Abolition or Reform? Navigating Muddy Water

I found myself in New York this week. Representing Impact Policy at the John Jay College for Criminal Justice. The conference was great and reaffirmed much of what we are championing at Impact, particularly around what lived expertise in policy design looks like. The impact of decolonising research serves as a tool for empowerment for our people and communities.

New York is one of the biggest, most notorious cities in the world when it comes to crime and justice, so to be there and be more than confident that what we are championing is really at the forefront of justice and policy was a significant experience.

While in Harlem this week, I picked up Abolition for the People, edited by Colin Kaepernick — a collection of 30 essays from abolitionist thinkers, activists, and organisers. Kaepernick, once an NFL quarterback silenced for kneeling during the anthem, is now a tech CEO and thought leader committed to dismantling oppressive systems that disproportionately impact Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities.

Kaepernick has always been a hero of mine because, like Ali, he sacrificed his prime and, in Colin’s case, his career for something he believed in. That integrity was something that always resonated with me, which was why Ali was my biggest hero as a kid as well. So with that I couldn’t help but buy this book, particularly as the street vendor selling it said all profit goes to this local slam poetry club, and I had only just performed the night earlier in Soho too.

The book ABOLITION is more than a critique of policing and incarceration—it’s a roadmap for radical imagination and practical transformation.

“Abolition is not about absence. It’s about presence—presence of life-affirming institutions, relationships, and structures that will replace the ones that currently harm and cage us.” Colin Kaepernick

That line shifted something for me. As someone who has worked in justice policy, I’ve often struggled with the concept of abolition. It felt too all-or-nothing. I used to think it meant immediately eliminating prisons and police. But abolition isn’t destruction—it’s redesign. It’s not just about tearing down but just as much about building up.

Mariame Kaba, one of the most powerful voices in the movement, writes in the same collection:

“Abolition is about creating the conditions where we don’t need prisons, police, or punishment to create safety and justice.”

That’s what stayed with me: abolition as a process, not a destination. It’s about reducing harm, redistributing power, and restoring care and restorative and community led justice, especially in communities historically overpoliced and under-resourced.

Angela Y. Davis takes this further:

“Abolition is not primarily a negative strategy. It’s about building new institutions.”

It reframes abolition as a generative act. One that asks, 'What could exist if we removed the punitive logic that dominates our systems? What could grow in its place?'

As a criminologist, I’ve long tried to hold the tension between reform and transformation. Justice reinvestment, for example, holds abolitionary promise in theory. But too often, without truly divesting from carceral institutions, those reinvestments become surface-level—band-aids on wounds needing deep stitching. It becomes clear that reinvesting alone doesn’t undo harm unless the structures causing it are actively dismantled.

We see this phenomenon in the data: over $1 million a year to incarcerate a single young person. Most are on remand. Many are there for non-violent crimes. Nearly all are trauma survivors. And yet, community care systems remain starved of resources, forcing police to become first responders to crises they were never trained to solve.

Am I an abolitionist or reformist? I don’t know if I subscribe to either, but what I do know for a fact is how much strength exists amongst our communities, and that with the investment coordination and agency to advocate, I could reimagine a better system where our communities lead first responses in many different situations. I think about the forced child removal space; I think about youth justice conferencing and restorative justice – there are many different examples of where we can co-design something better together.

And who knows, maybe along the way we begin to rebuild the conditions and start to realise that there are fewer aspects of the state that need to be involved so heavily in our children and our families.

Authored by Sam Alderton-Johnson for Impact Policy