Deuteronomy 30:15–20
This passage from Deuteronomy which promises “life and death, blessings and curses” is often a challenging one from a restorative-justice or abolitionist perspective. The stark contrast made here in Deuteronomy and the promise of reward and punishment for human action drive the Deuteronomic History of Israel, the telling of Israel’s history which unfolds over the books of Judges, Samuel, and Kings which sees Israel prosper when they are faithful and be punished when they do wrong. Such a simplistic narrative of reward and punishment is at first glance opposed to the more transformative understandings of accountability which derive from transformative justice practices.
I think this is a misunderstanding of the Deuteronomic History, which in fact offers a more nuanced and dialectical attempt to point towards the difficult-to-express reality of accountability without punishment. I’ve written more about that, in connection with the prophet Jeremiah, in this post.
But I also think there is value in facing the stark choice between life and death in this passage as an existential reality, reading it on its own terms and not just in light of how later authors use it to interpret Israel’s history. Because abolition, fundamentally, requires us to make a stark choice between life and death.
Prisons and policing are “death-making institutions,” as Mariame Kaba says. Ruth Wilson Gilore defines racism as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” in Golden Gulag. To uphold these systems is to support death-dealing. In place of them, abolitionists demand solutions aimed at life: caregiving, community. As Kaba and Andrea Ritchie put it, abolitionists demand “safety,” which depends on strengthening all the things in communities that can help promote well-being, rather than “security” provided by the exclusion and violence enforced by carceral systems.
The difference between safety and security is perhaps why the solutions abolition provides to violence don’t always compute within a carceral framework. Safety requires holistic approaches. It requires strengthening communities and practicing safety and accountability in small and partial ways, as Mia Mingus suggests, not simply looking for solutions that immediately remove or make invisible harm when crises occur. Supporters of police and prisons sometimes seem to think abolitionist responses are unserious because the response to violence is the ongoing production of care and safety, rather than insisting on violence in return for violence. But this turn to such deep, lasting work that can prevent violence in communities and defend against it is precisely the work of “choosing life,” the work of building beautiful things, which is — as we see in Deuteronomy — opposed to death-dealing systems, which are idolatry.
Ultimately, Deuteronomy poses an existential challenge we cannot avoid. To choose safety instead of security, to choose life over death, requires complete and unreserved commitment on our part.
Hannah Bowman is the founder and director of Christians for Abolition.