No Abolition Without Reparations

• In Event: Abolitionist Theorizing

Abstract

Mass incarceration’s consequences for the wealth, health, and safety of Black Americans have been rigorously documented. Yet calls for abolition rarely address the question of reparations to Black communities. Revisiting scholarship on mass incarceration’s harms from a stratification economics perspective, the results of a recent evidence review suggest that simply ending imprisonment—or even dismantling the entire criminal legal system—would be grossly insufficient to address the racial inequalities it has helped to build and sustain. Drawing on findings from an economic meta-analysis of the physical, social, and financial impacts of mass incarceration, we present a rigorous floor estimate for the economic damages of racially repressive policing and punishment in the US since 1978 and argue that abolition proposals must address these damages. To truly end mass incarceration will require transforming the conditions of white political and economic domination under which it arose, including legislative and judicial intervention to remedy white hyper-enfranchisement and reparations to close the Black-white wealth gap.

Authors

• Tasseli McKay, Duke University

• William "Sandy" Darity, Jr., Duke University