Toward an Abolitionist Practice of Psychology: Reimagining Psychology’s Relationship With the Criminal Justice System

Abstract

The social justice uprisings that have stemmed from several recent highly publicized murders of Black people by police have shed increasing light on the systems of oppression, inequity, and white supremacy that have been the backbone of the United States’ policing and criminal justice systems since their inception. The American Psychological Association, along with many professional organizations across the subfields of psychology, has released its statement outlining how psychology must contribute to the eradication of systemic racism and white supremacy. In this article, we address the need for psychology and its subfields to acknowledge our complicity in certain systems of oppression, such as our ties to law enforcement and the police, our support of mental health reforms that merely increase the scope of a punitive criminal justice system, and our complicity in the harm done by our current immigration policies. We argue that the best way, in fact the only way, for the profession to move toward an antiracist psychological practice is to embrace an abolitionist framework so that we may reimagine our relationships with historically oppressive institutions and rebuild our clinical practices to promote life-affirming interventions and liberation for individuals and communities.