Following some of the largest protests the US has seen in many years, police and prison abolition have become urgent issues of our time. As this book reveals, this marks a return: In the 1960s and 1970s, groups like the U.S. Prison Research Education Action Project and the Norwegian Association for Penal Reform advocated for a world without prisons. Instead, incarceration boomed, growing in the United States from about 200,000 prisoners to unprecedented 2 million and more. Now, grassroots movements and critical research are converging on an uncompromising critique of the regime of mass incarceration.
This book provides a trenchant guide to prison abolition, explaining why the solution to the criminal justice crisis is ending policing, imprisonment, and mass surveillance, and building a society that creates alternatives to punishment and carceral solutions to social contradictions. The book details and evaluates on-the-ground abolitionist projects throughout North America that provide alternative models, and reveals what it means to work for abolition today, what are ways to "de-carceralize" society.
