Why? Radio episode "Should We Abolish Prisons?" with guest Tommie Shelby
2:19AM Feb 12, +0000
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Tommie Shelby
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Hi, I'm Jack Russell Weinstein. Welcome to why philosophical discussions about everyday life. Today we're going to ask Tommy Shelby, whether it's time to abolish prisons. If you ask people whether we should follow the dictum An eye for an eye, chances are you'll get a negative response. No, they'll say It's brutal. It's primitive, it leaves the whole world blind. The ship has sailed for this particular moral standard. Except it hasn't. If we read the Bible for which it came, we'll see massive escalations and violence. Someone is killed in the victim's relatives slaughter, the killer's family and retribution, someone is raped, an entire village is destroyed in revenge. God is the worst culprit of all people become sinners. So God floods the world and everyone drowns except Noah and his family. These are not punishments to be proud of. The goal of Hammurabi, his code, the place and iPhone I came from was to insist upon a proportional response to crime, to stop violent escalations before it got out of hand. Its intention was to make sure that more damage wasn't done from the punishment than from the original crime. There is something very noble about putting a cap on destruction, especially in today's world of carpet bombs and decades long economic sanctions. These days, an eye for an eye seems positively quaint. I was reminded of all this when I read a passage from the idea of prison abolition. In it, our guest writes, I regard imprisonment as justified only if milder penalties are insufficient to control crime adequately, as with self defense and just war measures, we should cause no more suffering than is necessary to protect people from harmful wrongdoing. The only punishment that is justifiable, Tommy Shelby suggests is the bare minimum that we need to control crime, or to use one of my own examples. If someone is attacking us, and we can stop them by shooting their knees, we can't morally justify killing them. It's not quite an eye for an eye. But it's pretty close. What does this have to do with prisons, everything, maybe 20 years of fear, suffering and victimization in a cage is way too harsh of a sentence for anyone. Maybe destroying someone's future, denying them a family and removing their ability to better themselves is not the proportional response to anything. Prison, especially in the United States is often akin to torture. Inmates are brutalized, tortured by guards and other inmates and denied human rights by the very system that is supposed to protect them. Those who do make it through often leave the prison with nowhere to go and nothing to do. They're denied jobs, trust, empathy, even family long after they've paid their dues. Maybe all of this is too much. Now, let me be clear about two things. First, this is me speaking and not yet Tommy, I don't want to put words in his mouth. Second, I'm not offering these as conclusions. I'm not saying lengthy incarceration is necessarily the wrong solution to society's problems. I'm simply asking that we start considering the possibility that we've been led astray that may be just maybe prisons have outlived their usefulness. My thoughts are, of course, inspired by Tommy, his book in turn as a consideration of proposals put forth by members of the black radical movement, most notably Angela Davis. From WB Dubois onward, the black radical solution to deep structural racism in the United States is to invite us to tear down institutions that are too broken to fix. There are lots of reasons why the black radical tradition attacks prisons specifically, some argue, for example, that the penal system is an extension of slavery and that inmates are modern day slaves. Others assert that prisons destroy the political power of black neighborhoods. Still, others highlight the profit seeking prisons use their influence to justify harsher sentencing, trapping people of color into economic exploitation that destroys family and inhibits the creation of generational wealth. All of these will be the subject of Tommy's of my discussion. For now, I'd simply like us to consider the dubious calculations we do when we quantify Crime and Punishment. Why is taking someone's life worth 20 years and not 10? It's a tradition actuarial statistics. Why does premeditation for the usage of a deadly weapon add years to sentences? And how much should we subtract for a childhood of poverty or being raised in a neighborhood with no meaningful educational prospects? And by the way, how do these values change when we switch from punishing inmates to rehabilitating them, or demand that they provide restitution or participate in restorative practices? Aren't these all things we need to be pretty damn certain about before we mete out justice? Prison sentencing presumes both that there is some objective analogue to every crime and that we know what it This, but the fact of the matter is that sentencing is both subjective and idiosyncratic. The end result is distorted by political considerations judicial personality and frighteningly often the color of a defendants skin. I would suggest that when it comes to justify incarceration, there is more reasonable doubt than certainty about the validity of the process. And this in turn calls into question the existence of prisons themselves. Is this enough to stop using prisons? Of course not? Is it enough to put the question on the table, for sure. And that's what we're about to do. And now our guests, Tommy Shelby is Caldwell to come professor in the Department of African American Studies, and the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University. He's the author of three books, most recently, the idea of prison abolition. This is also Tommy second appearance on our show, he joined us in July 2016, for discussion called How to think philosophically about black identity. Tommy, welcome back to why.
Thanks for having me. Nice to talk to you, Jack. To
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I think a couple of ways. One might approach that. I mean, one is just to point out that the practice of imprisonment imposes tremendous harm, not only on those in prison, but on their families and their communities, break relationships through a person's life course, totally off track. And so whenever a society is going to use a practice that causes that kind of harm with those kinds of ramifications, I think it's important to reflect on whether your practice is truly justified. That will be true of other kinds of practices like that, that have that kind of these kind of disruptive consequences, we'd always want to reflect on whether the practices truly justified in the fact that it's existed for a long time, in itself is not a reason to think that questioning it makes no sense or is absurd. I think another way to approach it is to just think about the question of say capital punishment, which most people think is a perfectly fine question, you know, should we have it? Should people be put to death, even if they do something really horrific and horrible? And a lot of people think the answer is no. And in most many parts of the world, people have abolished the practice entirely. I think there's an analogous question here. Right. So the maybe there are some penalties that are appropriate for certain kinds of harmful wrongdoing. But in this case, you might wonder, well, is this one, this particular penalty, one that's justified as a response to a harmful wrongdoing? So those are usually the ways in which we try to get people to take up the question more seriously than they might otherwise.
You know, it's interesting that you bring up the idea of capital punishment, because I think, no, this is theory, of course. But I think that if I'm going to choose between being put to death and spending 30 years in a supermax prison, or frankly, any of the really awful prisons, we'll hear about that I might choose death. Am I Am I overselling it? Am I the victim of Hollywood, our prisons, really not that bad?
Many of them really are that bad. I mean, that's the thing. I mean, even in the United States, I mean, one thing to emphasize is that we do have federal prisons, they have about, you know, eight to 9% of the prison population, but the vast majority of prisoners are in various state and municipal incarceration facilities. And these vary enormously by state and municipality. Some of them can be quite horrific. And certainly if you're in a supermax prison, where you're spending 23 hours a day and a sale alone, with almost no interaction with other prisoners only an hour to kind of stretch your legs outside of your sale, all supervising just a larger cage. Yeah, I think a lot of you With regard death as preferable to those those kinds of constraints when it's going to happen over many, many years, perhaps the rest of your life. But there are, you know, variations are certainly prisons that are, you know, minimum security and medium security, where you're not confined to your cell all the time. Sometimes the cells even are open, fictional, pretty offensive, minimum security. So there's a lot of variation. So in some cases, yeah, I would say, it wouldn't be irrational to prefer death to imprisonment. But I think there can be lots of cases that are that are not quite like that.
Now, the way I ask the question, pulling on, you know, my own instinct and the realities of the world we're in now, that is certainly the way that many people start the conversation. You acknowledge this, but But you start your conversation by looking back in history towards WB Dubois, Huey Newton, Brack black radicalism, and specifically Angela Davis, other than I know from our previous conversation that you are heavily influenced by DuBois. Why did you decide to go that route? What does it attract what's attractive to you about black radicalism? And why respond to Angela Davis specifically?
Well, I mean, there are many things that attracted me to the black radical tradition, probably the most important is it's a tradition, I think that's most, that has always systematically engaged with questions of racial justice and economic justice in a way that's combined. Rather, this takes both seriously thinks hard about how to interact, and thinks about what are appropriate responses to social orders that are structured by economic inequality and racial domination. That tradition has many, many figures, Dubois being probably maybe the most famous central figure to thinking about that set of questions and ramifications of race and class and America globally. That's a big part of attraction. And Davis is a part of that tradition, a central figure who draws on insights from many black thinkers, but also from Marxism and other socialist thinkers, as they try to come to terms with, you know, our contemporary moment and the legacy of historical forms of oppression.
You at one point, you quote Assata Shakur talking about the impact of of the threat that of prison might have and how that threat isn't quite as serious as some people might think. And Shakur says that prisons are maximum security, but the streets meaning the ghetto, and the places where many people grow up are minimum security, that really struck me that that spoke to my history growing up in a bad neighborhood, it speaks to all of the stories I know of people who are growing up in Watts and East LA is is is that to hyperbole? Or is there really are are the people who end up in prison, leaving such awful lives, that prison maybe a notch worse, but isn't such a radical difference that they're not motivated by the by the threat?
Yeah, I think it's not entirely hyperbolic. I mean, it's, there are when you think about what we should be trying to do when we use the practice of imprisonment, part of what we're trying to decide the only thing that part of what we're trying to do or should be trying to do is deter people from engaging in certain kinds of unlawful, harmful wrongdoing. And I think we do that by attaching a penalty to include something that is generally undesirable, something that people would like to avoid, that deprive the product, some someone of the thing they would like to have. And so that's going to be effective. In cases where you'd have to give up a lot. If you committed a crime and you got caught, you'd be given giving up a lot, much more than you would want to give up. But if you're under living under very deprived conditions, if you're severely disadvantaged, having a hard time meeting your basic needs, subjected to mistreatment of various sorts, you know, then the incentive, the negative incentive here is not going to be as effective. So I think in that sense, I think that that's probably what Chicago is talking about is you're going to be less frightened by the prospect of prison when the conditions you Living under kind of resemble it in some in some respects. So I think part of what anybody who thinks that prisons are legitimate, but thinks they need to be reformed, part of what they should be trying to do is improve the life conditions of people in society. So that the penalty of prison is actually something that it would be rational to avoid risking having it imposed on you. So I think that that's part of what she's after. And she's one person in the broader, as you mentioned, back radical tradition, along with Davis and many others who have spent a lot of time in prison and reflect on these questions. From that point of view, from the point of view of someone who's spent time inside, and it gives a kind of special weight to what she's what she's speaking about.
You You mentioned that later on in the book. And one of the things you say a version of what you just said is, is that if prison isn't such a threat, then maybe what we have to do is look at the world that people live in to ask why it's so bad, that prison ceases to be a threat. So let's take a look at some of the larger structural and justices let's look at the conditions people live in. But how much does the ambiguity of that sentence hanging over your writing? And what I mean by that is, is Marx is a wonderful critic. He's powerful. I love teaching him because his his incisive, and insightful attack on particular aspects of capitalism are often unchallengeable. But he has no real solution. There's no picture of what a communist society looks like. There's also no picture of what a society without prison is going to look like, either. How hard is it for you to challenge and to critique the call for prison abolition, if the picture of what they're trying to accomplish is so vague?
makes it somewhat more challenging. You know, there's a dimension of utopianism in the vision. And depending how you look at it, this can be seen as a, a bad kind of utopian, it's good to minister utopianism. But there, there are some downsides. And, and one of them is that you're kind of asking people to take a pretty big leap of faith that you could actually bring about a social order that didn't require the use of imprisonment. When you don't have any models in front of you, right, I mean, that's, it's a, there's a comparable challenge for those people who want to abolish capitalism, as you say, I mean, there's those the the examples that we have don't inspire confidence about what a society that was structured by collective ownership of productive assets, and that eliminated the labor market that so there's a comfortable word here, we don't when we look at a modern world, you know, we don't see all all modern nations have prisons, for instance, and we don't have a thing we can point to and say, Look, see, you could do without it. We do have history in the sense that, you know, we haven't always had prisons, and there are many societies that have not had prisons in the past. It's a it's a modern invention. Probably one is appropriate to, you know, mass society that are very realistic and maybe not least, is tightly bound by a set of common values and traditions. And so you can look back in silica, we there have been social orders in the past that did not have prisons, and they seem ticket by but probably mostly what people would say, in defense of the kind of worry that this is a kind of bad utopianism is they get kind of smaller local experiments and living if you can put it that way, kind of attempts to kind of prefigure a life without relying on law enforcement of criminal law, or really dramatically limiting it, seeing what happens when you meet people's basic needs, when you would tend to harm in ways that don't involve composing further harm or violence. And you kind of see, and you try to build up from those local experiments to something on a larger scale. I think that's the The way a lot of abolitionists think of it, you know, rather than thinking of it as let's just close of a prison to today and just hope for the best, I hardly anybody is saying.
There's a scene in Stephen King's book, The Stand laid on in the novel where people are living in the town that's that's actually Boulder, Colorado, that where people are just starting to gather, and there's just starting to be a mass of people. And a guy gets drunk and starts breaking windows, and no one stops him because nobody feels they have the authority to stop him. That no one there's no police. There's no mayor, there's no one who's in charge. It's it's all very ad hoc and almost communal. To what extent do you think we need and that prisons and police provide a sense of authority that gives people agency to take responsibility for other people's actions whether their own, do you think I mean, that as I read it, in the black black radical tradition and anarchists traditions, in communist traditions, there's a there's a sense that people under conditions of Justice will be at their best. And so we don't have to worry about other people as much because people are worrying about themselves. Do you think that that's naive? Do you think that prisons provide some sense of authority to give us an excuse to have responsibility for other people? I'm not I'm not sure that I'm asking the question exactly, clearly, but I'm hoping you understand what I'm asking. I
think so. Um, the broader abolitionists, tradition means, you know, different evolutions for a long time. You know, what ended early 19th century that is, especially an anarchist tradition. And I think, many of these people who are kind of attracted to anarchism, I'm not myself, but those those who are, do imagine kind of smaller decentralize communities where people take responsibility for each other are connected to pretty thick bonds of reciprocity. And as a result, there's less of a worry about certain kinds of breaking of this of the social rules and that you need to take a really drastic response, like and find that in order to address it. So I think partly what's motivating at least some people in in the tradition is a, partly a rejection of, you know, mass society where there's a governing state that uses the threat of force to keep people in line, the thought that that's, that maybe that's appropriate for that form of life. But maybe that form of life itself should be, should be questioned. Where we are all kind of acting, just thinking about our own interest, or the interest of our family and loved ones, and no have no thicker sense of ties to others no sense of responsibility to others and their needs. I think partly what's being challenged is that, that vision that I think a lot of people accept in contemporary mass market societies. So the question of what do you need? legal authority might partly depend on whether you think there's a defensible form of mass market society that we should embrace and have allegiance to, or whether that itself should be something that we should be called into question. And I myself have been invested in, in wanting to try to get the benefits of living in larger science based market societies without its downsides, and trying to figure out a way to think about what reforms would be appropriate to make that form of life one worth supporting and defending.
When we come back, we'll pull that thread and we'll start looking at the meat of your argument. But until then, you're listening to Tommy Shelby and Jack Russell Weinstein on why philosophical discussions but over the life, we'll return right after this.
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you're back with why philosophical discussions about everyday life. I'm your host, Jack Russell Weinstein, we're talking with Tommy Shelby about abolishing prisons. And what Tommy is going to do is look at the argument put forth, particularly by Angela Davis, and the black radical movement for abolishing prisons, and he's going to tone that down quite a bit and argue for a more reform based approach. And we'll get there. But I keep thinking about this experience I had, that I actually think about quite a lot. I was early on in my career, still looking for a permanent tenure track job, still at the stage of of my career, where publications were everything and where you really had to distinguish yourself, and I went to visit Alcatraz with a friend. And we're, we're looking at the very tiny cells. And the first thought that still kind of haunts me today is my God, I would get so much work done. And it's, it's, it's almost obscene. What's perverse about that point of view? Why am I misrepresenting the prison experience? When I look at it that way? And what am I missing? What are what are prisons for? And why would I not get any work done?
Great question. It reminds me of how some people reacted during the height of the pandemic of being like confined to their homes, and they were this was we were prisoners like. Not quite. I mean, I think part of what you there's a tendency, when people think about prisons, they kind of abstract the experience inside of sale. But that's really the heart of, of what prison is, is like, you're in a cell you'd like in this room, right? Maybe back by yourself, but I think we the practice of imprisonment is a is not just locking people up in a building or a room, right? It's a, it's a broader hierarchical practice, it has a lot of administrators who are really directing every aspect of your day. And controlling your movements, what you can say, what you can wear, who you can associate with when you can speak, controlling your meals, controlling all your contact with outside world with your family and friends, you know, surveillance over you, when you do interact with family and friends, frat, you know, tracking your correspondence and so on. So there's really like a wide set of constraints that are in place that are not best represented or best understood by just thinking about what it means to be locked in a room. That, of course, is is horrifying to some people. But I think it's more the separation from the broader public and your family and friends, combined with the really quite dramatic and comprehensive control that prison administrators have over your life and over the course of your day over perhaps many years. That I think is more, what's horrifying about it and meant to be scary, in a way so that people will conform to the law, so they don't have to face that kind of that kind of penalty.
Is this the kind of thing that makes so many of the writers you're engaged with, suggests that there's a direct line between slavery and prisons? I mean, obviously, there's the whole discussion of just ushering black men in particular into into prisons to get them out of society, which is related, but not exactly the same question. But so many of the writers that you engage with, use the slavery metaphor, use the historical connection as evidence of the inherent corruptness of prison is what they're saying. Fair. I mean, on the one hand, write the COVID-19 example. It's too little, it's too easy. No, it's not prison. Your life is a lot better than that. On the other hand, maybe the slavery example is too much. Maybe it may be maybe that oversells The position? Is that the kind of thing that they're talking about that you want to respond to?
I mean, I do I mean, I think not just I mean, I should say I'm probably interested in a of the prison abolition movement and its arguments because it, there are some patterns of reasoning patterns of argument, that extend out beyond just thinking about criminal law and law enforcement. And, and one of those patterns is the tendency to invoke slavery as a way of critiquing various social practices, social conditions. And that makes sense in a lot of ways. Because, you know, slavery is one of these practices, that is pretty universally condemned these days wasn't always so of course, but these days, everyone thinks that slavery is is is wrong, and it wherever it exists, it should be stopped immediately. So if you can show that a practice is like slavery, then that can be a straw more argument for why you ought to end that practice, perhaps immediately, I think there are limits to that way of arguing. It's hard to get from those kinds of arguments to the thought that the practice of imprisonment is inherently unjust, I think, mostly what to get. And I think it's fair, that the existing practice of imprisonment in some places, is too much like slavery, and so should be changed fundamentally. But I think you rarely get to the conclusion that the practice of imprisonment as such, is one that shouldn't exist, because it's inherently dehumanizing or inherently a form of bondage, or it's inherently a way of traffic, any human bodies and so on. I think it's much harder to get to that conclusion. And so part of what I've tried to do in the book is suggest our lessons here about existing practices to point toward perhaps rather dramatic reforms and our prison systems, but to counsel against an over reliance on these kinds of analogies when we think we have other more resources to draw on, to think about when a practice should exist. And when it should.
I want to ask you more about that, because you're doing moral philosophy, ultimately, in this discussion, and in the book, you're not you're not doing a practical analysis, you're not doing criminology, per se, you're you're looking at this from a moral point of view. So so why is it difficult to get to that conclusion? That prison isn't a form of bondage, the prison isn't a form of of trafficking, as we'll talk about in a little bit. There's profit seeking, there's loss of agency, there's, there's, there's all sorts of other issues. So So why why do you why are you resistant to this to this idea, that, that, that fundamental similarity, of bondage and disrespect and exploitation and the using people as as tools and instruments in a way that that's dehumanizing, why is that so hard to get to?
Well, part of it is. A lot of these practices, the things you mentioned, are things that are not really essential to the practice of incarceration as a penalty for committing a crime. They are often attendant to such practices. So it's very different from the case where nobody thinks we're, you know, here's a form of slavery that, you know, removes the, you know, arbitrary abuse and removes a lot of the cruelty and so on. See, it's not so bad. You know, everybody thinks that, you know, owning people buying and selling people forcing people to, to work without pay, controlling their family relations, everybody thinks that those things are, are inherently wrong. There's no way of reforming slavery to make it acceptable. I think in the case of incarceration, when you think about what it involves, right, yeah, desegregation, from the outs from the broader community. There's a hierarchical structure of confinement Rules of Order that shaped a person's a lot person's life while they're inside. But that practice, we use in lots of other context, when we when the ends are different, right? So we sometimes use it. When were their prisoners of war, and now you're fighting a war and people were captured. And you hold them in confinement until the conflict ceases. And it will have all the same structure. And I think few people would say, well, that slavery. I think we pull people in psychiatric hospitals when they're dangerous to others, or sometimes to themselves. Sort of indican receive treatment, but they also are confined in a hierarchical institution with separation from the broader public, and we don't think most people don't think that's inherently wrong, maybe it's abused. Maybe it's used too often. But it's not inherently wrong. So I think part of the question here is whether the practice of incarceration, this way of confining people in this institutional context, and not allowing people to leave without the authorities. Permission, without that kind of practice, is something that you could have, without all these other attendant problems, profit seeking, abuse of authority, cruelty, susceptibility to interpersonal violence, and so on. So I think part of the trouble is what most people were doing is they're focusing on the forms of imprisonment, that have all these other elements that I think really can't be defended. But that's not quite the same as saying that the very practice of incarcerating people is is just like slavery, where has the same if you'd like wrong making feature that slavery and
now we still haven't, I'm gonna put her off for another minute, gotten to the question of what prisons are for whether it's punishment or retribution, or rehabilitation, or, or things like that. And I want the listeners to know that we're gonna get there. But you said something, you said in your last answer that it doesn't get to the the essence of the question of prisons and the essence of of incarceration. And this is a very, very philosophical move. And this is this is very important in the kind of work that that philosophers do, especially philosophers who were going towards a more analytic approach, but don't worry about that at home. But suppose someone comes along and says, Well, look, if we look at the essence of prisons, we're hiding the fact that the kinds of things that you talked about the abuse of power, for example, it isn't technically part of incarceration, but it is in fact, indistinguishable or inseparable from it. Part of the problem with prisons in the United States is the culture of of imprisoning for lack of a better term is horrendous. You get guards who are abusive and, and and who are violent themselves who are bullies, right, much the same, where people have similar critiques of police in general that that you can't talk about American policing without talking about the the high school boy hung up, I'm gonna be really crass here. The high school bullying Insell aspect of of the domestic abuser, that is the the police officer. Now, let me say I'm talking in someone else's voice there. But But I think it's important to do that as as directly as possible. So if you're talking about the essence of prison, can you really move away from the inherent abuse that the people who make up the prison engage in? Or do you? Or are you I don't know, defining the way the problem?
Okay, question about entering two parts. So one of the best pipe that I say in the book, I wish I had kind of lingered on it a little longer, was that, you know, when I make these sort of conceptual points about, you know, what imprisonment is? And, you know, what's the difference between the practice as we know it, and the practice as it could be? I don't emphasize enough that most of the things that I mentioned, there's things that you could, you know, you could have prison without these other problems. I say that, because in many in many societies, and even in some states, the United States, those conditions already exist. So it's not just a you dream up these things. I mean, they're, you know, if you look comparatively, at no prisons in Germany or the Netherlands or Norway and other places, other places Digital, you know, you will see very different kinds of prison life, you will see different ways in which the prison authorities and prisoners interact. And you'll see larger cells and all kinds of things. So it's not as if, you know, the things I'm talking about, we've never seen a prison that lack these objectionable features. I think it's rare in the United States that you see, prisons that are put out were regarded as acceptable. That's, especially at the higher levels of security, when you're talking about a maximum security prison or supermax prison, you pretty much never see that condition is regarded as acceptable. So that's partly what I would would want to emphasize, I think it is a real worry that one is kind of trying to give a philosopher's answer to a practical problem. But I think that the problem you're raising rises in other contexts, too, right. So, you know, we rely on the practice of the family, to raise children. And we're well aware of the fact that there are many dangers that are attended to that, we understand that children are quite vulnerable. In this situation, to abuse and neglect, we understand that it's in many ways, a dangerous practice that we have, and we have to ask whether that practice could be made better. So that the benefits outweigh the risks of having and that's true of many practices that we have, that there are inherent dangers, whether that's driving motor vehicles, where you know, more than 30,000 people are gonna die this year, and in a traffic accident, and many more are going to be going to be harmed. And we have to ask those same questions. This is a dangerous practice, you know, are the benefits worth it? And I think that's true of prisons, too. It's like this is a very dangerous practice it with the threat of abuse of power of people being mistreated and treated cruelly, is, is a real risk and happens often. And I think the question for anybody who thinks that that practice is defensible, was to ask whether there are ways we could structure or restructure the practice to limit the amount of such abuse and such cruelty. And I think that's really the challenge for anybody who wants to try to reform the practice.
I think that's a really powerful and important answer. And let me and tell me, if I'm getting this right, what you're saying that the benefit of the philosopher's essentialist approach is that we're distinguishing between those things that have to be a part of the system, and those things that don't. So incarceration may be inseparable from prison. But abuse isn't. So to say, well, let's burn the whole thing down is not to give enough credit to say, looking at the Danish model, or the Norwegian model of prisons and to say, look, there there are prisons, in which we can have incarceration that that better respects humanity and agency. And that the the goal here is to give us enough of an analysis to be able to distinguish between those things that we can reform and those things we can't. And the lesson we get is when you're doing when you're building a prison or operating prison, you've got to be extra super careful, because it's easy to slide into the things we don't have to do, that it might even be feel natural to slide into the things that we do. And so we have to be as attentive as possible at all times so that we only focus on the essence of the things that are good and work to to destroy the things that are bad is Is that a fair interpretation of what you just said?
Yeah, I think that is a fair, a fair reading of what I just said. I mean, I think you could think about the same same question arises at the level of political economy just by analogy, right. So there are many people probably many, many, most your listeners who think that capitalism, as we know, it has many problems. But they probably also think that those problems can be tamed or mitigated in a way that would make it still just to continue to this way of meeting our basic needs through having this kind of concentration of wealth and control over basic material assets and productive assets and over finance, and having other people providing labor to, to allow others to accumulate great, great wealth. But this is a way of meeting our basic needs. And no, it has many problems, and it can be destructive in lots of ways those things can be mitigated if you take certain kinds of actions. I think there's an analogous question here about the practice of imprisonment. And and the answer can and I don't mean to, I'm not trying to foreclose on the negative answer. I mean, I mean, it could be right, whether we're talking about capitalism or imprisonment, that it turns out that no, you can't, you can't, you can't. There's no way of having these practices. Without all these other evils. We can't mitigate them to a sufficient degree. That will justify it. I mean, of course, a natural response that a lot of people have is particularly part of partly what we began, which is, well, what are we going to do? If not, if not that? Also, what's the alternative? And is the alternative any better? And I think that is a question that I think the abolition raises, and there's a burden on on abolitionist part to to give us a convincing answer to whether the alternative they're proposing is one that would do better in these dimensions without having us give up too much of what we really want to hold on to
it. It's such a difficult question, and you and you do such a good job in the book of taking it seriously of going detailed by detail step by step in a way that philosophers do very well and you do excellently that you're, you're just patiently going from step by step argument by argument, they say this will but this, the essence doesn't work here. They say that while you're ignoring or emphasizing this, or that. Let's go back then to the question that I promised we'd answer because, because I think that it helps focus our whole conversation. If we're talking about essential to incarceration, if we're talking about prison in and of itself. What is prison for? Is it for punishment? Is it for rehabilitation? Is it for retribution and revenge? Is it some kind of healing practice? What is prison for? And? Well, I was gonna ask him who goes there? But but let's let's do the first because it's hard. What's prison for?
The way I think about this question is only one justification you could have for a practice life imprisonment, is that it helps to get or control serious, harmful wrongdoing. So then the question is, Well, how am I do that? How could it help control, minimize it limit that kind of serious harm for wrongdoing? I think you can do it in three ways. You can do it by, as I mentioned earlier, being a kind of deterrent. It's a negative incentive that everybody understands if they do certain kinds of things, that this will be the penalty for it. It can do it by incapacitating, dangerous individuals who we have reason to believe are serious threat to other safety, that sometimes we have to confine them, because they were not and cannot be deterred. And sometimes we can control crime or limited by reforming those who have engaged in that conduct. That's the rehabilitation part that we try to provide services and counseling, equipping them to live as an equal among us without being a threat to other people's liberty or personal or legitimate property. So deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation I think of appropriate aims of the practice of imprisonment and are all meant to be ways of trying to limit any control serious crime is how I think of I do not think retribution is a legitimate end of punishment. Now, some people When they hear punishment, they just immediately think retribution, or a kind of public revenge. Whereas I just think of it is just, it's just a, it's just a penalty, it's a deprivation or an imposition of some undesirable condition or suffering, that discourage people from doing it. So if, you know, we get five people who drive too fast on the highway, or don't pay their taxes or whatnot, and we can, there are other kinds of penalties, whether it's a community service, or, or home confinement, or the loss of certain privileges. And all of these are penalties, they're all punishments are always of, you know, attaching a penalty, to certain kinds of wrongdoing or breaking certain rules. And we hope that by having a practice of that sort, that will discourage people from doing those things. And I think, you know, imprisonment can function very similarly. And we don't need to think that, you know, when we're finding people or making them do community service, that we're exacting revenge against them, that we're trying to retaliate against them, we can just see it as a part of what it means in a society like our own, to try to maintain basic order and safety so everyone can get the full benefits of their freedoms and, and opportunities.
So the purpose of prison for you is to minimize wrongdoing. Now, let's say God forbid, someone did something to my daughter, my instinct, as a father, and knowing who I am, as a human being, I would want them to suffer every day for the rest of their lives. I wouldn't want the death penalty because I want I would want their life to be solitary, long, brutish, and short, right? to still learn from Hobbes, why isn't that prisons job? Why isn't the job of prison to make people suffer?
It's certainly I think, a familiar disposition that human beings have to retaliate against those who have harmed them or those who love to want to see those suffer who who treated them badly. I think there's a separate question about whether acting on that disposition of sentiment is justified. That's a different question. Understandable, but totally understandable. I can relate to the question about whether it's that's that's that's just that's a different is a different question. I mean, I think it's probably useful to kind of, because there are people who think that retribution is the aim of punishment, or at least one of the aims of punishment. So it's probably most people probably think that. Maybe it's useful just to say a little bit about what I think that kind of view entails. Because there's a lot of disagreement. So I think partly what people who think it's a justification, not just an understandable sentiment, is they think that it's that when you do certain kinds of wrong things that you deserve to suffer. They also think that, that depending on the thing that you did, that you should suffer in proportion to how wrong that thing was, the worst thing you did the worst you should have to suffer or pay. Typically, they also tend to think that it's good in itself, quite apart from any public safety benefits. It's just good, that people want to do certain kinds of wrong things, that they suffer proportionately for having done it, regardless of whether it has any public safety benefits. And they also think, I think, probably most critically, that they think the state are governing authorities, that it's a part of their rights, a part of their authority is part of their obligation to ensure that those who do wrong in these ways, experienced the suffering they deserve. Now, I myself, don't accept any of those four things. But we could talk about that a bit more. But I think anybody who didn't want to defend retribution, I think has to explain why each of those thoughts are fully justified. And I think in particular, I think is very challenging. That even if you think that it's good that people suffer and proportionate to their wrongdoing, it's quite another thing to think that it's the state's responsibility, and it's right to ensure that everybody get that suffer. That I think is a much harder thing to defend, even if the other three things have some merit.
You're very explicit. I just looked it up while you were talking on page 129. You, you're very explicit that, that you don't rely on the premise that those who commit crimes deserve to suffer. Right. And so you address this very specifically. And what comes to mind when I hear you talking about it here. And, again, listeners, this is my voice, not Tommy's is that this ultimately feels like the legacy of, of, of Christianity, that there is a metaphysical belief that people who sin deserve to suffer, and that suffering is good. And that that's why we have hell and things like that, and that Jonathan Edwards famously has this, this sermon where he takes pleasure in the fact that people are, are destined to hell. Do you think that that this notion that prison is part of just suffering, I'll call it just suffering is endemic in our culture, that if we were nicer people as a whole, if we were better, more empathetic, even more forgiving people as a whole to use the Christian language, that we would have a very different conception of what prisoners?
mean, probably, I mean, there's, there's enough research on these questions. And, you know, you see really big differences and tendencies toward retributive thinking, when you compare to us to say, you know, parts of Western Europe and so on where those sentiments are not as not as prevalent. And it's hard not to see, it is partly that, you know, our culture is maybe more, you know, religious, the public culture is a little more more religious than I would want to just pick on Christianity, it's true of a number of, of why the hill, wildly endorsed of faiths, that and you know, and the God is represented in a number of phases represented as, as a vengeful, God is a God that that does impose retribution when people disobey. So it is very surprised, but in the culture, and it's a kind of thing that one would have to confront, if you want to try to move in the direction I think we ought to move. But notice, again, like the last point I made about the need for public justification for a harmful practice, like imprisonment. And it just seems to me that this is, at best a sectarian justification for retribution. And so far as it relies on these theological beliefs, these are not ones that you could expect all your fellow citizens to endorse, if they don't endorse those faiths. And I think for practice, like imprisonment, the public justification needs to be one that any reasonable person, regardless of their religious beliefs, could could endorse. And I don't think that retribution is really going to meet meet that standard. So I agree that you unless you get people to reconsider, not necessarily reconsider their religious beliefs, I don't think that's necessarily to get where I think we need to go, I think what they need to reconsider is whether those religious beliefs should be embodied in public law. And in our criminal legal system. I think that's a different question.
Very, very quickly, implicit in your comment is our allusions to John Rawls, which would take an entire semester to unpack and I do that every every two years. But the gist of what you're saying, for our listeners, if I understand correctly, is that whatever theological belief, whatever religious beliefs people have, when we have a public conversation for the justification of prisons, we have to engage in it in a way that that everyone can approve of, regardless of their religious beliefs. So there's this this notion of reasonableness and public conversation, what's a ladder, what's not allowed? At some point, I should probably do a show on Rawls. I try not to do shows on individual philosophers. But at some point, I probably ought to do that because it will make all the political philosophy much clearer to everyone. I want to shift slightly, though, from that to the question of privatization. Because one of the central justification secular justifications in our society, one of the things that everyone pretty much believes in Our society is that people have a right to make money that people have a right to, to earn money from people's suffering and unhappiness. That's why we have dentists. That's why we have Locksmiths. That's why we have a whole host of other people, not the least of whom are prison guards and police officers. So to what extent are you swayed by? Or do you find convincing or not at all? This idea that prisons should be private, that prisons should be run like a business, and that that's acceptable? Because a lot of people, and this is not just the black radical tradition, but but a lot of people find the notion of a private prison, particularly egregious ly unjust, that that profit seeking over people who are who have no agency is just, I mean, just just awful. I can't think of a more sophisticated way to put it. So how much does the privatization question come in? Where do you stand on that? And how does the black radical tradition approach that?
I mean, it probably probably should start by just emphasizing that private prisons are a pretty small part of the broader landscape landscape of imprisoning states. You know, fewer than 10% of the US prisoners are in privately, a private in private prisons for profit prisons. Many of those are in the federal system, whereas the vast majority of prisoners are in the state system, some 80% in the state system, in many states don't have private prisons. So sometimes, it's a little bit over overdone when people emphasize that aspect. But I would agree that there are many reasons to object to it. You know, one of those reasons is, has to do with the perverse incentives that are, operate there, it's probably not a good idea, to have a practice where people companies have an incentive to have lots of prisoners. So and that's will be true, right, you can have a business of running prisons, withdrawn prisoners. And so it's like, it's kind of against your interest to have a reduction in the number of prisons that we have, which I think is a demand of justice, that we've dramatically reduced the prison population, and that part of the corporate world would be strongly opposed to and lobby against it. But there are other worries too, I mean, I do think it's, you know, worrisome insofar as that privatization extends to access to prison labor, on a for profit basis, I don't think people should be compelled to, to work for private companies for for profit. And insofar as that's happened, that would be another reason to, to, to object to it. Um, but I don't I don't object per se, in relying on private institutions to carry out some public games. I think sometimes, that can be a positive thing to have private entities play some role, especially under conditions that are pretty seriously unjust. And where you can't really rely on the government to fully carry out its public mission. Sometimes, you have to rely on some elements of the private sector to fill the void. But that's not that ideally, you know, what you have is a government that carries out those functions. But that isn't always the case. So sometimes we have to rely on the levers that are, are, are available to us. And sometimes that's a private organization, even for profit.
So that's really interesting, because the one of the implicit one of the arguments implicit in in the anti private prison discussion is that corporations are inherently more unjust than government. But part of what you're saying is, well, if the government isn't doing its job, then there's a possibility that the corporate that the company, the corporation, whatever, can actually be better and more just especially if, if they have a narrow job of feeding prisoners, they'll make sure that the prisoners get fed, cleaning the prisoners clothes, they'll make sure that the clothes get get cleaned at cetera, et cetera. So, as you point out in the book, it's unclear what people are attacking when they're attacking private prisons, because even public prisons still engage with private sources. So is ultimately the question. It is the philosophical question as follows. Is it wrong to make a profit from people's incarceration? Is that the essence of the question? And if it is, can you answer it? If it isn't? What is the question?
I mean, that's a question that people are implicitly raising. But I think it's often the not the one they that they should be asking. I mean, I think sometimes what people were objecting to is capitalism, as we know it. And maybe capitalism as imagined they may be opposed to it. And there's just no way to in a capitalist economy to carry out any public function on a large scale without reliance on for profit companies. So even a completely public prison is going to need supplies and other services that are going to be provided by the for profit, private sector, whether that's clothes or food, medical care, other kinds of technology, all kinds of things that are needed. And they're going to be produced by the broader capitalist economy. So sometimes, I think when people were objecting to for profit companies having a role in prison systems, they're really just objecting to, to capitalism. As such, I think it'd be better to just be clear about that. That's really what your objection is. And we can that's an important discussion. And when I think well worth having, I separate that out from are they objecting to the practice of imprisonment itself? And also, to be maybe clear about, you know, which particular interventions into the prison system by the corporate world are illegitimate and unacceptable, and which ones might be defensible and acceptable under some circumstances? And that seems to be a better place for the discussion to take place. Because it's just, it's just not possible to, you know, as I say, in the book, right? I mean, what would it mean to have a school system without where the private sector plays no role? I mean, who was making the depths and the books and who's providing all the supplies? And, and so on, so forth. So. So now, maybe some people would just say, Yeah, that's correct, that it's always legitimate to have these encroachments when it comes to carrying out these public function as part of their argument for a socialist economy. But let's just hear that argument. And then we can have that discussion. And I think talking about the prison is just going to be a distraction from the thing that is really at issue.
So I have I have one more question about the meat of your argument or one of your conclusions. And then I'm going to ask you sort of a weird question to conclude the question that the question the meat quest, the I've lost the ability to speak the question about your conclusion is one of your main conclusions is that prison is justified but only for the most serious crimes, that property crimes and drug dealing and things like that. They don't necessarily warrant prison time but but serious crimes of harm against persons. Maybe justified Can you talk a little bit why did you come to that conclusion? And what's what's your basic argument for
it? Well, since I don't think that you can justify in imprisonment just because people deserve it. So it can only be justified because of the good ends it serves. That that's partly what leads to death. So if you think well, and I think that imprisonment is a kind of evil, it causes great harm. And I think he couldn't really justify it unless it prevents a greater harm. So, and we shouldn't impose this kind of deprivation and suffering needlessly, right. So if if you don't need to impose such a, a tough penalty, then you shouldn't, because you're just depriving people of liberty and causing harms that are that are that are, that are needless right? Are justification for going to this drastic measure of confinement is gotta be the thing we're trying to prevent, is so important that we present that thing that we can take this drastic measure. And that leads me to certain kinds of crimes, right, the crimes that cause really great and irreparable harm, or really kind of deep and lasting trauma, the kind of things you couldn't really fix otherwise, that's part of the answer. Part answer is just, we are equipped with other ways of responding to less severe crimes that don't well, we don't have to go to confinement. Some of that is just technological developments that will enable us to, you know, rely on things like ankle monitors, or home confinement, or just a thicker system of probation than we might have been able to do in the past. Right? So we can rely on these less harmful, less severe penalties to try to deter these wrongs that are not as good or not as serious. And whenever that's possible, we should do that unless it turns out that they're really ineffective. And then we can use as a fallback, just more severe, more harmful kind of penalty, but only kind of as a fallback when we know these others are going to be insufficient.
So there's sort of an incrementalist approach, implicit in that answer that, as I alluded to, in the monologue, you want to do the least amount of harm and the least amount of punishment justifiable. So if there are some restorative abilities, if confining someone to their house, if making them work to repair things, if if going through some sort of therapy, if they're all these different things, we are morally obligated to try those things first, before we get to incarceration, except in a small number of cases, where there is, as you say, irreparable harm, and that imprisonment is the only option is is that again, a fair interpretation? Yes,
that that is because there are some things like, you know, what someone's killed? I mean, there's no, you know, I mean, there's no, you can't really repair that, right. So there's no substitute for that person. Persons are replaceable. And so I think it's critically important to try to prevent people from from killing others. So I think that that's that's a case where I think the reliance on incarceration can be justified, because the thing you're trying to prevent it just really, really important that you prevent it. It's less important. There's certain kinds of, you know, small economic crimes, very steps and other kinds of things that are bad people shouldn't do it. But it's just not as important that we prevent it. And there are ways of kind of the restitution and reparation other kinds of things of making up for the harm that was done. So it's that kind of distinction. I think it's really important this domain, and we unfortunately, we rely on imprisonment for a vast range of crimes. When I think we have other means of of responding to those things. In addition to the penalties that we can use the range of penalties we can use. We also could, Franklin, is this a big abolition this point? We could just we could attend to the many broader socio economic and justices that kind of distort and warp our society and that encourage people to engage in various forms of harmful wrongdoing. And by attending to those things, we might find that we don't need to rely on penalties at all.
Right, so if we had first off if we had a better, more just society, a lot of the crimes that we see are would probably disappear if we had a better society or Given an art kinds of society, the kind of crime of opportunity, or low impact crime might be better dealt with in in some other fashion. And then there are the the crimes like killing somebody that are a different category. And that's a different conversation. So I'm trying to figure out how to ask this question. And I actually, I mentioned it to my wife before the before we started, because I'm really not sure how to frame it. And it's, and it's as follows. You're dealing with such radical voices, as your interlocutors that as you're reading the book, the book feels very conservative. The book feels very status quo, almost, but it's not. And when you're really paying attention, and you're like, listen to the conclusions, you're actually arguing for, and making proposals that are themselves fairly radical, given the world we live in today and the conversations that we're having. It's not necessarily radical in a in a partisan way, I think some of the things that you're saying are very, very left wing, I think some of the other things you're saying might be interpreted as much more libertarian, that aside, as someone who sees himself as and I take this from our previous conversation, and from your other books, and your introduction, as someone who sees himself as part of the black radical tradition. How do we how do you? How does a reader isolate your voice? So that instead of seeing you in comparison to these very, very radical voices and making you feel conserved? How do we find you in the place that you really are, that gives your proposals, their proper place in the discourse? Like I said, it's a weird question. But I feel like I feel like your voice got lost in comparison, because the people that you're engaged in are so almost revolutionary at times are actually actually revolutionary at times, that your conclusions don't come off as powerful as I think they are when you pay attention to that, as a writer, as it as as a philosopher, as someone engaged in this conversation. How, what do we do about that?
Yeah. I'll say two things about me one thing to say about it is the way I wrote the book and the kind of audience that it's for, it's really, for people who, you know, like me, were aware of the prison abolition movement and this radical challenge to the practice of imprisonment, or maybe a policing as well. And who think, Hmm, that's, that's intriguing. Serious people are putting forward this few people who are respected and agree with on many issues are putting forth this view, what should be my view? Right? So that's the con, that's the audience. And that's kind of how I approach the task. I think of myself as like, Here are people who I agree with about many things. Here's this thing that they think as, even though I'm, I think I'm such a radical reform of the criminal legal system. They think that position is still too conservative. It's not radical enough. And I felt like I should take that channel seriously. And I should try to think it through for myself. And I think a lot of people are probably in that same position me some, of course, will just dismiss the whole thing and think it's not worth thinking about, I think the wrong way to do that. I think many of us and I think a lot of our students, a lot of people who are being exposed to this set of ideas think Ah, okay, yeah, that's the right position. That's the that's the right response to mass incarceration is like, it's just question the whole practice of a prison. And so I thought it was really important to think through that and to just take what I took to be the most compelling arguments, most serious arguments and think through whether those arguments really yield that conclusion. So that's so part of it is to, to read the book, and in that way, in that spirit, as a person inquiring into how to think about this issue, taking the argument trying to be charitable, and how I think about what they're up to, but sometimes disagreeing with them and trying to explain why. The other thing I would say is, I think it's really important and well in all political traditions, but they're focused on a black radical tradition. For there to be open, internal debate about our ultimate aims and not just about strategy and tactics, but like what fundamentally are we trying to bring about? And that has happened, you know, in various times in the history of this country and elsewhere, as black people have debated these questions about what should be what should be our basic, most fundamental political aims. And if you take a thing like think our moment is comparable to the moment where the civil rights movement is going on, and radical movement of Black Power arises to challenge that movement as insufficiently radical, it's not going far enough. And it's important that that debate ensued between mainstream civil rights movement and black power. And when you read a book, like Martin Luther King is where do we go from here, community or chaos, and he does a 50 page chapter, just trying to wrestle with the challenge of Black Power, trying to read a sympathetically take his argument, seriously, conceding where there's truth and important insight, but being clear about where you disagree, and I think that's an appropriate posture, to have amongst political community or community who are subscribed to a particular political tradition to be able to have that kind of open debate about what our basic aims should be, and where we might need to rethink things. So that's the spirit in which I approach it. And maybe, in doing that, I could come off looking somewhat more conservative than I am. But I hope if people read it, with those two points in mind, that maybe my voice might comfortable, a little more clearly at least the intent of the inquiry.
I really liked that answer. Because, first of all, it illustrates how difficult it is to write for multiple audiences at the same time, right that this conversation you're having with, with the larger community, as opposed to the conversation that you're having with the black radical community are sometimes at odds with one another rhetorically, but but the other thing is, especially given the two dimensionality of which we learn the civil rights discussion, and the fact that America is a center right? Country. At most. We have such stereotypical such caricature ish visions of who Angela Davis is who the black radicals are, who Martin Luther King was. And I really like when you said, you know, these are serious people. And this is a serious discussion, because that, I think, is one of the real nice consequences of the book is it completely decimates the caricature of what black black radicalism is, it forces the reader. And someone like me, who isn't as versed in the literature as you are, it forces the reader to really take these people with a renewed seriousness and a renewed respect that sometimes gets lost in popular culture. And I appreciated that much, as well as as the discussion about prison itself. And so in that regard, I encourage people to read it as well. It's a serious book for serious people. And it's very careful, and it's very specific. And it's going to make you think, and often it's going to make you think, in a way that you will find many things palatable than in a different discussion you would find not as appealing. And I think that's a real success. So, so Tommy, thank you so much for joining us on why. Thanks,
Jack for having me. Once again. I've always enjoyed talking with you.
You have been listening to Tommy Shelby and Jack Russell Weinstein on why philosophical discussions about everyday life. I'll be back with a few more thoughts right after this.
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You're back with why philosophical discussions about everyday life. I'm your host Jack Russell Weinstein. We were asking Tommy Shelby whether we should abolish prisons, and his answer was not Quite he thought that there was a lot of reform that we could do. But his vision of what prisons are, is very narrow, very specific, and I think fairly optimistic about what is possible in society. And that is the question before us. I think the real core philosophical question that underlines this and similar to conversations is, what can we reform? How bad does something have to be in order to tear it all down? Revolutionary discussion is exciting. Revolutionary language is powerful, especially when you're young, the vision of what the world could be is full of vibrant colors. And I'm not casting aspersions on that, that motivation has kept me alive and in many respects for a very long time. But at the same moment, we really have to consider what is realistic, and how we need to get from point A to point C, sometimes tearing all down is the wrong thing to do. And sometimes the question is, what can we do to go as far as we can to make things better? This is a question of justice. Political Philosophy is always concerned with justice. Justice is the political equivalent of morality, if something is good, and just it's what we want. Are we treating our prisoners justly? Our prisons, just institutions? Are police, arresting the right people, and treating folks with with respect and treating the evidence in ways that we can rely on these are questions that have been on the table for a really long time. But at the end of the day, when we imprison people, we are taking away their freedom. We are taking away their options, we're taking away part of their humanity. And there's no justification for doing that. If we can't do it in the best, most moral most just way possible. And that's what Tommy Shelby is talking about. And that's a question that we have to face in the immediate future. With all that said, if you've been listening to this on Sunday evening on Prairie Public, please know that a longer version with more than 30 more minutes of discussion is available online and as a podcast, visit why radio show.org To listen or subscribe for free. For everyone else. Please rate us on iTunes and Spotify to help spread the word about the show. Follow us on all the usual social networks our handle is always at why radio show and please help us continue broadcasting by making your tax deductible donation at y Radio show.org. Click donate in the upper right hand corner to go to UND alumni donation portal. We exist solely on the money you provide. Thank you yet again to my guests, the folks at Prairie Public especially Ashley Thornburg, our suffering engineer. I'm Jack Russell Weinstein signing off for y radio. Thanks for listening as always, it's an honor to be with you.
Why is funded by the Institute for philosophy and public life? Prairie Public Broadcasting and the University of North Dakota is College of Arts and Sciences and Division of Research and Economic Development. Skip wood is our studio engineer. The music is written and performed by Mark Weinstein and can be found on his album Louis soul. For more of his music, visit jazz flute weinstein.com or myspace.com/mark Weinstein philosophy is everywhere you make it and we hope we've inspired you with our discussion today. Remember, as we say at the institute, there is no ivory tower