Envisioning Abolition
Edited by David Gordon Scott and Emma Bell
Published
Mar 19, 2025Page count
400 pagesISBN
978-1529234770Dimensions
234 x 156 mmImprint
Bristol University PressPublished
Mar 19, 2025Page count
400 pagesISBN
978-1529234794Dimensions
234 x 156 mmImprint
Bristol University Press
Envisioning Abolition
Abolitionist thought visualises a world without prisons – or a radical reduction or transformation of prisons and punishment. This fascinating book explores the abolitionist ideas of key early socialists and anarchists, writing from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. It considers how these radical thinkers can provide insights into our present condition, both by highlighting the harms of punishment and by pointing to inspiring alternatives to current policy and practice.
By examining their calls for the ending of legal coercion, domination and repression, the book shows how the ideas of early socialists and anarchists can assist those engaging in emancipatory struggles against penal and social injustice today.
“This bold, authoritative and engaging collection has rich potential to inform and reanimate current debates on prison abolition. It can serve as an important source of inspiration for contemporary abolitionists.” Andrew M. Jefferson, DIGNITY - Danish Institute Against Torture
“While more and more people have joined the struggle to abolish cops, courts and cages in recent years, early contributions to penal abolitionist thought and praxis have often been ignored. Envisioning Abolition offers a window into the origins of penal abolitionism that ought to be taken up more readily in contemporary efforts to end imprisonment and punitive injustice.” Justin Piché, University of Ottawa and co-author of How to Abolish Prisons: Lessons from the Movement Against Imprisonment
David Gordon Scott works at The Open University and is Co-Founding Editor of the journal Justice, Power and Resistance.
Emma Bell is Professor of British Politics at Savoie University and is Co-Founding Editor of the journal Justice, Power and Resistance.
1. Abolitionism in Red and Black - Emma Bell and David Gordon Scott
2. The Abolitionist Ideas of William Godwin in the Late 18th Century - Ruby Tuke
3. Robert Owen and the Owenites: Abolitionist Ideas in the Early British Socialist Movement - Ophélie Siméon
4. ‘Do What is Right, and Let Come What May’: Tolstoy and Penal Abolition - Andrei Zorin
5. Arthur St John: Tolstoyan Abolitionism in Practice - Peter Cox and Paul Taylor
6. Edward Carpenter’s Realist Utopian and Contingent Abolitionism - Jonathan Baldwin
7. William Morris’ Utopian Case for Prison Abolition - Owen Holland
8. Beyond Sanction: Jean-Marie Guyau Between Penal Abolition and Social Defence - Federico Testa
9. Pyotr Kropotkin: Foundations of Anarchist Prison Abolition - Robert D. Weide
10. Anarchism and the Abolition of the Criminal Justice System: The Struggle for the Discourse on Evolution and Social Order in Spain - Alejandro Forero Cuellar
11. Fear or Freedom? Errico Malatesta on Crime and Punishment - Davide Turcato
12. Envisioning a New Society: Pietro Gori and the Problem of Criminal Justice - Marco Manfredi
13. ‘Cemeteries of the Living Dead’: Eugene V. Debs, Prison Abolitionist - Lisa Phillips
14. Altgeld’s Protégé: Clarence Darrow and the Abolition of Prisons and Capital Punishment in the United States
- Andrew E. Kersten
15. Emma Goldman: The Making of a Prison Abolitionist - Penny A. Weiss
16. Seeing Through the Game: Alexander Berkman and the Modern Prison Abolition Movement - Søren Hough
