The Road to Abolition

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In 2027, the doors of the largest state-funded infrastructure project in Indiana’s history will open. Already a winner of a “green” award for design sustainability, this public facility in the state’s northeastern corner includes 18,000 square feet of classroom space.

But this is not a community center or a free public college — it is the new 4,200-bed Northwest Indiana Correctional Facility for men.

In the words of the Indiana Public Defender Council, “policy choices, not crime rates” led to this prison’s construction, which promised to replace and consolidate the region’s decaying prisons. Yet in 2025 the state announced one of these ancient prisons will now stay open to incarcerate people abducted in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids.

The push to replace or rebuild aging prisons is not confined to Republican-majority states. In neighboring Democratic Illinois, in 2024 the state debuted a plan to demolish Stateville and Logan prisons, due to their “complete degradation” and “inoperability.” By 2026, the state confirmed two “facilities” with a combined capacity of 3,000 will be built on the footprint of Stateville. A state press release touts the plan’s “rehabilitative and gender-responsive spaces with housing, education, programming, medical and mental health, dietary, and recreational areas to support the successful re-entry of individuals into their communities.”

New prison projects underway across the U.S. champion reforms that appear progressive: “trauma-informed” (New Jersey); a “wellness center” (Pennsylvania); a “model” for rehabilitation (South Dakota).

Bipartisan Reforms Often Expand Prisons and Police. We Need Abolition Instead.

Prisons are aging. But in Illinois, where I live and teach the history of incarceration in my university classes, two realties are undeniable.

With 12,000 empty beds, truth in sentencing laws that ensure people serve their full sentences, and no parole or mechanism for release for people serving time (except the Hail Mary of a clemency petition or compassionate release for dying people), Illinois cannot build its way out of the problem of aging prisoners and prisons.

Any look at prison history reveals a pattern. From the penitentiary to today’s eco-conscious rebuilds, each reform justifies and usually expands carceral budgets, logics, and footprints: If they build it, they fill it. Every generation argues their experts’ reforms will ensure prisons are more therapeutic, safer, or scientific. But the end is always the same: “more prisons always lead to even more prisons,” as the scholar and organizer Angela Davis stated in a 1998 interview.

The Trap of “Progressive” Prison Reforms

The very prisons that today’s new construction projects aim to replace, with the promise to improve on their predecessors, were in their own time lauded as exemplars.

At Oakdale Reformatory for Women’s dedication ceremony on November 19, 1931, praise circulated freely: Illinois Gov. Louis Emmerson hailed the prison as “another milestone in the work of prison building and penal administration.” The director of prisons described Oakdale as a “a living monument to the women of Illinois,” while the Chicago Daily Tribune (now the Chicago Tribune) noted “no drab prison garb,” “no musty odor,” and heralded this “modern,” “scientific........

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