Editors' Introduction.

• Author: Coyle, Michael J.

THE PRESENT ISSUE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE CONSTITUTES THE THIRD OF three issues on the topic of penal abolition, collected by us in an effort to bring a sense of the history and contemporary character of penal abolition research to readers both familiar with such work and new to it. The focus of this issue is "Penal Abolition: Challenging Boundaries," and it is preceded by another two issues, themed on "Penal Abolition and the State: Colonial, Racial and Gender Violences" (Contemporary Justice Review 2017) and "Penal Abolition Praxis" (Critical Criminology 2018).

As the editors of the three volumes, we see our work as curatorial rather than prescriptive. We want to provide an intellectually capacious space for diverse epistemological, methodological, and disciplinary approaches to abolition. Taken together, the three issues contribute significantly to the abolitionist project through the cutting-edge work of the authors featured within them. Articles across the three issues problematize common-sense discourses on the Left that unwittingly work against abolition; delineate what abolition could look like for particular classes of prisoners, including youth, people with mental illness, asylum seekers, and those convicted of sex offenses; explicate the relationships between the carceral state and abolition with racial capitalism, settler colonialism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy; study and analyze abolitionist pedagogy; and consider abolition democracy at various scales of the carceral state's expression, including in places where it has heretofore been understudied.

Rose Braz, visionary abolitionist and cofounder of Critical Resistance, has argued that "abolition defines both the goal we seek and the way we do our work today" (Bennett 2008). For her, as for many of us, abolition is both the horizon toward which we work and a framework within which steps toward that horizon can be taken or discarded as expansionist reforms. When understood as such, we can begin to appreciate that abolitionist work is, in fact, occurring all around us. A cursory glance around academic, activist, and journalistic outlets for research reveals debates about and endorsements of abolition in major periodicals on the Left (Berger et al. 2017, Bernish 2016, Lancaster 2017, Washington 2018), academic conferences organized around abolition or else hosting significant sessions devoted to it (Society for the Study of Social Problems 2018, American Studies Association, American Society of Criminology), and organizations like the Black Youth Project 100, the Movement for Black Lives, We Charge Genocide, and others, whose work for reparations, Black freedom, and life itself is grounded in abolitionist theory and practice. This prevalence reveals that the foundational work of abolitionist scholars and activists to outline what the prison industrial complex is, and what a world without it might look like (e.g., Critical Resistance) (Davis 2003, Davis & Rodriguez 2000, Gilmore 2007), has circulated and swelled, and is perhaps...