Against Inevitability
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Against Inevitability
Freedom was not an End but an indispensable means to the beginning.
—W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935)
The precision with which Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes the intricate roots and devastating consequences of the modern carceral state is unparalleled. Abolition Geographies: Essays towards Liberation, a collection of Gilmore's essays and interviews, provides a window into the remarkable breadth of her work and her method of laying bare complex truths about why prisons persist, who creates the illusion of their permanence, and how we unravel them anyway. Gilmore is a geographer, so it is fitting that her stunning body of scholarship has established a foundational map that has guided generations of scholars, organizers, and artists around the world—inside and outside prisons—toward a collective practice of defining what abolition is and what we need it to mean. Gilmore's research, teaching, and political work have been a catalyst moving the political and spiritual project of abolition forward, grounding us with incisive, tangible analysis and moving us to action through her concept of freedom as a thing you make and a thing you do. In this reflection on Abolition Geographies and the broader contributions Gilmore has made to abolition as both a political movement and a freedom dream,1 I consider two themes that thread through her body of work: scale and change. These themes challenge the notion that prisons are inevitable, a deliberate fiction created to naturalize prisons and one that Gilmore's work methodically disassembles.
Algorithms for Abolition
Gilmore deploys a haunting rhetorical tool when she describes what we are talking about when we talk about prisons. She writes that the US political economy "repurposed acres, redirected the social wage, used public debt, and serially removed thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of people from households and communities."2 The first time I heard her articulate this phrase—"thousands and thousands and thousands …"—in a public lecture, [End Page 365] I realized that, during her iterations, I had been holding my breath. Attempts at describing the sheer scale of carceral devastation with statistics and theory can sometimes have the effect of making prisons harder to viscerally conceptualize. Two million people caged is an astounding number, but what that number means in terms of the cost to human life can become lost in a nation where astounding violence is a daily headline. Sometimes, the more profound the scale, the more cognitive distance one seeks from it. Yet Gilmore breaks through by teaching us to approach the puzzle of scale by turning it into a site of deliberate strategy—strategy for organizing, pedagogy, art, and analytic method—to help us intentionally contend with the multilayered scales and scopes of carceral control. Abolitionist strategy that aspires to teach requires rigor in two things: its truth and its capacity to produce an opening for others to meaningfully connect with that truth.
Creatively attending to the breadth and depth of carceral regimes strengthens the capacity of abolitionists to do some strategic scaling up of our own. As an example, consider participatory defense campaigns organized to free criminalized survivors of domestic and sexual violence. Mariame Kaba, a cofounder of the feminist abolitionist organization Survived & Punished, whose members have helped develop this organizing model, explains, "The #FreeBresha and #FreeMarissaNow campaigns, like the Free Joan Little defense campaign that came before it, have taken great pains to underscore that each survivor is one among thousands [and thousands and thousands and thousands …] of Black women and girls who have been and continue to be criminalized for trying to survive."3 Organizers use campaigns as a pedagogical tool and an organizing strategy that, at their best, open a window into the details of devastation behind abstract figures, and build a bridge for people to channel the experience of rage and powerlessness toward specific short-term action. These short-term actions (such as donating, petition signing, rallies, and teach-ins) can increase the impact of grassroots pressure as well as help sustain the survivor and their loved ones by establishing an active presence of supporters in their fight for freedom. However...
