Thinking about prisons: A response to O’Flaherty, Sethi, and Murphy

I provide a response to the commentaries on my book The Idea of Prison Abolition (2022) by Brendan O’Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi and by Colleen Murphy. With respect to the first commentary, I briefly discuss the comparison of US prisons to Norwegian prisons; the deterrent effect of well-crafted sentences; and the prospects of a world without prisons. In response to the second commentary, I argue that the methods of the scholar-activist and those of the analytic political philosopher are not incompatible with meaningful engagement and disagreement on the abolition-versus-reform question despite these methodological differences.