What Is Prison Abolition? How Would It Work? – GQ

As protests continue to spread in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, one seemingly radical, decades-old idea has been thrust to the forefront of mainstream discourse: prison abolition.

With over two million people locked up in prisons and jails, the United States incarceration rate is the highest in the world, to the point where the country constitutes about five percent of the worlds population and yet houses 25 percent of the worlds prisoners. Black and brown people are disproportionately imprisoned, sexual abuse is rampant, labor is exploited, and prolonged solitary confinementdenounced as a form of torture by the United Nationsis commonplace. The brutality of these conditions becomes all the more salient when compared to other developed Western nations, where even life sentences for murder rarely involve being condemned to spend the remainder of ones days behind bars.

Prison abolitionists argue that it is not enough to simply reform our current criminal justice systemthat it must be completely dismantled and, in its place, society must invest in communities and address harm in other ways. The two foremost leaders of the contemporary prison-abolition movement are famed activist Angela Davis and the scholar and geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore. In 1997, they cofounded the organization Critical Resistance with the mission to build an international movement to end the Prison Industrial Complex by challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe. (You may have encountered the organizations graphic chart breaking down the effectiveness of reform vs. abolition circulating on social media as of late.)

With the concept of prison abolition gaining increased visibility and unprecedented momentum, GQ spoke to Woods Ervin, an organizer with Critical Resistance who has been involved in the movement for a decade, about its basic tenets, goals, and visions for a prison-free future.

GQ: Prison abolition is an idea, when first encountered, that can feel incredibly radical and infeasible. How did you first encounter it, and was there a particular moment where you felt like the switch had been flipped for you?

Woods Ervin: The theory clicked for me around 2008. I was working at the time with queer and trans young people of color in Chicago. Part of the daily work was trying to support, engage, and help develop young people who are being constantly targeted by the prison-industrial complex [PIC]. I had a firsthand understanding of how the PIC comes into people's lives and shrinks their life chances.

These were young people who were 13, 14, 15, getting kicked out of their homes for being queer and trans, and who, out of survival, were constantly coming into contact with the prison-industrial complex. For me, that put it in really stark relief. Because they couldn't figure out how to get out of the systemic nature of it, there was nothing for those young people. They were just falling through the cracks.

It clarified for me that the prison-industrial complex needed to be pulled apart. I think it was then that the politics crystallized, and it was in the practice of organizing with Critical Resistance that the work of how to do it crystallized.

As an organizer, when you're giving someone the elevator pitch for prison abolition, what do you tell them?

I say that abolition is a political vision with a goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment. That it's not just about getting rid of building cages, it's about actually undoing the society that continues to feed on and maintain the oppression of masses of people through punishment, violence, and control. Because the prison-industrial complex isn't an isolated system, abolition is a broad strategy. And so we have to be building models today that develop and represent how we want to live in the future. It's both a practical organizing tool and a long-term goal.

The prison-industrial complex isnt broken. Its doing exactly what it's meant to do.

Compared to other countries, the U.S. has a particularly cruel prison system. You can look to, say, some of the Scandinavian countries and see more humane prison systems and life sentences that only last 10 years. To prison abolitionists, why is criminal justice reform based on a system like that insufficient?

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What Is Prison Abolition? How Would It Work? - GQ