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.

Short of major wars, mass incarceration has been the most thoroughly implemented government social program of our time.”

In less than a single decade, the number of California prisons doubled.

Thus, the prison is present in our lives and, at the same time, it is absent from our lives.

“criminals” and “evildoers” are, in the collective imagination, fantasized as people of color.

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.

gendered as male and racialized as white.

In other words, there is no pretense that rights are respected, there is no concern for the individual, there is no sense that men and women incarcerated in supermaxes deserve anything approaching respect and comfort.

Assata Shakur’s memoirs,73 for example, reveal the dangerous intersections of racism, male domination, and state strategies of political repression.

masculine criminality has always been deemed more “normal” than feminine criminality.

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

Native people are vastly overrepresented in the country’s federal and state prisons.

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.

the links between the military, corporations, and government are growing stronger, not weaker.

South Africa was the first country in the world to create constitutional assurances for gay rights, and it immediately abolished the death penalty after the dismantling of apartheid.

not only have to address specific activities that have been criminalized—such as drug use and sex work—but also criminalized populations and communities.