Someone you know was hurt. And afterward, the world had one piece of advice: report it. Press charges. Let the system handle it. What almost nobody asked was what that person actually needed. What would help. What would make it feel like it had been taken seriously.
That question is at the centre of the case for prison abolition. Not because abolitionists don't take violence seriously, but because the prison was never designed to answer it. It was designed to disappear the problem, to make the person who caused it invisible, while leaving the conditions that produced the violence completely intact.
This episode traces the prison from its origins in the 1820s, when Quaker reformers built the first penitentiary in Philadelphia and inadvertently drove prisoners insane, through the convict leasing system that replaced slavery in all but name, to the mass incarceration system that currently holds more people than any other country on earth. It asks what Angela Davis means when she says the prison performs an ideological function. What Mariame Kaba means when she describes abolition as a dual project. And what transformative justice actually looks like in practice, for survivors who need something now, before the world is different.
The hardest question the episode holds: what do we owe the person who was hurt and wants a response today? There is no clean answer. That is the point.
Further reading:
Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003)
Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us (2021)
Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Beth Richie, Erica Meiners, Abolition. Feminism. Now. (2022)
Creative Interventions Toolkit — free at creative-interventions.org
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag (2007)
Tags: prison abolition, abolition, carceral system, Angela Davis, Mariame Kaba, transformative justice, community accountability, convict leasing, 13th Amendment, INCITE, mass incarceration, penitentiary, prison industrial complex, Critical Resistance, anarchism, survivor centred justice
Show notes:
Prison abolition and the question nobody wants to answer
A Thousand Small Fires — Episode 10
The prison was not designed to answer what we do about violence. It was designed to disappear the person who caused it. This episode traces the history of incarceration from its Quaker origins through convict leasing to mass incarceration, and asks what abolition actually offers instead.
In this episode:
Thinkers and sources mentioned:
A question to carry:
What does accountability actually require — and does the system we have come anywhere close to it?
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