August 28, 2024
For a country that totes itself the ‘land of the free,’ the United States has a vast prison system that holds a quarter of the world’s prisoners despite being only 5% of the global population. For activist and writer Angela Y. Davis, this isn’t a faulty system in need of repair but a broken system to be abolished and reimagined. As highly readable as it is informative, Davis’ Are Prisons Obsolete? is a seminal work on prison abolition that asks us the very question of its title and calls on us to reimagine the criminal justice system that focuses on addressing the root causes of crime for restorative justice instead of punishment. ‘Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings,’ Davis writes and navigates the book through a look at prison expansions, the conditions that have cemented prisons as seemingly inherent to society, issues of the prison industrial complex and penal labor as an aspect of capitalism as well as gender and racial inequalities. Published in 2003, Are Prisons Obsolete? is still an essential introductory work that addresses many issues disputed today around policing but does an excellent job of showing the systemic relationships between issues for a wider perspective. Davis covers a lot of ground but does so in a sharp, succinct and highly readable manner that gives readers the tools to understand the basics of abolitionist theory and look towards their application for the future.
‘Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings…Prison abolition requires that we challenge our thinking about what constitutes punishment, for whom and why.’
‘Abolition is not a scary word,’ Davis argues, though the term often raises a lot of eyebrows as is dismissed as radical. In her book Women, Culture, and Politics, Davis discusses how the term ‘radical’ comes from the Latin radicalis, radic- meaning ‘root’ and so Davis writes ‘radical simply means “grasping things at the root.” This is the basis of prison abolition, to grasp crime at the root causes instead of applying carceral systems that, Davis argues, not only fails to prevent crime but often perpetuates crime and issues of recidivism.
In her book We Do This 'til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice, prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba argues similarly, saying:
Despite this, Davis says that ‘prison is considered an inevitable and permanent feature of our social lives,’ and asks us to consider why that is or why we feel safer when 7% of adults have been incarcerated. A big key to it, she explains, is the link between prison and economy that inevitably sustains the issues:
The US prison system has been growing and Davis shows how in the 80s and 90s ‘the number of California prisons doubled’ and yet by 2002 they were already overcrowded. Davis shows how economic downturns, exacerbated by issues like corporate migration, is part of the ‘ process [that] turns the men, women, and children who live in these damaged communities into perfect candidates for prison.’ Davis cites Geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore who describes the expansion of prisons as ‘a geological solution to socio-economic problems’ where the State buys land and promises these ‘small, depressed towns…that the new, recession-proof, non-polluting industry would jump-start local redevelopment.’ However, Gilmore says that the promise of jobs and revitalization rarely occur.
‘Never before had so much lobbying money been spent to expand America’s prison population, block sentencing reforms, create new crime categories, and sustain the fear and anger that fuel mass incarceration than during the last twenty-five years in the United States.’
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy
As to the solidification of prison in society, Davis also turns to social critic and activist Gina Dent on how Hollywood and the popularity of prison films make prison ‘wedded to our experience of visuality, creating also a sense of its permanence as an institution.’ The prison narrative is pervasive in our arts and culture, and a big hurdle towards abolition is that people cannot fathom a world without prison. Mariame Kaba addresses this in her book as well:
A big misunderstanding around the slogan “defund the police” during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 was a refusal to consider that not having police didn’t mean not having any system in place. Such as when my library stopped having security guards or police presence and instead brought in social workers (which has been incredibly beneficial), Davis argues that abolition seeks to offer alternatives to incarceration, we just have to be able to imagine it.
‘Why do prisons tend to make people think that their own rights and liberties are more secure than they would be if prisons did not exist?’
French Philosopher Michel Foucault argues that ‘punishment is not an act of justice, but an act of power,’ and thereby ‘prison serves as a mechanism of control and exclusion.’ Fear is a powerful tool to control the public, and Davis shows ‘the media…have a vested interest in perpetuating the notion that crime is out of control,’ such as how ‘from 1990 to 1998, homicide rates dropped by half nationwide, but homicide stories on the three major networks rose almost fourfold.’ In our present we see many politicians gearing up to center crime for their 2024 election platform, even having bills passed to increase policing claiming an increase in crime despite a decline in crime nationally at the moment. Yet prisons are overpopulated and since 1970 the US incarcerated population has increased by 700%, outpacing population growth despite FBI data showing violent crime rate fell 49% between 1993 and 2022 (yes a large percentage of incarcerations are drug charges but, as Dominique DuBois Gilliard argues, ‘We cannot incarcerate ourselves out of addiction. Addiction is a medical crisis that—when it comes to nonviolent offenders—warrants medical interventions, not incarceration.’). Add to this that the US spends on average $80 billion on incarceration a year, and it starts to seem far less about solving problems.
‘ As a society, our decision to heap shame and contempt upon those who struggle and fail in a system designed to keep them locked up and locked out says far more about ourselves than it does about them.’
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow
Speaking of grasping at the root, Davis unpacks the history of imprisonment and its ties to racism, which continually perpetuate today. Alex Lichtenstein discusses how in a post-slavery US South, Jim Crow laws and policing in general were used to ‘recruit and discipline a convict labor force’ which became a key in Southern industrialization and a focus on policing now-freed Black people brought them back into penal labor programs. Davis examines many ties to racism which leads to more policing of marginalized peoples (think post-9/11 and the massive increase in detainment of Middle Eastern and South Asian peoples by the INS) and links to how Black and other marginalized communities have a higher rate of imprisonment such as Black adults being 10 times more likely to receive prison than a white adult.
Davis also discusses gender disparities, such as looking at the imprisonment of Assata Shakur or discussing how sexual abuse is a rampant but unacknowledged form of punishment women prisoners are subjected to. ‘Deviant men have been constructed as criminal, while deviant women have been constructed as insane,’ she writes. For those interested in the subject, Davis furthered the topic in Abolition. Feminism. Now. along with Gina Dent ‘because we wanted to encourage people to think about feminism and abolition together.’ In an interview with Harpers, Davis discusses how part of abolition means attempting to ‘criticize carceral feminism that assumes that one can deal gender violence simply by incarcerating the individual perpetrator and not taking into consideration the larger social context that produces violence against women.’
‘I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions…which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished.’
—Howard Zinn
In her chapter Prison Industrial Complex, Davis looks at ‘the relationship between global capitalism and the spread of U.S.-style prisons throughout the world,’ and corporate investment and prison profiteering. ‘Not only do companies extract cheap labor from prisons but have also profited by selling products to correctional facilities and other corporate investments,’ and incarcerated workers produce more than $2 billion/year in goods and more than $9 billion/year in services. Yet, on average, inmates are paid between 13 cents and 52 cents per hour nationwide, if at all. States like Texas have no wage for prison labor but the Texas penal labor system was valued at $88.9 million in 2014. This is allowable due as, while the 13th Amendment protects against slavery it excludes those incarcerated due to criminal conviction.
A list of the 4,100 corporations using prison labor can be found HERE
'I think about capitalism as a political and economic system that categorizes groups of people for the purposes of exploiting, excluding, and extracting their labor toward the profit of another group. Those categories can consist of race, gender, disability, sexuality, immigration status, and much more.'
― Derecka Purnell
Finally, in the chapter Abolitionist Alternatives, Davis returns to how ‘we focus myopically on the existing system at the expense of imagining alternatives. She argues we must ‘let go of the desire to discover one single alternative system of punishment’ and instead ;imagine a constellation of alternative strategist…with the ultimate aim of removing prison from the social and ideological landscapes of our society.’ She looks at efforts in Australia to push back against privatization of prison and community support groups as ideas, pointing out that alternative justice and systems are already available to affluent communities—such as costly drug and alcohol treatments—and asks to imagine ways to make those systems available to the mass public. She offers a few alternative such as the demilitarization of school, accessible education for all, free healthcare, all in an aim to create a justice system based on reconciliation instead of punishment.
‘Of course, prisons and the system of forced labor do not correct the criminal, they only punish him.’
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from a Dead House
Overall, abolition is ideological work in ‘pulling apart the conceptual link between crime and punishment’ and overturning the socially couched notions that “criminals” are a lower class of people who’s civil and human rights may be diminished or revoked compared to others. Are Prisons Obsolete? is an effective look at the problems of prison and a well argued approach that says reform is not enough. As Ruth Gilmore says ‘abolition is about making things as much as it is about dismantling.’ A highly recommended read.
5/5
‘Rather than try to imagine one single alternative to the existing system of incarceration, we might envision an array of alternatives that will require radical transformations of many aspects of our society. Alternatives that fail to address racism, male dominance, homophobia, class bias, and other structures of domination will not, in the final analysis, lead to decarceration and will not advance the goal of abolition.’
Suggestions for Further Reading
Web resources:
What Does Justice Look Like Without Prisons?
Rethinking Our Justice System (UK)
Is Prison Necessary?
Books
We Do This 'til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice By Mariam Kaba
Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation by Ruth Gilmore
The Women's House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison by Hugh Ryan
The End of Policing by Alex Vitale
Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies by Andrea J Ritchie
Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom by Derecka Purnell
Abolition Feminisms
Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States by Maya Schenwar
‘Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings…Prison abolition requires that we challenge our thinking about what constitutes punishment, for whom and why.’
‘Abolition is not a scary word,’ Davis argues, though the term often raises a lot of eyebrows as is dismissed as radical. In her book Women, Culture, and Politics, Davis discusses how the term ‘radical’ comes from the Latin radicalis, radic- meaning ‘root’ and so Davis writes ‘radical simply means “grasping things at the root.” This is the basis of prison abolition, to grasp crime at the root causes instead of applying carceral systems that, Davis argues, not only fails to prevent crime but often perpetuates crime and issues of recidivism.
‘The prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers. This is the ideological work that the prison performs—it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.’
In her book We Do This 'til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice, prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba argues similarly, saying:
‘[A] system that never addresses the why behind a harm never actually contains the harm itself. Cages confine people, not the conditions that facilitated their harms or the mentalities that perpetuate violence.’
Despite this, Davis says that ‘prison is considered an inevitable and permanent feature of our social lives,’ and asks us to consider why that is or why we feel safer when 7% of adults have been incarcerated. A big key to it, she explains, is the link between prison and economy that inevitably sustains the issues:
‘The prison has become a black hole into which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited. Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison.’
The US prison system has been growing and Davis shows how in the 80s and 90s ‘the number of California prisons doubled’ and yet by 2002 they were already overcrowded. Davis shows how economic downturns, exacerbated by issues like corporate migration, is part of the ‘ process [that] turns the men, women, and children who live in these damaged communities into perfect candidates for prison.’ Davis cites Geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore who describes the expansion of prisons as ‘a geological solution to socio-economic problems’ where the State buys land and promises these ‘small, depressed towns…that the new, recession-proof, non-polluting industry would jump-start local redevelopment.’ However, Gilmore says that the promise of jobs and revitalization rarely occur.
‘Never before had so much lobbying money been spent to expand America’s prison population, block sentencing reforms, create new crime categories, and sustain the fear and anger that fuel mass incarceration than during the last twenty-five years in the United States.’
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy
As to the solidification of prison in society, Davis also turns to social critic and activist Gina Dent on how Hollywood and the popularity of prison films make prison ‘wedded to our experience of visuality, creating also a sense of its permanence as an institution.’ The prison narrative is pervasive in our arts and culture, and a big hurdle towards abolition is that people cannot fathom a world without prison. Mariame Kaba addresses this in her book as well:
‘Some people may ask, “Does this mean that I can never call the cops if my life is in serious danger?” Abolition does not center that question. Instead, abolition challenges us to ask “Why do we have no other well-resourced options?” and pushes us to creatively consider how we can grow, build, and try other avenues to reduce harm.”’
A big misunderstanding around the slogan “defund the police” during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 was a refusal to consider that not having police didn’t mean not having any system in place. Such as when my library stopped having security guards or police presence and instead brought in social workers (which has been incredibly beneficial), Davis argues that abolition seeks to offer alternatives to incarceration, we just have to be able to imagine it.
‘Why do prisons tend to make people think that their own rights and liberties are more secure than they would be if prisons did not exist?’
French Philosopher Michel Foucault argues that ‘punishment is not an act of justice, but an act of power,’ and thereby ‘prison serves as a mechanism of control and exclusion.’ Fear is a powerful tool to control the public, and Davis shows ‘the media…have a vested interest in perpetuating the notion that crime is out of control,’ such as how ‘from 1990 to 1998, homicide rates dropped by half nationwide, but homicide stories on the three major networks rose almost fourfold.’ In our present we see many politicians gearing up to center crime for their 2024 election platform, even having bills passed to increase policing claiming an increase in crime despite a decline in crime nationally at the moment. Yet prisons are overpopulated and since 1970 the US incarcerated population has increased by 700%, outpacing population growth despite FBI data showing violent crime rate fell 49% between 1993 and 2022 (yes a large percentage of incarcerations are drug charges but, as Dominique DuBois Gilliard argues, ‘We cannot incarcerate ourselves out of addiction. Addiction is a medical crisis that—when it comes to nonviolent offenders—warrants medical interventions, not incarceration.’). Add to this that the US spends on average $80 billion on incarceration a year, and it starts to seem far less about solving problems.
‘ As a society, our decision to heap shame and contempt upon those who struggle and fail in a system designed to keep them locked up and locked out says far more about ourselves than it does about them.’
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow
Speaking of grasping at the root, Davis unpacks the history of imprisonment and its ties to racism, which continually perpetuate today. Alex Lichtenstein discusses how in a post-slavery US South, Jim Crow laws and policing in general were used to ‘recruit and discipline a convict labor force’ which became a key in Southern industrialization and a focus on policing now-freed Black people brought them back into penal labor programs. Davis examines many ties to racism which leads to more policing of marginalized peoples (think post-9/11 and the massive increase in detainment of Middle Eastern and South Asian peoples by the INS) and links to how Black and other marginalized communities have a higher rate of imprisonment such as Black adults being 10 times more likely to receive prison than a white adult.
Davis also discusses gender disparities, such as looking at the imprisonment of Assata Shakur or discussing how sexual abuse is a rampant but unacknowledged form of punishment women prisoners are subjected to. ‘Deviant men have been constructed as criminal, while deviant women have been constructed as insane,’ she writes. For those interested in the subject, Davis furthered the topic in Abolition. Feminism. Now. along with Gina Dent ‘because we wanted to encourage people to think about feminism and abolition together.’ In an interview with Harpers, Davis discusses how part of abolition means attempting to ‘criticize carceral feminism that assumes that one can deal gender violence simply by incarcerating the individual perpetrator and not taking into consideration the larger social context that produces violence against women.’
‘I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions…which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished.’
—Howard Zinn
In her chapter Prison Industrial Complex, Davis looks at ‘the relationship between global capitalism and the spread of U.S.-style prisons throughout the world,’ and corporate investment and prison profiteering. ‘Not only do companies extract cheap labor from prisons but have also profited by selling products to correctional facilities and other corporate investments,’ and incarcerated workers produce more than $2 billion/year in goods and more than $9 billion/year in services. Yet, on average, inmates are paid between 13 cents and 52 cents per hour nationwide, if at all. States like Texas have no wage for prison labor but the Texas penal labor system was valued at $88.9 million in 2014. This is allowable due as, while the 13th Amendment protects against slavery it excludes those incarcerated due to criminal conviction.
A list of the 4,100 corporations using prison labor can be found HERE
'I think about capitalism as a political and economic system that categorizes groups of people for the purposes of exploiting, excluding, and extracting their labor toward the profit of another group. Those categories can consist of race, gender, disability, sexuality, immigration status, and much more.'
― Derecka Purnell
Finally, in the chapter Abolitionist Alternatives, Davis returns to how ‘we focus myopically on the existing system at the expense of imagining alternatives. She argues we must ‘let go of the desire to discover one single alternative system of punishment’ and instead ;imagine a constellation of alternative strategist…with the ultimate aim of removing prison from the social and ideological landscapes of our society.’ She looks at efforts in Australia to push back against privatization of prison and community support groups as ideas, pointing out that alternative justice and systems are already available to affluent communities—such as costly drug and alcohol treatments—and asks to imagine ways to make those systems available to the mass public. She offers a few alternative such as the demilitarization of school, accessible education for all, free healthcare, all in an aim to create a justice system based on reconciliation instead of punishment.
‘Of course, prisons and the system of forced labor do not correct the criminal, they only punish him.’
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from a Dead House
Overall, abolition is ideological work in ‘pulling apart the conceptual link between crime and punishment’ and overturning the socially couched notions that “criminals” are a lower class of people who’s civil and human rights may be diminished or revoked compared to others. Are Prisons Obsolete? is an effective look at the problems of prison and a well argued approach that says reform is not enough. As Ruth Gilmore says ‘abolition is about making things as much as it is about dismantling.’ A highly recommended read.
5/5
‘Rather than try to imagine one single alternative to the existing system of incarceration, we might envision an array of alternatives that will require radical transformations of many aspects of our society. Alternatives that fail to address racism, male dominance, homophobia, class bias, and other structures of domination will not, in the final analysis, lead to decarceration and will not advance the goal of abolition.’
Suggestions for Further Reading
Web resources:
What Does Justice Look Like Without Prisons?
Rethinking Our Justice System (UK)
Is Prison Necessary?
Books
We Do This 'til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice By Mariam Kaba
Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation by Ruth Gilmore
The Women's House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison by Hugh Ryan
The End of Policing by Alex Vitale
Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies by Andrea J Ritchie
Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom by Derecka Purnell
Abolition Feminisms
Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States by Maya Schenwar
