In the United States, a prison abolition movement has been slowly gaining ground. One of its most influential voices is Angela Davis, who makes her case from a Marxist-feminist perspective. I think there’s also a strong case to be made from another direction: the radical behaviorism of B. F. Skinner.

Skinner wasn’t a political activist, but he was deeply skeptical of punishment as a way to change behavior. He argued that punishment doesn’t teach people how to behave better. Instead, it mostly teaches them how to avoid getting caught. Davis, for her part, argues that prisons function as a way to manage poverty and racism rather than to solve them. Both are materialists in different ways. Both reject the idea that people are simply “bad” and need to be hurt to learn a lesson. They focus instead on environments in order to understand and change people’s behavior.

If we were to take the radical step of putting their insights together. a clearer alternative to prisons begins to emerge.

Davis gives us the big picture. She shows how systemic racism and economic inequality create the conditions in which crime becomes a predictable response to deprivation. Skinner, on the other hand, gives us the nuts and bolts. He shows how behavior is shaped by reinforcement, and how positive reinforcement works better than fear and isolation.

So abolition, in this view, isn’t about simply opening the prison doors and hoping for the best. It’s about redesigning the environments that shape behavior in the first place. Instead of cages and isolation, you build systems that make pro-social behavior the easiest and most rewarding path: stable housing, meaningful work, healthcare, community support, and practical behavioral programs that reinforce new habits rather than suppress old ones.

The current system operates on *retribution* and assumes that people freely choose wrongdoing. The Davis-Skinner approach starts from the idea that behavior grows out of social and material conditions. If you want different outcomes, you have to change those conditions.

When critics ask, “What do you do with people who cause harm?”, this synthesis offers an answer. You address the structural causes Davis identifies, and you apply the behavioral science Skinner developed. As Skinner argued in Beyond Freedom and Dignity, we are always shaped by our environments. The real question is not whether behavior will be influenced, but by what: a punitive system built on fear, or a supportive community designed to reinforce well-being.

In that sense, abolition is not just a slogan. It’s a design project: dismantle the structures that produce harm, and build environments that make healthier patterns of life possible.

For further reading

Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis (2003). This seminal book argues that the prison-industrial complex sustains inequality and calls for abolition by dismantling systemic racism and economic deprivation. A PDF of that book is available at https://decolonisesociology.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/angela-davis-are_prisons_obsolete.pdf

Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B.F. Skinner (1971). Directly supports your reference: Skinner contends that human behavior is environmentally determined, not driven by autonomous “free will,” and advocates designing cultures to reinforce well-being over punitive control. A PDF of that book is available at https://selfdefinition.org/psychology/BF-Skinner-Beyond-Freedom-&-Dignity-1971.pdf

Alexis B Apel, James W Diller. “Prison as Punishment: A Behavior-Analytic Evaluation of Incarceration” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6701209/. Applies behavior analysis to critique how prisons fail as punishers per Skinner’s framework, advocating environmental redesigns to reduce recidivism via reinforcement.