Prison Abolitionist Movement
Prison
abolition, as a movement, sounds provocative and absolute, but what it
is as a practice requires subtler understanding. For Gilmore, who has
been active in the movement for more than 30 years, it’s both a
long-term goal and a practical policy program, calling for government
investment in jobs, education, housing, health care — all the elements
that are required for a productive and violence-free life. Abolition
means not just the closing of prisons but the presence, instead, of
vital systems of support that many communities lack. Instead of asking
how, in a future without prisons, we will deal with so-called violent
people, abolitionists ask how we resolve inequalities and get people the
resources they need long before the hypothetical moment when, as
Gilmore puts it, they “mess up.”
“Every
age has had its hopes,” William Morris wrote in 1885, “hopes that look
to something beyond the life of the age itself, hopes that try to pierce
into the future.” Morris was a proto-abolitionist: In his utopian novel
“News From Nowhere,” there are no prisons, and this is treated as an
obvious, necessary condition for a happy society.
think
absolute power depends on absolute control over knowledge, which in turn necessitates absolute corruption
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