UnEarth Magazine.

The Prison Abolition Movement, An Ecological Perspective

Words by Kerys Bettles, Art by Leela Stoede. Prison abolition is a movement that seeks to imagine and create a world where prisons are obsolete. In this article, I hope to provide an introduction to the prison abolition movement, through an ecological perspective. I will disentangle the way the carceral system is deeply embedded in…

UnEarth Magazine
5–8 minutes

Words by Kerys Bettles, Art by Leela Stoede.

Prison abolition is a movement that seeks to imagine and create a world where prisons are obsolete. In this article, I hope to provide an introduction to the prison abolition movement, through an ecological perspective. I will disentangle the way the carceral system is deeply embedded in forms of life, and consider how an ecological understanding can transform and be transformed by the prison abolition movement.  

Carcerality is woven into every cell of our being; through ideas, practices, spaces and structures. It is rooted in harm to ourselves, to others, and to the Earth. Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore are two abolitionist scholars and activists, that trace a history of carcerality, tied to a colonial-capitalist configuration (2003; 2022). They describe how colonial acts of enclosure, and the creation of wage and enslaved labourers altered relationships with the land. Marked by extraction and exploitation, these relationships were degrading to the soil and the self. The emergence of the plantation economy in North American colonies homogenised ecologies and was based on extraction at an unsustainable rate. In North America, the creation of the carceral system was a direct response to slave resistance and uprising. Like enslavement, incarceration was also based on a degrading relationship to the land, in the form of carceral labour.  

From its beginnings, carcerality has been enmeshed in colonial-capitalist relations. Angela Davis explains the way this relationship with a growth-oriented economic system was solidified, through the concept of the ‘Prison-Industrial Complex.’ The PIC describes how prisons became an industry in and of themselves, and imprisoning individuals became a way to generate profit and drive capitalist growth. The Prison-Industrial Complex denotes a web of interconnected networks, systems and infrastructures that mutually support and sustain each other, reinforcing carcerality. In the UK, as of 2018, there were fourteen private prisons that accounted for one-fifth of those imprisoned (Corporate Watch 2018). Yet public prisons still generate profit for private companies through the outsourcing of contracts in management, maintenance, and construction. If like me, your school building was built and owned by a corporation that profits from carceral expansion, you may begin to make some sinister connections. Carcerality is deeply, deeply entrenched.  

The role of prisons is not to make a society safe, but to make profit. The carceral system sustains itself by making a connection between criminality and incarceration, but the prison abolition movement disputes this, arguing there is no correlation between the crime rate and the prison population, nor the rate of prison expansion. The criminalisation of individuals and communities, that tend to be poor or Black, is an act of scapegoating, diverting attention from the real roots of socioeconomic problems.  

The creation of criminality is entirely arbitrary. This is most obvious in the criminalisation of environmental activists and land defenders, rather than those issuing new oil and gas licenses. Furthermore, carcerality is deeply embedded in our lives, through our experiences of coercion and punishment. We uphold systems that function through these harmful principles, because we are told that they keep us safe. In our schooling, exclusion and isolation are common practices that are mirrored in a carceral society. All too often, conflict is escalated to a point where an individual must be removed from their community altogether.   

Isolation is deeply harmful to our bodies and minds. In the UK, prisons are often built on contaminated land, including former nuclear sites, and adequate ventilation and heating is rare. Prison infrastructure is toxic to its environment in many ways. Further, the drive to imprison means that prisons often become overcrowded, creating dangerous conditions, which were exacerbated during the Covid-19 pandemic. Carcerality is rooted in relationships that are deeply degrading and destructive, to ourselves, to others and to the Earth.  

The prison abolition movement disentangles and destabilises the ideas, practices, spaces and structures that create and sustain carcerality. It challenges the integrity of prisons and carcerality more broadly. Like the breaking down of living matter, this process of decomposition produces fertile ground for new ideas and practices to take root and grow.  

Cradle Community, a prison abolitionist collective, foreground alternative modes of making communities safe, beyond carcerality (2021). These are rooted in the principles of transformative justice and community accountability. They are a set of practices to address harm, that prioritise survivor support, accountability and collective responsibility in changing the conditions that enable harm to happen. This differs to a punitive system, where the consequences of harm are so disproportionate and dehumanising that individuals are actually disincentivised from taking accountability for the harm they have caused. A system that recognises and seeks to make amends for the way a community is complicit in enabling harm, takes that harm way more seriously than a system that fails to address the root causes. This feels especially pertinent when considering the role of the patriarchy in gender-based violence.  

Cradle Community are committed to building safe and healthy communities by focusing on the root causes of socioeconomic problems, by addressing poverty, housing, domestic violence, addiction, and by supporting the most vulnerable members of society. These are not abstract ideals, but demands; first to redirect funds away from building and filling new prisons, and toward supporting those who need it most. The prison abolition movement extends from our most intimate and close connections, through a commitment to removing aspects of coercion and punishment from parenting and pedagogic practices, and to abolish the prison of the mind.  

Learning from and developing tactics from abolitionists, Black liberationists, environmental activists and land defenders, prison abolitionists weave solidarities across these movements. In the UK, Community Action on Prison Expansion (CAPE) find ways to resist new prison proposals, through objections based on environmental grounds. Through resistance rooted in struggles against extractive and exploitative practices, and an economic system based on endless growth, these movements are wholly entwined. The prison abolition movement imagines and seeks to create a world that values rootedness and connectedness to ourselves, each other and to the Earth.  

End Note 

Reading prison abolition literature has really enabled me to understand the myriad, interconnecting and deeply embedded ways that carceral ideas, spaces, practices and structures can cause harm. Prison abolition is a praxis, so it asks us to reflect and take action. I have included a list of references and possible actions to take at the end of this article.  

Prison abolition is rooted in the experiences of individuals and communities, for whom the carceral system was not designed or intended to protect, including Black and poor communities. They have had to develop other ways of keeping their communities safe. It is from these people and their practices, deeply rooted in community, that this work derives, and must be attributed. I have learnt so much from the writings of Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Cradle Community and many others. I hope that if this article acts as an introduction to the prison abolition movement, you can go on a journey with these writers, and I promise it will be truly transformative.  

List of Resources 

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