Imagination is our most powerful tool. How else does a child keep themself entertained for hours on end with just a cardboard box? A living room transforms into outer space, a sibling becomes an alien, and pyjamas are a space suit. As children our imaginations were capable of changing our world, and as grown-ups, our imaginations still hold that power.
For me, prison abolition is firmly a project of the imagination – but it is no unattainable utopia, it is a reimagined way of being in the world that begins with a reimagined notion of justice. In Angela Davis’s seminal book Are Prisons Obsolete? she writes, “the prison is considered an inevitable and permanent feature of our social lives”. It is something we take for granted, that “has become so much a part of our lives that it requires a great feat of the imagination to envision life beyond [it].”
She is right. But that imagining must be done.