In preparation for our own series on militaries in The Good Society, I’m reading this very interesting series from the Military Times:
It’s worth checking out.
Charles Koch is committed to reforming the criminal justice system:
“We are not a nation of bad people. We are a nation that made some bad choices,” he said.
“We’ve become addicted to severe sentences, to the point where we are mass-producing convictions in many courts, while not providing defense counsel on a timely basis.
“We’ve got to fix that, and there is now a growing consensus among people knowledgeable about justice and economics that we are wasting precious human resources in criminal justice.”
Koch is never quoted in the article, just his chief council. But still, this is the promised conservative critique of prisons we’ve been waiting for. On the other hand, Koch has only donated single-digit millions, (i.e. “seven figures”) which is a small amount of his political contributions in total. The real question is what kind of pressure he’s putting on Republican nominees and politicians.
Will this be in the Republican Party’s platform for 2016? Will it be in the debates?
Eric Schwitzgebel does the math, interprets the lessons:
(This past Hannukah, my daughter Kate and I spun a sample of dreidels 40 times each. One in particular landed on shin an incredible 27/40 spins. [Yes, p < .001, highly significant, even with a Bonferroni correction.]) [….]
You can, if you want, always push things to your advantage: Always contribute the smallest coins you can, always withdraw the biggest coins you can, insist on using what seems to be the “best” dreidel, always argue for rule-interpretations in your favor, eat your big coins and use that as a further excuse to only contribute little ones, etc. You could do all this without ever once breaking the rules, and you’d probably end up with the most chocolate as a result.
But here’s the brilliant part: The chocolate isn’t very good. […]
Dreidel is a practical lesson in discovering the value of fairness both to oneself and others, in a context where proper interpretation of the rules is unclear, and where there are norm violations that aren’t rule violations, and where both norms and rules are negotiable, varying from occasion to occasion — just like life itself, but with only mediocre chocolate at stake.
I tend to think that early exposure to randomness (at low stakes and without a skill element) can supply more than one important lesson for children. But I like this lesson best: the benefits of fairness usually trump the benefits of unfairness.
Shawn Gude at Jacobin discusses The Bad Kind of Unionism:
“It’s easy to focus on the individual over the institution. Not a few police officers are drawn to the profession out of a desire to “serve the public.” Many genuinely want to serve, and take great pride in their chosen occupation. Police don’t have to enjoy breaking up protests; they don’t have to be racists or hate homeless people. But once they decide to do their jobs, institutional exigencies overwhelm personal volition. When there’s mass resistance to poverty and inequality, it’s the cops who are summoned to calm the panic-stricken hearts of the elite. They bash some heads, or infiltrate and disrupt some activist groups, and all is right in the world again.
Such is the inherent defect of law-enforcement unionism: It’s peopled by those with a material interest in maintaining and enlarging the state’s most indefensible practices.”
There’s an interesting discussion over at Daily Nous regarding whether we ought to pursue political diversity in philosophy. I suspect the following three things to be true:
It’s not clear what we want when we say we want more political diversity or conservatives. Much of Haidt’s argument is deliberately equivocating about the relevant terms and tendencies. (That is: using partisan identification as a stand-in for shared values, assumptions, beliefs, and topical interests, where most of the work done by psychologists doesn’t have either explicit or implicit political valence.) According to Haidt’s early work, the problem is that liberals somehow just don’t recognize several fundamental moral intutions: liberals don’t think purity, loyalty, and appropriate authority matter. So he’s been telling this “liberals have broken moral compasses” story for a while now, and it’s dumb, and he’s mostly backed away from it, only to replace it with this other kind of story: liberals have different hobby horses than conservatives, and we need as many hobby horses as possible to keep everyone honest.
The liberal response has largely been to say that Haidt’s (early) description is right (i.e. liberals really don’t care about purity, ingroup loyalty, or hierarchical moral intutions) but that this is really liberals being rational and overcoming bad impulses. I think that story is bullshit, too: everyone on both sides of partisan debates finds ways to incorporate the full panoply of moral intuitions. We just do it differently, on different topics: liberals don’t find homosexuality unpure and thus immoral, they find GMOs and pollution unpure and thus immoral. Liberals don’t respect priests, they respect scientists. Etc.
So if that’s right, then it’s not about a “diversity of thinking styles” when we see calls to include conservative researchers. You won’t be including lost moral intuitions, but rather missing beliefs and priors. There’s no natural liberal/conservative divide, just commitments and policy views that get stacked together arbitrarily or sociologically. So political diversity is about whether we need to include, not just moral conservatives or libertarians, but Republicans. Perhaps without their arbitrary ideological constellations to counter our own, our research communities are prone to systematic errors and biases. But if political diversity gathers people with arbitrarily assembled constellations of beliefs, rather than Republican and Democratic brains, there is value in seeking out disagreement just for its own sake, to engage in some helpful motivated skepticism to counter our own motivated reasoning. When like-minded researchers engage in motivated reasoning to pursue lines of inquiry that support their arbitrary priors, they are likely to fall into error or polarize their results. This is even more likely when the criterion of evaluation is itself murky. (“Philosophers admit falsifying results of thought experiment,” etc.)
To be clear, if the cultural cognition view is correct, it’s not ideology or psychology that is driving my partisan affiliation, assumptions, values, beliefs, and topical interests; it’s identity-protective cognition garnered from my friends and our shared identity. So we can’t have a professional community that won’t have some of that: by dint of calling ourselves philosophers we’ll have some priors we’re not well-placed to challenge. Certainly we COULD do a lot to reduce the potential for bias in this way, but it’s just not clear that we SHOULD. The evidence suggests that research communities require shared beliefs and goals to engage in inquiry at all. It’s really difficult to build professional communities around fundamental disagreements, precisely because that community requires shared goals and methods, and identity-based disagreements create schisms and hunkering down and bullet-biting. Philosophy already suffers pretty badly in that area.
These are all good reasons to hope for more diversity in philosophy, though mostly on race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability lines. But not just the big stuff…. For instance, how many geologists do we have in philosophy of science? Wouldn’t that expand the kinds of research questions there? Where are the dentists and home health aids in bioethics? And sure, where are the great climate change skeptics? Where are the great defenders of Catholic sexual morality? Where are the great pro-IQ philosophers? (And are those even what we mean when we talk about conservatives? I prefer to think not, but Haidt et al explicitly mention IQ issues, so….)
Those dimensions of diversity seem (to me) to be of only minor importance compared to the big stuff, though of course worth cultivating. So far, though, I haven’t yet seen an argument for weighting it comparatively heavier.
“Get Money Out of Politics” by Flickr user Light Brigading
Some things live forever in social media. In my circles, one article that comes up all the time is the Marten and Gilens study of legislative influence that is often interpreted this way: “US No Longer an Actual Democracy” or “Princeton Concludes What Kind of Government America Really Has, and It’s Not a Democracy.”
Part of the problem is that I think there are serious political inequality issues in the US. But the study fails to prove it, and it’s been blown out of proportion in lots of disempowering ways. The study is basically a victory for the null hypothesis: on reflection, we don’t have much evidence that policies are determined by a single group.
Here’s how it works: the study compares the policy preferences of four groups: median voters, voters in the top 10 percent of income, business-oriented interest groups, and “mass-based” interest groups. Using data from survey responses, they note that policy outcomes more often correlate with the rich and business-oriented interest groups than with the median voter and mass-based interest groups. Case closed, right?
No so fast: It’s still the case that the best predictor of the success or failure of any policy initiative is the median voter. But the median voter and the 90% voter usually agree. When they don’t, the 90% voter usually either a) prefers the status quo or b) prefers the socially liberal position. And so over the last 20 years, the status quo has tended to win out (in aggregate) except when it is broadly favored by median and 90% voters or is socially liberal and favored by the 90% voter.
A lot of this paper depends on obscuring some important issues behind difficult math. Their R2 is .074; that’s actually, pretty close to random. It means that median voters, economic elites, and interest groups, together, determine 7.4% of the variability in policy outcomes! Almost all of that is elites and interest groups, it’s true! But when you’re dealing with such small numbers, it’s easy to get *statistically* significant results that aren’t actually all that significant in human terms. In 92.6% of the policy outcomes, none of these independent variables was predictive.
That means that no group predominates most of the time, but “US System of Government is 95% Democratic” doesn’t get people to link to your study on social media.
What’s worse is that most of my progressive readers will disagree with the policy issues that the median voter has lost on.
A Metafilter friend who looked at the SPSS file wrote: “Of the 1779 polls, 105 ended up with policy being what rich people wanted and what median-income people didn’t, out of 189 polls where rich people and regular folks disagreed. The only times there was more than a 20-point gap (ie 60% of rich wanted one side but only 40% of regular people did) were the 10 or so questions about NAFTA. The rest of the time it was a slight majority of rich people favoring something and a smidge under 50% of regular folks favoring it.
Rich people got their way mostly on social issues — RU486 legality, IDX legality, gays in the military, various abortion/birth control restrictions. But also stuff like outright banning immigration for five years, the legality of public-sector strikes, outright bans on military or domestic aid to any foreign country, and so on.”
The median voter has sometimes been prone to serious mistakes or moral failings, as you can see. So the real title should be “US System of Government is 95% Democratic and a Lot of the Rest of The Time the Demos are Assholes and Deserve to Lose.”
Then, too, nothing in their data can disaggregate the top 1% or the top 0.1%, as the authors freely admit. It also doesn’t ask about the bottom 10% or the bottom 1%, which is a perspective I much prefer.
But that means that their conclusions regarding elite domination are even less well-supported. As a progressive I’m primed to suspect that very wealthy interests usually dominate: what’s interesting is how hard it is to prove what “everybody knows.” If you believe in their conclusions, then you should actually downgrade your priors on the basis of this study. Mostly, this is a study that demonstrates how hard it is to do serious empirical work on this question. It ignores selection bias issues like which policies pollsters poll on. (Hint: they tend to poll on popular policies that are not yet in place.) If there aren’t any polls on the vast majority of things affluent and median disagree on, we’d be in the dark about affluent influence. As longtime readers know, my favorite policy initiative is the basic income guarantee, but it’s very rarely polled and when it is polled, it’s fairly unpopular.
So I do think “median voters and affluent voters generally agree in polls” is the most significant finding here. Democracy may often lead to this confluence of elite and mass interests, either through propaganda or elite-deference to voters. Perhaps voters judge outcomes rather than policy inputs, so politicians aim to guarantee good economic and social outcomes even when these contradict the policy preferences that would have unintended consequences. Perhaps it’s even true that the petite-bourgeoisie still finds its class interests allied with capital most of the time. The real victims can’t vote, right?
I’ve been thinking a lot about how the middle-class exercise school choice through real estate decisions, and what that does to the fabric of our cities. Recently I came across a dissertation by Jennifer Burns Stillman that has some interesting references. Here, for instance, she addresses Barbara Ehrenreich’s account of the middle-class mentality. Much as material conditions matter, I suspect there is something to this analysis:
“Ehrenreich (1990) would call this a ‘fear of falling,’ a ‘rational fear’ held by the middle-class that their children will not also be middle-class if they don’t instill them with the right education and work values. She argues that unlike the lower or upper classes, where class is simply transmitted through birth, middle-class professionals cannot simply pass down their middle-class status to their children. The steep educational barriers to enter middle-class professions–law, medicine, engineering, business, etc.– keep out those who lack discipline and a willingness to delay gratification, something parents can’t simply give to their children. The only thing middle-class parents can do “…is attempt, through careful molding and psychological pressure, to predispose each child to retrace the same long road they themselves once took. If they fail in this task, their children could fall down the social class ladder. A child’s school experience is key to this careful molding process, with peer pressure viewed by middle-class parents as equally important to parental pressure. Evidence from recent school integration research suggests that children from a high socio-economic status do not learn as much in schools dominated by children from low socio-economic backgrounds as they do in schools dominated by children from high-socio-economic backgrounds (Rumberger and Palardy 2005), lending credence to the reluctance of [gentrifying parents] to utilize their neighborhood school.”
It shows just how much of school competition is due to a perhaps-impossible task: to preserve a family’s middle-class status intergenerationally, even as the jobs that guarantee that life change. With enough money, you can make a child upper-class, and without any money you can virtually guarantee a child lower-class. But the middle-class is anxious because we can’t guarantee our children’s future. And that anxiety drives everything else: de facto segregation, massive real estate bubbles, and ultimately the equation of poverty and race, of blackness and danger.
But what’s really at work is adverse selection: chasing great schools, the middle class follow each other from the city to the suburbs and back again, and from neighborhood to neighborhood within the city.
Real estate prices surge and plunge in our wake; people are left in “failing” schools” or congratulated and then displaced from improving ones.
The power to move from place to place is a privilege: it’s a white privilege, generally (though middle-class African-Americans do the same thing). But here I think a class analysis helps: because it shows us the anxiety that makes that privilege so very stifling. It shows us the fear that turns an advantage into a burden.
There has been much discussion lately about the ranking of graduate programs in philosophy: Ed Kazarian writes “Maybe the Best Rankings are No Rankings at All,” and Eric Schliesser replies with “Yes, but, we do need rankings.”Noelle McAfee suggests a search engine that allows prospective students and administrators to create their own rankings based on whatever critera are important to them.
“Only when they must choose between competing theories do scientists behave like philosophers.” -Thomas Kuhn
When you think about rankings, you should worry about pluralism. When you think about the pluralism debate in philosophy, I think it makes sense to start with a conception of what paradigmatic research or “normal science” looks like. How much pluralism can there be within a discipline? Here’s Thomas Kuhn’s formulation:
“‘Normal science’ means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice.”
“Normal” science is paradigmatic, non-revolutionary research: plodding, accretionist, and useful. It assumes that a basic disciplinary picture of the world is true and tries to get the details into sharper focus like an art restorer cleaning off the muck of ages. In practice, this means that there’s wide-spread agreement on what’s known and what’s unknown, and widespread agreement about which things it’s okay to disagree about! It doesn’t really make sense to be a “pluralist” about the natural sciences: the disagreements among professional scientists should necessarily be pretty small and well-understood. You can’t stage a debate or frame research questions on climate change if some of the participants are still arguing about phlogiston.
This also means that under conditions of normal science, important research results are often discarded as irrelevant. Later, these results may prove more interesting, but for the purposes of normal scientists they’re just noise. Innovation may be an important philosophical goal, but it’s anathema in normal science. Perhaps, then, we are not normal scientists? Here’s Kuhn again:
“Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend most all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Normal science often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments. As a puzzle-solving activity, normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.”
Kuhn’s theory of “normal science” has always seemed like a refreshing bit of sociology for philosophers. I suspect many philosophers believe that the discipline of philosophy doesn’t have a “normal science” problem, perhaps because it is constantly revolutionizing itself or because it is characterized by disagreement. This is largely what is at stake in arguments about whether philosophers “make progress.” Kuhn’s account of the role of textbooks captures this conception of revolutionary non-progress pretty clearly:
“An increasing reliance on textbooks or their equivalent was an invariable concomitant of the emergence of a first paradigm in any field of science. …The domination of a mature science by such texts significantly differentiates its developmental pattern from that of other fields. For the moment let us simply take it for granted that, to an extent unprecedented in other fields, both the layman’s and the practitioner’s knowledge of science is based on textbooks and a few other types of literature derived from them. Textbooks, however, being pedagogic vehicles for the perpetuation of normal science, have to be rewritten in whole or in part whenever the language, problem-structure, or standards of normal science change. In short, they have to be rewritten in the aftermath of each scientific revolution….”
But serious reflection points up many fields where paradigmatic research rules: analytic logic, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind all have relatively circumscribed projects. Developments in continental ontology and phenomenology follow a fairly well-recognized pattern. Political philosophy has pretty clear set of questions and concerns and progress on these issues proceeds exactly the kind of plodding, accretive manner as normal science. There is widespread agreement among our textbooks about what counts and doesn’t count as an important philosophical text, and challenges to this canonicity follow predictable (you might say paradigmatic) forms. This is largely true within the sub-disciplines and within the major “camps” of philosophy as well. In that sense, I’d claim that normal science predominates quite a bit, and that there are sub-disciplinary standards of quality that percolate among the major camps. If there were not such standards, there could not be textbooks.
Those groups already agree on what counts as a good contribution to continental political philosophy, or critical race theory of aesthetics, or American pragmatism-inflected history of philosophy or feminist philosophy or language. We don’t have to decide, up front or really ever, which of these approaches ought to rule the discipline: that was the flaw in the analytic takeover by Metaphysics & Epistemology, to think that analytic M&E should trump value theory and continental M&E and American pragmatism and feminist philosophy and the history of philosophy. The people doing the best work in any sub-field seemed to run roughshod over those divisions, so it was obvious to most that this dominance was (is) unsustainable.
The bigger challenge, I think, comes from folks like Kristie Dotson, Tommie Curry, the bloggers at xcphilosophy, etc. These folks argue that “normal science” views of philosophical research will always be exclusive. Even my claim that the folks doing the best work tend to bridge divides is itself a claim that there is a consensus about what it means to do the “best” work and about “what the world is like.” If this kind of research is discovering novelties that can and ought to disrupt the whole way our textbooks are written, then clearly the old standards are in need of constant revision and the rankings must be continually re-written, right? So you might as well give up on rankings completely.
I think those critiques are important, but I think they can be included within a normal science view of philosophy, My claim would be the following: we don’t all share anything like a foundational sense of past philosophical achievements, and so in that sense we are not a part of a discipline. Yet we do have a fairly narrow sense of how these disagreements should be articulated, how claims about inclusions and exclusion are best adjudicated, and about the goals of our research. It’s common to claim otherwise, but I think these protestations are mostly performances in the name of those shared goals. Folks who really don’t want to do philosophy stop; they leave the discipline entirely. (And that happens.) What it means to still consider oneself a philosopher seems to involve a very loose shared methodology. As I’ve said before: I don’t know any philosophers who ignore and avoid interlocutors and dissenters. (Perhaps they avoid me?) In our profession, a good disagreement is the greatest gift we have to give to each other, and that’s what keeps us together.
Now, I say all that despite the fact that I once saw someone dance a critique of Derrida. I’ve seen scholars end their papers with a song. But still, these were meant to be arguments and in the best sense both the dance and the song acted as an argument. These are perfomative refutations, little different in function than the analytic philosopher Syndey Morgenbesser’s reply to the other analytic philosopher J.L. Austin’s claim that while a double negative is a positive, a double positive is not a negative: “Yeah, Yeah.” We already have the tools within the discipline to allow for challenges to the canon, for challenges to the strict methodology of proofs and counterexamples. We even have shared standards for evaluating research contributions. The question is whether that makes ratings and rankings possible.
On my view, there will almost certainly be some sort of rankings, so the best we can hope for is that they’re governed in a way that includes diverse practitioners and values justice. I’m mindful of the conservatism of my “there is no alternative” concerns, here: it’s a willingness to accept a second-best institution for fear of how the pursuit of a perfect institution will lead to something worse, another version of the seemingly eternal debate over meliorism and abolition.
I think of the rankings issue in classical liberal terms: will the proposed remedies succeed in the first place? Will they have unintended consequences? On those grounds it seems preferable to improve the existing rankings and proliferate the ranking criteria rather than to leave a void for an even less sympathetic force to fill.
But maybe we must risk the vaccuum for pluralism to proliferate.
Other disciplines have rankings, tacit or explicit. Prospective students have a right to know whether the program they’re considering can give them a good education and place them in a job. I think it’s best to separate a program’s research ratings from its placement ratings. (So what we need are robust placement data like Carolyn Dicey Jennings tried to put together.) But they’re likely to be linked, in most cases, because productive scholars will have their pick of students, and this choosiness, itself, will introduce considerations of merit and exclusivity.
The best argument I’ve heard against rankings is that they play into the logic of exclusivity and and competition for finite resources that plagues the university. As evidence, we see that the ranked departments are a subset of graduate programs, and that the best-ranked departments tend to be strong in M&E, specifically philosophy mind and language. This is intimately tied to the depoliticization of Anglo-American philosophy, the creation of programs of research meant to suck every last possible scintilla of communist propaganda out of our methods.
Still, there are many possibilities. Perhaps we should only rank sub-specialties on the basis of faculty research quality and leave generalized ranking alone. Perhaps we should rank graduate programs on another basis, like placement. Perhaps we should just put all these statistics into a centralized database and let students and administrators decide what to do with the numbers. Notice that this will disempower philosophy practitioners compared to the administrations that govern us and the market for labor. It’s surprising, then, that the most progressive members of the profession seem to prefer the rule of bureaucrats and markets to measures that could be democratic, simply because the current measures are not democratic. Rhetorically, the argument seems to be a Luddite demand to smash the esteem machines rather than a Marxist strategy to seize the means of meritocratic production.
“My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism. I think that the ethico-political choice we have to make very day is to determine which is the main danger.” -Michel Foucault
Recently I’ve been thinking about a book by Erin McKenna which I read as an undergraduate: The Task of Utopia: A Pragmatist and Feminist Perspective. I read it then because it promised to bridge the divide between my favorite genre, science-fiction, and my interest in philosophy. But the book profoundly changed me, and I’m always surprised that others haven’t read it; it feels like a classic. Using John Dewey’s work, McKenna articulates what she calls a “process model” for utopias, whereby we distinguish disputes about “end-states” from judgments about the “ends-in-view.” And this has always deeply affected my politics and thinking about political philosophy. I tend to think that far too many theoretical and practical divides are reducible to debates about end-states, such that even though progressives, libertarians, and anarchists all share the same criticism of some aspect of the state, they cannot work together. Usually these disputes are bolstered by philosophical and theoretical apparatus. The divide between prison reformers and abolitionists, for instance, is understood by abolitionists through the lens of Foucault’s critique of the 19th Century reformers, whose reforms, though sometimes well-meaning, only intensified incarceration by making it more exacting and effective while empowering the reformers. Meliorists who merely protests injustices or inequities but do not loudly call for the absolute abolition of prisons are falling into a “carceral logic” by which prisons will inevitably be preserved in all their evils.
Where I find McKenna helpful is, first, in her claim that end-state disagreements tend to be associated with masculine utopias, while feminist utopias emphasize ends-in-view (which jives with my readings of the relevant science-fiction utopias, and also of polital theories that have utopian elements), and second, in her Dewyan typology for judging ends-in-view. According to McKenna’s reading of Dewey, there are five criterion (five questions, really) by which we can judge an end-in-view:
Halden Prison in Norway
This is where I find abolitionism frustrating: the project of prison abolition seems like an end-state rather than an end-in-view. It deliberately ignores (1) the wishes of victims, citizens, and even many of the incarcerated (all of whom are understood to be duped and epistemically blinded by the ideology of carcerality unless they adopt abolitionism.) It doesn’t start with our current carcerality and work away from it, but rather starts with a rejection of the current context and the constraints it creates (2). It’s inflexible (3) in the sense that it does not allow that some limited carcerality (a la Norway?) might still be reasonable. Though there’s the sense that that is the direction that abolitionism must proceed, it does not currently emphasize the development of the skills and abilities (4) that alternatives to incarceration would require. And though it does aim to foreclose carcerality forever, I do think abolitionists are most concerned to promote plurality, cooperation, and empowerment (5) for some of the most dominated people in our world today, which is why I can’t help feeling the pull of abolition even as the other objections I mention raise red flags.
Meliorism, on the other hand, has all the problems that the abolitionists describe. Reformers work with and within the system to resist it, which requires all sorts of rhetorical and practical compromises. By chipping at the edges and living too comfortably with “constraints” and “realism,” (2) meliorists leave the status quo mostly untouched. We adopt democratic projects and processes (1), but leave the fundamental injustices in place. We develop capacities (4) but usually we can’t create the institutions and conditions (5) where those capacities will be actualized. We are, at base, flexible (3) with evil, and thereby compromised by it, while the righteous know that evil requires inflexibility and even sacrifice.
Angela Davis puts it this way at the start of Are Prisons Obsolete?:
“As important as some reforms may be-the elimination of sexual abuse and medical neglect in women’s prison, for example-frameworks that rely exclusively on reforms help to produce the stultifying idea that nothing lies beyond the prison. Debates about strategies of decarceration, which should be the focal point of our conversations on the prison crisis, tend to be marginalized when reform takes the center stage. The most immediate question today is how to prevent the further expansion of prison populations and how to bring as many imprisoned women and men as possible back into what prisoners call the ‘free world.'”
No reformer wants to “produce the stultifying idea that nothing lies beyond prison,” but much of the rest of Davis’s book is devoted to the claim that reform is inextricable from that consequence. Ultimately, she equates prison reform with the absurdity of “slavery reform.” America’s prisons are historically and in current practice entangled with the Black Codes, the convict-lease system, Jim Crow, sexism, and antiblack racism; therefore, reformers are merely (hopefully unknowingly) fluffing the pillows while white supremacy and patriarchy is maintained:
If the words “prison reform” so easily slip from our lips, it is because “prison” and “reform” have been inextricably linked since the beginning of the use of imprisonment as the main means of punishing those who violate social norms.
Yet consider: Davis assumes that the majority of the increase in incarceration has been driven by the drug war, and that alternatives to incarceration will foreground drug treatment and decriminalization of drugs. In fact, though the largest group of arrests are tied to drug use, the largest group of prisoners are incarcerated for violence; this reflects sentencing differences and the kinds of treatment diversion programs for which she calls. There’s good evidence that the drug war, poverty, and racist policing produce some of that violence, but not all of it. Plus, prison populations are already shrinking, but at least some of this decline is due to the increase of post-release strategies that export carceral logics into a parolee’s (or even an unindicted suspect’s) everyday life. The goals of decarceration can fall into the logic of carcerality as easily as the goals of reform. So how much really separates reformers from abolitionists? A reformer might call for the restoration of prison education and voting rights, for the creation of schools that teach rather than prepare students for prison, for decriminalization and treatment of drug abuse, for poverty-reduction and racial justice, while still thinking that certain kinds of violence should lead to coercive detention, that restorative justice has dangerous implications when applied to cases of sexual assault or organized violence.
And we see similar strands in Davis:
“In thinking specifically about the abolition of prisons using the approach of abolition democracy, we would propose the creation of using an array of social institutions that would begin to solve the social problems that set people on the track to prison, thereby helping to render the prison obsolete. There is a direct connection with slavery: when slavery was abolished black people were set free, but they lacked access to the material resources that would enable them to fashion new, free lives. Prisons have thrived over the last century precisely because of the absence of those resources and the persistence of some of the deep structures of slavery. They cannot, therefore, be eliminated unless new institutions and resources are made available to those communities that provide, in large part, the human beings that make up the prison population.”
A reformer sees nothing objectionable in those prescriptions, wants to join with the abolitionists for all their ends-in-view and put off the day when end-states might divide us. When the day comes that prisons truly are obsolete, reformers hope that they will be able to see that, too. But who really thinks that today is that day? Not Davis, who wants to “solve social problems” before throwing open the prison doors. In the meantime, why can we not work together to shrink and ameliorate the torturous institutions we all abhor? Why isn’t the reified distinction between abolition and reform as meaningless, today and for the foreseeable future, as the division between those who want to live in a world where the state withers away (Engels) and the world where the state has become small enough to drown in a bathtub (Norquist)? (Norquist now favors some decarceral strategies: is he an ally or an enemy?) If ends-in-view divide us, we must deliberate, compromise, and fight; so long as we are only divided in our utopias, why not collaborate?
A couple of weeks ago, I joined with hundreds of other students and scholars at Johns Hopkins for a conference on prisons and the social determinants of health. The star of the conference was this story:
One day three men were fishing in the river when they noticed a baby floating towards them. Two of the men jumped out of their boat to save the child, and the third brought the baby and the boat to shore to care for it. As they stood around comforting it, one of the men spotted a second baby floating downstream! As he ran back towards the river, he was shocked to see his friend turn and run upstream. “What are you doing?!?” he cried. “There’s a baby in the water!” His friend shouted back over his shoulder: “I’m going to find the asshole throwing kids into the river!”
It was repeated and referenced throughout the day; it is a story about root causes and priorities, and it’s quite appropriate in a public health context where there’s always a tension between treating the symptoms or identifying the etiology. “Going upstream” means looking for the systematic and institutional causes of the illnesses and deaths public health workers encounter every day. We have to save the babies in the water, but we can’t ignore how they got there.
What we heard time and time again at this conference was a curious mix of ideas and arguments: on the one hand, many of Baltimore’s and America’s worst public health problems could be laid at the feet of the mass incarceration of its least advantaged residents. The nexus of poverty and educational failures were closely correlated with racism and prisons, and these were closely correlated with premature mortality, disease, and lost capacities. Put simply: prisons are one of the primary mediating terms for the creation of disparate health outcomes for whites and blacks.
And yet: we heard from a number of scholars who tried to give us a window onto criminality and delinquency through the neurobiology of adolescent impulsivity or the experience of substance abuse and dependency. These scholars didn’t even mention these racial disparities, and so they seemed to offer us little hope of a connection between the putative objectivity of brain and addiction science and the clear biases in arrests, prosecutions, convictions, and incarcerations. We even heard from one scholar who spent a long time touting his credentials and then accused African-American men of “compensatory narcissism.” (What was *he* compensating for?)
by Flickr user John Watson
Each panel was punctuated by a student poet from Dew More Baltimore, and these sizzling lyrics gradually seemed to impress the speakers that they could not ignore race any more. As the day went on, we heard from Elijah Cummings and Eddie Conway. We heard from a group of formerly incarcerated men who ran non-profits working on reentry and job placement. And we started to hear more talk of solutions: ways to reduce the number of people in jail, divert juveniles from the school-to-prison pipeline, and deal with substance abuse issues. David Kennedy‘s work with SafeStreets is designed to reduce the number of crime victims, and as a side effect reduce the number of people incarcerated: this is certainly laudable work worthy of all the celebration it has received, but it’s not really about abolishing prisons so much as it is about better-managing policing to increase efficacy, reduce costs, and mitigate harms. In that sense, it’s meliorist rather than abolitionist. It goes upstream, but does it go upstream enough? Or does it tarry there in the water because there are lives to be saved right now?
What I never heard was a response to Vesla Weaver‘s challenge from the beginning of the day: African-Americans who encounter the criminal justice system are increasingly socialized with a dual logic: they are held responsible for the outcomes in their lives, while being actively disenfranchised in the decisions that will affect the conditions that produce those outcomes. The language of personal responsibility is rampant, even in public health; yet we know that demographic and institutional factors will play a major role in shaping outcomes. Disenfranchisement is the ultimate “up stream” moment; building social capital and public health seems to require re-enfranchisement.
Of course, Weaver herself didn’t tell us how to accomplish that. And so I return to Elinor Ostrom: you have to create an alignment between responsibility and the power to act. Ostrom showed that institutions can “crowd-in” responsibility: those who will experience the consequences of an action have to be the ones who control it. Civic capacities are hampered by medical and social incapacities, but at the same time civic capabilities can produce better outcomes in medicine and the economy.
Right now, we seem committed to more expert management of disenfranchised populations, and so we continue to create the mismatched logic of powerless responsibility and unaccountable power. The alternative is to let the Dew More poets take center stage and ask the scholars to wait for the intermission.