Angela Davis: Prison

“The pivotal struggle which must be waged in the ranks of the working class is consequently the open, unreserved battle against entrenched racism. The white worker must become conscious of the threads which bind him to a James Johnson, Black auto worker, member of UAW, and a political prisoner presently facing charges for the killings of two foremen and a job setter. The merciless proliferation of the power of monopoly capital may ultimately push him inexorably down the very same path of desperation. No potential victim of the fascist terror should be without the knowledge that the greatest menace to racism and fascism is unity!”

Angela Davis

If They Come in The Morning (1971)

Knowledge

“The prison has become a black hole into which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited. Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison. There are thus real and often quite complicated connections between the deindustrialization of the economy—a process that reached its peak during the 1980s—and the rise of mass imprisonment, which also began to spiral during the Reagan-Bush era. However, the demand for more prisons was represented to the public in simplistic terms. More prisons were needed because there was more crime. Yet many scholars have demonstrated that by the time the prison construction boom began, official crime statistics were already falling.”

Angela Davis Are Prisons Obsolete?

Source: Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), Chapter One

People , Time , Wealth

“The political prisoner’s words or deeds have in one form or another embodied political protests against the established order and have consequently brought him into acute conflict with the state. In light of the political content of his act, the “crime” (which may or may not have been committed) assumes a minor importance. In this country, however, where the special category of political prisoners is not officially acknowledged, the political prisoner inevitably stands trial for a specific criminal offense, not for a political act.”

Angela Davis

If They Come in The Morning (1971)

Light , Country

“The eternally repetitive routine, the imposed anonymity and the rigid atomization of numbers and cages are just a few of the dehumanizing, desocializing mechanisms. As for the relationship of prisoners to life outside, it is supposed to be virtually nonexistent. In this respect, the impenetrable concrete, the barbed wire and the armed keepers, ostensibly there to deter escape-bound captives, also suggest something further: prisoners must be guarded from the ingressions of a moving, developing world outside. Disengaged from normal social life, its revelations and influences, they must finally be robbed of their humanity. Yet human beings cannot be willed and molded into nonexistence. In reality the facts of prison life have begun in recent years to bespeak the irrationality of its goals. Even the most drastic repressive measures have not obstructed the progressive ascent of captive men and women to new heights of social consciousness. This has been especially intense among Black and Brown prisoners”

Angela Davis

Source: If They Come in The Morning (1971), Chapter 2, "Lessons: From Attica to Soledad"

Life , Women , Men , World

“Nat Turner and John Brown were political prisoners in their time. The acts for which they were charged and subsequently hanged, were the practical extensions of their profound commitment to the abolition of slavery.”

Angela Davis

If They Come in The Morning (1971)

Time

“The massive prison-building project that began in the 1980s created the means of concentrating and managing what the capitalist system had implicitly declared to be a human surplus. In the meantime, elected officials and the dominant media justified the new draconian sentencing practices, 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”

Angela Davis Are Prisons Obsolete?

Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003)

People , Way , Communication

“Acknowledging continuities between nineteenth century anti-slavery struggles, twentieth century civil rights struggles, twenty-first century abolitionist struggles—and when I say abolitionist struggles I’m referring to the abolition of imprisonment as the dominant mode of punishment, the abolition of the prison industrial complex—acknowledging these continuities requires a challenge to the closures that isolate the freedom movement of the twentieth century from the century preceding and the century following.”

Angela Davis

Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Closures and Continuities (2013)

Freedom

“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.”

Angela Davis Are Prisons Obsolete?

Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003)

Communication , Problem , Thinking , Affliction

“The vicious circle linking poverty, police, courts and prison is an integral element of ghetto existence.”

Angela Davis

If They Come in The Morning (1971)

“Political repression in the United States has reached monstrous proportions. Black and Brown peoples especially, victims of the most vicious and calculated forms of class, national and racial oppression, bear the brunt of this repression. Literally tens of thousands of innocent men and women, the overwhelming majority of them poor, fill the jails and prisons; hundreds of thousands more, including the most presumably respectable groups and individuals, are subject to police, FBI and military intelligence surveillance. The Nixon administration most recently responded to the massive protests against the war in Indochina by arresting more than 13,000 people and placing them in stadiums converted into detention centers.”

Angela Davis

If They Come in The Morning (1971)

Women , Men , War , People

“Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings. And the practice of disappearing vast numbers of people from poor, immigrant and racially marginalized communities has literally become big business.”

Angela Davis

Source: "Masked Racism" (1998)

People , Communication , Business , Problem

“On the whole, people tend to take prisons for granted. It is difficult to imagine life without them At the same time, there is reluctance to face the realities hidden within them, a fear of thinking about what happens inside them. Thus, the prison is present in our lives and, at the same time, it is absent from our lives. To think about this simultaneous presence and absence is to begin to acknowledge the part played by ideology in shaping the way we interact with our social surroundings. We take prisons for granted but are often afraid to face the realities they produce.”

Angela Davis Are Prisons Obsolete?

Source: Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), Chapter One

Fear , Time , Imagination , People

“The prison industrial complex is much more than the sum of all the jails and prisons in this country. It is a set of symbiotic relationships among correctional communities, transnational corporations, media conglomerates, guards' unions, and legislative and court agendas.”

Angela Davis Are Prisons Obsolete?

Source: Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), Chapter Six

Communication , Country

“Despite the important gains of antiracist social movements over the last half century, racism hides from view within institutional structures, and its most reliable refuge is the prison system.”

Angela Davis Are Prisons Obsolete?

Source: Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), Chapter Five

“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.”

Angela Davis Are Prisons Obsolete?

Source: Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), Chapter Five

“The call to abolish the prison as the dominant form of punishment cannot ignore the extent to which the institution of the prison has stockpiled ideas and practices that are hopefully approaching obsolescence in the larger society, but that retain their ghastly vitality behind prison walls.”

Angela Davis Are Prisons Obsolete?

Source: Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), Chapter Four

Idea

“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.”

Angela Davis Are Prisons Obsolete?

Source: Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), Chapter Four

World , Women , Men

“Critiques of the prison industrial complex undertaken by abolitionist activists and scholars are very much linked to critiques of the global persistence of racism. Antiracist and other social justice movements are incomplete with attention to the politics of imprisonment.”

Angela Davis Are Prisons Obsolete?

Source: Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), Chapter Five

Justice

“The notion of a prison industrial complex insists on understandings of the punishment process that take into account economic and political structures and ideologies, rather than focusing myopically on the individual criminal conduct and efforts to "curb crime."”

Angela Davis Are Prisons Obsolete?

Source: Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), Chapter Five

Understanding , Effort

“While jails and prisons have been dominant institutions for the control of men, mental institutions have served a similar purpose for women. That is, deviant men have been constructed as criminal, while deviant women have been constructed as insane.”

Angela Davis Are Prisons Obsolete?

Source: Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), Chapter Four

Women , Men