Reforming Abolition

Abolition is an elusive concept, which allows people with various political views to identify with the idea. This Article unpacks some of the conceptual features that lead to its elusiveness. This imprecision has empowered some to point out the diverse—if not inconsistent—positions that self-identified abolitionists take when articulating the contemporary abolition movement’s demands. The question then becomes whether the movement could protect itself from being a rootless position with insufficient tools to guide change. I suggest that it can. Rather than getting caught up in debates about abolition’s ends, I propose that more attention be paid to abolition’s grounds. By focusing on what grounds abolition, we see that the threat to the movement does not come from those who stop short of absolutism (that is, those who do not advocate abolishing our penal systems altogether); rather, it comes from those who ground their absolutism in principles inconsistent with the positive features necessary to achieve an abolition democracy. A consequence of this view is that the lines between abolition and reform become blurry. Some abolitionists argue that this blurriness is reason to reject reformist proposals. However, I suggest that this ambiguity is not a problem—and, indeed, may be beneficial. I point out that most abolitionists are out to reform something, and the primary source of disagreement within the movement is about what must be reformed. This, however, doesn’t mean that we should, as many suggest, distinguish abolitionism by its pursuit of non-reformist reforms (or “abolitionist steps”) instead of reformist reforms. Rather than being a helpful way to separate abolitionism from less progressive reforms, I argue that the appeal to non-reformist reforms substitutes one elusive term (abolition) for another (non-reformist reforms), rejects legitimate reforms that benefit persons currently suffering in our legal systems, and advances a conception of progressive change that forecloses valuable opportunities to mobilize the least well-off. More people are engaging with abolitionist thinking than ever before. This Article is an attempt to shift the discourse around abolition so that the concept primarily serves its political mission and allows abolitionists to avoid getting bogged down in debates that have little upshot today. In other words, it’s a call to reform abolition.