Are Prisons Obsolete?

"Or at least they should be made to be, yes. It’s partly for the reasons I’ve already mentioned. There are several abolitionist traditions. Davis presents abolition in the form that I find most compelling and makes me feel that I really do need to respond to the challenges this movement has presented. And that’s because she is situated within both the feminist tradition and the black radical tradition, and while her political philosophy is informed by Marxism and the Frankfurt School of critical theory, and even Foucault, she’s also drawing on a broader black intellectual tradition closely linked with radical feminist theorizing and practice. I find that synthesis of ideas powerful. I think of myself as in the black radical tradition and have been greatly influenced by Angela Davis’s work. I agree with her about many things, and so, naturally, I felt compelled to engage with her on this question. “While many existing prisons are deeply unjust, I don’t think that prisons are inherently wrong” Another aspect of this is that Davis is a philosopher, one of us, and so understands, in a way some abolitionists might not, the kind of thing I’m trying to do in my own book, where I’m thinking through the details of arguments, attempting to systematize ideas within a consistent set of basic principles, asking difficult counterfactual questions, trying to extract more general lessons from particular examples, and the like. The kind of thing philosophers like to do. She totally understands that. This common philosophical background makes her a more appropriate interlocutor than some other abolitionist thinkers. She herself, like some others we’ve talked about, has spent time in prison, as a political prisoner. She has been engaged in anti-prison activism for more than 50 years. I think of her as the leading abolitionist thinker in the black radical tradition today. I also feel that her work is too often ignored by philosophers, or not taken seriously enough. It’s important to engage with a figure like Davis, not least because she’s a black woman. How often do you find detailed, in-depth critical engagement with black women philosophers in academic philosophy? It’s rare, unfortunately. Davis is clearly writing for a public audience in a book like Are Our Prisons Obsolete? She writes as a scholar-activist, as an academic, but she’s not writing in a purely academic way. She is trying to raise political consciousness about this issue. And she’s not shying away from being explicit about what her political commitments are. She also draws on modes of argument and inquiry that don’t always have a natural place in academic philosophy, whether that’s memoir, personal experience, or using art, especially experimental art, or drawing heavily on history, to establish a conclusion. Some of these genres of writing are not commonly used in academic philosophy. That’s right. The most forceful arguments that she presents I would reformulate as arguments for a radical moratorium on the use of prisons in the US. By that I mean the view that we are faced with such grave systemic injustice in our society—as we’ve already discussed, so many of the people who find themselves in prisons are among the most marginalized, disenfranchised, and exploited—that we can’t justify using the prison system to control and confine them, at least not for many crimes. So we should dramatically ramp down — ‘decarcerate’ is the word abolitionists would use. We should really decarcerate, reduce significantly the number of people who are in prison to only the few who are causing great and irreparable harm or deep and lasting trauma. I think that a moratorium is different from a more radical abolitionist position, which would regard the use of prisons as always wrong, whether now or in the future. I think there’s also a question of whether in a fully just society, imprisonment would be a justifiable practice. Here I’m inclined to think it could be a justified practice, depending on how the prisons are structured and governed and provided due process requirements are followed. And I remain agnostic about whether we would in fact need prisons in a fully just society, whether we could actually make prisons obsolete, because I think it’s difficult to predict how big a problem we would face of serious aggression against others, even under much more egalitarian circumstances. So while many existing prisons are deeply unjust, I don’t think that prisons are inherently wrong. I believe they can be humane and used in a way that respects people as persons, and that in-prison services should be provided that will allow prisoners to reenter society as equals. We’re far from that ideal in many places. But I think it’s something that we could achieve, and there are some good examples that approach it in other parts of the world, particularly in Scandinavia. But we should also try to restructure our society so that we need prisons much less than we currently seem to need them, and experiment with other practices that are much less harmful to see if we can enhance public safety without resorting to such a severe and troubling practice. So I’m with Angela Davis on many things, but I don’t endorse the claim that a world without prisons would be the only just one."