What it means to be an abolitionist
By: Richard Garside
Tags: Prison Reform, Prison Abolition, Criminal Justice Reform

In my day job I am the Director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, an educational charity that advances public understanding of crime and criminal justice. This piece is a personal reflection, though one inevitably influenced by my experience of working at the Centre.

In its work around prisons, the Centre walks the uncomfortable and ambiguous line between prison reform and prison abolition. It recognises the urgency of much-needed improvements to existing prisons. It also champions the need for sustained decarceration and a shrinking of the prison estate.

When it comes to prison abolition, the Centre has an open view: inspired by the possibility of the long-term abolition of prison, while realising that abolition is neither a simple task, nor one devoid of risk and unforeseen effects. The notion that ‘whatever a non-carceral future holds it will surely be better than what we have now’ should, as the abolitionist Liat Ben Moshe argues in a recent essay, be resisted. It could be worse.

If decarceration and, in the longer-term, abolition, are to be realised — and realised in a way that such a future is better, rather than worse, than the present — it will require a broad-based, inclusive movement for change: one that embraces difference and diversity, and that eschews dogmatism and group-think. It will require collaborative solutions to problems and challenges; and a respectful acknowledgement of differences and disagreement.

How can this be done? In looking for answers to this question, a good place to start is with one of the foundational — arguably the greatest — contributions to contemporary European abolitionist thinking: Thomas Mathiesen’s 1974 masterpiece, The Politics of Abolition.

What is so striking about this book is Mathiesen’s concern with what it means to be an abolitionist — what abolitionist praxis looks like — rather than with the abstract discussion of alternatives to prisons, or the offering of sterile position statements.

Prison abolitionists are often pressed to explain what they would do instead of prisons: what about the rapists, the murderers, the drug lords? In The Politics of Abolition, Mathiesen makes a virtue of not trying to answer this question. Abolitionism, he argues, is about ‘the anxiety and pleasure involved in entering a field which is unsettled’. The dilemma of abolitionism rests in resisting the pressure to accept ‘finalized clarity’, choosing a ‘tolerance of ambiguity as the counterpart to the status quo’.

Abolitionists, Mathiesen argues, face ‘enormous political pressure’ to present worked up solutions, a finalised set of demands and perspectives. Capitulating to this pressure is a mistake, he argues: one that leads to a stagnation and a falling back on old ways of thinking, coercive ways of working. Abolitionism is only effective, can only be relevant, in its movement, in the degree to which it operates in an ever expanding circle of theory and action. This involves a rejection of certainty and dogmatism, and an embrace of challenging ways of thinking, new ways of working. As Mathiesen writes:

there is no reason to expect any terminated condition of final abolition… The maintenance of an abolition implies that there is constantly more to abolish, that one looks ahead towards a new and still more long-term objective of abolition, that one constantly moves in a wider circle to new fields of abolition.

Mathiesen wrote these words in a different time. The spirit of his analysis still holds. What are the implications for contemporary abolitionist thinking and practice in the UK?

The main implication is that abolitionism will fail if it does not affirm the centrality of dialogue and learning, and acknowledge the importance of a humility that comes from not having all the answers. It requires an openness to learning from others, and to changing through such encounters. The abolitionist movement will have life and relevance only to the degree that it is open, inclusive and unfinished: in movement, rather than locked in the static dogmatism of fixed positions, in the comforting certainty of the rightness of its beliefs, and the wrongness of those of others.

Current abolitionist activism is a long way from meeting this challenge. It needs to change if it is to have any hope of being relevant.