Crash Course: Political Theory

Abolish the police!

Abolish prisons!

Youve probably encountered these phrases on social media over the past few years.

Since the murder of George Floyd in 2020, these rallying cries have grown across the United States.

Prison abolition, which was once seen as extreme and unrealistic, is now a full-blown social movement.

But however you feel about this, you probably have some questions.

And political theory can help us navigate them.

I'm Ellie Anderson and this is Crash Course Political Theory.

[THEME MUSIC] In her 2003 book Are Prisons Obsolete?, Angela Davis wrote that the prison is considered so natural that it is extremely hard to imagine life without it. And when you consider that the US has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, its easy to see why thats the case.

We tend to assume prisons have always existed, but theyve only been around in the Western world since the late 1700s.

Sure, there were jails before that, for short-term confinement, but nothing like the long-term carceral system we have today.

So, I wanted to know: whats the rationale behind our current form of prison-based punishment?

Before the late 1700s in England and colonial America, almost everything was punishable by death.

Which yikes!

Calm down, ye olde folks.

In this context, the idea of prisons was seen by some as a humane alternative.

Which brought me to the 19th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who argued that the point of punishing lawbreakers is to keep people from breaking the law also known as deterrence.

Which you can do in two ways.

You can deter would-be criminals by having a serious enough penalty, scaring them out of committing the crime in the first place.

Or, you can deter repeat offenders by physically stopping them from doing it again.

Like by locking them up.

And/or, using a strategy Bentham thought was even more effective: surveillance.

Bentham envisioned a prison where someone is always watchingor at least might be.

Imagine a circular building with an open space in the middle.

The walls are lined with cells, with one prisoner in each cell, and in the middle theres a watchtower.

A guard in this watchtower can see into every single cell, but the prisoners cant see the guard.

Of course, the guard cant actually be looking in every cell at every minute, but the prisoners always know the guard might be watching them.

And so, Bentham thought, they would be deterred from stepping out of line.

He called his creation the panopticon. If this sounds incredibly creepy to you, youre not alone!

A hundred fifty years or so later, the philosopher Michel Foucault appropriated Benthams idea and offered a new way of thinking about modern punishment and its impacts on European society.

To Foucault, the panopticon was a metaphor for a power system that influenced all parts of society, from prisons, to hospitals, to factories.

Wherever you go, and whatever you do, Big Brother might be watching.

Foucault argued that people who live under this system of control eventually become their own wardens.

They internalize the power structure and adjust their behavior accordinglyno prison necessary.

Which on one level sounds like deterrence at work.

But it also sounds more than a little dystopian.

In Foucaults words, the panopticon presents a cruel, ingenious cage. Today, some argue were all living in a panopticon, digitally speaking.

People on both the left and the right point to the states increased ability to surveil its citizens through technology, whether that means watching security camera footage or reading my group chats about The Bachelor.

But, OK, even with that level of security, you cant deter everybody from committing crimes.

So what happens when they do?

And what do we hope to achieve by punishing them?

I learned you can break down the intended purposes of criminal punishment into three overarching categories: retribution, reformation, and restoration.

But first, Im gonna need to level up my coffee game [funky music] Almost too pretty to drink.

When the point of criminal justice is to avenge victims, its called retributive justice.

An eye for an eye.

Today, very few political theorists, or even pro-prison advocates, would openly subscribe to this rationale, which can feel very outdated, or Game of Thrones-y.

Instead, the modern Western world takes the reformative justice approach.

This version doesnt set out only to penalize an offender it theoretically aims to correct their behavior.

You can hear it in the words we use: correctional facility, corrections officer.

Reformative justice thinks of criminality as a condition that prison or other sentences can treat.

At least in theory, an offender walks into prison a criminal and comes out a law-abiding citizen, ready to rejoin society.

But heres the thing if we fail to make good on efforts to reform people whove committed crimes, we sort of end up with a retributive justice system, whether we like it or not.

Thats why, more recently, theres been a greater push for a third way: restorative justice.

Proponents argue neither reformation nor retribution addresses the needs of everyone involved in a crime.

In this view, crime isnt just a violation of the law; its a violation of social relationships.

And to hold offenders responsible for their actions would require them to repair the harm done.

For example, the Victim Offender Education Group pairs an offender with a surrogate victim someone whos been affected by a similar crime to exchange their stories.

The goal is to help both victim and offender find common ground and heal from the experience.

In this case, justice becomes about more than just punishing one individual.

Its about understanding the pain on both sides of the victim and offender relationship what reformative justice advocates want to normalize.

Its important to note that experiments in restorative justice have been on a relatively small scale.

We dont have examples of it on a large-scale civic level, at least not yet.

But whatever it might look like in practice, the prison abolition movement provokes us to think deeply about incarceration, and ask if these rationales for punishment really hold up.

Lets go back to Angela Davis, the prison abolitionist I mentioned at the beginning.

She gave a name to the network of systems that uses surveillance, policing, and imprisonment to address economic, social, and political problems.

She called it the Prison Industrial Complex, which is a riff on the Military Industrial Complex, a phrase you mightve heard of before.

Police forces, private prisons, companies that provide food to incarcerated people or use prison labor they all benefit financially from incarceration.

And this is all wrapped up with pervasive racial inequalities in our country.

Karim, can you throw that Black American History episode onscreen?

Thanks.

But what about the people who should theoretically benefit from prisons the people sent there to be reformed?

Prison abolitionists make the case that prisons actually harm more than they help.

Because of the growing number of incarcerated people, US prisons are overcrowded, which can affect living conditions, safety, and access to meaningful programs and mental health services.

Prisons isolate people, taking them away from family and friends.

And the harm can continue even after a person is released having a record makes it hard to get a job or find a place to live.

So, if prison is meant to be reformative, but it ends up creating new harms, where does that leave us?

Well, thats where the call to abolish prisons comes in.

To do so would require reducing the number of incarcerated peoplein other words, decarceration.

But then what?

There are people in prison who have committed seriously violent offenses.

Do we just let them out?

Turns out, most prison abolitionists have thought about this.

They tend to suggest replacing prison with other strategies to rehabilitate offenders, like restorative justice approaches, and offering more robust services that prevent crime before it even happens, like broader mental health and substance abuse programs.

And many people argue that theres still a place for prisons, just a radically reduced one.

Tommie Shelby, an advocate for prison reform, agrees that most of the alternatives that Angela Davis suggests like rehab, mental health support, and restorative justice are more effective crime deterrents than the ones we have now.

But he argues that sometimes well need to incapacitate people whove committed violent crimes, and we cant reintroduce them to society.

Still, the world he imagines is one with way fewer prisons.

And that word, imagine, is essential.

Political theory is about imagining a better world, and part of that exercise is to set aside the practical considerations for a moment and think about who we want to be.

Contending with these ideas is good and healthy, even if you, and me, and everyone else watching reach different conclusions.

When it comes to prisons and mass incarceration, it can seem like the place were in is inevitable.

The prison abolition movement asks us to remember that its not inevitable, and that we are active agents in deciding the kind of world we want to live in.

Next time, well talk about utopia and if its really too good to be true.