RUNNING HEADER: AFFECTING ABOLITION: ANIMATING RESISTANCE TO

PUNITIVE









Affecting Abolition: Animating Resistance to Punitive Desires
Will DeWayne Leone
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
SOCW 451 (Kate Sheridan)
AFFECTING ABOLITION: ANIMATING RESISTANCE TO PUNITIVE
Affecting Abolition: Animating Resistance to Punitive Desires
Punitive Desires and Abolitionist Longings
What have been the effects of desiring punishment as a gauge of inclusion and protection
in the contemporary neoliberal U.S.? To respond to this question, I work closely with Sarah
Lambles (2014, p. 151-171)
1
analysis of queer investments in punishment to pursue three
threads of inquiry: (1) what are resonant concepts in the emergent research areas of queer affect
studies and trans*/queer prison studies; (2) how this research offers insight into contemporary
political moments; and (3) why social work must meaningfully engage this research as a
profession to demonstrate its commitment to social justice.
Punitive Desires
In naming queer investments of punishment, Lamble offers a way of thinking through the
affective and material aspects of well-funded LGBT organizations promotion of hate crime
sentencing extensions within the US and UK, particular as seen in the Matthew Shepard and
James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009. Tacked on to and passed with the 2010
National Defense Authorization Act, the largest military defense expenditure bill in US history

which funded $130 billion of the allotted $680 billion to the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq the Hate Crimes Prevention Act exclusively focused on expanding state-level
prosecutorial resources and did nothing to address the (systemic) conditions within which hate-
motivated violence takes place. As Lamble remarks, this legislation constitutes breath-taking
contradictions of political freedoms that are contingent on violence both laid bare and rendered
normal, compatible and commonsensical (p. 155); the US states claim to defend U.S. LGBT
people is made contingent not only on its imperialist violence in the Middle East, but also
AFFECTING ABOLITION: ANIMATING RESISTANCE TO PUNITIVE
through enhancement of the neoliberal carceral state
2
and its anti-black, anti-latin@, and
increasingly anti-Muslim racism
3
(p. 158).
In saying that this and other recent moments in legal culture and mainstream
4
LGBT
organizing manifest a growing desire for punitive politics that stands in stark opposition to the
long history of LGBT decarceration politics (p. 151, 169), Lamble emphasizes the affective
economies of punishment in the US. They
5
articulate these affective economies as spatially and
temporally specific social mechanisms that orient and intensify feelings that support retributive
criminalization, the states harm of those who do illegal acts, and socioeconomic abandonment,
the shift from welfare-as-entitlement logic to welfare-as-privilege logic
6
under neoliberal
capitalism (p. 152). Moreover, these affective economies of punishment range from international
levels for instance, retaliatory military interventions and multinational prison growth
7
to the
domestic, as in emotional abuse in romantic relationships (p. 152). Crucial to the current queer
investments in affective economies of punishment is the myth that the criminal justice system
punishes those that deserve it, and that imprisonment is about safety, justice and protection for
all, and not about warehousing, caging, and punishing particular targeted populations (p. 155).
As Che Gossett (2014), Sarah Lamble (2011), and Julia Sudbury
8
(2004) all make clear, these
particular targeted populations are people of color, especially poor trans* and queer people of
color, who have long fought back collectively against the racist, homophobic, and transphobic
violence of the neoliberal carceral state and continue to do so
9
.
Abolitionist Longings
Given the scope and scale of punitive desires in the US, it comes as little surprise that
demands for abolition have taken such a wide variety of forms. Lamble concludes their text by
citing current activist work that is making concrete steps towards a queer politics of punitive
AFFECTING ABOLITION: ANIMATING RESISTANCE TO PUNITIVE
disinvestment and decarceration (p. 165). Sudbury (2004), a co-founder of Incite! Women,
Gender Non-Conforming, and Trans people of Color does not engage queer studies, but instead
offers a nuanced political economy analysis of the US and international prison systems within a
context of US imperialism as seen in the Middle East the War on Terror and in the Global
South the War on Drugs. Moreover, Sudbury argues: Radical prison abolitionists, especially
grass-roots activists of color, have a great deal to add to the global movement against
imperialism and neoliberal capital (28). While Lambles analysis does not foreclose this
possibility of international coalitions, they also do not evoke it.
Animating James Baldwins prison abolitionist writing in a context of black radical,
queer and/or trans left and AIDS activist political horizons (p. 45-46), Che Gossett carefully
archives the messy overlaps in these activist histories from the Jim Crow era through the present
to provide a detailed analysis of how state violence has shored up systemic homophobia,
transphobia, and anti-blackness. Whereas Lamble emphasizes the context, deployments, and
costs of queer punitive desires and Sudbury focuses on the profitable penal warehousing (p. 22)
of immobilized and disenfranchised people of color within the US and at its sites of imperial
military interventions, Gossett foregrounds the intimacies between the US prison-industrial
complex and the US HIV epidemic (p. 31) while centering black lives, theory, and activism.
Although all of these texts close with calls to organize, imagine and ultimately, to live
otherwise (Gossett, 2014, p. 46), thus orienting
10
themselves towards a world devoid of punitive
desire, Dean Spade, Morgan Bassichis, and Alexander Lee (2011) yearn for more than the mere
absence of carceral practices. Beyond reaching for a world in which prisons are socially
nonsensical, they insist on building up things that nourish such as accessible and affirming
healthcare, safe and quality education, meaningful and secure employment, loving and healing
AFFECTING ABOLITION: ANIMATING RESISTANCE TO PUNITIVE
relationships, and being our full and whole selves (p. 35-37). This future-oriented manifesto is
grounded in their immediately preceding analysis that shows how all of these things are routinely
denied and violated by the neoliberal carceral state.
In discussing these affective economies of punitive desires and abolitionist longings
and in sketching a mere glimpse of the complicated geographies of both how have we arrived
at mechanisms by which some lives, bodies, and histories are marked as worthy of social and
state protection and resources while others are left die, neglected, abandoned, abused, or even
killed? I turn first to biopolitics and biopower as a way of complicating a common social work
practice analytic, the Bioecological model (Bronfenbrenner, 1999), before invoking Achilles
Mbembes (2003) superb critique of Foucaults biopolitics through the notion of necropolitics
and Jasbir Puars (2007; 2013) subsequent theorizations of queer necropolitics. I then conclude
by revisiting the Bioecological model.
Bioecology/Necroecology
Bioecology
Urie Bronfenbrenners (1999) Bioecological model is defined by two explicit
Propositions. Proposition 1 declares that human development is the result of proximate processes,
which are enduring forms of interaction in the immediate environment; Proposition 2 (p. 5)
positions these proximal processes at the nexus of individual development, environmental
changes, and the sociohistorical contexts of both. These two Propositions underlie
Bronfenbrenners notion of micro, meso, exo, and macro interactions in which each level is
contextualized within the next one by moving from individual proximal processes to
increasingly broader environmental and sociohistorical contexts. As Bronfenbrenner goes on to
note, the temporal aspect of Proposition 2 strongly resonates with Glen Elders oeuvre of Life
AFFECTING ABOLITION: ANIMATING RESISTANCE TO PUNITIVE
Course theory, which is characterized by its own four Principles. These Principles assert that
individuals lives are: (1) contingent on their sociohistorical context; (2) dependent on the timing
of biosocial transitions, such as motherhood; (3) interdependent on the lives of their family
members; and (4) capable of human agency (p. 20-22). Implicit in Bronfenbrenners and Elders
work alike is an orientation towards operational frameworks for assessing (and implicitly,
optimizing) the life of individuals.
Michel Foucaults (1976/2003) theory of biopolitics directly engages these notions of
codifying and enhancing life, asserting that the late 18
th
century European response to endemics
and their impact on labor demanded the regulation of populations in tandem with the disciplining
of individuals. At this moment and around the same time as the birth of the modern prison
the Euro-American state turned towards knowledge and practice formations that documented and
sought to control biological risk of contagion. Foucault asserts that this move away from the
sovereigns rights to take life or let live, established at the moment of spectacularized
executions, to the biopolitical states right to make live or let die marked the inception of state
racism. That is, as the states affective economy shift in alignment with its biopolitical aims of a
control society, the need to legitimize state killing and neglect through the logic of making live
and letting die was met by deploying the new tools of population documentation. Specifically,
the state mobilized its newfound capacity for animating new population categories to declare
some as expendable for the well-being of the nation precisely as these populations were reified,
essentialized, and inscribed with narratives that aligned with the states interests. One such
example would be the US Thirteenth Amendments stipulation that the forced labor
characterizing slavery be banned except for those held as prisoners. This caveat was purposeful
and would be strategically aligned with increased sentences for non-violent crimes under Jim
AFFECTING ABOLITION: ANIMATING RESISTANCE TO PUNITIVE
Crow legislation and policing, which in turn would extend the racism of slavery through prison
labor (Angela Davis, 2000, cited in Kim Gilmore, n.d.).
Necroecology
Achilles Mbembe (2003) questioned the explanatory efficacy of Foucaults theory of
biopower and biopolitics
11
, asking whether the growth of politics oriented towards the murder
of the enemy (p. 12) could be neatly fitted within a biopolitical model that justifies death only
insofar as it enhances life. They propose complementary notions of necropower and
necropolitics to account for this recent shift as seen in their example of Israels ongoing
occupation of an increasingly unlivable if not outright deathly Palestine.
Jasbir Puar (2007) mobilizes Mbembes analysis to articulate their notion of
homonationalism and its attendant queer necropolitics, both of which resonate with but differ
from Lambles (2013) analysis of queer punitive desires. Homonationalism speaks of the
contingent formations in which a given state makes imperialist violence against Muslim people
and nations common sense through Orientalizing conflations of homophobic laws and violence
and the absence of protection for Western notions of queer subjects with a Muslim nations
savagery and need for Western discipline. Puars queer necropolitics engage this analysis of
homonationalism by emphasizing the affective dimensions of necropolitics, particularly the
politics of becoming such as the ascendancy of queer populations now embraced by the state
through mechanisms that normalize and necessitate the killing of racialized populations of
Others evoked into being (for instance, as terrorists). Gossett (2014) and Lamble (2014), like
the other authors in Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, and Silvia Posoccos (2014) Queer
Necropolitics, explicitly engage and deploy Mbembes (2003) optic of necropolitics, with
AFFECTING ABOLITION: ANIMATING RESISTANCE TO PUNITIVE
Lambles analysis directly addressing homonationalist complicities in queer investments in
punishment (p. 152, 155-158).
Revisiting the Bioecological model
As Mimi Kim (2013) demonstrates, contemporary social work has facilitated the
expansion of the neoliberal carceral state through its collusion with carceral feminisms
12

conservative domestic violence politics, as well as its diminishing attention to and involvement
in grassroots organizing. Their example is especially fitting because of carceral feminisms joint
complicity with homonationalism in shoring up US imperialist violence, as seen in the attempts
to extradite Julian Assange through rape allegations for the sole purpose of punishing his anti-
war activism (Dean Spade and Craig Willse, 2014, p. 14-16).
In using the Bioecological model, how can social workers learn from the mistakes of
queer and feminist punitive desires? How can social work as a profession productively respond
to Kims (2013) critique of its disinvestment in collective activism and uncritical use of social
justice as its central tenet? If the social work profession disavows or ignores Kims insights as
well as those evidenced by the texts mentioned above, then how will this inform our
understanding of social works limitations as well as its relation to state violence? I ask these
questions because discussing them not only among social workers, but with grassroots
organizations led by those most directly impacted by neoliberal carceral violence is a critical
first step if social work is to contribute to the fight for a world in which punitive affect feels out
of place.
Two Parts of Life Existing as One
AFFECTING ABOLITION: ANIMATING RESISTANCE TO PUNITIVE
To think through the above theoretical discussion, I turn to a local and seemingly banal
interview that I conducted at the Transitional Initiatives and Mens Empowerment Services
(TIMES) Center in Champaign, IL in the late morning hours in August, 2014.
Locating the TIMES Center
Following the historical narrative asserted by Community Elements, which oversees the
TIMES Center, both can be traced back to the founding of the Champaign County Mental Health
Clinic program in 1956. From this point through the 1990s, the facility gained nonprofit status
and independence from its parent program, the Champaign County Mental Health Society. The
newly independent Champaign County Mental Health Center expanded its services to
adolescents, inmates at the Champaign County Correctional Center, and homeless mentally
disabled people until incorporating the Mens Emergency Shelter and Volunteer Center of East
Central Illinois in 1997; in the following year, property was donated for what would become the
TIMES Center, which replaced the Mens Emergency Shelter in 2000. (Community Elements,
n.d.)
Stepping beyond the confines of Community Elements self-described history, Charles
Vogel a former TIMES client who had been temporarily banned presented in 2004 to the
Champaign County Mental Health Board to make the continuation its $50,000 pre-screening
funding for TIMES contingent on the creation of a third-party board to oversee all bans at the
Center. Vogel was part of a task force appointed by local homeless agencies, and in addition to
internal proposals for an advocacy group that would assist homeless people in making grievances
against agencies, the group formed an advocacy group demanding policy changes at TIMES
Center through protest. (Julie Wurth, April 2004)
AFFECTING ABOLITION: ANIMATING RESISTANCE TO PUNITIVE
Only months later, Julie Wurth (July 2004) interviewed the TIMES Center Executive
Director and noted that because of the Illinois Department of Human Services July 1 policy
change which disallowed funding for emergency homeless shelter open more than twelve
hours a day TIMES would now require the homeless male clients to save 60 percent of their
income and perform 15 hours of community service, unless physical or mental disabilities
prevent them from working. At the same time, there would be no time limit for residents to stay
at TIMES. This marked a departure from the former emergency-oriented operation in which
clients were permitted to stay thirty days but needed to apply for a two-year transitional program
to stay longer.
It is in this context that I called the TIMES Center to request an interview with one of
their clients; although staff member Christine offered me a choice in the interviewee selection, I
declined. The process was easier and much faster than I had expected, and even after
circumstances demanded that I reschedule the initial interview time, I was able to do so with the
same TIMES Center client right away. On the morning of the interview, I walked to the Center,
which is now located only a few blocks away from the commercial downtown Champaign area.
Upon entering, I saw two black males speaking to white female staff members across an desk
surface perimeter that enclosed the office and its passage to the kitchen, which I had volunteered
in about a year prior to the interview. Christine noticed my presence first and called me by name;
calling for me and my interviewee, Charles Thomas, Jr.
13
, Christine otherwise did not engage
Charles while I shook his hand before following her lead. Once in the Centers library room, and
in reference to the chairs placed on top of four adjoined folding tables, Christines only words to
Charles were I dont know what you guys do in here, which Charles did not respond to. After
indicating that I could begin the interview, she left for her office and left the door to the hallway
AFFECTING ABOLITION: ANIMATING RESISTANCE TO PUNITIVE
ajar; as most of the clients were gone for the daytime hours, I was unsurprised when no one
passed by the door throughout the interview.
I want tojust live: an interview with Charles Thomas, Jr.
On November 5, 2012, Charles was arrested after a gunfight that involved some of his
self-declared friends led police to his home located just blocks away from TIMES Center
where they found several guns and illegal drugs (Nexstar Broadcasting, 2013).
14
Notably, no
other people were arrested at this time despite SWAT time intervention. As he put it during our
interview, it was his own stupidity to help his friends by providing them with guns. Charles
told me that he would proceed to be held in jail for six months and then in prison for another six
months before finally being released around November 2013.
But whereas before he could rely on the support of his friends and family his wife and a
son whose age he recalled as 1 year and 2 months once arrested, he found that most of his
friends refused to talk to or help him, even if they claimed they wanted to do so.
15
He remarked
that the very same friends to whom he had provided with guns and enjoyed beer games with now
failed to acknowledge him on the streets and had failed to invite him to a recent barbecque. His
feelings of abandonment by those he felt were supposed to be friends was palpable. Charles
nostalgic and passionate rendering of life before imprisonment was centered on present longings
to do the family thing and just live by reuniting with his wife and son and the structure
they provided. Even when speaking of how he had gotten used to having a car and using it to
go to the movies, the local parks, and (immediately prior to his arrest) Six Flags, he
contextualized all of these within a famial lens. Although he seemed to imply that he was not in
contact with his wife or son, he mentioned that his strained relations with his brothers and sisters
was still intact.
AFFECTING ABOLITION: ANIMATING RESISTANCE TO PUNITIVE
Nevertheless, after his release from prison, Charles felt that there was nobody to turn to,
particularly with his felony conviction preventing him from obtaining either employment or
social welfare, and came to TIMES in December 2013. Although he immediately noted the
stress of living here with fourty other men, he asserted that, as an older guy, the TIMES
program was easy now that he knows what he really wants: he says that he feels ready to
start another chapter in life and that TIMES is wholly responsible for this opportunity. That
said, before Charles arrived at TIMES he looked down on those using its services. While
noting a change in this perspective in light of TIMES drug abuse recovery programs, particularly
in light of his exchanges with alcoholics who had been estranged from their family, Charles also
asserted that clients would only get as much out of TIMES services as they put in.
16
Charles
further highlighted the transition programs work-directed focus by observing that TIMES
routinely helped clients gain access to critical documentation (state IDs and birth certificates, for
instance) needed for job applications and social services.
Towards the end of my discussion with Charles, I asked about his political views as well
as his thoughts on the interview and research on local homeless peoples lives in general. He
insisted that volunteering at TIMES was a valuable way to gain perspective on the lives of the
people there. Recognizing that outsiders those who were not using TIMES services and,
implicitly, did not need them may push away those drug-abusing people they know, he
believed that by volunteering, they would see that its still part of the two parts of life existing
as one. I asked him to elaborate, and after a long silence, he prompted me to attempt an
intreptation of his words. I talked through a quickly sketched diagram that I drew on the back of
one of my pages of interview notes: proposing that outsiders typically located homelessness,
poverty, and drug abuse within TIMES, I suggested that they also denied the existence of these
AFFECTING ABOLITION: ANIMATING RESISTANCE TO PUNITIVE
things and their impacts among themselves; thus, I concluded, Charles seemed to be arguing for
volunteering at TIMES as a way to recognize how homelessness, poverty, and drug abuse were
relevant to those living outside the Center. Charles seemed pleased with this interpretation and
agreed to it.
Abolishing the Punitive in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois
In formulating my ten questions for my semi-structured interview with Charles, I made
implicit reference to the Bioecological model to learn about some of his micro and meso
interactions and proximal processes before and after imprisonment. Yet what I immediately
found most striking about Charles autobiography was its silences. While he locates TIMES as a
stigmatized space, this is the extent of his explicit engagement with macro processes most
notably to me, he mentioned neither race nor police violence once in our hour-long interview
despite his experiences as a previously imprisoned black male now using social services
predominately used by other black males. That said, my questions did not mention race or police
violence; and moreover, the neoliberal rhetoric of individual responsibility pervading the TIMES
Center
17
(and the context of its government funding) would have likely discouraged Charles
from a more nuanced macro analysis of his life, let alone disclosing it to someone he had just
met.
I close with one final example of punitive desire. On August 16, 2013, the commercial
Champaign Center Partnership worked with Community Elements and the city of Champaign to
launch the Make Real Change program (City of Champaign, September 2013). Alleging the
need to bring awareness to the issue of aggressive panhandling, this program converted four
used city coin meters throughout downtown Champaign and the University of Illinois
campustown area into donation collectors to be mainly funneled into the TIMES Center. The
AFFECTING ABOLITION: ANIMATING RESISTANCE TO PUNITIVE
programs webpage advocates against panhandling on the grounds that those who engage in it
may not be homeless, may not be in need of food, may not be from our community, and
may actually discourage them from seeking the services that they desperately need
ultimately concluding that giving change to panhandlers would prevent real change.
In the neoliberal carceral state, the desire to care for marginalized others poor people,
Palestinians
18
, terrorists, prisoners, trans*/queer people of color is deemed too risky for
individuals and grassroots collectives and should be left to state-controlled resources. Make
Real Change attempts to foreclose affective economies of caring by actively working to reframe
them into racist fear economies that long for the false security of the carceral state against the
nonviolent crime of aggressive panhandling and here, it is worth remembering the racist
history of such criminalized poverty post-Thirteenth Amendment (Davis, 2000). Barely implicit
in Make Real Change is its attempt to normalize further state-sponsored violence against poor
and homeless people by prominently centering a phone number to call for those who feel
threatened by panhandling near an ATM, Bust Stop or blocking your path. In effect, the goal
of Make Real Change is commercial space devoid of homeless bodies and lives. This is not
remotely suprising given that the express purpose of Champaign Center Partnership is to jointly
market the center city to not only the residents of Champaign and Urbana but to a regional and
national market; the (queer/trans*) homeless have long been targets of collaborative violence
between businesses and the police and have collectively fought back accordingly (Jennifer
Worley, 2011).
Even as Make Real Change ostensibly provides material aid to homeless males in
Champaign-Urbana (CU), it is critical to assess the mechanisms by which these social services
are delivered. Whether founded or not, Charles Vogels voicing of a collective critique of
AFFECTING ABOLITION: ANIMATING RESISTANCE TO PUNITIVE
TIMES arbitrary administration of client bans ranging from 30 days to a lifetime reminds us
that not all homeless people in CU are granted access to the TIMES services, let alone at all
times. Make Real Change insists that we fine and thus effectively imprison those who remind
us of the neoliberal states abandonment of the poor and homeless especially black people
already prefigured as aggressive in the white mythology supported by the carceral state. I want
to be quite clear: Make Real Change directly contributes to state violence against and
abandonment of homeless and poor people both in practice and in affect. And given the anti-
black cycle of poverty and mass imprisonment (Morgan Bassichis, 2007), it is crucial to
remember that this state violence is already racialized.
How do we make sense of the collusion between TIMES and neoliberal carceral state,
along with the punitive desires that make it possible? I leave this question for further grassroots-
driven research and collective activism. That said, I suggest as a starting point that any
Bioecological analysis of Charles Thomas, Jr.s life at TIMES along with any politically useful
conceptualization of US social justice must account for the diffuse affective and material
manifestation of the neoliberal carceral state.

AFFECTING ABOLITION: ANIMATING RESISTANCE TO PUNITIVE
Notes
1. I refer to Sarah Lambles 2013 text that was republished in Queer Necropolitics. (pp. 151-171)
2. I draw on Lambles definition of neoliberal carceral state as the states institutions and practices of
policing, disciplining, and punishment as well as their context within neoliberal capitalism. (pp. 169)
3. Tellingly, despite the jump in imprisoned Muslims from 5% to 12% of the UKs total prison population
from 1994 to 2010, only 1% of those currently imprisoned have been convicted of terrorist-related
activities- in contrast to the alleged necessity for heightened policing of Muslim communities. Michelle
Alexander (2012) offers a compelling argument for the current disproportionate imprisonment of black
males in particular as indebted to and a re-manifestation of the Jim Crow laws that themselves have been
commonly accepted as the states way of continuing slavery by other means (along with frequent
lynchings). See Jasbir Puar (2007, p. 149-151) for insight into increasing anti-Muslim policing.
4. I tentatively equate mainstream LGBT organizations with those who are well-funded, or with yearly
budgets in excess of $1 million (and thus equipped with the resources needed to visibilize their
organization) (Morgan Bassichis, Dean Spade, and Alexander Lee, 2011, p. 38).
5. I will use they whenever I am unsure of the persons preferred gender pronouns (PGPs), by which I mean
the gender pronouns a given person identifies with. The term PGP is commonly used in trans* spaces at U
of I.
6. Morgan Bassichis, Dean Spade, and Alexander Lee (2011, p. 20-22) site both NAFTA (North American
Free Trade Agreement) and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996
as key factors in this neoliberal shift in US welfare.
7. For a political economy analysis that links US imperialism and multinational prison industry growth with a
focus on Iraq, see Julia Sudbury (now Julia Oparah) (2004).
8. Julia Sudburys name is now Julia Oparah; I have cited the former to aid those looking to find her 2004 text.
9. See Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith (ed., 2011) for historical and contemporary examples of trans*/queer
people of colors resistance to the carceral state.
10. Sara Ahmeds (2005) brilliant account of queer phenomenology offers a valuable opportunity for
elaborating on the political potential of orienting against/around punitive desire.
11. Whereas biopower speaks to the constantly shifting formations of knowledge and power relations that
enabled a control society to gain ascendancy, biopolitics emphasizes the deployment of biopower in
particular contexts.
12. Carceral feminism emerged as a strain of anti-violence feminism and asserts that the carceral state must
defend women from interpersonal violence. This logic has been soundly rejected by women of color
feminists for its elision of the US carceral states ongoing history of interpersonal violence against women,
particularly women of color, to name but one source of critique (Kim, 2013, 1277-1278).
13. Following my interview with Charles Thomas, Jr., I had an extended discussion of confidentiality with him
and offered to anonymize both his name and the TIMES Center in any public reproduction of our interview
so as to avoid any complications that might affect him. However, he insisted that he had nothing to hide
AFFECTING ABOLITION: ANIMATING RESISTANCE TO PUNITIVE
and waived his confidentiality despite my stated reservations. I have chosen to cite Charles name since
there is no evidence that it will cause harm and to short-circuit the perceived anonymization that Charles
himself contested, in which outsiders (those living in Champaign but not using TIMES services) denied
the individuality of those using the Center.
14. Since I had not known who I would be interviewing prior to arriving at TIMES, I only located this news
story after the interview was completed.
15. I asked if he meant that people had simply said they would help to seem polite, to which he assented.
16. This specific claim aligns with the shift in the neoliberal logic of welfare from right to privilege, perhaps
most visibly in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996.
17. The TIMES Executive Director deploys the logic of free choice in her interview with Julie Wurth (July
2004) to dismiss Charles Vogels earlier allegations of arbitrary policy enforcement to ban clients. And as
mentioned before, TIMES 2004 program changes aligned it with the welfare-as-privilege logic of an
increasingly neoliberal US.
18. See the recent abrupt termination of Steven Salaitas publically-finalized offer for tenured faculty position
at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for social media critiques of Israelis occupation of and
violence against Palestine. As Jasbir Puar has noted, those who critique Israel (and US imperialist
investments in it) are having their support for Palestine deemed fit for censorship within academia (Puar
2011).

AFFECTING ABOLITION: ANIMATING RESISTANCE TO PUNITIVE
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