Factually! with Adam Conover - Should Prison Be Reformed, or Abolished? with Tommie Shelby

Episode Date: April 10, 2024

The American prison system is in shambles. Rehabilitation efforts fall short, recidivism rates soar, and the numbers show that our incarceration system fails to actually make us any safer. While the notion of abolishing prisons might sound radical, entertaining its principles could help cast light on the shortcomings of our current system and steer us toward a more just society. This week, Adam sits down with Tommie Shelby, a philosopher and professor of African-American studies at Harvard, who authored The Idea of Prison Abolition. Together, they discuss the historical of prison abolition, its feasibility, and its relationship with the practicalities of prison reform. Find Tommie's book at at factuallypod.com/booksSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. I don't know the truth. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's all right. That's okay. I don't know anything.

Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. I'm Adam Conover. I'm a music critic. I'm a music critic. I'm a music critic. I'm a music critic.

I'm a music critic. I'm a music critic. I'm a music critic. I'm a music critic. I'm a music critic. I'm a music critic. I'm a music critic. I'm a music critic. I'm a music critic. I'm a music critic. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually, I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again.

Mass incarceration is maybe the great moral and policy failure of our time. America has the largest prison population on the planet and you can bet it's not filled with white corporate criminals. Although only 13% of Americans are black, 38% of prisoners are, which means that you end up in prison just as much because of who you are as what you do.

And the results of mass incarceration are devastating for the long-term prospects of those imprisoned, for their families on the outside, and the communities they come from. And guess what? It's not even that great for anybody else in society. Because rehabilitation in our country is a joke, recidivism is incredibly high, and what we're left with is an insanely punitive system that doesn't even really make us safer according to the data. So, many people have asked, why do we have an incarceration system like this at all? Could we imagine a world without prisons?

Now, to be sure, prison abolition is a radical idea. Because prisons are so woven into the fabric of our society and our systems of justice that it's hard to imagine America, or really any other country, without them. But it is an idea that is worth taking seriously. Because if we do, it can point to what is truly unjust about our system and how we could imagine a better world, especially if we dissect it using the best tools that we have to understand ideas, philosophy.

And this week on the show, we are gonna do exactly that. But before we get into it, I just wanna remind you that if you wanna support this show and all the conversations we bring you every single week, you can do so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad free. We have a bunch of other great community features as well, and we'd love to have you.

And if you want to come see me on the road, doing standup comedy in a city near you, head to adamconover.net for tickets and tour dates. And now let's get to today's guest. His name is Tommy Shelby, and he's a philosopher and a professor of African-American studies at Harvard. And while he himself does not identify as an abolitionist,

his book, The Idea of Prison Abolition, does an incredible job of taking the ideas of abolition seriously, steelmanning them, if you will, seeing what they have to offer and how they can point us towards a more just world and society. I know you are gonna love this conversation, so please welcome Tommy Shelby.

Tommy, thank you so much for being on the show. It is a pleasure, thanks for having me. So the idea of prison abolition has been around for a while. It's really grown in the last few years in American discourse. Where does it come from and what has led to this resurgence in the last few years in American discourse. Where does it come from and what has led to this resurgence in the idea in your view? It is an old idea.

You can find a lot of people in the 19th century defending it, various versions of it. Often many of these people are associated with the anarchist movement. But in more recent years, I think it's the modern abolitionist movement, what you find is there's a movement in light of a range of prison riots and black radical movement in the late 60s and early 70s. You see an emerging kind of anti-prison movement often associated with black power. prison movement often associated with Black Power. And some years later, you get a more theoretical, if you like, version of abolitionist ideas, largely in the work of Angela Davis

as a kind of one of the, I think, most articulate and influential abolitionists and American abolitionist movement. So that's largely what it comes out of. It's largely a left-wing movement, though it comes in many different ideological varieties, some of them associated with Marxism, but some of them associated with forms of Christian pacifism, and some of them associated with forms of and some of them associated with forms of anarchism, as I mentioned. So there's a wide variety,

but you see it now cracking into the mainstream in a way in which it hadn't in the past. And you're a political philosopher. What was your interest in the idea and how do you approach it in this book? Well, I mean, I've been thinking about the justification of punishment for a long time. It's a classic question in political philosophy, you know, even comes up in Plato, but it runs

throughout the Western tradition of philosophy thinking about, you know, how can you justify this practice that imposes harm on other people? Even if it seems like it's doing it for good reasons, it clearly has a huge impact on negative impact in our lives, not only the people who are punished, but others as well. But that debate within philosophy is usually pretty abstract. I mean, it doesn't really talk that much about the form that the punishment might take. It's more that the prison is kind of assumed in the background and not a kind of thing that kind of gets focused on this,

that this particular form of punishment. And that does arise in the case of capital punishment, what people do talk about, you know, executing people. But the prison itself gets a lot less scrutiny as a penalty. And I really think it was important to bring that kind of abstract discussion around punishment with this practice that we're familiar with, but doesn't really get the kind of critical reflection that I think that really warrants. I'm curious, do you think there is in our current system of incarceration, is there a consistent philosophy behind it?

Like, is there an idea in American life, in the judicial system, in the criminal justice system, that is coherent about why we punish or incarcerate people in the way that we do? Because sometimes I think about it and I go, why do we do this? It doesn't, does it rehabilitate? Does it punish?

None of these things, none of these explanations seem to add up to me. You know, I don't think there's anything like consensus on what the justification is in the United States. I mean, it's interesting. You know, in the eighties, there was a big movement of victims of crime to, you know, have truth in sentencing because a lot of people weren't doing their full

sentence and they were upset about this. And so there was a whole movement around this and there were hearings and then there was a sentencing commission and a Senate to rethink sentencing guidelines. And it's interesting, I've sort of read through a lot of that work and they don't really take a position on the justification of punishment. What they say is that, well, you know, there's deterrence, there's rehabilitation and they call just desserts, which philosophers call retributivism or retribution. But they don't really take a position on like what the point of it is. I mean,

we've seen a movement away from rehabilitation as a kind of goal within the US prison system. Really? Yeah, just in terms of like the infrastructure and the amount of money you spend on in prison services to try to prepare people to reenter society is much less focused on that. Like college programs and things like that, yeah, have been cut massively. That's right. And so what you get mostly is, you know, some combination of incapacitation, just holding

people so they can't harm people, at least not people who are outside of prison. And maybe some sense of deterrence for the people, either for those people who've experienced it, maybe they won't repeat it, or for people who just are on the outside who never experienced it, just a fear that they might experience it. That tends to be the rationalist mostly in vote, though I think a lot of Americans, as a matter of fact, are mostly drawn to retribution. That is, they think people who do bad things deserve to suffer some deprivation, depending on how bad a thing it was that they did.

And they should be punished in proportion to how bad a thing was that they did or how bad they are. I think that probably is the thing that's most compelling to a lot of ordinary people. Yeah, I've felt that a lot myself recently because I sort of grew up thinking, well, is it deterrence? Is it rehabilitation?

Is it simply to sequester people away from us? And then when you're looking at those arguments, you start to go, well, it's so expensive to have the prison, you know, there are better ways to do rehabilitation, there's better ways, you know, et cetera. They don't really hold up. And then I started to realize just over the last year, oh wait, the real justification that no one says is that the public to a certain degree almost demands blood from people who have they perceived to have done wrong.

That it's almost a way to forestall the mob, like taking someone and just undergoing a violent mob justice. Well, if we give the public the impression that someone is being punished, they will be happier. And I started to realize that when, over the last couple years, the sort of reporting and public response

to the crime wave narrative in the last couple years, regardless of how much you wanna say that crime wave was real or imagined by the media, there was a huge upsurge of people saying, we want punishment, we wanna see the bad guys punished. And that seems to often not be acknowledged by, when we're having these conversations, that that's a real reason,

that's a real motivation for the system that we have, is to hurt people because it feels good when we see people who we perceive as bad being hurt. I think that's right. I mean, politicians definitely understand this. Yeah. Maybe academics and other intellectuals, liberal minded people may not take it as seriously,

but certainly politicians understand that this is a current and the public. And if you can, whether through propaganda or misinformation or whatnot, persuade people that they're just really horrible people and there's a crime wave and so on, and that can, you could, that allows people to ramp up the punishment and it's not much of a political cost to politicians, to being really draconian in that, because it does satisfy, as you say, a perceived need that people have. People think they need this to happen, and either for some combination of public safety,

but probably more often a sense of vengeance and having that satisfied. I think it's important for us to have open discussions about revenge and retribution as motives, because I think there's a lot to be said against that as a way to approach criminal justice in a democratic society. Well, yeah, what argument would you make against that motive? Well, I mean, there are many things to be said against. I mean, the principal idea is that people deserve to suffer because of things that they've done wrong. And that, I think intuitively, I think it probably hits a kind of deep impulse to retaliate

when you've been wrong. That's in us, but it's hard to explain why, morally speaking, it's good that people suffer, right? So you might think it's always bad, is what I think. It's always bad that people suffer. It's never good. It's not intrinsically good.

And the only thing where you could justify in making people suffer in this way is because you're trying to prevent a worse thing. It can be that it's good in itself. I think it's hard to explain. But I'm also compelled by the thought that even if you could explain that, like maybe you have some justification for it, maybe it's rooted in theological beliefs that you have. I think for many people it is. a sense of their faith and what they read and whatever sacred text that they have allegiance to. That can't be the basis for criminal law in a democratic society.

It's a sectarian reason for a practice that affects us all. Many of us, of course, do not subscribe to these religious views. That's the legitimate justification to say that, well, my God plunges people out of a sense of vengeance. I'm like, well, mine doesn't, or if you're not a person of faith like that. I think you need a public reason, a reason that your other citizens

in a pluralistic society can accept and be compelled by. And I think it's hard to give justification for retribution that satisfies, I think, that democratic condition. Yeah, well, that is such a clear explanation. I mean, I think off the top of my head, and look, as I often say on this show, I have a bachelor's degree in philosophy, so I'm not trying to tangle with you here,

but I'll offer my own off the top of my head justification. I think the best justification you could give for vengeance is that it feels good. Some things we think are good because they feel good. I think sex is good because it feels good, for example, or art is good because it feels good. And you could say, well, vengeance feels good. You know, all of Quentin Tarantino's movies are justified.

You know, they're all acts of vengeance, and it's nice to watch Django go and murder all those people who wronged him in the past. Feels good for him, feels good for us watching it. That's basically all Quentin needs to make the movie. But you make a great point that that is not a good enough justification for building a societal system. Because then you're building societal system around, hey we've got these massive prisons,

we've got this court industrial complex, we've got police, we're spending billions of dollars, just to make some people feel good and other people feel bad, and it serves no real other purpose. And yet, it kind of feels like that's the system we have. Doesn't it, Tommy? Like, I mean, a lot of it is when you look at the justification for, you know, the mayor of a major city saying, well, we need to add cops and expand prisons

rather than reform the criminal justice system. What they're usually responding to is pure rage on the part of their constituents who say, I'm angry because I haven't felt the vengeance that I want to feel. I, you know, I'm a victim or I feel like a victim and something bad happened and I want to see somebody punished and that hasn't happened. I don't care if it doesn't make me safer.

I just want to feel that way. It seems like that's what's actually going on, even though in your view, it's not a good justification. Do you agree? I do. I mean, I think that is the reality on the ground that politicians do things for many reasons and often not for reasons of justice, right? I mean, so sometimes they're trying to get reelected

or get elected and this sells. I mean, telling people who, if they've been convinced that there are horrible people out there and there's a crime wave and so on, people are getting away with it, it's an easy move to crack down on it. And it's actually, you know, less expensive to do that

than to provide the kinds of programming, social programs, or retributive efforts to raise taxes, to fund those things, than it is to do those kinds of things, promote equality and social welfare than it is to have dronyan, criminal justice policies. We spend an enormous amount of money on police and prisons and we don't need to get into the numbers.

I think there are some folks who might say, hey, the programs I propose are cheaper, but it is more politically difficult to put those programs into place as well, because there's so much of the system is pushing in the direction of more cracking down, more incarceration, et cetera. But sorry, please continue your point.

No, I mean, I've, people do dispute how much it would cost. It depends on how much social change you think is required, right? So how much it might cost to do something other than spend more money on cops and prisons. But it's also just true that the public is more prepared to spend money on cops than they are to create a fair society

or to attend to the needs of the worst off. So there's much, those kinds of appeals, as many apologisms have tried over the years, they try to appeal to people, look, we're a really, really rich society. It's kind of ridiculous. We got all these poor people. It sounds like we should do something about that,

but that doesn't, it's hard to get anybody to support that. But it's pretty easy to get people to support more police or putting more people in prison, especially if those people are black and brown and thought of as inherently dangerous. Yeah, and if we have a criminal justice system and an incarceration system that is built on the lust for vengeance and making, satisfying that desire,

well, that means we end up applying that system towards people who haven't actually hurt anybody, but have simply, you know, are being judged by those other people. You know, if it's a, I want people I don't actually heard anybody, but have simply, you know, are being judged by those other people. You know, if it's a, I want people I don't like to be punished. Well, then that might include people of color. It might include people who have addictions,

if that's considered to be a moral failing, which I would say most people probably incorrectly think of addiction as a moral failing, et cetera. And so then it leaves this propensity, hey, let's throw all those people in a place where we can't see them. That makes me happy. If all those people I think are, you know,

horrible blights on society, they're being punished, then I feel good about it. And that's when you get to the conclusion that I feel like I've come to in all my years of looking at the criminal justice system that in many ways is just designed to take elements that are seen by the dominant culture in America as undesirable and shove them away

and say, we don't wanna look at these people, let's put them in a little box somewhere. That seems often what it's designed to do. Does it feel that way to you? Or I guess maybe a better question is what, it seems as though you have examined work of people who feel the same way I do and have gone to conclusions

beyond that about how we should reform the criminal justice system. What do you think about it? I think the prison system plays many roles, right? So one of the, and many of them are nefarious, right? So there, the roles you've mentioned, there are a lot of people who are stigmatized, marginalized, thought to be undesirable, and people don't really want to

regard them or don't regard them as equals, and they fear them. And as a result, they want them removed so they don't have to deal with them. And maybe they also have hostility toward them and they don't mind that they're being harmed in this way and take some pleasure in that. So I think there's no question that that plays a role in penal policy and how to electorate response to demands for, say, more police or longer sentences. So you can have a practice that plays a role like that, that's really terrible, but that also does some positive things too. Right. So it can be the case that, and I think there's much to

be said against a system that does those kinds of things and other things that are there, I think are clearly unjust. I think what reformers think is that what you try to do is remove those elements and keep the positive dimension, which has to do with securing public safety. I don't think that using prisons should be the first thing we do. I don't think it should be our default response to harmful wrongdoing. There are many other things we can do besides that. And some of the penalties, and if you want to apply a penalty, there are other penalties that don't involve incarceration for long periods of time.

Genic is extremely harmful not only to those in prison, but to their families and their communities. But there are some times when you do have to resort to such drastic measures. I think in the cases where the person has done something that causes great and irreparable harm like in a case of murder or violent sexual assaults that cause lasting trauma that people don't often don't recover from, it's just extremely important that we prevent those things. Yes. And we should try other ways of preventing it, but sometimes we don't have a good alternative. And so the question is whether you can have a practice that tries to discourage people from

doing those kinds of actions or incapacitates them if they can't be deterred, whether we can do that in a way that you can really justify to the people who are harmed by the practice. And I think that's kind of the difficult philosophical question, if there is one here. When you say justify the people who are harmed by the practice, just your last sentence, can you just expand on a little bit? Because I'm sure trying to follow up. Yeah.

So if you think this is a harmful practice, so I think it's bad that people suffer underprivileged. And in general, I think it's particularly bad when they suffer or harm because they're incarcerated for long periods of time, separated from their family, lose their freedom. It throws them all off in all kinds of ways. And it's very hard to re-enter society

and be productive and content. So if you're going to do that, I think you need to have a good justification to the people who you're going to impose this harm on. I don't think it's not just that you did something wrong. I think it's that what you've done is caused really great and irreparable harm to others. And not only should you not have done that, but you could have not done that. And that opportunity to avoid the penalty that is part of our justification to them.

That is, you don't have to face this arm of the state, this violent arm of the state, this violent arm of the state, if you can restrain yourself in these ways, and you can restrain yourself in these ways as part of our justification to them. That's not the whole justification. I think we also want to make sure that people have a social environment that's conducive to them developing the right kind of habits and dispositions and, and, and kind of frames of mind that allow them to comply with what we're demanding of them through the law. Right. You don't want to just say, oh, you could have done it. You could have just refrained from doing that when you've put them in situations

where they're probably going to be very inclined or tempted to do those things. So we owe them more than just due process. We'd owe them that, of course. But we also owe a social environment that's conducive to people living up to their duties as citizens and fellow human beings. Yeah, I mean, I think often, you know, I did not grow up in a neighborhood in suburban Long Island where, you know, the only form of social organization was a gang, which many people do grow up in that circumstance, where there are some towns, if you grow up in that town, you either join a gang or you're in trouble. And then once you're in the gang,

you are put in a position of having to maybe make a decision that you're talking about. I never had a decision like that to make growing up. maybe make a decision that you're talking about. I never had a decision like that to make growing up. You know, I, and so no one ever asked that of me. Hey, do the right thing at this moment or you will face the violent arm of the state. Never came up in my life because of my background.

There are other folks who, because of their backgrounds, where they grew up in this country, had to face that problem every day, had to face that problem every day, had to face that question every day. And to me, that's when it starts to seem very unfair, right? Because like, well, all right, someone fucked up one day out of, it happened to a hundred times. And then once they fuck up and then they're in prison

for a hundred years or whatever. Whereas, other people are walking around never having had to face this going, oh geez, make sure you do the right thing or that won't happen to you. You know, it's a very, that's when it starts to seem very perverse. I agree.

I mean, we're, I mean, we, you've got a public and a political class that is really complicit in a lot of the crime that they punish. And that, that's something that has to be addressed. Like we're playing a role in either creating or enabling or conditions that we know from psychology and sociology and economics that is going to lead to high crime rates. But we don't do anything about that. So now that I think for me, that means that a lot of the punishing that we do, we don't really have a good justification for doing it.

And we should really pull way back from using, especially incarceration, but maybe other kinds of penalties to try to deal with it until we can try to get our stuff in order. Right. But it may be that in the meantime, that it particularly serious crimes and I tend to focus on on murder and rapes because of the kind of harm that they do. That's different from someone stealing your car or whatever, right? You can get a new car, if there's money,

you can deal with that, right? You can always find a way to kind of repair the situation, but you can in these other cases. So I think in those cases, even in a society like our own, that is, I think, unjust in a range of ways, and that makes it very difficult for a lot of disadvantaged people to comply with what we generally would expect from people.

In that kind of situation, we should really pull back and say, look, we're a lot of these crimes are minor, and we just have to kind of absorb that in other ways. And maybe that's a way of leaning on rehabilitation in non-carceral spaces, that is, so like forms of surfaces and treatment options that happen outside of the prison, that maybe you can, if not compel people to do, you can strongly encourage them to do by providing that as an alternative penalty, to say, you must be in this set of programs. Maybe they're rooted in the community

that help you to handle, deal with your anger, to deal with, you have a substance abuse issue. And if you do that program, then we won't impose these harsher penalties. And that might encourage them, more people to do that. That requires money too, to do that. But I think that would be a reasonable response to a range of communal wrongdoing

that probably wouldn't occur, at least not at the level that it occurs in if it weren't a society that was so unequal with so many really adjusted disadvantaged people. Yeah. Today's episode is brought to you by one of my absolute favorite sponsors, Thrive Market. You know, me and my girlfriend were happy Thrive Market customers long before they even

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That's T-H-R-I-V-E market.com slash factually. Thrivemarket.com slash factually, your belly and your dog will thank you. That is such a wonderfully nuanced view that you present of incarceration, of when we might use it and when we might want to avoid it. But there's a range of thinkers, you mentioned Angela Davis, who take a more radical view that the system is so unfair, so fucked up and deeply that it's impossible to make those

reforms and that it needs to be removed to some degree, right? I assume that's a fair characterization of abolition. So what sort of arguments do those folks make? And yeah, how do they go? Yeah, they have lots of different arguments. I mean, part of what I try to do in the book is engage what I think are the strongest arguments for abolition. My book is not the case against

abolition or anything. I'm really trying to learn from them, even though I'm not a radical abolitionist. I think I have learned from engaging with their arguments. Some of the things that they're up to have to do with a broader vision of society that I think is often at the root of it is that they, they're really for a much more egalitarian society than we have. And so they're about the business of building that. And they think that many of the people who find themselves in prison, and we know this, right, that know some large percentage like the last time I checked you could have you know some 80% of the people don't even have a high school diploma many of them are coming from the poorest neighborhoods either urban or rural many of the minority so what

they're often about is they think we're instead of being about the business of creating that society that really wants our allegiance and support the good and What they're often about is they think we're, instead of being about the business of creating that society that really wants our allegiance and support the good and just society, what we do is we just try to contain these problems that are created by living in an unjust one. And one of the ways we do that is just warehousing a bunch of people who we don't have a way to deal with other than that way. Because we're not gonna try to meet their needs. We're not gonna ensure that they have good employment

and good housing and so on. So we just kind of warehouse them elsewhere, sort of that they're out of sight. So we're not gonna feed people, we're not gonna educate people. And then when they get so hungry or crazy that they do something horrible, well, then we'll just, when it actually affects us,

we'll just warehouse those people away. We'll deal with the symptom, but we'll never address the cause. That's right. I think that's a big part of it. Sometimes I think they, I mean, I think the probably strongest argument that they have for taking action now

to dramatically reduce number of people we have in prison is that the way we handle the problem of crime is not terribly effective. I mean, having really long sentences doesn't really seem to bring the crime rate down significantly. And so a lot of the argument is based on an analysis of the history and of the social facts of the situation where they just think, this is not really a good way to deal with this problem. Let's try some other ways, right? So that's a big part of it.

Some of it, I mean, so you could think of their objections as coming in two forms, right? So one form is this is an inherently wrong practice. We should really just not have a practice like this. And there you'll see things like comparisons to slavery or things like that. Practices that there's no form in which you will be acceptable, right? So part of it is just to make a case against it on moral grounds. And the other part of

it is to make a case on grounds of effectiveness to just really get into the nitty gritty of the empirical reality and ask yourself, is this really the best way to handle the problem? Okay, well, do we have alternatives? And I suppose there's a kind of third category that's more politically strategic, if I can put it that way. That if they're trying to get people by having them see the limits of building up this mass criminal justice system, the limits of that and how it distracts us

and from the social injustices we really should be trying to address. We're over here just focusing on our perception of crime going crazy or something like that. When really what our attention should be on all the ways in which there's, the society is rife with exploitation and oppression. And that's what we really should be attending to. And actually, if we attended to that, then we would see that we don't need to spend as much money and resources trying to contain a problem that's created by the fact that we're

not dealing with that. If you get what I mean. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, I can make that concrete here in LA where I live. You'll hear politicians say, oh, people don't feel unsafe. Or I've heard neighbors say, I don't feel safe in my neighborhood.

And I live in that neighborhood and my feeling is, well, what they really feel unsafe about is that, for instance, there's a homeless encampment on the corner, right? And you know what? I feel less safe when there's someone living in a tent on my corner. That doesn't mean that those people are criminals, that there's a crime or that you are literally less safe, but it does create a feeling of less safety. And so when I have those conversations, I say, Hey, I think the problem is maybe the existence of homelessness, maybe if we found homes for these folks,

that would improve your feeling of safety more than adding a bunch of cops, right? Like, is that, that sort of argument is what you're talking about? Yes, I think that's right. I mean, I'm, you know, because I'm interested in, I'm interested in the politics, obviously I'm interested. I'm a citizen human being,

I care about social justice and so on. I mean, I'm interested, I'm a citizen human being, I care about social justice. And so I mean, I'm engaged in these issues, intellectually and philosophically, partly because I think that they're really deep issues that that don't just bear on, you know, the US and its politics, but more that forces to kind of reflect on a practice that's been around for a while, that we just kind of take for granted and treat as natural.

And we don't reflect on what we're doing. I think it's really important to not just treat it as just kind of, you know, a kind of common sense that can't be questioned. That this is how we handle the problem of crime. So I'm interested in that and my contribution if there is one here is to try to get people to reflect on this practice doesn't exist here, it exists in every single modern nation. Yeah.

But I think there's real questions about, whether this is the way to proceed. And even if we come out, we reflect on it and we think it really is an indispensable, socially necessary practice, I think what the abolitionists are doing are forcing us to think about whether we should do it the way we do it. Even if we need to have it, maybe there's a different way to do it. And so I embrace that challenge for that reason, because I think it's just too easy to just take it for granted.

It's not unlike the movement to kind of end the death penalty, right? I mean, it's like you've got to practice been around a long time and still exist in some places, including parts of the US where, you know, people think, yeah, the person did this thing, you just kill them. Or in some cases you torture and maim them. And these things have been around a really long time. And for a long time, people didn't really question them. It just seemed like obvious. What else would you do?

Right. But now people do think about that. No, actually, regardless of what people did, we're not going to like cut off their limbs. And then at least many of us think, nor are we going to take their life. Even if it did reduce the crime rate, we're still not going to cut off their limbs and take their lives. So I think that question is is not just a,

you know, abstract philosophical question when we ask it about the prison, I think it's one that we should be seriously thinking through. Like, is this like maiming, torture, and the death penalty? Or is this something we can really defend? And if so, what form must it take for it to be defensible? I think that's a really important question

that too often we don't even take seriously. Yeah, and you're really highlighting, I think one of the most important roles that philosophy plays of like looking at established practice and saying, does this actually make sense? Is it coherent? Is it, does it make any sense? Is it moral?

Is it just? Does it make any sense? And it sounds like you really appreciate the abolitionist thinkers as, you know, jumpstarting that conversation and provoking that conversation. So you listed the sort of arguments that abolitionists tend to make, a moral argument, a comparison to slavery, the argument of efficacy. I'm curious which you find compelling and which you find less compelling. Well, I mean, I think I'm most compelled by the thought. I mean, like I say,

the abolition goes back really far to, you know, you can read it in Peter Kropotkin in the 19th century writing about Russian and French prisons and so on. Just the thought that, you know, kind of at the heart of why we have defaulted to this practice of imprisoning people is really a problem of poverty and inequality and that we're just not dealing with that. And I think that that's an important insight that they have. Let's enamor with the frequent invocations of slavery as a comparison to incarceration for a variety of reasons. I mean, partly, I think that, as I mentioned earlier, slavery is a practice that's inherently

wrong, right? It doesn't matter where it exists, what form it takes, it's not a justified practice. I don't think that's true of incarceration as a penalty. I think it's not inherent. I think it in practice is often unjust and certainly often unjust in the US and some other societies. But I don't think inherently unjust.

It is reformable in a way in which slavery is not reformable. And I think some of those invocations of slavery are too easy way to try to get people to think that what you have here is an unreformable system. And it's not clear to me those arguments are entirely successful. And many of the features that I think of, if you think of like the central features of incarceration, you know, what does it really involve? There's confinement, obviously, there's segregation from the broader public. There is a system of order there, there's a hierarchical system of order there that constrains people's movements and the like. strains people's movements and the like.

And the carceral authorities claim a kind of a custodial authority to that involves not only just maintaining order within it, but also meeting a variety of purposes, many of them, I think, are clearly legit. I think it's important, an important moral advance that in an unfortunate situation where we're at war with other people because they've wrongly aggressed against us, that is, I think it's better that they're prisoners of war, then that we kill everybody we capture. I don't think it's wrong that we confine them why the fight is ongoing. In the hypothetical case of a just war, which it's an entirely different philosophical argument, what would a just war be?

But we'll just take that as a given. There are certain situations in which it might be not immoral and expedient in order to have prisoners of war rather than any other system. Yes. I mean, I'm assuming this situation, obviously a lot of wars are unjust

and they're imperialistic land grabs and other kinds of things, right? But in a case where you're the victim of that, someone's aggressing against you because they're trying to take your land, you will be entitled to defend yourself against that. And in defending yourself against that, if you were to capture people who were in that conflict, I think the just thing to do would be to confine them until the fighting is over,

as opposed to maiming or killing them. I don't think it's wrong to do that, nor do I think it's wrong in the case of, there are some people that tried to cases. You can have a teenager that has tried to commit suicide multiple times, you've done everything you can to try to help them and you worry that they're going to be successful eventually. They need psychiatric help and maybe medication that they were refusing to take. And sometimes you might need to confine them for a period

of time where they get that kind of treatment as you're typically save their lives. Now that's a kind of incarceration has the same structure. They are confined, they are separated from the public, they are under the custodial authority in a hierarchical system, all those same features. Now, you're not doing it to penalize them. It's not a punishment. But you are incarcerating them in the same way I think you are in the case of the prisoners of war. I think those practices are defensible. I think that incarceration as a penalty is defensible as well under certain conditions. And I think that sometimes abolitionists are too quick to think that there's no conditions

under which a practice like this could be justified to the people who have to endure them. And you feel the comparison to slavery is often made because slavery, we would never countenance under any circumstances. And so, abolitionists would like to categorize prison as being that sort of system, where sometimes you hear about, oh, Norwegian prisons,

they're quite nice. And maybe we would like that type of prison. You never hear anyone say, oh, Norwegian slavery, that kind of slavery is okay. So there's a move to say, hey, actually prison is closer to slavery than it is to other practices. And you just disagree on the grounds that, hey, there are some situations in which incarceration,

if we really look at it carefully, would not be immoral if done properly under the right circumstances. So it's a different kind of thing than slavery is. I think that's right. And that's partly, you know, I do that, that kind of arguing in a kind of abstract philosophical way, but also, I mean, this is not a matter of just thinking about things that we might do in the far off future. I mean, there are societies that do this much better than us. I mean, you people do often mention Norway, but it's not the only place. I mean, there are other places that, if you're in Germany and Netherlands, other kinds of places that I think have prisons that are

considerably more humane than our own and also much shorter sentences, which I think are also all for, and have a rehabilitative ethos rather than a strongly retributive one. So we don't necessarily have to, you know, build from scratch or anything. You can learn from other people who are doing who have also had abolitionist movements, some of these places like in Norway, and they have changed their prison systems in ways I think are that are defensible. Unless you thought there's some kind of weird American exceptionalism here, or maybe some people believe that they just think there's something special about the US. It could never resemble these other societies.

You could think that about if we're talking about Nordic states, my game, I said, look, those societies are very culturally homogeneous. They're almost all white and so on. When it's not like that. But then I say, well, I don't know. Germany is pretty, pretty diverse. And it's not like Norway. And yet its prisons do much better on most metrics

from a human rights point of view than US prisons do. So I don't, it's not clear to me that we're so special or different that we could never. I will say, Tommy, that, you know, American slavery as practiced in this country for hundreds of years, before the country was even, you know, the constitution was written, was very specific to America.

It was practiced here in a way it was practiced in almost no other place in the world. And American incarceration is also currently very different from every other country in terms of the percentage of our population we incarcerate and especially our black population. And so one might be tempted to look at that and say, hey, here are two things that are different about America

from other countries. Maybe they are connected. You know, you could be forgiven, I think for coming to that conclusion, right? You could. You know, you could be forgiven, I think, for coming to that conclusion, right? You could. You know, I would also use myself. There are these features that are not entirely distinctive.

I mean, slavery is, you know, existed in lots of parts of the Western hemisphere. But you know, the question, the thing I was trying to point to was whether we should think that it's just impossible to create more just conditions, including more just prisons that resemble, say, these other societies except for their racial diversity, let's say. Is there a reason to think that? And I don't really see what that reason would be like that. And but even if you thought like, we can't approach it, it's still not clear to me. I mean, what does that leave you practically speaking? Right? So why then is prison abolition your demand?

I mean, if you think, you know, we can't actually create a pluralistic, democratic, just society. Then I don't understand what, you know, why is your call that the abolition of a prison is maybe your call should be like some conservative black nationalists I have in the past, we thought, well, what you really should do is that we should just give up on this experiment of racially pluralistic democratic society and people can live together like that. So we should go try to build a society with people

who are more like us. That would make more sense to me than saying, no, we should do is not have come into law, which I don't think is the right response, even if that's your diagnosis. That's really fascinating that if your view of American society and its potential for change for the better is so negative and pessimistic

that you can't imagine this country ever having a system of incarceration that we would truly consider just, we have to eliminate incarceration altogether, then you, yeah, maybe, like, well then what do you wanna do? It's difficult to then figure out what we do then, right? Like if we could abolish prisons,

but then we still have a extremely racist, unjust society that, you know, that is, was the result for the creation of the prisons in the first place. And so presumably you would think that would be unreformable as well. That's kind of what I would think. I mean, I'm with the abolitionists in thinking, I mean, my own view is on the question,

could we build a society, a just society that didn't rely on incarceration as punishment to provide public safety? I'm just agnostic on that question, because I think it's very hard to know what human beings will be like under these rather different social conditions that I think abolitionists envision. I mean, I think they have a pretty optimistic view of human nature and probably think that when people do really bad things, that's probably a matter of their upbringing or something like that.

And if you could restructure the society in a way, you wouldn't have people who will behave in those ways. I guess a very optimistic view of human nature. I'm more inclined to think that, you know, human personality is quite diverse and even under very different conditions, you're going to see people behave sometimes in ways that they ought not and including them doing really horrible things to other people. Maybe I'm wrong about that. So I'm prepared to be agnostic on if we could build the truly just society and eliminate poverty and the kind of things abolitionists want, maybe we wouldn't need and if

that if the problem, the public safety was not severe, I think we shouldn't rely on the prisons to try to deal with, say, a small amount of criminal wrongdoing. But that still leaves us with the question of what to do in the meantime. And there, I think, at least when it comes to some kinds of criminal wrongdoing, it seems like the best way we can justify our actions to those who will be harmed by that wrongdoing is to take measures to try to prevent it, including up to incarceration, at least in some cases. Yeah.

Well, tell me more about, you know, again, this has been a somewhat abstract philosophical conversation in some ways, but we are talking about something that's very real. And so, given this, we had a very thorough discussion of abolition, let's talk about reform. Like what are reforms that you would like to see in the most concrete terms possible? Let me try to say a few things.

I mean, you have to think about reform, even if you just set aside background social justice and just focus on the criminal justice system. You're going to need reform at various parts along the way. So you need some of them are before anybody ever goes to prison that have to do with ensuring that due process is strong. Right. So that probably means things like making sure people have proper defense, that poor disadvantaged people have lawyers to give them the defense that they need. It probably means reducing the power of prosecutors to use throwing tons of charges at them and threatening them with long prison terms to get them to give up their right to a trial, which is mostly happens. We only have about 5% of these things actually ever go to trial. They mostly just worked out in plea bargaining, which usually often happens because the person doesn't have access to an attorney and they feel like the public attorney they're going

to get is probably because they're overworked and have too many cases and not going to do a good job by them. So they often take the offer attorney they're gonna get is probably because they're overworked, they have too many cases, they're not gonna do a good job by them. So they often take the offer from the prosecutor in this case. So some of the reforms are on that end, right? That just have to do with that, including bail reform, right? And we don't, I don't think we should be putting people in jail just to ensure that they show up

for the hearing or for the trial. I think we should only do that in cases where we think the person is an immediate danger to others. And that would release a lot of people from the system. But those are fun and things. There are lots of things you do within the prison, which has to do with in-prison services, education, vocational,

people need treatment for drug disorders, drug use disorders, people need psychiatric help to deal with their anger and other kinds of unresolved trauma. So there's a range of imprisonment services that we don't really provide, not nearly at the level that we need to. And there's much to do on after, right? We have a problem of recidivism. And a lot of that's because we don't prepare people to reenter society and we don't support them when they do reenter society. And ideally, when a person has served out their sentence, they're welcome back in the society as an equal

instead of treated as a permanent pariah, permanent outsider and stigmatized for the rest of their lives. Deprived of the right to vote, finding a hard place to get a job, not getting access to educational funds, and so on, right? So you have to work on many fronts, I think, to make a practice like this fully justified

when I'm just mentioning a few. But those are the kinds of things I think we will really need to do if we were gonna be able to justify this concrete practice that we have to the many people who suffer because of the way it's currently structured and practiced. And let me ask you a question that might be,

I almost feel bad asking of a philosopher, but how can we practically do these things when, as we've said, the actual justification for much of our system is just straight up bloodlust on the part of the public and that that often seems to win the day. When you see around the country, something I've talked about many times on this show is the sad fate of criminal justice reform that over the past 10 years we had so many steps forward and then a whiff of a crime wave and suddenly progress is rolled back

suddenly and abruptly. You know, if you look at even just what's happened since the murder of George Floyd, right? That we had the dialogue went in one way in this country and then suddenly snapped backwards the other way. And I think it's still to be seen whether we're gonna end up you know, further towards justice or further away from it than where we started.

How much faith do you have in the ability of our system and the public to be responsive to, you know, philosophical arguments, such as the ones that you make? Because sometimes it seems like no one wants to hear what a philosopher has to say on the subject, no offense. Imagine that. I mean, I do, but you know, I'm talking about the DA, right? Yeah, they're not lining up to buy my book or anything.

No, I mean, I agree. I mean, I don't think that writing books like this or writing articles or like this is the critical thing to kind of move things in a more just way. I mean, I think the role that someone like a philosopher thinking about issues of justice can make is helping us to think more clearly about these issues. You need a person who cares about issues of justice, that their sense of justice is strong, and they want to think through what their views should be. The role I play, people like me, is to try to help people as they think through these complex questions of justice, which are very difficult. But that's, I think, a necessary but a small part in a way. I mean, you can't bring about social change just

by making good arguments. I do think you need serious social movements that people are committed to, that you have to build, that have an egalitarian purpose and commitment. And that can be difficult to do here as elsewhere. But I think that's where all the practical action is, is in trying to generate a social movement, democratic social movement that is hard to foster under the

kind of conditions that we're currently under. But that's where I think all the practical action is because that only through that pressure, are you going to get politicians to who seem mostly to be concerned with gaining power and keeping it. It's the only way you're going to get them to move in the to be concerned with gaining power and keeping it. It's the only way you're gonna get them to move in the directions that you wanna move things into. But of course philosophers, doing the kind of serious organizing activism

work that involves, Foster's are probably not on the front lines. When it comes to that. Well, that actually leads me really well to my last question because, you know, we've been having this discussion of abolition versus reform. I sort of consider myself an agnostic on those isms.

You know, I care much more about the social movement itself and about how we make progress. And that means coalition building, that means making common cause and getting hopefully abolitionists and reformers under the same tent. Unfortunately, there's a constant sort of urge to create a divide there, right?

Abolitionists will say, well, reformers wanna do this, they're not part of our project, we're trying to do that. And honestly, many reformers do the same thing. You often see people say, that person's an abolitionist. You know, we can't have them run for office or et cetera, et cetera. The way you talk about this issue makes me think I would put you in a camp of being a reformer,

but you are really informed by the abolitionists in a way I find really interesting. And so I'm curious how you think about the interplay between those two groups, is making common cause possible and how might we go about doing it? Cause I think that's a really important question for every social movement. How do we get people who have philosophical differences,

real ones, important ones that we don't want to ignore, but we still wanna all be rowing in the same direction. That's right. Yeah, I think, I mean, the book is meant to be an attempt at a kind of reconciliation between these two camps to try to get them to better understand each other and to see that there's a lot of places where people can work together. Some of those things are very practical things. Like, you know, many reformists think that that we over incarcerate, that that gives you a lot of common ground, right? So you're, you know, there are many people who are in prison, this shouldn't

be. And presumably, abolitionists agree. Right? So that, so you got a lot of common ground just in that. And then there are questions of, because abolitionists think are mostly motivated by not just the harsh conditions and many prisons, but actually by the broader society they think produces those conditions and produces the kind of people who end up in them, end up in prison. That directing our focus toward that, I think is probably the right way to go. I mean, the way I think about this is,

you think about the modern civil rights movement in the United States, right? Toward the end of the 60s, Martin Luther King and the broader movement have been very successful in giving us the Civil Rights Act, 64, giving us the Voting Rights Act, ultimately getting Fair Housing Act and so on. But there were people who thought of themselves to the left and were radical who were very critical of that movement,

people who identify with Black Power. And I think King does a great job in writing, you know, the 67th book, Where Do We Go From Here, Community or Chaos, there's a long chapter on Black Power, and it's written in a very sympathetic way. He hears what they're saying. He agrees with things that the power people were saying, and he points out, you know, sympathetically, but, you know, forthrightly where he thinks they go wrong. And part of what you have to do when you're doing this kind of coalition building is to find ways to engage in, you know in meaningful dialogue, even when it involves disagreement that's charitable, that really gives really listens to the other side and is responsive.

We understand this is a part of democratic practice to think through these issues. You can't assume everyone's going to accept your entire ideology. You have to think through these things and we have to model that. I think the King tried to model that there. We need other places where we model that kind of engagement across ideological differences where people are no more or less on the same side but disagree about the details or the broader vision. We need that kind of practice. It's difficult to do in a world that has Twitter now call X and other kinds of things like that where people just like to yell at each other and be inflammatory and say the most extreme thing, you know, that doesn't help anything. Um, but you, but I think finding places where you can kind of model

serious civil disagreement about things that matter is I think really the only way forward here. That's a wonderful answer. Thank you so much for being on the show, Tommy. Tell us the name of the book and where folks can pick it up. Well, the book is called The Idea of Prison Abolition. It's in many bookstores and it's pretty easy to find online. And there's a wonderful audio version if you happen to have long commute somewhere rather,

taking your philosophy by listening to a beautiful narrator tell you what my book is about rather than reading it on the cold page. So please check out The idea of prison abolition. And of course, as always, you can pick up a copy of the book at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books, if you want to support the show. Tommy, thank you so much for being on the show. It's been an incredible conversation.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Thank you once again to Tommy Shelby for coming on the show. If you want to pick up a copy of his book, head to factuallypod.com slash books for his and all of our past guest books. And a reminder that when you buy them there, you are supporting not just our show,

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