“View of Fifth Block Corridor, with Gallery, two Stories high,” from Brief Sketch of the Origin and History of the State Penitentiary for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania (1872) | Richard Vaux / Public Domain
There are nearly two million people incarcerated in the United States. The idea of an end to the mass incarceration of those deemed criminal is perceived as far-fetched, naive, or unrealistic. But political scholar Anna Terwiel disagrees. In her new book, Prison Abolition for Realists (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), Terwiel insists that prison abolition is a commonsense endeavor. Pushing back against skepticism, Terwiel draws from decades of abolitionist theory to build an argument for prison abolition that’s based in the reality of how US criminal justice institutions actually function and the so-far limited efforts toward reform.
In a conversation with Madeline Trice, Terwiel discusses her experience working alongside imprisoned people, and her hopes for basic necessities such as air conditioning inside the prison system. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Madeline Trice: What drew you to abolitionist theory? Were there any particular theorists or other influences that led you to this subject?
Anna Terwiel: When I was in graduate school at Northwestern, I was introduced to the Prison and Neighborhood Arts and Education Project (PNAP), a collective of humanities scholars and artists in the Chicago area. They offer arts and humanities classes at Stateville Prison outside the city and bring the art and writing of incarcerated artists back to Chicago. I was working on my dissertation focused on hunger striking, which is a paradigmatic form of prison protest, so I was already thinking about prisons and confinement and the struggles of incarcerated people. Once I was connected to PNAP, a colleague and I cotaught two political theory courses at Stateville Prison. This gave me an insight into what the contemporary US prison system actually looks like in practice: the harm it does warehousing people for years and decades on end under troubling conditions. But it also put me in touch with this collective who were working together to try to undermine the prison system in a practical way, to support incarcerated people. That was a first lived connection to what I think of as an abolitionist practice.
Trice: Your book presents a broad and comprehensive array of arguments for prison abolitionism as a realist endeavor, but I wonder, when discussing abolitionism in everyday contexts, what are the specific points you often find yourself gravitating to as a way to disarm the skepticism that prison abolition is often met with?
Terwiel: I think it can sometimes be helpful to think about our own lives and our own experiences. All of us have most likely either committed or experienced a criminalizable event. Once we think about our own lives and experiences, we might also then be able to think of examples of intervention, prevention, conflict resolution, or efforts at repair that didn’t involve the police or prisons; such as neighbors who intervened to deescalate a conflict. Maybe we have less inspiring or very few examples, but it’s worth asking ourselves: In our own experiences, do we have any examples of alternatives to police and prisons? Grounding our thinking about harm and crime—and justice and safety—in our own experiences can be a way to disrupt the sense that criminals are dangerous others, maybe racialized others, and that safety comes from violent state intervention.
Trice: You use the term “agonistic abolition” throughout the book. How did this idea of contest and conflict become so central to your work in abolitionist theory?
Terwiel: I’m trained as a political theorist and have studied with Bonnie Honig, who is one of the key thinkers of agonistic political theory, which says that conflict and contestation are central and enduring features of political life, so politics are never over and done with. We ought to engage in political struggles to make the world more democratic and just, but we will never arrive at a point where that work is done. Instead, there’s this understanding that politics and political life are always going to have this element of conflict and contestation: that any struggle for democracy will be ongoing, that it also will face opposition, and that the challenge is to think and act strategically to advance democracy as best as possible.
I show in the book that what prison abolitionism means—how we should think about abolition, and how we should advance it—is an object of contestation. It’s not one unitary thing or project but a set of theories and political practices that have been developed over decades. Conflict and disagreement are permanent features because there are ongoing debates about what abolitionism means and how to advance it. You can’t abolish the prison system in one go; there’s an ongoing struggle at multiple scales and in particular situations and contexts, so what does it make the most tactical or strategic sense to fight for?
Trice: You propose that incarcerated people should have the right to comfort, using extreme temperatures in Texas prisons as the impetus for this emergent rights claim. How did you come to this specific issue as an entry point for this argument?
Terwiel: While I was teaching at Stateville Prison, one of the courses was late enough in the year that it was pretty hot and the education building was not air conditioned. In that particular moment, the heat seemed to be bearable, but it may not have been where the incarcerated people lived or during other times of the year. So I had some direct experience with it being hot in prison without air conditioning. In 2016, I learned about these lawsuits, specifically Keith Cole’s, who was one of the lead plaintiffs in this case in Texas, where they were objecting to the extremely high temperatures they were subjected to in the summer and demanding air conditioning. They described feeling like you’re trapped in an oven, you can’t move, and there’s this inescapable blanket of heat. You’re slowly being cooked alive. The class action lawsuit was arguing for the right to air conditioning because this heat could be life-threatening, as Cole himself and his coplaintiffs were folks with specific medical conditions that made them more sensitive to heat related illness and death. The opponents of their lawsuit were depicting air conditioning as a luxury that incarcerated people don’t deserve because they’re being punished, and punishment should involve physical discomfort like—
Trice: Like 130 degree temperatures?
Terwiel: Right! And what ended up happening was that lawsuit led to a partial victory where there’s now a two-tiered system in Texas called “cool beds,” where some people have protection from the extreme heat. There’s still ongoing activism to protect all incarcerated people from extreme heat, such as the Texas Prisons Community Advocates, who are currently waging a campaign called “85 to Stay Alive,” with 85 degrees Fahrenheit as the maximum allowable prison temperature. There’s also an initiative, the Toxic Prisons Map, that’s an online resource, and it shows you a map of all the carceral facilities in the United States, and it lists different environmental hazards that incarcerated people are exposed to in each facility, and they’ve started including extreme temperatures as one of the possible hazards.
I argue that extreme temperatures are completely unacceptable for anyone and that we need to disrupt this idea that justice is done through punishment that is the infliction of suffering on all or most of the punished population. I suggest that this right to comfort could both be language to think about the right to air conditioning in prisons, but that it could also help us think about what an abolitionist world might look like. What is it that we want? We want no prisons. We want no one to be cooked alive in extreme heat. We want a world in which we all have a right to be comfortable. So maybe incarcerated people have a right to also hug their children or their loved ones when they come to visit, as opposed to being behind plexiglass or being forced to talk on a video call. And outside of prisons, maybe we have a right to shade, a right to not be extremely hot in our globally warming world and a right to live in neighborhoods with tree cover, parks, and fountains where you can be comfortable and play and be well. So I use it more generally as a kind of device to spark the imagination and help us think about what it is that we currently do not have, are told we cannot have, that it would be unreasonable and crazy to ask for, but that actually we really might deserve and should demand.
Trice: What advice might you give on how to apply agonistic abolitionism into your everyday life?
Terwiel: Beware the carceral state. If you find yourself in a situation where police and prisons are presented as the thing that will make us safer or make society more just, try to interrupt that line of thought to make room for other ways of thinking about justice and safety. Generally, prison abolition is a political project to build a social movement that is capable of generating enough power to be able to change our collective circumstances, so getting involved in collective efforts toward economic justice, racial justice, and social justice is key. It’s not about people in isolation changing their minds, it’s about working together to push for different ways of imagining and realizing justice and democracy.
We’ve seen the power of the collective organizing around ICE and supporting immigrants from ICE raids. I find that a really inspiring example of collective action toward a different vision of justice. There’s also an ongoing vibrant Palestinian solidarity movement. There might be a bail fund that you can join to work together with others to raise funds to get people out of jail. The website transformharm.org also collects resources about restorative and transformative justice and community accountability. So get involved, beware of the carceral state, and know that we don’t have to get everything perfect. We can’t get everything right, but what matters is working with others toward a more just and democratic world.
