ANGELA DAVIS, PRISON ABOLITION, AND THE END OF THE AMERICAN CARCERAL STATE
Over the past thirty years, arguably no American institution has so intensified its reach and power over African Americans than the prison. In the early 1980s, roughly 474,000 men and women were incarcerated in federal and state penitentiaries, but, by the beginning of the 2010s, that number had ballooned to over two million.1 This rapid growth was no accident but was part of a concerted political effort. Calling for cracking down on crime and increasing law-enforcement authority, Richard Nixon’s “law-and-order” discourse in the late 1960s and early 1970s became persuasive to many in the American middle class. By the 1980s, Congress began passing “War on Drugs” legislation, which criminalized low-level drug use and distribution. Little changed in the 1990s. Democratic president Bill Clinton signed into law the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which increased federal funding for prisons, added over 100,000 police officers, and created harsher sentencing laws, especially for drug offenders. The prison population continued to swell.2
The Panthers had expressed concern that an unjust policing and criminal-justice system, which preemptively criminalized black Americans with as much regularity as it exonerated white Americans, was as inimical to American democracy as it was deadly for many people of color. But they never could have fully anticipated that it would congeal to create something of a national prison epidemic—no one could.3
Political realism put the Panthers in a good position to understand that tough-on-crime discourse would be politically profitable. Nixon won a contested 1968 presidential contest against the Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, partly by appealing to the racial resentment held by segments of the working-class white American electorate—the use of what the conservative tactician Kevin Phillips called the “Southern Strategy.”4 In 1968, many whites were prepared to support the openly racist Alabama governor, George Wallace, the third-party candidate who won an unprecedented 13 percent of the popular vote.5 Election seekers on the American left and right—and most recently, the Republican presidential candidate and real-estate mogul Donald Trump—have since followed Nixon’s example. Existential fear about crime across the racial spectrum brings many people to the polls and often trumps other political issues.6 The resulting mass-incarceration system is, however, much easier for whites to support. After all, they understand that those citizens who will be trapped behind its walls will most likely be nonwhite. Not their children or family members.7
Racial disparity defines contemporary American mass incarceration. According to one influential sociological interpretation, the prison is the most recent installment of a history of racial oppression, what the sociologist Loïc Wacquant calls the fourth “peculiar” race-based American institution of social control that first began with chattel slavery before continuing through Jim Crow and then the black ghetto.8 If W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk correctly prophesized the color line to be the defining boundary for distributing rights to black and white Americans in the twentieth century,9 then the prison is the most obvious manifestation of the color line in the twenty-first century.
Thirty-six percent of the American population is nonwhite, but over 60 percent of the American prison population is of color; some projections indicate that one in three black men born in the United States will be incarcerated at some point in their lives.10 Incarceration carries direct political implications. Prisons welcome people with open arms but release them with a mark of social deviance. Many states place voting restrictions on felons, and even a short period of time spent incarcerated can destroy one’s family and deplete one’s social connections, greatly restrict one’s prospects for future employment, and create lasting psychological distress.11
Mass incarceration has increased in unprecedented ways over the past three decades, but the prison has always been a fixture in America.12 American democracy, which prides itself on a commitment to human flourishing, seems at odds with prisons. Prisons are structured as hierarchies, they degrade human beings by placing them in cages, and they inflict suffering on people’s minds and bodies through disciplinary measures. But punishment and democracy have always been intricately linked in America. Tocqueville only composed Democracy in America (1835/1840), after he traveled, along with a fellow Frenchmen, Gustave de Beaumont, across the United States in 1831 to study its prisons. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville had little to say about the American prison system, instead spending pages upon pages cataloguing how he was as impressed by the exceptional American spirit of unbridled individualism as he was shocked by the spontaneity with which Americans joined together to form civic associations and the unanimity with which they held their political convictions.13
But Tocqueville and Beaumont’s now-forgotten report on American prisons, On the Penitentiary System in the United States: And Its Application in France (1831), issued a powerful reminder to those who read it: “It must be acknowledged that the penitentiary system in America is severe. While society in the United States gives the example of the most extended liberty, the prisons of the same country offer the spectacle of the most complete despotism. The citizens subject to the law are protected by it; they only cease to be free when they become wicked.”14
Perhaps unintentionally but nonetheless quite powerfully, these words undercut the very opposition Tocqueville and Beaumont wished to establish between the despotic severity of punishment and the overarching American commitment to a democratic society. What becomes apparent instead is that the very democratic law that protects people’s liberty is what creates the prison. John Locke—himself one of the core theoretical inspirations for American liberalism—was among the first thinkers to establish this link years before Tocqueville and Beaumont’s study. In his Second Treatise of Government, Locke argued that one of the purposes of representative government was to maintain social order by replacing a person’s natural right to punish those who committed crimes in the so-called state of nature with an impartial judicial system. In the state of nature, Locke claimed, “the law of nature is … put into every man’s hands, where every one has a right to punish the transgressors of that law to such a degree, as may hinder its violation.”15
If the link between punishment and democracy in America is as complex as it is mutually constitutive, how should social movements address it? What alternative visions must they advance? And how should they couch their arguments?
Many antiprison activists have called for substantive prison reform—centering on changing mandatory-sentencing standards such as the infamous “Three Strikes” law, which, in many instances, carries the sentence of life in prison after someone has committed three felonies, or on efforts to decriminalize certain activities, especially drug possession and addiction. Only a small minority, however, have made the much more radical argument for prison abolition.
No thinker over the past thirty years has been as incisive and theoretically sophisticated in such a call than Angela Yvonne Davis. Born in 1944 in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, Davis would go on to receive a doctorate in philosophy under the direction of the Frankfurt School critical theorist Herbert Marcuse before becoming an international cultural and political icon in the early 1970s after being famously placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.16 Davis’s political-theoretical writings offer a wide range of arguments that deserve attention, ranging from her view that freedom should be understood as an unending condition of struggle, rather than a static good that people are simply given,17 to her thinking about the excesses of global neoliberal capitalism, which coalesce with, sustain, and are sustained by war and empire,18 to her reflections on the intersection between gender and race.19
No study as of yet, however, has seriously examined the political theory at the heart of what has arguably been one of her life’s overarching theoretical projects—a complete rethinking of the American prison system and the regimes of punishment, discipline, control, and security upon which it has always been founded. Not only does this dimension of Davis’s work directly address a concrete and pressing political problem—what to do about prisons?—but it also grapples with a host of theoretical questions. For example, what is the relationship between prisons, crime, and democracy? How does punishment relate to freedom and equality? How does political liberalism continue to justify and reproduce a massive system of incarceration?
At its heart, Davis’s work—and the grassroots-led abolitionist social organization Critical Resistance, which she cofounded in the late 1990s—answers a broader and more untimely question: How would one articulate a political theory and normative defense of an idea that appears politically impossible?
Raising the possibility of prison abolition over the past two decades was a powerful intellectual intervention, but it was also not entirely out of step from the historical moment in which both Davis and we still reside. It was a response to a reality in which the impossible became possible. From the 1980s through the financial collapse of 2008, not only did the prison population increase in unprecedented ways, but neoliberal privatization measures, which championed the rule of free markets, eroded government regulation of the financial sectors and the social-welfare state, creating an unseen gap of economic inequality between the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans and the other 99.20 Decrying prison abolition as nothing more than political utopianism thus seems odd. After all, the world abolitionists have been addressing seemed unreal. If anything, especially for many poor citizens of color, this world looked much more like a nightmare from which they could not awaken.
Davis’s call for prison abolition followed in the footsteps of earlier nineteenth-century slavery abolitionists, whose utopian calls to end slavery were realized in their own lifetime, and American anarchists, who—with little political success—in the early twentieth century continued to call for an end to state rule, which empowered a military-industrial complex and unfettered capitalism to roam freely. Yet not only did Davis expand the abolitionist vision, which was largely focused on securing equal political rights and dignity for slaves, to include more robust socioeconomic equality, but she was also more attentive than her white anarchist antecedents to the racial and gendered experience of domination.
Countering the culturally widespread American view that punishment was nothing more than a deterrence strategy for crime, Davis stressed that it was an instrument of social control that dehumanized culturally demonized populations. Punishment reproduced existing systems of socioeconomic inequality and fractured spaces of social solidarity for marginalized populations. Punishment was neither natural nor apolitical.
Davis supplemented this analysis with a set of alternative democratic ideals and practices that she believed could most effectively replace prisons. Self-examination of the proclivity to feel apathy toward those suffering in unseen spaces needed to be tethered to a commitment to social interdependence, in which citizens saw themselves and others as requiring socioeconomic resources to flourish. A mode of judgment attentive to the political dimensions of seemingly private forms of violence and that rejected moralistic binaries needed to be adopted. Citizens needed to reimagine themselves as fallible while taking seriously restorative justice practices such as forgiveness, empathy, trust, and reconciliation.
Critical Resistance has developed many of Davis’s insights by offering a set of concrete, practical strategies—including workshops, exercises, and toolkits for activists—that aim to deconstruct the notion of criminality and safety. Two tactics of prisoner protest have extended Davis’s ideas. Hunger strikers dramatize how the state’s use of solitary confinement violates its commitment to protect citizens from cruel and unusual punishment. And jailhouse lawyers use American constitutional guarantees of free speech to carve out the right to defend themselves legally in ways that reclaim their dignity.
PUNISHMENT AND RACE
Very few thinkers have, like Davis, so eloquently countered the view that state-enacted punishment is nothing but a race-neutral, strategic response meant to deter individuals from crime.21 Central to this criminological position was a theory of individual behavior, which, as famously expressed by the Nobel Prize–winning economist Gary Becker as early as 1968, viewed people as rational actors—as economic man, homo economicus. Becker’s rational subject could choose when to commit a crime and would calculate whether punishment was a cost worth incurring for the gain of succeeding. “A person commits an offence,” he wrote, “if the expected utility to him exceeds the utility he could get by using his time and other resources at his activities.”22 If Becker was right—as many Democrats and Republicans believed him to be—then a spirit of fairness seemed to animate both President Richard Nixon’s “law-and-order” rhetoric in the early 1970s and James Q. Wilson and George Kelling’s theory of “broken-windows” policing, which argued in the 1980s that low-level criminal offenders such as petty drug dealers, drug addicts, burglars, and the homeless population needed to be swept off the streets. “Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree,” they wrote, “that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken.”23 In their own estimate, neither Nixon’s nor Wilson and Kelling’s defense of punishment was discriminatory—that is, neither was based on gender, race, sexuality, or class background. After all, crime was an equal-opportunity endeavor enacted by profit maximizers who thought it was simply in their self-interest. Punishment, like crime, was thus also something of an equal-opportunity practice.
Davis saw things differently. “The prison,” she claimed, “reveals congealed forms of antiblack racism that operate in clandestine ways,” but “they are rarely recognized as racist.”24 Like Newton, Davis experienced punishment firsthand when she spent over a year in jail for criminal conspiracy after purchasing a firearm that was used by Jonathan Jackson, a seventeen-year-old African American radical who initiated a tense hostage situation in a California courtroom that led to a confrontation with police, leaving several people wounded and one dead. Although eventually acquitted of these charges, Davis came to understand that punishment disproportionately centered its attention upon and affected certain social groups. She agreed with Michel Foucault that the modern penitentiary had a history—that it was produced through eighteenth-century liberal-humanitarian discourses of rehabilitation and minimizing suffering.25 But she criticized Foucault for overlooking the way that prisons were built upon and were extensions of racial orders. “A genealogy of imprisonment that would differ significantly from Foucault’s,” she explained, would “accentuate the links between confinement, punishment and race.”26 Even if one were to concede that there was something “race free” about Becker’s notion of the criminal as rational actor, nothing was “race free” about a state-sanctioned system of punishment—informed by a network of policing and prisons—that had long treated acts committed by people of color as criminal offences in ways not identical to how it treated similar acts by white Americans. Even in its earliest forms, punishment was differentially and racially enacted. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, prisons were reserved for reforming and punishing “white wage-earning individuals,” but slavery functioned differently:
Within the institution of slavery … racialized forms of punishment developed alongside the emergence of the prison system … the deprivation of white freedom tended to affirm the whiteness of democratic rights and liberties. As white men acquired the privilege to be punished in ways that acknowledged their equality … the punishment of slaves was corporal, concrete and particular.27
Davis followed Wells in shifting attention away from the morality of state-based punishment or the moral culpability of those who committed crimes and onto the effect punishment had upon human beings. She connected what seemed for many Americans completely unconnected: what she called the contemporary “prison-industrial complex” with a history that began with slavery—the complete deprivation of black freedom, the exploitation of black labor, and unchecked violence against black bodies—to the more modified but no less egregious history of the Black Codes, which criminalized acts including vagrancy, breach of contract, and possession of firearms only if they were committed by people of color, and to the rise of the convict-lease system—the provision of prison labor for private companies—that disproportionately affected black Americans under Jim Crow.28 “As black people were integrated into southern penal systems—and as the penal system became a system of penal servitude,” Davis wrote, summarizing the way racialized punishment centered on what Foucault would call regimes that discipline bodies and what Marx would see as the ruthless exploitation of people’s labor, “the punishments associated with slavery became further incorporated into the penal system.”29 In short, “both Emancipation and the authorization of penal servitude combined to create an immense black presence within southern prisons and to transform the character of punishment into managing former slaves as opposed to addressing problems of serious crime.”30
Given the way American punishment was so closely linked to the operations of legal justice, which depended upon and reinforced certain notions of identity, there seemed something misplaced, Davis implied, in the liberal philosopher John Rawls’s belief in A Theory of Justice (1971) that any concept of justice required individuals to go behind a so-called veil of ignorance—so they had no idea what their identity was or where they would end up socioeconomically, their “class position or social status” or “fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities … intelligence, strength, and the like.”31 In Davis’s view, this was because words helped organize access to citizenship, creating the very truth of disenfranchisement rather than simply describing it. “Criminals” were “constituted as a class,” Davis argued, “and, indeed, a class of human beings undeserving of the civil and human rights accorded to others.”32 The term “criminal” was often racialized. “Particularly in the United States,” she suggested, “race has always played a central role in constructing presumptions of criminality.”33 From the 1980s onward, American critics of affirmative action had contended that race-conscious public policies such as affirmative action violated the American cultural commitment to colorblindness.34 But arguably the much bigger problem—that itself affected black opportunities to go to college, get decently paying jobs, have access to affordable housing, and, in some cases, exercise their political right to vote—was that punishment was not colorblind.
The contemporary prison was an institution of social control that not only deprived human beings of freedom but also dehumanized them. As Davis wrote:
Imagine what our lives might have become if we were still grappling with the institution of slavery—or the convict lease system or racial segregation. But we do not have to speculate about living with the consequences of the prison. There is more than enough evidence in the lives of men and women who have been claimed by even more repressive institutions and who are denied access to their families, their communities, to educational opportunities, to productive and creative work, to physical and mental recreation.35
The prison, for Davis, was what segregated public housing was for Newton: a highly regulated space that not only restricted individual movement but created something approximating spiritual death.36 The prison stifled creative work that gave one a sense of meaning, and it destroyed social connection, intimacy, and the potential for critical thought capable of confronting arbitrary formulations of state power. Nowhere was Davis’s argument expressed as eloquently as in the writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal, an African American inmate on death row who, over the past thirty years, has become an outspoken prison-abolition advocate and whose conviction, based on highly circumstantial and questionable evidence, and continuing incarceration have become a symbol of racial injustice. Abu-Jamal wrote:
The ultimate effect of noncontact visits is to weaken, and finally to sever, family ties. Through this policy and practice the state skillfully and intentionally denies those it condemns a fundamental element and expression of humanity—that of touch and physical contact—and thereby slowly erodes family ties already made tenuous by the distance between home and prison. Thus prisoners are as isolated psychologically as they are temporally and spatially. By state action, they become “dead” to those who know and love them, and therefore dead to themselves. For who are people, but for their relations and relationships?37
For Davis, unlike Abu-Jamal, soul death not only gave rise to social death but also reproduced the system of socioeconomic inequality responsible for rising incarceration rates: “Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth,” Davis reflected, “and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison.”38 States stripping felons of voting rights was just the tip of the iceberg. Prisons were implicated in increasing capitalist profit.
Corporations producing all kinds of goods—from buildings to electronic devices and hygiene products—and providing all kinds of services—from meals to therapy and healthcare—are now directly involved in the punishment business.… It was during the decade of the 1980s that corporate ties to the punishment system became more extensive and entrenched than ever before. But throughout the history of the U.S. prison system, prisoners have always constituted a potential source of profit.39
The libertarian valorization of free markets, Davis implied, was a myth.40 On the one hand, state-regulated institutions funded by taxpayers were crucial for providing public jobs and creating a space for the private economy to flourish when deindustrialization was wreaking havoc on working-class Americans.41 On the other hand, the capitalist economy depended upon new markets in which cheap and unfree labor could be turned into profit.
Prisons also mirrored another structurally similar state-sanctioned apparatus: the military. “The emergence of an ever expanding, ever more repressive prison system, [and] the economic, political, and ideological stakes in the punishment industry … [has] created a set of relations that recapitulate the development of the military industrial complex.”42 The prison, like the American military, provided jobs for many working-class people and was deployed upon populations to create the feeling of safety for the American majority.
Prisons solidified ideologies that perpetuated social inequality: “The institution of the prison has stockpiled ideas and practices that are hopefully approaching obsolescence in the larger society, but that retain all their ghastly vitality behind prison walls.”43 Following black feminists who claimed that sexual violence was a social problem not confined to the privacy of people’s homes, Davis cast the prison, which was one of the most public yet deeply segregated-from-view spaces in America, as a microcosm of and productive force for gender inequality.44 Prisons reinforced the gendered division of citizenship—between public actor and private person —by placing women behind bars in ways that kept masculine political power in place and where, as objects of male desire, their bodies would be objectified and physically abused:45 “for women, prison is a space in which the threat of sexualized violence that looms in the larger society is effectively anchored as a routine aspect of the landscape of punishment behind prison walls.”46
Like Walker, Davis thought that punishment fractured solidarity for the racially and socially marginalized. But unlike Walker, she thought this happened not through cultivating competition or ignorance but through creating deeply stigmatized emotions. Wells recognized that shame was a great intensifier: It naturalized and reinforced existing deleterious assumptions about gender roles that facilitated violence—recalling how white men were so ashamed of being emasculated by the imagined black rapist that they wanted to lynch black men with brutal intensity. For Davis, however, shame had more a depressive political function; it led people to disavow those who were stigmatized: “The ideologies that support the prison system demonize those who have been touched by it, and many of us are afraid to admit that we know someone who could be the kind of person who is behind bars.”47 Yet for many white Americans, a willful kind of amnesia—what Baldwin called “racial innocence”—rather than shame led to the relegation of prisons to the back of their minds, which only intensified the brutality experienced by those who lived within prison walls.48 Davis explained: “The prison-industrial complex has materialized and mushroomed because we have all learned how to forget about prisons; we push them into the background even if they’re in our own neighborhoods.”49
American communitarians such as Robert Bellah and his coauthors, writing in their best-selling Habits of the Heart (1985), were convinced that the embrace of a socially unfettered individualism helped erode American civic engagement. At issue for them was not simply “whether self-contained individuals might withdraw from the public sphere to pursue purely private ends, but whether such individuals are capable of sustaining either a public or private life.”50 For Davis, however, individualism could become lethal for those behind bars, where it transformed into a radical kind of moral apathy. If no one cared about what was happening, then it would happen over and over again.
Davis’s overarching argument was that punishment was not natural. Punishment was filtered through historically contingent factors, which themselves were caught in a milieu of interests entwined with the society in which one lived, and these interests often were always fully apparent to those who held them.
“Punishment” does not follow from “crime” in the neat and logical sequence offered by discourses that insist on the justice of imprisonment, but rather punishment—primarily through imprisonment (and sometimes death)—is linked to agendas of politicians, the profit drive of corporations, and media representations of crime.51
In Davis’s view, however, the dynamism of punishment was only matched by that of freedom. Freedom was not defined as a protection from government or as the ability to flourish but was a dynamic idea found in and through struggle. In one of her early philosophy lectures in 1969 at UCLA in a class on black literature, she found this definition in Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom: Freedom was “the goal of an active process, something to be fought for, something to be gained in and through the process of struggle.”52 But freedom’s dynamism cut both ways; it was as potent for white supremacy as it was valuable for racial justice. Prisons functioned analogously to racism. The prison, like racism, Davis explained, relieves
us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers … it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.53
Prisons, like racism, displaced one’s own darker emotions, such as rage and fear, onto stigmatized populations. Gone was the personal responsibility to confront these issues. This constituted an implicit critique of Rousseau, who once asserted that society created self-love (amour-propre) and a vicious form of social comparison, which unleashed within people feelings of hatred, competition, and jealousy. “Self-love,” he claimed, “leads each individual to place greater value on himself than anyone else, which inspires all the evils that men do to one another.”54 For Davis, unlike Rousseau, the problem was not self-love but rather self-fear. Domination was caused by the very wish to be free of one’s darker feelings and personal failures rather than simply the wish to preserve one’s own economic or social freedom.
Prisons reminded Americans of their negative freedom of minimal physical mobility but also relieved them of the burden of social engagement that would abolish the excesses of global capitalism and racism so that all people were afforded the ability to flourish. Capturing this tension, Davis noted at once seriously and ironically: “Prisons tell us that we are free. We are able to recognize ourselves as participants in a democracy because we get to look at this institution that has walled off those who are not. And because there are those who are not, by comparing ourselves to them, we know that we are.”55
PRISON ABOLITION
For Davis, prison abolition depended as much on robust political coalitions and concrete policy goals as it did upon individual ethical transformation. Walker called for cynical scrutiny of political institutions, Douglass for embodied political thinking about freedom, Wells for attentiveness to suffering, and Newton for empathetic perspectivalism. Davis added her voice to this chorus: “If I acknowledge that I am also implicated in the continued patterns of racism, I ask not only how do I help to change those whom I hold responsible for the structures of racism, I ask also: How do I change myself?”56 Not only did Davis’s turn to the personal seem opposed to a structural remedy to racial inequality, but this turn appeared problematic given the cultural discourse of her time. Although the feminist claim “the personal is political” was a powerful strategic intervention in countering the 1960s patriarchal society that refused to see the politics of reproductive rights, by the 1980s conservatives exercised a hegemonic hold over the language of personal responsibility and used that language to expand the prison system. Prisoners were responsible for their crimes; they deserved the ensuing repercussions.
These criticisms cannot be ignored, but they miss an important point. Personal action is both as capacious as it is malleable, defined less by its antithesis to collective action and more by what one does with it. Indeed, the kind of transformation Davis counseled centered on cultivating a utopian imagination in ways that threatened what was practical. Central to this was postulating what Kant called a “regulative ideal”—something that did not yet exist but that served as a transcendental aspiration for which individuals could strive.57 Asking the question “what if?” and assuming that the impossible could become possible did not mean confusing hope with reality. “The prison,” Davis acknowledged, “is considered an inevitable and permanent feature of our social lives … in most circles prison abolition is simply unthinkable and implausible.”58 But the very act of asking an unasked question, of assuming what was not realized could be realized, constituted a powerful political-theoretical intervention.
The most effective abolitionist strategies will contest these relationships and propose alternatives to pull them apart. What, then, would it mean to imagine a system in which punishment is not allowed to become the source of corporate profit? How can we imagine a society in which race and class are not primary determinants of punishment? Or one in which punishment is no longer the central concern in the making of justice?59
The act of questioning, for Walker, reflected one’s capacity for democratic judgment, while for Davis it inspired an intellectual process for severing the link between the practical and the valuable. Corporate profit needed to be isolated from punishment rather than curtailed through government regulatory practices. Justice needed to be transformed into something that was not about meting out appropriate punishments for alleged crimes but rather what encouraged self-determination and equality. Social statuses like race and class, which were often seen as surmountable barriers to individual achievement, needed to be examined for the way they legitimized state-sanctioned violence.
Something capacious was at the heart of this intellectual work: a holistic political imagination that appreciated the multilayered intersections of personal, social, political, economic, and civic life. Reform sought to improve what existed, while abolition was about entirely reimagining what it might look like:
A necessary step in winning greater freedom and greater justice is to imagine the world as we want it to be, a world in which women are not assumed to be inferior to men, a world without war, a world without xenophobia, a world without fenced borders designed to make us think of people from Mexico and Latin America as aliens and enemies. It is important to imagine a world in which binary conceptions of gender no longer govern modes of segregation or association, and one in which violence is eliminated from state practices as well as from our intimate lives, in heterosexual and same-sex relationships alike. And, of course, it is important to imagine a world without war.60
Abolition depended on a fundamental transformation of the prevalent ideologies. Americans needed to renounce a biologically deterministic view of gender identity that asserted that women’s potential was to be found in the household;61 the idea of national cultural purity, in which white Anglo-Saxon values were to be upheld against all others;62 and that war was essential for peace.63
So too was it necessary to upend the “public-private dichotomy.” Violence against women and queer, nonheteronormative populations was, as Davis noted, “still seen as private and personal,” but it needed to be seen as informing regimes of punishment.64 Antiprison activism needed to extend globally, from struggling against torture, which made physical harm a tool for national security, to the “War on Terror,” which encouraged domestic racism toward Arab Americans. “Linked to the abolition of prisons,” she wrote, “is the abolition of the instruments of war, the abolition of racism, and, of course, the abolition of social circumstances that lead poor men and women to look toward the military as their only avenue of escape from poverty, homelessness, and lack of opportunity.”65 Dismantling American punishment, Davis believed, required what the contemporary philosopher Judith Butler has recently identified as crucial for global responsibility: undoing the discursive and conceptual frames that make certain lives grievable and ungrievable. “To say that a life is injurable, for instance, or that it can be lost, destroyed, or systematically neglected to the point of death,” Butler wrote, “is to underscore … its precariousness (that life requires various social and economic conditions to be met in order to be sustained as a life).”66 This meant shattering the vocabulary of normalcy that sponsored an economy of violence—directing it against some and withholding it from others—and an economy of human worth, which was predicated on the notion that certain lives were indispensable and others disposable.
Also necessary was a shift in perspective, from a philosophy of pick-oneself-up-by-the-bootstraps individualism to the idea of social interdependence. The community-to-prison pipeline eroded social resources essential for freedom.67 A program of decarceration would require the “revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all.”68 No less important was the radicalization of American education. Davis shared Dewey’s belief that education was the bedrock of democracy: the space where citizens learned to listen and disagree.69 Dewey devoted his attention to revolutionizing the power relations within the classroom—so students would move from passive to active learners, making ideas matter for their lives—but Davis was concerned with demilitarizing the education system.
Thus, we need schools—schools that don’t feel like prisons.… As schoolchildren they are already treated like prisoners. When the message they receive in school is that they live in the world as objects of surveillance and discipline, and that security guards are more important and powerful than teachers, they are clearly learning how to be prisoners.70
Nondomination, for Davis, meant not the idea centered on public citizenship—to participate in politics freely and vigorously—but a commitment to creating conditions of nonviolence that enabled creative human development.
In Davis’s view, the moral boundaries between those who were free and imprisoned needed to be dismantled. “If we agree to begin to acknowledge that there is no essential difference between people in prison and people in the free world,” she wrote, “then we can seek to create more contact between the inside and the outside, and between prison and what prisoners call the ‘free world.’ ”71 Accepting this idea of equality did not fit into the version of classical liberal thought espoused by Locke. For Locke, the criminal may have been equal to everyone else in terms of their capacity to reason, but when the criminal committed a crime, they existed beyond the reasonable, moral community. “In transgressing the law of nature, the offender declares himself to live by another rule than that of reason and common equity,” Locke claimed, “and so he becomes dangerous to mankind.”72
Unlike Locke, Davis refused to banish those who committed crimes from the realm of reasonableness. If anything, she countered Locke by calling upon citizens to diminish their feelings of moral superiority toward those who transgressed the law. This required adopting a denaturalized and unexceptional view of crime. Crime needed to be seen as nothing more than a social designation connected to the law, which could be unjust.73
In the post–civil rights era, a hallmark of American conservative discourse was racializing and sensationalizing crime. In the 1970s and 1980s, Reagan invoked the specter of the “welfare queen” who fraudulently lived off of government’s dime, and the Republican presidential candidate George H. W. Bush in 1988 described the mythical black rapist, exemplified by Willie Horton, who, upon being released on a furlough authorized by Massachusetts’s Democratic governor, Michael Dukakis, raped a white woman. These images relieved white Americans citizens of the guilt for sending many black people to jail and helped destroy the welfare state—which would be gutted through the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996, signed into law by Bill Clinton, and which replaced federal government entitlement programs for the poor with those that were substantially weaker and contingent upon work.74
To counter this ideological discourse, Davis recast the meaning of “criminal.” Criminal acts cut across racial boundaries and were deeply pervasive in everyday American life. Davis asked: “What is a crime? How do you define a crime? The fundamental legal definition of crime is an action in violation of a law. Whenever you have broken a law you have committed a crime. People generally refer to crimes as felonies, rather than misdemeanors or traffic violations. However, people break the law all the time.”75 Expanding the idea of criminality recalled Walker’s earlier attempt to equalize Americans by recalling the inescapable fact of mortality, but Davis’s strategy emphasized the way fallibility was an inescapable part of the human condition—something that could never be fully eradicated but only haphazardly managed. A traffic violation, Davis explained, was not morally equivalent to murder, but the forces that inspired one to transgress the law—everything from unchecked desire, to cold-blooded self-interest, to a false sense of necessity—were universal. Arguments about the moral rectitude of punishment provided easy cover for masking the complex dynamics of human behavior. Ideological justification replaced acknowledging harm.
Absolute moral superiority was thus a fiction. Criminality was an elastic concept as universal as it was banal. Prisoners were unexceptional in this fundamental way: They were, like everyone else, ordinary human beings prone to error. One needed to ask whether it was just for people to live the way they did behind bars. Davis asked citizens to consider: “Have you ever looked at a prison and imagined what was happening on the other side of those walls? … what it might be like to live under those repressive conditions? … that people just like you are in prison, people who may have made one mistake and never had the opportunity to get themselves back on the right track?”76
An even more radical practice Davis counseled was striving for greater physical proximity. She dramatized this when she brought her gender-studies class on incarcerated women at San Francisco State University to an actual women’s prison. Positioning the prisoners as teachers challenged the expectation shared by students and prisoners that the students would be the ones teaching the inmates. “They taught the students about life in jail,” Davis would go on to say, “what went on there, what the major problems were, and they got to choose how the students, those in possession of formal learning, could effectively assist the prisoners. This reversal of assumed hierarchies of knowledge created a radical and exciting learning environment.”77 Undoing assumptions of moral difference entailed placing oneself in a position where one would be forced to rethink one’s own agency. Placing in positions of agency those who were disenfranchised challenged one dominant American conservative position of the 1980s and 1990s, advanced most notably by the political scientist Lawrence Mead in Beyond Entitlement (1986), which asserted that the state needed to be a paternalistic force that educated the poor into normative standards that would make them capable of exercising full citizenship. Mead wrote that the best hope for solving the “welfare problem” was “to require recipients to function where they already are, as dependents … they need to face the requirements, such as work, that true acceptance in society requires.”78 For Davis, prisoners not only had worthwhile local knowledge; that knowledge was also a form of power crucial both for self-determination and for contesting state power.
Equally important for abolition were community reconciliation programs. Taking seriously reconciliation may have appeared odd, given that Davis was a political radical whose political affiliation had once been the Communist Party USA and who endorsed Marx’s structural critique of capitalism. But it followed from her understanding of the power of restorative justice. Davis applied to the American context the ideas of the South African philosophers Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, who created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to help postapartheid South Africa complete the transition from minority-white to majority-black rule.79
In her conclusion to Are Prisons Obsolete? she took intellectual sustenance from the example of Linda and Peter Biehl, who forgave several young black South African men who, while chanting antiwhite slogans, partook in the stoning to death of their daughter, Amy, a white American Fulbright student visiting the country in 1993. After successfully petitioning the family for amnesty during the proceedings of the TRC in 1998, two of the attackers, Easy Nofemela and Ntobeko Peni, were released from prison. Shortly thereafter, the Biehls invited them to work as instructors for their foundation, which was named after their deceased daughter. One of the perpetrators, Nofemela, eventually told the Biehls, “I know you lost a person you love. I want you to forgive me and take me as your child.”80 Years later, Davis continued,
Linda Biehl, when asked how she now feels about the men who killed her daughter, said, “I have a lot of love for them.” After Peter Biehl died in 2002, she bought two plots of land for them in memory of her husband so that Nofemela and Peni can build their own homes. A few days after the September 11 attacks, the Biehls had been asked to speak at a synagogue in their community. According to Peter Biehl, “We tried to explain that sometimes it pays to shut up and listen to what other people have to say, to ask: ‘Why do these things terrible things happen?’ instead of simply reacting.”81
Good reasons exist to be skeptical of restorative justice. For example, it can depoliticize problems by turning them into moral issues.82 But never did Davis assert that it was superior to political or economic reform. Reconciliation was more about developing an alternative democratic vision of community. In her depiction of the Biehls as exemplary citizens, she did much more than emphasize the importance of social trust.83 A crucial function of reconciliation, Davis made vivid, was to counter the dominant logic of politics by replacing the thirst for retribution with love, rational self-interest with forgiveness.
Prisons exemplified a theory of democratic society founded on the notion of emotional defensiveness, but the process of working through past trauma interpersonally to repair what had been smashed emphasized mutual vulnerability.84 Undertaking the emotionally strenuous decision to forgive someone who had committed an unforgivable crime or listening to accusations could remake the moral grammar of the world in which both victims and perpetrators lived.85 Simply ridding the community of transgressors reified the world while leaving untouched the profound sense of loss that the crime unleashed or the social relations and community values from which it emerged. Reconciliation taught citizens to assume responsibility for collective life, to understand opposing perspectives, and to be capable of doing what once seemed impossible, like empathizing with those who wronged them the most. This helped undermine the binary that punishment encouraged between normal and abnormal, right and wrong, practical and impractical, possible and impossible.
CRITICAL RESISTANCE AND ABOLITIONISM
Over the past two decades, no organization has sought to implement Davis’s theoretical insights into a full-fledged political movement like Critical Resistance. Started in 1997, with Davis as one of its cofounders, as a conference meant to address what its organizers called the “prison-industrial complex”—“the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems”86—by 2001 Critical Resistance was a national political organization with local chapters in New York City, Los Angeles, Oakland, and Portland. It has organized protest campaigns against everything from prison construction to juvenile-detention centers and has called for expanding affordable housing, health-care resources, and addiction-treatment centers. Through its newspaper, The Abolitionist, Critical Resistance raises awareness about intersectional oppression based on multiple identity standpoints and challenges American law-and-order rhetoric and the demonizing images of those viewed as deviant. Published since 2005 and written by prison activists, prisoners, and ex-prisoners, it tackles issues including immigration, the national-security state, sexual violence in prison, and the link between capitalism and prisons, with the aims of providing incarcerated people in the United States with a political voice and of raising consciousness about their lives throughout the globe.
Mirroring the Panther Ten-Point Program, Critical Resistance borrows its political philosophy from a text published almost thirty years prior to the group’s formation: the Prison Research Education Project’s (PREAP) Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists (1976).87 Published in the summer of 2006, the fourth issue of The Abolitionist excerpted nine broad perspectives.88 By invoking a strategy used in various ways by Douglass, Wells, Du Bois, and King, Perspective One described prisons as antithetical to Enlightenment moral principles, upon which U.S. political culture was ostensibly founded and to which it proclaims commitment: “Imprisonment is morally reprehensible and indefensible and must be abolished.”89 Perspective Two cast language as a form of power that could empower or disempower human beings or frame the contours of the institutions that shape their life chances.90 As it suggested: “The message of abolition requires ‘honest’ language and new definitions.”91 Perspective Three argued for adopting a restorative conception of justice rather than one based in punishment, claiming that “abolitionists believe reconciliation, not punishment, is a proper response to criminal acts.”92
Perspective Four—embodying Newton’s empathetic perspectivalism—emphasized the difference between institutions of oppression, which had their own logic, and the citizens who populated them, that is, those who worked within them and those who were worked on by them: “Abolitionists work with prisoners but always remain ‘nonmembers’ of the established prison system.”93 Perspective Five followed anticolonial thinkers that warned against the seduction of paternalism (“Abolitionists are ‘allies’ of prisoners rather than traditional ‘helpers’ ”), while Perspective Six—taking seriously the notion of radical democracy agency—called for a commitment to prisoner self-determination, suggesting that “abolitionists realize that the empowerment of prisoners and ex-prisoners is crucial to prison system change.”94 Echoing Foucault’s theory of power, Perspective Seven argued that power existed everywhere, including in those who were disenfranchised, rather than being restricted to elites.95 “Power,” it claimed, “is available to each of us for challenging and abolishing the prison system.” Perspective Eight denaturalized crime, making it productive of social conditions and “mainly a consequence of the structure of society” rather than driven by individual biological failures; Perspective Nine reimagined human flourishing to depend not on self-interest but upon a community founded on what feminists would call an “ethic of care.”96 “Only in a caring community,” it said, could “corporate and individual redemption can take place.”97
Critical Resistance has transformed this philosophy into a policy platform. First, replacing capital punishment with health, “ending the death penalty, and putting appropriate care in place” are ideas that espouse a view of government that ought to nourish rather than simply protect people from physical harm. Second, improving rehabilitation programs for “education, therapy, drug and alcohol treatment, job training, art, athletics and other structured social activities” is a policy that emphasizes the notion of a whole person who cannot be reduced to the crime for which he or she is imprisoned. Third, ending prison-guard brutality and administrative corruption and allowing for prisoners to organize politically “without the threat of punishment” all make the prison subject to democratic accountability and suggest that those languishing within its walls are deserving of the right of freedom of assembly. Fourth, sentences should be reduced and parole opportunities increased. Fifth, state-run responses to harm reduction should be reduced or eliminated and replaced with community programs.98
In “The Abolitionist Toolkit,” Critical Resistance offers pedagogic material including discussion questions and critical writing and thinking exercises that ask citizens to rethink commonly held theoretical ideals. Deepening Davis’s thoughts on the politics of language, in a chapter called “Words Matter: Language and Abolition,” Critical Resistance seeks to make serviceable for prison abolition the French poststructuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida’s thinking about the power of hierarchical binary oppositions. “We are not dealing with a peaceful coexistence vis-à-vis but rather a violent hierarchy,” Derrida claimed. “One of the two terms governs the other … or has the upper hand.”99 Derrida’s name isn’t mentioned in the text, but his ideas permeate it. Oppositions such as “guilty v. innocent,” “violent v. nonviolent,” “criminal v. victim,” and “punishment v. justice,” so says the toolkit, conjure specific cultural representations that are positioned along a value hierarchy, where the term in the first part of the binary is seen as of a lesser, or more harmful, order.100 Yet both terms in the binary are intensified precisely because of their opposition: The “criminal” is “criminal” precisely because of the “innocent,” and the “innocent” is “innocent” precisely because of the “criminal.”
Supplementing this insight into language’s role in creating social inequality are critical exercises that aim to make language emancipatory. Marx famously contended that the task of philosophy was not to conceptualize the world philosophically as it was to change it,101 but Critical Resistance asserts the purpose of language—which Marx himself was uninterested in—is not to describe the world but to change it. “How could you re-phrase this information [concerning the binaries that perpetuate the prison-industrial complex] to be in line with the ideas that no one should be in a cage, and that putting people in cages helps no one?”102 Words could be subversively resignified by those seeking to trouble extant social identities103—examples might include black youth resignifying the language of “nigga” to invoke black solidarity, gay citizens reclaiming “queer” to mean something that counters heteronormative identity, or youth reimagining “punk” as something that resists conformity—the toolkit asks: “Are there ways to use the word ‘against itself’—to use it in a way that challenges the way it’s most used now?”104
This open-ended question embodies the kind of pedagogic democratic ethos, like Walker’s, that insists upon everyone’s capacity for expressing their own reasoned thoughts—but one term the toolkit calls for rethinking is safety. Security has been as central to American political culture as much as any other ideal, but over the past fifteen years, in the wake of the September 11, 2011, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, it has arguably become one of the most significant. Not only has this allowed for a doubling down on mass incarceration, but it has legitimized the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the construction of an expansive domestic national-security state, which has included warrantless wiretapping programs and the covert surveillance of American citizens.
Critical Resistance confronts the language of safety, rather than abandoning or simply positioning it on a lower normative order than liberty: “Policing and prisons are held up as the only solution, the only way to control problem and create safety. One positive way to talk about what we do is to challenge that idea by talking to people about what really makes our communities safe. What else makes safety?”105 Critical Resistance’s answer to this question, that “tough-on-crime” laws have had “little impact on ‘public safety’ ” severs the link between safety and incarceration.106 Everyday insecurity is an existential experience for all people—in varying degrees and at different moments in their lives—that can never be fully eradicated by removing certain people from society. So too does Critical Resistance’s claim that “random violence is not as common as it’s made out to be” challenge the idea that self-interested desires to harm others are central to the human condition.107 Moreover, its suggestion that “most physical injury happens to people who know each other” describes violence as an interpersonal, temporary problem rather than suggesting that conflict is indiscriminate and ongoing.108
Rethinking language is only part of the equation. No less important is implementing the Canadian Aboriginal practice of “circles,” which extends Davis’s thinking about reconciliation. As a community-based healing process involving two discussion facilitators—those who inflicted the harm and those who were harmed—circles dramatize that moral wrongs are experienced, with clear lines between victims and perpetrators, but that these wrongs can be repaired. After gaining as much information as possible about the circumstances and addressing the competing narratives of the harm—without recourse to the various evidentiary procedures that comprise the state-sanctioned legal trial process and with a diverse array of emotions and concerns that may not be normal in the courtroom—participants decide on the appropriate form of redress, which can range from compensation for lost property to interpersonal mediation.109 Circumventing the state and embracing self-determination clearly has limitations. Circles have not been used to address murder, they can contain age- or gender-based power imbalances, and they cannot alone change policing and punishment systems or the larger patterns of social inequality that give rise to crime.110
But circles provide a regulative ideal for justice that opposes the prison-industrial complex, which defines itself through “punishment, authoritarianism, racism, profit-seeking, and state control,” with “personal and social transformation, accountability, equality, fairness, understanding, cooperation, sharing, solidarity, forgiveness, popular participation, and self-determination.”111 Circles can be valuable pedagogically in ways that lead to critical thinking about prisons, even if they cannot replace prisons in the foreseeable future. Critical Resistance urges citizens to adopt circles for a role-playing classroom exercise: to redress a situation in which a high-school student experiences facial deformities for life after being beaten by one of his peers, who himself is regularly beaten by an alcoholic father. Intended less for disclosing that prisons are unjust or that violence is always motivated by tragic social circumstances,112 this exercise is more about exploring the complex ways that harm becomes manifest, the feelings that it conjures, and the competing ways to address it. The questions ask: “1. What values of principles should guide our circle as we discuss both what happened and how we plan to address it? 2. What happened? How were you affected by what occurred? 3. As much as possible, what can we do to repair the harm that has been done? 4. What can we do to prevent future forms of harm in our community?”113 Against the prevailing system of legal justice that too often ignores—or even worse, as a way of legitimating itself, intentionally masks the contested narratives and views on authority through which it operates—the questions posed here, which follow insights of critical race theory, transform justice into an ongoing process that is about asking questions rather than answering them, about reflecting upon the values upon which justice should be based.114
HUNGER STRIKING AND JAILHOUSE LAWYERING
Critical Resistance aims to empower prisoners, but prisoner protests enrich the theory of prison abolition. Prisoners don’t have many tools to protest, but one thing they have is their bodies—a tool that they have used in various hunger strikes. Consisting of thirty thousand strikers statewide and lasting for sixty days, the summer 2013 hunger strike at California Pelican Bay State Prison was not only one of the most famous in recent memory but the largest in history. Protestors mobilized against degrading conditions such as arbitrary solitary confinement, lack of nutritious food, group punishment, and administrative abuse while calling for more creative programming. The strike eventually led to hearings and reform proposals in the California state legislature. This materialized into marginal benefits for those in solitary confinement (like more family visits; permission to use radios and televisions; the use of utensils, bowls, and cups; and underwear) and more significant changes (a more extensive review and oversight of solitary confinement practices).
The Pelican Bay hunger strike, however, was as much a protest tool as it was a statement about the contradictions of American culture. The Panthers’ protest was directed outward against police officers; hunger striking is directed inward. The inmate’s body becomes the same symbolic weapon that the gun was for the Panthers: It problematized American notions of freedom and bodily security.
Hunger striking replaces the idea of self-defense with self-sacrifice to highlight the intensity of state violence. State violence is so devastating that the only solution is to double down on self-directed violence. The state’s commitment to protect a citizen’s body as expressed in the Ninth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment is beyond nonexistent. The state actually does the exact opposite: It destroys the body and mind. By dramatizing how prisoners have commitments to transcendent ideals such as human dignity and justice, hunger striking challenges the idea of a fixed criminal identity—the assumption that those who commit crimes are somehow defined by self-interest or immorality. Like the civil rights protestors who continued to march in the streets despite the racial violence that threatened them and thus reflected their exemplary civic love of America, hunger strikers say that their commitment to democracy is so intense that they are willing to die for it.
Another form of prisoner protest is jailhouse lawyering, which consists of prisoners informally assisting fellow inmates with legal issues related to sentencing, probation, and stay of execution and educating them about their habeas corpus rights.115 In her foreword to Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Jailhouse Lawyers, Davis herself applauded the way
jailhouse lawyers have challenged inhumane prison conditions, and even when they themselves have been unaware of this connection, have implicitly followed the standards of such human rights instruments as the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (1955), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), and the Convention Against Torture, and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984).116
Jailhouse lawyers mobilize the principles of international human rights to call attention to and subvert American democracy’s unjust outcomes while carving out rights in spaces that do not easily grant them. Challenging the notion that prisoners should be, or the fact that they actually are, barred from public life and the fruits of citizenship, jailhouse lawyers may not always be legally successful, but they reclaim their dignity and that of those they represent through the practice of direct action that Douglass identified over one hundred and fifty years ago in My Bondage and My Freedom.
PRISON ABOLITION AND AMERICAN POLITICS
A sober assessment of American politics might lead some to insist that prison abolition seems politically impractical, if not impossible. Perhaps the ideology of socialism—as the recent rise of the Democratic presidential candidate Vermont senator Bernie Sanders illustrates—might have a fighting chance today, even if for much of the twentieth century it was a demonizing epithet reserved only for those who were depicted as antipatriotic atheists. But calls for prison abolition would likely be treated with the same antipathy as earlier twentieth-century anarchist calls to abolish the state. American citizens might concede Davis’s argument that prisons are unjust for the same reasons some agreed with Emma Goldman’s critique of the American state, which she called “the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law … killing in the form of war and capital punishment.”117 Prisons can easily be corrupted by unbridled capitalism, they can undermine individual rights, and they can become purveyors of human suffering. But in the very same breath, even the most progressive citizens would surely temper such concessions with a dose of prudent realism: The price of potential human suffering that prisons create for a relatively small minority of the U.S. population might be morally indefensible, but it is cheaper than the instability that might come from losing such institutions of social control over those who commit crimes.
If this weren’t difficult enough, the abolitionist movement faces an even steeper climb because some of the most successful recent arguments for downsizing the prison population—focusing mainly on nonviolent offenders—have failed to address the social factors that compel people to commit crime. Arguments about rational self-interest based in cost-ineffectiveness, which highlight that state-run prisons are too expensive to maintain with taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars, have not only given private companies the opportunity to transform punishment into a profit-making enterprise but have left unchanged Americans’ reluctance to support rehabilitation programs for the most vulnerable. The beneficiaries of prison-downsizing programs no longer have to live behind bars, but, given the pitiful public investment in state-run social-welfare programs, many are now free to live much like they did before they were incarcerated: homeless or jobless, perhaps suffering from severe mental illness or debilitating drug or alcohol addiction.
Although these obstacles might dishearten even the most optimistic of political radicals, the theory of prison abolition exceeds a narrow political goal. A regulative ideal as much as a political objective, abolition is powerful because it reflects a unique theory of citizenship that calls for the ongoing perfection of tactics and striving toward a horizon that cannot be fully reached; it calls for acknowledging forms of social interconnectedness that are not only obscured and rendered invisible but that sponsor inequality. At the same time, prison abolition draws attention to the power of language for democracy while taking seriously the ethical language of reconciliation.
As foreign as they might be to the mainstream of the American tradition, perhaps these alternative practices of citizenship, alongside prison abolition, might not seem so foreign if, as abolitionists insist, Americans actually began the direct action championed by thinkers as diverse as anarchists such as Goldman, pragmatists such as Dewey, transcendentalists such as Thoreau, liberals such as King and, of course, Walker, Douglass, Wells, and Newton. Prison abolitionists share a core insight with all these thinkers: that the feasibility of any political project depends less on argumentatively sound reasoning than on the process by which one attempts to realize this project in the world.
Action is therefore not simply a testing ground for a prepackaged theoretical truth but creates new truths. Action can challenge one’s capacity to withstand what appears insurmountable and to realize what appears unrealizable. It is almost as if the very unlikelihood that prison abolition would ever succeed today or even ten years from now requires those few Americans who are serious about the project to keep acting as if it were possible now. Indeed, Davis’s and the prison-abolition movement’s call to end mass incarceration today recall the words of King. In “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” he chastised Alabama clergymen who, borrowing the novelist William Faulkner’s advice in the 1950s, told black civil rights protestors to be patient in their racial justice struggle so as not to alienate potentially sympathetic moderate whites. King’s words are still as relevant now as they were then:
We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.118