Reform or abolition? Using popular mobilisations to dismantle the ‘prisonindustrial complex’

Abstract

In April 2009, California officials unveiled historic plans to cut $400 million from the state's $9.8 billion corrections budget by reducing the prison population by 8,000. With half the reductions coming from changes in parole policy that would reduce the revolving door of parolees being returned on technical violations, and the other half from changes in the treatment of property crimes and enhanced credits for prisoners attending education programmes, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation effectively adopted part of a larger plan created by Californians United for a Responsible Budget, a lobby group made up of 43 prison abolitionist, reform and social justice organisations. This temporary alignment between anti-prison activists and one of the nation's largest and most powerful correctional departments is a dramatic shift from a political terrain in which activists have relied on direct action, mass protests and lawsuits to block state officials bent on inexorable prison expansion. I want to argue that the grassroots tactics used by the antiprison movement over the past decade to transform popular understandings of mass incarceration have opened up the door to new political possibilities at a time of economic crisis. Where prisons were once seen as a recession-proof inevitability, the anti-prison movement has created a chink in the armour that may be the first step in ending America's over-reliance on imprisonment as a solution to deep-rooted social problems.