Article by Ben Turk and Firehawk for the first issue of Abolition Journal, written in the spring of 2016, about the bipartisan coalition to end mass incarceration and how their reforms reinscribe white supremacist logics and update control structures. Read online here: https://abolitionjournal.org/shifting-carceral-landscapes/

Authors’ Note: This article was written for Abolition Journal (abolitionjournal.org) in the spring of 2016, months before the election of Donald Trump. Under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and the rest of the Trump Regime, we’ve seen the carceral landscape shift in a dramatically regressive direction. This turn back towards embracing mass incarceration at the federal-level, the drug war, and prison construction presents the same challenges in terms of both economic stability and democratic legitimacy that led to the bipartisan coalition against mass incarceration in the first place. We predict that the 2016 election’s regressive turn will be short lived, and will in the long run, advance the shifts described in our article by allowing them to pose as wonderful alternatives to the Trump/Sessions regime.