Legal systems are entrenched by corporate elites and police unions who have general interests in the CJS – refusal isn’t enough if they have no method for abolition

The challenges for abolitionist thought are made visible when we focus on abolitionist logics refusing to frame problematic situations within a national scale. This refusal manifests itself in multiple forms, such as in the idea that criminal legal systems are disempowering and de-autonomizing individuals and communities, whose needs and interests are negated or neglected. What abolitionist thought has failed to articulate thus far is an adequate sociology or philosophy of political community or identity that can do without penal norms. Is a political community possible without claims to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within some necessarily clearly demarcated space (Weber, 1921 [1946, 78])?

This is not a challenge for abolitionism established from an anarchistic perspective, which obviously contests the need for a political community in the first place. Still, whether anarchistic or not, abolitionists usually advocate for responses to problematic situations as advanced by the individuals and communities involved, leaving unresolved the question of the borders of communities. The face-to-face model of conflict typically used by abolitionism, largely inspired by Christie (1977) and Hulsman (1986), implies a conception of community-as-tribe that might not always be adequate for many problematic situations that are seen as a legitimate realm of intervention by criminal legal systems, such as those involving state actors and corporate ‘moral persons’. Problems highlighted by the mobilization of the PIC or the critique of global carceralization, such as a capitalism (Davis, 2003), racism (Sudbury, 2005) and sovereign exceptionality (Larsen, Piché, 2009), clearly affects communities larger than those constituted through nationality (Carrier, Piché, 2015).

Moreover, penal abolitionism dictates a norm prohibiting retaliatory harm to which, paradoxically, communities that should be self-governed nevertheless ought to obey. This norm has been unevenly enforced through the use of physical force by sovereign powers since what Foucault (1974b) called the devilish invention of the notion of ‘crime’ as infraction (Carrier, Piché, 2015). The question as to how a norm of non-retaliatory harm can be imposed without physical force remains open, at both theoretical and practical levels. Similarly to challenges stemming from the carnival of punishment, abolitionist thought indeed seems a bit sociologically nonchalant towards challenges raised by various forms of vigilantism. While we certainly agree with the idea of working towards eliminating the violence of incarceration, penality and carceral controls more broadly, how does one subscribing to an ‘unfinished’ alternative guard against equally or more insidious material forms of violence taking their place in the void stemming from abolitionist victories? The posing of this question, however, should not be interpreted as an attempt to reject work aimed towards the dismantling existing structures of state repression (i.e. what abolitionists are against), but abolitionism could be more mindful of its potential pitfalls and more clearly articulate possible futures (i.e. what abolitionists support)11 as a means of refining its promise.

The challenge of imposing a norm of non-retaliatory harm without relying on the threat of, and actual use of, physical force gets even larger if we locate the discussion not at the typical abolitionist level of urban and suburban neighborhoods, but instead at the level of national, international or cosmopolitan imagined communities (Anderson, 2006). 12 Doing this locates incarcerated, punished and detained individuals within a continuous communal space. This continuity might seem unproblematic if one’s point of departure is traditional forms of abolitionist thought. It might be more difficult to establish if one is not informed by this tradition. Academic literatures on the abject treatment of individuals as bodies without political existence, and literatures on exceptional measures of control officially targeting ‘terrorism’, do not usually operate in reverse the logical and topical extension that carceral abolitionism achieves: the critique of the camp does not necessarily lead to a problematization of the incarceration or the punishment of criminalized individuals even if Agamben’s (1998) analysis of homo sacer constantly associates it to the biopolitical figure of the ‘bandit’. This is particularly the case when the critique of confinement is based on the absence of any formal criminal charges laid against individuals, which performs an association between criminal law and the production of justice with which most abolitionists would be uncomfortable. The critique of carceral spaces such as those found at the American Guantanamo Bay Naval Base or in the transit zone of Paris-Orly Airport does not magically lead one to find something scandalous in incarcerating or otherwise punishing someone who has been found guilty of aggravated sexual assault. In other words, being interpolated as a ‘citizen of the world’ to problematize the predicament of individuals detained and stripped of political existence does not trouble in itself the idea of ‘criminal justice’, particularly in a context where the International Criminal Court attempts to further expand, symbolically and materially, the reach of the idea that impunity is the fundamental injustice.13