In the last two decades, however, prison abolitionism has enjoyed a resurgence, both as a rallying cry for activists and as a focus of sustained scholarly inquiry for geographers, sociologists, philosophers, radical criminologists, and others. Legal academia, however, remained curiously impervious to these developments.
Until recently. Over the last half-decade, legal scholars have begun grappling with the challenges and promises of prison abolition. In a 2015 article entitled Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice, Professor Allegra McLeod provided the first sustained discussion of prison abolition in legal scholarship; in the 2019 Foreword to the Harvard Law Review’s Supreme Court Term issue, Abolition Constitutionalism, Professor Dorothy E. Roberts cemented abolitionism’s place in elite academic legal discourse. A small flood of related scholarship — either expressly adopting an abolitionist lens, or at least responding to abolitionist critiques — has now appeared in leading law reviews. Both the Harvard Law Review and the UCLA Law Review have dedicated symposia to furthering abolitionist perspectives. Abolitionists’ “‘fugitive’ knowledges,” it seems, have finally begun infiltrating even the most rarified spaces of mainstream legal academia.