The Dialectics of Abolition

• Published in: American quarterly Vol. 75; no. 2; pp. 371 - 376
• Main Author: Lowe, Lisa
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: College Park Johns Hopkins University Press 01.06.2023
• Subjects: 20th century; Adjustment; Apartheid; Capitalism; Criminal justice; Criminalization; Dominance; Globalization; Imprisonment; Legitimacy; Minority & ethnic groups; Neoliberalism; Political activism; Political economy; Power; Prisons; Social activism; Social control; States; Structural adjustment; Violence; United States > US
• ISSN: 0003-0678; 1080-6490; 1080-6490
• DOI: 10.1353/aq.2023.a898165

Ruth Wilson Gilmore has devoted decades to the study of the prison-industrial complex and to organizing for its abolition, and her profound contributions have become cornerstones of carceral studies and the prison abolition movement owing to their compelling explanatory power. To the contrary, the state expands and fortifies as it reorganizes, and it is precisely in prison buildup that we observe the apotheosis of the state's means to restructure both criminal justice and the political economy in order to safeguard capital and exerting social control. [...]the late twentieth-century US state faced, and faces in exacerbated ways today, a legitimacy crisis at home, as its violent practices of social control come into explicit contradiction with its claims to democratic inclusion, while internationally, as US economic power wanes, the bid to maintain geopolitical dominance has led to imperial overreach, more wars, and the global expansion of military basing. In several of the essays in the collection, Gilmore refers to it as a form of "structural adjustment," which connects it of course with austerity programs imposed on other nations (through the World Bank and IMF) to dictate how those other states administer goods, utilities, and services; that is, the prison-industrial complex is a program of "structural adjustment" that the US state imposes on its own society.