ABSTRACT
Abolitionism is a movement to end systemic violence, including the interpersonal vulnerabilities and displacements that keep the system going. In other words, the goal is to change how we interact with each other and the planet by putting people before profits, welfare before warfare, and life over death. This chapter considers four of these challenges: first, the relationship between abolitionism, the prison, and newly emerging and allied forms of confinement and surveillance; second is the punishment of the contemporary 'rabble' in and through the penal/welfare complex. Third is the consolidation of state power in the context of the privatization, commercialization and contracting out of a range of state services; and finally the ideological reassertion that a 'rehabilitation revolution' is taking place in prisons. The fierce campaign against private prisons diverted resources away from the ongoing struggle to consolidate Woolf's liberal agenda.
