Are Prisons Obsolete? (Open Media Series)

by Angela Y. Davis

[t]he acknowledgement that sexual assault does occur in institutions for people with intellectual disabilities, prisons, psychiatric hospitals, youth training centres and police stations, usually centres around the criminal acts of rape and sexual assault by individuals employed in those institutions. These offences, though they are rarely reported, are clearly understood as being ”crimes” for which the individual and not the state is responsible. At the same time as the state deplores “unlawful” sexual assaults by its employees, it actually uses sexual assault as a means of control.

But why is an understanding of the pervasiveness of sexual abuse in women’s prisons an important element of a radical analysis of the prison system, and especially of those forward-looking analyses that lead us in the direction of abolition? Because the call to abolish the prison as the dominant form of punishment cannot ignore the extent to which the institution of the prison has stockpiled ideas and practices that are hopefully approaching obsolescence in the larger society, but that retain all their ghastly vitality behind prison walls.

The term “prison industrial complex” was introduced by activists and scholars to contest prevailing beliefs that increased levels of crime were the root cause of mounting prison populations. Instead, they argued, prison construction and the attendant drive to fill these new structures with human bodies have been driven by ideologies of racism and the pursuit of profit.

A more cogent way to define the relationship between the military industrial complex and the prison industrial complex would be to call it symbiotic. These two complexes mutually support and promote each other and, in fact, often share technologies. During the early nineties, when defense production was temporarily on the decline, this connection between the military industry and the criminal justice/punishment industry was acknowledged in a 1994 Wall Street Journal article entitled “Making Crime Pay: The Cold War of the ’90s”: Parts of the defense establishment are cashing in, too, sensing a logical new line of business to help them offset military cutbacks. Westinghouse Electric Corp., Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Co, GDE Systems (a division of the old General Dynamics) and Alliant Techsystems Inc., for instance, are pushing crime fighting equipment and have created special divisions to retool their defense technology for America’s streets.