In this moment of dystopian pandemonium, nearly everything feels overwhelming as the lives of literally all humans are threatened by the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), which has spread rapidly, infecting hundreds of thousands, and killing an unforeseeable number of individuals. As millions of jobs are upended and schools are closed indefinitely, it is easy for the issue of mass incarceration and abolition to take a back seat to the legitimate hysteria caused by COVID-19. Yet in this time of unprecedented global catastrophe, we must not lose track of how human health and governmental oversight are intrinsically entangled with the issues of mass incarceration and neoliberal policymaking in the United States. As we face the unimaginable, we are collectively being called on to adapt, and to use our imagination and intellect to rebuild in ways aligned with abolitionist ethics and visions, which seek for a total restructuring of government, policies, and our relation to capital.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department announced that it has reduced its inmate population by 600 people and counting in the last two weeks. New York City Mayor, Bill de Blasio, recently stated that the city would be identifying physically vulnerable and “low risk” inmates for release in the coming days. Since then, at least 38 people have tested positive for COVID-19 inside New York City Jails. [1] Across the country and world, correctional facilities are being forced to evaluate the impending threats and strains that prison overpopulation will surely cause as COVID-19 ravages cell blocks. While still small, the depopulation of prisons by the very forces who uphold the carceral state underscores the possibility of decarceration and total abolition as not simply possible, but imperative for human survival and wholeness in our rapidly changing and ever-uncertain world.

Now, more than ever is the time to understand and lift up the social justice framework of prison abolition. Prisons -like all industries and businesses- are fueled by an increase in demand. And consequently, the conditions that are necessary for fostering and maintaining punishable crimes is perpetuated, creating a chain of supply for prisons. In her essay, A Jailbreak of the Imagination: Seeing Prisons for What They Are and Demanding Transformation, leading prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba explains that hyper-policing, surveillance, and mass incarceration is not a fixed part of natural human order, but rather an outgrowth of American deindustrialization, and the lack of social programming to support the country’s subaltern population of racially and economically disenfranchised people. 

In Carceral Capitalism, Harvard doctoral candidate and prison abolitionist, Jackie Wang dives into the history of racial capitalism, predatory lending, redlining, and deindustrialization in the making of 20th century urban ‘ghettos.’ [2] Specifically, Wang lifts up the work of noted Black Panthers, Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, in their conceptualization of Black America as an “internal colony, to elucidate finance capital’s predatory relationship to Black America.” Wang highlights the national disinvestment in social services after WWII as the transformation of the U.S. welfare state into the penal state. Wang notes that this “dismantling” of the welfare state was central to the making of “urban Black ghettos.” Coded structural racism she asserts, was used to justify and construct racial poverty as indicative of moral failure. (Much like the Moynihan Report.) Through this logic, Wang argues how Black Americans become ‘deserving’ of punishment.

In less than two decades after the start of the Reagan Administration, (1981-89) the number of people behind bars for nonviolent drug offenses ballooned from 50,000 in 1980 to well over 400,000 by 1997. [3] Ronald Reagan’s targeted “War on Drugs” campaign effectively rerouted the trajectories and lives of specifically young Black boys and men in this country, siphoning the freedom of hundreds of thousands into a penal system, that has in more ways than one become the new Jim Crow. Following a long and arbitrary history of Black criminalization, the draconian War on Drugs campaign sought to restructure the intrinsic nature of Black humanity as less than whole and always guilty. 

Briefly highlighting the structurally racist history of mass incarceration helps to underscore “why abolition is important as a political framework and organizing strategy.” [4] The work of Kaba and Wang emphasize abolition as not simply about ending all prisons, but as about fundamentally restructuring a society in which prisons exist, and where people’s intrinsic worth is measured by indicators such as race, class and gender. Kaba like others, insist that an abolitionist framework is a critical pillar in the creation of a new society. Surely, with COVID-19, something new and radically different must arise in the wake of its destruction. In underscoring certain critical elements to the making of mass incarceration in the United States, I hope to unsettle deep-seated notions of criminality and race that are enmeshed in this country’s founding. In doing so, we necessarily change the current paradigm that absolves morally-corrupt policymakers, (like Republican Senate-Majority leader Mitch McConnell, who worked to block the coronavirus relief package passed March 13th) while criminalizing people of color and the poor in times of disaster. 

  In Dr. Angela Davis’s seminal book, Are Prisons Obsolete? she explores the construction of presumed Black criminality following the abolition of slavery. Dr. Davis outlines the passing of Black Codes, which were arbitrary crimes defined by law for which only Black people could be convicted. Through Black Codes, Black people who were no longer legally enslaved were cast back into the tight grip of white supremacist control through penal servitude and labor. For example, vagrancy (an anti-Black and structural consequence of emancipation) became enshrined as a Black crime, and was thus punishable by incarceration and penal labor, “sometimes on the very plantations that previously had thrived on slave labor.” [5] Black people without a plantation to toil on or cell to inhabit became code for criminal Black bodies that needed to be subjugated and contained. It is within this socio-historical context that the penal system shifted from one of atonement to a system of racial punishment and servitude. 

Kaba, Davis, and Wang’s (and countless other prison abolitionists, many of whom are also Queer women and femmes of color) approach to abolition requires that we work toward building alternative strategies with the intention of totally removing prison from the social and ideological fabric of our society. To do so, abolitionists urge that we must not simply strive toward decarceration or prison substitutes, but that a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment must include the demilitarization of schools on top of improved public education, free and universal health care, and a judicial system rooted in reconciliation and reparation, amongst much else. [6]

I believe it is through the praxis-oriented framework of abolition that we can both understand the arbitrary and obsolete nature of racialized criminality in the United States, and seek to change it. Moreover, we can learn from and employ alternative, abolitionist strategies as we face the cataclysmic effects of global disaster, namely COVID-19. The restructuring of human life in relation to capital and the creation of new institutions over and against space now occupied by prisons is imperative in the paradigm shift away from structural white supremacy and toward collective human wholeness. In recounting this country’s construction of racialized criminality, we can anticipate the many potential scenarios that will play out as a result of this ensuing health pandemic. In what ways will criminality be deployed in the coming days and weeks if and when Americans, particularly poor, Black Americans begin taking what they need with or without paying for it? Will residents be called ‘looters’ and ‘criminals’ for demanding access to food, baby products, and basic household goods when they are unable to pay for them? Will Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and Mike Pence ever be indicted for their crass response to the spread of COVID-19, and the denial of basic human rights in this moment of disaster? History helps us not simply elucidate the likely answers to the questions posed, but it helps us think creatively about how to build alternatively in the wake of disaster. 

Dr. Davis always says it best. That “creating agendas of [abolition] and broadly casting the net of alternatives helps us do the ideological work of pulling apart the conceptual lie between crime and punishment.” [7] Through the scholarly leadership of the theorists we have explored, we come to see the ways in which punishment does not always follow crime in a logical fashion, touted by popular discourses of imprisonment, but rather that punishment is tied to political, corporate, and social agendas. Furthermore, we come to understand the ways in which crime is fashioned within preexisting structures of race, class, gender, and nationality, which too often absolve our political leaders of corruption because of their social location and access to power. In briefly exploring the analytic and historical frameworks in support of abolition, we are offered innovative and necessary ways to think through equitable systems change.

Now, more than ever is the time to learn from and engage in the revolutionary movement of prison abolition, that more broadly encompasses a total egalitarian restructuring of society, in which all people have access to basic human rights, freedom of movement, social mobility, and are free from state-sanctioned violence. It is by leaning into new and life-giving ways of being that we can more aptly address our most current global health crisis, whose effects reach beyond human health, and increasingly speak to issues of structural racism and inequity. Abolition offers us a historical and analytic framework to help us collectively think through restructuring the economic and social conditions that generate crime, despair, and exclusion, and is thus a framework that ought to be employed in this time of unprecedented global catastrophe.

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You can learn more & donate to ongoing efforts here:

https://deeperthanwater.org/2020/03/17/mass-incarceration-mutual-aid-and-covid-19/?fbclid=IwAR27NgEeOi7YcvoQb0-RLsHU1xi3RS42RjUIghMDtgM7RC9gox_wJ3JXiec

https://www.paroleprepny.org/covid

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[1] Carissimo, Justin. “38 people, including 21 inmates, test positive for coronavirus in New York City Jails.” CBS News. March 22nd, 2020.

[2] Wang, Jackie. “Carceral Capitalism.” Intro. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series: South Pasadena, 2018. pg. 78.

[3] “A Brief History of the Drug War.” The Drug Policy Alliance.

[4] Kaba, Mariame. “A Jail of the Imagination: Seeing Prisons for What They Are and Demanding Transformation.” Truthout. May 3rd, 2018. pg. 12.

[5] Davis, Angela Y. “Are Prisons Obsolete? Slavery, Civil Rights, and Abolitionist Perspectives Toward Prison.” Seven Stories Press: 2003. (pg. unknown, accessed online via Hollis)

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

Works Cited:

“A Brief History of the Drug War.” The Drug Policy Alliance. 

A.Y. Davis. “Are Prisons Obsolete? Slavery, Civil Rights, and Abolitionist Perspectives Toward Prison.” Seven Stories Press: 2003.

Jackie Wang. “Carceral Capitalism.” Intro. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series: South Pasadena, 2018.

Justin Carissimo. “38 people, including 21 inmates, test positive for coronavirus in New York City Jails.” CBS News. March 22nd, 2020.

Mariame Kaba. “A Jail of the Imagination: Seeing Prisons for What They Are and Demanding Transformation.” Truthout. May 3rd, 2018.

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Najha is a second year Master of Theological Studies candidate at Harvard Divinity School, exploring Black Diasporic religions and culture. She is also the founder of the course, “Freedom School: A Seminar on Theory and Praxis for Black Studies in the United States,” a student-led popular education colloquium at Harvard.