Critical Prison Studies Caucus: Making Freedom: Materializing Abolition Through Non-Reformist Reforms

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

After decades of antiprison activism, the crisis of mass incarceration is receiving increased national attention. Across the political spectrum, from the Koch Brothers to activists within #BlackLivesMatter, people are calling for policing and prison reform to a degree not witnessed since the 1970s. Navigating this political terrain, while full of possibility, also raises questions of how to best confront the carceral state at this historical juncture. Historically, the penal system has been able to incorporate reforms efforts, which often have strengthened its capacity to repress and punish. From this vantage point, we are compelled to strategically consider when do reforms reify the very systems of criminalization and state violence we are seeking to dismantle and how can they serve non-reformist, or abolitionist, ends in the pursuit of collective liberation and freedom?

In this panel, we will think through what materializing abolitionist reforms looks like in practice through exploring how communities have and continue to shift, dismantle, and transform the political, economic, and social structures that underpin the carceral state. David Stein traces how the failure of the Black freedom movement’s campaigns for full employment in the 1960s and 1970s shaped the crisis of surplus population in the 1980s that came to be “resolved” through the build up of the carceral state. This history points to the ongoing necessity of struggling around structural unemployment as an abolitionist strategy. Melissa Burch tracks contemporary job discrimination against formerly incarcerated people and asks how campaigns such as “ban the box” and civil rights lawsuits can serve to not simply increase people’s employment opportunities but to fundamentally shift consciousness and weaken the penal system. Lydia Pelot-Hobbs turns to New Orleans in her examination of how the grassroots organization BreakOUT!’s decision to focus their activism on ending both the practices and effects of the criminalization of Black queer and trans youth has opened up the conditions and possibility for members to survive and thrive in tandem with winning meaningful policing reforms. kai lumumba barrow closes out the panel by charting out how the space of collective imagination is critical in the work of ending anti-Black violence and developing abolitionist strategies. Drawing on slave narratives, prisoner writings, oral history, and cultural ephemera, barrow explores the ways that people have and continue to navigate the space between confinement and resistance and what such radical navigations have to teach us for the current conjuncture. In bringing these papers together, this panel hopes to further ongoing analysis within the Critical Prison Studies Caucus and the ASA about how policing and imprisonment might be abolished.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Craig Gilmore, Independent Scholar

Individual Presentations

• Learning from Losses: Black Freedom Movements for Guaranteed Jobs and the Rise of Mass Incarceration - David P. Stein, City University of New York, Graduate Center (NY)

• Limits and Possibilities in the Struggle to Confront Criminal Record-based Discrimination - Melissa Burch, University of Texas, Austin (TX)

• ‘To Walk Down the Street Without Fear’: Fighting Criminalization, Creating Transformation - Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, City University of New York, Graduate Center (NY)

• Decolonizing Imagination: Improvisations on Anti-Black Violence - Kai Lumumba Barrow, Independent Scholar

Comment

• Craig Gilmore, Independent Scholar