This inventive project invites people variously engaged in prison abolition (activists, academics, ex-prisoners) to ‘time travel’ to a future UK in which prisons no longer exist, and to craft science-fiction about how prisons were abolished and what came after. Building on the political consensus that prison does not diminish social harm, the project uses a novel creative method, ‘fictioning’, to re-imagine prison and the future of justice in the UK.

The project aims to:

• critically engage and explore possibilities of transformative change in the UK prison system.

• employ creative, practice-based methods to stimulate new ways of thinking beyond entrenched, circular debates about prison, and as a model for addressing other intractable social problems.

• offer a distinct account of UK abolition (particularly BAME efforts).

• test the viability of ‘fictioning’ as a robust tool of social science research and inquiry.

• disseminate creative products that can stimulate new dialogues on the future of prison 

• develop a workshop format that can be reproduced independently by others and could form the basis of further research.

The methodology will be advanced via 11 months of creative action-research workshops with abolitionists, aimed at generating new insights into punishment and justice. We will produce fiction, an educational resource, and a website, and publicly share these outputs to revitalise penal reform and abolition debates.

This project argues that arts-based methods can play a vital role in re-imagining the future of prisons and more just solutions to social harm. In its creation and dissemination of an accessible learning resource, the project also contributes to public knowledge of the social harms of prison and arguments for prison abolition.