Are Prisons Obsolete? (Open Media Series)

by Angela Y. Davis

Mumia Abu-Jamal, who has challenged the contemporary dismantling of prison education programs, asks in Live from Death Row, What societal interest is served by prisoners who remain illiterate? What social benefit is there in ignorance? How are people corrected while imprisoned if their education is outlawed? Who profits (other than the prison establishment itself) from stupid prisoners?65 A practicing journalist before his arrest in 1982 on charges of killing Philadelphia policeman Daniel Faulkner, Abu-Jamal has regularly produced articles on capital punishment, focusing especially on its racial and class disproportions. His ideas have helped to link critiques of the death penalty with the more general challenges to the expanding U.S. prison system and are particularly helpful to activists who seek to associate death penalty abolitionism with prison abolitionism. His prison writings have been published in both popular and scholarly journals (such as The Nation and Yale Law Journal) as well as in three collections, Live from Death Row, Death Blossoms,66 and All Things Censored.67