Prison AbolitionBooks

Thenmozhi Soundararajan combines memoir, Dalit feminism, engaged Buddhism, and embodied practice to examine how caste injury enters bodies, communities, and transnational institutions.

Shon Faye places trans politics in Britain within healthcare, housing, labor, class, and punitive systems, making material life central to trans justice.

No More Police reframes safety by taking it out of punishment infrastructure and into care, survivor support, and social redesign, advancing abolitionist feminist and transformative justice frameworks.

This collaborative work traces abolition feminism through women-of-color, queer, anti-capitalist, internationalist movement histories.

Mariame Kaba’s essays and interviews connect abolitionist organizing with the collective work of building conditions for safety and freedom.

Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law show how electronic monitoring, house arrest, and mandated treatment can expand punishment beyond prison walls.

Liat Ben-Moshe connects deinstitutionalization with prison abolition, challenging the claim that closing institutions caused mass incarceration.

Danielle Sered explores responses to serious violence that center survivors’ needs, require accountability, and pursue repair beyond prison.

Emily L. Thuma reconstructs the anticarceral politics developed from the 1970s into the early 1980s by criminalized women and Black, queer, prisoner, and psychiatric-survivor organizers.

Andrea Ritchie documents police violence against Black women, Indigenous women, immigrant women, sex workers, and trans women whose experiences are often erased from public narratives.

Susan Burton’s lived account connects trauma, the drug war, repeated incarceration, and reentry, then turns recovery into care and political work led by formerly incarcerated women.

INCITE! centers women of color to connect interpersonal violence with policing, colonialism, militarism, and reproductive control.

Trans and queer accounts expose how policing and prisons enforce gender binaries, linking gender liberation with prison abolition.

Beth E. Richie examines violence against Black women and how racialized policing and punitive policy undermine their protection.

The authors trace how queer criminal stereotypes shape policing, courts, and prisons, turning sexuality and gender expression into suspicion.

Michelle Alexander argues that the War on Drugs and mass incarceration rebuild racial caste through formally colorblind law.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore traces California’s prison expansion through the political economy of surplus land, labor, capital, and state capacity.

Angela Y. Davis’s classic short book denaturalizes prisons as historical institutions and asks readers to imagine justice and safety beyond incarceration.