Incarceration, Law, and Abolition

This paper advances a legal, moral, and theological argument justifying poor Black mothers’ who break the law to survive and secure quality of life for themselves and their families against unjust social conditions. A critical task is to uncover the synergistic and contentious relationship between law and morality that intersect with harmful theologies and punitive philosophies in the context of Black motherhood and the criminalization of survival. In response, I conceptualize a new paradigm called Womanist Abolition that contributes theoretical and methodological interventions pushing forward frontiers in the study of religion. Womanist Abolition consists of legal analyses, moral reappraisals, and an emancipatory theology to undermine carceral systems that limit and foreclose Black mothers’ survival practices. This study’s outcome is the organization Abolitionist Sanctuary. In the final analysis, Womanist Abolition extends an academic study to coalitions of solidarity that expand a faith-based abolitionist movement validating the divinity and dignity of Black mothers as sources of moral integrity and salvation necessary to create a more just and equitable world beyond punishment, policing, and prisons.