Description
Book SynopsisAccording to Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) 'Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.' Connecting the politics of abolition to wider emancipatory struggles for liberation and social justice, this book argues that penal abolitionism should be understood as an important public critical pedagogy and philosophy of hope that can help to reinvigorate democracy and set society on a pathway towards living in a world without prisons. For Abolition draws upon the socialist ethics of dignity, empathy, freedom and paradigm of life to systematically critique imprisonment as a state institution characterised by 'social death'.
Trade Review'For Abolition is a vital response to these darkening penal times It is essential reading for anyone who cares enough to wonder why England and Wales is in sight of a daily prison population of 100,000 … The book makes a challenging case well, and if it is properly digested and savoured its arguments are hard to gainsay.'-- Mike Nellis, Emeritus Professor, University of Strathclyde; 'A brilliant intellectual intervention... This book has been so very helpful.'-- Simone Rowe, School of Law, Society & Criminology, Faculty of Law & Justice, The University of New South Wales; 'A thoroughly engaging and passionate challenge to dominant understandings of crime and punishment ... Prisons are revealed as sites of mental and physical brutality, utterly incapable of providing constructive transformative regimes'-- Professor Emma Bell, University of Savoie; 'A timely and urgent reminder of the need for Abolition ... excellently exposes prisons as institutions of domination, repression and power ... A must read for all concerned with the state of prisons'-- Dr Kathryn Chadwick, Manchester Metropolitan University; 'A book that should be cherished by scholars, students, practitioners and activists alike ... it is rare to find a text so sensitively and empathically composed'-- Dr Alana Barton, Edge Hill University.
Table of ContentsTable of Cases; Foreword by Joe Sim; The Prison Puzzle and Socialist Ethics - Making the Case for Abolition; Abolitionist Ethical Hermeneutics - Hearing and Interpreting Voice; Invisible Brutal Hands - The Problem of Prison Officer Violence; Phantom Faces at the Window - Prisons, Dignity and Moral Exclusion; Prison is Not a Home - Estrangement and the Prison Zone of Abandonment; Falling Softly to Your Grave - Time Consciousness and the Death-bound Subject; Abolitionism as a Philosophy of Hope - System 'Inside-Outsiders', Freedom and the Reclaiming of Democracy; Ordinary Rebels, Everyone - Abolitionist Scholarship and the Struggle for Freedom; The Abolitionist Imagination - Ethics of Empathy, Dignity and Life; Afterword; Bibliography; Index.
