Abolitionist Alternatives: Embracing the Failure of Punishment

• In Event: Critical Futures: Transforming Identity, Digital Space, and Disciplinary Power

Abstract

This paper argues that abolition may be what happens when punishment is queered, when we seize punishment’s failure to achieve any legitimate goals for a democratic society as the crack through which a new world might be glimpsed. Beginning with the argument that criminal punishment has dressed as a system of justice but was only ever able to harm in ways that have been useful to the powerful, in this paper I use Halberstam’s theory of queer failure to embrace punishment’s failure. As punishment fails to be possible, as the terms of normative punishment are understood to be incompatible with their own legitimacy, failing at punishment becomes an opportunity—even a demand to create a world in which prisons are impossible. Abolitionism becomes the only option. By uniting Halberstam’s queer theory of punishment with recent developments in abolitionist theory, I argue that new forms of theorizing and being can be imagined.

Author

• Wendy Wright, William Paterson University