Abolition Geography
by Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Abolition Geography explores the complexity of the carceral state’s expansion through a multi-dimensional geographic and socioeconomic lens while citing a variety of historical organized movements to exemplify processes of freedom-making.
“Space always matters, and what we make of it in thought and practice determines, and is determined by, how we mix our creativity with the external world to change it and ourselves in the process.”
MY TAKEAWAYS
We’ve arrived at our current state of mass criminalization and incarceration not through singular momentous events, but rather a broad range of shifting state capacities (and motives) and social enemy-production.
“Through production of public enemies, the state safeguards the unequal distribution of resources and reinforces the logic of scarcity…”
Prisons (and policing) primarily function to facilitate the political, social, and premature death of surplus populations, serving (and failing) as the catchall solution to social problems.
“…[R]acism functions as a limiting force that pushes disproportionate costs of participating in a increasingly monetized and profit-driven world onto those who, due to the frictions of political distance, cannot reach the variable levers of power that might relieve them of those costs.”
As social welfare is increasingly divested from, social warfare gains traction, sweeping more and more people into the carceral net (who were made vulnerable by said divestment).
“State budgets don’t shrink, but human and environmental care does.”
Activism and resistance to organized violence perpetrated by the state must be global, “…[moving] beyond place-based identities toward identification across space, from not-in-my-backyard to not-in-anyone’s backyard.”
Criminality is a social construct with an essence of malleability, capable of being changed at will as the state sees fit. This is a tool used to determine who is caged and who is not, often resulting in favor of more cages, harsher sentences, bigger budgets, greater police militarization, and less investment in social welfare.
“The way the system works is to move the line of what counts as criminal to encompass and engulf more and more people into the territory of prison eligibility, if you will. So the problem, then, is not to figure out how to determine or prove the innocence of certain individuals or certain classes of people, but to attack the general system through which criminalization proceeds.”
The state encourages an “us versus them” mentality, generating psychosocial schemas through which to interpret certain populations as criminal, “the enemy”, or deserving of being caged. There is no “them” - we are all vulnerable to becoming victims of state violence as the carceral state continues to expand, reinforced by the “us versus them” logic deployed throughout society, government, media, etc.
“If unfinished liberation is the still-to-be-achieved work of abolition, then at bottom what is to be abolished isn’t the past or its present ghost, but rather the process of hierarchy, dispossession, and exclusion that congeal in and as group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”