Are Prisons Obsolete? (Open Media Series)

by Angela Y. Davis

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.1

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

how it is that so many people could end up in prison without major debates regarding the efficacy of incarceration.

it had taken more than a hundred years to build the first nine California prisons.

There are now more women in prison in the state of California than there were in the entire country in the early 1970s.

Why do prisons tend to make people think that their own rights and liberties are more secure than they would be if prisons did not exist?

The prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers. 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.

The turn toward increased repression in a prison system, distinguished from the beginning of its history by its repressive regimes, caused some journalists, public intellectuals, and progressive agencies to oppose the growing reliance on prisons to solve social problems that are actually exacerbated by mass incarceration.

The most immediate question today is how to prevent the further expansion of prison populations and how to bring as many imprisoned women and men as possible back into what prisoners call “the free world.”

White antislavery abolitionists such as John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison were represented in the dominant media of the period as extremists and fanatics. When Frederick Douglass embarked on his career as an antislavery orator, white people—even those who were passionate abolitionists—refused to believe that a black slave could display such intelligence.

a man who appeared to be black was shot while committing a robbery. The wounded man, however, was discovered to be a respectable white citizen who had colored his face black.

Proof that crime continues to be imputed to color resides in the many evocations of “racial profiling” in our time.

Southern whites almost universally concluded that blacks could not work unless subjected to such intense surveillance and discipline.

convict leasing was far worse than slavery,

the conditions under which leased convicts and county chain gangs lived were far worse than those under which black people had lived as slaves.

the post-Civil War evolution of the punishment system was in very literal ways the continuation of a slave system,

in the aftermath of emancipation, large numbers of black people were forced by their new social situation to steal in order to survive.

It was the transformation of petty thievery into a felony that relegated substantial numbers of black people to the “involuntary servitude” legalized by the Thirteenth Amendment. What Curtin suggests is that these charges of theft were frequently fabricated outright. They “also served as subterfuge for political revenge. After emancipation the courtroom became an ideal place to exact racial retribution.” 30 In this sense, the work of the criminal justice system was intimately related to the extralegal work of lynching.

convict lease system in the nineteenth century and prison privatization in the twenty-first.

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.

racism surreptitiously defines social and economic structures in ways that are difficult to identify and thus are much more damaging.

When children attend schools that place a greater value on discipline and security than on knowledge and intellectual development, they are attending prep schools for prison.

the origins of the prison are associated with the American Revolution and therefore with the resistance to the colonial power of England.

In seventeenth-century Britain, women whose husbands identified them as quarrelsome and unaccepting of male dominance were punished by means of a gossip’s bridle, or “branks,” a headpiece with a chain attached and an iron bit that was introduced into the woman’s mouth.39 Although the branking of women was often linked to a public parade, this contraption was sometimes hooked to a wall of the house, where the punished woman remained until her husband decided to release her.

Transported English convicts also settled the North American colony of Georgia.

During the early 1700s, one in eight transported convicts were women, and the work they were forced to perform often consisted of prostitution.

We should therefore question whether a system that was intimately related to a particular set of historical circumstances that prevailed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can lay absolute claim on the twenty-first century.

Since women were largely denied public status as rights-bearing individuals, they could not be easily punished by the deprivation of such rights through imprisonment.

According to English common law, marriage resulted in a state of “civil death,” as symbolized by the wife’s assumption of the husband’s name.

Consequently, she tended to be punished for revolting against her domestic duties rather than for failure in her meager public responsibilities.

The persistence of domestic violence painfully attests to these historical modes of gendered punishment.

solitary confinement—next to torture, or as a form of torture—is considered the worst form of punishment imaginable.

The congressional debate concluded with a decision to add an amendment to the 1994 crime bill that eliminated all Pell Grants for prisoners, thus effectively defunding all higher educational programs.

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.”

Since the population of women in prison now consists of a majority of women of color, the historical resonances of slavery, colonization, and genocide should not be missed in these images of women in chains and shackles.

“sexual misconduct by prison staff is widespread in American women’s prisons.”

The fact, for example, that many corporations with global markets now rely on prisons as an important source of profit helps us to understand the rapidity with which prisons began to proliferate precisely at a time when official studies indicated that the crime rate was falling.

critiques of the prison industrial complex undertaken by abolitionist activists and scholars are very much linked to critiques of the global persistence of racism.

the expanding system of prisons throughout the world both relies on and further promotes structures of racism even though its proponents may adamantly maintain that it is race-neutral.

What may be even more important to our discussion is the extent to which both share important structural features. Both systems generate huge profits from processes of social destruction.

these systems begets grief and devastation for poor and racially dominated communities in the United States and throughout the world.

Corporations producing all kinds of goods—from buildings to electronic devices and hygiene products—and providing all kinds of services—from meals to therapy and healthcare—are now directly involved in the punishment business.

Hornblum’s book, Acres of Skin: Human Experiments at Holmesburg Prison, highlights the career of research dermatologist Albert Kligman, who was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Kligman, the “Father of RetinA,” 105 conducted hundreds of experiments on the men housed in Holmesburg Prison and, in the process, trained many researchers to use what were later recognized as unethical research methods.

Johnson and Johnson, Ortho Pharmaceutical, and Dow Chemical are only a few of the corporations that reaped great material benefits from these experiments.

transformation of government-run hospitals and health services into a gigantic complex of what are euphemistically called health maintenance organizations.

poor people’s abilities to survive became increasingly constrained by the looming presence of the prison.

sending more and more people to prison in the frenzied drive to build more and more prisons by arguing that this was the only way to make our communities safe from murderers, rapists, and robbers.

crime coverage was the number-one topic on the nightly news over the past decade.