This article introduces and explains the key concerns that have informed and inspired this special Issue of the Community Development Journal. It sees punishment and prisons as troubling issues for community development despite the comparative lack of attention they have received in the journal to date. The article acknowledges that the specific forms that punishment, incarceration, and their alternatives take, have profound implications for the lives people live in communities; but that those forms of punishment, as well as resistances to them, are also shaped by collective activism and actors operating from, on, through, or on behalf of communities, both real and imagined. We reflect on changing conceptions of the carceral state, positing that ‘carceral community development’ is playing an increasingly prominent role in the extension, outsourcing and normalisation of punishment internationally. Against such tendencies we consider the potential for abolitionist theory and practice to contribute to a critically self-reflexive community development that is committed to anti-carceral or de-carceral futures, and to the building of concrete forms of community in the here and now.