Reframing Incarceration

I have been considering how to transform my 10,000-word dissertation into a blog post for some time. Initially, I thought a summary of each section would be the easiest approach, but after giving considerable thought to why I wanted to write this blog in the first place, I have adjusted my strategy.

My Master’s Dissertation aimed to summarise key abolitionist thinking and synthesise key strands of abolitionist thought into a framework capable of critiquing the government’s 10-year Prison Capacity Strategy. It argued that abolitionist thought provides valuable insights for rethinking justice in a system facing crisis and should inform the development of responses that move beyond punishment toward more equitable and transformative alternatives.

For about six months of my life, I was utterly immersed in the world of abolitionism, reading and analysing hundreds of texts. Why? Because I believe abolitionism is the answer. Because I believe the government’s 10-year Prison Capacity Strategy, specifically David Gauke’s Independent Sentencing Review, is narrow-minded, short-sighted, and dehumanises prison-experienced people. Because I believe that Western criminological enquiry excludes and suppresses non-white, non-establishment scholarship. And this is what I want to try to translate for you here.

This blog will therefore explore the main theories, argumentations, and ideas I outlined in my dissertation. It will also point you in the direction of papers, books, and other artefacts that you might be interested in exploring. A sort of brief encyclopedia, if you will. It is by no means a comprehensive representation of the vast landscape of abolitionist scholarship, but it is a good starting point. If you love pain and want to read the whole 10,000-word piece, please let me know!

While abolitionism necessarily resists categorisation and indeed any forms of control, I found it helpful in the paradoxical effort of synthesising the literature. I created four categories within which to frame various abolitionist theories, and it is these I turn to first.

Structural abolitionism.
Structural abolitionism includes all theories that see prisons not as mechanisms to address crime or harm, but as instruments of social control that reinforce power, perpetuate systemic oppression, and marginalise specific populations. It emphasises that mass incarceration, institutional racism, and the imprisonment of young people, to name a few, are intentional, and that such imprisonment structures can never be meaningfully reformed.

Spatial abolitionism.
Spatial abolitionism encompasses ideas that examine how imprisonment operates through geography, focusing on how physical spaces are transformed into controlled places of confinement. It highlights carceral logics beyond prisons, such as urban planning, surveillance, and borders, and advocates for decarcerating space.

Reparative abolitionism.
Reparative abolitionism includes community-centred ideas that envision alternatives to punishment, focusing on addressing the root causes of harm. It emphasises healing, choice, and human-driven conflict resolution, rejecting retributive logic that seeks to assign individual blame and punitive approaches, such as incarceration.

Strategic abolitionism.
Strategic abolitionism encompasses pragmatic frameworks that seek to gradually render systems of imprisonment obsolete by working within existing structures. It challenges the effectiveness of punitive frameworks, exposing criminalisation as a tool of social control rather than justice, protection, or rehabilitation, and focuses on actionable pathways toward decarceration.

This section examines some of the influential theories that underpin the various abolitionist ideas. This is a small selection of the theories explored in the paper, but I believe they represent some of the most interesting and valuable contributions.

Abolition ecology
An approach linking environmental justice with prison abolition, arguing that the same extractive systems that criminalise marginalised communities also expose them disproportionately to toxins, pollution, and environmental neglect. A key example of this is David Pellow’s explanation of Environmental Racism, whereby racialised communities are systematically exposed to harmful environmental conditions and excluded from decisions about ecological safety.

Abolitionist Compass
A framework developed by David Scott, which outlines a set of guiding principles for reforms prioritising human dignity, social justice, and participation, while rejecting punishment as a legitimate means to address harm. It seeks to direct policy changes by centring them on abolitionist values.

Afterlife of Slavery
A theme in abolitionist work (such as that of Michelle Alexander) that connects contemporary imprisonment to past systems of forced labour, racial control, and colonial domination.

Carceral Capitalism
A term coined by Jackie Wang that explains how contemporary imprisonment functions as a system of wealth extraction, where punishment becomes a strategy for governments and private companies to generate revenue and reinforce particular logics of public safety.

Carceral Continuum
A concept taken from Michel Foucault describing how systems of control exist not only in prisons or policing but across institutions like schools, hospitals, and families, shaping how society understands conflict and safety.

Carceral thinking
An ideology that frames social problems and harm as issues to be managed through punishment, state intervention, and imprisonment rather than prevention, care, or systemic reform. An example of this is the criminalisation of drugs.

Defunding the police
The strategic diversion of public funds away from policing and punitive state institutions toward community-based safety and harm-prevention initiatives.

Decriminalisation
The process of reversing criminalisation, either through legal reform (de jure) or selective enforcement (de facto), to remove discriminatory or unnecessary acts from the criminal legal system. It reduces the number of people criminalised for non-violent or marginalised behaviours.

Decarceration of space
The abolitionist strategy of removing carceral control from both prison institutions and the wider environments where surveillance, policing, and containment govern people’s movements.

Hostile solidarity
A social phenomenon described by Henrique Carvalho and Anastasia Chamberlen in which groups derive a sense of unity or camaraderie by criminalising and punishing others, often reinforcing inequality and exclusion.

Institutional racism
A structural condition within the criminal legal system where discriminatory outcomes for racialised groups result from systemic practices and decision-making, not the isolated actions of “bad apples.”

Invisibilisation and homogenisation
Processes through which prisoners are stripped of individuality and reduced to anonymous masses via institutional design, restricted access, and representation mainly through statistics rather than lived experience.

Moratorium on prison building
A temporary or permanent halt on constructing new prisons, redirecting resources to preventative measures and community development instead of punitive expansion.

Non-reformist reforms
Policy changes or interventions that reduce the power of oppressive systems without reinforcing the prison as the ‘natural response’ to harm. They are designed to create systemic, long-lasting change rather than temporary relief.

Organised abandonment
A process described by Ruth Wilson Gilmore where poor and racialised communities are deliberately cut off from economic, social, and spatial resources, subjected to surveillance and imprisonment, and rendered ‘surplus’ to capitalist production.

Prison Industrial Complex (PIC)
A framework describing how networks of government, private companies, and political interests drive prison expansion for profit and control. It views imprisonment as driven by economic and coercive interests, rather than public safety, and characterises prisons as mutually reinforcing tools of social control and profit-making. Angela Davis is an instrumental thinker in the development of this framework.

Prison-like practices
An idea taken from Rashad Shabazz describing how conditions outside prison, such as surveillance, over-policing, or architectural structures designed to contain communities, replicate the spatial and social constraints of imprisonment.

Radical placemaking
An indigenous idea defined by Megan Ybarra as grassroots strategies for reclaiming space through street art, sit-ins, riots, and shutdowns, aimed at removing the entrenched structures of racial capitalism and settler colonialism, and reimagining land as a participant in community survival.

Total institutions
A description of Prisons as closed worlds where people are cut off from society and live within entirely new systems of norms, meanings, and language, reinforcing the divide between inside and outside.

Transformative Justice
A framework that seeks to address harm without relying on state actors. It emphasises community-based responses, holistic conflict management, and transforming the social conditions that produce harm, rather than focusing on restoring individual relationships.

Victim-perpetrator dichotomy
The framing of harm as a linear relationship where one person is solely responsible (perpetrator) and the other exclusively harmed (victim). Abolitionists reject this simplification in favour of systemic and relational understandings of harm.

This is an adjusted version of my citations list from the original paper. Some of them are about abolitionism, others decolonialism, and others still about imprisonment and its history. If you are looking for a place to start on the abolitionist journey, these are my top recommendations.

Alisa Bierria, Jakeya Caruthers and Brooke Lober (eds), Abolition Feminisms, Volume 1: Organizing, Survival, and Transformative Practice (Haymarket Books 2022)

Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (Seven Stories Press 2003)

Angela Y. Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (Haymarket Books 2016)

Angela Y. Davis and others, Abolition. Feminism. Now. (Penguin Books 2022)

Chris Cuneen, ‘Decoloniality, Abolitionism, and the Disruption of Penal Power’ in Ana Aliverti and others (eds), Decolonizing the Criminal Question (2023 Oxford University Press)

Carissa Honeywell, ‘Non-reformist reforms towards abolition’ (2025) Dialogues in Human Geography

David Pellow, ‘Struggles for Environmental Justice in US Prisons and Jails’ (2020) 53 Antipode

David Scott, Against Imprisonment: An Anthology of Abolitionist Essays (Waterside Press 2018)

David Scott, ‘Visualising an abolitionist real utopia: principles, policy and praxis’ in Margaret Malloch and Bill Munro (eds), Crime, Critique and Utopia (Palgrave Macmillan 2013)

Debbie Kilroy, Tabitha Lean and Angela Y. Davis, ‘Abolition as a decolonial project’ in Chris Cunneen and others (eds) The Routledge International Handbook on Decolonizing Justice (Routledge 2023)

Deborah H Drake and David Scott, ‘Prison Abolition in Question(s): Part One’ (The Open University, 22 February 2017)

Dylan Rodriguez, ‘Abolition As Praxis Of Human Being: A Foreword’ (2019) 132 Harvard Law Review

Eleni Dimou, ’Decolonizing Southern Criminology: What Can the “Decolonial Option” Tell Us About Challenging the Modern/Colonial Foundations of Criminology?’ (2021) 29 Critical Criminology

Grace L. Carson, ‘Tribal Sovereignty, Decolonization, and Abolition: Why Tribes Should Reconsider Punishment’ (2022) 69 UCLA Law Review

Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism (Semiotext(e), 2018)

Jennifer E. Cobbina-Dungy and Delores Jones-Brown, ‘Too much policing: Why calls are made to defund the police’ (2023) 25(1) Punishment & Society

Jennifer Fleetwood and John Lea, ‘Defunding the police in the UK: Critical questions and practical suggestions’ (2022) 61(2) The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice

Leah Cowan, Why Would Feminists Trust the Police (Verso, 2024)

Liat Ben-Moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition (University of Minnesota Press 2020)

Louk H.C. Hulsman, ‘Critical criminology and the concept of crime’ (1986) 10 Contemporary Crises

Mariame Kaba, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us (Haymarket Books 2021)

Marquis Bey and Jesse A. Goldberg, ‘Queer As in Abolition Now!’ (2022) 28 GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies

Michael J. Viola, Dean Itsuji Saranillio, Juliana Hu Pegues, and Iyko Day, ‘Introduction to Solidarities of Nonalignment’ 5(1-2) (2019) Critical Ethnic Studies

Megan Ybarra, ‘Radical Placemaking is a Verb’ (2025) Dialogues in Human Geography

Mimi E. Kim, ‘From carceral feminism to transformative justice: Women-of-color feminism and alternatives to incarceration’ (2018) 27(3) Journal of Ethnic & Cultural Diversity in Social Work

Mia Mingus, ‘Transformative Justice: A Brief Description’ (Transform Harm, 11 January 2019)

Minh-Ha T. Pham, ‘A World Without Sweatshops: Abolition Not Reform’ in Alisa Bierria, Jakeya Caruthers and Brooke Lober (eds), Abolition Feminisms, Volume 1: Organizing, Survival, and Transformative Practice (Haymarket Books 2022)

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Alan Sheridan trans, Penguin Books 1991)

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press 2010)

Naomi Murakawa, ‘Naomi Murakawa & #BlackLivesMatter: Liberals, Guns and the Roots of the U.S. Prison Explosion’ (YouTube, uploaded by Laura Flanders & Friends, 15/12/2015)

Nils Christie, ‘Conflicts as Property’ (1977) 17(1) The British Journal of Criminology

Nils Christie, ‘Images of man in modern penal law’ (1986) 10 Contemporary Crises

Nik Heynen and Megan Ybarra, ‘On Abolition Ecologies and Making ‘Freedom As a Place’’ (2020) 53 Antipode

Paul Gilroy, ‘The Myth of Black Criminality’ in Martin Eve & David Musson (eds), The Socialist Register Vol 19 (Merlin Press 1982)

Patrisse Cullors, An Abolitionist Handbook: 12 Steps to Changing Yourself and the World (OWN IT! Entertainment 2021)

Rashad Shabazz, Spatializing Blackness: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago (University of Illinois Press 2015)

Rashad Shabazz, ‘“We gon be alright:” containment, creativity, and the birth of hip-hop’ (2021) 28(3) Cultural Geographies

Rachel Herzing, ‘Abolition is Practical’ (Inquest, 11 July 2023)

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press 2007)

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, ‘Forgotten Places and the Seeds of Grassroots Planning’ in Charles R Hale (ed) Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship (University of California Press 2008)

Sarah Lamble, ‘Transforming Carceral Logics: 10 Reasons to Dismantle the Prison Industrial Complex Through Queer/Trans Analysis and Action’ in Nat Smith and Eric Stanley (eds), Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (AK Press 2011)

Sebastian Scheerer, ‘Towards abolitionism’ (1986) 10 Contemporary Crises

Stephen Case and Kevin Haines, ‘Abolishing Youth Justice Systems: Children First, Offenders Nowhere (2021) 21(1) Youth Justice

Thomas Mathiesen, The Prison on Trial (Sage Publications 2010)

Thomas Mathiesen, ‘The politics of abolition’ (1986) 10 Contemporary Crises

Thomas Mathiesen, ‘Ten Reasons for Not Building More Prisons’ in Melissa McCarthy (ed) Incarceration and Human Rights (Manchester University Press 2016)

The CR10 Publications Collective, Abolition Now!: Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle Against the Prison Industrial Complex (AK Press 2008)

Yvonne Jewkes, ‘“Places to Heal, Not to Harm”: Why Brutal Prison Design Kills Off Hope’ (The Guardian, 24 September 2024)