What about the victims? Addressing the lost voices of prison industrial complexes and the movement to abolish them

Abstract

Prison abolition is an imaginative and psycho-social ideology, an emerging social movement with traceable historical roots and promising futures. It retains its fluidity as it unfolds, responding to the ebbs and flows of contemporary societies in their pursuit of justice. One of the most difficult questions that abolitionists grapple with is what to do about the victims of violent crime, how abolition can responsibly and realistically account for the most dangerous and violating members of our societies. This thesis engages with this subject by navigating the rights afforded to victims within global criminal justice systems, observing if and how those rights align with victims’ interests as dynamic, complicated, inherently uncodified individuals. Further, it explores if those interests are compatible with criminal justice in the first place, or if they contrast with the very nature of such systems.