Prison Abolition as Lived Religious Peacebuilding

This roundtable will bring together U.S.-based practitioners of restorative justice (RJ), transformative justice (TJ), and prison abolition from within and outside academe. It will both situate their praxes as peacebuilding practice and explore these entwined (and sometimes at-tension) modalities as lived religion. While conceiving of prison abolition as a religious practice of peacebuilding is novel, one quickly finds similarities between them in the work of community-led interventions in violence, exercises of imagination, social analysis, and critiques of dominant systems. This roundtable will contextualize prison abolition, RJ and TJ within the peace studies subfield of religious studies, allow participants to engage one another in terms of what, concretely, their praxes entail; the degree to which their activities, commitments, and coalitions constitute lived religious practice; and how everyone can learn from differing emphases in praxes with the potential for collaboration.