Cultural Politics

  MOVEMENTS TO RADICALLY REFORM OR ABOLISH PRISONS

Movements to radically reform or abolish prisons, and drastically change the nature of policing away from deeply racially biased existing forms have been going on for several decades. But the brutal police murder of George Floyd, following upon increasing awareness of these issues as raised by movements like Black Lives Matter has given new urgency, new impetus and created a much wider audience of concerned citizens. 

The resources on this page link to historical and sociological analyses of the problems, practical proposals being proffered, and the movement groups and strategies seeking to take these efforts to a new level.

Some Key Movement Groups

• Black Lives Matter. Official site of the foundational organization.
• Campaign Zero. Policy-driven approach to ending unjustified police violence. See their excellent Research section for statistical and analytic evidence about which approaches work.
• Critical Resistance. Building an international movement against prison-industrial complex.
• Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. Excellent folks continuing the work of the great civil rights organizer Ella Baker.
• Mapping Police Violence Documenting cases of death by police across US.
• The Movement for Black Lives. Coalition of several dozen organizations fighting for criminal justice reform and a host of human rights issues.
• #SayHerName. Focused on police violence against Black women, girls & femmes.

Movement Strategies and Practical Resources

• Aviram, Hadae. Cheap on Crime: Recession-Era Politics and the Transformation of American Punishment (University of California Press, 2015).
• Berger, Dan. “Social Movements and Mass Incarceration: What is to be Done?” Souls 15, 1-2 (2013), 3–18.
• CR10 Publications Collective, Abolition Now: Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle Against the Prison Industrial Complex (AK Press, 2008).
• Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. “The Worrying State of the Anti-Prison Movement,” Social Justice Journal, February 23, 2015. 
• Gottschalk, Marie. Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics (Princeton University Press, 2015).
• Growing Abolition on Campus
• Hernández, Kellly Lytle. “Amnesty or Abolition: Felons, Illegals, and the Case for a New Abolition Movement,” Boom: A Journal of California 1.4 (Winter 2011), 54–68.
• Marshall Project. Curating the best journalism on prisons and police abuse.
• Oakland Power Projects
• Prison Policy Initiative
• Transform Harm
• Reiter, Keramet. “The Pelican Bay Hunger Strike: Resistance within the Structural Constraints of a US Supermax Prison,” South Atlantic Quarterly 113.3 (Summer 2014), 579–611.
• Sudbury, Julia. “Reform or Abolition?: Using Popular Mobilizations to Dismantle the Prison-Industrial Complex,“Criminal Justice Matters 77.1 (2009), 17–19.

Videos and Pod Casts

Ruth Gilmore Makes the Case for Abolition podcast

Visions of Abolition feature length video documentary

Mariame Kaba and Prison Abolition podcast

Analyzing Angela Davis's Work on Abolition conference video

Select General Bibliography

• Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New Press, 2010).
• Bobo, Lawrence and Victor Thompson. “Racialized Mass Incarceration: Poverty, Prejudice, and Punishment,” in Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century, Hazel Markus and Paula Moya, eds., (Norton, 2010), 322–55.
• Davis, Angela. Are Prisons Obsolete (2003).
• Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press, 2007).
• Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States (PM Press, 2014).
• Gonnerman, Jennifer. Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett (Picador, 2005).
• Hinton, Elizabeth. From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Harvard University Press, 2016).
• James, Joy. States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000).
• Kohler-Hausmann,  Julilly, “The Attila the Hun Law”: New York’s Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Making of a Punitive State,” Journal of Social History 44.1 (2010), 71–95.
• McCorkel, Jill. Breaking Women: Gender, Race, and the New Politics of Imprisonment (NYU Press, 2013).
• McDowell, Deborah, Claudrena Harold, and Juan Battle, eds., The Punitive Turn: New Approaches to Race and Incarceration (University of Virginia Press, 2013).
• Parenti, Christian. Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (Verso, 2001).
• Pattillo, Mary. David Weiman, and Bruce Western, eds., Imprisoning America: The Social Effects of Mass Incarceration (Russell Sage Foundation, 2004).
• Prison abolition course syllabus with wide-ranging set of bibliographies.
• Provine, Doris Marie. Unequal Under the Law: Race in the War on Drugs (University of Chicago Press, 2007).
• Perkinson, Robert. Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire (Metropolitan Books, 2010).
• Richie, Beth.  Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation (NYU Press, 2012).
• Simon, Jonathan.  Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (Oxford University Press, 2007).
• Thuma, Emily. “Lessons in Self-Defense: Gender Violence, Racial Criminalization, and Anticarceral Feminism,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 43, 3-4 (2015), 52–71.
• Thuma, Emily.  “Against the Prison/Psychiatric State: Anti-violence Feminisms and the Politics of Confinement in the 1970s,” Feminist Formations 26, 2 (2014), 26-51.
• Ruth, Henry and Kevin R. Reitz, The Challenge of Crime: Rethinking Our Response (Harvard University Press, 2003).
• Tonry, Michael Punishing Race: A Continuing American Dilemma (Oxford University Press, 2011).