Abstract
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.
I don’t know what you know about my academic background, but it’s an unconventional one for a sociologist. I was a physics major and math minor in college at Chicago, also a civil rights activist. When I began college, I joined the campus chapter of the NAACP. Six months later the Southern sit in movements developed.
This was the early 1960s?
Even earlier. I started college in the fall of 1959. And the NAACP was not supportive of the sit in movement. So our chapter wanted to be supportive. And we disaffiliated from the NAACP, and became a chapter of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality. Later in 1966, I worked in a voter registration campaign in rural South Carolina, living in the Black community and trying to encourage black residents to register to vote, something that had not been possible until the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964.
Where in South Carolina?
Hampton County and Barnwell County.
So then, it became impossible for whites to work in Black civil rights organizations.
Why was that?
Black nationalism, separatism. I was turned away at the door.
Then the Vietnam War was becoming a major issue. And conscription started. In 1966, a student group at the University of Chicago began called We Won’t Go. I think it had national scope. People would sign a pledge saying we won’t go if drafted. But in some ways it was only a symbolic gesture, because students had deferments and were not being drafted. So, a confrontation that we might anticipate between the anti-war forces and the government wasn’t taking place. Also the anti-war movement tended to focus on electoral politics, but that excluded students because 21 years was the voting age and undergraduates didn’t have the vote.
There were large marches twice a year. There would be a march in Chicago down Michigan Avenue or a March on Washington. So people would march and they would go home and the war would continue. This led to a sentiment that a stronger opposition or confrontational style was needed.
Different people took action in different ways. There was the split off from SDS in the direction of making bombs, for example. Another aspect was draft resistance. Some people were declining to apply for conscientious objector status, saying that this was a way of buying off the opposition. The government would grant the Quakers or other pacifist groups a deferment to work in hospitals, and no confrontation would take place. People got the idea of encouraging war opponents to refuse to apply for conscientious objector status, which would force the government to prosecute.
This is people in SDS, or adjacent to SDS?
SDS was mostly not involved. Some may have been, but mostly they were just independent war opponents who had been attending and participating in the marches. People who would sign the We Won’t Go pledge.
There were also demonstrations connected with the university, against giving student’s grade point averages to the Selective Service administration. In Chicago, the university's position was that we will turn over your students’ grades to the Selective Services on request.
Why would that be relevant to the Selective Service System?
Decisions about drafting people were being made by the local draft board, for citizens that were not government employees. And the position at the University of Chicago was, in addition to handing in or sending the individuals grades, they would also send the grade point average at the university so that the draft board could see how the student is doing relative to other students at that university. And therefore, my grades would be used to compute the average. This was seen as a kind of complicity with the mechanism.
Anyway, the students occupied the administration building at the University of Chicago—it lasted four days—in protest against the University's position.
You could see sentiment against the draft was building nationally. And a demonstration, a big mass demonstration was scheduled in New York, in Central Park. And there were Chicago delegates.
There was a pledge being circulated that if 500 people signed up, they would burn their draft cards. Federal law required men of draft age to have a draft card in their possession at all times. The number we’d signed up turned out not to reach 500. But the four who were present from Chicago met, and decided that when they got back to Chicago, they would continue meeting and try to start a local anti-draft operation in Chicago.
And you were one of the four?
No. I was not a believer in traveling halfway across the country to go to demonstrations. I thought a lot of money and effort was being wasted that could have been spent on building local opposition to the war. But the group started quickly recruiting anti-war activists in Chicago and then we started meeting initially in a private apartment and formed a group called CADRE: Chicago Area Draft Resistors.
So I was a part of that group. And we quickly came in contact with similar groups that were forming spontaneously in different parts of the country. One of the important figures here was a fellow named David Harris. He had been president of the Stanford student body as an undergraduate and later married Joan Baez. He was kind of a charismatic figure. [...]
What year are we talking about?
1967. And we set October 16, 1967 as a date for a national draft card turn in. In the meantime, we had opened an office in Chicago. We got donations, especially from an older generation of present or former Communist Party members
Why specifically, them?
We knew them. Or at least one guy in our group, he was a little older. He knew them through civil rights activities. Many of them had become doctors and lawyers.
Were there many Quakers involved?
There were several Quakers in our group, including one of the people who had been in New York. They were actually doing conscientious objector service and working in a hospital or something.
So we made many buttons, and this became national. We made a little white button with black letters: “OCT.16.” We would wear them outside and people would ask “what’s October 16?” And we’d say “That’s the day I’m going to hand in my draft card,” which would initiate a conversation.
On that day a demonstration was held in front of the federal building in Chicago, where we handed in our draft cards.
How many were you?
We had about 20 some in Chicago. The plan was one guy would walk into the federal building, go to the US Attorney’s Office and hand in a bag containing our draft cards. But the police knew that this was going to happen, whether through tapped telephones or whatever. So the police were lined up and would not let anyone into the building, they closed the building to prevent the draft cards from being handed in. And we tried, the guy who was delegated to take them inside, tried pushing his way in. He was arrested, charged with disorderly conduct, convicted, and given a 10-day sentence in Cook County jail.
At the time this turned out to be a fortunate event. Normally spending any time in the Cook County jail would be unpleasant. But not too long after that, maybe later that week, there was a police raid on one of the collective communal apartments that our group had. The police went right to a small table where there was an ashtray and found the butt of a single marijuana cigarette. So all of the occupants in the apartment were charged with possession of marijuana.
Now if you want to get a warrant, you need to have the basis for that warrant. The basis for the warrant in this case was that an undercover police agent claimed to have bought some marijuana from one of the occupants of the apartment. However, the guy named as having sold it was on that day in Cook County jail, serving that 10 day sentence.
The informant’s name was Tony Rigoni. We subpoenaed all the people in the Chicago telephone directory named Tony Rigoni, each of them said that it was not I. The police were then asked to produce the informant to swear under oath. When they declined to produce the informant it became clear that whoever claimed to be Tony Rigoni having bought the marijuana was lying. So the indictment was dismissed!
So anyway, in the end our draft cards were taken to Washington DC and dumped on the desk of the US Attorney General Ramsey Clark.
Soon to advocate prison abolition himself...
Yes, and he became an attorney for some of the ultraleft political groups.
Anyway, the government strategy for people who handed in their draft cards was not to indict them for failing to possess their draft cards, which was a smart move on their part. Most people put their draft card in their drawer and ignored it. People did not carry them around particularly. Many probably lost them.
Their strategy was the local draft board would call or pick them up for induction. Then, if they went into the army, fine that ended the draft resistance. If they did not show up, or declined to submit to induction, they would be indicted for failure to go into the army.
Would they target the draft resisters for induction?
Yes, but it was up to the local draft board. In my case, I was never called for induction because, of the five people on my local draft board, one was my high school math teacher, and another was my high school general science teacher. So I was their pride and joy for going on to physics. By this time, I was a graduate student in physics. So I was never called for induction, but was active in the group.
Then I got a postdoc at Carnegie Mellon University, where there was another draft resistance group that I became affiliated with. And while I was there, I was still expecting to be called for induction and I started reading in the library whatever I could find about prisons to prepare myself for what was to come.
Because you would have refused the conscientious objector status?
Yes. So that reading led me to write the pamphlet, The Problem of Prisons.
So you’re just doing that reading on your own, in the library. Was that your first dive into sociology?
Yes, but I wouldn’t even call it sociology, mostly just writing about criminal justice. 2
CADRE in Chicago, had a printing press, we published leaflets. Not only for our own use, but we also served many of the anti-war groups in the Midwest. We did regional traveling to small campuses. So the initial publication of The Problem of Prisons was rather crudely printed by CADRE with a cardboard cover.
And the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) later republished it?
Well, initially, they just took some copies to put in their office literature, that people could take. Then they decided that they would like to do a fancier printing job and they found someone to find photographs, a glossy cover. This is likely the copy you would have seen.
Presumably you were not a member of the Quaker church, it was just that there were a lot of Quakers who were in the anti-war movement who were prepared to do prison time, so it made sense for them to publish it?
Yes. While I was doing the post doc, the AFSC decided they should do more than they were doing on prison issues. There is a long historical connection of Quakers and prisons, dating back to the early history of Quakerism in England. What they were doing in the United States at that time had been perhaps opening a new halfway house every few years. But with a number of Quakers going to prison for draft refusal, they thought they should be doing more. They raised some money and formed this group because of the pamphlet, and I was asked to become a part of that group.
Which group?
The AFSC Working Party, which ended up writing The Struggle for Justice.
And this involved people from all over the country?
Yes, people were living in different parts of the country. One of them, Jan Marinissen, was originally from Norway, but living in the Bay Area.
Was he connected to the Norwegian prison abolition movement?
I don’t know, he was more like an independent minister, somehow, doing social work in that area, and maybe working with homeless people, I forget the details.
It seems that several members of the group were either former prisoners or currently serving time in jail or prison?
A few people were former prisoners. James Giles had been on death row and had been exonerated. Richard Boardman was part of CADRE, he was a birthright Quaker who went to prison for draft resistance while the Working Party was doing its work. After he got out, he may have come to one meeting. But during most of the lifetime of the group, he was in prison. Jane Schulman’s husband was also in prison for draft resistance.
However, most of the people who were appointed as representing different Quaker constituencies had, as far I could see, limited knowledge or involvement in prison issues. They participated in the meetings, but were not active contributors to the contents of the book.
How was the contribution divided up?
They would schedule a meeting at a Quaker retreat, it might last two or three days. We would have lots of discussion, somewhat aimless initially. There would be a break. And several of us would use the time to write drafts, or start to write them, for discussion. The three people who contributed ideas and drafts were Caleb Footefo, John Irwin, and myself.
Caleb Foote was a Quaker who went to prison during the Second World War for draft refusal twice. After he got out he became a law professor, initially at the University of Pennsylvania, and then Berkeley.
John Irwin was an ex-convict. He was white working class, grew up in Los Angeles. He became an armed robber, served two prison sentences for armed robbery, decided that he was a failure as a thief, and told the prison authorities that when he got out, he wanted to go to college. He was denied parole for a number of years because of unrealistic career aspirations.
They told him he could never go to college?
Yes. But he ultimately got released, went to Santa Barbara, and took a criminology class with Donald Cressey who was then a very prominent criminologist, a student of Sutherland.
Cressey had just published a paper on the theory of inmates’ subcultures. John Irwin said to him, your theory is all wrong, I’ve been there, I know. Cressey was skeptical, but Irwin started bringing some of his ex-convict friends into Cressey’s office. Ultimately, Cressey was persuaded to retract his earlier theory. He and John Irwin wrote a paper on their own, and then Irwin went to Berkeley for graduate school, where he studied with David Matza and Erving Goffman. His dissertation became a book, The Felon, one of the landmark studies in the sociology of American prisons.
So Irwin and Caleb Foote knew each other, both were living in the Bay Area. And I think Irwin was recruiting people for Caleb Foote to interview. Foote was interested in discretionary decision-making on the part of the parole board.
In our conversations at these meetings, the three of us began developing our critiques of discretionary decision-making and the rehabilitative model. And most of the meetings were then used to persuade other members of the group of our respective ideas.
They were initially skeptical?
These were mostly people who held the conventional view that rehabilitation is a good thing. Some preferred to call it “treatment.” But ultimately, we brought them along. And after a couple of years of these meetings, I was handed a pile of the drafts we had been circulating and asked to produce the first draft of the book, which I did when I was teaching at a small college in Chicago, Columbia College. After I handed in my first draft, I gave it to a copy editor, though I was not entirely happy with the copy-editing they did.
After Struggle for Justice was published I did some speaking to Quaker groups. They generally didn’t like it. They had an intuitive sense that there were some people they wanted locked up, but it was important to them that they not consider themselves to be punitive. The idea of “treatment” made it possible for them to think well of themselves while locking people up. So, initially, AFSC were talking about starting a project based on the book. They did start a project, but downplayed the book.
So I’m curious about how your thinking about prison abolition changed over time. The Problem of Prisons is an explicitly abolitionist text, but Struggle for Justice, which came out in 1971, is more ambiguous, and in later texts, you are critical of some abolitionist arguments. How did your views on prison abolition evolve?
When The Problem of Prisons was being circulated, by CADRE and the AFSC, I was able to have some copies smuggled into Cook County Jail. I was able to do that because I had developed a contact with a Black Assistant Warden. I had started a group called Chicago Connections. The phrase “connections” played on the first syllable CON. There had been another group in the Bay Area also called Connections, which provided services to inmates as they were getting released.
So, I and a few other people in Chicago, including the wife of an imprisoned draft resistor, Judy Mott, would do things for prisoners as a way of getting entrée into the institution. For example, some of the charitable organizations in the suburbs of Chicago would hold annual bookfairs, rummage sales, or different things like that. At the end of the weekend, the books that were not sold, they would just dump them. So we said we’ll take the books and donate them to the library in the Cook County Jail. They took them, the books. And our name got to be known by the inmates. We also did some other things. I arranged for John Baez to give a free concert in the yard of the jail.
They accepted that?
It turned out to be a fiasco, because she didn’t show up. She confused the date of the appointment. She was in Chicago, I think, for a public concert, and she went out shopping on Michigan Avenue, and couldn’t be reached. So the Assistant Warden is now faced with 1000 inmates sitting in the yard of the jail, waiting for a performer who doesn’t show up, he was furious. But every day for a year, Joan would telephone him to come back at a mutually convenient time. And ultimately, he broke down and allowed this. It wasn’t sponsored by us, which from our point of view was unfortunate, because we didn’t get any credit for it.
Anyway, I got a letter from one of the inmates who had read The Problem of Prisons. He said, this talk about prison abolition is completely unreal, it will never happen. There’s no way politically that it could be brought about, you’re wasting your time by making that the focus instead of focusing on more modest goals that might be attainable. That seemed to me to be probably right.
Interesting, that reminds me of the prisoners who responded to Clarence Darrow’s abolitionist speech to the Cook County jail, saying that it was “too radical.”
From that moment on I dropped the theme of abolition.
Was this before Struggle the Justice came out?
Yes. After the one year at Columbia, they did not rehire me for the following year. There was a German woman teaching in the social science department named Dagmar Schultz. She was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin living in Chicago. She had started a women’s consciousness-raising group which included students. There was a photography exhibit that included some photographs of nude women. Someone put stickers on the glass frames of these photographs which said “this exploits women.” I wouldn’t call them exploitative. They seemed very tasteful to me. But the president of the college at that time was a man named Myron Alexandra. He was the son of a wobbly who had done organizing for the CIO, in his youth. He postured as a radical, but ran the institution in a single handedly dictatorial fashion. So he fired Dagmar, and he fired me.
Why did he fire you?
I circulated a protest petition against the firing of Dagmar. There was actually no evidence connecting the group, or Dagmar, to these stickers.
So I was without a job, not knowing what would become with me. Then in November, when I was just sitting at home, working on a physics article, the phone rang. The caller identified himself as Andrew von Hirsch. Von Hirsch had been a legislative aide to former senator Goodell in New York. He was something that no longer exists, namely a liberal Republican. He had lost his reelection bid in New York. So his friends in the foundation world set him up with a big grant to do a policy analysis of prisons and mental health institutions. He knew nothing about this. Von Hirsch, who had been his legislative aide, knew nothing about the topic either. Word about Struggle for Justice was circulating, the book had not been published yet, but word of it was circulating. So, when he asked people who he might hire, who might have some background in the field of prisons with an unconventional perspective, my name was mentioned.
The final product, ultimately, was a book which came out under von Hirsch’s name called Doing Justice. This was seen as at the time as an important statement of a neo-retributive perspective. The Advisory Committee for that group included Wrving Goffman and Stanton Wheeler, who was at the Yale Law School faculty, and Joe Goldstein who was interested in juvenile justice. I worked for them, wrote memos for circulation within that group.
And when I saw the grant money was running out, I started applying for sociology jobs, hiding my physics background, because I thought when people look at job applicants, they would just dismiss me if they didn’t see a sociology background. They had a job at the NYU sociology department and when the chair of the search committee called me to invite me for an interview, he said we were curious about the absence of any referees or letters from Chicago. So I then told him about my sordid background. He said maybe I’ll check with my committee to think about whether we really want to invite him. I said, look, I’m going to be in New York that week anyway, it won’t cost you anything to bring me in for an interview. And so he did invite me for the interview, I gave the job talk, and they hired me.
