The catastrophic failure of the prison system in the United States has prompted a shift in criminal punishment system rhetoric and policy toward reform. Numerous programs and initiatives facilitate reentry for the hundreds of thousands of individuals coming out of prison every year, but these and other reforms remain problematic. They do little to improve the social and material conditions of those attempting to reintegrate. By failing to question the social, historical, political, and economic conditions of criminal system problems, they reproduce the oppressive social conditions that they are intended to address. This article diagnoses several major issues with conventional reform efforts in rehabilitation and reentry scholarship and praxis and argues that what is needed is not further attempts to improve these reforms but, rather, an approach that considers these problems through an abolitionist lens. An abolitionist frame, I suggest, is particularly useful in articulating suggestions for change. I apply an abolitionist analysis to an examination of reentry, illustrating how abolitionism helps to diagnose problematic reentry reforms and how an abolitionist approach to reentry can address these issues in a more effective, profound, and enduring way.
As calls for defunding and dismantling police and other punishing institutions have become increasingly widespread across the United States in the wake of protests against the murder of George Floyd and other people of color, abolitionism has become increasingly relevant. Even prior to this, however, abolition has been experiencing increasing attention and legitimacy in criminological and legal scholarship. However, much of abolitionism remains under-theorized, particularly regarding the intersection between theory and praxis. This article aims to begin to map some of the heretofore unmapped terrain of abolitionism by looking at the ways in which abolition must involve a component of individual, personal, and relational work — work that involves practicing abolitionist principles in one’s day-to-day life, making continuous efforts to decolonize one’s mind, and building trust, integrity, mutual support, healing, and facing conflict through principled struggle in one’s relationship with self and others.
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