Penal Abolition as Severing the Threads of Penality

• In Event: Penal Abolition – Building Ideas and Practices

Abstract

Penal abolition entails severing the influential threads that maintain and grow the penal system. Some of the key threads include: penality as capitalism (profiteering in the carceral project through political lobbies, private police, lawyering, private prisons, or what has been called the “Prison Industrial Complex”); penality as patriarchy and white supremacy; penality as entertainment (the use and sale of penal products in an endless looping of media, entertainment and consumer conglomerates); penality as power (for career politicians and other moral entrepreneurs); penality as profession/career (numerous jobs in policing, lawyering, guarding and academics); and penality as a complex cultural system (disseminating punishment as social control, addressing conflict and harms in relationships with new conflict and new harms, etc.).

Author

• Viviane Saleh-Hanna, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth