Prison and police abolition aim to replace the current criminal justice system with alternative solutions to violence and harm. These movements are international, but their heartland is in the USA, where rates of incarceration are much higher than in most countries, and with prisons filled with disproportionately many Black and Hispanic people. Police in the USA also carry firearms as standard, and the rates of people killed by the police are among the highest in the world.
The broader ambit of the abolition movement opposes many other forms of surveillance, control, and punishment. This includes the carceral infrastructures that sustain national borders in their current forms. There are also substantial overlaps with anti-carceral feminism. Anti-carceral feminism recognises how the criminal justice system frequently fails to provide effective and just solutions for gender-based violence, especially for people of colour and trans and gender non-conforming people.
In 'Two Ideas of Justice' (2022), Gautum Bhatia writes:
It is my impression [...] that as a genre, SF still remains overwhelmingly focused on issues around corrective justice. That is not to suggest that these issues are unimportant or uninteresting; however, as we enter a time in which the climate crisis reveals to a greater and greater degree the unsustainable bases of our current society and political economy, it will therefore be interesting to see if science fiction will respond with a greater, sharper focus on questions of distributive justice.
Is there much science fiction which engages seriously with prison and police abolitionism? Which imagines futures in which carceral infrastructure has been dismantled? Or has particularly intriguing ideas about justice, either corrective, or distributive, or both, or neither? In truth, I have not been able to find all that much. And what I have found (and my own short story, 'Seven Non-Abolitions', published in Phase Change) often seems quite preoccupied with science fiction about science fiction: what stories, rituals, games might exist in a world without police and prisons?
But what am I missing? Let me know.
I am especially interested in the relationship of police and prison abolition with capitalism. Some prison and police abolitionists are explicitly anti-capitalist; Bettina Aptheker describes the need to ‘mount a struggle to abolish the present functions and foundations of the prison system, an effort which can finally succeed only with the abolition of capitalism.’ Even when this is not the case, however, there are powerful resonances between abolitionism and postcapitalist thought. In particular, many abolitionists are interested in understanding the Prison-Industrial Complex as an underlying system which makes reforms to the criminal justice system ineffective.
One way of looking at the Prison-Industrial Complex is as 'the interweaving of private business and governmental interests, serving to increase the profitability of private corporations and at the same time expand social control, while the pronounced rationale lies with crime fighting' (Papageorgiou and Papanicolaou, 74). Private companies have economic interests in profiting from construction, utilities, catering, and healthcare for prisons. Private investors buy bonds to finance prison construction. Prison populations may form literally captive markets, forced to pay high prices for services like e-messaging, to stay in touch with loved ones outside prison. Prisoners themselves are often exploited as a source of cheap labour.
But more broadly, the Prison-Industrial Complex can be seen as a set of mechanisms which filter and contain potential threats against the smooth functioning of capitalist accumulation. By and large, the more you are harmed by capitalism, the more you are likely to also be punished for it: your lived experience of the hypocrisy of the capitalist dream makes you dangerous. These mechanisms are the more painful and punitive counterparts to the disciplinary aspects of the welfare state.
At the same time, some fierce critics of the criminal justice system are unpersuaded by the usefulness of the concept of the Prison-Industrial Complex. The sociologist Loïc Wacquant dislikes (among other things) how the concept tends to emphasise an economic logic at the expense of a political logic:
namely, the construction of a post-Keynesian, “liberal-paternalistic” state suited to institute desocialized wage labor and propagate the renewed ethic of work and “individual responsibility” that buttress it. Profiteering from corrections is not a primary cause but an incidental and secondary consequence of the hypertrophic development of the penal apparatus [...]
Abolitionism is also crucially about building alternatives. Mariame Kaba writes:
While some people might think of abolition as primarily a negative project—“Let’s tear everything down tomorrow and hope for the best”—PIC abolition is a vision of a restructured society in a world where we have everything we need: food, shelter, education, health, art, beauty, clean water, and more things that are foundational to our personal and community safety.
As Fred Moten and Stefano Harney point out, building those alternatives would likely also shift our perceptions and understandings about exactly what it is we are abolishing.
What is, so to speak, the object of abolition? Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society. The object of abolition then would have a resemblance to communism that would be, to return to Spivak, uncanny.
Alternative forms of safety and justice take time to build. Prison abolitionists are not against incremental changes. But they support incremental changes that are not reforms. Instead, such incremental changes need to be real steps toward post-carceral futures, which also accomplish concrete benefits in the present. For example, abolitionists work to raise consciousness and strengthen solidarity among prisoners. In Blood in My Eye, George Jackson writes, ‘The sheer numbers of the prisoner class and the terms of their existence make them a mighty reservoir of revolutionary potential’ (108). Abolitionists also campaign to halt or reverse the growth in numbers of prisons and police officers, and to invest instead in social welfare, healthcare, education, and other public services. This goes hand-in-hand with cultivating community-based transformative justice. Transformative justice seeks to keep people safe, to hold perpetrators accountable, and to resolve conflicts without involving the state. Mariame Kaba, for example, envisions ‘a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation. What would the country look like if it had billions of extra dollars to spend on housing, food and education for all?’
Clearly prison and police abolitionism are closely entwined. ‘Who you gonna call?’ asks Ray Parker Jr. in the Ghostbusters theme song. Abolitionism is also an invitation to reimagine how labour is divided in society, especially who does what when it comes to safety, care, and truth-seeking. For instance, Roge Karma points out how police officers are ‘trained in military-style academies’, are ‘equipped with lethal weapons at all times’, and ‘operate within a culture that takes pride in warriorship, combat, and violence’. They are then ‘mainly called upon to be social workers, conflict mediators, traffic directors, mental health counselors, detailed report writers, neighborhood patrollers, and low-level law enforcers’.
Abolitionism and postcapitalism also involve shared concern for what is imaginable. It has been said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Jackie Wang adds, ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine a world without prisons.’ Kaba writes, ‘when we set about trying to transform society, we must remember that we ourselves will also need to transform. Our imagination of what a different world can be is limited. We are deeply entangled in the very systems we are organizing to change.’ Police and prison abolitionism draw on a powerful history to demonstrate how what may seem unimaginable (or unimaginable to some) can quickly become real. As Angela Davies writes:
Slavery, lynching, and segregation are certainly compelling examples of social institutions that, like the prison, were once considered to be as everlasting as the sun. Yet, in the case of all three examples, we can point to movements that assumed the radical stance of announcing the obsolescence of these institutions. (Are Prisons Obsolete?, 24)
However, when science fiction explores alternative justice, it is often more fascinated with gruesome and bizarre punishments, than with police and prison abolitionism, or with restorative or transformative (or distributive) justice. In Franz Kafka's ‘In the Penal Colony’ (1914), a machine tortures the accused to death by carving the relevant law into their flesh. In James Tiptree Jr.'s ‘Fault’ (1968), the protagonist Mitch is sentenced to be ‘slipped’ for having torn off the ‘feelers’ of an alien. His movement through time gradually de-syncs with everybody else’s, an agonizing form of social death. The Quantum Thief (2010) by Hannu Rajaniemi features a virtual prison called the Dilemma Prison, where Jean le Flameur forced to play out endless variations of the Prisoner's Dilemma.
Science fiction is also interested in speculative forms of rehabilitation — or transformations that go well beyond mere rehabilitation. Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962) follows the story of Alex, a violent youth who undergoes an experimental psychological conditioning. In Iain M. Banks’s Walking on Glass (1985), Quiss and Ajayi are war criminals from opposing sides, imprisoned in a purgatorial castle of puzzles and games until they can solve the riddle, ‘What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?’
Prisons may also enact more ambiguous and ambivalent transformations. A character Adrian Tchaikonvsky’s Dying Earth novel Cage of Souls (2019) features a penal colony, the Island, where the protagonist encounters the monstrous and marvellous sentience of the more-than-human world.
I have a vision of the world in several centuries’ time. There are no human beings in my vision but there are the web-children who evolved, or were evolved, in our image, and they have prospered. They have made a civilisation that does not rest on energies and weapons. Instead they use the powers of their minds to build and create, and they work together.
A related theme is the grotesque exploitation of prisoners’ bodies. Cordwainer Smith's ‘A Planet Named Shayol’ (1961) portrays a penal world where prisoners are used to grow transplantable organs. In Larry Niven’s A Patchwork Girl (1980), convicted felons are broken up for organ transplants.
As medical techniques improved and spread to the have-not nations, demands on the public organ banks had grown. The death penalty was imposed for armed robbery, rape, burglary. A plea of insanity became worthless. Eventually felons died for income tax evasion or driving while high on funny chemicals.
Some science fiction has envisioned the unbundling and distribution of criminal justice across space. Iain M. Banks’s Culture series, a “slap-drone” is a robotic escort assigned to somebody who has committed a violent crime, to make sure they don’t do it again. Larry Niven’s ‘Cloak of Anarchy’ (1972) is set in the Free Park where no law exists save a technologically-enforced injunction against direct bodily violence. Intriguingly, the ‘copseyes’ don’t really bother with who started it:
There was only one law to enforce. All acts of attempted violence carried the same penalty for attacker and victim. Let anyone raise his hand against his neighbor, and one of the golden basketballs would stun them both. They would wake separately, with copseyes watching.
Such thought experiments explore how the unjust justice system might be shrunk to some useful minimum — perhaps in line with the harm principle set out by John Stuart Mill in his 1859 essay On Liberty. However, today they also resonate with reactionary, techno-carceral appropriations of police and prison abolitionism.
Some science fiction explores technology from the perspective of restitution rather than deterrence or disciplinarity. In Tochi Onyebuchi's ‘How to Pay Reparations: A Documentary’ (2020) an algorithm is developed to deploy reparations for slavery. It doesn’t quite work out — the story offers a critique of a techno-solutionist approach to reparations, one that is unaccompanied by true collective deliberation and reflection. Yet it does not entirely dismiss the idea that algorithmic governmentality might be mobilised for purposes of social justice and liberation.
Science fiction and other speculative fiction sometimes gestures toward the role of the criminal justice system in bringing forth the very behaviours which it polices and punishes. In the old story, told by Rumi among others, the protagonist glimpses the Angel of Death giving him a look of wrath, and flees to India to escape his fate. But the Angel was not angry, it is revealed, merely surprised to see the man here in Jerusalem — when he had an appointment with him very soon in India. Philip K. Dick's 'The Minority Report' (1956), the vocalisations of prophetic ‘precog idiots’ are analysed to arrest would-be criminals before they commit their crimes. Peter Watts' ‘The Eyes of God’ (2008) features an airport security system that uses neural scanners to detect potentially harmful thoughts or intentions in passengers, also raising questions about privacy, pre-emptive justice, and the nature of crime. The cyberpunk anime series Psycho-Pass (2012-) imagines a surveillance dystopia, where citizens are constantly scanned and evaluated for supposed latent criminality. Psycho-Pass also features Enforcers, individuals whose latent criminality metrics have crossed critical thresholds, but who are permitted to work on the side of the law.
These science fiction works about pre-crime resonate with recent developments in predictive policing and its critiques, including racist and classist bias, and the risk of predictive policing creating self-fulfilling prophecies. Such works also tend to explore the relationship between harms and crimes. How can someone be punished for something they have not done, even if they were (supposedly) definitely going to do it? At the same time, while the distinction between ‘harm’ and ‘crime’ is undoubtedly useful for abolitionist thought and practice, the two concepts may be more entangled than is sometimes recognised. A crime may legally codify an alleged harm that has no real basis in experience, or whose basis is wildly disproportionate. But abolishing crime and organising society around harm instead is far from straightforward. How should society equalise access to the means of expressing and redressing harms? Is every claim to have experienced a harm equally legitimate? If not, what factors should legitimate or de-legitimate a claim to have experienced harm? If certain harms become conventionally recognised and associated with certain forms of address, is there a risk of the emergence of a new taxonomy of informal crimes?
Some science fiction may shed light on transformative justice in oblique ways. In 2017, Alexandra Rowland coined the term ‘hopepunk,’ contrasting it with the nihilism and pessimism of grimdark fantasy. The term quickly became cluttered and incoherent, and drew criticism especially from outside the US and from left-wing commentators. ‘Part of the problem of hopepunk is its class blindness,’ writes Adam Turl. However, one potentially positive aspect of some hopepunk writing might be its intermittent interest in groups figuring out minor conflicts among themselves, and preempting major ones. This is also of course a preoccupation of a great deal of literary fiction. But in the work of science fiction writers such as Becky Chambers, the wholesomely optimistic futuristic setting can leach in interesting ways into these stories about emotions, expectations, compromise and communication.
Other science fiction does touch on futures beyond prisons and the police more directly. Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974) features a group of children from a post-carceral society discovering the concept of ‘prison’ and, fascinated, turning it into a game. What they eventually discover horrifies them. Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) imagines a post-carceral society that also has a kind of death penalty:
“Assault, murder we still have. Not as common as they say it was in your time. But it happens. People still get angry and strike out.”
“So what do you do? Do you put them in jail?”
“First off, we ask if person acted intentionally or not—if person wants to take responsibility for the act.”
“Suppose I say, ‘No, I didn’t know what I was doing, judge.’”
“Then we work on healing. We try to help so that never again will person do a thing person doesn’t mean to do.”
“Suppose I say I’m not sick. I punched him in the face because he had it coming, and I’m glad.”
“Then you work out a sentence. Maybe exile, remote labor. Sheepherding. Life on shipboard. Space service. Sometimes crossers cook good ideas about how to atone. You could put in for an experiment or something dangerous.”
She stared. “You’re telling me that when I smashed Geraldo’s face, I’d tell you what I should do to . . . atone?”
“How not?” Parra stared back. “You, your victim, and your judge work it out. If you killed, then the family of your victim would choose a mem to negotiate.”
“If I killed a bunch of people, then I’d just sign on as a sailor or herd sheep?” “You mean a second time? No. Second time someone uses violence, we give up. We don’t want to watch each other or to imprison each other. We aren’t willing to live with people who choose to use violence. We execute them.”
Abolition Science Fiction (2022), edited by Phil Crockett Thomas, is a collection of stories by activists and scholars involved in prison abolition and transformative justice in the UK. Three short vignettes in particular offer glimpses of worlds without prisons. Ren Wednesday's 'Walk Out' imagines a mixture of revolutionary excitement and conservative moral panic, as prisoners all over the world start to learn simply to walk through walls. In Chris Rossdale's 'The Parc,' the protagonist Alex braves the People’s Activity and Recreation Centre, a place physically completely transformed from the prison it once was, yet haunted by a traumatic carceral aura. 'The Monument' by Dave gives us a glimpse of Christopher, a Municipal Heritage Warden, getting ready for work at a new location. It is intriguingly ambiguous, as Christopher feels uneasy with his own somewhat police-ish behaviours, “scanning for damage or dereliction, spotting dangers to public safety, and keeping an eye on all the people that came and went.” Christopher also happens to be policing a monument which seems to simultaneously celebrate the abolition of the police, and the police officers themselves:
This lavish recognition, like the generous severance packages and comprehensive retraining schemes negotiated by the Police Federation in the final months of its existence, before it was forced to transform into a retirees’ social club, is by way of a compromise. It indicates, very clearly, that no personal condemnation of the police, or of those who took their side, was implied by the success of the Abolitionists.
In anthropology, the term ‘leveling mechanism’ refers to cultural practices that seem to work to prevent the emergence of power hierarchies. Science fiction imagining post-carceral futures seem to often be interested in leveling mechanisms in a broad sense. In this way it becomes, strangely, a kind of science fiction about science fiction. The prison game which the children play in The Dispossessed, like the strange monument in ‘The Monument’ which seems to both celebrate and condemn the police, imagine the kind of cultural memory that might be necessary to ensure that an understanding of carceral violence is not lost in a post-carceral world. In Woman on the Edge of Time, the inhabitants of the future utopia Mattapoisett engage in similar rituals and games:
“How is Bee?”
“Look!” Luciente pointed. “Bee is explaining about agribusiness, cash crops, and hunger.”
“He’s teaching a class?”
“A memorial. Tonight.” Luciente waved at the booths, the tables, the holies and exhibits. “It’s winter games. . . . Traveling spectaclers are visiting us this week. We all played roles. Divvied into rich and poor, owners and colonies. For two days all us who got poor by lot fasted and had only half rations two other days. The rich ate till they were stuffed and threw the rest in the compost. I know in history they didn’t, Connie blossom, but it’s not right to destroy, we just can’t do it. We’ve been feeling a class society where most labor, others control, and some enjoy. We had prisons, police, spies, armies, torture, bosses, hunger—oh, it’s been fascinating. Now we’re discussing to know better before they go on.”
