Straying with the Trouble: Science fiction, utopia and the anti-carceral imagination

Prisons continue to dominate our collective social imagination of the best way to respond to social harm, despite the overwhelming evidence that they do not make society safer or enact justice. To support the urgent work of thinking beyond prisons, this article focuses on the anti-carceral imagination of activists and scholars involved in the movement for prison abolition. I discuss findings from Prison Break: Imagining Alternatives to Prison in the UK (2021–2022), an interdisciplinary research project which used creative writing workshops to support activists and scholars involved in prison abolition and transformative justice in the UK, to write short works of science fiction imagining more just futures. These were published in an open-access book: Abolition Science Fiction. The first part of this article discusses the project’s innovative methodological approach of collaborative fictioning, and its theoretical framework, both of which draw on poststructuralist feminist approaches, abolitionist scholarship, literary and utopian studies. I then discuss some of the project’s findings via an analysis of a sample of the stories which explore utopian temporalities, drawing both on our collective analysis within the workshops, and my own close reading. Through this, I offer insights into how the stories can improve our understanding of abolitionists’ anti-carceral imagination and help enact more just futures, arguing that fiction is an important space where activists reckon with the complexity of their concerns and hopes about the distant future, and hold them close as a distant presence in their daily lives.