Visit http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/abolition1313/9-13-prison-abolition/ to register
Bernard Harcourt, Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought (CCCCT)
13/13 CCCT, Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought (CCCCT)
The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, The Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and Columbia Global Center - Paris
Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought (CCCCT) presents 9/13 | DEATH PENALTY ABOLITION
Angela Davis, Ian Manuel, Allegra McLeod, and Bernard E. Harcourt
read and discuss:
Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis
“Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice” by Allegra McLeod
About this seminar:
This session will discuss the decades-long effort to abolish prisons spearheaded by Angela Davis and Critical Resistance. It will also broach the topic of the deinstitutionalization of asylums and mental hospitals in the 1960s, which prefigured the abolition of total institutions, but also points to certain risks and pitfalls of abolitionism.
“We should understand abolition not as the “elimination of anything but . . . as the founding of a new society.” The relationship between prison abolition and the Constitution, then, should be seen less as the condemnation of our existing abolition constitutionalism and more as the genesis of a new one.”
— Dorothy Roberts, “Abolition Constitutionalism” (2019)
Abolition 13/13 information, including bibliographies, can be found here.
