From Prison to Police Abolition: Challenging Queer Criminology’s Investments in the Police

• In Event: Abolition and Queer Justice: Queer Criminalization and Criminology’s Investments in the Police

Abstract

This essay reflects upon the expansion of police abolition theorising, activism, and critique over the past decade that I have been researching queer/trans entanglements with policing in Australia and beyond. Since the 2010s, the idea that police should be disarmed, disempowered, and ultimately disbanded has bloomed in public scholarly and activist discourse, largely thanks to movements for Black lives, First Nations sovereignty, and queer/trans justice (McDowell and Fernandez, 2018; Russell 2018). This welcome development draws upon, and significantly extends, a longer tradition of abolitionist theorising centering around the prison (Davis, 2003; Russell and Carlton, 2013; Stanley and Smith, 2011). Engagement with these ideas in queer criminology, however, has been uneven and sometimes contradictory. One the one hand, criminology generally has longstanding and enduring ties to the police and correctional enterprise, and on the other hand, many mainstream LGBTIQA+ organisations have symbolic and material investments in policing and punishment (Lamble, 2013; Russell 2019). The complexities of these twin pressures create challenges for those of us working in and around queer criminology that want to account for the enduring violence of the police in our work and support movements led by communities most affected by it. This essay combines reflections on my own experiences as a PhD student and junior scholar with an exploratory review of the literature on police abolition, contributing to debates in queer criminology about the nature, function, and effects of the police and our engagements with them.

Author

• Emma Russell, La Trobe University