The prison abolition movement is a network of groups and activists that seek to reduce or eliminate prisons and the prison system, and replace them with systems of rehabilitation and education that do not focus on punishment and government institutionalization. The prison abolitionist movement is distinct from conventional prison reform, which is intended to improve conditions inside prisons.
Supporters of prison abolitionism are a diverse group with differing ideas as to exactly how prisons should be abolished, and what, if anything, should replace them. Some supporters of decarceration and prison abolition also work to end solitary confinement, the death penalty, and the construction of new prisons through non-reformist reforms. Others support books-to-prisoner projects and defend prisoners' right to access information and library services. Some organizations, such as the Anarchist Black Cross, seek the total abolishment of the prison system without any intention to replace it with other government-controlled systems.
Definition Scholar Dorothy Roberts takes the prison abolition movement in the United States to endorse three basic theses:
"[T]oday’s carceral punishment system can be traced back to slavery and the racial capitalist regime it relied on and sustained." "[T]he expanding criminal punishment system functions to oppress black people and other politically marginalized groups in order to maintain a racial capitalist regime." "[W]e can imagine and build a more humane and democratic society that no longer relies on caging people to meet human needs and solve social problems."
Thus, Roberts situates the theory of prison abolition within an intellectual tradition including scholars such as Cedric Robinson, who developed the concept of racial capitalism, and characterizes the movement as a response to a long history of oppressive treatment of black people in the United States. In Canada, many abolitionists have called Canada's prisons the "new residential schools", which were designed as a cultural genocide of Indigenous people.
Legal scholar Allegra McLeod notes that prison abolition is not merely a negative project of "opening … prison doors", but rather "may be understood instead as a gradual project of decarceration, in which radically different legal and institutional regulatory forms supplant criminal law enforcement." Prison abolition, in McLeod's view, involves a positive agenda that reimagines how societies might deal with social problems in the absence of prisons, using techniques such as decriminalization and improved welfare provision.
Like Roberts, McLeod sees the contemporary theory of prison abolition as linked to theories regarding the abolition of slavery. McLeod notes that W. E. B. Du Bois—particularly in his Black Reconstruction in America—saw abolitionism not only as a movement to end the legal institution of property in human beings, but also as a means of bringing about a "different future" wherein former slaves could enjoy full participation in society. (Angela Davis explicitly took inspiration from Du Bois's concept of "abolition democracy" in her book Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture.) Similarly, on McLeod's view, prison abolition implies broad changes to social institutions: "[a]n abolitionist framework", she writes, "requires positive forms of social integration and collective security that are not organized around criminal law enforcement, confinement, criminal surveillance, punitive policing, or punishment."
The abolition of prisons is not only about the closure of prisons. Abolitionist views is also a way to counter the hegemonic discourse, and gives an alternative ways of thinking. It is a way to reconceptualize basic notions like crime, innocence, punishment etc.
Historical development Anarchism and prison abolition
Many anarchist organizations believe that the best form of justice arises naturally out of social contracts, restorative justice, or transformative justice.
Anarchist opposition to incarceration can be found in articles written as early as 1851, and is elucidated by major anarchist thinkers such as Proudhon, Bakunin, Berkman, Goldman, Malatesta, Bonanno, and Kropotkin.
Personal experiences in prison because of revolutionary activity prompted many anarchists who were “deeply affected by their experiences” to publish their criticisms. In 1886, the trial of eight anarchists following the Haymarket riots brought state repression to public attention. Lucy Parsons, an anarchist and wife of one of the Haymarket eight, embarked on a speaking tour through 17 different states speaking to a total of almost 200,000 people. Speaking at his trial, in a widely disseminated speech, one of the co-accused, August Spies, stated: It is not likely that the honorable Bonfield and Grinnell can conceive of a social order not held intact by the policeman's club and pistol, nor of a free society without prisons, gallows, and State's attorneys. In such a society they probably fail to find a place for themselves. And is this the reason why Anarchism is such a "pernicious and damnable doctrine?"The Anarchist Red Cross, a prisoner support group and the precursor to the Anarchist Black Cross, was founded roughly in 1906. By that year, groups existed in Kiev, Odessa, Bialystok, and trials of its members led to its spread across Europe and North America. A 2018 guide to starting an Anarchist Black Cross group states that "we need to destroy all the prisons, and free all the prisoners. Our position is an abolitionist stance against the state and it’s prisons."
In 1917, the Anarchist Red Cross would disband and members joined the revolution in Russia. Following the February revolution, political prisoners were released from Russian jails, in a massive wave of amnesties. The Anarchist Red Cross reorganised in 1919 as the Anarchist Black Cross, with some members joining the anarchist insurgent Nestor Makhno.
The Anarchist Black Cross was reconstituted in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. The pressure from the number of anarchist prisoners in need of aid led to the closing of “most of the chapters in the United States and Europe.” Alternative groups, such as the Alexander Berkman Aid Fund and the Society to Aid Anarchist Prisoners in Russia would take their place. Another resurgence was felt in 1967, and, again, in 1979 owing to the efforts of Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, whose writings on prison and anarchism are credited as having spread and been foundational to Black anarchism.
Campaigns to free anarchist prisoners have served as the basis for calling for freedom for all prisoners. June 11, 2011, international solidarity actions for anarchist prisoners Marie Mason and Eric McDavid triggered the start of an international day and week of solidarity with all anarchist prisoners in 2015.
The Prisoners Movement Emerging in the 1960s, engaging with traditions of abolitionist thought, The Prisoners' Movement was a nationwide struggle of incarcerated people against both institutions and ontologies of punishment culture in the United States. Growing alongside the anger and the activism of the Civil Rights Movement and soon Black Power, attention was drawn to an identified political economy that privileged racial hierarchies vis-à-vis the constructed identity of ‘whiteness’ through the subjugation of Black and Brown people.Colley, Zoe. “War without Terms: George Jackson, Black Power and the American Radical Prison Rights Movement, 1941-1971.” History (London) (HOBOKEN) 101, no. 345 (April 2016): 269. Prisoners, especially Black inmates who faced the greatest oppression, increasingly began to politicize their own status as inmates, reviving abolitionist discourse; challenging not only prison establishments, but also called for the dismantling of greater systems of surveillance, policing, and economic subjugation facilitated by racial capitalism.Colley, Zoe. “War without Terms: George Jackson, Black Power and the American Radical Prison Rights Movement, 1941-1971.” History (London) (HOBOKEN) 101, no. 345 (April 2016): 269. This framework of critique would later emerge to be identified along terminology of the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC).
At first, one of the most prominent ways prisoners challenged the status-quo was through legal pathways and in court. Many of the initial cases in the early 60s related to prison conditions and infringements on rights, especially around religion and freedom of speech of Black Muslim inmates.Williams , Tiana Alexandria. Locked down: The hidden history of the prisoners’ rights movement. Accessed May 15, 2026. https://mcnair.ucdavis.edu/sites/g/files/dgvnsk476/files/inline-files/2020%20McNair%20Journal%20XVIII%20Version%20Tiana%20Williams.pdf. One of the most prominent cases of the decade, Supreme Court ruling of Cooper v. Pate in 1964, was spearheaded by the Nation of Islam and obtained the legal right to address their grievances before the court. News of this case was soon circulated widely and utilized in hundreds of following court cases, serving to increase prisoners' access to legal counsel, end of brutal conditions, and outside literature. While the Nation of Islam was not overtly abolitionist in the traditional sense, their messaging of Black nationality, rejection of White Christianism, and solidarity was fundamental not only to increasing unity and awareness, but also became deeply threatening to the state.COLLEY, ZOE. “Erasing Minds: Behavioral Modification, the Prison Rights Movement, and Psychological Experimentation in America’s Prisons, 1962–1983.” Journal of American Studies (Cambridge, UK) 57, no. 1 (February 2023): 60. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875822000123. From New York to California, authorities began to complain of the 'disruptive force' the Nation of Islam was causing within correctional facilities, stating that the potential of African American's allegiance could destabilized the "entire penal system." Soon, as the Nation of Islam was viewed as the greatest threat in the early-mid 60s, the emergence and politics of the Black Panther would grow the internal movement only further.