What is, so to speak, the object of abolition?
Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society.
— Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, The University and the Undercommons1
Introduction
For decades, police in Chicago chained people in their custody to the wall in dark, windowless rooms and subjected their captives to beatings, electric shocks, anal rape, and racial abuse.2 In July 2016, members of the #LetUsBreathe Collective, created in the aftermath of numerous police killings in Chicago and elsewhere, occupied vacant lots adjacent to the Chicago Police Department’s Homan Square facility — one of the locations where such abuse occurred.3 The Collective sought justice, not through recourse to the criminal courts or civil litigation, but instead by reconceptualizing justice in connection with efforts to end reliance on imprisonment and policing.4 The organizers redesignated Homan Square — which shares a name with the Chicago slumlord Samuel Homan5 — “Freedom Square.”6 The organizers’ idea was to begin to realize on a small scale what the scholar and activist Professor Angela Davis, echoing the words of W.E.B. Du Bois,7 has called “abolition democracy.”8
Organizers in Freedom Square and across the city amplified the penal-abolitionist platforms of the Movement for Black Lives and Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100),9 demanding that the state divest from policing and imprisonment and invest in new forms of more equitable and just coexistence.10 Freedom Square was to be an experiment in which participants would “imagine a world without police,”11 a world where the 1.4 billion–dollar Chicago police budget12 would be directed away from detaining human beings and toward a democratic revitalization of public education, employment, restorative justice, mental health, housing, addiction treatment, arts, and nutrition.13 Before they disbanded, those engaged in the Freedom Square experiment provided meals to hundreds of people each day and offered educational workshops, clothing, books, and play spaces for neighborhood children.14
Similar efforts took shape beyond Chicago, from New York City, where organizers launched a protest called “Abolition Square” that same summer,15 to Los Angeles, where Black Lives Matter activists occupied an area near police headquarters and issued calls to “decolonize City Hall.”16 Across the country, contemporary movements against the violence of policing have taken up the cause of penal abolition, denouncing caging and minutely controlling human beings while re-envisioning democracy in genuinely liberatory terms. Through these abolitionist efforts — from those of organizers in Chicago confronting the decades of torture perpetrated by police, to those of people struggling together to address the aftermath of sexual assault and homicide, to those of community members organizing to ensure greater economic well-being and security — a new conception of justice has begun to emerge.
Justice in abolitionist terms involves at once exposing the violence, hypocrisy, and dissembling entrenched in existing legal practices, while attempting to achieve peace, make amends, and distribute resources more equitably. Justice for abolitionists is an integrated endeavor to prevent harm, intervene in harm, obtain reparations, and transform the conditions in which we live.17 This conception of justice works, for example, to eliminate the criminalization of poverty and survival while addressing the criminality of a global social order in which the eight wealthiest men own “the same amount of wealth as” fifty percent of all people on earth.18 To approach justice in these terms requires what Professor Lisa Guenther, an abolitionist philosopher, describes as “collective resistance and revolution at the scene of ‘crime’ itself.”19 Such resistance begins by unmasking the illegitimacy of much of what is subject to criminalization — for instance, the prosecution of immigration offenses, which compose at present more than half of the U.S. federal criminal docket.20 Resistance at the scene of crime itself also entails working to eliminate existing punitive institutions while identifying meaningful forms of accountability and prevention to respond to actual violence and wrongdoing. Finally, such resistance involves addressing how mainstream economic practices and arrangements perpetrate violent theft every day in ways that can be thoroughly redressed only by democratizing political and economic institutions so as to prevent and respond to the highly unequal distribution of resources and life chances.
Whereas reformist efforts aim to redress extreme abuse or dysfunction in the criminal process without further destabilizing existing legal and social systems — often by trading reduced severity for certain “nonviolent offenders” in exchange for increased punitiveness toward others — abolitionist measures recognize justice as attainable only through a more thorough transformation of our political, social, and economic lives.21 To realize justice in abolitionist terms thus entails a holistic engagement with the structural conditions that give rise to suffering, as well as the interpersonal dynamics involved in violence.
This Essay argues that this abolitionist conception of justice presents a formidable challenge to existing ideas of legal justice. Whereas conventional accounts of legal justice emphasize the administration of justice through individualized adjudication and corresponding punishment or remuneration (most often in idealized terms starkly at odds with actual legal processes), abolitionist justice offers a more compelling and material effort to realize justice — one where punishment is abandoned in favor of accountability and repair, and where discriminatory criminal law enforcement is replaced with practices addressing the systemic bases of inequality, poverty, and violence.
Much of this Essay will focus on abolitionist projects unfolding in Chicago, in part because Chicago is a place where abolitionist organizing has flourished over the last decade, bringing together interracial coalitions working for immigration justice and racial inclusion, reparations, participatory budgeting, and social and economic transformation. But the sustained focus on a single place, with its particular history and present, is also an important dimension of the conception of justice embraced by contemporary abolitionists — namely, abolitionists are committed to justice grounded in experience rather than proceeding primarily from idealized and abstract premises with little attention to how those ideals are translated into actual practices.
The remainder of this Essay proceeds as follows: Part I further explores the project of abolition democracy. Part II focuses on how abolition democracy constitutes an alternative conception of justice, one that is taking shape in political mobilizations that aim to prefigure a fairer and more peaceful world without relying on prisons and police. Part III argues that this emergent conception of justice is more meaningful and transformative than existing ideals of legal justice, which all too often operate at such a degree of remove from the realities of legal processes that they lose their connection to the aim of justice altogether. By contrast, those committed to abolition democracy attend closely to and thereby begin to approach what justice actually demands.
* Professor, Georgetown University Law Center. I am grateful to Amna Akbar, Geoff Gilbert, Sora Han, Stephen Lee, and Alexandra Natapoff for their careful engagement with this Essay and to workshop participants at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. I owe thanks also to the editors of the Harvard Law Review and to librarians at Georgetown Law for their outstanding work. And I am most grateful to Sherally Munshi for her brilliant ideas and editorial guidance, steadfast support, and inspiration. This Essay is dedicated to our son, Kiran Bayard, with the hope he lives to see a world that comes closer to realizing abolition democracy.