ABSTRACT
The Routledge International Handbook of Penal Abolition provides an authoritative and comprehensive look at the latest developments in the 21st-century penal abolitionism movement, both reflecting on key critical thought and setting the agenda for local and global abolitionist ideas and interventions over the coming decade.
Penal abolitionists question the legitimacy of criminal law, policing, courts, prisons and more broadly the idea of punishment, to argue that rather than effectively handling or solving social problems, interpersonal disputes, conflicts and harms, they actually increase individual and societal problems. The Routledge International Handbook of Penal Abolition is organized around six key themes:
- Social movements and abolition organizing
- Critical resistance to the penal state
- Voices from imprisoned and marginalized communities
- Diversity of abolitionist thought
- International perspectives on abolitionism
- Building new justice practices as a response to social and individual wrongdoing.
A global-centred and world-encompassing project, this book provides the reader with an alternative and critical perspective from which to reflect and raises the visibility of abolitionist ideas and strategies in a time when there is considerable discussion of how we will move forward in response to what has given rise to the criminalizing system: white supremacy, racial capitalism and human wrongdoing. It is essential reading for all those engaged with punishment and penology, criminology, sociology, corrections and critical prisons studies. It will appeal to any reader who seeks an innovative response to the calamitous failures of the modern criminalizing system.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part 1|72 pages
Abolition now
part 2|87 pages
Resisting penal subjugation
chapter 14|13 pages
“Dare to struggle, dare to win”
chapter 21|11 pages
Prison abolition movement in France
part 3|67 pages
Abolitionism is for the oppressed
chapter 27|2 pages
Surviving domestic violence and its consequences
chapter 28|3 pages
Cruel and unusual punishment
chapter 29|11 pages
Enabling penal abolitionism
chapter 30|12 pages
Barred by the maddening state
part 4|91 pages
Abolitionism
chapter 36|11 pages
Thinking beyond penal reform in India
chapter 41|10 pages
Penal abolitionism and restorative justice in Brazil
chapter 42|10 pages
As goes the South, so goes the nation
part 5|88 pages
Abolitionist reimaginings
chapter 47|11 pages
The revolutionary consciousness of abolition
chapter 51|12 pages
Beyond racial capitalism’s spacetime
part 6|38 pages
Activist toolbox