thumb|"Prison is torture" graffiti with the [[Anarchist Circle-A symbol in Catalonia]]
Prison abolition is a movement that seeks to abolish prisons as an institution. Based on new evidence, several abolitionists have argued that "much of what reformists claim is wrong with the criminal punishment system—such as high rates of recidivism, severe racial disparities, and extreme obstacles to reintegration—is in fact intrinsic to the logic of how it is intended to work and that it is inherently and purposively stacked against the interests of the poor, minorities, and marginalized groups".
Activists Ruth Wilson Gilmore and James Kilgore explain that their abolitionist convictions are derived from years of working in and observing prisons. Abolitionists challenge all of the conventional justifications for imprisonment, citing lack of evidence for the effect of prison on incapacitating, deterring, or rehabilitating offenders; as well as for improving public safety and reducing crime. Prison abolition is often described as utopian, both in a positive and negative sense. The lack of attention to prison as a human rights problem has been criticized by some scholars, citing its disproportionate impact on poor and marginalized people.
Opposition
Critics of abolition describe it as "naïve idealism" due to the lack "of any practical alternatives to prison", Thomas Ward Frampton cites the most common argument against abolitionism as what to do with the small number of prisoners who present the most danger to society; abolitionists do not have a unified answer to this problem. Prison abolition also was somewhat popular in the United States at the same time, with some experts at the time viewing the eventual abolition of prison as inevitable.
In “Par delà le principe de répression. Dix leçons sur l'abolitionnisme pénal” published in France in 2025, Geoffroy de Lagasnerie presents, discusses, and defends the movement of penal abolitionism, which, beyond the issue of prison, also attacks the idea of crime as such and the necessity of repression, and proposes other forms of action on human behavior and other ways of dealing with injury.
Notable supporters
- Howard Zinn
- Angela Davis
See also
- Prison abolition movement in the United States
- Abolition feminism