Gina Dent & Erica Meiners offer abolition feminism as a way to fight the prison-industrial complex

Gina Dent is an associate professor of feminist studies, history of consciousness, and legal studies at UC Santa Cruz in California. Erica R. Meiners is professor of education and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Northeastern Illinois University. Dent and Meiners are two of the four creators of a pivotal new book from Haymarket entitled Abolition. Feminism. Now. (https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1546-abolition-feminism-now) It’s an essential text that was also co-written by Angela Davis and Beth Ritchie, two central thinkers on the prison industrial complex and its deep connections to racial capitalism. Abolition. Feminism. Now. is an invitation to enter a conversation about how we might respond as a society to the dehumanizing and brutal system of policing and punishment that we’ve more or less come to accept as the only means of ensuring public safety. Rich with examples of strategies for liberation, this book offers an authoritative analysis of not only the forgotten place of the incarcerated in contemporary society, but many other timely social problems that feel, at times, like they have no solution. The trick is, they say, the solutions are hard to imagine because of the way that ideology and a “carceral aesthetics” blind us to the urgent necessity of abolition. In this conversation, I tentatively ask Gina and Erica whether there might be a way for abolition to become more insistent on proactive change, rather than only emerging in response to particular crises. Their response reminded me of how little I really know about the movement for abolition. This is not about some historically new force in global politics; it is not the case that abolition feminism right now represents the reactionary emergence of something that wasn’t there. Abolition feminism has been here for a very long time, it is just that this history has been purposefully and perniciously forgotten. This moment of increased mobilization that we’re seeing today is the product of what Gina calls a “widening [of] the circle” to include people that have been “awakened” by recent events, and who are trying to respond to “multiple temporalities” coexisting at one time. They suggest that striking back against the normalizing of state violence requires the work of pushing the public’s sense of what the prison industrial complex is, past the specific space of unfreedom we imagine, and insisting on “having a longer [and more complex] conversation” about the system of racist mass incarceration we inhabit and are complicit in. That’s a lot to take in, but it’s necessary, they argue, to stay with the complexity, with the trouble. As they write in Abolition. Feminism. Now., it feels like “historical time is accelerating.” Crises are escalating and crashing violently onto the poor and precarious. So we have to try to respond with radical solutions to the emergencies that envelope the vulnerable first, while also remembering that, as they try to explain, we are always going to struggle to “learn in the space of emergency” because of the sometimes suffocating intensity of emergency. This is a problem if the goal and challenge of our times is no less than to fundamentally rework the very way in which society is structured.