Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis

There's an interesting strategy in some advocacy circles that you make super extreme policy reforms in order to get the conversation started.  Once you do that, it's a series of compromises on both sides of an issue until you get some of what you want.  "If you say, I'm for equal pay, that's a reform. But if you say I'm a feminist, that's a transformation of society." That quote from Gloria Steinem sort of demonstrates that point.  So when I read the title of Angela Y. Davis' book was Are Prisons Obsolete?, I sort of assumed that the book was doing a bit of Steinem-y hyperbole to get folks to realize that what's going in with the prison industry in the United States was nuts and we needed to rein it in a bit. I was wrong.

This is a short book, coming in at 128 pages, including a significant portion of notes and citations. If you're not in the mood for almost 300 pages of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, this might be the book for you. It covers a lot of the same ground and history, but in a less detailed way. There are six chapters and each one is worth a bit of coverage.

Chapter One: Introduction - Prison Reform or Prison Abolition?

In this chapter, Davis addresses the elephant in the room: "In most circles prison abolition is simply unthinkable and implausible. Prison abolitionists are dismissed as utopians and idealists whose ideas are at best unrealistic and impracticable, and, at worst, mystifying and foolish." (9-10) Davis IS arguing that prisons are an unnecessary institution and dives into the proliferation of building prisons and imprisoning more and more people in the 1980s and 1990s in the United States.

Chapter Two: Slavery, Civil Rights, and Abolitionist Perspectives Toward Prison

Look, Davis spends some time talking about how it's absolutely possible to abolish terrible institutions that have been considered necessary in this country, particularly slavery.  Yes, it took some time, but the permanence of slavery has been so undone that most folks don't even know if there was a slaver owner in their family tree.  Much like how slavery has been undone as an institution, so has lynching and legal segregation. "Slavery, lynching, and segregation are certainly compelling examples of social institutions that, like the prison, were once considered to be as everlasting as the sun." (24)  Davis' point here is that prison is just another one of these types of antiblack racist institutions that somehow has managed to persist through to modern day. The shift from slavery to imprisoning black folks as a method of control was thoroughly covered in this chapter. Prisons went from being vastly majority white to majority black in a very short amount of time after the ending of slavery.

    "...black people were imprisoned under the laws assembled in the various Black Codes of the southern states, which, because they were rearticulations of the Slave Codes, tended to racialize penality and link it closely with previous regimes of slavery." (31)

Edited to add: I've been thinking about this chapter a lot and I think my biggest gripe with it is that Davis doesn't actually grapple with the difficulties of dismantling institutions like slavery and legal segregation.  It wasn't like the Emancipation Proclamation happened or even the Civil War Amendments were passed and former slaves were in the clear. Many former slaves actually became worse off in the immediate aftermath and many just became subsistence farmers.  Obviously, it was the right thing to do to end slavery, but wouldn't it have been better if there had been supports in place for people to see assistance in the transitional time?  I guess that's the issue I have with this book. Yes, I think prisons are bad. But if we just free the entire prison population, what supports are in place for those folks to transition back into society?  How are we going to find jobs for all those people? How are we going to make sure they have access to mental health services, drug/alcohol rehab, and support systems to make sure they are connected to the community?  I'm not saying it shouldn't be done or that it can't be done, but we can't actually have millions of homeless wandering around our country because we didn't think ahead.

Chapter Three: Imprisonment and Reform

Davis runs through the history of prisons as an institution. In general, prisons replaced much more physically brutal and social devastation - punishments such as banishment, forced labor, forced removal to other locations, appropriation of property, not to mention all types of corporal punishment like stocks, pillories, whippings, brandings, and amputation. Let's not get into punishment of women, which could be either dealt with "at home" or could be forced prostitution or other methods of sexual assault. So the original "prison reform" was really a way to end such repulsive punishments. 

Davis spends much time reviewing how prisons went from aspirations to "result in moral renewal and thus mold convicts into better citizens...[who] MUST pass into society again" (49) to the current state of supermax facilities with prisoners spending 23 hours a day in solitary confinement.  

Chapter Four: How Gender Structures the Prison System

This was hard to read. Davis quotes from Assata Shakur's memoir about prison and how an "internal search" was required as a way to "expose an everyday routine in women's prison that verges on sexual assault as much as it is taken for granted." (63).  It is the first time I've ever heard of the slogan "Stop State Sexual Assault," which is a campaign against strip searches. Reading about the strip searches and other sexual abuse in prisons is disconcerting, to be sure. But it's a tough sell, the women's prison, because "[s]tudies indicating that women have been even more likely to end up in mental facilities than men suggest that while jails and prisons have been dominant institutions for the control of men, mental institutions have served a similar purpose for women." (66) But the rise of feminism has pushed to make prisons equal for men and women, which obviously means worse for women.

Chapter Five: The Prison Industrial Complex

I'm just going to leave this quote here: "Corporations producing all kind of goods - from buildings to electronic devices and hygiene products - and providing all kinds of services - from meals to therapy and healthcare - are now directly involved in the punishment business. That is to say, companies that one would assume are far removed from the work of state punishment have developed major stakes in the perpetuation of a prison system..." (88)

If you wonder about how hard it would be dismantle the prison system, the economic devastation to particular segments of the economy is a good place to start.  Just as it was challenging for the American South to figure out how to profit off of an agricultural system without slavery, entire cities and counties in this country would flail without the prison economy.

Chapter Six: Abolitionist Alternatives

"Forget about reform; it's time to talk about abolishing jails and prisons in American society...Still - abolition? Where do you put the prisoners? The 'criminals'? What's the alternative? First, having no alternative at all would create less crime than the present criminal training centers do. Second, the only full alternative is building the kind of society that does not need prisons: A decent redistribution of power and income so as to put out the hidden fire of burning envy that now flames up in crimes of property - both burglary by the poor and embezzlement by the affluent." (Arthur Waskow, 105 of this book)

This is the weakest part of the book.  Davis admits that there's no one-to-one replacement for prisons. Instead, we must re-envision society.  More equality (good in theory - what's the practical application?), more mental health resources (good in theory - where are the therapists, psychiatrists, and facilities to make this happen?), more assistance to families, including childcare and early education (good in theory - is this a politically feasible option?), more effective drug treatment programs for poor people. It's not that I disagree with anything Davis is saying, but I'm just not sure how any of it is going to get accomplished.  It does make her sound unrealistic and impractical, just as she predicted her critics (ahem) would do in her first chapter.

"...imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social and ideological landscapes of our society." (107)

"...envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment - demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education of all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental health care to all, and a justice system base don reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance." (107)

It's an interesting book and one I won't forget soon, but it's also one that makes it seem like this an easy fix, when, indeed, the problems are intractable and built-in to the American psyche.