Are Prisons Obsolete? (Open Media Series)

by Angela Y. Davis

The prison is considered so “natural” that it is extremely hard to imagine life without it.

I have seen the population of U.S. prisons increase with such rapidity that many people in black, Latino, and Native American communities now have a far greater chance of going to prison than of getting a decent education.

the U.S. population in general is less than five percent of the world’s total, whereas more than twenty percent of the world’s combined prison population can be claimed by

the United States.

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.

People sentenced to the penitentiary in the North, white and black alike, were popularly represented as having a strong kinship to enslaved black people.17

Since these were the requisites of slavery, and since slaves were blacks, Southern whites almost universally concluded that blacks could not work unless subjected to such intense surveillance and discipline.

Slave owners may have been concerned for the survival of individual slaves, who, after all, represented significant investments. Convicts, on the other hand, were leased not as individuals, but as a group, and they could be worked literally to death without affecting the profitability of a convict crew.

in the aftermath of emancipation, large numbers of black people were forced by their new social situation to steal in order to survive. It was the transformation of petty thievery into a felony that relegated substantial numbers of black people to the “involuntary servitude” legalized by the Thirteenth

In the state of California, public colleges and universities are provided with furniture produced

by prisoners, the vast majority of whom are Latino and black.

Prior to the appearance of punitive incarceration, such punishment was designed to have its most profound effect not so much on the person punished as on the crowd of spectators.

The process through which imprisonment developed into the primary mode of state-inflicted punishment was very much related to the rise of capitalism and to the appearance of a new set of ideological conditions.

The computability of state punishment in terms of time—days, months, years—resonates with the role of labor-time as the basis for computing the value of capitalist commodities.

Marxist theorists of punishment have noted that precisely the historical period during which the commodity form

arose is the era during which penitentiary sentences emerged as the primar...

The Western State Penitentiary in Pittsburgh, based on a revised architectural model of the panopticon, opened in 1826.

1971 prisoner rebellion at Attica and the government-sponsored massacre,

This recent rise in the rate of women’s imprisonment points directly to the economic context that produced the prison industrial complex and that has had a devastating impact on men and women alike.

Studies 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. That is, deviant men have been constructed as criminal, while deviant women have been constructed as insane.

When we consider the impact of class and race here, we can say that for white and affluent women, this equalization tends to serve as evidence for emotional and mental disorders, but for black and poor women, it has pointed to criminality.

Training that was, on the surface, designed to produce good wives and mothers in effect steered poor women (and especially black women) into “free world” jobs in domestic service. Instead of stay-at-home skilled wives and mothers, many women prisoners, upon release, would become maids, cooks, and washerwomen for more affluent women. A female custodial staff, the reformers also argued, would minimize the sexual temptations, which they believed were often at the root of female criminality.

However, this feminized public punishment did not affect all women in the same way. When black and Native American women were imprisoned in reformatories, they often were segregated from white women. Moreover, they tended to be disproportionately sentenced to men’s prisons.

“This differential was justified on the basis that women were sent to reformatories not to be punished in proportion to the seriousness of their offense but to be reformed and retrained, a process that, it was argued, required time.”84 At the same time, Zedner points out, this tendency to send women to prison for longer terms than men was accelerated by the eugenics movement, “which

sought to have ‘genetically inferior’ women removed from social circulation for as many of their child-bearing years as possible.ʺ85

keep Native Americans in a colonial situation.”87 She points out that Native people are vastly overrepresented in the country’s federal and state prisons. In Montana, where she did her research, they constitute 6 percent of the general population, but 17.3 percent of the imprisoned population.

Native women are even more disproportionately present in Montana’s

prison system. They constitute 25 percent of all women impri...

In an attempt to justify these examinations, the chief medical officer explained that women prisoners had rare opportunities for “male contact,” and that they therefore welcomed these superfluous gynecological exams.

Precisely that which is advantageous to those corporations, elected officials, and government agents who have obvious stakes in the expansion of these systems begets grief and devastation for poor and racially dominated communities in the United States and throughout the world.

The transformation of imprisoned bodies—and they are in their majority bodies of color—into sources of profit who consume and also often produce all kinds of commodities, devours public funds, which might otherwise be available for social programs such as education, housing, childcare, recreation, and drug programs.

During the post-World War II period, for example, medical experimentation on captive populations helped to hasten the development of the pharmaceutical industry.

In the context of an economy that was driven by an unprecedented pursuit of profit, no matter what the human cost, and the concomitant dismantling of the welfare state, poor people’s abilities to survive became increasingly constrained by the looming presence of the prison.

The massive prison-building project that began in the 1980s created

the means of concentrating and managing what the capitalist system had implicitly decla...

During the same period when crime rates were declining, prison populations soared.

The numbers recognize no distinction between the woman who is imprisoned on drug conspiracy and the man who is in prison for killing his wife, a man who might actually

end up spending less time behind bars than the woman.

black bodies are considered dispensable within the “free world” but as a major source of profit in the prison world.

In arrangements reminiscent of the convict lease system, federal, state, and county governments pay private companies a fee for each inmate, which means that private companies have a stake in retaining prisoners as long as possible, and in keeping their facilities filled.

In 2000 there were twenty-six for-profit prison corporations in the United States that operated approximately 150 facilities in twenty-eight states.119

Nevertheless, public prisons are now equally tied to the corporate economy and constitute an ever-growing source of capitalist profit.

Despite the important gains of antiracist social movements over the last half century, racism hides from view within institutional structures, and its most reliable refuge is the prison system.

The racist arrests of vast numbers of immigrants from Middle Eastern countries in the aftermath of the attacks on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent withholding of information about the names of numbers of people held in INS detention centers, some of which are owned and operated by private corporations, do not augur a democratic future. The uncontested detention of increasing numbers of undocumented immigrants from the global South has been aided considerably by the structures and ideologies associated with the prison industrial complex. We can hardly move in the direction of justice and equality in the twenty-first century if we are unwilling to recognize the

enormous role played by this system in extending the power of racism and xenophobia.

Schools can therefore be seen as the most powerful alternative to jails and prisons. Unless the current structures of violence are eliminated from schools in impoverished communities of color—including the presence of armed security guards and police—and unless schools become places that encourage the joy of learning, these schools will remain the major conduits to prisons.