ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a legal landscape to shift the conversation about the abolition of criminology in the less visible, often overlooked sites of the courthouse and courtroom. This opens abolitionist discourse for the incorporation of a bridging assessment towards creative directions. In many ways, courtroom praxis and courthouse design both shape and connect what policing does within the community with the “end of the line” praxis of punishment through imprisonment. I anchor this assessment of the courthouse and courtroom within a Black postcolonial feminist analysis to highlight how these two sites are a mechanism of colonialism. I employ the methodology of a case study to illustrate the many ways courthouse and courtroom procedure, function, and layout protects the colonial state. In order to do this, I analyze Assata Shakur’s (born Joanne Chesimard) very public case, arguing that it is the courthouse and courtroom as a place that situates Shakur into a criminal.
