Prison abolition movement in the United States
movement to end incarceration
The prison abolition movement is a network of groups and activists that seek to reduce or eliminate prisons and the prison system, and replace them with systems of rehabilitation and education that do not focus on punishment and government institutionalization. The prison abolitionist movement is distinct from conventional prison reform, which is intended to improve conditions inside prisons.
Supporters of prison abolitionism are a diverse group with differing ideas as to exactly how prisons should be abolished, and what, if anything, should replace them. Some supporters of decarceration and prison abolition also work to end solitary confinement, the death penalty, and the construction of new prisons through non-reformist reforms. Others support books-to-prisoner projects and defend prisoners' right to access information and library services. Some organizations, such as the Anarchist Black Cross, seek the total abolishment of the prison system without any intention to replace it with other government-controlled systems.
Definition
Scholar Dorothy Roberts takes the prison abolition movement in the United States to endorse three basic theses:
"[T]oday’s carceral punishment system can be traced back to slavery and the racial capitalist regime it relied on and sustained."
"[T]he expanding criminal punishment system functions to oppress black people and other politically marginalized groups in order to maintain a racial capitalist regime."
"[W]e can imagine and build a more humane and democratic society that no longer relies on caging people to meet human needs and solve social problems."
Thus, Roberts situates the theory of prison abolition within an intellectual tradition including scholars such as Cedric Robinson, who developed the concept of racial capitalism, and characterizes the movement as a response to a long history of oppressive treatment of black people in the United States. In Canada, many abolitionists have called Canada's prisons the "new residential schools", which were designed as a cultural genocide of Indigenous people.
Legal scholar Allegra McLeod notes that prison abolition is not merely a negative project of "opening … prison doors", but rather "may be understood instead as a gradual project of decarceration, in which radically different legal and institutional regulatory forms supplant criminal law enforcement." Prison abolition, in McLeod's view, involves a positive agenda that reimagines how societies might deal with social problems in the absence of prisons, using techniques such as decriminalization and improved welfare provision.
Like Roberts, McLeod sees the contemporary theory of prison abolition as linked to theories regarding the abolition of slavery.
The public source identifies “Prison abolition movement in the United States” as movement to end incarceration. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Prison, abolition and movement.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q135968705. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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