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ANALYSIS: Prison abolition scholars have nothing to say about Luigi Mangione, Lindsay Clancy, or Tyler Robinson
Ongoing criminal cases have attracted nationwide attention, but professors who support abolishing the prison system have been quiet when asked for comment.
A judge recently ruled Tyler Robinson should face a trial for allegedly killing Charlie Kirk during an event at Utah Valley University. At the same time, Luigi Mangione has admitted to killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York. Finally, Lindsay Clancy is awaiting the next steps in the case against her for killing her three children.
Yet many university professors who advocate against prisons did not respond to multiple requests for comment in the wake of these ongoing court proceedings.
The College Fix contacted nine university professors and graduate instructors who support prison abolition from states including Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Utah. The Fix then asked for their views on the court cases such as whether they were convicted, and whether they would support prison time and/or the death penalty for any, all, or some of these cases. In addition, The Fix asked what punishments, if any, the accused killers should face if convicted.
The Fix contacted Toussaint Losier University of Massachusett-Amherst, Anthony Nocella at Salt Lake Community College, Robert Holbrook at University of Pennsylvania, and doctoral student Celena Todora at the University of Pittsburgh.
Tommie Shelby at Harvard University, Ben Brucato University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and Mark Warren at University of Massachusetts-Boston all did not respond to emails and phone calls in the past several weeks.
Professor Dorothy Roberts, at UPenn, declined to comment, as did Professor Jasmine Rose at Boston University.
“My work focuses on evidentiary procedure. I do not see how my personal opinion regarding these tragic homicides in pending cases could be of any particular import to anyone,” Professor Rose said via email.
An assistant for Professor Roberts said she has a full schedule and “is unable to provide a comment.”
Two legal scholars explained why they thought abolitionists would not comment on these cases.
“Prison abolition supporters would have a difficult time recommending appropriate treatment for anyone found guilty of a heinous crime,” Barry Latzer told The Fix via email. He is an emeritus professor of criminal justice at the City University of New York.
“They will not support the death penalty and they generally do not offer an alternative to imprisonment for serious crimes,” Latzer, the author of “The Myth of Overpunishment,” said. “Such cases expose a critical weakness in the abolitionist’s position: they do not have a credible replacement for prison.”
George Washington University law professor John Banzhaf played devil’s advocate and suggested how he thinks prison abolitionists might respond.
Banzhaf described prison abolitionists as having “[ONE] opposition to sentences of life without the possibility of parole (LWOP) which they frame as ‘death by incarceration’; in part [TWO] because they believe that prisons fail to address the root causes of most crimes including inadequate mental health care (as well as poverty, racism, etc.)”
In the Clancy case, Banzhaf argued that prison abolition had influenced the jury “by sympathy for her because of the ‘poor’ mental health care she received, and concern that the LWOP sentence for first degree murder was both too extreme and unnecessary in her case.”
In the Mangione trial, despite prison abolitionists opposing the death penalty, Banzhaf pointed out that “some radical or anarchist-adjacent writers have tried to explain (and perhaps even justify or applaud) Mangione’s killing of a powerful health insurance company executive as a response to systemic harm allegedly caused by his and other health insurance companies to millions of Americans, including to Mangione himself.”
An example Banzhaf gave was “filmmaker Lexi Alexander appearing to mock the stabbing death of Bank of America executive Erin Piacenti with a Luigi Mangione meme just because Piacenti worked for a bank which the killer believed supported Israel.”
Finally, with the Tyler Robinson trial, Banzhaf distinguishes it from earlier cases because Robinson is not a victim of the health system or any form of harm from Charlie Kirk.
In Robinson’s case, however, Banzhaf “suggested that his motivation to kill was rooted in perceived harm to a vulnerable community (his transitioning partner), invoking a loose ‘defense of others’ moral argument; i.e., anti-trans rhetoric is arguably a form of ‘violence,’ and therefore might be sufficient provocation to use violence (including shooting) to fight violence with (preemptive?) violence.”
As a result, Robinson’s actions are more defensible under a prison abolition perspective, supporters might argue.
Banzhaf argues that the “overwhelming number of Americans reject violence as a justifiable response to perceived injustices, or even alleged threats to our political system.”
However, he states that surveys “suggest that a small but growing number of Americans – presumably including some prison abolition supporters – now believe that the use of violence is ‘usually or always’ justified to advance at least some goals or objectives, and this might even include the killing of a leader with great influence.”
