And… Utopia: Fiction, failure, and the anti-carceral imagination, Phil Crockett Thomas

Imprisonment is a contradictory ‘solution’ to the problem of social harm; consistently declared to be a policy failure, with prisons permanently ‘in crisis’, it nonetheless dominates and limits our social imagination of alternative responses to harm. Further, critical penal scholars, abolitionists, and activists have noted that the necessity of documenting and critiquing the harms of incarceration can act to limit their capacity for developing truly transformative alternative visions and practices of justice. Imprisonment is thus a successful failure, casting those who seek to imagine and enact alternatives to imprisonment as unrealistic utopians doomed only to propose something worse.

Drawing on Tom Moylan’s conception of the ‘critical utopia’ (Moylan, 1986), this presentation focuses on how prison abolitionists use fiction to create spaces of hope, respite, and resistance in their ongoing struggle for abolition. To do so, this paper reflects on findings from Prison Break (2021-22), an interdisciplinary research project that used creative writing workshops to support UK-based activists and scholars involved in prison abolition and transformative justice to create ‘social science fiction’ (Theall, 1975) to help imagine and enact more just futures. In this presentation, I will focus on the content and themes explored in the collection of short stories written by participants as part of the project (published as Abolition Science Fiction (2022)), discussing what they demonstrate about the contemporary anti-carceral imagination particularly in relation to temporality, social justice, failure, and the ‘fault-lines’ (Thaler, 2023) within utopia. I will also discuss the activist practice of collectively writing and sharing ‘visionary fiction’ (brown and Imarisha, 2015) that inspired the project, and the methodological approach I developed for collaboratively fictioning ‘critical utopias.’ Abolition Science Fiction (2022) is available open access at www.abolitionscifi.org for anyone who wishes to read the stories beforehand.

Biography

Phil Crockett Thomas writes fiction and poetry, and teaches sociology and criminology at the University of Stirling. Her research focuses on social harm, justice, and creative and collaborative methods. Her fiction has appeared in Granta and on BBC Radio 4. She is the editor of Abolition Science Fiction (2022), and of The Moon Spins the Dead Prison (2022) with Thomas Abercromby and Rosie Roberts. Her website is https://crowdedmouth.com/