Are Prisons Obsolete? (Open Media Series)

by Angela Y. Davis

Despite the availability of perceptive portrayals of life in women’s prisons, it has been extremely difficult to persuade the public—and even, on occasion, to persuade prison activists who are primarily concerned with the plight of male prisoners—of the centrality of gender to an understanding of state punishment. Although men constitute the vast majority of prisoners in the world, important aspects of the operation of state punishment are missed if it is assumed that women are marginal and thus undeserving of attention. The most frequent justification for the inattention to women prisoners and to the particular issues surrounding women’s imprisonment is the relatively small proportion of women among incarcerated populations throughout the world. In most countries, the percentage of women among prison populations hovers around five percent.78 However, the economic and political shifts of the 1980s—the globalization of economic markets, the deindustrialization of the U.S. economy, the dismantling of such social service programs as Aid to Families of Dependent Children, and, of course, the prison construction boom—produced a significant acceleration in the rate of women’s imprisonment both inside and outside the United States. In fact, women remain today the fastest-growing sector of the U.S. prison population. This recent rise in the rate of women’s imprisonment points directly to the economic context that produced the prison industrial complex