The role of reform in revolutionary struggles: advancing imaginable, semi-imaginable, and unimaginable reforms to work towards prison abolition
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores how different types of reform can be used to progress short-, medium-, and long-term abolitionist goals. I begin by examining liberal reform – or reformist reforms – and how they often end up reifying imprisonment. I juxtapose liberal reform to the proposed abolitionist reform typology, consisting of imaginable, semi-imaginable, and unimaginable reforms. Drawing on the community organizing of the Criminalization and Punishment Education Project (CPEP) – a volunteer-based activist group working in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada – I demonstrate how different types of reforms can be pursued by abolitionists simultaneously: imaginable reforms that reduce the harms and use of carceral spaces and practices; semi-imaginable reforms that work to divert and decarcerate people from custody; and unimaginable reforms that replace oppressive structures with caring and compassionate ones. I also explore the pitfalls, possibilities, and tensions within each approach to reform within revolutionary struggles. This paper seeks to cover the possibilities and pitfalls of different types of reform and envision how they can be used in concert to progress prison abolition.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it