The reform-versus-abolition divide has come to define the justice field. But we may have misunderstood what the argument is actually about
There is a fault line running through the American justice field that we usually describe in two words:
reform or abolition.
The disagreement is real.
Reformists believe the institutions we have can be transformed. Courts can become fairer. Progressive leaders can change the system from within them. Policing can be constrained and redesigned. The criminal legal system we inherited can, through sufficient change, become something capable of delivering justice.
Abolitionists start somewhere else.
Their argument is that a system built through slavery, Jim Crow, racialized social control, punishment and economic exploitation cannot simply be remodeled into justice. At some point, renovation becomes the wrong metaphor. The foundation itself is the problem.
So the work is not merely to improve the existing structures. It is to dismantle them while building the institutions to replace them.
That is not a minor disagreement. But it may be keeping us from asking the more important question:
Where, exactly, are we trying to go? What would a just society require?
People should be safe.
People who cause harm should be accountable for it.
People who are harmed should have meaningful paths toward repair.
A person’s humanity should not disappear because they have done something wrong.
Race, wealth and geography should not determine how the state treats you.
Communities should have the resources necessary to prevent harm before it happens.
Children should not inherit the consequences of their parents’ contact with the justice system.
People should be capable of returning from wrongdoing.
There would undoubtedly be arguments about that list.
Good.
Have them.
Make the list longer. Challenge its assumptions. Bring in victims. Bring in formerly incarcerated people. Bring in prosecutors and abolitionists and organizers and judges and scholars and people who have never thought about criminal justice until it entered their lives.
But keep asking the question: What are we trying to build?
Because once the destination becomes clearer, something interesting happens to the reform-versus-abolition divide. It doesn’t disappear. It becomes more useful.
The reformer can say: I believe we can get there by transforming the institutions we have.
The abolitionist can say: I don’t believe those institutions can ever take us there. We have to dismantle them and build something different.
Fine. Now we have an argument about the road. And arguments about roads can be tested.
Does this reform move us closer to the destination or farther away?
Does it reduce harm or merely make an unjust institution more tolerable?
Does dismantling this institution create something better in its place?
Does the alternative actually deliver safety?
Who benefits?
Who remains vulnerable?
What does this decision make possible ten years from now?
Those questions are much harder than choosing a camp.
They are also much more productive.
The destination has been strangely underdeveloped
The American justice field has spent decades developing extraordinary expertise around what is wrong.
We know an enormous amount about racial disparities, whether it be sentencing laws, conditions of confinement, policing, reentry, etc. And we have organizations devoted to each of them, researchers studying them, advocates fighting them and policy specialists designing interventions around them.
What we have built much less infrastructure around is the other side of the sentence:
Instead of this, what?
Not at the level of a slogan. At the level of a society.
What institutions would exist?
What would accountability mean?
What would happen after someone committed terrible harm?
What responsibilities would belong to communities?
Where would state power still exist?
Where shouldn’t it?
What would we invest in upstream?
What would success look like twenty-five years from now?
That is not principally a communications problem. It is an intellectual and institutional one. Organizations are fighting related battles but explaining the future differently, often forced to communicate inside frames created by the very systems they are trying to change.
It is difficult to tell a shared story about a future the field has not had enough infrastructure to collectively imagine.
So perhaps the first job isn’t better messaging. Perhaps it is building somewhere capable of doing the imagining. Researching the history. Looking outside the United States. Bringing competing traditions into serious conversation. Studying what communities actually value. Turning abstractions like safety, accountability, dignity and repair into institutional questions. Testing ideas in practice. And continually asking whether the things we are building now move us toward the future we claim to want.
The goal would not be to settle the abolition-versus-reform argument.
I don’t think it needs to be settled.
A field can sustain multiple theories of change.
What it cannot do indefinitely is pursue multiple roads without being able to describe where those roads are supposed to lead.
We don’t need everyone to agree on the road.
We need to become much clearer about the destination.
At COJA, we help mission-driven organizations move beyond explaining what’s broken and get clearer about what they’re building toward. If your work is strong but the larger story is harder to articulate, we should talk. Book a call with us to learn more.
