Courts and the Abolition Movement

This Article theorizes and reimagines the place of courts in the contemporary struggle for the abolition of racialized punitive systems of legal control and exploitation. In the spring and summer of 2020, the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many other Black and Indigenous people sparked continuous protests against racist police violence and other forms of oppression. Meanwhile, abolitionist organizers and scholars have long critiqued the prison-industrial complex, or the constellation of corporations, media entities, governmental actors, and racist and capitalist ideologies that have driven mass incarceration. But between the police and the prison cell sits the criminal court. Criminal courts are the legal pathway from an arrest to a prison sentence, with myriad systems of control in between, including ones branded as off-ramps. We cannot understand the present crisis without understanding how the criminal courts not only function to legitimate police and funnel people into carceral spaces but also contribute their own unique forms of violence, social control, and exploitation. These mechanisms reveal the machinations of mass criminalization and the injustices operating between the police encounter and the prison cell. Our central argument is that courts with a focus here on criminal trial courts and the group of actors within them function as an unjust social institution. We should therefore work toward abolishing criminal courts and replacing them with other institutions that do not inherently legitimate police, rely on jails and prisons, or operate as tools of racial and economic oppression. Drawing on legal scholarship and empirical social scientific research, Part I describes injustices perpetrated by criminal courts, detailing their role in the present crisis of mass criminalization through legal doctrine, racialized social control and violence, and economic exploitation. Part II describes the contemporary abolition movement, briefly laying out its genesis and three guiding principles typically considered in relation to policing and prisons: (1) power shifting, (2) defunding and reinvesting, and (3) transformation. Part III explores how these principles could operate in relation to the courts, drawing on analysis of existing grassroots efforts and offering new possibilities. In the short term, non-reformist reforms could make criminal courts a venue to unmask, and therefore aid in dismantling, police and prisons. Such reforms could complement the broader abolition movement and reduce the churn of people through the criminal legal system. Ultimately, the goal is to abolish criminal courts as sites of coercion, violence, and exploitation and to replace them with other social institutions, such as community-based restorative justice and peacemaking programs, while investing in the robust provision of social, political, and economic resources in marginalized communities.

Automated summary

This Article discusses the role of criminal courts in the contemporary struggle against racialized punitive systems and argues for their abolition. The article analyzes the injustices perpetuated by criminal courts and describes the principles of the abolition movement. It explores the possibilities of alternative institutions and non-reformist reforms in relation to the courts. The ultimate goal is to replace criminal courts with social institutions that do not legitimize police or operate as tools of oppression.