It all starts with an observation: “the services that prisons are supposed to provide will never compensate for the harm they have caused since their creation. » Thanks to mass incarceration and the murder of George Floyd, which led to strong pleas for defunding the police, the discourse towards prison has become increasingly critical in recent years in the United States. United States and, to a lesser extent, in Canada.
However, the militant movement aimed at penal abolitionism – that is, the abolition of prisons and other institutions which form the penal system, such as the police and the courts – took root in Europe, in Scandinavia, at the beginning of the 1970s.
Often described as utopian or dangerous, the tradition of penal abolitionism has spanned the ages in different forms, supported by activists and groups of the radical left; voices among which stood out Angela Davis in the United States, Louk Hulsman in the Netherlands, Jacques Lesage from The Hague and Thierry Lodé in France.
In the test Brick by brick, wall by wallGwenola Ricordeau, associate professor in criminal justice at California State University, Joël Charbit, associate researcher at the Lille Center for Sociological and Economic Studies and Research, and Shaïn Morisse, doctoral student at the Center for Sociological Research on Law and penal institutions, retrace the history and transnational trajectories of political movements which have put at the heart of their approach the radical critique of the prison or judicial system.
Thus, for abolitionists, the reforms of prison institutions are insufficient and only serve, without any convincing results, to reinforce an illusion of protection, security and justice. The three authors dissect a set of myths, demonstrating – with supporting figures – that penal institutions are stigmatizing and destructive for convicted people, incapable of providing the resources or support necessary for the healing of victims, in addition to perpetuating an unequal social and racial order.
Beyond its more didactic nature, which is aimed first and foremost at activists, the essay also includes a more accessible and very informative section, aiming to answer frequent questions asked by the general public, particularly in link to fear of murderers and attackers and possible alternatives to prisons.
Well documented, rigorous and judiciously constructed, the essay proves to be an excellent source of reflection for imagining a different society, thus opening up work on future reflections. As what they describe, however, emanates from a distant horizon – not to say inaccessible -, the researchers would have benefited from turning even more towards the side of the victims, in order to see how the proposed changes could, in the short term, change the situation for those who, while waiting for the great revolution, continue to suffer the violence of an inadequate system, and offer a solution to those who no longer know how to move forward.