Is There a Future Without Incarceration? Abolitionist Art Shows Us One.

Ibanged my head on the bars. It was 2:00 am. I was in a Brooklyn jail. Under the fluorescent light, other men slept on the bench. Each one of us was arrested for so-called quality-of-life crimes like drinking a beer on a stoop, blasting a radio, or being unhoused. I shook the bars again. The walls closed in on me. I had a hard time breathing.

When I got out the next day, neighbors told me their lockdown stories. In many cities around the U.S., going to jail is a rite of passage. So many generations of us, men of color, have cycled through prison. It shaped how we see our future. I didn’t want that to be my future, or my son’s future.

I spent a short time in jail, but many of my neighbors spent years behind bars. Every day, more and more people are being arrested. Now the Trump administration is expanding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) jails, and more are threatened with imprisonment as the administration labels left-wing groups and individuals “domestic terrorists.” Add to this the use of artificial intelligence to enhance state and corporate surveillance, and we face a future of the U.S. becoming a totalitarian carceral state.

Is a world without prisons possible?

It is, but it begins in the artistic imagination. We see, listen and read art, but rarely learn about art that challenges the powerful. Yet, overlooked by critics is prison abolitionist art. It literally spans centuries. You see it in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave from 380 B.C. and in the 2025 Afrofuturist film Space to Breathe. Prison abolitionist art has three major themes: using prison as a metaphor for society; showing how the mind escapes metaphorical prisons; and, finally, imagining a world without mass incarceration.

A strong, popular social movement can fight it. We need a vision to guide it. Prison abolitionist art shows the way.

A Nation Behind Bars

“Land of the free and home of the brave,” the crowd sings. When I go to sports events, people with a beer buzzed from beer sing the national anthem. When the last note is sung, the stadium erupts in cheers. Yet I don’t join. Underneath the patriotism is a bleaker reality: for many, the U.S. is a prison.

The U.S. is the independent democracy with the highest incarceration rate in the world. The U.S. has roughly 342 million people; according to the Prison Policy Initiative, 2 million are jailed at any given time. When you read that number, it is important to know two things. First, mass incarceration is a pyramid of federal and state prisons as well as immigration jails. Add local and juvenile jails. Add CIA foreign black sites and overseas ICE jails. The U.S. prison system is like one of those face-hugger parasites from the movie Alien, feeding off the host. Each year, 10.5 million people are arrested, or one every three seconds.

Second is that prison is larger than the physical cell. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, nearly 650,000 people are released from prison each year, but “two-thirds will likely be arrested in three years.” Why this revolving door? Well, of the 19 million people convicted of a felony and the 79 million who have a criminal record, re-entry into life is a gauntlet of obstacles. The Sentencing Project paints a vivid portrait of post-prison life: Very few rehabilitation programs. Minimal financial resources. Employees often don’t hire people convicted of felonies. Landlords discriminate. Some people convicted of felonies can’t vote or get public housing. They face stigma and isolation. They become an invisible underclass.

Put two and two together and what becomes clear is that mass incarceration is a factory that transforms millions of people a day into permanent prisoners. Even when it spits them out and they are technically “freed,” they face poverty, depression, and stigma that drives them right back into jail — which, by the way, costs $445 billion a year. Whole generations of people are destroyed so money can be made.

Many of us feel rage at being jailed. The anger is stuffed down until you take your child to a playground in a bright afternoon. You can’t help but worry which one will be caught by that system. Who is going to get jailed later in life? You hate that you even have to think about it. But you do. And you hold your child even tighter.

Prison Society

Is there a way out? Yes, but the first step is using prison as a kind of prism to analyze society itself. Incarcerated artists created, and continue to create, a canon spanning literature, cinema, and music that does exactly that. Through their art you grasp “jail” as something more than a physical building; it can be the structure of a whole society.

You probably were taught in school about “the canon,” or works of art that one must know to be considered “literate.” Maybe they were of exceptional quality. Maybe they helped define a people. Think Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” or Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. The prison art canon is work by incarcerated artists who explore civil corruption and self-transformation. Prison literature specifically began as fragmentary scenes in other books like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in his book The Republic. The canon really gets going in The Consolation of Philosophy, written in 523 A.D. by the philosopher Boethius, the original prisoner-author, while he was unjustly jailed before his execution in 524. Others followed, like Thomas Usk in the 14^th century, who wrote The Testament of Love, or George Ashby’s A Prisoner’s Reflections, written in the 15^th century. The European tradition of prison literature hit a high point in the 18^th century with Marquis de Sade’s sexual mysticism composed in jail.

In the U.S., the tradition of European prison literature morphed into prison abolitionist art. It went beyond merely describing jail or civic corruption to placing self-transformation as the first step to social change. It imagined a world beyond prisons. The first book in this genre was Frederick Douglass’s 1845 slave narrative. No, he was not held in a modern jail, but he analyzed slavery as an open-air prison. Slavery, like modern prison, held people captive. It stripped one’s identity. It used violence to force obedience. It taught enslaved people to obey rules to gain easier work. After Douglass escaped and became a famous orator, he was in Washington, D.C., surrounded by powerful politicians. He bitterly realized free whites acted like slaves. They faced poverty and punishment. They lied to get favors. Society was just an open-air plantation. He wrote, “The same traits of character seen in slaves, are seen in the slaves of political parties.”

More than a century after Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail” again used the prison metaphor to describe life under racial segregation. He wrote of the open-air prison of segregation, “when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next.” A supposedly free society was like a large jail.

You see the prison metaphor 136 years after Douglass in the 1981 film My Dinner with Andre, in which the protagonist Andre says to his friend Wallace that modern life is “…the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing that they’ve built — they’ve built their own prison.”

The prison metaphor, or seeing the U.S. through the prism of the prison, is a common theme. You see it in films like the Matrix and Hunger Games trilogies. You see it in books like George Jackson’s 1972 Blood in My Eye or Assata Shakur’s self-titled 1987 autobiography, Assata. You see it in new works like Jean Trounstine’s 2026 novel, Sounds Like Trouble to Me, in which a former prison guard murders her abusive husband. When she is jailed, she faces the same brutality that she once dished out.

The Illusion of Freedom

Within prison abolitionist art is a shocking contradiction: Freedom is found in confinement. The isolated mind is cut from attachments. In that isolation, one sees through illusions like consumerism, job status, or patriotism. In Boethius’s The Consolations of Philosophy, he writes, “…human souls are free when they persevere in the contemplation of the mind of God, less free when they descend to the corporeal, and even less free when they are entirely imprisoned in earthly flesh and blood.” The scene of a prisoner-artist freed from illusion appears through centuries. Nearly 1,500 years later, Malcolm X described in his autobiography the power of learning in prison: “I knew right there in prison that reading had changed my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside of me some dormant desire to mentally alive.”

In prison abolitionist art, two essential themes appear. The first is to use prison as a lens to analyze society. The second, to show how isolation can be subverted as tool of oppression and used to free the mind from the illusions of freedom that exist beyond bars. What sets the genre of prison abolition art apart from prison art is that the former imagines a future free of incarceration.

Until Everybody’s Free

The world is at the crossroads. On one side, we see signs of mass AI-driven unemployment, coupled with an AI-driven police state. It is a dystopic future: Millions of people warehoused in prisons, guarded by robots. On the other hand, we hear calls for universal health care, moratoriums on data centers, care instead of cops, and as one book title says, a Fully Automated Luxury Communism.

What prison abolitionist art does is provide a vision of a future with no jails. Maybe that’s why science fiction takes the lead. Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel The Dispossessed portrays two planets, one capitalist, named Urras, the other an anarchist commune, named Anarres. Its citizens, called the Annaresti, do not use prisons but severe social shaming. Another sci-fi franchise that imagines a future with very little use for prisons is “Star Trek.” Aside from a few villains, you don’t see anyone in jail. In a classic “Next Generation” episode, Picard tells a man who was frozen that in the 24^th century, there is no scarcity. He said, “A lot has changed in the past 300 years. We are no longer obsessed with accumulation of things. We eliminated hunger, want and the need for possessions. We’ve grown out of our infancy.”

Prison abolitionist art creates a future to briefly live in, and from that place, turn and look at our present. We can ask questions, again. We can hope, too. Recently, I had friends over to binge-watch shows with a prison abolitionist theme. Of course, “Star Trek” episodes were played, but we ended with Space to Breathe, directed by Juicebox P. Burton. It is a sci-fi short film that is campy, Afrofuturist, yet sincere. It portrayed three Black youth in a future with no prisons, looking back at the revolution that ended in Abolition Day, the day when the dismantling of mass incarceration began in this fictional history. Burton told Truthout, “We made this film as a gift to organizers, to help them imagine a different world. To show that their hard work today is building a more, free future.” The movie is showing at Reclamation Day in Brooklyn on June 20^th, and activists already are talking about it.

I was lucky to have a link to preview it and showed it to a few friends. As we watched, we were deeply moved by the use of real people, talking in a circle about restorative justice, and footage of former prisoners released and hugged by family. One elder with thick glasses said, “Take the money that’s going for jail and put it into Black community for services like health care and jobs, so people can live.”

Space to Breathe did not have the big budget of “Star Trek.” But seeing Black people in the next century, living in a world we could only dream of, deeply touched us. After it ended, we sat imagining who our children’s children could be. They were radiant. They were free. The room was quiet — so quiet that for a moment, you could hear the future.