2024.08.4 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Tommie Shelby’s The Idea of Prison Abolition, Princeton University Press, 2022, 248pp., $21.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780691229768.
Reviewed by Amelia M. Wirts, University of Washington
Many existing prisons are deeply unjust spaces, rife with violence, racial inequality, and inhumane conditions. In The Idea of Prison Abolition, Tommie Shelby analyzes Angela Davis’s arguments that these manifest injustices call for prison abolition. Ultimately, Shelby argues for radical reform over abolition because reformed prisons can accomplish the essential state function of crime control without the attendant grave injustices that plague many existing prisons.
The thrust of the book is that the myriad ways that existing prisons are unjust are distinguishable from the essential features of prisons that contribute to crime control. The central argument is a response to three abolitionist objections to prisons: dehumanization, links to slavery, and racial subjugation. Shelby concludes that each of these unjust features are accidental aspects of prisons…
Read the full article which is published on Notre Dame's Philosophical Reviews (external link)
