et al., Instead of Prisons.
[9] ibid.
[10] ibid.
[11] ibid.
[12] ibid.
[13] Prison Policy Initiative and Peter Wagner and Bernadette Rabuy, “Following the Money of Mass Incarceration,” https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/money.html, Prison Policy Initiative and Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner, “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2019,” https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2019.html.
[14] “U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts: United States,” https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045218. , “BOP Statistics: Inmate Race,” https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_race.jsp
[15] Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill, N.C: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
[16] Faye Honey Knopp et al., Instead of Prisons.
[17] Jackson, Soledad Brother.
[18] Joy James, ed., The New Abolitionists: (Neo) Slave Narratives and Contemporary PrIson Writings (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2005).
[19] Baldwin, “An Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis,” If They Came in the Morning: Voices of Resistance.
[20] US Constitution, Amendment XIII, 1865.
[21] Jackson, Soledad Brother.
[22] Davis, “Political Prisoners, Prisons & Black Liberation”, If They Came in the Morning: Voices of Resistance.
[23] Jackson, Soledad Brother
[24] Davis, “Political Prisoners, Prisons & Black Liberation”, If They Came in the Morning: Voices of Resistance.
[25] James, The Angela Y. Davis Reader.
[26] Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” The Angela Y. Davis Reader.
[27] ibid.
[28] ibid.
[29] ibid.
[30] For more about the #SayHerName campaign visit: https://aapf.org/sayhername. For more about Survived and Punished visit: https://survivedandpunished.org/analysis/
[31] ibid.
[32] Knopp et al., Instead of Prisons.
[33] ibid.
[34] Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,”
[35] Knopp et al., Instead of Prisons.
[36] Jackson, Soledad Brother..
[37] ibid.
[38] Jackson, Blood in my Eye.
[39] “Frederick Douglass Project Writings: West India Emancipation | RBSCP,” https://rbscp.lib.rochester.edu/4398.
[40] Jackson, Soledad Brother.
[41] Jackson, Soledad Brother.
[42] Howard Alk, The Murder of Fred Hampton (Chicago: Facets Multi-Media Chicago Film Group, MGA Inc, 1971), http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067456/.
[43] “Frederick Douglass Project Writings: West India Emancipation | RBSCP.”
[44] Knopp et al., Instead of Prisons.
Work Cited
“About the #SayHerName Campaign.” AAPF, The African American Policy Forum , aapf.org/sayhername.
Alk, Howard. The Murder of Fred Hampton. Chicago: Facets Multi-Media Chicago Film Group, MGA Inc, 1971. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067456/.
“BOP Statistics: Inmate Race.” Accessed April 6, 2020. https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_race.jsp.
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