The Idea of Prison Abolition by Tommie Shelby

Author:Tommie Shelby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

Extrinsic Institutional Racism and Penal Policy

Davis’s analysis of imprisonment as institutional racism offers wisdom and insight. Yet when cast as a functional critique, it cannot establish that the eradication of prisons is morally required or even desirable. That said, a modified form of this critique could help establish the need for a limited moratorium on prison use in the United States and elsewhere. It can do so without relying on controversial functional explanations and without insisting that there is always a covert racist purpose behind the practice of imprisonment.

Black radical thinkers developed the concept of institutional racism to account for the fact that racism can exert influence in institutional contexts where officials do not consciously hold or openly express racist beliefs and intentions.26 Earlier I discussed intrinsic institutional racism, with a focus on covert goals and discriminatory practices. However, institutional racism can also be extrinsic. An institution’s policies can be racist, not only in virtue of the racist attitudes or goals of those who make and implement policy, but also in virtue of the consequences of an institution’s policies, even when these consequences are unintended or unforeseen.

Extrinsic institutional racism occurs when officials use a policy that is race-neutral in content and public justification but nevertheless has a significant or disproportionately negative impact on a disadvantaged racial group. Those who make and apply the policies need not intend this result and may not themselves harbor racist attitudes. The institution’s practices are nonetheless wrong, because they perpetuate the negative effects of ongoing or past racist actions and because they thereby encourage racist attitudes and stereotypes.

Some social groups are already disadvantaged by racism, and an institution that is not intrinsically racist may still play a role in reinforcing the oppression of these groups. These detrimental effects can lead some to believe that the disadvantaged occupy their low social station because of their own moral failings or inherent inferiority, inviting the conclusion that they (rather than the social structure) should be blamed for any failure to flourish. The institution may not itself be responsible for the group’s prior disadvantages, and the racism the institution is complicit with may be extrinsic to the institution itself. Nevertheless, corrective justice—the principles that govern how we should respond to and rectify injustice—may demand that the public actively seek to reverse or mitigate these oppressive institutional effects. This reduction or shift in the weight of oppression could be achieved through the implementation of policies that would have a less adverse effect on disadvantaged racial groups.

Davis thinks that the destructive power of the “black criminal” notion—an ideological idea—cannot be defused unless we abolish prisons. In the United States, black people are disproportionately locked up, and this might continue to be the case even if intrinsic institutional racism within the criminal justice system were eradicated. After all, joblessness, poverty, and educational disadvantage are strongly correlated with criminal offending, and black people are disproportionately unemployed, poor, and educationally disadvantaged. If part of the worry is that racial disparities in imprisonment seem to

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.