Are Prisons Obsolete? (Open Media Series)

by Angela Y. Davis

more than two million people (out of a world total of nine million) now inhabit U.S. prisons, jails, youth facilities, and immigrant detention centers.

See the new Jim Crow

there may be twice as many people suffering from mental illness who are in jails and prisons than there are in all psychiatric hospitals in the United States combined.

ten times

two million people—a group larger than the population of many countries—are

more than twenty percent of the world’s combined prison population can be claimed by the United States.

Recall that it had taken more than a hundred years to build the first nine California prisons. In less than a single decade, the number of California prisons doubled. And during the 1990s, twelve new prisons were opened,

Latinos, who are now in the majority, account for 35.2 percent; African-Americans 30 percent; and white prisoners 29.2 percent.6 There are now more women in prison in the state of California than there were in the entire country in the early 1970s.

!

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.

The prison has become a black hole into which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited.

one in three

one in ten

black women, whose imprisonment increased by seventy-eight percent.

803,400 black inmates—118,600 more than the total number of white inmates.

Yet herein lurked a paradox: if the penitentiary’s internal regime resembled that of the plantation so closely that the two were often loosely equated, how could the prison possibly function to rehabilitate criminals?”

Both institutions reduced their subjects to dependence on others for the supply of basic human services such as food and shelter. Both isolated their subjects from the general population by confining them to a fixed habitat. And both frequently coerced their subjects to work, often for longer hours and for less compensation than free laborers.16

CCA [Corrections Corporation of America] is paid per prisoner. If the supply dries up, or too many are released too early, their profits are affected . . . Longer prison terms mean greater profits, but the larger point is that the profit motive promotes the expansion of imprisonment.

One of the grave consequences of the powerful reach of the prison was the 2000 (s)election of George W. Bush as president. If only the black men and women denied the right to vote because of an actual or presumed felony record had been allowed to cast their ballots, Bush would not be in the White House today.

Some scholars have argued that the word “penitentiary” may have been used first in connection with plans outlined in England in 1758 to house “penitent prostitutes.”

“They see books as full of gold.” The prisoner who for many years had served as a clerk for the college sadly reflected, as books were being moved, that there was nothing left to do in prison—except perhaps bodybuilding. “But,” he asked, “what’s the use of building your body if you can’t build your mind?” Ironically, not long after educational programs were disestablished, weights and bodybuilding equipment were also removed from most U.S. prisons.

“You mean they really put their hands inside you, to search you?” I had

masculine criminality has always been deemed more “normal” than feminine criminality. There has always been a tendency to regard those women who have been publicly punished by the state for their misbehaviors as significantly more aberrant and far more threatening to society than their numerous male counterparts.

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

If you got a problem, they’re not going to take care of it. They’re going to put you on drugs so they can control you.

As slaves, they were directly and often brutally disciplined for conduct considered perfectly normal in a context of freedom.

since women were not acknowledged as securely in possession of these rights, they were not eligible to participate in this process of redemption.

women convicts were irrevocably fallen women, with no possibility of salvation. If male criminals were considered to be public individuals who had simply violated the social contract, female criminals were seen as having transgressed fundamental moral principles of womanhood.

were designed ideologically to reform white women, relegating women of color in large part to realms of public punishment that made no pretense of offering them femininity.

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

the prison’s presumed goal of rehabilitation has been thoroughly displaced by incapacitation as the major objective of imprisonment.

For most of the period after World War II, the female incarceration rate hovered at around 8 per 100,000; it did not reach double digits until 1977. Today it is 51 per 100,000 . . . At the current rates of increase, there will be more women in American prisons in the year 2010 than there were inmates of both sexes in 1970. When we combine the effects of race and gender, the nature of these shifts in the prison population is even clearer. The prison incarceration rate for black women today exceeds that for white men as recently as 1980.86

“prisons, as employed by the Euro-American system, operate to 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 imprisoned by the state.88

the gathering was so repulsed by this enactment of a practice that occurs routinely in women’s prisons everywhere that many of the participants felt compelled to disassociate themselves from such practices, insisting that this was not what they did. Some of the guards, George said, simply cried upon watching representations of their own actions outside the prison context. What they must have realized is that “without the uniform, without the power of the state, [the strip search] would be sexual assault.”

“For private business prison labor is like a pot of gold. No strikes. No union organizing. No health benefits, unemployment insurance, or workers’ compensation to pay. No language barriers, as in foreign countries. New leviathan prisons are being built on thousands of eerie acres of factories inside the walls. Prisoners do data entry for Chevron, make telephone reservations for TWA, raise hogs, shovel manure, and make circuit boards, limousines, waterbeds, and lingerie for Victoria’s Secret, all at a fraction of the cost of ‘free labor.’”

throughout the history of the U.S. prison system, prisoners have always constituted a potential source of profit. For example, they have served as valuable subjects in medical research, thus positioning the prison as a major link between universities and corporations.

During the same period when crime rates were declining, prison populations soared. According to a recent report by the U.S. Department of Justice, at the end of the year 2001, there were 2,100,146 people incarcerated in the United States.

with a total of 803,400 black inmates—118, 600 more than the total number of white inmates. If we include Latinos, we must add another 283,000 bodies of color.113

Montana, Alaska, and Wyoming turned over more than twenty-five percent of their prison population to private companies.

In 2000 there were twenty-six for-profit prison corporations in the United States that operated approximately 150 facilities in twenty-eight states.119 The largest of these companies, CCA and Wackenhut, control 76.4 percent of the private prison market globally. CCA is headquartered in Nashville,

$66.5 million.

In 1995 Dial Soap sold $100,000 worth of its product to the New York City jail system alone . . . When VitaPro Foods of Montreal, Canada, contracted to supply inmates in the state of Texas with its soy-based meat substitute, the contract was worth $34 million a

Private prisons are direct sources of profit for the companies that run them, but public prisons have become so thoroughly saturated with the profit-producing products and services of private corporations that the distinction is not as meaningful as one might suspect.

supermax—prison in the United States, which presumes to control otherwise unmanageable prisoners by holding them in permanent solitary confinement and by subjecting them to varying degrees of sensory deprivation.

Prisoners confined in such facilities spent an average of twenty-three hours a day in their cells, enduring extreme social isolation, enforced idleness, and extraordinarily limited recreational and educational opportunities.

where, it is assumed, they belong.

However, the cost for the first six days is $1,175 per day, and after that $525 per day.131 If a person requires thirty days of treatment, the cost would amount to $19,000, almost twice the annual salary of a person working a minimum-wage job.

violence against women is a pervasive and complicated social problem that cannot be solved by imprisoning women who fight back against their abusers.

‘Why do these terrible things happen? ’ instead of simply reacting.”