Should we eliminate all prisons? This question, once unfamiliar to many, has become increasingly prominent and especially controversial in the wake of Black Lives Matter and recent debates about crime and public policy.

In The Idea of Prison Abolition, leading philosopher and African American Studies scholar Tommie Shelby ventures into this explosive debate to examine the case for prison abolition as advanced by Angela Y. Davis and others, offering a set of sympathetic criticisms and alternative paths forward.

Tommie Shelby, Harvard University (bio)
Daryl Atkinson,  Co-Director and Co-Founder of Forward Justice (bio)
Vesla Weaver,  Johns Hopkins University (bio)
Chris Muller, UC Berkeley and Radcliffe Fellow (bio)
Moderated by: Elizabeth Hinton, Yale University (bio) & Brandon M. Terry, Harvard University (bio​​​​​​​)

Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research

Co-Sponsored by the Edmund and Lily Safra Center for Ethics, the Center for History and Economics, and the Department of African & African American Studies