Does Shelby’s functional analysis meet his own conditions for abolition?

Tommie Shelby lays out demanding conditions for abolition through functional critique. Historical and current harms are insufficient, since institutions can change and harmful consequences can be removed through reform. Rather, to justify abolition, it must be proven that prisons persist because they serve oppressive functions and therefore contribute to an "unredeemably unjust” system (91, 102). In Shelby’s words, “The explanatory claim must ground the critical claim”: the oppressive function must explain the institution’s survival (91).

Shelby introduces a “master function” of prisons: that prisons serve to stabilize unjust social systems (105). All other functions of a prison, including racial domination, obscuring capitalism’s social issues, and economic exploitation are subsidiary to the master function (105). He then argues that unjust modern societies that persist over time “tend to develop and maintain prisons, which enable the survival of [these] oppressive social systems..” (105). At first glance, this account of the function of prisons plausibly suggests that prisons are both created and maintained because they serve oppressive functions (which if proven, is a condition for abolition under the functional critique). 


Yet, the mere fact that prisons are functional for unjust societies does not prove their existence.  The stabilizing effects of prisons could be an unintended byproduct of a system persisting for unrelated reasons. To establish a legitimate functional explanation, a mechanism showing how these consequences contribute to the institution’s persistence is necessary. He suggests that such explanations often take the form of “feedback loops,” where an institution generates consequences that reinforce the beliefs and social structures that sustain it (106-107). This account raises a challenge for his reformist conclusion. If prisons help reproduce the ideology and social conditions that legitimate them, then incarceration may persist partly because of these stabilizing effects. This possibility supports Angela Davis’s claim that the prison system seems to be functioning exactly as it is supposed to, rather than functioning as a broken system to be reformed (91). 


If incarceration helps reproduce the ideological conditions that sustain it, then Shelby’s analysis raises the possibility that prisons persist precisely because they stabilize unjust social systems, suggesting that their role may be structural (“unredeemably unjust”) versus circumstantial, and thus potentially satisfying the condition Shelby sets for abolition.

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