Shelby, Davis, Marx and a Partridge in a Pear Tree

    In Tommie Shelby's The Idea of Prison Abolition, he offers what he calls a "functional critique" of the prison in order to conduct a social analysis in line with a Marxist tradition. Angela Davis offers a similar critique, drawing on Marxism as well; she believes that "capitalism is a degrading and despotic system of involuntary servitude."

    While both academics rely on Marxism, they draw on different parts of his literature and theory. Davis calls for the abolition of prisons on the account that their latent function is to serve as an "instrument of political repression... [which] serves as a place to warehouse people who represent major social problems" (89). Shelby, however, claims that "It is not enough to show that prisons came into existence to serve these functions. If prisons can be reformed so that they are humane, fair to prisoners, and only perform legitimate functions, than functional critique cannot yield abolitionist conclusions" (91). His perspective on the potential for evolution of institutions, and their potential for disconnection with problematic historical connections, stems from marxism. On the topic of institutional legacy, he states:         

"This point is entirely consistent with -- indeed, a necessary feature of -- a broadly historical materialist outlook. Marx thought that the means of production in the hands of the bourgeoisie were instruments of subjugation and exploitation. But once the proletariat takes hold of them, placing them under worker control and no longer using them as private capital to maximize profit, these means -- whose immense productive power has been cultivated under capitalism -- will be the basis for freedom, community, and material prosperity for all" (83). 

To "prove" the prison system's capacity to reform, rather than call for their total abolition, Shelby offers a functional critique of prisons which re-centers the blame on prison's potential for harm on their ideology. He, and Davis agrees, says that "the prison, though not a belief system, can perform essentially the same function that ideologies do. An institution or social practice can serve an ideological function in that it can mislead us about or conceal important social facts." 

This designation, however, complicates Shelby's Marxist attribution of institutions as changeable based on those who holds them. In Shelby's example from Marx, the means of production change their legacy depending on if the bourgeoisie or the proletariat holds it; but the means of production don't necessarily produce ideology in the same way that Davis and Shelby claim that prisons can. What implications does this have for his argument, and how it interacts with Davis's? 

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