Changing the Carceral Course: How the Carceral Shift in Human Rights Met the Good Friday Agreement and Northern Ireland’s Abolitionist Imperative

Northern Ireland faces a growing police use of force, increased imprisonment of individuals suffering from mental ill-health, the lowest minimum age of criminality in Europe, and high reports of abuse against marginalised communities. Despite a decades-long movement for carceral abolition in the United Kingdom and a robust Northern Irish civil society human rights apparatus, reliance on police and prison as means of social control remains robust in Northern Ireland, as both the immediate custody and remand populations in prison have climbed to the highest they have been in almost 9 years. Why have carceral systems, such as police and prisons, persisted in Northern Ireland? This article argues that the carceral ‘turn’ in international human rights and historic marginalisation of economic, social, and cultural rights were incorporated into the Good Friday Agreement with the effect of anchoring reliance on carceral responses to social harms. This has continued well into the twenty-first century, despite growing criticism of such responses at the local and international levels. In response, this article suggests strengthening the alternatives to criminal legal systems that are already being pursued by carceral abolitionist and anti-carceral human rights advocacy organisations in Northern Ireland.