Transcript
Upon Further Review: Frontline Conversations with Dean Bobo
Episode 6 with Tommie Shelby
Posted 16 December 2022
Division of Social Science
Faculty of Arts & Sciences
Harvard University
[00:00:06.33] LARRY BOBO: Welcome, everyone, to another episode of Upon Further Review:
Frontline Conversations with Dean Bobo. I am Larry Bobo, Dean of Social Science at Harvard
University. My guest for this discussion is Tommie Shelby, Caldwell Titcomb Professor of
African and African American Studies and of Philosophy. And he is also currently chair of the
Department of African and African-American Studies. We are focused on Professor Shelby’s
newest book, The Idea of Prison Abolition. Welcome.
[00:00:37.65] TOMMIE SHELBY: Glad to be here, Larry. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:39.81] LARRY BOBO: Please. It’s my pleasure, and it was a real delight to read the book
and engage the issues it puts on the table. You are obviously well-known for work and
scholarship right at the intersection of philosophy and Black studies. And so at one level, we
could say it makes an enormous amount of sense in these times to focus on this type of question.
[00:01:05.28] If we think about events in Ferguson, if we think about the murder of George
Floyd, if we think about the phenomenon of mass incarceration, which I tend to call racialized
mass incarceration just to be explicit about it, it makes sense for a student of the AfricanAmerican experience to take up these issues. But let me ask– and I don’t mean to be challenging
in a way, but just to get you to explore this idea– why bring a distinctly philosophical lens to the
question of prisons? In particular, why literally frame it as engaging the idea of prison abolition,
something potentially regarded as a radical proposition in many quarters, and perhaps all lay or
common sense discourse?
[00:01:56.14] TOMMIE SHELBY: That’ll take a while.
[00:01:57.52] LARRY BOBO: OK. Give it a shot.
[00:01:58.85] TOMMIE SHELBY: I’ll give it a shot. Well, you know, I should probably say that
it’s not a book that’s written to necessarily respond to a political crisis or the moment, in a way. I
mean, the book is based on some lectures I gave in 2018. And I was working on that until the
lead-up to those lectures. And they kind of come out of some unresolved questions that I had
when I was writing my last book, Dark Ghettos.
[00:02:29.28] And there I was really trying to think about one of the problems of ghettoization
and concentrated poverty in poor Black communities, is the fact that so many people from those
communities find themselves in prison. And it’s a cycle of coming out of those communities into
the prison and back out. It shapes, often, the culture in some of those communities, as you know,
bleeds out into popular culture and the like.
[00:02:56.98] And so in that context, I did talk a lot about how to respond to the problem from a
standpoint of political philosophy, how to think about when it’s appropriate to impose
punishment in circumstances of injustice. And I made some suggestions about some reforms I
would call for there. I was aware at the time that there was a kind of budding prison abolitionist
movement. I certainly knew that Angela Davis had been writing about it for many years. And I
didn’t really take it up in the book. I kind of knew it was there, and I kind of felt like I needed to
think through it.
[00:03:36.54] Part of the reason I think I felt like I needed to think through it was so many
people that I respect and have learned from were defending an abolitionist outlook. And I’m in
conversation with people, people broadly, Black progressives, Blacks on the left, thinking
through this set of issues. And I felt like I just– as I do, I think, everything I write. They all kind
of comes from, what should I think about that?
[00:04:04.30] And this was one of these cases, where what should I think about this? I haven’t
really thought it through, and what better way to do it was to engage with the people I already
respect on many other issues to see if they could bring me around to their point of view. So that’s
kind of what led me to the topic.
[00:04:17.12] LARRY BOBO: And so you flag already, in a way, one of the key figures, if not
the key figure in the argument you make and the positions you interrogate, and that’s Angela
Davis, a figure who looms large here in launching this. But it seems to me part of what you’re
saying is that whether or not it’s made its way into any sort of mainstream consciousness, or is
even circulating broadly in the Academy as such, this is an idea that’s got some momentum
behind it. Yes?
[00:04:51.01] TOMMIE SHELBY: Yeah, clearly now. I mean, you could give many examples,
when The New York Times is running profiles on abolitionists and the New Yorker’s running
profile on abolitionists, and you see it covered in all the mainstream press. That wasn’t true when
I first started working on the book. You didn’t really see that as much.
[00:05:09.26] And if you might have just noticed, just yesterday the Freedom Scholars Award,
which is a quarter of $1,000,000 given to scholar activists, many of them working in and around
movements, at least six of the 10 are identified abolitionists.
[00:05:25.76] LARRY BOBO: So there you go. Yes.
[00:05:27.10] TOMMIE SHELBY: So it’s clearly out there. I generally have a view that I think
of myself as broadly progressive thinker, and engage with people who are on the left thinking
through a range of questions, not just about criminal justice, but social inequality more broadly.
And I think it’s important for us to think about what posture should we have toward the criminal
justice system. And there’s a range of views about what our attitudes should be toward policing
incarceration or broadly the criminal justice system.
[00:05:57.23] And so this was, in a way, a desire on my part to kind of be in dialogue with
people about these issues. As you mentioned, all of my work, almost all of it, is kind of working
at the intersection of philosophy and Black studies. It’s kind of like I think of myself as
philosophizing about Black life and thought. And there are currents within Black Studies. This is
one of the dominant currents, not the only one. The dominant current in Black Studies is to
position yourself with respect to abolition.
[00:06:23.93] And so I sort of felt like in a way, part of what I’m doing is just engaging in
ordinary scholarly discourse around an issue that’s arising in the field. Even though I myself am
not a scholar activist exactly, a lot of people writing about this are. And so that kind of pulls me
into conversation with them.
[00:06:42.16] LARRY BOBO: Yeah. Perfectly understandable. As you launch into the
argument, you suggest that there are two key questions that you’re kind of wrestling with and
organize the intellectual project here. One of them is, can the practice of imprisonment be
justified despite the existence of severe societal injustices? Or should the use of prisons
effectively be ended or at least halted until we have what is a more just, equitable social order?
That’s kind of one animating thread, I think, throughout the work.
[00:07:18.56] Secondly, could the practice of imprisonment ever be justified in just social order
if we really were to achieve that state? Or would a fully just society somehow really completely
obviate the need for prisons, or at least have arrived at a point where prisons were regarded as
illegitimate. The very idea of them might be in question.
[00:07:45.61] And maybe I can connect to getting you to say why those are the starting points to
another distinction I’d like you to help pull out for me as someone who’s not got deep expertise in
the kind of methodological theoretical terrain of philosophy. And that is to say, how does an
analytical philosopher differ in his or her approach to these questions from a continental one, if
that makes sense to fold into this.
[00:08:16.35] TOMMIE SHELBY: Now you’re bringing me into very controversial waters here.
This was one of those kind of explosive– all disciplines have these things, where there are
conflicts between people in different kinds of schools, points of view, and sometimes they’re
seen as partly political in nature. And so this is one of these cases in philosophy where there’s a
sense that those of us who think of ourselves in the analytic tradition, which I do, dominate a lot
of the top universities in the English-speaking world. And people who draw their inspiration in
the canonical figures, they mostly are from continental Europe, primarily Germany and France,
often feel embattled in this context.
[00:09:04.83] So in many ways, I don’t think of myself as a partisan in that debate. I think of
myself as– I mean, I did write a dissertation on Marx, after all. I try to draw from the broadly
continental tradition, whether that includes not just Marx, but Habermas or Fanon or others who
are kind of broadly in that tradition. But they tend to go at things somewhat differently. There’s
much more emphasis on historical studies and social theory. The writing sometimes may be a
little more literary, maybe a little more in the poetic register, whereas those of us who identify
more with analytic tradition tend to be more inspired by what’s happening in the sciences, with
formal logic, tend to attend more to the fine-grained details of arguments more, and tend to reach
less for the metaphor, but to try to unpack arguments.
[00:10:14.65] LARRY BOBO: And that’s part of the point about being concrete about what the
exact questions are that you’re wrestling with. OK, I’ve got that.
[00:10:21.46] TOMMIE SHELBY: Exactly. Yeah. I mean, part of the virtues you’re striving for
here– and that’s not to say that people in the continental tradition don’t strive for these in their
own way– but to strive for a kind of precision with the question you’re trying to address. And in
a way, I see this as very fits with the kind of Black Studies orientation. I mean, it’s not a field
defined by a set of agreed upon methods. It’s a field that takes up a range of questions and
reaches for the methods that are most appropriate for answering those questions.
[00:10:55.00] And so here, just getting really clear about what’s the problem here? What’s the
question we should be asking ourselves? And that kind of will dictate what methodological
approaches are going to be most appropriate for answering it. So the questions that I’m
identifying here that you just summarized, I think accurately, are ones I think philosophy can
speak to.
[00:11:19.21] LARRY BOBO: Very good. And to emphasize a point that you touched upon, and
pardon me if I’m not using the phrase that you yourself have used, you approach things in a
methodologically eclectic way. I mean, it’s not as though there’s an analytical approach that
requires the rejection or negation of the continental approach, that you’re perfectly willing to
engage serious claims and arguments and ideas kind of across a spectrum of sources of
information and lines of reasoning here.
[00:11:57.91] TOMMIE SHELBY: Yeah, for sure. And in a lot of ways, the tradition that I see
Angela Davis as coming out of is a broadly critical theory tradition that has its roots in certain
variants of Marxism. And I’ve been influenced by many of those, the thinkers that she also has
been influenced by. And so I see myself, in that sense, we have a common ground in terms of the
inspiration for a lot of the things that we write, even if we might write about them somewhat
differently.
[00:12:28.92] LARRY BOBO: Absolutely. So you’re leading directly into where I was headed
next, which is to get you to spell out for me, and perhaps our listeners, what a kind of Black
critical tradition entails, or what that perspective involves, and in particular, in the instance of the
idea of prison abolition, you draw a lot on people who I think are thought of more as political
activists than as necessarily political theorists or philosophers.
[00:13:04.12] So George Jackson, on Huey Newton and Assata Shakur and Malcolm X, but most
centrally, Angela Davis. So we’ll come back to her in a moment. But if one were to think about,
especially, how you draw on a George Jackson, a Huey Newton, and Assata Shakur, whose work
takes primarily the form of first person narrative, there nonetheless is kind of a logic or an
analytical framework or set of presumptions that guides what they’re putting on the table, right?
Or have I got that wrong?
[00:13:38.71] TOMMIE SHELBY: No, I think that’s right. I think of myself as a student of the
history of Black political thought. And much of the writing that happens in that tradition does not
take the form of the traditional philosophical treatise, as you might imagine. So you’ve got
people writing slave narratives. They’re writing memoirs, various pamphlets. They often write in
a kind of first person storytelling kind of way. There’s a lot of emphasis on oratory, not even on
writing.
[00:14:10.85] So I think anybody that wants to take the Black political tradition seriously, as I
do, has to be able to kind of move comfortably across genres of writing that aren’t going to be the
typical journal article in philosophy, for instance, or philosophical treatise on whatever the
question is.
[00:14:27.40] So I do try in the book to take one of the things that you see, which is an attempt to
use first person experience, particularly with the prison, being inside prison, of political prisoners
who were thinking about not just their life inside, but also about what brought them there, and
the kind of world that they think that shaped them and that they’re reacting to and resisting. And
that often takes the form of a memoir or autobiography or prison letter.
[00:14:56.26] So I do spend some time trying to think through what kind of theoretical
contributions are they making to thinking about what is it to be a political prisoner? What is it to
be in appropriate forms of resistance to injustice as they see it. And so you have to be able to
read through writing of that sort to kind of get at what they’re after.
[00:15:22.56] Now, there are academics who are necessarily– the people you mentioned are not
academics. There’s a sense in which, I guess, Huey Newton was, ultimately did write a
dissertation. So it is a way in which he kind of is in our tribe, in a way. But many of the people
who are academics but are scholar activists, some of them, I think, position themselves in a way
we probably wouldn’t, as a little more at odds with the mainstream of the Academy. They might
stay somewhat more skeptical of the traditional methods of the disciplines. They’re more eclectic
in kind of how they approach questions, and maybe even transgressive of a lot of the norms of
the mainstream Academy in their work, now partly because they’re moved, I think appropriately,
and in some ways I agree with them, by that they felt they living in an unjust society, an unjust
world, a world that’s violent and requires a response.
[00:16:24.19] And so though they’re scholars, their ultimate goal is not just engage in
disinterested inquiry, but to try to help those who are oppressed find freedom. And they do that
through research and thinking through difficult issues and argument in a way that’s familiar to us.
But it’s driven by kind of a passion to free the oppressed.
[00:16:49.62] So that sometimes affects the form that they use when they express themselves,
and who they see themselves as engaged with, who they see as their primary audience. So this
does present some difficulties for someone like me, who doesn’t typically write in that way. But I
try to take it seriously and try to read it sympathetically kind of to see what they’re up to.
[00:17:12.70] LARRY BOBO: And this may feel like a little bit of an aside, but how does, say,
the philosophical academic establishment respond to weaving that sort of source material into
serious philosophical writing and scholarship?
[00:17:31.85] TOMMIE SHELBY: Good question. I think OK. I mean, there’s a way in which
the history of philosophy, we don’t get into the Academy until pretty late. So you got a tradition,
at least in the western tradition, even, 2,500 years. And you only got a couple of centuries of that
is really in the Academy. So in one way, it’s familiar to have people writing in these ways. We
all read Plato, and the only thing we have of Plato’s writings are in the form of dialogues. And
there are characters, and some of them based on real life figures and so on. And central figures
wrote autobiographies, whether that’s Augustine or Rousseau or others who express themselves
in the form of autobiographical narratives.
[00:18:23.69] So in some ways this is familiar terrain for philosophy. Even though most of us
wouldn’t probably dare to write a dialogue as our scholarly contribution, or an autobiography,
we’re used to kind of wrestling with texts like that. And philosophy, of course, isn’t really defined
by an agreed upon method.
[00:18:45.35] There’s some very general things you could say about approach. But mostly what
we’re doing is taking up questions where there isn’t a clear method to answer what it is. And you
reach for the forms of inquiry you think that might help you get some traction on it. But they
might not be the established ones.
[00:19:05.67] So in that sense, it’s not so outside of what philosophers might typically do. At
least so I say
[00:19:15.62] LARRY BOBO: Well, very good. I’m kind of glad to hear that. And I hope that it
gets broad and serious engagement even beyond those who would just be philosophers of race or
of the African-American experience.
[00:19:28.31] [MUSIC PLAYING]
[00:19:51.29] But let me try to next pin down a bit, if we could, what are the core presumptions
or arguments of folks coming from the abolitionist point of view. And maybe one of the first
things to observe, as you characterize it here, is that these are folks, by and large, who are not
interested in addressing problems with how the prisons are functioning. They’re not interested in
even pretty substantial reform. These voices are often really absolute abolition, or at least in the
particular case of Angela Davis, the idea is prisons have to go. And so what is the case for
having gotten to that conclusion?
[00:20:35.01] TOMMIE SHELBY: Well, I guess it’s a complex case. One thing I would say is I
think some of the people who would identify as prison abolitionists, even very radical prison
abolitionists, I think they wouldn’t see themselves as entirely hostile to reform efforts. I mean,
they recognize that there are people inside, and their well-being is threatened by existing prison
conditions. And so they are often willing and engage, sometimes, in a quite serious, concerted
way with trying to improve the lives of those inside.
[00:21:10.49] And that might require collaborating with people who they disagree with
fundamentally about whether the system should really exist. But almost any abolitionist who you
read or talk with sees this as a long range kind of goal to do away with the prisons. And they see
it as it’s not a matter of just letting everybody out and not putting anybody in. It’s a matter of
trying to change the conditions where reaching for incarceration to solve social problems isn’t
something that we do. So that’s obviously a very long term project.
[00:21:48.29] But they have a wide range of objections to the practice. And I try, in the book, to
kind of go through the ones that I think are the most important and the most compelling. So I
spend a lot of time talking about, should you think that it’s a very real worry that when the public
equips the state with the power to imprison, they’re giving state officials a quite powerful
weapon that can be very easily misused. So they’re giving the state the power to use incarceration
to sometimes contain and silence, and sometimes kill their political enemies, and that often
happens.
[00:22:33.83] And it’s happened a lot in the Black freedom struggle, where the mechanisms of
law enforcement are used to sideline, assassinate, de-legitimize, contain political leaders. And
that’s not peculiar to the United States. This happens in other places, too, as we know. And it
happens ongoing right now in many places.
[00:22:58.62] So that’s a serious worry. And I think that requires thinking through whether the
dangers of giving the state that kind of power are offset by anything you might gain from having
the practice.
[00:23:13.13] You might also worry about, is the practice ultimately just an inhumane one? You
might worry, even if you thought that it was, in some sense, humane, that it kind of responds to
human wrongdoing in a way that’s dehumanizing in some way, treats us in ways that we ought
not be treated even when we do wrong. Many, of course, people think that it’s bound up with
racial subordination and that it’s very difficult to untangle whatever ostensible public safety
benefits you might get from it is bound up with not just many Black and brown people find
themselves in prison, but many of us who are not in prison being stigmatized by the thought that
we might be criminals.
[00:24:03.93] And so that’s a big worry. People worry about the way in which the practice is
embedded in a range of for profit capitalist enterprises. And the way in which that can exacerbate
the problem doesn’t help us solve it, and you create a set of vested interests in growing the prison
system.
[00:24:27.19] So there are a range of objections. There’s not really one. There’s a lot of different
things that people are worried about when they raise it. And I think maybe the biggest thing is
they think that there’s a way in which what we’re doing, when we’re relying on incarceration to
deal with various social problems, is we’re avoiding rectifying a range of structural injustices that
are called for. And we deal with the consequences of not rectifying those injustices by just
locking up those who are most marginalized by the system.
[00:25:05.31] And so they want to draw our attention to the need to engage in that structural
transformation by showing how we’re relying on the prison, and maybe law enforcement more
broadly, to deal with problems best dealt with by trying to achieve a just social order.
[00:25:25.73] LARRY BOBO: Those issues that you’ve summarized, at least several of them,
strike me, at least, as I’m doing my pass through the book– and excuse me if I’m engaged in an
entirely too stylized the treatment of your argument and engagement with these issues. But there
were some things you identified as kind of functional critiques of the prison. And I think you’ve
just listed off some of those, that it’s part of a tool for ensuring economic exploitation of certain
peoples, groups, populations. It could have the explicit narrower objective of racial subjugation
of African-Americans or Latin peoples, Indigenous peoples.
[00:26:08.65] And at the same time, it can also be a tool to kind of conceal other intractable
social problems that are the real ills rather than what the state is sort of defining as crime, and
imprisoning people over. And then, of course, one of the points you started with, that it can
become a tool when you’ve given the state this kind of power for silencing and repressing
political resistance and critique of existing state power.
[00:26:37.28] So are those elements, then, are those kind of the functional critiques of the
reliance on prison as a way of dealing with breaking of society’s rules, especially of society, what
it regards as more serious rules?
[00:26:55.63] TOMMIE SHELBY: I think many of those objections tend to be articulated as
forms of functional critique. I should probably say a little bit about what I have in mind by that.
[00:27:05.38] So you often hear and read in abolitionist writings and speeches claims of the sort-
and you hear this in other domains as well– where there’s a practice that people are objecting
to. The practice has some ostensible aim that is maybe good, like public safety. But the claim
will be the system, and then the slogan might be, the system isn’t broken. It’s working the way it
was designed to or the way it’s supposed to.
[00:27:41.56] And when they say that, I take it what they mean is something like, though the
system has this ostensible aim to protect the public from criminal wrongdoing, say, its real aim,
though hidden, latent, disavowed, is really something else. And that real aim could be the things
you just mentioned. It could be political repression. It could be economic exploitation. It could
be racial subordination and so on.
[00:28:08.80] And so you’ll often find in these writings– and again, you see this in a lot of left
wing social criticism– the critique of institutions and practices by suggesting that they have a
nefarious social function that is in some ways hidden. And part of the point of critical theory is to
try to expose that, to highlight it to show actually what’s happening is this other thing.
[00:28:37.51] So this part of the book might be one of the more challenging parts, a little harder
to summarize. It involves a little bit of philosophy of science, a little bit of how to think about
what people are doing there. And I’m trying to make a more general point, maybe beyond the
debate between reformers and abolitionists about what radical social criticism should look like.
And I worry that there’s an over reliance on this form of critique.
[00:29:12.80] And we could talk more about it if you like. But that’s the thrust of it. Now some
of the points you’ve made, I think, could be articulated without framing it in that way. And
there’s still a question about whether they would deliver abolition as a conclusion. But I’m very
skeptical that this form of critique can, when it takes the form of functional critique, can deliver
abolitionist conclusions, even if there’s something to what you’re saying.
[00:29:38.84] LARRY BOBO: | see. And is it that then what kind of makes it a the functional
critique is that these are, in many respects, hidden agendas of the system? They aren’t the kind of
forward public discourse around why we have a prison system.
[00:29:54.82] TOMMIE SHELBY: Exactly.
[00:29:55.33] LARRY BOBO: OK, but they are inescapable consequences of that system.
[00:29:59.86] TOMMIE SHELBY: Inescapable, yes. Insofar as you’re going to have– something
about the practice, is the thought. There’s something about the practice– and you could say this
about other things, too. Maybe you say a similar thing about capitalism or so on– there’s
something about the practice, the way it’s organized, given what it’s really about, that you can’t
really avoid these consequences. That’s sort of the general thought.
[00:30:23.59] LARRY BOBO: Let me pose a slightly different question, then, and that’s whether
there are some other kind of fundamental postulates that animate some of the prison abolitionist
thought that you’re engaged with here. So I thought I caught variants of three of them. One is the
notion that the prison is, in effect, inherently dehumanizing. It really is a form of practice that is
incompatible with respect for basic human dignity, and that that’s kind of an irreducible claim, in
some sense.
[00:31:07.55] Secondly, that imprisonment is, in effect, directly analogous, if you will, to
slavery, and that it is, as a result, illegitimate and reprehensible on its face. It’s just a condition
we do not subject other human beings to because it’s such a violation.
[00:31:27.86] And closely related to that is just the historical or genealogical observation that our
contemporary practice of imprisonment, at least in the US, perhaps in other parts of the world, is
a direct legacy or descendant of slavery as an institution, and that this bulwark is a key element
of the abolitionist case with regard to prisons.
[00:31:56.99] TOMMIE SHELBY: Yeah. I think these are central sorts of objections. And I can
say a little bit about them. So the thought, people mean different things when they say
something’s dehumanizing. So the way I interpret the claim, it’s a claim about when you
understand what’s essential to being human, that there are ways of treating creatures like that that
is inappropriate. So if you think, as I do, that we are rational agents, we are able to act for
reasons, sometimes good, sometimes bad, but we’re able to act for reasons. We have a sense of
justice, and that’s effective so that we can recognize when something’s unjust, and though we
might be tempted to do it anyway, we can refrain from doing.
[00:32:57.86] So if you think we’re beings like that, as I do, there’s a question about whether
imprisonment disrespects us insofar as we’re agents of that sort. That’s the kind of attack on
dignity. And so I spent time trying to explain why I think it doesn’t. I mean, it often does. I don’t
want to be misunderstood. I mean that often, the conditions in prisons and the way the
correctional officers treat people is dehumanizing, the way people get treated like animals,
spoken to as if they were animals like brutes, and mistreated in all kinds of ways that no one
could really accept as appropriate.
[00:33:39.50] But I take it the question here is whether the practice of imprisonment necessarily
entails dehumanizing treatment. And it’s there where I depart from the abolitionists in thinking
that it can be appropriate when it’s a serious harmful wrong that people are engaged in, or where
you’re worried about such behavior, to use incarceration to try to discourage people from
engaging in that kind of behavior when they’re appropriately warned. They know that they
shouldn’t be doing this.
[00:34:15.46] And the imposition of the penalty is one that matches the gravity of the thing
you’re trying to prevent, that it can be a respectful way of responding to human agency to impose
it when people refuse to abide by these really basic, I think inescapable moral requirements to
not treat people in ways that would cause them great harm or great trauma.
[00:34:43.63] So I don’t think it’s dehumanizing. And I think, when you compare it to other
practices that are very similar to prison– whether that be the use of psychiatric hospitals,
sometimes quarantine when it’s serious enough, sometimes people, especially when you’re
talking about adolescents who are dealing with suicide, suicidal tendencies– there’s lots of cases
where I think we would accept that institutional confinement can be inappropriate and not an
attack on human dignity.
[00:35:21.12] And so I’m inclined to think though, while the practice as it exists, especially in the
United States, is often dehumanizing, it’s not inherently so. The questions about slavery, there’s a
way in which is obvious that abolition, the very slogan is built around a comparison with the
struggle to end chattel slavery, and many of the heroes of abolitionists are well-known people in
the abolition movement to end slavery in the United States and the Americas more broadly.
[00:35:57.02] So it’s, I think, natural for people to reach for something that everybody agrees is
grossly unjust like slavery, and to try to show that something that many people think is perfectly
morally acceptable, to show that it’s really like that, it’s like slavery, that’s a kind of form of
social criticism that’s very common. I understand it. I think it’s overdone. I think people have a
tendency to reach for slavery whenever they want to condemn something.
[00:36:32.48] It’s kind of like– and it happens even with racism, the same thing. Everything’s
racism because we’ve all agreed racism is bad. If you can show this is racism, then you got it,
right? But I think that there are real limits here in this domain because it doesn’t really seem to
me– there are so many things wrong with slavery. It’s no one thing. So many things wrong with
slavery.
[00:36:51.62] But what I try to do in the book, it’s like, let me think of the half dozen things that
you could say against slavery, the more serious things. And it doesn’t seem to me that those
objections are inherent features of the practice of imprisonment. So I spent time thinking through
those things to kind of figure, well, it doesn’t seem like it’s an inherent feature, too, that you buy
and sell prisoners, for instance. That might happen. It has happened. But it needn’t be that way.
Doesn’t seem like it implies social death. Prisoners often have a range of constitutional rights, not
all the ones that they should have, but they often do have effective constitutional rights. And
indeed, in some places, they even have a right to vote, like in Vermont and Maine.
[00:37:34.64] So as you walk through the various things you might say against slavery, even
though many of those points do apply to some existing prisons– and I think on that point
abolitionists are right to draw attention to them. Our prisons have too many things in common
with slavery. But I take it the question is whether you could alter the practice in ways to
eliminate the things that are akin to slavery and still have something that we want to call prison.
And it strikes me that the answer to that is yes.
[00:38:10.35] LARRY BOBO: But let me push it on a more practical point. I think about some
of the arguments that sociologist Loic Wacquant has made about how our prison system is
functioning now. And one of the terms he uses for what happens to people swept up in our mass
incarceration order, in a way, is that they’re kind of extruded from the social compact, even after
prison, where, to the extent we can try to do things like eliminate the box, that is, whether you
have to check off if you have a criminal record– I’m sure many employers nonetheless still try to
pursue some check on criminal backgrounds. And it’s clear that if you end up hiring a school bus
driver or a teacher who’s got a criminal background, you’re in trouble as a school district, or
something of that kind, that there’s an imprint that comes from having been so marked that very
hard to undo.
[00:39:15.40] TOMMIE SHELBY: No question. It’s extremely difficult to do. There’s a kind of
stigma that attaches to those who’ve been in prison, sometimes even if they’re acquitted, it
continues to be attached to them. And I wouldn’t want to deny that for a second.
[00:39:32.62] I suppose that that’s a thing we have to think about, whether I think, in a place like
United States, where we’re very resistant to reintegrating people who’ve been to prison and to
society as equals, just like there’s this enormous resistance to allowing people to rejoin us as
fellow members, which is extremely troubling because in a way, part of your justification for
using the practice, rather than maiming or banishing or torturing people and so on is because we
think, this is a humane way to deal with our fellow citizens. People do things that are wrong.
They make mistakes. Sometimes things they do are serious enough that we have to respond in a
serious way. And so we do this.
[00:40:22.90] But we do this because we’re trying to protect others from their harmful
wrongdoing, but in a way that respects them as moral agents, as people who have families and
who have a life after prison. And I think we partly justify doing this because the thought is that
they will rejoin us, and they will rejoin us as an equal with all the rights to go along with that.
[00:40:50.30] The trouble is, in this country and some others, that the public is broadly unwilling
to do that, unwilling to give people access to the basic benefits of a welfare system, to access
education grants, to be unencumbered in looking for jobs, to find public housing if they need
that. And so we have all these restrictions that make it extremely difficult to rejoin, including
sometimes not allowing people to even regain the right to vote, even though that seems to be
changing in a lot of places now.
[00:41:23.04] And all these are ways of keeping them in this kind of position as a kind of
permanent outsider. So I wouldn’t deny that that’s real. But I think the question is whether, with
respect to the debate between reformers and abolitionists, is whether these are correctable things,
or is it something about having the practice that it’s just an unavoidable feature of it, that people
will find themselves in this kind of permanent outsider outcast position.
[00:41:54.79] [MUSIC PLAYING]
[00:42:11.75] LARRY BOBO: Let me ask another set of questions, some of which you’ve
already begun to engage, which is the matter of what are, then, the legitimate uses or rationale
for prisons? It seems to me you engage with several possibilities there. One is that prisons and
the prospect of imprisonment, or actually the experience thereof, may produce a socially useful
or valuable deterrent to engaging in aberrant and harmful behavior.
[00:42:50.58] Another possibility is a sort of incapacitation effect, where let’s say people who
might not be as good a self-control agent, let’s say, who don’t take the message that we don’t
really approve of, say, assaulting other people or driving recklessly, or driving while profoundly
intoxicated and so on, and doing things that are injurious to others. But the more time they’re out
of the population and, in effect, quarantined in some manner, the safer we all are and the greater
enjoyment of life we all can take part in.
[00:43:32.60] And then, of course, there’s the prospect of some emphasis on rehabilitation, where
we’re trying to bring a person to a whole different mode of behavior and engaging with society.
And I guess part of my question here is why isn’t punishment or retribution among the
potentially legitimate uses of the threat of imprisonment and incarceration?
[00:44:08.30] TOMMIE SHELBY: Oh, great. In philosophy of law and theories of punishment,
retribution is discussed a great deal. It has been discussed for many, many years. And there are
certainly philosophers even now who would defend some version of it.
[00:44:25.96] I myself have never really been that attracted to the view. And though I don’t, in
the book, mount a critique of it, since I take it as kind of common ground between me and many
abolitionists to kind of reject retribution as a justification for punishment, I could say a couple of
words about what it is, and what it is that we’re kind of–
[00:44:47.71] LARRY BOBO: Part of the reason I ask about this is some of my own research.
And I’ve done focus groups with both groups of white Americans, Black Americans, and we
would pose a small scenario to them in which, say, a 14-year-old has committed homicide. And
we asked them then, should this teenager be at risk of the death penalty?
[00:45:14.37] And I’m astonished to say that, and a remarkably high fraction of the people in a
variety of focus groups, both Black and white, say absolutely yes. And we’ve talked about a
variety of scenarios in these focus groups. And in one case, a gentleman in the focus group
leaned back and he said, do you all realize what we’ve just done? We have said that a 14-yearold, obviously not a fully developed person, should be executed by the state if they have
committed a crime.
[00:45:51.69] And it was like there was no compunction about saying there should be an
equivalence to what happens, that the character of lay moral reasoning was such that it was easy
to do that. And there was often dissent from one or two voices in our Black focus groups. But in
some ways, there was even more animation. Do the crime, do the time, right? And there really
should be something that felt pretty close to an eye for an eye. And so I don’t know how you
engage that problem of ordinary moral reasoning that’s kind out there in the world if one doesn’t
want to say, yeah, sometimes punishment and retribution are really what this is about.
[00:46:39.09] TOMMIE SHELBY: Yeah, that’s great. I guess I’m not surprised by the findings.
You know, I take it that we have human beings, those of us socialized by western traditions and
so on, it’s not surprising that this would be a sentiment widely embraced, I don’t think. One could
speculate a bit about why that’s so. Some of it, probably, you could tell a kind of social or
biological story about it. It makes perfect sense for communities that are very vulnerable to being
raided and exploited by others, for those societies to be able to survive, people are probably
going to have to be a widespread disposition within it to retaliate when attacked. And that makes
perfect sense.
[00:47:30.28] I can totally see why we would have that. We have lots of tendencies, dispositions
that it would make sense for them to emerge in us. And we have religious traditions that kind of
reinforce those and so on. So I totally get that.
[00:47:48.35] But I think we have to, even with all that said, reflect on whether we want to
embrace those dispositions and tendencies. So it can be true that even now, there are certain
kinds of things, if people were to say them to me or act in a way, I’d probably become aggressive
in response to it. But I think it’s important for us to reflect on whether that’s the right way to
respond to things.
[00:48:14.83] And I think it’s hard to explain. I guess that’s the reason why I find myself kind of
rejecting retributivism. I simply can’t understand the thought that because this person did
something wrong, that they deserve to suffer. If someone could help me put those two things
together, I might be able to get on board. But I just don’t see how you can explain, how you
could justify the thought, OK, this person did wrong, we’re gonna make them suffer not because
that’s going to provide us any public safety. It’s not going to make them any better. It’s just like,
that’s how we’re going to respond. I have a hard time making sense of it, to be honest.
[00:48:59.80] And so it leads me to think–
[00:49:01.48] LARRY BOBO: And in that, you mean in terms of ethical or moral reasoning
sense.
[00:49:05.23] TOMMIE SHELBY: I can understand it in an explanatory sense. I can understand
why dispositions of that sort would emerge and be preserved over time. I don’t have any
difficulty understanding, and why, even though I think it probably is best understood as a
practice meant to deter people because you put people on notice that if they attack they’re not
going to get away with it. There’s going to be a response. Being disposed to do that can have a
deterrent effect.
[00:49:38.50] But I think what happens is one internalizes it as a kind of a moral sentiment that
they deserve to suffer. They did me wrong. They deserve to suffer and so on. So I would defend
incarceration as a penalty for serious wrongdoing on the grounds that helps to prevent such
wrongdoing. Can’t stamp it out. Probably nothing can. But it can bring it down to maybe
tolerable levels, joined with other practices.
[00:50:12.62] And so I’m led to think, rather than fall back on the idea that retaliation is justified
or something like that in itself, to think that sometimes, by responding to criminal wrongdoing
with imposition of a penalty can discourage that kind of activity. We know this even outside of
the context of imprisonment. There are a range of penalties that we impose. And we do that not
because we’re necessarily trying to make the person suffer because we think that in itself is good,
but because we think it might discourage people from engaging in that kind of behavior, whether
that’s reckless driving or other kinds of things we think.
[00:50:49.67] So in this case, that’s one reason that we might engage. And I think you could
justify to people that look, the wrongs are serious enough– people are going to be harmed,
sometimes killed– it’s important for us to try to prevent that if we can. And so by setting up a
practice of imposing penalty when people do those things, you put people on notice that this
would happen, and that could potentially discourage them from doing it.
[00:51:15.63] But of course, we know that sometimes people won’t be discouraged. There are
people who, despite the fact that this threat looms over us all– that’s part of what it is to live
under a criminal justice system is that we’re all subject to this– many of us may not be tempt to
do these things anyway. But even if we are tempted, we might be discouraged by the presence of
it.
[00:51:36.35] But some people, they won’t be discouraged, and they might engage in these things
anyway. And sometimes you do have to, as you mentioned, sometimes you have to incapacitate
people if the harms they’re going to engage in are serious enough, and you have real reason to
believe that people are in imminent danger.
[00:51:54.48] So I think that can be appropriate, and also part of how we justify the practice.
And I think sometimes in many cases, the kind of rehabilitation efforts we might engage in might
be best engaged in with people who are not locked up. There are lots of rehabilitation you might
do with people in a way you might say kind of outpatient way, if you like.
[00:52:18.74] But it might be, if you’re dealing with someone who has some serious problems,
say, controlling their anger, or they’re sort of really disposed to act aggressively toward people in
ways that they find difficult to resist, you might have to hold them while you try to rehabilitate
them. And so I think that three-pronged approach to crime prevention, of general deterrence,
incapacitation, and rehabilitation is how you would justify it.
[00:52:51.42] LARRY BOBO: And so part of what I wonder, then, is what is the abolitionist
response? So for example, you discuss– I think it’s in this section of the book– the practice of
restorative justice of some kind, or really powerful illustrations of cases of forgiveness and what
it takes to accomplish that, if you will. So it makes me wonder, someone who really was a
committed abolitionist, say, what would Angela Davis say to the claim you’ve just made if she
were going to stick with the abolitionist line?
[00:53:32.19] TOMMIE SHELBY: A range of things. I think abolitionists generally, just they
don’t think that prisons deter. So there’s a factual question here.
[00:53:43.26] LARRY BOBO: So then how do they deal with bad behavior, as it were? s are
they really assuming the accomplishment of some utopian state where there kind of are no
violations of respectful decent treatment of everyone else by everyone else?
[00:53:59.85] TOMMIE SHELBY: Well, I think they probably think that if you could transform
society and the world in a way to make it more egalitarian, and rather than punished, you treat
those who have substance use disorders or who have mental illnesses of various sorts, you would
treat those rather than punish people who have those problems, you’re going to probably bring
down the problem of crime dramatically.
[00:54:36.87] So there’s a question of what do you do with what remains? So you might think
that– again, it’s hard to know, but maybe you could bring it down to a point that it’s actually
lower than it is now. There’s a lot of people who are committing crimes that never get caught,
they never get punished and so on. So it’s not as if it’s unheard of that there are people out there
who are a danger to others who we never really deal with.
[00:55:05.32] But if you brought it down to a low enough level, you might think that that’s a
level that we should tolerate without resorting to incarceration to respond to. And what you do
for the people who do engage in harmful wrongdoing, you have a more victim-centered approach
to the problem. You try to attend to the needs of those who have been harmed by others, both
their ordinary physical necessities, but also their mental health needs.
[00:55:39.15] You try to create a situation where they can move beyond the trauma that was
involved, which usually involves some kind of effort at restorative justice, some kind of way of
getting those who’ve wronged them to acknowledge what they’ve done, to apologize, make
repair, restitution for it, to demonstrating some kind of way that they’re turning away from that
kind of conduct. These are ways of bringing closure to harmful wrongdoing and allowing people
to move past it.
[00:56:07.93] So you can imagine a kind of two-pronged response. On the one hand, a lot of the
violence and serious harm that’s happening is a symptom of other structural injustices. What
remains is either some problems with people dealing with substance abuse disorders or mental
illnesses that could perhaps be treated. And if there’s still some left, then you could respond to
that with various forms of restorative justice. This would be a better, more decent way for us to
respond to these problems than, as they might say, lock people away in cages.
[00:56:50.92] So I myself am agnostic on whether we could create those conditions. I don’t
know. I think it’s worth aspiring to try to create those kinds of conditions. So I find myself
thinking that’s a worthy ideal to strive for. I don’t know that we’re in a position right now that we
can say confidently that if we were to create those conditions, we wouldn’t need prisons. But
maybe we wouldn’t. So I think there’s something to that position.
[00:57:25.98] LARRY BOBO: All right. Two probably unfair questions. One of them is would
you say that there is a sort of political project or policy agenda, in Professor Tommie Shelby’s
view, of the challenge of incarceration? And secondly, and this is the most unfair of the
questions, what about defund the police? Is that a politically viable project?
[00:57:58.50] TOMMIE SHELBY: That last one.
[00:58:00.54] LARRY BOBO: I said it wasn’t a fair question.
[00:58:03.12] TOMMIE SHELBY: I’ll see what I can think what I can say. I guess the policy
agenda was already kind of articulated in my previous book, Dark Ghettos, where I was really
trying to think about, for me, I feel like you’ve got ghettos, barrios, reservations and so on. And a
lot of the people in prison, they’re coming from these places. The prisons filled with people from
these places.
[00:58:27.14] And so it seems to me that responding to the structural injustices that create that
kind of concentrated disadvantage is the religion. And there’s no one thing. There’s just a range
of things that have to be responded to, whether that’s about how you handle employment, what
kind of subsidies are appropriate to people who are deeply disadvantaged, tax code. There’s a
range of issues right there. So these are the broadly egalitarian policy agenda.
[00:59:01.17] I think in the criminal justice realm, I think trying to use incarceration to deal with
the social problems that are created by deep systemic injustice is a really morally perilous kind of
thing to be engaged in. I think sometimes you have to if the thing is serious enough. So I myself
do favor pretty radical decarceration, that is, to make efforts to really limit the number of people
who we put in prison, even now, under these kind of conditions that are far from just.
[00:59:36.79] So that might be how do you handle the people who are merely accused of crimes
that haven’t been convicted of crimes.
[00:59:46.15] LARRY BOBO: Who are often spending a long time in jail.
[00:59:49.15] TOMMIE SHELBY: A really long time.
[00:59:50.21] LARRY BOBO: Yes.
[00:59:51.47] TOMMIE SHELBY: I don’t see how you can justify it. [INAUDIBLE] don’t really
rely, the way we do, on cash bail the way that we do. These are people who are accused of,
haven’t even been shown to have committed a crime. And yet we will hold them for months,
sometimes years before we resolve the matter. And I don’t think you could possibly justify that.
[01:00:10.08] So it does seem to me people who are engaged in bail reform and trying to have it
be the case that really only the people who you have strong evidence are an imminent danger to
others, do you hold them pretrial. That all would get a lot of people out of prison, and also allow
a lot of people to keep their jobs if they have them, because once you go in, it’s like it’s all over.
And as you know, the stain of that just follows you. And it’s like, how are you going to feed
yourself?
[01:00:43.13] But also, there’s just overcriminalization. There’s just a bunch of things that don’t
need to be felonies. And we are in a position technologically now– and some abolitionists will
hate this thought– but we have ways of containing people through electronic monitoring that will
allow them to keep their jobs and to stay in their homes. So some of the crimes that people are
engaged in are not ones that we have to fear grave danger to others. I don’t see that we need to
resort to imprisonment to discourage that kind of conduct. We have other ways of discouraging
that.
[01:01:29.83] So the kind of policy that I would favor is one that really narrowed the range of
things that would bring about an imposition of a prison sentence to really the things that cause
really great harm, the kind of harm you can’t repair, that cause a kind of lasting trauma that
people can’t really get over readily. Those are the kinds of things I think where you want to resort
to incarceration.
[01:02:04.13] So I do really favor pretty radical decarceration, I think, across a range of different
domains. So at least within that– and lots of organizations are doing that kind of work that I
think is really important. And there’s lots of great reporting, I think, being done on it, too, the
Marshall Project and others, to bring to light the efforts that are being made in these domains.
[01:02:31.96] On defund, sometimes the slogan– I’m always hesitant to talk about the police,
you know. I’ve studied policing to some extent. I don’t consider myself an expert on policing. I
understand the thought behind defund. I take it that the idea is they think the institution, the
practice is pretty corrupt, and at least the United States, and that the police don’t really provide
much in the way of public safety, and that the money that we spend on them would be better
spent elsewhere on some of the things we’ve already talked about, in fact.
[01:03:14.51] So this is complex because you can tell me better than I can tell you about where
the empirical literature is on this. It does seem to me, and I’ve relied on many of our colleagues
to try to get clear about this, it does seem that effective policing can help to reduce serious
violence.
[01:03:41.87] That research seems pretty strong. I’ve looked at a lot of it, a lot of reviews of it,
talked to Rob Sampson and others to figure out what should I be reading. And it seems like a lot
of studies have been done across a range of countries. It’s not just the ones that are United States.
And it seems like it can help to discourage proactive place-based policing based in real data, not
just racial stereotypes, can actually help to bring down these kinds of.
[01:04:11.21] So I myself, while I think the police are kind of a menace to many people of color,
I’m not inclined to dismiss the practice altogether. I think it has a role to play. And I think, in
fact, I don’t think that imprisonment can have the deterrent effect that I’m suggesting that it has in
the absence of effective policing.
[01:04:40.01] So I myself am not inclined toward– if defund means abolish the police, I don’t
favor it.
[01:04:48.99] LARRY BOBO: So let me ask one final question, then, and thank you for this very
rich discussion so far. And that is, what do you hope people do with the idea of prison abolition?
What role do you want this book to play, and what effect would you hope to see it have?
[01:05:09.61] TOMMIE SHELBY: Yeah. Well, I think with philosophy, in general, like I say,
my approach to these questions is always, what should I think about? I mean, philosophy is done
in the first person. I don’t write these things where I think, I’ve got it all figured out. All I’ve got
to do now is figure out how to persuade everybody else to do what I already want. There’s more
so the project of writing a book like this is a project of thinking through a question that I don’t, at
least initially, know what the answer is.
[01:05:40.42] And what you try to do is you do that in a way where you might help others who
are also thinking about the question. So I think it’s a question for those people who they’ve heard
of abolition, they might be intrigued by the idea, might be tempted by the idea, but they don’t
know exactly what to think. And I’m hoping that reading my book might help them sort through
the questions.
[01:06:01.15] They might land in a different place than where I land. But the hope is that by
trying to think through the issues in a kind of step by step way and in a forthright way, it can help
people decide whether this is a cause they should join and participate in, or whether they should
do something else.
[01:06:24.62] I guess as a secondary hope, the hope is that for those who are already pretty
committed abolitionists, that they will take my argument seriously. Even if I’m wrong, I think
some of the arguments that they present for their view have, I think, some pretty deep flaws, and
that they should think about whether they want to rest their position on arguments of that sort.
[01:06:53.48] And I also hope that they, at least some who sometimes can be quite aggressive in
their critique of people who advocate reform, that they might see that there’s maybe much more
shared with those who advocate reform– at least those of us who wouldn’t limit ourselves to
criminal justice reform, but also think the society itself, especially US society, needs to be
transformed– they would see us not as enemies who are complicit in maintaining an unjust
system, but as people who they might work with to try to improve our society and improve the
lives of those who we, unfortunately, sometimes have to imprison.
[01:07:32.50] Whether it will have that effect, only time will tell.
[01:07:35.26] LARRY BOBO: Only time will tell. But I think the odds are very good on both
hopes that it’s going to have the effect you want. Certainly as someone who’s interested in these
questions, I found it an enormously engaging and enlightening read, and forced me to be more
systematic about a few ideas. And I don’t doubt that many of those who might well be in the
camp of committed abolitionists are going to have to engage the argument pretty seriously.
[01:08:00.10] So thank you, Professor Shelby, for joining me here on Upon Further Review. And
I can wholeheartedly recommend this book and Professor Shelby’s body of work to all of you.
Thank you so much.
[01:08:14.05] TOMMIE SHELBY: Thanks for having me. Been a pleasure.
[01:08:15.63] [MUSIC PLAYING]