Are Prisons Obsolete? (Open Media Series)

by Angela Y. Davis

From 1990 to 1998, homicide rates dropped by half nationwide, but homicide stories on the three major networks rose almost fourfold.108

when crime rates were declining, prison populations soared.

The numbers recognize no distinction between the woman who is imprisoned on drug conspiracy and the man who is in prison for killing his wife, a man who might actually end up spending less time behind bars than the woman.

the prison privatization trends—both the increasing presence of corporations in the prison economy and the establishment of private prisons—are reminiscent of the historical efforts to create a profitable punishment industry based on the new supply of “free” black male laborers in the aftermath of the Civil War.

industry will do what is necessary to guarantee a steady supply. For the supply of prisoners to grow, criminal justice policies must ensure a sufficient number of incarcerated Americans regardless of whether crime is rising or the incarceration is necessary.

black bodies are considered dispensable within the “free world” but as a major source of profit in the prison world.

CCA and Wackenhut literally run prisons for profit.

Texas and Oklahoma can claim the largest number of people in private prisons.

New Mexico imprisons forty-four percent of its prison population in private facilities,

Montana, Alaska, and Wyoming turned over more than twenty-five percent of their prison popul...

federal, state, and county governments pay private companies a fee for each inmate, which means that private companies have a stake in retaining prisoners as long as possible, and in keeping their facilities filled.

thirty-four government-owned, privately run jails in which approximately 5,500 out-of-state prisoners are incarcerated. These facilities generate about eighty million dollars annually for Texas.

Many corporations, whose names are highly recognizable by “free world” consumers, have discovered new possibilities for expansion by selling their products to correctional facilities.

Private prisons are direct sources of profit for the companies that run them, but public prisons have become so thoroughly saturated with the profit-producing products and services of private corporations that the distinction is not as meaningful as one might suspect.

public prisons are now equally tied to the corporate economy and constitute an ever-growing source of capitalist profit.

activists must pose hard questions about the relationship between global capitalism and the spread of U.S.-style prisons throughout the world.

mistreatment and torture are far more likely in isolation.

some prisoners were being held indefinitely in special high security units without knowing why or when their isolation would end.

The dominant social expectation is that young black, Latino, Native American, and Southeast Asian men—and increasingly women as well—will move naturally from the free world into prison, where, it is assumed, they belong.

How, then, do we accomplish this balancing act of passionately attending to the needs of prisoners—calling for less violent conditions, an end to state sexual assault, improved physical and mental health care, greater access to drug programs, better educational work opportunities, unionization of prison labor, more connections with families and communities, shorter or alternative sentencing—and at the same time call for alternatives to sentencing altogether, no more prison construction, and abolitionist strategies that question the place of the prison in our future?

imagine a system in which punishment is not allowed to become the source of corporate profit?

alternatives to imprisonment—demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance.

Schools can therefore be seen as the most powerful alternative to jails and prisons.

unless schools become places that encourage the joy of learning, these schools will remain the major conduits to prisons.

transform schools into vehicles for decarceration.

There are currently more people with mental and emotional disorders in jails and prisons than in mental institutions.

rather than try to imagine one single alternative to the existing system of incarceration, we might envision an array of alternatives that will require radical transformations of many aspects of our society.

Alternatives that fail to address racism, male dominance, homophobia, class bias, and other structures of domination will not, in the final analysis, lead to decarceration and will not advance the goal of abolition.

decriminalization of drug use as a significant component of a larger strategy to simultaneously oppose structures of racism within the criminal justice system and further the abolitionist agenda of decarceration.

proposals to decriminalize drug use should be linked to the development of a constellation of free, community-based programs accessible to all people who wish to tackle their drug problems.

vast range of alternative strategies of minimizing violence against women—within intimate relationships and within relationships to the state—should be the focus of our concern.

social relations that support the permanence of the prison.

“criminals” have been constituted as a class and, indeed, a class of human beings undeserving of the civil and human rights accorded to others.

if we are willing to take seriously the consequences of a racist and class-biased justice system, we will reach the conclusion that enormous numbers of people are in prison simply because they are, for example, black, Chicano, Vietnamese, Native American or poor, regardless of their ethnic background. They are sent to prison, not so much because of the crimes they may have indeed committed, but largely because their communities have been criminalized.

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