What is Abolition?
Abolition is the political movement to end slavery and liberate enslaved individuals around the world. In contemporary usage, abolition extends beyond the 19th-century campaign against chattel slavery to encompass efforts to dismantle prisons, policing, surveillance systems, and other institutions rooted in violence and control. Prison abolition is a movement that seeks to abolish prisons as an institution, aiming to establish a criminal justice system that avoids the use of detention entirely. Rather than reforming punitive systems, abolitionists work toward their elimination and replacement with structures grounded in accountability, healing, and collective care.
Prison abolition is not merely a negative project of opening prison doors, but rather a gradual project of decarceration in which radically different legal and institutional regulatory forms supplant criminal law enforcement, involving a positive agenda that reimagines how societies might deal with social problems in the absence of prisons. The movement draws connections between historic struggles—the abolition of slavery, civil rights movements, anti-colonial liberation—and present-day campaigns to end mass incarceration, policing, and state violence.
Origins & Lineage
The abolitionist movement gained momentum in the western world in the late 18th and 19th centuries. In Colonial America, a few German Quakers issued the 1688 Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery, which marked the beginning of the American abolitionist movement. The abolition movement began with criticism by rationalist thinkers of the Enlightenment of slavery’s violation of the “rights of man,” and Quaker and other evangelical religious groups condemned it for its un-Christian qualities.
The organized abolitionist movement officially emerged around 1830. William Lloyd Garrison published The Liberator in 1831. The American Anti-slavery Society formed in 1833. The movement combined moral urgency with political organizing, employing petitions, boycotts, publications, and direct action.
Contemporary prison abolition has distinct roots. The prison abolition movement in the United States formed in part as a response to the 1971 Attica Prison riot, which drew attention to the inhumane conditions common in prisons. Angela Davis traces the roots of contemporary prison abolition theory at least to Thomas Mathiesen’s 1974 book The Politics of Abolition, which had been published in the wake of the Attica Prison uprising and unrest in European prisons around the same time. She also cites activist Fay Honey Knopp’s 1976 work Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists as significant in the movement.
Davis traces the contemporary movement to abolish prisons to earlier movements—to abolish slavery in the 19th century, to end second-class citizenship for Black people in the 20th, and to abolish the death penalty in the 21st. The concept of “abolition democracy,” invoked by contemporary abolitionists like Angela Davis, draws on W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction.
How It’s Practiced
Abolition operates on multiple scales simultaneously. At the structural level, it involves campaigns to defund police, close prisons and detention centers, decriminalize activities like drug use and sex work, and redirect resources toward housing, healthcare, education, and mental health services. Prison abolitionists often advocate major structural changes to prevent crime at the societal level by addressing its root causes.
At the interpersonal level, abolition manifests through transformative justice practices. Transformative justice is an abolition feminist practice that has become increasingly visible as a praxis for addressing inter-personal harm, often with a focus on gender-based violence, without relying on the criminal justice system. Transformative justice seeks to solve the problem of violence at the grassroots level, without relying on punishment, incarceration, or policing. These community-based processes emphasize accountability, healing for survivors, transformation of conditions that enabled harm, and collective responsibility rather than punishment.
Abolition can be a spiritual practice, a spiritual journey, and a spiritual commitment, considered as a collective and improvisational project. For many practitioners, abolition involves daily practices of boundary-setting, community care, conflict resolution, and mutual aid—embodying alternatives to carceral logic in everyday life.
Abolition Today
The prison-abolition movement is a loose collection of people and groups calling for deep, structural reforms to how we handle and even think about crime, with de facto figureheads such as Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and organizations such as Critical Resistance, INCITE!, the Movement for Black Lives, the National Lawyers Guild, and Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee.
Seeker encounters with abolition today include study groups reading foundational texts like Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003) and Abolition Democracy (2005), Mariame Kaba’s We Do This 'Til We Free Us (2021), and Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Golden Gulag (2007). Workshops on transformative justice teach practical skills for addressing harm without state intervention. Community organizations offer political education, mutual aid networks, and campaigns to close jails or resist new prison construction.
During the 2010s, there was a revitalization of abolition discourse and a (re)politicization of the carceral state. Following uprisings against police violence in 2020, abolitionist frameworks entered mainstream discourse, with increased public engagement around demands to defund police and reimagine public safety.
Spiritual and contemplative communities have begun exploring abolition’s resonances with practices of non-harm, collective liberation, and transformative healing. Collections like Spirituality and Abolition gather writings, poetry, and art from thinkers, organizers, and incarcerated people, tracing the importance of faith and spirit in ongoing struggle towards abolitionist horizons.
Common Misconceptions
Abolition is not simply about releasing everyone from prison tomorrow. Mariame Kaba notes that transformative justice cannot be seen simply as an alternative practice to incarceration but rather as an ideology, a framework, a political vision, a practice—a way to shift and transform relationships to build conditions under which prisons are no longer needed.
Abolition is not a rejection of accountability or safety. Rather, it challenges the assumption that cages produce either. Abolitionists argue that prisons do not reduce harm but perpetuate cycles of violence, and that genuine safety requires addressing root causes: poverty, lack of mental health care, housing instability, and structural racism.
The prison abolitionist movement is distinct from conventional prison reform, which is intended to improve conditions inside prisons. Abolitionists are skeptical that institutions designed to punish and control can be reformed into humane ones, arguing instead for their replacement with systems organized around different principles entirely.
Abolition is not solely a Black American movement, though Black organizers have been its most prominent architects. The International Conference on Penal Abolition (ICOPA) periodically brings scholars and activists together from Europe, South America, Australia, Africa, and North America, revealing the varied nature of this movement. Indigenous communities worldwide have practiced transformative justice for centuries.
How to Begin
For those new to abolitionist thought, begin with Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), a concise introduction to the logic and history of prisons and the case for their elimination. Follow with Mariame Kaba’s We Do This 'Til We Free Us (2021) for accessible essays on abolitionist organizing and transformative justice in practice.
Engage with local organizing. Search for groups affiliated with Critical Resistance, Black and Pink, or other abolitionist networks. Many offer political education sessions, skill-shares on conflict resolution, and campaigns addressing local criminalization.
Examine your own relationship to punishment, safety, and justice. Notice when you default to carceral thinking—calling police, seeking punishment for harm—and practice imagining other responses. Study transformative justice resources on addressing harm, accountability, and healing without state intervention.
Recognize abolition as long-term work requiring both immediate action and patient vision-building. Support campaigns to free political prisoners, oppose jail construction, decriminalize survival activities, and redirect resources toward community needs. Cultivate practices of accountability, boundary-setting, and collective care in your own relationships and communities.