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33 J.L. & Soc. Pol'y 1 (2020)

handle is hein.journals/jlsp33 and id is 1 raw text is: Lee: Thinking Broadly: This Volume as a Guide for Abolitionists Thinking Broadly: This Volume as a Guide for Abolitionists ADAM LEE* On 15 March 2019, the Journal of Law and Social Policy (JLSP) held Detained: From Supporting Prisoners to Abolishing Prisons, a day-long symposium on prisoner support and prison abolition. Framed as a space for lawyers, law students, activists, organizers, and community members alike to come together and learn about prisons from one another, the event ran as a series of panels on a wide variety of topics from nine o'clock in the morning until past ten o'clock at night. A year and a half earlier, a government official gave a guest lecture at Osgoode Hall Law School about prison conditions. After discussing at length the horrors of solitary confinement and other harms created by prisons, a question came from a student: if prisons are sites of rampant human rights abuses, why privilege the existence of prisons at all by attempting to reform them as opposed to abolishing them? The official responded that society needs prisons in order to function. Prisons must be reformed and made more humane for the people inside them, the official concluded, but because society needs prisons, the line is drawn at ending them. With this response still in our minds, we-as student editors-were unsure how a conversation about abolition would be received. At the same time, the official's response proved to us that we needed to force a conversation about abolition at Osgoode and in legal education more broadly. We wanted to challenge the default paradigm espoused by many that the problem with prisons is that they execute their function poorly. To the contrary, the argument running through the symposium (and which runs through the articles presented in this volume) is that the carceral state functions exactly as it is intended. The violence in this system cannot be reformed away; it persists because it is designed to be so. The symposium had been planned primarily by a committee within the JLSP editorial team over the course of several months. In a pivotal moment during our very first meeting as an organizing team the September before, a question was raised: How big do we want this event to * Adam Lee is an LLM candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School and a former student editor with the Journal of Law and Social Policy in 2018-19 and 2019-20. Adam would like to thank Krisna Saravanamuttu, Adrian Smith, Janet Mosher, Amar Bhatia, and Caitlin Leach for their feedback and support on this introduction. The symposium and this volume would not have been possible without the contributions and support of many people and organizations alike. From planning and organizing to setting up placards and distributing programs, the symposium could not have happened without every single member of the 2018-19 JLSP editorial team, each of whom played a crucial role. The editorial team would like to thank our Co-Editors-in-Chief at the time of the symposium, Professors Janet Mosher and Amar Bhatia. Their enthusiastic support was much needed at a time when abolition felt like a controversial topic in law school. None of this would have been possible without their guidance, leadership, and genuine commitments to justice and to their students. Nor would it have been possible without generous funding from the Criminal Law Society at Osgoode, the Institute for Feminist Legal Studies, Osgoode Hall Law School, the Osgoode Hall Law Union, the Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights, Crime, and Security, and the York Centre for Public Law & Policy. We would also like to thank everybody who spoke at the symposium, and particularly those with lived experience of carcerality, for their generosity in sharing their irreplaceable expertise with all of us present. We will carry it forward.

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