I recently read The Idea of Prison Abolition, a book by Tommie Shelby collecting his remarks in the Carl G. Hempel Lecture Series at Princeton. It’s a book on a polarizing issue, and its conclusions will satisfy few participants.
But that need not trouble us.
Shelby isn’t an abolitionist. Rather, he sets out to study the work of abolitionists in order to draw philosophical and practical insights about prisons. He draws insights both for our society and for the better societies we seek to build. Along the way, he draws key distinctions and offers sympathetic criticism of abolitionism. He also situates abolitionism within both black Marxist and black radical traditions.
It’s a worthwhile project, and I’ll take an extended look at it. I’ll also say a bit about how it clarifies and expands upon what I wrote about prison abolition some time ago.
The Idea of Prison Abolition: Opening Distinctions
Shelby takes the abolitionist work of Angela Davis as his main guide. He divides this work into an early critique of the U.S. system of political prisoners and a later critique that expands to the prison system as a whole (e.g., Are Prisons Obsolete?). He finds the early work especially fruitful for ideas on prison reform.
To lay a background, Shelby sets out a number of distinctions that help clarify the idea of prison abolition. For one, he points out that prisons are but one form of incarceration among many. Society incarcerates people for many reasons: quarantine or isolation from infectious diseases, rehabilitation of people who have committed crimes, and treating people for psychiatric disorders. Shelby uses ‘prison’ to refer to detainment, rehabilitation, and punishment as distinct forms of incarceration.
To provide a standard by which to judge prisons, Shelby lays down the criterion that prisons must play a positive role in the prevention and control of crime. This is, in his view, a necessary condition for us to reasonably claim prisons are justified. And I think this is a fair criterion that all sides in prison abolition debates can accept. At least people on the left.
Functionalist Arguments
Shelby reads abolitionists as running a number of functionalist arguments against prisons. Defenders of prisons sell them to the public as something that serves a key purpose for society. Prisons, according to them, help prevent crime, clean up the streets, and so on. However, abolitionists think that, in fact, prisons serve very different functions. They, e.g., protect the interests of capital, advance racism and other systems of oppression, and so on.
Shelby lays out in detail claims about the hidden functions prisons serve. Namely, that they dehumanize people and continue the pre Civil War system of slavery. But Shelby argues against both claims. Against the former, he argues (quite plausibly) that dehumanization isn’t an essential feature of prisons. Places other than the U.S., e.g., Scandinavia, developed less dehumanizing versions. And against the latter, he points to some of the obvious disanalogies between slavery and prisons.
He expands the analysis to the broader prison industrial complex, an analogy to the military industrial complex of leftist analysis. For Shelby, this analysis opens the door to a kind of reform or moderate abolition (Shelby is unclear on the boundary between these two things). We could, for example, ban private prisons, restrict for profit contractors from the prison system, and even limit prisons to a subset of crimes or enact a moratorium on the use of prisons.
Alternatives and Utopias
Finally, Shelby evaluates the idea of prison abolition through alternatives to prisons. And it’s here where he lays down his main critiques of abolitionism.
These alternatives range from better mental health care to drug treatment and transformative justice programs. And Shelby endorses each of the alternatives. He thinks they all play a role in facilitating the reform and reduction of prisons.
However, he argues, quite plausibly in my view, that these run into sharp limits. All require voluntary cooperation of one kind or another. In particular, transformative justice programs are quite limited in what they can do. And they require a lot in the way of political agreement, anarchist theory, racial justice theory, and/or training. So, again quite plausibly, Shelby argues that these simply cannot replace prisons. They can only reduce them.
Shelby thus sees the idea of prison abolition as part of a utopian ideal and utopian movement. He thinks considering it will inspire us to enact more creative prison reforms.
But he also points to some of the negatives of abolitionist movements: unfair dismissal of empirical social science, unrealistic ideas about eliminating violent crime, tying itself into knots over functionalist critique (e.g., if, as Davis argues, prison serves to ‘solve’ the problem of social outcasts and a ‘lumpenproletariat’ in capitalism, then it isn’t ‘obsolete’ after all).
Talk of prison abolition, on Shelby’s view, alienates potential political allies for, at best, marginal gains. Why? Doing it would almost certainly require changing a lot about society. It would require, in short, a thoroughly anti-capitalist society in order to work. But anti-capitalism is more popular than abolitionism, both in its short- and long-term aims.
In that respect, Shelby converges with Cedric Johnson.
Prison Abolition and Utopian Thinking
For the most part, I was happy with both the philosophical depth and accessibility of The Idea of Prison Abolition. Shelby treats abolitionism fairly in his critiques, but he also uses the movement to draw valuable insights.
I do, though, find a few problems.
For one, Shelby is suspectible to the criticism that he, too, relies on utopian ideals in his limited defense of prisons. He discusses this in the book, of course, under the banner of “ideal theory.” But I don’t think he quite hits the mark.
Shelby defends prisons as punishment, for example, under the assumption that the background social conditions are ‘reasonably just.’ But we’re nowhere near that in current U.S. society. At best for Shelby, I think he has to endorse strong limits, if not a full moratorium, on our current prison system.
Moderate Abolition?
And that takes me to my second point, which is that Shelby is quite unclear about the boundary between ‘reform’ and ‘abolition,’ especially when he introduces the notion of ‘moderate abolition.’
Shelby aims his critiques at ‘radical abolition,’ which (at least on my reading of Shelby) advocates the complete elimination of prisons. And while Davis is at times equivocal on this stance, other authors (e.g., Mariame Kaba) aren’t. They do, indeed, advocate elimination of prison (and in Kaba’s case, also the police). Shelby chooses Davis’s work over Kaba’s for different reasons, i.e., Davis is a better philosopher with better arguments.
Here’s my point. While Shelby effectively criticizes an implausible abolitionist view, he does so in a way that leaves open the door to a more moderate abolition that I’ve sympathized with in earlier writings.
The term ‘prison,’ as Shelby himself points out, is quite unclear. Why not defend a moderate abolition that would eliminate the use of prison for punishment and most forms of detention and rehabilitation, but continue incarcerating (a much, much smaller number of) people as a means of temporary incapacitation (i.e., preventing them from being an immediate threat to others) and for limited forms of rehabilitation? Why not leave it in place for only a small range of crimes?
Would this be moderate abolition or merely reform?
