Resurgent interest in prison abolition from academics, activists, and popular culture is a response to mass movements: some of the largest protests in US history.1 The George Floyd rebellions during the summer of 2020 responded to the latest series of US police murders of Black people, including George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, and others, by attacking the “carceral institutions [that] have become enmeshed in the daily life of the racialized US working class.”2
Françoise Vergès’s Feminist Theory of Violence: A Decolonial Perspective and Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie’s Abolition. Feminism. Now. can be seen as interventions into this moment, conditioned as it is by a longer crisis that necessitates prison abolition. The authors—long-time feminist activists and theorists—characterize sexual violence as a social problem that cannot be ameliorated through criminal legal sanctions for individual perpetrators. While prison abolitionists have long debated...
