Abstract

While we live in an era of intense concern about crime and victimization, heralded by calls for increasingly harsh punitive approaches, it is increasingly clear that more harm is inflicted on people by corporations and nation states than by individuals. The Case for Penal Abolition marshals convincing arguments from a number of scholars and activists not only for abolishing imprisonment, but overhauling our entire penal injustice system. The movement for penal abolition is as old as prisons themselves, which from their beginning have failed to achieve any of their stated objects: individual and general deterrence, rehabiliation, and restoring a sense of justice. Given the failure of penality in addressing individual ("street") crime, how then should penal abolitionists respond to corporate ("suite") crime? Abolitionists have traditionally opposed increased control. Should they now consider increased control for these new kinds of criminality? The Case for Penal Abolition challenges us all - theorists, lawyers, justice system workers, activists, inmates, victims, and citizens - to move away from failing penal systems towards a new democratic global humanity in resolving human conflicts and legal issues.