Reforming Abolition

Daniel Fryer* November, 2025

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.

Introduction

Nearly everyone agrees that the United States criminal legal system is inadequate. Imprisonment rates are among the highest in the world,¹ Black people are disproportionately incarcerated,² trust in law enforcement is at an all-time low,³ and jails and prisons are vicious places with high rates of violence committed by both inmates and staff.⁴ Although there is much bickering over the correct solutions to these problems, many seem to believe that something drastic needs to be done about our criminal legal systems.⁵

One popular position suggests that we reform police, prisons, jails, and other aspects of our systems that are oppressive, unjust, and inefficient. Another position claims that, instead of making improvements within systems designed to oppress and exclude, we should dismantle them altogether. This latter position—described as “prison abolition,”⁶ “police abolition,”⁷ “prison-industrial complex abolition (PIC),”⁸ or, what is sometimes viewed as more comprehensive, “penal abolition”⁹—is often perceived as a radical alternative to reform because, unlike reform, abolition rejects the position that systems designed to harass and control can be repaired.¹⁰

However, the critical differences between reform and abolition depend on the details. There are various senses of the term “abolition” (and “reform”) thrown around in political discourse today. This elusiveness of the label “abolition” makes it difficult to determine the view’s substance, which leads to uncertainty about what it means to adopt the label.¹¹ Sometimes, the abolitionist position is articulated in a way that very few people will disagree with. “[I]f you are somebody that is kind, caring[,] and empathetic[,] you’re an abolitionist, because those are the key ten[ets] to what it means to be an abolitionist[. Y]ou want the best for folks, and you want them to become their best sel[ves].”¹² That’s from the co-host of “Abolition is for Everybody,” a podcast created by an abolition organization, Initiate Justice, developed to abolish incarceration in California.¹³ Surely, you too are an abolitionist by that description. Indeed, that understanding of the position suggests that abolition really is for (almost) everybody.

How about this one: “[A] commitment to the principles of prison abolition is incompatible with the idea that incarceration is a just or appropriate solution for interpersonal harms—ever.”¹⁴ Are you still an abolitionist? The comment comes from highly influential activists and writers Mariame Kaba and Rachel Herzing. They are responding to self-proclaimed abolitionists who say things like “ ‘I’m a prison abolitionist but I’m happy R. Kelly¹⁵ is in jail’ and ‘I love abolition, but send him to prison.’ ”¹⁶ Kaba and Herzing argue that a criminal legal system is never capable of bringing justice to persons who commit wrongs in our society.¹⁷ So, when their interlocutor asks questions like: “Well, surely you don’t mean that R. Kelly shouldn’t be in prison?,” Kaba and Herzing are unwavering in their answer: “We do.”¹⁸

Does this mean that Kaba and Herzing’s interlocutor is not a prison abolitionist? I’m unsure. It could be said, for instance, that although the interlocutor wants us to move toward a society without prisons, our current state requires us to use prison as a tool to incapacitate some who have committed crimes. That is, even if they endorse abolition as a long-term strategy, its conditions of application are not met until we live in a society where prisons are obsolete.¹⁹

Alternatively, it could be said that those who want to see R. Kelly imprisoned still aim to have our systems of policing and imprisonment radically changed so they are no longer the dominant mode of control. That is, a system that punishes, say, only people who rape and murder—the so-called “dangerous few”—would look unfamiliar to many of us and, hence, would indicate an end to our systems of policing and imprisonment as we know them.²⁰

This latter view is thought to blur the line between reform and abolition. Many reformers also want to see radical changes in our systems of policing and imprisonment.²¹ If abolition is merely a way of making the point that we need radical changes in our penal systems, then reformism and abolitionism seem to go together in ways that are often denied. Rather than being regarded as “the righteous nemesis of reformism,”²² abolition becomes another way of reiterating that we need to repair our damaged legal systems. Of course, there’s a lot more that must be said before we get to this conclusion—but it’s best to try to set the stage now.

I want to offer a set of reflections on both longstanding and relatively new claims about abolition. I intend to show that abolition discourse has been carrying on with a frustrating level of incoherence that makes abolition itself hard to pin down. Consequently, people with different political commitments have identified as abolitionists while offering inconsistent comments about our political and legal institutions. I will demonstrate how different conceptual tools permit “abolition” to be used in these various ways, but my intention is not merely to quibble with language.²³ Because of abolition’s elusiveness, scholars and activists have begun to criticize other uses of the term that do not fit with their preferred understanding of abolition. Rather than use the malleability of the term in their favor, these abolitionists have worked toward preventing abolition from being a position more palatable to a large group of people seeking change. The unfortunate consequence of this has been the formation of alliances when we may expect opposition—and opposition occurring when we may expect alliances.²⁴ Paradoxically, left-wing radicals criticize radical progressive reformists while befriending right-wing libertarians who endorse an absolute eradication of our penal systems.

It is easy to get distracted by the end goal of abolition and miss valuable opportunities to assist with progressive change today. My purpose here is not to convince abolitionists that they shouldn’t be wary of any reforms, but I do want to highlight the ways in which strands of abolition discourse that fall short of complete eradication are both consistent with the history of abolitionism and useful for tackling some of the pressing issues facing us today. Rather than trying to make a nemesis out of reform, more abolitionists may want to consider embracing it. (And, perhaps, more reformists ought to consider embracing the arguments put forward by abolitionists.) While I won’t argue that abolition is for everybody, I will suggest that excluding some of the less radical views from the movement is not the best solution.

The increasing number of people identifying as abolitionists has made this an important political issue, not just an academic one. Recently, a few politicians began to view themselves as abolitionists.²⁵ Unsurprisingly, these politicians often endorse a relatively modest understanding of abolitionism.²⁶ By dismissing these views as reformists’ attempts to co-opt abolition, the movement may miss a valuable opportunity to show up in political conversations in which they have not been historically welcomed. Rejecting articulations of abolition that are politically palatable is something that one should expect from opponents to abolitionism—not from proponents of abolitionism who are trying to mobilize a political force to enact change. Instead of challenging the rhetoric of these politicians, abolitionists should consider the ways in which politicians self-identifying with the movement could advance the political project of abolition.

In Part I, I describe the elusiveness of abolition and how it allows people with various political views to adopt the label. I suggest that we could understand many of these different iterations of abolition as being based in diverse views about the scope and site of abolition, as well as different conceptions of the terms modifying abolition. The question then becomes whether the contemporary abolition movement could protect itself from being a rootless position with tools insufficient to guide change. In Part II, I suggest that it can. Rather than getting caught up in debates about the ends of abolitionism, I propose that more attention be paid to abolition’s grounds. Grounds are background reasons instructing why we should support a position. By focusing on what grounds abolition, we see that the threat to the movement does not come from those who stop short of absolutism but rather those who ground their absolutism in principles inconsistent with an abolition democracy. Consequently, the lines between abolition and reform become blurry. In Part III, I suggest that this is not really a problem. I argue that most abolitionists are out to reform something, and the primary source of disagreement among abolitionists is over what should be reformed. This, however, doesn’t mean that we should, as many suggest, distinguish abolitionism by its pursuit of non-reformist reforms. Rather than being a helpful way to separate abolitionism from less progressive reforms, I argue that this move substitutes one elusive term (abolition) for another (non-reformist reforms), rejects legitimate reforms that benefit current persons suffering in our legal system, 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. Reforming abolition so that it could primarily serve its political mission better advances the abolitionist’s cause than getting bogged down in debates that have little upshot today.

I. The Elusiveness of Abolition

Activists or abolition-curious people will often ask me, “What does abolition look like to you?” My answers change all the time during conversation, especially since I believe that the dreaming and practicing should happen together.

—Derecka Purnell²⁷

What does it mean to be an ‘abolitionist’? Concepts such as ‘abolitionism’ and ‘abolitionists’ swirl around. Admittedly, I have made them swirl around myself.

—Thomas Mathiesen²⁸

In this Part, I demonstrate the elusiveness of abolition. There are two parts to understanding how the term eludes. First is its duality. Although the plain meaning of the term suggests a negative vision aimed at dismantling oppressive structures, contemporary abolitionists maintain that a positive project accompanies the negative vision. This suggests that the view’s content is going to contain something different from people’s ordinary understanding of abolition. Second, disagreements between self-identified abolitionists make it hard to determine the contours of the view. I follow Rachel Barkow in explaining how disputes about the site and scope of abolition allow people with varying views regarding how we should change our criminal legal system to identify as abolitionists. However, I show that this distinction is murky: What is presented as a disagreement about scope could easily be rendered a disagreement about site (and vice versa). Moreover, I show that, even when abolitionists agree about the scope and site of abolition, they can still have different conceptions of the terms modifying abolition (police, prison, the prison industrial complex, etc.). Part I describes the conceptual tools one can appeal to when labeling a view “abolitionist.” This sets up the discussion in Part II about why abolitionists (and their opponents) may want to limit the use of the term.

A. The Structure of Abolition

Descriptions of the contemporary abolition movement cause confusion in part by breaking away from what could be viewed as the natural understanding of the term “abolition.” At first blush, abolition appears to be a concept whose plain meaning indicates the complete end of something.²⁹ This initially suggests we need only to find out what that “something” is to understand the substance of the view. So, prison abolition would be a view advocating for the complete end of prisons, police abolition would be the view advocating for the end of police, penal abolition would be the view advocating for the end of the penal system, and so on. On this understanding, abolition is seen as a negative project aimed at dismantling a broken part of our unjust system. Indeed, just as slavery abolitionists called for the immediate and unconditional end to enslavement because it served no good social function,³⁰ it may be tempting to think abolitionists today would be calling for an immediate and unconditional end to our penal institutions that serve no good social function.³¹

This interpretation would appear to put abolition in line with a long tradition of writing about the racial realities that we despise in this country. As Randall Kennedy has put it, a “salient feature of American race law” is that it gravitate towards acting negatively:

Anti-discrimination, anti-classification, and anti-subordination are the key legal concepts in this area. The Thirteenth Amendment prohibits slavery; it does not designate the essentials of freedom. The Fourteenth Amendment prohibits states from denying persons the equal protection of the law; it does not elaborate on what equality means in terms of a positive entitlement. The Fifteenth Amendment prohibits states from denying persons the vote on the basis of race; it does not arm citizens with a right to vote.³²

The social and political responses to American racism, Kennedy tells us, have long focused on the conditions of society that should not remain.

For the contemporary abolitionists, though, a project merely focused on the negative aspects of our social institutions is inadequate.³³ Although much of the discussion around abolition treats problems with the administration of criminal law as its starting point,³⁴ the proponents of abolition focus on changes that need to be made for us to have a radically different society.³⁵ For instance, Allegra McLeod writes that “a prison abolitionist framework involves initiatives directed toward positive rather than exclusively negative abolition.”³⁶ For McLeod, this entails “developing and implementing other positive substitutive social projects, institutions, and conceptions of regulating our collective social lives and redressing shared problems—interventions that might over the longer term render imprisonment and criminal law enforcement peripheral to ensuring relative peace and security.”³⁷ In a similar vein, V. Noah Gimbel and Craig Muhammad have encouraged us to imagine abolishing criminal law enforcement as a project of building up community-powered institutions to supplant racist ones.³⁸ “[R]ather than a negative vision of abolition (i.e. fire all cops),” they write, “we support the creation of new non-police institutions empowered to supersede the police monopoly on violence reduction.”³⁹ Viewing this project as “identical to what W. E. B. Du Bois called ‘abolition democracy,’ ” Gimbel and Muhammad view “the democratic takeover of state institutions” by local communities as necessary for the positive project of abolition.⁴⁰ Likewise, Marc Lamont Hill writes that “an abolitionist vision is about more than dismantling the prison.”⁴¹ For Hill, abolitionism “is also about building a world where we work together to meet one another’s needs; a world built on communities of care and networks of nurture; a world in which every living being has access to safety, self-determination, freedom, and dignity.”⁴² The positive strand of abolition focuses on constructing new institutions to replace an old social order.⁴³

So, abolitionists tell us that there is a negative and positive aspect of abolition. But more than that, abolitionists insist “it is the innovative rather than the destructive that marks abolitionist thinking.”⁴⁴ Here, they seem to be taking their cue from W.E.B. Du Bois’s writing on the abolition of slavery.⁴⁵ Du Bois writes: “The abolition of slavery meant not simply abolition of legal ownership of the slave; it meant the uplift of slaves and their eventual incorporation into the body civil, politic, and social, of the United States.”⁴⁶ Contemporary abolitionists have interpreted this text to suggest that slavery “abolition ought to have been a positive project as opposed to a merely negative one.”⁴⁷ And they suggest that the same point applies to criminal law today: Confronting our criminal legal institutions’ problems requires that we invest in positive social projects that prevent people from getting caught up in our criminal legal systems.⁴⁸ By operating as a negative and positive project, abolitionists seek to move beyond traditional critiques of American race law, opening the possibility for new tools to attain freedom.⁴⁹ Yet, in that process, they also make abolition out to be something other than its plain meaning.⁵⁰ As opposed to mere elimination, abolition has become a view that cannot be understood without appreciating its positive elements. Abolition, then, is not (merely) about abolition.⁵¹

B. Disagreement Among Abolitionists

Deviating from a common understanding of a term is in itself enough to cause some confusion. But the misunderstandings don’t end there. Perhaps because contemporary abolitionists view abolition primarily as a positive project, we see disparate ideas about what is being eliminated. Even those who identify as abolitionists often offer slippery and elusive explanations of what abolition entails. Hence, we get a broad and inconsistent array of views under the label “abolitionist.” For instance, here is Philip Atiba Goff explaining how we should understand abolition given our nation’s history of racist policing:

Simply, it is not possible to look honestly at the history of law enforcement in the United States and imagine it was not intended—for most of its existence—as a means of Black oppression. Similarly, there has been no time in the nation’s history when this mission has been explicitly acknowledged, repudiated, and corrected. One meaning of police abolition, then, is simply a call to abolish this mission and empower those tasked with maintaining public safety with a different one. Although the word abolition may seem frightening to some, the notion of interrupting the historical legacy of explicit anti-Blackness should not be.⁵²

On this understanding, police abolition becomes a view calling for the eradication of the mission of Black suppression from those we empower to maintain public safety. It is not so much calling for the end of all law enforcement. It is instead a view acknowledging that we cannot have adequate public safety without “reckoning with the US history of anti-Blackness” in law enforcement and beyond.⁵³ Abolition, Goff tells us, requires “two overarching goals: First, communities should have the resources to reduce the need to call law enforcement. Second, communities should have more options when experiencing a crisis than fire, medical, or law enforcement. This is particularly true for economically and racially marginalized communities.”⁵⁴ Instead of viewing abolition as a dismantling of police altogether, Goff appears to understand abolition as a transformation of law enforcement by addressing its racist mission.

Other abolitionists take a different approach. Rather than seeing abolition as a project aimed at eradicating anti-Blackness (or even racial oppression as a whole), some view any attempt at repairing our criminal legal systems as inherently flawed. Abolition becomes more than a project of transforming police departments by altering their underlying mission: It becomes a project about eliminating the police entirely. As Mariame Kaba puts it: “Even if the criminal punishment system were free of racism, classism, sexism, and other isms, it would not be capable of effectively addressing harm.”⁵⁵ For Kaba, the appropriate response to the history of police violence that Goff mentions is straightforward: “Quite simply, we must end the police.”⁵⁶ Kaba writes: “The hegemony of police is so complete that we often can’t begin to imagine a world without the institution. We are too reliant on the police. In fact, the police increase their legitimacy through all the non-police-related work that they assume, including doing wellness and mental health checks.”⁵⁷ Instead of abolishing the racist mission of the police, Kaba is direct about what, in her opinion, satisfies the project of police abolition: We must “literally abolish the police.”⁵⁸

What permits both these alternative views to be presented under the “abolition” label? It doesn’t appear to be a disagreement about the racial history of law enforcement or the present harms the police inflict. Both Goff and Kaba acknowledge that abolition is a response to a long history of racial oppression that continues to manifest itself today. Yet their prescriptions differ. Goff seems to believe that abolition would be satisfied if our law enforcement agencies are no longer oppressive and communities have the resources to “reduce” the need to call law enforcement. Kaba doesn’t. Her argument suggests that nothing short of the full eradication of the police will satisfy abolition’s mission. And, of course, these aren’t the only two views on the matter. Abolitionists appear to recognize the malleability of the term, sometimes pointing out that “abolition may mean different things in different contexts.”⁵⁹ Some see this fluidity as complicating the discourse surrounding abolition but still go on to find key questions motivating abolitionism.⁶⁰ Others, however, take a more contentious strategy. Instead of acknowledging the fluidity of abolition, they attempt to strengthen their position on what abolition is by pointing out why alternative views ought not don the label.⁶¹ In Part III, I discuss the concerns around limiting what abolition is. But before we discuss these restrictive strategies, we should try to better understand the source of the disagreements. The next three Sections describe three overlapping ways to make sense of the disagreements between abolitionists.

1. Scope

One way to understand varying views about what abolition entails is to notice disagreements about the scope of abolition.⁶² Some may use the term to mean total abolition. Others seem to use the term to simply mean something like “greatly reduce,” thereby reserving some use of the penal system in limited cases (such as a tool to penalize the dangerous few). Even the most influential scholar-activists who write about this subject often hedge in a way that suggests they are not endorsing an absolutist position. Angela Y. Davis, for instance, “envisions the creation of new institutions to address issues like healthcare needs and education that will ‘start to crowd out the prison so that it would inhabit increasingly smaller areas of our social and psychic landscape.’”⁶³ And she has also called for us to “abolish imprisonment as the dominant mode of punishment.”⁶⁴ Similarly, Allegra McLeod acknowledges that there may be a “dangerous few” who “cannot live safely among us,” but she maintains that this “ought not to interfere with serious engagement with abolitionist analysis” because most prisoners will not fall into that category.⁶⁵ For McLeod, “an abolitionist ethic does not necessarily deny that in some instances there may be people so violent that they cannot be permitted to live among others.”⁶⁶ But that the literature refers to this group as “the dangerous few” is indicative of just how “very rare they are relative to the vast population of the incarcerated.”⁶⁷ And “Ruth Gilmore says ‘[t]he terrible few are a statistically insignificant and socially unpredictable handful of the planet’s humans whose psychopathic actions are the stuff of folktales, tabloids (including the evening news and reality television), and emergency legislation.’ ”⁶⁸

Some abolitionists, then, seem to endorse a position that falls short of complete elimination. From this perspective, the scope of the abolitionist project is aimed at greatly reducing the number of people in our criminal legal systems. Although some may think that abolition requires complete elimination, others appear to suggest that something short of total abolition may suffice. So, the abolitionist posture could vary depending on the scope of the view.

2. Site

Another way to perceive these differences is as a disagreement about the site of abolition. Even if two people call themselves abolitionists, they may have different views on what should be abolished. While one person may think that, say, prisons ought to be outright dismantled, another may aim to abolish prisons as we know them (or, perhaps, the “prison industrial complex”).⁶⁹ Again, Davis seems to open the door for a more moderate view when explaining what she believes abolition requires. She writes: “We need to reimagine security, which will involve the abolition of policing and imprisonment as we know them. We will say demilitarize the police, disarm the police, abolish the institution of the police as we know it . . . .”⁷⁰ Likewise, The Movement for Black Lives “calls for ‘an end to all jails, prisons, immigration detention, youth detention [a]nd civil commitment facilities as we know them.’ ”⁷¹ But the qualifying language here (“as we know it/them”) suggests that the site of abolition is not the entire system of prisons and policing but rather the overly punitive, highly militarized, and racially oppressive aspects of our current systems.⁷² This take on abolition is different from the view expressed by Patrisse Cullors: “Abolition centers on getting rid of prisons, jails, police, courts and surveillance. Period.”⁷³ This difference in opinion about the site of abolition could lead to various views about what it takes to satisfy the abolition project. Even if one doesn’t want to end all forms of confinement, aiming to end prisons as we know them puts that perspective in good abolitionist company.

Notice that what looks like a disagreement about scope could easily be presented as a disagreement about site, and what looks like a disagreement about site could be presented as a disagreement about scope. For instance, someone who wants us to reserve prisons for only the dangerous few might be called a non-absolutist and may be accused of transforming abolition into “criminal law minimalism” or deviating from intelligible understandings of the view.⁷⁴ Abolitionists who take this position may seem like they are not really abolitionists at all: Their call is to reduce a system, not abolish it.

But we can shift the focus. Those who want to reserve prisons for punishing the dangerous few may take an absolutist posture against our traditional structures of prisons. In other words, they may claim that if we reach a state where we are imprisoning only the dangerous few, then prisons as we know them would be abolished. This abolitionist would view the site of abolition as our current state of prisons. By transforming them to look a lot different than they do now, one could claim that prisons have indeed been abolished.

3. Conception

Differences about the scope and site of abolition provide the concept with a ton of flexibility—but we could still stretch the idea even further. Even when abolitionists agree about both the scope and site of abolition, they may still dispute what abolition demands. For instance, two people may think that we should absolutely abolish prisons, full stop. Yet, they may have different views about what prisons are. They may, as philosophers would put it, share the same concept of prison abolition but nevertheless have different conceptions.⁷⁵ Consider, for instance, two people who may disagree about whether a loveseat is a chair. They both have the concept of a chair—a four-legged object used for sitting—but disagree on their conceptions of chairhood. One person may reserve the term “chair” for a seat that sits one person. Whereas, the other person may want to extend the notion to include a seat that sits two. The dispute may, for instance, lead to a couple agreeing that a chair ought to be in every room of their house but debating about whether the loveseat in their study satisfies that requirement.

Similarly, two people who share the concept of, say, prisons may have different conceptions. One person may take prison to mean any form of involuntary state punitive confinement, while another may want to reserve the term for an industrialized form of punitive confinement that invokes needless suffering. Consider Michelle Alexander’s comments on how we should understand prison abolition:

[T]he question is do we want to create and maintain sites that are designed for the intentional infliction of needless suffering? Because that’s what prison is today. They are sites where we treat people as less than human and put them in literal cages and intentionally inflict harm and suffering on them and then expect that this will somehow improve them. It’s nonsensical, immoral, and counterproductive, and that is what I would like to see come to an end.⁷⁶

But what does it mean to be a site “designed for the intentional infliction of needless suffering”? Alexander is clear that this “doesn’t mean that I don’t think we don’t need to remove people from the community who pose a serious threat or who cause serious harm for some period of time,”⁷⁷ suggesting that she believes we do not have to abolish involuntary punitive confinement entirely. Yet, this doesn’t stop her from identifying as a prison abolitionist.⁷⁸ One way to make sense of this view is to understand Alexander as having a conception of prisons that isn’t so broad as to include any involuntary confinement of persons who pose a serious threat or cause serious harm. Some abolitionists have explicitly taken this view.⁷⁹ And Alexander at least hints at this idea here. For Alexander, prisons today are, by definition, inhumane. If our spaces for confinement are no longer sites for needless suffering, profitability, or oppression of minorities, then Alexander’s position suggests that we would have abolished prisons.⁸⁰

Once again, notice how disagreements about the conception of police or prisons could be presented as disagreements about their site or scope. So, you may think that by noting varying conceptions of prisons, one is just providing another way of saying that people disagree about the site of abolition.⁸¹ From this perspective, the different views are explained by what one is calling to be abolished: any punitive confinement versus confinement that inflicts inhumane, needless suffering. Alternatively, you may think that Alexander is merely limiting the scope of abolitionism because her position allows for some people—likely very few people—to be removed from the community after committing a crime. From this perspective, the disagreement seems to be about how many people one permits to remain subject to confinement: zero versus the dangerous few.

That may be right. Again, I am not trying to invoke hard categories as much as I am showing the conceptual tools available to call oneself an abolitionist. The crucial point to realize, for now, is that the concept–conception distinction suggests that some of the disputes do not hinge on what abolition is but instead on what constitutes the police, or prisons, or the penal system, or the prison industrial complex, and so on. The abolitionist with a different conception of, say, prisons could take an absolutist posture and refrain from using qualifying language as they describe their view. They wouldn’t advocate merely to eradicate prisons as we know them or maintain that prisons ought to be preserved for the dangerous few. Instead, they would take an absolutist position with regard to eliminating the conception of prisons that they deem accurate. Thus, it may seem misleading to tell them that they are not “abolitionists.” Their rebuttal is that they do want to abolish prisons, full stop. The upshot is that analyzing what “abolition” means may not be enough to help us figure out the substance of one’s view—legitimate disputes may remain about the terms modifying abolition (police, prison, prison industrial complex, penal system). Understanding the different views about the scope and site of abolition, as well as different conceptions of the terms modifying abolition, allows us to make sense of the overlapping ways in which disagreements between abolitionists arise.

II. Limiting Abolition

PIC abolition is still marginalized and frequently misunderstood. Its somewhat increased popularity has been accompanied by a diffusion of the politics: it can be taken to mean anything from eliminating imprisonment to installing mutual aid pantries or making individual lifestyle choices.

—Rachel Herzing⁸²

The last Part demonstrated the elusiveness of abolition and the many tools we have for labeling a view “abolitionist.” In this Part, I examine recent attempts to limit the way abolition is understood. I begin by addressing the worry about co-optation. To protect against some activists harnessing abolition for more modest ends, some abolitionists have taken issue with articulations of abolitionist projects that are more reserved than their own. I give two reasons why these attempts may fall short: one based on language and another based on history. Relying on the points in Part I, I demonstrate that disagreements about the site and scope of abolition, as well as different conceptions of the terms modifying abolition, suggest that assorted descriptions of the abolitionist project may all be conceptually accurate. Moreover, I argue that the more qualified abolitionist positions seem to be a central part of the abolitionist tradition. This, however, does not mean that contemporary abolitionists ought to be accepting of anyone who adopts the label. Rather than focus on the end goals of abolition, I suggest that we pay more attention to what grounds abolition. Focusing on grounds, I argue, provides a better way of determining who should be considered allies in the abolitionist movement. Part II concludes by showing that underlying these debates are deeper questions about whether the political project of abolition should consider its starting place to be our present condition or an imaginary future. I give a plug for the former and raise a cautionary note about the latter.

A. The Co-Optation Worry

The elusiveness of abolition suggests that the label could accommodate various positions that do not share the same political end. Some see this as worrisome for a political project that aims to advance progressive change.⁸³ Proponents of abolition have tried to mitigate this worry by trying to get us to rein in our understanding of abolition. As one abolitionist puts it, “there has been an ‘increasing invocation of “abolition” by academic elites and other prominent voices seeking to harness the excitement surrounding abolition towards other more limited goals,’ some quite distinct from ‘the ultimate eradication of the prison as a site of state violence and social repression.’ ”⁸⁴ To protect abolition from being used for limited ends, some abolitionists have decided to “take issue with these articulations of the abolitionist project.”⁸⁵ Rather than accept a more expansive understanding of abolition, these abolitionists attempt to guard the position against co-optation.

These sorts of criticisms are often directed at self-identified abolitionists who do not want to eliminate our criminal legal system entirely. Recall Mariame Kaba and Rachel Herzing’s criticism of those who identify as abolitionists while also endorsing the confinement of R. Kelly.⁸⁶ Kaba and Herzing seem to be fighting against an understanding of abolition that would permit us to use prison in cases involving the dangerous few. That is, they are guarding against a view that does not entail absolute eradication of state punitive confinement. Kaba and Herzing make clear that they do not think abolitionism has a monopoly on radical critiques of policing and imprisonment. Thus, they assert that “not everyone who organizes for radical reform is a PIC abolitionist.”⁸⁷ This means “[o]ne may advocate for radical reform of surveillance, policing, sentencing, and imprisonment without defining oneself as a prison abolitionist.”⁸⁸ The message they want to convey is clear: If you think incarceration is ever an appropriate response to wrongdoing, then you are not an abolitionist. This understanding of PIC abolition requires that we not accept the conditions of punitive confinement for anyone, ever.⁸⁹ If you accept punitive confinement as appropriate for any wrongdoing, this position entails, abolition is not for you.

Consider also Derecka Purnell’s criticism of Tracey Meares’s use of the term “police abolition.”⁹⁰ For Meares, police abolition requires us “to recenter policing’s fundamental nature as a public good.”⁹¹ Meares states that “[t]hose who dismiss abolitionists’ call for an end to policing assume that policing necessarily prefigures public safety.”⁹² Instead, Meares argues, we should adopt a broader conception of public safety that includes protection from government overreach and oppression.⁹³ Adopting Meares’s proposal would lead to a transformation of policing agencies to a state where officers “take preservation of life seriously” and do not “treat[] crime reduction as the highest goal.”⁹⁴ Does this transformation mean that we give up on policing entirely? Not really. “Disadvantaged communities,” Meares writes, “ought not give up policing any more than they should give up public schools, electricity, or water.”⁹⁵ Still, Meares sees abandoning our traditional approaches to policing and the adoption of new goals, such as “[a]ttention to co-production of public security with communities,” as an abolitionist project.⁹⁶

Purnell, on the other hand, contends that Meares’s recommendation “undermines the purposes of abolition.”⁹⁷ She asks: “How can we re-center an entity as a public good if it never was one?”⁹⁸ Rather than try to transform oppressive systems, Purnell declares that “[o]ppressed people must give up the systems that harm them.”⁹⁹ Purnell endorses a conception of police abolition that “require[s] society to decrease and eliminate its reliance on policing.”¹⁰⁰ Thus, she advocates for a vision of police abolition beyond transformation.¹⁰¹ Rather than seeing Meares’s proposal as an abolitionist project, Purnell says that it is “at best unclear and, at worst, a liberal version of broken windows policing.”¹⁰²

The increase of people self-identifying as abolitionists has made this an important political question. Recently, some politicians have begun to self-identify as abolitionists.¹⁰³ And, unsurprisingly, these politicians often endorse a relatively modest understanding of the abolitionist position. Here’s Colorado House Representative Elisabeth Epps’s description of abolition as a policy position:

[A]bolition does not mean immediately disbanding all law enforcement and decriminalizing all offenses—of course not.
But it does mean actively investing in mental health care, harm reduction, smart drug policy, public schools, clean air and safe water, and other sound policies actually proven to enhance community safety for all.¹⁰⁴

Here’s former Washington State Representative Kristen Harris-Talley, who also identifies as an abolitionist, describing her position:

I want every neighborhood to be like the most affluent neighborhood you live near that has very low policing. Everyone has jobs. Every child has an education. Everyone has health care. You don’t see folks going to jail from those communities because they’ve been invested in in the ways that we know make a difference.¹⁰⁵

And here’s United States Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez describing what abolition would look like if realized in our society: “[A] lot of people, cannot fathom what an abolitionist America looks like. Tell them it looks like a suburb.”¹⁰⁶ The type of abolitionism that Ocasio-Cortez endorses would no doubt lead to a radical transformation of our carceral systems.¹⁰⁷ Yet, rather than eliminating all forms of state confinement, Ocasio-Cortez’s comments suggest that abolition would be satisfied if we got rid of most state confinement and police activity in our neighborhoods.¹⁰⁸ Hence, when responding to worries about the dangerous few, Ocasio-Cortez writes: “We should work to an end where our prison system is dramatically smaller than it is today.”¹⁰⁹

In a society where few people take the idea of abolitionism seriously,¹¹⁰ you may question whether it is prudent for abolitionists to try to limit the term even more. One benefit of having politicians self-identify as abolitionists is that the idea of abolition may get a place in political spaces that have historically not had to confront the merits of abolitionism or the demands of the abolition movement.¹¹¹ A more flexible understanding of abolition would allow us to change the view based on political and social circumstances and help mobilize a large group of people dissatisfied with the current system. Indeed, painting abolition as a narrow, absolutist, static position is a tactic that one expects from the opponents of abolition—not those who want to mobilize others in society to take the abolition movement seriously.¹¹²

Still, as noted above, some abolitionists have adopted uncongenial approaches to more modest depictions of the abolitionist project. Thus, they are likely to count these politicians among the “other prominent voices seeking to harness the excitement surrounding abolition towards other more limited goals.”¹¹³ Indeed, some abolitionists have specifically taken aim at politicians’ relatively modest understanding of abolition, making clear their disdain for using abolition in a more reserved manner.¹¹⁴

But why are the conceptions endorsed by these politicians a problem? The purported issue is that these modest perspectives do not advocate for the total eradication of some aspects of our legal system. Or, as Thomas Frampton has put it, “these vaguer, modest reframings are consistent with a world in which we retain a prison system resembling the status quo, albeit much smaller (perhaps recast in ‘public good’ terms) and reserved for ‘the dangerous few.’”¹¹⁵ Abolitionists, this view suggests, have good reason to guard against the term being understood as anything short of complete eradication of our criminal legal systems. Not clearly distinguishing these views from abolitionism, the argument goes, risks confusing a world in which abolition is complete with a world in which we retain penal systems mirroring the status quo.

I don’t find this position persuasive. For starters, any system “resembling the status quo” would, almost by definition, not have abolished the system as we know it. Indeed, the system of policing that serves the public good in the way Meares proposes, or a penal system that only confines the dangerous few that Ocasio-Cortez appears to have in mind, would not look anything like our present state of affairs. This transformed system would recognize a minimal role of the criminal law, provide communities with the “resources to reduce the need to call law enforcement,”¹¹⁶ and be “a kind of policing that we all can enjoy.”¹¹⁷ If our current system were anything like that, it would look unfamiliar to most of us.

Perhaps more importantly, it is not clear what would support this limited conception of abolition. As I noted in the last Section, those with different conceptions of police, prison, or the prison industrial complex could claim that they are abolitionists in the sense that they want to abolish these systems—even if they have a different understanding of what constitutes police, prison, or the prison industrial complex.¹¹⁸ So, it may be tough to limit the view on conceptual grounds, as some abolitionists (and their opponents) want. Meares and Purnell seem to have a different conception of policing, but they both see value in calls to abolish what they view as “the police.”¹¹⁹ And Kaba and Herzing’s interlocutor may disagree with them about the site of abolition (e.g., prisons versus prisons as we know them), but they likely agree that imprisonment as the dominant mode of punishment should be abolished.¹²⁰ Thus, the label “abolition” appears to be conceptually accurate.

In addition, as a historical matter, relatively modest framings of abolitionist positions have long been part of the abolition tradition. Angela Davis, who is treated as the pioneer of the contemporary abolition movement, has repeatedly used qualified language when describing the abolitionist position.¹²¹ This is not surprising. Davis interprets the histories of abolition as being grounded in this qualified posture. In this spirit, she tells us that the “germinal text” on the subject, Thomas Mathiesen’s The Politics of Abolition, was “concerned with transforming prison reform movements into more radical movements to abolish prisons as the major institutions of punishment.”¹²² Mathiesen himself was deliberate about not describing abolition as a completely finished project. For him, “any attempt to change the existing order into something completely finished, a fully formed entity, is destined to fail.”¹²³ Thus, Mathiesen described his project as “the unfinished,” indicating that it was “an attempt to change the existing state of affairs through an intervention that is partial, incomplete and in process.”¹²⁴ Mathiesen preferred “letting forecasts remain vague rather than making them crisp and clear.”¹²⁵ Social and political changes alter our views, and a more qualified position allows us to cope with the unending social changes that we cannot yet predict.¹²⁶ Thus, it may be fair to take Davis at her word when she states: “Prison needs to be abolished as the dominant mode of addressing social problems that are better solved by other institutions and other means.”¹²⁷ Davis herself seems to invite an interpretation of abolition that does not require the complete eradication of our criminal legal systems. And insofar as abolitionists are following the tradition that Davis has played a major role in creating,¹²⁸ dismissing relatively qualified positions as not abolitionist seems unwarranted.¹²⁹

B. Grounding Abolition

This does not, however, mean that contemporary abolitionists ought to be receptive to anyone who dons the label. Abolitionists may be correct to worry about not having a principled way of distinguishing their view from more threatening views. We see this point expressed in Frampton’s concern about prison abolitionists’ arguments that permit punishment for the dangerous few. Frampton’s primary concern is that this position “transform[s] abolitionism into a de facto minimalist posture.”¹³⁰ But he also raises an important question about what happens when abolition no longer means complete elimination: “Is that which separates the abolitionist, the Brennan Center, and the Koch Brothers simply an empirical dispute about how few ‘the dangerous few’ really are?”¹³¹ We want a principled way to distinguish the position from right-wing figures whose actions “negatively affect the same communities that are historically targeted for incarceration.”¹³²

But allowing a conception of abolition fall short of complete elimination does not mean that differentiating alternative political projects gets left to empiricists. After all, theories for change have grounds. These grounds are background reasons instructing us on why we should support a position.¹³³ Grounding the contemporary abolitionist’s claims is the acknowledgement that our current criminal legal system is racist, economically exploitative, violent, and wasteful with respect to social resources that could be put to better use elsewhere.¹³⁴ It takes itself as continuing W.E.B. Du Bois’s project of “abolition democracy,” which aims to “create the institutions that will truly allow for a democratic society.”¹³⁵ “Prison abolition, as a movement,” Ruth Gilmore tells us, “sounds provocative and absolute, but what it is as a practice requires subtler understanding.”¹³⁶ That subtler understanding requires keeping the project of creating a society among equals at the forefront and working to “resolve inequalities and get people the resources they need.”¹³⁷ That the contemporary abolition movement is primarily led by Black women and is “inspired by racial critiques of the criminal legal system” is often noted.¹³⁸ Indeed, to emphasize abolition’s grounding in an anti-racist project, Angela Davis has claimed that “we cannot begin to think about the abolition of prisons outside of an antiracist context.”¹³⁹

Focusing on grounds gets rid of the worry that there is no protection against co-optation and may provide the kind of determinacy that some abolitionists apparently seek. Abolition would no longer get caught up in defending what we ought to do in far off, uncertain circumstances; instead, abolition would be a position trying to continue Du Bois’s project of building egalitarian institutions to “supplant oppressive social structures inherited from the legacy of chattel slavery.”¹⁴⁰ However, two significant things follow.

First, we should note that even those who purport to disagree with abolitionists would still accept most of the reasons that ground the abolitionist view. For instance, Brandon Hasbrouck writes, “Abolition democracy, as described by W.E.B. Du Bois, is the establishment of democratic institutions that ensure that all citizens be provided with the respect, education, economic security and resources, civil rights, and franchise necessary to be free, informed, and active participants in all significant aspects of public life.”¹⁴¹ Although Tommie Shelby rejects contemporary abolitionism,¹⁴² he likely agrees with those DuBoisian ideas.¹⁴³ Even when criticizing the abolition ideal, Shelby emphasizes why our criminal legal systems (and broader society) are systemically unjust and advocates for institutional fixes.¹⁴⁴ There may be space, then, for the abolitionists to come together with those advocating for radical changes in our legal systems even when they refrain from endorsing complete elimination of our criminal legal systems. Instead of having the most extreme view dominate discussion, abolitionists should emphasize the ideas grounding their views and the prescriptions for how we could achieve an abolition democracy. Starting the debate about how to transform our legal systems by focusing on “the dangerous few” or other marginal issues may be counterproductive.¹⁴⁵ It makes an enemy out of an ally.

Second, by focusing on the grounds of abolition, we start to see why it may not be wise for contemporary abolitionists to align with other critics of our criminal legal system even when they join abolitionists in endorsing the complete elimination of our criminal institutions. There are going to be other groups that call for the dismantling of some institutions based on principles that conflict with the idea of an abolition democracy and the background reasons grounding contemporary abolitionist discourse. “Anarcho-libertarians,” Jake Monaghan reminds us, “will say that the police function, like everything else, should be provided entirely by private agencies.”¹⁴⁶ And some right-leaning organizations have taken encouragement from calls for abolition to push their mission of decreasing the government’s role in our lives.¹⁴⁷ Although it may seem like a complementary position to contemporary abolitionism, this approach is in direct conflict with abolitionists who demand something different—not less—from the state.¹⁴⁸ Instead of calling for a decreased role of the government in our lives, contemporary abolitionists are calling for the state to respond to our socialized problems by investing in housing, healthcare, education, and other programs.¹⁴⁹ They are grounding their project in the ideas of equal rights and antiracism, not the idea of a limited or minimal state. The upshot of this is that even though the anarcho-libertarian and the abolitionist may find commonality through the negative agenda of abolition,¹⁵⁰ they will disagree significantly over positive features, which many view as the most important part of contemporary abolitionism.¹⁵¹

You may not think that there is a problem here. If contemporary abolitionists are able to find unity with those who ground their views on different background commitments, perhaps that’s a win for the project. Even if the libertarian doesn’t walk with the abolitionist all the way, they are at least able to take some steps together. Finding common ground with those on the other end of the political spectrum seems like “politics as usual.” Indeed, some contemporary abolitionist organizations have already formed coalitions with “multiple political tendencies including anarchist, communist, and more state-oriented socialist projects and strategies.”¹⁵² They see varied visions of the future as “an advantage” because it permits diverse coalitions to jointly work on a shared project.¹⁵³

The trouble with this view, however, is that when pursuing social policy, policymakers have a tendency towards selective hearing.¹⁵⁴ Indeed, the historical record suggests that punitive crime policy in the United States is largely a consequence of selectively hearing Black voices on criminal issues while elevating the demands of others.¹⁵⁵ Recall, for instance, how Black people’s views were used to support the war on crime. Black leaders in the 1970s called for criminal penalties for those who committed crimes in Black communities, while also attacking the underlying inequalities in education, health, and employment that lead to crime.¹⁵⁶ However, the response was to increase the penalties for crimes while ignoring the call for social programs that Black communities wanted. The result was “the worst of all possible worlds.”¹⁵⁷ More Black people ended up in prison and no governmental funding was directed at the root causes of crime.¹⁵⁸

Or consider the circumstances leading to the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984. Those with various political views came together to support the abandonment of indeterminate sentencing in favor of more fixed sentencing guidelines. For some, indeterminate sentencing was the source of social inequality, and they viewed “its abolition as a critical piece in a wider struggle for social, economic, and racial justice.”¹⁵⁹ For others, indeterminate sentencing was problematic because it allowed judges to show an unfair amount of leniency towards poor and Black criminal defendants.¹⁶⁰ The mandatory sentencing requirements of the Act ultimately accomplished the goals of the latter, leading to Black people receiving more severe sentences after the changes.¹⁶¹

And, of course, we cannot forget the passage of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. Again, prominent Black politicians supported addressing crime but preferred an alternative bill that addressed the prevention of crime and provided resources to diversion programs that would have allowed criminal defendants to avoid incarceration.¹⁶² The result: “Black support for anti-crime legislation was highlighted, while black criticism of the specific legislation was tuned out.”¹⁶³

From this perspective, we could see the worry about aligning with those who ground their calls for abolition in a view about the limited permissible reach of the state. The anarcho-libertarian may join abolitionist movements in their calls to eliminate public police and prisons, but they are not going to support the government programs that have become central to how contemporary abolitionists perceive their project.¹⁶⁴ By aligning with that movement, then, contemporary abolitionists make themselves vulnerable to having their position used to support the negative project of abolishing the police or prisons without any support for eliminating the societal drivers of crime. This could create the worst of all possible worlds: the most vulnerable in our society being disproportionately subjected to crime and no governmental funding directed at changing our social order. Rather than welcoming the anarchist-libertarian whose views are grounded in ideas about the limited reach of the state, abolitionists may want to keep in mind how the selective hearing of the past resulted in harmful conditions with loose references to the positions taken up by Black people. They should not cheerfully accept as a partner someone whose views are in direct conflict with the project of abolition democracy. Seeking commonality with those who share the goal of abolition for the wrong reasons can be destructive to the positive mission of abolition.¹⁶⁵ It makes an ally out of an enemy.¹⁶⁶

I should be clear: My goal here is not to suggest that contemporary abolitionists should spend more time trying to limit the idea so that others are unable to identify with the movement. Although some may see abolition as “irresistible,”¹⁶⁷ I don’t see enough people allured by the idea of abolition to help us implement the radical changes that we need.¹⁶⁸ Ultimately, how receptive abolitionists should be to various conceptions of abolition depends on which understanding serves the project of abolition best.¹⁶⁹ The point I am pressing is this: If contemporary abolitionists want to guard the idea of abolition, they should be more concerned about those grounding their views in commitments that are inconsistent with their positive agenda than those who seem to agree with the positive agenda but refrain from advocating complete elimination of our criminal legal institutions. If you are going to take steps with allies in the movement, you have to be comfortable with steps taken that would make the situation better than the current state of affairs. A political stall can occur at any moment if your allies do not see the value in moving forward. And partially achieving abolition isn’t necessarily a good thing.¹⁷⁰ Thus, it is better to be stepping away from injustice than it is to be stepping toward an ideal that may never be reached. If abolitionists’ views are going to be exploited, it’s unlikely to be from those policymakers attempting to rid our legal systems of racism, classism, sexism, and other ills that prevent us from being free and equal citizens.¹⁷¹ It’s more likely to be those who see an opportunity to push the government away from spending resources on crime control efforts that disproportionately benefit those in marginalized communities. Put simply, those who advocate that we abolish the ghetto,¹⁷² abolish carceral logic,¹⁷³ or abolish prisons and policing as we know them¹⁷⁴ are not the enemies of the contemporary abolitionist movement. But someone who calls for the absolute abolition of police and prisons on the grounds of limited government may be.

C. Abolition as Ideology

There is a deeper question lying in the background of the discussion above that may be worth bringing to the forefront: Where do we start when thinking about social change? Here’s one pitch: “Let’s begin our abolitionist journey not with the question ‘What do we have now, and how can we make it better?’ Instead, let’s ask, ‘What can we imagine for ourselves and the world?’ If we do that, then boundless possibilities of a more just world await us.”¹⁷⁵ These questions may seem like two sides of the same coin, but they’re not. It mirrors the ideal versus non-ideal theory debate, a debate that has been going on in philosophy seminars and journals for the past few decades.¹⁷⁶ One side argues that in order to determine the guiding principles necessary to help us move towards a just society, we should abstract from certain features of our present condition and make assumptions about people and institutions even though we know them not to be true.¹⁷⁷ The other side argues that the first kind of approach is antithetical to guiding our actions in the present world. By abstracting in such a way, our conceptualized legal system will be one “with little or no sense of how their actual workings may systematically disadvantage women, the poor, and racial minorities.”¹⁷⁸ That is, by deviating too far from the here and now, “we [abstract] away from realities that are crucial to our comprehension of the actual workings of injustice in human interactions and social institutions,” thereby assuring that justice will never be achieved.¹⁷⁹ Charles Mills was the main proponent of this latter view, and he accused the former view, “so-called ideal theory,” of being obfuscatory, discriminatory, and ideological (in the pejorative sense of the term).¹⁸⁰ To cope with the injustices of the present world and move us to something better, Mills argued, we should refrain from following the mainstream philosophical approach of making appeals to a perfectly just society. Although it would be somewhat natural to expect a progressive, left-wing social movement to follow Mills in his distrust of idealizing, abolitionists have surprisingly taken the opposite approach.¹⁸¹

But is Mills right? Well, we don’t need to get too far into that debate to see how the concerns apply here.¹⁸² It is enough to raise two cautionary notes about some abolitionists’ choice to construct a vision for social change from the position of a perfectly just society (with boundless possibilities) instead of from the here and now. First, our guiding principles ought to be tailored to the motivational and cognitive capacities of humans.¹⁸³ The principles that are appropriate for perfectly rational and flawless persons would not produce the same results when we ask humans, with our motivational and cognitive limitations, to follow them.¹⁸⁴ Just laws and institutions should “be designed to block, work around, or cancel out our motivational and cognitive deficiencies, to harness our nonmoral motives to moral ends, to make up for each other’s limitations by pooling our knowledge and wills.”¹⁸⁵ Such designs require us to pay attention to our particular states, including our biases, reasons for mistreating others, and tools we need to change people’s conduct.¹⁸⁶ We could only craft these policies by focusing on the here and now—not some far-off just world that may await us.

Second, by starting from the position of a perfect society, we risk leaping to the conclusion that the policies appropriate in an ideal society are also appropriate in our society and thinking that any gaps between that imagined state and our reality must be the cause of the problems.¹⁸⁷ For instance, it may be the case that an ideal society is one in which racial differences would not matter, and we are all judged by our individual efforts, character, and values.¹⁸⁸ This, then, suggests that we should adopt “colorblind” policies and deem unacceptable any race-conscious policies that may fail to signal the right values in our ideal society.¹⁸⁹ However, such recommendations are misguided in our present society, which is deeply influenced by racial differences.¹⁹⁰ In addition, certain facts about our history and present condition could make a post-racial society no longer undesirable. It could be true that in enduring certain harmful racist histories, Black people have formed valuable, culturally distinctive features and expressions that give reason to resist pressure for sameness and reject attempts to eradicate race.¹⁹¹ From this perspective, although a colorblind society would be desirable if we were not bound by our historical realities, it is not desirable when we look at the here and now and attempt to make it better. By focusing on the ideal, instead of the present, we risk making inadequate empirical assumptions that ignore the realities of race, racism, and racial injustice. The principles that are appropriate in an ideal society may not have any basis—or worse, may distort what we need—in our present society.

One could imagine telling a similar story about abolition. Thinking about an imaginary society in which prisons or police are obsolete risks putting to the side important features of our current reality that we need to engage with to change our criminal legal institutions. By starting from a place where there are boundless possibilities, we abstract the very flaws of humans and institutions that we must address and risk overlooking certain protections that, given our history, the state ought to provide. Just as no one would defend race-conscious policies in a society where race is obsolete, no one would defend prisons or police in a society in which those institutions are obsolete. The question, however, is what the injustices of our current world are and what should we do about them. We don’t need a conception of perfect justice from a boundless future to answer that question any more than we need a conception of a perfect piece of art to determine whether a Basquiat painting is better than a toddler’s rotini pasta art.¹⁹² Removing the present-day criminal injustices does not require knowledge of a perfect society that is radically different than the society we live in today.¹⁹³ Abolition is primarily a political project. Our political society and power relations are constantly evolving. And addressing these injustices in our society hinges on current conditions and our historical circumstances. We’re unlikely to address these injustices by looking at a world that looks nothing like our own. Imagining what an ideal society may look like makes for a good exercise in university seminars, but it’s not the sort of approach one would expect to be useful for a political movement.¹⁹⁴

Of course, not all arguments for abolition present it as an idealized view. Rejecting idealized views does not entail a rejection of abolition. Sometimes, for instance, abolition is presented as “a gradual project of decarceration, in which radically different legal and institutional regulatory forms supplant criminal law enforcement.”¹⁹⁵ This method of implementing radical change does not require us to picture what a perfectly just world looks like.¹⁹⁶ And, for this reason, the method is less vulnerable to the criticisms levelled against ideal theories.¹⁹⁷ More important, the gradual decarceral approach reinforces the idea that we should focus on abolition’s grounds—not abolition’s ends. It also better protects abolitionists against forming the wrong alliances. If in the process of decarceration we are simultaneously creating alternative institutional programs that supplant criminal law enforcement, we do not have to worry about reaching a state where the negative project of abolition is realized and the positive project is ignored—these two programs will be operating at the same time. Therefore, the worries about selective hearing are mitigated. Understanding abolition as a gradual project of decarceration, then, seems like a better way to advance the project of abolition than the idealized approach, and focusing on abolition’s grounds is a better approach than focusing on abolition’s ends.

III. Reform Is Not a Bad Word

I don’t know anybody who is an abolitionist who doesn’t support some reforms.

—Mariame Kaba¹⁹⁸

Let’s recap: I have argued that abolition is an elusive concept that allows people with various political views to adopt the label. Part of its elusiveness comes from its duality; and part of it could be explained by diverse views about the scope and site of abolition, as well as different conceptions of the terms modifying abolition. While this makes abolition appear as a rootless theory with insufficient limits, I have noted that this need not be the case. Rather than getting caught up in debates about the ends of abolitionism, I have proposed that more attention be paid to its grounds. By focusing on what grounds abolition, we see that threats to the movement do not come from those who stop short of complete eradication but rather from those who base their project of eradicating our criminal legal systems in principles inconsistent with an abolition democracy. Focusing on grounds also reminds us that our attention should be on the historically contingent present and not some ideal condition that we may never reach.

Maybe that’s all true. But what happens to the distinction between abolition and reform? In this Part, I address the worry about abolition slipping into reform. I argue that it’s not really much to be concerned about: Abolitionists already accept that reform is going to be a central part of the abolition project, and they often advocate to reform institutions that have a similarly oppressive history as the ones they want to eliminate. The real challenge for abolitionists, I suggest, is to decide consistent criteria for when an institution should remain and when it should go. I then analyze the distinction between reformist reforms and non-reformist reforms. I argue that, rather than presenting a coherent way to ground abolitionist projects today, the distinction between reformist reforms and non-reformist reforms is not sufficiently clear to capture a distinct abolitionist position. I also show why taking a stand against reformist reforms when they will benefit the most vulnerable groups in our society is a problematic position. And I show how such a stand may be politically counterproductive in that it passes up the opportunity to help mobilize a political force that would enable abolitionists to succeed in their causes.

A. Slipping into Reform

I have suggested that focusing on abolition’s grounds would show that some who reject the complete dismantling of our punitive institutions as an end goal would still accept some of the grounds for abolition, such as antiracism, social equality, and the creation of substitutive social projects and institutions that regulate our collective social lives in a non-punitive manner. But is that enough? One might argue that by focusing on the principles that ground an abolition democracy, we lose the ability to distinguish it from reformist views. Some abolitionists like to motivate their view by showing how it avoids the “reformist trap,” where we focus on trying to improve the institution that we should be destroying.¹⁹⁹ Indeed, it has been proposed that one of the main reasons to reject the acceptance of any form of punitive intervention is to avoid confusing abolition with reform. By permitting a view of abolition that allows for punishment even in a very few limited cases, the argument goes, “the abolitionist ventures down a slippery slope, blurring the lines between prison abolition and other species of less ambitious criminal justice reform (on both the political left and right).”²⁰⁰ Don’t we want to be able to clearly identify abolitionist projects without worrying about them slipping into reformist measures?²⁰¹

Perhaps. This is a familiar worry in abolitionist discourse.²⁰² But I’m not sure if it’s a legitimate worry. For starters, any argument in a slippery slope form should be looked at with skepticism. As Fred Schauer notes, “in virtually every case in which a slippery slope argument is made, the opposing party could with equal formal and linguistic logic also make a slippery slope claim.”²⁰³ Here, we could imagine someone objecting to an abolitionist position by stating that completely dismantling our penal system leads us down a slippery slope of abolishing every feature of our society.²⁰⁴ But most abolitionists stop short of this conclusion, usually arguing for us to reform some aspect of society in order to achieve an abolition democracy. Sure, Ruth Gilmore’s “change everything” is a familiar enough tagline.²⁰⁵ But even Gilmore doesn’t seem to think that we should burn everything down and start from scratch. To “those who feel in their gut deep anxiety that abolition means knock it all down, scorch the earth and start something new,” Gilmore writes, “let that go.”²⁰⁶ At its essence, abolition is not about rebuilding from scratch. “Abolition is [about] building the future from the present, in all of the ways we can.”²⁰⁷ Thus, there is no need to worry about abolitionism slipping into a reformist posture. Reform is going to have some place in the discussion.²⁰⁸ Or to put the point more provocatively: Nearly every abolitionist is out to reform something.²⁰⁹

That last point shouldn’t be overlooked. Abolition often pitches itself as a radical method to get rid of institutions that have historically been racist and oppressive to marginalized groups. Because of the harmful pasts of these institutions, they should be viewed as illegitimate and dismantled. But the same arguments that they give for eradicating our system of punishment could usually be put toward the institutions they want to reform. Dorothy Roberts critiques the harmful history of our criminal legal system while simultaneously arguing that we use the Constitution as a fix for our problems.²¹⁰ One could understand Roberts’s distrust of our criminal legal systems. Indeed, she has skillfully detailed the historical role of our criminal justice systems in imposing oppression: “Penal institutions have historically been key components of social policy aimed at governing marginal social groups.”²¹¹ But Aya Gruber seems right to ask: “Couldn’t the same critique apply to constitutionalism?”²¹² Like our system of punishment, our Constitution has from its inception been deemed racist, sexist, and economically exploitative.²¹³ It’s hard to come up with good reasons why this history necessitates getting rid of policing and punishment altogether while reforming the Constitution.

And the same could be said for other features of society that abolitionists wish to reform. Consider, for instance, Brandon Hasbrouck’s powerful argument for democratizing abolition.²¹⁴ Hasbrouck calls for us to “democratize abolition and inject it into all aspects of our society.”²¹⁵ For Hasbrouck, reform efforts of the past have been insufficient: “Our past attempts at reconstruction have proved incomplete, addressing only some abuses while failing to root out the fundamental injustices of American law and society.”²¹⁶ Thus, he claims that our goals should not be mere reforms to alleviate injustice—they should be towards the establishment of an abolition democracy.²¹⁷ How do we establish it? Well, part of the project that Hasbrouck details requires us to “expand and reform the courts.”²¹⁸ As he sees it, reforming the courts would provide the opportunity to achieve demographic parity, where the racial and gender balance of the court would reflect the American people.²¹⁹ Once courts reflect who we are, they would be better paced to respond to our needs. On this view, abolitionism demands that we reform the courts to assist with progressive causes. Or, as Hasbrouck puts it: “The lasting success of a modern abolitionist movement will require courts prepared to reverse the reactionary precedents of past courts while protecting the legislative gains of abolitionist social and political organizing.”²²⁰

Okay. But, again, why do the courts get a pass? That is, why think our penal institutions are beyond reform, but our courts aren’t? Courts too “contribute to unique forms of state violence, social control, and exploitation.”²²¹ And many organizers and activists view “courts as an unjust institution.”²²² Indeed, Hasbrouck’s argument is based on the idea that courts “enshrine white supremacy in legal principles such as ‘separate but equal,’ colorblind jurisprudence, and nigh-impossible tests to prove discriminatory intent.”²²³ Yet, he still sees courts as reformable. What gives?

I think part of the explanation has to be that Hasbrouck grounds his vision of abolition democracy in attaining freedom for the oppressed. For this reason, he doesn’t think the government itself is the problem: “[O]ppression can come just as easily from a corporation, church, criminal enterprise, labor union, guild, political party, club, fraternity, or even individual abuse of institutions.”²²⁴ The task is to shatter oppression in whatever form it takes and use the tools at your disposal to do so. But one would imagine that those tools will include some aspects of our penal system if we are trying to correct the problems today.²²⁵ And it may be a bit premature to say that these tools won’t be the necessary ones in the future. If the notion of reform has baked into it the idea that oppression would be used to fix the problem, then of course reform should probably be rejected in all cases (legal reform, Constitutional reform, court reform, etc.).²²⁶ But that’s a peculiar way to understand reform. When I use the term, I simply mean to improve a condition of a system or eliminate the flawed aspects of the system.²²⁷ We shouldn’t take any harmful institution as a given, and we should be open to reforming, transforming, or abolishing any institution that gets in the way of progressive change. But abolishing (or reforming) these institutions isn’t itself a desirable goal; making sure they don’t get in the way of progressive change is.²²⁸ Although we should not be preoccupied with refining our penal institutions, we shouldn’t be preoccupied with destroying them either. As we seek to build a better future from our present condition, it seems unnecessary—if not impossible—to refrain from reformist measures.²²⁹

B. Reformist Reforms Versus Non-Reformist Reforms

Maybe abolitionists are willing to accept the above. After all, the deeper concern isn’t so much that abolition collapses into a reformist view, it’s that it collapses into a “less ambitious” reformist view.²³⁰ Abolitionists are concerned about reforms that do not advance the ball towards abolition. In this sense, they reject “conventional modes of reform” that fail to “mitigate the scale of state and market violence and exploitation.”²³¹ We see this illuminated in their use of the distinction between “reformist reforms” and “non-reformist reforms.” Abolitionists often reject what they call “reformist reforms”—that is, conventional reforms that do not seek to undermine or abolish our criminal legal systems. And they instead advocate that we adopt “non-reformist reforms”—that is, abolitionist steps that directly attack our legal institutions with the goal of dismantling them.²³² The abolitionist may shrug their shoulders at much of what was said above and declare that what really differentiates their view from the reformist view is that they pursue non-reformist reforms, not measly reformist reforms.

Note that this would be viewed by some as a significant change to the abolitionist position. Rather than being marked as a nemesis to abolition,²³³ reform becomes an alternative way of framing the debate. The question of whether you buy into the abolitionist movement would be based on whether you are committed to the pursuit of non-reformist reforms over reformist reforms.²³⁴

Unfortunately, though, I’m not sure if this view has much purchase. First, the move from speaking about abolition versus reform to speaking about reformist reforms versus non-reformist reforms is unlikely to provide sufficient clarity. Even abolitionists admit that “the lines between reformist and non-reformist efforts are blurry.”²³⁵ As Amna Akbar tells us: “The same demand may look non-reformist from one point of view and reformist from another; non-reformist when proposed and reformist down the line.”²³⁶ Is eliminating cash bail a non-reformist reform because it attacks pre-trial detention and moves us toward a society where we no longer criminalize poverty? Or is it a reformist reform because it makes the system seem more legitimate when people are incarcerated after being convicted at trial or agreeing to a plea bargain? Is legislation requiring police officers to carry personal liability insurance to cover legal claims that victims of brutality may raise a non-reformist reform because it makes police officers more accountable and reduces their proclivities toward violence? Or is it a reformist reform because it bolsters the public image of the police by suggesting that they will personally take responsibility for our wellbeing? Arguably, anything that falls short of completely eliminating a system could have the effect of legitimating it (and an incremental change that highlights flaws in the system could lead to large groups mobilizing to eradicate the system altogether). Rather than giving abolitionists the tools to differentiate their views from others, the switch to talking about non-reformist reforms merely substitutes one elusive category (abolition) with another elusive category (non-reformist reforms). Thus, it’s not clear that non-reformist reforms could help illuminate a distinctive abolitionist position.²³⁷

More substantively, the rejection of reforms that often benefit the least well-off in society is a problematic stance that abolitionists should reconsider. Many abolitionists tend to believe that “[r]eformist reforms are often used by elected and state officials to demobilize movement and relegitimize current power dynamics.”²³⁸ They claim that “[e]fforts to improve the fairness of carceral systems and to increase their efficiency or legitimacy only strengthen those systems and divert attention from eradicating them.”²³⁹ Thus, they prefer to adopt non-reformist reforms that “don’t make it harder . . . to dismantle the systems [they] are trying to abolish.”²⁴⁰ Unlike reformist reforms, non-reformist reforms are permissible because they “reduce the power of an oppressive system while illuminating the system’s inability to solve the crises it creates.”²⁴¹

This stance “leads abolitionists to adamantly oppose reforms that invest resources into surveillance, policing, and punishment systems.”²⁴² For instance, abolitionists have rejected resentencing and commuting death penalty sentences to life without the possibility of parole as reformist reforms that make it less likely that people will get out of prison.²⁴³ Likewise, they have opposed legislation to reclassify certain felonies as misdemeanors and apply such classification retroactively on the grounds that it “reinforces the idea that some people deserve incarceration and ends up buttressing racialized determinations of who is dangerous.”²⁴⁴ I find it hard to see why we should refrain from alleviating the suffering of someone today just because we think that it would get in the way of us achieving a long term goal that many abolitionists admit we may never reach.²⁴⁵

In addition, this approach to reform operates on a misunderstanding about how progressive causes are won. Progressive movements depend on mobilizing “a political force” to form an organized plan that contests those in power.²⁴⁶ Even if non-reformist reforms are enacted today, they could have a demobilizing effect that creates divisions among the least well-off.²⁴⁷ On the other hand, reformist reforms could have a mobilizing effect that creates solidarity among the least well-off.²⁴⁸ This could eventually strengthen the abolitionist mission and draw more supporters into the abolitionist cause. By rejecting reforms that could assist in mobilizing those who are currently suffering from the carceral state’s extensive reach, abolitionists deny opportunities to strengthen their movement for social change.²⁴⁹ Rather than becoming a helpful way for abolitionists to distinguish abolition from less advantageous reforms, the reformist reforms– non-reformist reforms distinction becomes a way to substitute one elusive term (abolition) for another (non-reformist reforms), reject legitimate reforms that benefit current persons suffering in our legal system, and advance a conception of progressive change that forecloses valuable opportunities to mobilize the least well-off.

If abolitionists refrain from making a nemesis out of reform and use reformist measures to help mobilize people who already believe our criminal legal systems need radical change, then many possibilities arise. As we begin our decarceration efforts, while simultaneously building alternative public institutions to solve our needs, more of us may recognize that public safety is better secured by taking proactive approaches.²⁵⁰ This would radically reduce our reliance on punitive institutions and may even eventually lead to small-scale attempts to eliminate the penal system altogether. But there doesn’t seem much to be gained by staking out territory on that possibility in a distant future—especially when it comes at the cost of making progressive change today. Even when criticizing abolition, commentators often concede many of the arguments put forth by abolitionists and note that the agendas between those wanting radical reform and those wanting to eliminate our penal system substantively overlap.²⁵¹ A consistent theme throughout this Article is that we could mobilize a movement for radical progressive change by embracing those overlapping agendas when they derive from the same grounds. In focusing on abolition’s grounds and not its ends, we don’t get caught up in debates highlighting marginal differences that won’t have substantive impact anytime soon. Abolitionists could go on making arguments for why the dangerous few are not so dangerous or explaining why it is impossible for police to not be racist. But that would get tiresome, and it is not clear whether having people accept those arguments would lead to the changes that contemporary abolitionists want. Moreover, there will be political costs to painting abolition as a narrow position that rejects some of the reforms proposed by progressive politicians, scholars, and activists. That alone should give abolitionists pause. Again, abolition is primarily a political position. And a conception of abolition that does not make an enemy out of reform seems to best serve the political project of abolition.

Conclusion

Where does all of this leave us? Well, not very far from where we started—and that’s sort of the point. Though contemporary abolition perspectives may have a lot to offer us as we try to figure out what to do with our overly populated, racially imbalanced, and violent criminal legal system, it’s easy to get lost in its purported absolutism that distracts from what abolition could provide those who want to make changes to our legal system today. Abolition is at its strongest when it presents as a positive decarceration project that doesn’t rely on idealized language or positions that exclude those who want to take up the radical task of securing an abolition democracy but fall short of absolutism. Abolition is a lot less attractive when it presents as an unyielding absolutist position based on a perception of an idealized society that we may never achieve. Abolitionists should encourage an abolitionist ethos that is not built on aspirational thinking and distinguishing itself from reform²⁵² but instead is built on Du Bois’s idea of establishing “democratic institutions that ensure that all citizens be provided with the respect, education, economic security and resources, civil rights, and franchise necessary to be free, informed, and active participants in all significant aspects of public life.”²⁵³

Let’s return to Mariame Kaba one last time. I may have given the impression that she is an exclusionist who wants to guard abolitionism against more expansive visions of the project. But she doesn’t always sound like that. Here’s Kaba discussing the project of abolition in more inclusive terms:

For me I’ve always felt that PIC abolition, Prison Industrial Complex abolition, is very much a project of creation and very much a project of building. So really it’s a positive project. . . . I believe that we’re practicing abolition on a daily basis when we are thinking about how to address harms for example in our family, in our communities, without involving the state which includes policing but also includes child welfare and other kinds of parts of the carceral state. When we do that work we’re doing abolitionist work all the time. When you’re an organizer or an activist or just somebody in the community and you’re pushing against climate change and you’re doing that work you’re really doing abolitionist work. If you’re building and pushing for universal education for all you’re doing abolitionist work. You’re pushing for living wages, you’re doing abolitionist work. So I think it’s an expansive vision and an expansive framework.²⁵⁴

My inclination is that the movement’s intellectual arm may better assist the abolitionist cause by playing up this project of creation, describing what grounds the everyday practice of abolition, and explaining how to theoretically support the idea of abolition as an expansive framework. In other words, if it is really true that abolitionism causes a great number of people in our society anxiety²⁵⁵ and frightens people who may be sympathetic to many abolitionists’ causes,²⁵⁶ the correct response is not to double down on a narrow understanding of the idea and tell other radical progressive thinkers that they should not adopt the label. Instead, one may consider tweaking their approach and altering aspects of their view that prevent it from having a larger political effect. One may consider, that is, reforming abolition.

* Assistant Professor of Law and Philosophy, University of Michigan. For helpful comments, conversations, and suggestions, I would like to thank Michelle Adams, Umana Ahmed, Rachel Barkow, David Blankfein-Tabachnick, Paul Butler, Andrew Crespo, Kevin Douglas, Chad Flanders, Heather Foster, Barry Friedman, Tiffany Fryer, Kiara Gilbert, Jonathan Gingerich, Ethan Greenberg, Daniel Halberstam, Scott Hershovitz, Emma Kaufman, Cecilia Kei Atkins, Máximo Langer, Christopher Lewis, Nathaniel Magrath, Drake Marsaly, Keenen McMurray, Tracey Meares, Gabe Mendlow, Ginny Miller, Eve Primus, Richard Primus, Daniel Richman, Yangji Sherpa, Glen Staszewski, Etienne Toussaint, Jack Webb, Ekow Yankah, and the participants at the Criminal Justice Roundtable at Columbia Law School, Harvard/Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum, John Mercer Langston Writing Workshop, Michigan Legal Theory Workshop, MSU Law Faculty Workshop, NYU Crim Workshop, Princeton UCHV Race Theory Reading Group, and Rutgers Law Faculty Colloquium.