"The Abolitionism-Reformism Spectrum": A Conversation with Jason Warr (Keywords: Punishment; Incarceration; Suffering; Social Control; Epistemic Injustice)

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The debate between prison reformists and prison abolitionists is raw and heavily politicised. This increases the risk of each side in the debate speaking past each other or criticising straw man versions of their opponents’ arguments. In this conversation with Andy West, criminologist Jason Warr offers an even-handed assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of both positions, along with some reflections on the morality of punishment.

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Andy West (AW): I recently interviewed Tommie Shelby about his new book, The Idea of Prison Abolition. He was very keen to bring a so-called “philosopher’s toolkit” to address the longstanding debate between prison reform and prison abolition, in part because he felt that many of the most well-known prison abolitionists, such as Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, tend to focus on autobiography, critical race theory, and genealogical narratives, rather than analytical philosophy. He wants to apply these more analytic methods to the logical moves in the arguments of the abolitionists to better understand if their conclusions are warranted. I am interested in what, if anything, you think philosophy can offer to this very raw and political debate about reform or abolition?

Jason Warr (JW): I think philosophy can bring two overlapping benefits to the conversation. The first benefit is analytic in nature, and this is really about addressing the basic assumptions and fallacies that exist in both reformist and abolitionist positions – especially in relation to how they conceptualise the other’s position. What we often find is that abolitionists seem to argue against straw man variants of reformist positions, and vice versa. So, there are clear benefits to the analytical approach, specifically in clarifying what the assumptions and claims are, and whether or not they produce valid arguments.

I’ll give you an example. One of the straw men that we typically find within abolitionist perspectives is that reformism is about improving systems of punishment, or making systems of punishment more efficient. But what you actually find with most reformists is that their major concern is about the reduction of human suffering and harm that is occurring in the present. Similarly, reformists often claim that the abolitionists are pushing for the abolition of all forms of social control. But when you start looking at most abolitionist positions, what they are arguing for is also the reduction of human suffering, albeit by shifting away from the systems that create that human suffering in the first place.

Once you start getting down to the actual arguments at play – one about changing things in the here and now, and one about longer-term change required to transform systems – then we get to an interesting conversation about the important differences between these two positions. But often, we see only a superficial quasi-dialogue between these two sets of straw man positions. I think the analytic philosophy approach can help us to get past this kind of superficiality.

There are clear benefits to the analytical approach, specifically in clarifying what the assumptions and claims are, and whether or not they produce valid arguments.

The second benefit that analytic philosophy can offer is that it provides a tool to better understand the moral traditions that inform both debates. Most people learn about and engage with the abolition vs. reform debate via the social sciences or the humanities: criminology, criminal justice studies, or law, for instance. What such disciplines do is focus on the endpoint of these discussions, rather than the histories of thought that have underpinned them. And of course, this means that a lot of the nuance and reasoning of those positions then gets missed; this allows for the collapsing of these positions to these quite weak straw men arguments.

For instance, the reformist position emerges from an Anglo-Christian tradition, which, when it comes to wrongdoing, is predicated on the idea of repentance and reformation, and therefore social systems of justice ought to be built on, and should allow for and progress, such values. Institutions that go beyond these principles in the harm or punishment that they mete out should be altered or mitigated in such ways that what they do is proportionate to that which allows humans to repent or reform. However, conflating this reformist tradition with the idea that “prisons should be reformed so they are better institutions of punishment” represents a failure to engage with the long cultural and historical traditions that inform reformism in the present.

Similarly, if you focus on the histories of abolitionist thought, we see numerous critiques of notions of harm and beneficence within legal and criminal justice that are coupled with economic theories of labour and class oppression. For instance, much of the abolitionist position is based on the idea that it is the working classes who are subject to the constraining and punitive efforts of the legal order of contemporary capitalist societies. This is done so as to maintain class positions and suppress the labour power of the working classes. This creates a great deal of harm for the majority in the economic interest of the minority owners of the means of production and their State supporters. As such, we should abolish these harmful institutions. That’s somewhat simplified for the purposes here, but it will have to do! There are rich histories to both reformist and abolitionist traditions. But without understanding the kind of moral histories that culminate in their contemporary variants, it is very difficult to have a sensible debate, because lots of the nuance, detail and even similarities between the two are overlooked. 

Without understanding the moral histories [of reformism and abolitionism] that culminate in their contemporary variants, it is very difficult to have a sensible debate.

AW: That’s interesting what you say about both sides attacking one another’s straw man positions. I can see how the principle of charity that people employ within the analytic tradition could offer a way beyond that. From your answer, I can tell that you like to stand back and look at things from the philosopher’s favoured synoptic perspective, from where you can witness the discussion, tensions, and assumptions on both sides. In the end, would you say you lean more towards reform or abolition?

JW: It’s difficult because in many ways I’m neither, but I’m also a bit of both! On the one hand, I’m all for the reduction of human suffering, however and whenever that can occur. But there are a couple of issues to consider.

One is the kind of agenda-setting claims that are made within both positions. I think part of this (and we see this increasingly with all sorts of public debate) is that the moment a strong ideological position is taken, one that is often based more in emotive coding than reason, what you get is very entrenched thinking. Obviously, some claims are fundamental to the position being held, but what I am talking about here is the type of claims-making that results not in debate, not even in the setting out of one’s argument, but in entrenchment of one’s own position and the outright rejection of the other. And within those very entrenched positions, people are only willing to deal with superficial or reified versions of the arguments or claims made by their opponents. I think this is problematic, and especially so when we are dealing with a circumstance in which people are suffering. These are not just abstract debates; actual human suffering is occurring. But when you are trapped within an ideological position, it can often undermine the very goals that you are attempting to achieve. It traps you in your rhetorical position, rather than in achieving your aims.

When you are trapped within an ideological position, it can often undermine the very goals that you are attempting to achieve.

Despite what I have just said, I think there are powerful and important critiques to be made of both positions. For example, in the reformist position, I often see a lot of denial about the harms that the system creates. What you increasingly find within the reformist movement is a kind of “atomization of focus”. For example, reformists will look at something like pregnant women in prison, and claim that we ought to either improve the lives of such women in prison or that we should not have pregnant women in prison at all. But what this does is deny the fact that prison has an awful impact on all women, regardless of whether or not they’re pregnant. But in order to “win the point”, reformists often reduce the debate down to such specificities in a way that actually occludes many wider considerations. What about the children? What about the men? What about those who are yet to be convicted? What about those with mental health conditions? What about those that are suffering trauma – and who are being (re)traumatised?

As for abolitionists, what I often see is a kind of ethical cowardice of non-engagement (certainly here in the UK and in the European context). The abolitionist may offer a utopian vision of a better future, and this becomes the focus of their work. But what they don’t do is build the empirical evidence by getting their hands dirty in the actual prison system and dealing with the lived realities of people in the systems. Part of the reason for this is a belief that if you engage with the system, you are thereby legitimating it. This is, in my opinion, a misunderstanding of the processes of legitimation, and this principle of non-engagement leads to a kind of ethical cowardice. Another consequence of this is that abolitionists frequently talk about carceral realities that don’t exist anymore; their work is out of date. It is abstracted in such a way that it is not grounded in the realities that we know are happening in the prison system right now.

In the reformist position, I often see a lot of denial about the harms that the system creates. As for abolitionists, what I often see is a kind of ethical cowardice of non-engagement.

AW: So you try to find the good points and bad points in both positions, rather than rigidly align yourself with one?

JW: In terms of my own thinking, I tend to be rather pragmatic. I do think that there are contextual positions that we need to consider in terms of whether or not reformist or abolitionist positions are valid. In my opinion, you cannot support carcerality and remain moral. If you do support carcerality, then inherent to your position is that you are comfortable with the imposition of pain on someone you think has transgressed the moral and legal order of your country. I cannot reconcile the imposition of pain on unconsenting, unwilling people – regardless of how wicked you may view them – with a justified moral position. I don’t think any of the major moral traditions of punishment and justice can truly justify the idea of deserved suffering without twisting their own logic. Unsurprisingly, then, I don’t think retributivist positions have any moral validity to them. Retributivists consider punishment to be morally just so long as it is proportional to the harm caused, because they believe that it will ultimately reduce offending and thus lead to overall increase in the utility of all. However, that is patently and empirically not true. Eye-for-eye positions just lead to a lot of blind people, rather than to the maximisation of utility. So, I don’t think you can remain moral in the support of prisons.  But similarly, you can’t have a disengaged position or a denialist position and remain moral.

If you have a carceral spectrum, with reformism at one end and abolitionism at the other, I’m somewhere in between. One of the things that neither position really tackles is the need for processes of social ordering, and this is where I sit with my sociologist hat on. We live in societies that are fundamentally built on principles of social order, and when you have principles, structures, and processes of social ordering, social control is a necessary condition. You need to have processes of social control because what happens if someone sits outside of or breaches the social order? You must have mechanisms that are able to deal with that breach in order to maintain order. And if you have these kinds of conditions, then you need to think quite carefully about abolishing the systems and structures that are currently in place. What do you replace them with?

I don’t think any of the major moral traditions of punishment and justice can truly justify the idea of deserved suffering without twisting their own logic.

If you look at the kinds of utopian positions defended by abolitionists, the problem is that such positions cannot divorce themselves from the political and economic structures of punitivity that it inherently rejects. We live in a society in which punitivity has become so conflated with the idea of justice that we struggle to escape these notions. We can reject them, but we can’t escape them. And it is here that I find the reformist position more generative: we can’t escape these things, so how do we make them survivable?

AW: I want to know more about your framing of reform and abolition as being located on a spectrum.

JW: I suspect it’s more like a web than a spectrum. You have the abolitionists who are looking ahead to some possible or potential future, whereas the reformists are focusing down in the mud and the reality of what’s happening. I vacillate between these two positions. A lot of my work is focused on the realities that people experience in the day-to-day world of imprisonment, and how structures of power and expertise operate within carceral systems. The reason that I focus on this is because even though there are centuries of carceral writings, we still know very little about how these processes work, function, and impact the people who both impose carcerality and are subjected to it. We know very little about what it means on a day-to-day basis to take the power of the state and impose it upon another person.

I don’t think we can get to a position where we can envisage utopia until we really understand what’s happening in the mud. If you go in your back garden and dig it up, you’re going to find species of bacteria that are hitherto unknown. Similarly, every time someone undertakes research on prisons, every time someone walks into a prison and asks how a prisoner feels about X, we learn something new and this in turn makes a future without systems of carcerality more likely.

Even though there are centuries of carceral writings, we still know very little about how these processes work, function, and impact the people who both impose carcerality and are subjected to it

AW: It sounds like you think we need to know much more about our “is” before we can have a grounded sense of our “ought”. Another topic I wanted to discuss with you is the subject of reading. A long time ago, you served a life sentence, where I know you consumed numerous books a week, pushing the prison library to exhaustion. I’m very interested in your experience of reading in a prison cell, what it gave you, what it taught you about philosophy or ideas or language.

JW:  There were two fundamental thoughts that shaped my experience: one was about escape and the other was about resistance. On the first or second day that I was in prison, someone handed me a book and said, “...mate, get your head out of here, and in here”. Just get your head out of what’s going on here or you’re not going to survive. So I started reading, primarily as a means of escaping the walls of the establishment. There is a widely circulated picture of a little boy standing on a stack of books overlooking a wall into a fantastical land. It’s this kind of metaphor that comes to mind when I think about reading in prisons; the more you read about other worlds, the more you can envisage an elsewhere that you can’t currently see because the walls of your confinement trap you in a limited material reality.

As for resistance, I was incarcerated on a murder charge, and at that time the prison system was shifting from more of a welfarist and retributivist model to the more rehabilitative model that we see today. After the crises in criminal justice practices in the 1980s, when people were becoming despondent about the failure of our punitive systems to affect any change in offending behaviour, we began to see a shift in penal logics. These historical logics began to give way to a model of penality that was built on quite medicalised, interventionist ideas of producing change in people. This was thought of as a rehabilitative turn – a somewhat nonsensical idea in my opinion as coerced change does not necessarily return a person to a position of habilitation. Anyway, I was told very early on that I would constantly have to deal with psychiatrists and psychologists as part of this rehabilitative agenda. At the time, I didn’t even understand what this meant. So whilst I was on remand (I wasn’t even convicted yet at this point), I started getting sent books on psychology and psychiatry. I went from “Psychology for Dummies” through to Freud’s introductory lectures, through to Jung, and so on, all the way through to contemporary cognitive behavioural therapy texts. I read about the history of psychology so that I would have an understanding of it when I’m talking to a psychologist or a psychiatrist, so that I would have some understanding of what they were trying to achieve by talking to me. I wasn’t willing to go into these situations passively. I understood very early on that passive engagement with these very significant forms of control in the prison system would be a bad thing for me. So this was a kind of epistemic resistance.

Prisoners are largely barred or actively discouraged from learning the conceptual frameworks that are used to shape their reality. 

I wasn’t willing to remain in a situation of what Miranda Fricker called “epistemic injustice”, which is a condition that a lot of prisoners are kept in. What you have is these systems of expertise and knowledge that are imposed upon prisoners without them having any means of accessing the reasons for this. For instance, prisoners are governed by imposed notions of risk that shape most elements of their carceral life. Yet most of them have no idea how their “risk” is calculated and, even though it is their responsibility to mitigate that risk, they are deliberately kept from the types of information that would allow them to understand how this works. Like other forms of expertise, the symbolic language of “criminogenic” risk is encoded into particular discourses that are the province of those inculcated into those systems of power. Prisoners are largely barred or actively discouraged from learning the conceptual frameworks that are used to shape their reality. I didn’t know what epistemic injustice was at that point, but the moment I read Fricker’s work, I realised that what she was describing is exactly what happens to a prisoner who has to engage with a system of risk assessments with no idea about how the predicates of risk are being constructed – and yet are expected to engage within the system. They don’t have an accessible framework to understand their reality, and what they say about themselves is disbelieved. I understood early on that I didn’t want to be in whatever that position was. I didn’t want to engage with a process that I didn’t understand, especially when the stakes were so high.

Jason Warr is an Associate Professor in Criminology at the University of Nottingham with research interests in penology, sociology of power, narrative and sensory criminology, and the philosophy of science. His most recent book, Forensic Psychologists: Prisons, Power, and Vulnerability (2020), is concerned with forensic psychologists employed within the prisons of England and Wales. Twitter: https://twitter.com/WarrCriminology 

Andy West is a senior specialist with the Philosophy Foundation and philosopher in residence at HMP Pentonville, London. His writing has been published in The Guardian, The TLS, and The Millions, among others. He is the author of The Life Inside: A Memoir of Prison, Family and Philosophy (2022).Twitter: https://twitter.com/AndyWPhilosophy 

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