How can one argue for a future that violates the bounds of imagination? For many Americans, a world without prisons cannot be fathomed. While there is rich bipartisan support for prison reform – from modest to radical – the notion that prisons are inherently unjust and must be abolished strikes many people as unrealistic or even unwise. Despite clear historical and cultural alternatives, many Americans remain skeptical of abolition. Why? Joshua Dubler and Vincent Lloyd make a compelling argument that punishment has been almost inextricably tied to justice in our collective imagination, making it hard to conceive of a justice system that is rooted in anything other than punitive measures (Dubler & Lloyd 2020). I believe this has a deeper effect on American consciousness around abolition – because the carceral logic is so deeply imbedded, abolitionist discourses seem illogical and, therefore, inconceivable to many.
In this presentation, I argue that given the collective lock on our imagination, prison abolition movements can gain much from turning to mystical rhetoric to expand readers’ ability to imagine a world without prisons. Distinct from mystical experience, although many activists are currently/formerly incarcerated, have been touched by a loved one being incarcerated, or survivors of violent crime, prison abolition does not rely on embodiment or experience. Rather, it relies upon a) certainty and moral clarity surrounding the injustice of incarceration, and b) the ability to imagine the world created anew. This is not to say that the lucid, rational arguments by abolitionists Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mariame Kaba, and others are not sufficient to argue for the necessity of abolition. Rather, it is to follow Malcolm X’s directive to achieve liberation “by any means necessary” and present a new mode of communication to the abolitionist discourse: the mystical.
To make this argument, I first present how the arguments of Davis, Wilson Gilmore, Kaba, and others are effective to stir people’s moral consciousness but often meet resistance in committing fully to the abolitionist worldview or activism. I then draw on theory of arational discourse by scholars of ineffability and mystical rhetoric, such as Michael Sells and William Franke, alongside artistic and religious calls for abolition (Miklat art installation and zine, sermons, and more) to demonstrate how abolitionist discourse can be enriched by more mystical modes of writing and expression.
In drafting this proposal, I reflected on my observations when teaching Religion and Incarceration and in my activist work. In these spaces, while many people are sympathetic to the concept of prison abolition, they remain unconvinced. The main question tends to be “what replaces prisons?” Any response less than a fully formed alternative that has been tested and promises 100% accuracy was frequently rejected. The refrain seemed to be some version of: “yes, prison is bad, but how else can we hold people accountable?” This response is curious given that such a world has existed. Angela Davis, Tanya Erzen, Joshua Dubler, and Vincent Lloyd have all demonstrated that prison is actually a relatively modern construction and we can look to history to consider a world without prisons (Erzen 2017; Dubler 2013; Dubler and Lloyd 2020). Moreover, as countless abolitionist activists note, traditional justice systems the world over (most notably Native American and African communal practices) offer practiced alternatives to incarceration, religious traditions (such as the notion of teshuvah in Judaism, tawba in Islam, Buddhist notions of accountability, and more), and traditions of restorative and transformative justice all offer clear and viable alternatives to our current system. To answer that the aim is not to replace prison, but to remake society is often dismissed as utopian or impractical.
As Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes argue, prison abolition requires a “jailbreak of the imagination,” writing that “when we speak about the abolition of the prison-industrial complex, many react as though the idea is alien and unthinkable – as if, to them, prisons, policing, and surveillance are part of a natural order that simply cannot be undone.”[i] Related to the notion of a jailbreak of the imagination, others have argued that prison abolition is rooted in radical optimism. Dubler and Lloyd argue that “The will to abolish is what comes forth when pessimism about the possibility for effective justice hits rock bottom and careens back up in the form of righteous fury…abolitionism is both the abandonment of hope and its weaponization.”[ii] This is a particular kind of optimism, one rooted in a wholesale rejection of an unjust status quo while remaining hopeful in spite of the fact that there is no reasonable way to be hopeful.
Given this lack of “reason,” abolitionists would benefit from expanding to a new discourse. Theorists of the ineffable have long noted that just because something violates the bounds of rationality does not render it meaningless or untrue. Indeed, as the French post-structuralist Jean-Franҫois Lyotard notes, the ineffable is “the unstable state and instant of language wherein something must be put into phrases yet cannot be.”[iii] Lyotard was analyzing the so-called “unstable” testimony of Holocaust survivors, and as feminist scholars and psychologists have long noted, survivors of sexual trauma often have difficulty articulating their experience in ways that fit neatly with expectations of logical rigor. Similarly, mystics find themselves trying to express an experience beyond language and conventional thought using the tools available to them: oral and written transmission. Kevin Corrigan, a scholar of Plotinus, believes that mystical language “though not discursively reasonable; it is the only appropriately thinkable language” to use to describe mystical concepts.[iv] Given the collective hold prisons hold on our imagination, let us utilize a mystical mode of discourse as a potential source of liberation.
[i] Mariame Kaba, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021), 21.
[ii] Joshua Dubler, and Vincent Lloyd, Break Every Yoke: Religion, Justice, and the Abolition of Prisons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 46.
[iii] Jean Franҫois Lyotard, The Différend: Phrases in Dispute, translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 13, §22.
[iv] Kevin Corrigan, Reading Plotinus (Purdue, IN: Purdue University Press, 2004), 169.
For many Americans, a world without prisons cannot be fathomed. Joshua Dubler and Vincent Lloyd have argued that punishment has been almost inextricably tied to justice in our collective imagination, making it hard to comprehend a justice system that is rooted in anything other than punitive measures (Dubler & Lloyd 2020). I believe this has a deeper effect on American consciousness around abolition – because the carceral logic is so deeply imbedded, abolitionist discourses seem illogical and therefore inconceivable to many.
In this presentation, I argue that prison abolition movements can gain much from using mystical modes of rhetoric to allow readers to imagine the world anew. While respecting the rational, clear-sighted moral arguments for abolition from Angela Davis, Ruth Gilmore Wilson, Mariame Kaba, and others, I follow Malcolm X’s directive to achieve liberation “by any means necessary” and present a new mode of communication to the abolitionist discourse: the mystical.