ABSTRACT

Building Abolition: Decarceration and Social Justice explores the intersections of the carceral in projects of oppression, while at the same time providing intellectual, pragmatic, and undetermined paths toward abolition.

Prison abolition is at once about the institution of the prison, and a broad, intersectional political project calling for the end of the social structured by settler colonialism, anti-black racism, and related oppressions. Beyond this, prison abolition is a constructive project that imagines and strives for a transformed world in which justice is not equated with punishment, and accountability is not equated with caging.

Composed of sixteen chapters by an international team of scholars and activists, with a Foreword by Perry Zurn and an Afterword by Justin Piché, the book is divided into four themes:

• Prisons and Racism

• Prisons and Settler Colonialism

•    Anti-Carceral Feminisms

• Multispecies Carceralities.

This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, activists, and scholars working in the areas of Critical Prison Studies, Critical Criminology, Native Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Black Studies, Critical Race Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Critical Animal Studies, with particular chapters being of interest to scholars and students in other fields, such as, Feminist Legal Studies, Animal Law, Critical Disability Studies, Queer Theory, and Transnational Feminisms.

chapter |11 pages

Introduction

Doing abolition

part I|56 pages

Prisons and racism

chapter 2|14 pages

Racial innocence, liberal reformism, and immigration detention

Toward a politics of abolition

chapter 3|15 pages

The thin blue line between protection and persecution

Policing LGBTQ2S refugees in Canada

chapter 4|10 pages

Abolishing innocence

Disrupting the racist/ableist pathologies of childhood

part II|80 pages

Prisons and settler colonialism

chapter 5|26 pages

Aan yátx'u sáani!

Decolonial meditations on building abolition

chapter 6|13 pages

Settler colonialism, incarceration, and the abolitionist imperative

Lessons from an Australian youth detention center

chapter 8|26 pages

“The women that died in there, that's all I could think of”

The P4W Memorial Collective and garden initiative

part III|76 pages

Anti-carceral feminisms

chapter 9|14 pages

Starting with life

Murder sentencing and feminist prison abolitionist praxis

chapter 10|19 pages

Looking from northwest to southeast

Feminist carceralism, gender equality and global responses to gender-based violence

chapter 11|12 pages

Remembering Carol Smart

Tensions between feminism, victims' rights and abolitionism

part IV|82 pages

Multispecies carceralities

chapter 14|21 pages

Carceral canines

Racial terror and animal abuse from slave hounds to police dogs

chapter 15|17 pages

Trauma as a Möbius strip

PTSD, animal research, and the Oak Ridge prisoner experiments

chapter 16|12 pages

Coexistence as resistance

Humans and non-human animals in carceral settings