Should Prison Be Reformed, or Abolished? with Tommie Shelby

Factually! with Adam Conover

Headgum

Comedy

4.4 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 10 April 2024

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The American prison system is in shambles. Rehabilitation efforts fall short, recidivism rates soar, and the numbers show that our incarceration system fails to actually make us any safer. While the notion of abolishing prisons might sound radical, entertaining its principles could help cast light on the shortcomings of our current system and steer us toward a more just society. This week, Adam sits down with Tommie Shelby, a philosopher and professor of African-American studies at Harvard, who authored The Idea of Prison Abolition. Together, they discuss the historical of prison abolition, its feasibility, and its relationship with the practicalities of prison reform. Find Tommie's book at at factuallypod.com/books

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a headgum podcast. I don't know what to think I don't know what to say.
0:15.0	Yeah, that's all right.
0:18.0	That's okay.
0:21.0	I don't know anything.
0:25.0	Hello and welcome to Factually.
0:27.0	I'm Adam Conover.
0:28.0	Thank you so much for joining me on the show again.
0:30.0	Mass incarceration is maybe the great moral and policy failure of our time.
0:35.0	America has the largest prison population on the planet and you can bet it's not filled
0:39.7	with white corporate criminals. Although only 13% of Americans are black, 38% of prisoners are,
0:46.5	which means that you end up in prison just as much because of who you are as what you do.
0:51.6	And the results of mass incarceration are devastating for the long-term
0:55.4	prospects of those imprisoned, for their families on the outside, and the communities they come from. And guess what?
1:00.8	It's not even that great for anybody else in society.
1:04.1	Because rehabilitation in our country is a joke, recidivism is incredibly high, and what we're
1:09.1	left with is an insanely punitive system that doesn't even really make us safer according to the data.
1:15.5	So many people have asked, why do we have an incarceration system like this at all?
1:21.2	Could we imagine a world without prisons?
1:24.0	Now to be sure, prison abolition is a radical idea,
1:28.0	because prisons are so woven into the fabric of our society and our systems of justice that it's hard to
1:33.8	imagine America or really any other country without them. But it is an idea that is
1:39.4	worth taking seriously because if we do it can point to what is truly unjust about our system
	...

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