Here are summaries of my current research projects, each corresponding to a draft in various states of completion. Please email me at lyons [at] ucsc.edu if you would like to read any of the papers!

“Why We Should Unbundle the Police” (under review; conditionally accepted)

Police violence and incompetence in the United States and elsewhere have led to a tragic and avoidable loss of life and led many people to question the legitimacy of policing institutions. Over the past several years, there has been a promising uptick in philosophical debates about policing. Some proposed solutions include providing reparations to victims of police violence, implementing stricter criminal statutes to hold police accountable, improving police training, and increasing oversight and accountability. In this paper, I show that these solutions do not go far enough in addressing the broader, structural problems with policing. Activists have long argued that beyond reforms internal to policing, we ought to reimagine the present distribution of responsibilities among institutions and reallocate powers and resources away from police towards other public institutions that are not tied to the criminal-legal system. I call this idea the unbundling proposal. This paper clarifies and defends this proposal.

“Beyond Carceral Feminism” (under review)

In recent decades, feminist movement organizing has confronted a tension in determining appropriate responses to gender-based and sexual violence (GBSV). On one hand, taking GBSV seriously and eradicating sexual violence is a central and urgent feminist project. On the other– as many critics have noted– employing the criminal law towards these ends not only fails to achieve them, but also expands the net of mass incarceration and perpetuates structural injustice. This paper contributes to the interdisciplinary literature on so-called “carceral feminism” by offering some insight into the tension and giving a set of arguments about why we should oppose incarceration as a response to GBSV. I begin by describing how the feminist anti-violence movement, both historically and today, has supported carceral solutions to gendered violence and then discuss the development of Black feminist abolitionist feminism which pointed out the flaws with carceral feminist logic. I then present the abolitionist feminist position by way of two arguments. The first, the ends undermining argument, focuses on how carceral solutions to GBSV undermine the ends at which they aim because of non-ideal features of our institutions and social landscape— thus carceral responses are self-defeating. The second argument, the accountability argument, claims that incarceration eschews meaningful accountability after wrongdoing and that in many cases of GBSV, transformative justice and community accountability strategies are preferable. Both arguments bring sentiments from Black Feminist abolitionist feminism into conversation with political philosophical questions about the ethics of institutional design and legal philosophical questions about justice after wrongdoing.

“Defending Incarceration Abolition” (the beginning of a book project?!?)

The notion that we ought to abolish incarceration has gained substantial traction in recent years. Abolitionists claim that jails and prisons are beyond repair and that we should gradually do away with them (their negative proposal) and install an alternative set of institutions and measures, which includes strategies to prevent social disorder upstream and respond to it when it inevitably occurs (their positive proposal). The aim of this paper is to clarify and defend this demand. After presenting the abolitionist proposal in detail, I motivate the case for abolition by canvassing a series of concerns that have led abolitionists and others to object to the practice of punishment by incarceration: these range from skepticism about moral responsibility to concerns about how incarceration perpetuates endemic inequality. I proceed to consider how we can reach the conclusion that we should abolish incarceration on the basis of these objections. I’ll aim to provide a general account of when calls for abolishing institutions are warranted that applies outside of the criminal legal context. I show that, among other issues, abolitionists need to respond to “the appeal to necessity,” or the idea that though objectionable, some institutional practice may be justified if alternatives are worse still; in this case, incarceration may be a necessary evil (Boonin 2008). After considering whether reforms will address the objectionable features of incarceration, I address the appeal to necessity in detail. I argue first that we should be agnostic about whether incarceration is necessary for adequately preventing crime, citing some intractable empirical and normative issues. I then claim, more affirmatively, that the abolitionist transformative justice proposal provides an appealing and perhaps superior means of responding to wrongdoing when it does occur. Given that it is unclear whether incarceration is necessary for preventing crime and that the abolitionist proposal involves a promising mechanism for achieving corrective justice, the appeal to necessity rests on shaky grounds. 

“The Ethics of Police Surveillance” (draft)

One of the most notable developments in policing over the past several decades is the increased use of technology— from CCTV cameras to predictive policing algorithms, facial recognition software, drones, and gunshot detection systems. The goal of this paper is to consider what, if anything, is wrong with mass surveillance by the police. I begin by canvassing and critiquing two perspectives on what is objectionable about police surveillance: one is that it violates our privacy, and the other is that it is too indiscriminate, impacting the innocent as well as the suspicious. I raise some questions about these views and propose an alternative. I call this the institutional account, as it focuses on surveillance within extant social and institutional contexts, as opposed to violations of individual rights. My view is that the issue with police surveillance is that it optimizes the function of unjust systems and objectionably shifts institutional power dynamics. Police surveillance, I argue, threatens to expand an unjust criminal legal system, while the private entities that effectively carry it out gain power and influence.

“Mass Incarceration and Non-Ideal Legal Expressivism” (early stages)

It is now widely agreed that mass incarceration is gravely unjust. Our theories of punishment should shed light on why this is the case. In this paper, I explore how to think about legal expressivism given central, non-ideal features of present punishment regimes in the United States and elsewhere. I suggest that mass incarceration ought to be evaluated as an expressive public act. I then claim that though our criminal legal institutions may aim at expressing condemnation of wrongful behavior, their capacity to do so is undercut by what our system’s non-ideal features and unequal effects express. In particular, mass incarceration expresses the normative exclusion of members of socially vulnerable groups, expressing that their dignity, privacy, and freedom have been insufficiently regarded.

“Rethinking Functional Critique” (Early stages, with Andrew Rubner)

Critiques of institutions are often framed in terms of their pernicious functions. In his recent The Idea of Prison Abolition, Tommie Shelby engages in a novel analysis of functional critiques of prisons: namely, that prisons function so as to exploit marginalized people, perpetuate racism, and/or repress political resistance. The goals of this project are first to raise some questions about the mechanics of functional critique, drawing on extant theories of functions in philosophy of science, and then to consider the normative force of functional critique in general. What is distinctive about a function of an institution X is that a function explains some important feature of X. Our view is that questions arise when cashing out what, specifically, a function is supposed to explain. In particular, what are often called the latent pernicious functions of political institutions may not do the explanatory work typically required of functional ascriptions. We highlight how institutions can produce pernicious effects that are neither manifest nor latent functions because they are explanatory inert— call these byproducts. Our further view is that the thrust of functional critiques still holds whether they can meet the explanatory requirements or not, and correspondingly, whether pernicious effects are functions or byproducts. What’s important from a normative point-of-view is identifying harmful effects, regardless of whether they qualify as latent functions or are explanatorily inert.

“The Ethics of Electronic Monitoring” (early stages)

In recent years, there has been a massive expansion in the use of electronic monitoring, with jurisdictions employing it as an alternative to incarceration, for parole and probation, immigration enforcement, and pretrial detention. Some criminal justice reformers have hailed EM as a more humane and fair alternative to traditional incarceration. Critics, on the other hand, argue that while it may appear to be a less severe form of control, EM replicates many of the punitive aspects of incarceration, and may actually expand rather than reduce the footprint of the criminal legal system. It also enables, and perhaps normalizes, heightened government surveillance. These concerns are particularly relevant in the context of net-widening, or when a reform intended to provide a more humane alternative to traditional punitive measures, like incarceration, inadvertently increases the number of individuals under some form of control or surveillance. In this paper, I dive into this debate and explore the extent to which net-widening is a contingent result of the shift towards electronic monitoring, and more broadly, how we should understand the mechanics of net-widening. I ultimately propose a framework for the limited, restricted use of electronic monitoring grounded in the abolitionist concept of non-reformist reforms.

I am also interested in a number of other research areas including:

1. Moral questions about policing, state intervention, and the family, specifically issues related to when, if at all, state intervention is justified. I am particularly interested in how to think about intervention when state policies and institutions have failed to fulfill their duties to aid vulnerable families.

2. The ethics of facial recognition.

3. The moral principles that should govern immigration detention, and the relationship between critiques of incarceration (as well as pre-trial detention) and critiques of immigration detention, given the prison-like conditions of detention facilities. I am also interested in how past injustice— and in particular, colonialism and malign interference—impacts the ethics of detention.

4. Questions around racial health equity and criminal punishment, and in particular, what morality requires us to do when an institutional structure churns disparities.