David Greenberg on prison abolition, an interview by John Clegg

David Greenberg, who passed away in July 2024, was a pioneer of radical criminology as well as polymath who excelled in several disciplines, including physics, history, and mathematical sociology. In November 2022, I spoke with David about some research I was doing into the history of prison abolitionism in the United States. David had been the author of “The Problem of Prisons,” a pamphlet written in 1969 which was one of the first sustained arguments for prison abolition to have been published in the post-war United States. He also edited and was a main contributor to The Struggle For Justice, a coauthored book published in 1971 by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). This book would become a key reference in the emerging field of radical criminology and would influence early Quaker prison abolitionists like Fay Honey Knopp and Ruth Rittenhouse Morris, as well as later abolitionist groups like Critical Resistance. In his later writings, however, David was critical of prison abolitionism. 1 I was curious about how and why his views changed, so I sat down with him in a Greenwich village cafe and recorded our conversation. The following is an edited transcript of that recording.