I provide a response to the commentaries on my book The Idea of Prison Abolition (2022) by Brendan O’Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi and by Colleen Murphy. With respect to the first commentary, I briefly discuss the comparison of US prisons to Norwegian prisons; the deterrent effect of well-crafted sentences; and the prospects of a world without prisons. In response to the second commentary, I argue that the methods of the scholar-activist and those of the analytic political philosopher are not incompatible with meaningful engagement and disagreement on the abolition-versus-reform question despite these methodological differences.
MurphyC (2024) Abolition, scholar-activism, and deterrence: Reflections on Tommie Shelby’s the idea of prison abolition. Philosophy, Politics & Economics.
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O’FlahertyBSethiR (2024) On prison systems. Philosophy, Politics & Economics.
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SalkinW (2024) Speaking for Others: The Ethics of Informal Political Representation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
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ShelbyT (2016) Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform. Cambridge: Belknap Press.
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ShelbyT (2021) Afro-analytical Marxism and the problem of race. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association95: 37–60.
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ShelbyT (2022) The Idea of Prison Abolition. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
