Abstract
There are various critiques laid out against the framework of carceral abolition (as it appears currently in prison abolition and deinstitutionalization): that it is abstract, only critiques but does not suggest specific solutions; that it is a utopian vision of the world; and that it is unrealistic in the world we currently occupy. Throughout this article I will demonstrate how such critiques can be conceptualized as strengths of these movements and frameworks for liberation. I argue that carceral abolition (as it appears in prison abolition and deinstitutionalization) is a form of knowledge, an ethical position. My first claim is that this knowledge is rooted in maroonage and I show the consequences of not engaging with abolition from intersectional frameworks. My second claim is that we can understand abolition as a dis-epistemology that rejects ways of knowing tied to certainty, optimism and certain notions of futurity and temporality.
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Notes
I use the term ‘race neutral’ as opposed to ‘color blind’, which I find to be a confusing and ableist term.
Maroon refers to the communities of runaway slaves and indigenous people that have formed in the Americas since the seventeenth century.
The organization disbanded in 1980. Szasz (2002) book alludes to slavery and its abolition and its relation, or mostly analogy to, psychiatry. I discuss this history and the AAAIMH in more detail in my larger project.
In 1979 for example, self advocates in Nebraska held a press conference stating that all institutions should be closed. See Williams and Shoultz (1982).
"The State-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death."
See the insightful work of Erica Meiners (2009) on the topic of ‘stranger danger’ and sex offender registries.
It is important to keep in mind however that many of these accounts of disability culture and epistemology do not often provide the kind of intersectional analysis, especially in relation to race, that fugitive knowledges demand, see also Puar (2017).
Although I do draw here on conceptualizations from some European or diasporic theorists, my research and claims here are grounded in the North American context, particularly carceral abolition movements in the U.S., and should be read from this specific geographical and historical context.
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Ben-Moshe, L. Dis-epistemologies of Abolition. Crit Crim 26, 341–355 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-018-9403-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-018-9403-1