Emma Goldman: The Making of a Prison Abolitionist

Emma Goldman’s experiences with the criminal justice system were deeply problematic, from watching Russian police harass marginalized groups of citizens, to witnessing the unjust verdicts handed down in the Haymarket affair, to experiencing and observing US police harassment of everyone from free speech advocates to union organizers, to spending time in a US federal penitentiary; it is not surprising that she became a prison abolitionist. While she was considered a dangerous anarchist, she thought the real danger came from overzealous states that would stop at virtually nothing to enforce obedience and conformity to the law. She deemed prisons ‘a social crime and failure’ that were incapable of meaningful reform. This chapter examines both what Goldman’s own experiences in prison revealed to her about incarceration and about the carceral state, and the difference between calling prisons a ‘social crime’ and labelling them a ‘failure’. I argue that Goldman was not ‘ahead of her time’, in championing prison abolition, but that, instead, her critique of them was very much based on the prison realities of her time, which are, for the most part, still our realities. I leave the reader with a distinctly anarchist understanding of why prisons must be eliminated, and why they can be.