Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how a prison abolitionist campaign navigates the immediate goal of shutting down a pre-trial detention facility by engaging in a politics of (dis)inheritance, articulating the continuities and ruptures from antecedent struggles to envision a radical abolitionist future.

Paper long abstract:

"Close the Workhouse" is a grassroots campaign based in St. Louis, Missouri, which has as its stated goal the closure of a notorious jail referred to as "The Workhouse", which primarily detains inmates awaiting trial and unable to pay bail. Based on recent fieldwork in the St. Louis Metropolitan Area, Missouri, this paper will examine the ways in which actors working with the campaign mobilize the rhetoric of (prison) abolition; how the struggle for an abolitionist society is formulated as part of an abolitionist tradition with its antecedent agendas - abolition of slavery, de-segregation, and de-carceration, and is so doing; how they re-signify previously canonized narratives and figures from and since the Civil Rights era, effectively engaging in a politics of (dis-)inheritance toward the radical present and envisioned futures. Specifically, the paper explores how the continuities in forms of oppression - from the Slavery Era through the Jim Crow era to the "Age of Mass Incarceration" (Alexander 2016) are transcribed for a contemporary manifesto of the abolitionist agenda, as well as how the ruptures therein are articulated for the immediate spatial and temporal present - a present which appears to place concrete limits on the possibilities of the horizon of democratic politics (Mouffe 2000).