History vs. Potential

In Dark Ghettos, Shelby claims that “serious injustices in the basic structure of a society compromise both the state’s authority to punish criminal offenders and its moral standing to condemn crimes” (228). That means in deeply unjust societies like the United States, the state’s authority to punish seems illegitimate. Shelby distinguishes between authority and enforcement, so even if citizens don’t owe obedience to an unjust state, the state may still punish certain acts like violence because punishment can prevent further harms. 

Shelby seems to think that this resolves the legitimacy problem that he raises, but I’m not entirely convinced. If the state lacks the moral standing to demand obedience, why does it still have the authority to incarcerate people? It seems somewhat arbitrary to me, deeming that only certain crimes justify punishment. Where does that line get drawn, and won't that open another massive can of worms in Supreme Court interpretations?

Moreover, he uses this idea in response to abolitionists like Angela Davis in The Idea of Prison Abolition. Davis argues that the prisons “warehouse people who represent major social problems” (89) and serve oppressive functions like “economic exploitation” and “political repression” (95). Shelby’s response is that functional critiques only justify abolition if they show that these functions are inherent to prisons, and if they can be “reformed so that they are humane, fair to prisoners, and only perform legitimate functions, then functional critique cannot yield abolitionist conclusions” (91). 

But this perspective changes the focus from the history of institutions to the potential they have. Shelby’s entire argument for the systemic injustice framework in the beginning of Dark Ghettos seems to rely on the historical injustices that have developed into structural issues. But this reversal on the prison abolition stance, to instead focus on the possibility that they might improve/reform, seems to go against the egalitarian pluralist model that attempts to wholly uproot the basic structure and political institutions. If prisons can be reformed so that they are just, why haven’t they? Shelby himself argues that prisons “can perform essentially the same function that ideologies do” (107). If prisons’ ideological function is to hide the failures of the basic structure, is a just prison even possible? And if it is possible, why is it an egalitarian pluralistic remedy and not a medical model one, especially if prisons were built on historical institutional racism? 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

We're all separate but equal

During my tutorial with Dylan yesterday, he brought up the SCOTUS case Brown vs. Board of Education in our discussion of a minimal state. Whilst reading Marx, I realized that both the legal implication (state according rights to individuals) and the societal implication (abolishment of the 'separate but equal' doctrine) of the case are relevant to the claims Marx is making.  Marx delineates between two societies -- political and civil -- and further between the two lives one leads in each -- public and private. In a political society, man is entitled to the liberties given to him by the state, and considers himself a member of a functional community. Marx hints at the mirage of political society, writing that man is “the imaginary member of an imaginary sovereignty, divested of his real, individual life, and infused with an unreal universality” (34). In such a society, he leads a public life, one in which the state can establish political equality by abolishing “the distinctio...
Read more

What Brettschneider Ought to Admit: Democracy Is Substantive

Although Corey Brettschneider presents his value theory of democracy as a third way between pure proceduralism and outcome-based accounts, his framework collapses into substantivism. Despite insisting that democracy cannot be reduced to “procedure-independent evaluations of outcomes,”(2) he explicitly grounds democratic legitimacy in substantive rights that “limit those policy outcomes that would fail to respect citizens as rulers.” (20). Legitimacy therefore hinges not merely on fair participation but on conformity to three independently specified values—equality of interests, political autonomy, and reciprocity. These values operate as external normative standards against which democratic decisions are judged. Brettschneider treats policies such as ex post facto laws or vote buying as democratically illegitimate regardless of procedural authorization, making clear that outcomes remain subject to direct moral assessment. This is not procedural democracy supplemented by rights; it is ...
Read more

'Enough and as Good' for Whom?

 Both Hobbes and Locke describe a state of nature grounded in equality and natural law. Yet, they reach sharply different conclusions about property. Hobbes denies any possibility of owning property in the state of nature. Locke, by contrast, argues that individuals may aquire private property prior to any government by mixing their labor with common resources. By allowing pre-political appropriation, Locke commits himself to moral constraints on ownership.  Locke introduces these limits through two provisos. The Spoiling proviso requires that an individual only claim ownership over land/natural resources to what one can use before it spoils, critizicing waste as a violation of natural law: "Nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy" (21). To me, this limit is relatively clear and intuitive.  More demanding, however, is Locke's second proviso, claiming that appropriation is only legitimate if "enough, and as good" is left in common for others. At first...
Read more