Strategizing for Abolition: A Bionian Account of Strategic Debates within Radical Alternatives to Prison

Founded in 1970, Radical Alternatives to Prison (RAP) represented the most militant wing of Britain’s penal reform movement, calling for the abolition of prisons, refusing ‘humanitarian’ impulses, and remaining sceptical of other organisations in the field. But despite its dogmatic politics, RAP found itself repeatedly stuck before three strategic dilemmas: 1) How to balance concern for prisoners’ wellbeing with the desire not to ‘prettify’ a fundamentally unjust institution? 2) Whether they could develop genuine alternatives to prison that didn’t just extend carceral logics beyond the prison walls? 3) Whether RAP should concentrate on delivering practical support or on making theoretical interventions?

By examining two decades of debate and strategizing within RAP, this paper will make three contributions to the study of social movement strategy. First, it will help to excavate the story of British prison abolition in a field dominated by North American histories and frameworks (Ruggiero 2010, Ryan & Ward 2014). Second, these strategic dilemmas are not unique to RAP but are rather three versions of the much more general tension between reform and revolution (Jasper 2004). Finally, in most approaches to the study of social movement strategy – from resource mobilisation theory (Oberschall 1973) and the structuralist accounts of the 1970s and 1980s (Gamson 1975, McAdam 1982) to more recent interest in agency and culture (Ganz 2000, Doherty & Hayes 2012, Rossi 2017) - strategy emerges either out of external structures, or out of a black box of purposive reasoning. In neither case is there any attempt to directly address the question of how groups think. As a partial redress, this paper will therefore borrow from Wilfred Bion’s (1961) psychoanalytic theory of group dynamics to illuminate twenty years of strategic debates within RAP.