None of that was evident in Lancaster's article, however. He engages neither the breadth of theorizing of abolition (works by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Beth Richie, Erica Meiners, Dean Spade, Liat Ben Moshe, Eric Stanley, among many others) nor, more importantly, the work of abolitionist organizations (BYP 100, Critical Resistance, Incite!, Survived and Punished, among many others). Lancaster describes abolitionists as divorced from reality. Yet even a cursory review of actually existing abolitionism reveals how wrong this view is.
His suggestion that abolition is not an advisable goal since it ”shows little sign of winning over the wider public" misunderstands how social change occurs. Such an argument could easily have been mobilized (and was mobilized) to undermine the abolitionist movement in 1835; the women's suffrage movement in 1912; the fights for industrial unionism in 1929; the civil rights movement in 1953; and the presidential prospects for Bernie Sanders in 2014, to name but a few examples.
History provides too many instances where our hubristic expectations of what is possible in a given temporal horizon are chastened. Most abolitionists, in our experience, would subscribe to Nelson Mandela's adage that ”it only seems impossible until it is done."
If anything, prospects for developing mass consciousness about prison abolition are growing. In 1998, when the prison industrial complex — the linked relations of surveillance, policing, and imprisonment — showed little sign of abating, a collective of organizers and scholars called for a one-time conference to discuss the problem of prisons. Expecting a few hundred people, they were surprised to find several thousand attend a conference framed around abolishing the prison industrial complex. Since then, Critical Resistance has become a national chapter-based organization connected to a number of grassroots campaigns. Two years later, thousands gathered at Incite! Women of Color Against Violence's convening in Santa Cruz to build on some of what had been discussed in 1998 and to insert the dimension of racialized gender violence into the conversation.
