Full Description
According to Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) 'Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.' Connecting the politics of abolition to wider emancipatory struggles for liberation and social justice, this book argues that penal abolitionism should be understood as an important public critical pedagogy and philosophy of hope that can help to reinvigorate democracy and set society on a pathway towards living in a world without prisons. For Abolition draws upon the socialist ethics of dignity, empathy, freedom and paradigm of life to systematically critique imprisonment as a state institution characterised by 'social death'.
Contents
Table of Cases; Foreword by Joe Sim; The Prison Puzzle and Socialist Ethics - Making the Case for Abolition; Abolitionist Ethical Hermeneutics - Hearing and Interpreting Voice; Invisible Brutal Hands - The Problem of Prison Officer Violence; Phantom Faces at the Window - Prisons, Dignity and Moral Exclusion; Prison is Not a Home - Estrangement and the Prison Zone of Abandonment; Falling Softly to Your Grave - Time Consciousness and the Death-bound Subject; Abolitionism as a Philosophy of Hope - System 'Inside-Outsiders', Freedom and the Reclaiming of Democracy; Ordinary Rebels, Everyone - Abolitionist Scholarship and the Struggle for Freedom; The Abolitionist Imagination - Ethics of Empathy, Dignity and Life; Afterword; Bibliography; Index.
