ABSTRACT
Like many others, I share the belief that prisons should be radically reformed or even abolished. This statement, that there are those who believe prisons should be rethought or dismantled, is often met, in my experience, with shock, anger, or disbelief. 1 This suggests, I fear, that fundamentally changing prisons is an aim far disconnected from mainstream thought in the United States. To counter this, there are at least two avenues that would-be reformers must pursue. On the one hand, they must articulate alternatives to the practices of imprisonment that seem unquestionable in the United States. On the other hand, they must question the unquestionable nature of imprisonment; they must ask, in other words, why it is so difficult to conceive a world without prisons as they currently exist. It is this second avenue that I aim to address in this chapter, and here I am guided by two principles. First, I believe there are a cluster of philosophical tools that can help us understand why prisons are, or have become, so obvious and inevitable for us. Specifically, I will discuss three concepts and methods that help us understand why there is an entrenched “prison tunnel vision”—that is, why there is a strong resistance to alternatives to incarceration, and why there is an aversion toward forming coalitions with those who are incarcerated and the communities most affected by mass incarceration. This resistance comes not from simple habit, and certainly not from calm reason, but from investments we all have in our own histories, identities, and knowledges. Questioning practices of imprisonment, then, must also be a practice of questioning ourselves, and it is this latter form of questioning that I seek to encourage here. Second, I believe that it is important to engage not only my fellow philosophers, or even my fellow academics, but to address anyone interested in discussing prisons, their reform, and potentially their abolition. For this reason, it is my intent to articulate these philosophical tools and their potential application to our thinking about prisons in ways that are more widely accessible than many academic articles. If there are ideas that remain unclear at the end of the chapter, I hope this will be understood as a fault of my writing, and not evidence of the difficulty of the texts or ideas that I am drawing from.
