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.