Mass incarceration continues to be a devastating blight on the United States, with particularly destructive impacts on the poor and people of color. Yet people across the political spectrum are increasingly aware of the gross injustice of the US prison system and are taking action to change it.

On the Left, opponents of the country’s carceral regime have been divided between “reformist” and “abolitionist” camps. Reformists argue that our current practices of imprisonment are horribly unjust and ought to be radically changed, while admitting that prisons in some form may be socially necessary and morally legitimate. Abolitionists, on the other hand, think of the prison as a fundamentally rotten institution: our goal shouldn’t be to make prisons fairer or more humane but to eliminate them entirely.

The eminent political philosopher Tommie Shelby takes up this debate in his new book, The Idea of Prison Abolition. In the book, Shelby sympathetically and critically examines arguments by leading abolitionists for their position, with a particular focus on the work of Angela Davis. Jacobin’s John-Baptiste Oduor interviewed Shelby about what he finds valuable in abolitionist thought, what he disagrees with in it, and why thinking about what a just society would look like is essential to the socialist project.