Summary
Abolition, in the sense developed by the US geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore, means ending reliance on prisons and policing by building what makes them unnecessary: housing, healthcare, education, meaningful work. Gilmore co-founded Critical Resistance with Angela Davis in 1997, and her book ‘Golden Gulag’ (2007) ties California’s prison boom to what she calls organised abandonment – the state and business pulling support from whole communities.
So the target is far wider than the prison. In a 2022 interview she said that “what abolition is about is changing everything”, meaning the whole web of relations around anyone who “eventually gets plucked out of their life”.
Rationale
Our articles don’t name abolition. It resonates because it works on the conditions around a harm, and asks what we ask: “What holds the current contexts in place, and who does that serve?”