ABSTRACT
Building abolition also demands intellectual labor to make sense of shifts and continuities in the deployment of carceral logics and power, including in these times of intersecting pandemics of inequality in which policing, punitive injustice, and confinement are being deployed in stated efforts to enhance public health and safety. Escaping carceral logics and practices in the future also requires building ways of attending to the needs stemming from conflicts and harms premised on knowledge and processes that collectively break us free from the desire to control and punish. Building on the insights of pioneering critical feminist criminologist Carol Smart concerning the limits of law, Kilty and Bogosavljevic note the important role feminist killjoys can play in illuminating “the fantasy that carceral logics adequately nurture our emotional state and keep us safe,” as well as the need to channel “emotions that underpin calls for carceral punishment toward an abolitionist ethos” in the pursuit of liberation and social justice.
