Are Prisons Obsolete? (Open Media Series)

by Angela Y. Davis

It is as if prison were an inevitable fact of life, like birth and death.

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.

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.

How can we imagine a society in which race and class are not primary determinants of punishment?

If we insist that abolitionist alternatives trouble these relationships, that they strive to disarticulate crime and punishment, race and punishment, class and punishment, and gender and punishment, then our focus must not rest only on the prison system as an isolated institution but

Even President Bill Clinton admitted that he had smoked marijuana at one time, insisting, though, that he did not inhale.