Abolitionist Voices
Edited by David Gordon Scott
Published
Mar 19, 2025Page count
320 pagesISBN
978-1529224030Dimensions
234 x 156 mmImprint
Bristol University PressPublished
Mar 19, 2025Page count
320 pagesISBN
978-1529224054Dimensions
234 x 156 mmImprint
Bristol University Press
Abolitionist Voices
Why have so many radical thinkers advocated for the abolition of prisons and punishment? And why have their ideas been so difficult to popularise or garner the political will for change? This book outlines several different approaches to penal abolitionism and showcases their calls for the ending of legal coercion, domination, and repression.
This exciting and innovative edited collection shows how abolitionist ideas have continued topicality and relevance in the present day and how they can collectively help with devising new ways of thinking about social problems as well as suggesting alternatives to existing penal policies, practices and institutions.
David Gordon Scott works at The Open University and is Co-Founding Editor of the journal Justice, Power and Resistance.
Foreword by Johannes Feest
Preface - David Gordon Scott
1. The Abolitionist Rhizome - David Gordon Scott
Part 1: Voices of the Oppressed
2. Kropotkin and the Anarchist Case for Penal Abolition - Ruth Kinna
3. Angela Davis and the Contributions and Contradictions of Abolition - Joy James
4. Phenomenology, Abolition and the Lived Experience of Incarceration - Lisa Guenther
Part 2: Abolitionist Ideas
5. Liberation and Reconciliation: The Christian Tradition and Prison Abolition - Hannah Bowman
6. The Daybreak of Abolition: The Overcoming of Punishment and Promotion of Therapy in Nietzsche’s Philosophy - Caius Brandão
7. Marxism and the Political Economy of Abolitionism - Jon Burnett
8. Foucault and Prison Abolition - Chloë Taylor
Part 3: The Scope of Oppression
9. The Slavery Industrial Complex - Viviane Saleh-Hanna
10. Abolition and the Colonial Carceral Archipelago - Thalia Anthony and Harry Blagg
11. Southerning Nonpunitive and Abolitionist Feminism - Valeria Vegh Weis
Part 4: Struggles for Liberation and Justice
12. Eco-abolition: Policing Environmental Injustice - Nathan Stephens-Griffin and Andrea Brock
13. Abolitionist Activism in Post-Mass-Media Societies: Moral Panic and the Amplification of Abolitionist Voices - Michael Dellwing
14. Libertarian Socialism and the Struggle for Liberative Justice - David Gordon Scott
