Prison Abolition, Transformative Justice, and the Work of Radical Care

Prison abolitionist proponents in the United States have turned their attention to responses to social problems such as food insecurity, housing insecurity, and interpersonal violence through mutual aid networks and community-based interventions. In recent years, these have been defined as mutual aid and radical care. As a critique of neoliberal social welfare practices and policies in the United States and condemnation of the rapidly escalating use of criminal legal interventions to address an expanding scope of social problems, abolitionists have reclaimed “community-based” responses as more effective and liberatory than those offered by the state. Transformative justice as a practice developing non-state collective responses to domestic and sexual violence has emerged as an explicitly anti-carceral frame and practice for violence intervention. Often dominated by female or femme labor, interventions to violence, however, have not been overtly defined as forms of care. This paper looks at the growing theoretical and empirical literature on care to discern the ways in the transformative justice may be included in and can even shape the growing discourse on radical care as a productive framework for envisioning more human-centered and sustainable approaches to social reproduction.