This resource guide offers sources on policing, prisons, and punishment. In general, I’ve tried to list shorter pieces, articles, and listening/viewing material. Though the sources are organized thematically, there is no issue in the carceral state that doesn’t intersect with another; therefore, most of the categories are necessarily false divides used for purposes of organization. In places where I’ve listed books, I include a link to the book or to an interview with the author.

You can find another truly fantastic resource hub, created by Mariame Kaba, here.

Contents:

· Prison Abolition: What is it? · Police Abolition: What is it? · Abolition and Coronavirus · Origin Stories · Criminalizing Blackness · Sexual Violence and Anti-Carceral Feminism · Community Accountability, Restorative Justice, and Transformative Justice · Disability Justice · Not Just The “Nonviolent Drug Offender”: The Perils of Reform and Tech Fixes · Prison Organizing, Past and Present · Are Private Prisons and Prison Labor *the* Problem? · Mutual Aid and/as Abolition · Child Welfare and Family Regulation · Climate (In)Justice and Prisons · Crimmigration · LGBTQ Criminalization · Christianity and Prison Abolition

PRISON ABOLITION: WHAT IS IT?

For introductory context on the U.S. prison system, see Prison Policy Initiative, “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020.” For a more academic list of resources, see here. See also, An Indigenous Abolitionist Study Guide.

Shorter Pieces

Dan Berger, Mariame Kaba, and David Stein, “What Abolitionists Do,” 2017.

Mariame Kaba and John Duda, “Toward the Horizon of Abolition: A Conversation with Mariame Kaba,” 2017.

Rachel Kushner, “Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind,” 2019.

Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes, “A Jailbreak of the Imagination: Seeing Prisons for What They Are and Demanding Transformation,” 2018.

Rachel Herzing, “Black Liberation and the Abolition of the Prison Industrial Complex: An Interview with Rachel Herzing,” 2016.

Joshua Dubler and Vincent Lloyd, “Think Prison Abolition in America is Impossible? It Once Felt Inevitable,” 2018.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore and James Kilgore, “The Case for Abolition,” 2019.

K Agbebiyi, “Prison Abolition FAQ,” 2020.

Dean Spade, “Prison Abolition Argument Chart,” 2017.

Micah Herskind, “Some Reflections on Prison Abolition,” 2019.

Reina Sultan and Micah Herskind, “What is Abolition, and Why Do We Need It?”, 2020.

Subsection: Example Platforms and Roadmaps

No New Jails NYC, “Close Rikers Now, We Keep Us Safe: A New Yorker’s Guide to Building Community Care and Safety by Closing Rikers with No New Jails,” 2019.

#8ToAbolition, 2020.

Interrupting Criminalization, Defund Police Toolkit, 2020.

Dream Defenders, Defund Police, Rebuild Our Communities, 2020.

Subsection: Should Killer Cops Go to Prison?

Listening and Viewing

Reina Gossett and Dean Spade, YouTube Abolition Series, 2014:

Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein, “Beyond Prisons” podcast series.

Chris Hayes, “Thinking About How to Abolish Prisons with Mariame Kaba,” 2019

Josie Duffy Rice and Clint Smith, “Justice in America: Mariame Kaba and Prison Abolition,” 2019.

Longer Pieces and Books

Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, 2003.

The CR10 Publications Collective, Abolition NOW! Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle Against the Prison Industrial Complex.

Julia Sudbury, “Reform or Abolition? Using Popular Mobilizations to Dismantle the ‘Prison-Industrial Complex,’” 2016.

Allegra McLeod, “Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice,” 2015.

Patrisse Cullors, “Abolition and Reparations: Histories of Resistance, Transformative Justice, and Accountability,” 2019.

POLICE ABOLITION: WHAT IS IT?

For more resources, see the resource hub: For A World Without Police

Shorter Pieces

Derecka Purnell, “How I Became a Police Abolitionist,” 2020.

Alex Vitale, “The Police Are Not Here to Protect You,” 2017.

Maya Dukmasova, “Abolish the Police? Organizers Say It’s Less Crazy Than It Sounds,” 2016.

Mariame Kaba, “Police Reforms You Should Always Oppose,” 2014.

José Martin, “Policing is a Dirty Job, But Nobody’s Gotta Do It: 6 Ideas for a Cop-Free World,” 2014.

Critical Resistance, “Reformist Reforms vs. Abolitionist Steps in Policing.”

Mychal Denzel Smith, “Abolish the Police. Instead, Let’s Have Full Social, Economic, and Political Equality,” 2015.

Rose City CopWatch, “Alternatives to Police,” 2008.

Sarah-Ji and Monica Trinidad, “Community Compilation on Police Abolition,” 2016.

Garrett Felber, “The Struggle to Abolish the Police is Not New,” 2020.

Edward Ongweso Jr., “Defunding the Police Actually Means Defunding the Police,” 2020.

Tasha Amezcua, Ejeris Dixon, and Che J. Rene Long, “Ten Lessons for Creating Safety Without Police,” 2016.

Amber Hughson, Alternatives to Police Flyers, 2018.

Cameron Rasmussen and Kirk “Jae” James, “Trading Cops for Social Workers Isn’t the Solution to Police Violence,” 2020.

Longer Pieces and Books

Alex Vitale, The End of Policing, 2018. [interview with author linked]

Meghan G. McDowell and Luis A. Fernandez, “Disband, Disempower, and Disarm: Amplifying the Theory and Practice of Police Abolition,” 2018.

Amna Akbar, “Toward a Radical Imagination of the Law,” 2017.

ABOLITION AND CORONAVIRUS

Shorter Pieces

Beyond Prisons, Covid-19 Demands, 2020.

Critical Resistance, “Abolitionist Steps to Combat COVID-19 Behind Bars,” 2020.

Kevin Rigby Jr., “The Whole Thing Has Got to Go: Why Abolition Must be About Ending White Supremacy,” 2020.

Bret Grote, “Empty the Jails Now,” 2020.

Micah Herskind, “Three Reasons Advocates Must Move Beyond Demanding Release for “Nonviolent Offenders,” 2020.

Melissa Gira-Grant, “The Pandemic Is the Right Time to Defund the Police”, 2020.

Viewing and Listening

Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Naomi Murakawa, “Covid-19, Decarceration, and Abolition” 2020.

Angela Davis and Naomi Klein, “Movement Building in the Time of Coronavirus,” 2020.

Amanda Alexander, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Kim Wilson, “Survival Pending Abolition,” 2020.

ORIGIN STORIES

The number of ‘origin stories’ for mass incarceration has exploded in recent years. These are mostly books. Here are some:

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, 2010.

Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America, 2014. [interview with author linked]

Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America, 2016. [interview with author linked]

Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, 2010. [interview with author linked]

Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, 2003.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California [interview with author linked]

Jonathon Simon, Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear, 2006. [review of book linked]

Heather Ann Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History,” 2010.

James Forman, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, 2017, [interview with author linked]

Charlotte Rosen, “Abolition or Bust: Liberal Police Reform as an Engine of Carceral Violence,” 2020.

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 1995.

CRIMINALIZING BLACKNESS

Shorter Pieces

Angela Davis, “From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of Prison: Frederick Douglass and the Convict Lease System,” 1998.

Amna Akbar, “Policing Black Radicalism,” 2016.

P.R. Lockhart, “Living While Black and the Criminalization of Blackness,” 2018.

Viewing and Listening

Documentary: Slavery By Another Name, 2012.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad, talk on The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, 2016.

Dara Lind, Liz Scheltens, and Gina Barton, “The School-to-Prison Pipeline, Explained,” 2016.

Longer Pieces

Elizabeth Hinton and DeAnza Cook, “The Mass Criminalization of Black Americans: A Historical Overview,” 2020.

Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography, 1987.

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, 2010.

Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America, 2014. [interview with author linked]

Monique Morris, Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools, 2015. [interview with author linked]

SEXUAL VIOLENCE AND ANTI-CARCERAL FEMINISM

Shorter Pieces

Victoria Law, “Against Carceral Feminism,” 2014.

Miriam Perez-Putnam, “Surviving Rape as a Prison Abolitionist,” 2020.

Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba, “The Sentencing of Larry Nassar Was Not ‘Transformative Justice.’ Here’s Why,” 2018.

Beth Richie, “How Anti-Violence Activism Taught me to Become a Prison Abolitionist,” 2014.

James Kilgore, “Locking People Up Doesn’t Make Us Safer, Abuse Survivor Says,” 2019.

Victoria Law, “How Can We Reconcile Prison Abolition with #MeToo?”, 2018.

Kristian Williams, “A Look at Feminist Forms of Justice that Don’t Involve the Police,” 2015.

Melissa Jeltsen, “Don’t Use Domestic Violence Victims to Derail Police Reform,” 2020.

Stefanie Mundhenk Harrelson, “I Was Sexually Assaulted. And I Believe Incarcerating Rapists Doesn’t Help Victims Like Me,” 2019.

Viewing and Listening

INCITE!, Abolition Feminism: Celebrating 20 Years of INCITE!, 2020

Longer Pieces and Books

Emily Thuma, All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence, 2019. [interview with author linked]

Andrea Ritchie, Invisible Justice: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color, 2017. [interview with author linked]

Beth Richie, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation, 2012. [interview with author linked]

Ann Russo, Feminist Accountability, Disrupting Violence and Transforming Power, 2018. [overview of book linked]

Mimi Kim, “From Carceral Feminism to Transformative Justice: Women-Of-Color Feminism and Alternatives to Incarceration,” 2018.

Donna Hylton, A Little Piece of Light: A Memoir of Hope, Prison, and a Life Unbound, 2018. [interview with author linked]

COMMUNITY ACCOUNTABILITY, RESTORATIVE JUSTICE, AND TRANSFORMATIVE JUSTICE

Shorter Pieces

Mariame Kaba, “Transformative Justice,” 2012.

Ruth Morris, “Why Transformative Justice?”, 1999.

Sujatha Baliga, “What is Restorative Justice? A Different Path for Confronting Sexual Assault,” 2018.

Mia Mingus, “Transformative Justice: A Brief Description,” 2019.

Mia Mingus, “Pods and Pod Mapping Worksheet,” 2016.

Connie Burk, “Think. Re-think. Accountable Communities.” n.d.

Leila Raven, “An Open Letter to the Former Commune Mag Editor Who Raped Me,” 2020.

Creative Interventions, “Creative Interventions Toolkit,” 2012.

Wispy Cockles, “Taking the First Step: Suggestions to People Called Out for Abusive Behavior,” n.d.

National Sexual Assault Coalition, “Transformative Justice Resource Compilation,” 2019.

Mia Mingus, Two Part Series on Apologies: “How to Give a Good Apology Part 1: The Four Parts of Accountability” and “How to Give a Good Apology Part 2: The Apology — The What and the How,” 2019.

Listening and Viewing

Kiyomi Fujikawa, Shannon Perez-Darby, and Mariame Kaba, “Building Accountable Communities,” Four-Part Video Series.

Books

Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Beyond Survival, 2019. [interview with authors linked]

Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair, 2019. [interview with author linked]

DISABILITY JUSTICE

For a more comprehensive set of resources, see Talila Lewis’ syllabus “Disability Justice in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” and support the work of HEARD.

Shorter Pieces

Patty Bernes, “Disability Justice — A Working Draft,” 2015.

Mia Mingus, “Changing the Framework: Disability Justice,” 2011.

Talila Lewis and Dustin Gibson, “The Prison Strike Challenges Ableism and Defends Disability Rights,” 2018.

Talila Lewis, “Response: Concerns Re Disability/Deaf Rights Communities’ Responses to Policing Systems’ Violence,” 2019.

The Harriet Tubman Collective, “Disability Solidarity: Completing the ‘Vision for Black Lives,’” 2016.

Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu, “We Don’t Need Cops to Become Social Workers: We Need Peer Support + Community Response Networks,” 2020.

Listening and Viewing

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Elliott Fukui, “Moving at the Speed of Trust: Disability and Transformative Justice,” 2020.

HEARD, “Deaf in Prison,” 2014.

Mia Mingus, “Mia Mingus on Disability Justice,” 2013.

Longer Pieces and Books

Liat Ben-Moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition, 2020. [talk with author linked]

Liat Ben-Moshe, “Deinstitutionalization: A Case Study in Carceral Abolition,” 2014.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, 2018. [interview with author linked]

Liat Ben-Moshe, Chris Chapman, and Allison Carey, Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada, 2014. [interview with author linked]

NOT JUST THE “NONVIOLENT DRUG OFFENDER”: THE PERILS OF REFORM AND TECH FIXES

Shorter Pieces

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “The Worrying State of the Anti-Prison Movement,” 2015.

Micah Herskind, “Three Reasons Advocates Must Move Beyond Demanding Release for ‘Nonviolent Offenders,’” 2020.

Survived and Punished, “Preserving Punishment Power: A Grassroots Abolitionist Assessment of New York Reforms,” 2020.

Asar Amen, “To End Mass Incarceration, Our Society Must Look Beyond the ‘Non-Violent Drug Offenses,’” 2016. (page 5 of link)

Michelle Alexander, “The Newest Jim Crow,” 2018.

Sarah T Hamid, “Community Defense: Sarah T. Hamid on Abolishing Carceral Technologies,” 2020.

James Kilgore, “Repackaging Mass Incarceration,” 2014.

Marie Gottschalk, “The Folly of Neoliberal Prison Reform,” 2015.

Naomi Murakawa, “How Liberals Legitimize Broken Windows” in Camp and Heatherton, Policing the Planet, 2016. [pgs. 186–194 of linked PDF]

Vesla Weaver, “The Untold Story of Mass Incarceration,” 2017.

Marie Gottschalk, “Did You Really Think Trump Was Going to Help End the Carceral State?” 2019.

Kay Whitlock and Nancy Heitzeg, “Billionaire-Funded Criminal Justice Reform Actually Expands the Carceral System,” 2019.

James Kilgore, “The First Step Act Opens the Door to Digital Incarceration,” 2018.

Longer Pieces and Books

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence,” 2017.

Lena Carla Palacios, “Challenging Convictions: Indigenous and Black Race-Radical Feminists Theorizing the Carceral State and Abolitionist Praxis in the United States and Canada,” 2016.

Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, 2019. [brief synopsis of book linked]

Dorothy Roberts, “Digitizing the Carceral State,” 2019.

Christopher Seeds, “Bifurcation Nation: American Penal Policy in Late Mass Incarceration,” 2017.

James Forman Jr., “Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration: Beyond the New Jim Crow,” 2012.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Race, Capitalist Crisis, and Abolitionist Organizing,” 2010.

Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America, 2006 [especially chapters 5–7]

PRISON ORGANIZING, PAST AND PRESENT

To correspond with someone in prison, visit Black and Pink’s website or the Mississippi Freedom Letters Campaign.

Shorter Pieces

Stephen Wilson, “Dis-Organizing Prisons,” 2019.

Stephen Wilson, “Building Together, Inside/Outside,” n.d.

Jared Ware, “I’m For Disruption: Interview with Prison Strike Organizer from Jailhouse Lawyers Speak,” 2018.

2018 Prison Strike Demands, 2018

United Black Family Editorial Collective, “My Comrades’ Thoughts on Black Lives Matter: A Collection of Essays and Poems by Incarcerated Activists,” 2020

Jared Ware, “Interview: South Carolina Prisoners Challenge Narrative Around Violence at Lee Correctional Institution,” 2018.

Dan Berger, Ryan Fatica, and Duncan Tarr, “As the Coronavirus Spreads, Prisoners are Rising Up for Their Health,” 2020.

In The Belly: An Abolitionist Journal, Volume 1, 2020. [please support the patreon here]

Books and Longer Pieces

Samuel Melville, Letters from Attica, 1972.

Angela Davis, If They Come in the Morning…Voices of Resistance, 1992.

Victoria Law, Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women, 2009. [interview with author linked]

Dan Berger, Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era, 2016. [interview with author linked]

Garrett Felber, Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State, 2019. [podcast interview with author linked]

Dan Berger and Toussaint Losier, Rethinking the American Prison Movement, 2017. [adapted article from authors linked]

Orisanmi Burton, “Organized Disorder: The New York City Jail Rebellion of 1970,” 2018.

ARE PRIVATE PRISONS AND PRISON LABOR *THE* PROBLEM? (Hint: No.)

Shorter Pieces

Ruth Wilson Gilmore and James Kilgore, “Some Reflections on Prison Labor,” 2019.

Kay Whitlock, “Prison Reform Misdirection: 5 Caveats About Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration,” 2016.

Craig Gilmore, Twitter thread on prison privatization, 2018.

Craig Gilmore, “On the Business of Incarceration,” 2019.

Brian Sonenstein, “Elizabeth Warren’s Flawed but Well-Intentioned Proposal for Banning Private Prisons,” 2019.

Darren Klimek, “Abolishing Private Prisons Is a Start, But It Will Not End Mass Incarceration,” 2020.

Dan Berger, “How Prisons Serve Capitalism,” 2018.

Longer Pieces and Books

Lauren-Brooke Eisen, Inside Private Prisons, 2017 [I disagree with many of the book’s conclusions, but lots of valuable information in it. Interview with author linked]

MUTUAL AID AND/AS ABOLITION

Mariame Kaba, Mutual Aid Resources, 2020.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Mariame Kaba, “Mutual Aid 101,” 2020.

Big Door Brigade, “What is Mutual Aid?,” 2020.

Collaborative Zine Laboratory, “What is Abolition in a Time of Covid-19? How to Make a Mutual Aid Map,” 2020.

Alisa Bierria, Interview: Abolition and Mutual Aid, 2020

Listening and Viewing

Mariame Kaba, Dean Spade, Klee Benally, and Kali Akuno, “Mutual Aid: Building Communities of Care During Crisis and Beyond,” 2020.

Kelly Hayes and Pilar Weiss, “Our Government Has Failed Us in This Crisis. How Do We Protect Our Communities?,” 2020.

Longer Pieces

Dean Spade, “Solidarity Not Charity: Mutual Aid for Mobilization and Survival,” 2020.

CHILD WELFARE AND FAMILY REGULATION

Shorter Pieces

Dorothy Roberts, “Abolishing Policing Also Means Abolishing Family Regulation,” 2020.

Erin Miles Cloud, “Toward the Abolition of the Foster System,” 2019.

Dina Ortiz, “Battling an Unjust System: How the War on Drugs Stole My Daughter,” 2019.

Elizabeth Brico, “How Child Protective Services Can Trap the Parents They’re Supposed to Help,” 2019.

Center for the Study of Social Policy, “What Does it Mean to Abolish the Child Welfare System as We Know It?”, 2020.

Emma Williams, “‘Family Regulation,’ Not ‘Child Welfare’: Abolition Starts with Changing Our Language,” 2020.

Viewing

Dorothy Roberts, “Fighting for Family: Intersections of the Family and Criminal Punishment Systems,” 2019.

Books and Longer Pieces

Dorothy Roberts, “Prison, Foster Care, and the Systemic Punishment of Black Mothers,” 2012.

Dorothy Roberts, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare, 2002 [overview of book linked].

CLIMATE (IN)JUSTICE AND PRISONS

Brett Story and Seth Prins, “A Green New Deal for Decarceration,” 2019.

Prison Ecology Project, “Background on Mass Incarceration and the Environment”

Truthout, article series, “America’s Toxic Prisons”

Candice Bernd, Maureen Nandini Mitra, and Zoe Loftus-Farren, “The Environmental Injustices of Mass Incarceration,” 2017.

Panagioti Tsolkas, “How the Fight Against Toxic Prisons Could Shape the Future of Environmentalism,” 2016.

CRIMMIGRATION

You can find an excellent resource hub on crimmigration here.

Shorter Pieces

César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, “Abolish Immigration Prisons,” 2019.

Cora Currier, “Immigration Detention is Part of Mass Incarceration: The Case for Abolishing ICE and Everything Else,” 2019.

Naomi Ishisaka, “Who Profits from ‘Crimmigration’? Not America or its Ideals,” 2019.

Taniv Misra, “The Rise of ‘Crimmigration: An Interview with César García Hernández,” 2016.

Mike Ludwig, “Grassroots Activists: “Abolish ICE” Means Disband, Not Reform the Agency,” 2018.

Longer Pieces

Kelly Lytle Hernández, “Amnesty or Abolition? Felons, Illegals, and the Case for a New Abolition Movement,” 2011.

Allegra McLeod, “The U.S. Criminal-Immigration Convergence and Its Possible Undoing,” 2012.

Katherine Beckett and Naomi Murakawa, “Mapping the Shadow Carceral State: Toward an Institutionally Capacious Approach to Punishment,” 2012.

Adam Goodman, The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants, 2020. [interview with author linked]

LGBTQ CRIMINALIZATION

Shorter Pieces

Ilan Meyer et al, “Incarceration Rates and Traits of Sexual Minorities in the United States: National Inmate Survey, 2011–2012,” 2017.

Transformative Justice Law Project of Illinois, “Quick Guide to the Criminalization of Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming People.”

Dean Spade, “Toward a Critical Trans Politics,” 2012.

Jerome Hunt and Aisha Moodie-Mills, “The Unfair Criminalization of Gay and Transgender Youth,” 2012.

Adryan Corcione, “How Layleen Xtravaganza-Polanco’s Case Impacted Organizing for Transgender Prisoners,” 2020.

Margaret Goff, “Five Reasons Mass Incarceration is a Queer Issue,” 2017.

Longer Pieces and Books

Eric Stanley and Nat Smith, Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, 2011.

Eric Stanley, Dean Spade, Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock, “Queering Prison Abolition, Now?”, 2012.

Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock, Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States, 2012. [review of book linked]

CHRISTIANITY AND PRISON ABOLITION

You can find excellent resources compiled by Christians for Prison Abolition here, here, and here.

Shorter Pieces

Hannah Bowman, “A Christian Case for Prison Abolition,” 2018.

Joshua Dubler and Vincent Lloyd, “Mass Incarceration Is Religious (and So Is Abolition): A Provocation,” 2016.

Catherine Grainge, “A Christian Case for Prison Abolition,” 2019.

Micah Herskind, “The Individualizing Paternalism of Big Christian Ministry,” 2019.

Christians for Abolition, “Introductory Abolitionist Theologies.”

Christians for Abolition, “Toolkit: Building Space for Non-Punitive Accountability in Christian Communities,” 2020.

Longer Pieces and Books

Joshua Dubler and Vincent Lloyd, Break Every Yoke: Religion, Justice, and the Abolition of Prisons, 2020. [article from authors linked]

Lee Griffith, The Fall of the Prison: Biblical Perspectives on Prison Abolition, 1993. [review of book linked]

Tanya Erzen, God in Captivity: The Rise of Faith-Based Ministries in the Age of Mass Incarceration, 2017. [review of book linked]