Are Prisons Obsolete?

Thank you for schooling me on the why, the history behind the creation of prison–and imprisonment–as the ultimate form of punishment, and on the how, the prison industrial complex–in which virtually no institution and corporation within our country is not at least somewhat culpable in maintaining. How this isn't a mandatory read in high school or college is baffling considering this affects so many of our younger generations before they even make it out of school.

Highly recommend to everyone but especially U.S. residents.

This was an interesting, readable look at the history of (chiefly) American incarceration. It's fairly old now (2002), so some of the content on the War on Drugs seems dated, but in general still feels very relevant. I found the chapters on gendered incarceration particularly good. I'd recommend it if you're interested in sociology.

An excellent introduction to abolitionism. Rigorous but accessible, and brief.

Are prisons obsolete? The answer may surprise you!
...
It's ‘YES'. Yes, prisons ARE obsolete.
More specifically, prisons are a societal failure. Our punitive justice system is built not on justice, but on cruelty and slavery. Slavery was never abolished in the USA, it was merely nationalized. Read that 13th amendment a little closer.
The US prison system is a crime against humanity. It is a violation of human rights. Solitary confinement is state-sanctioned torture. Both solitary confinement and the death penalty are cruel and unusual punishments that must be outlawed.
We must evolve beyond a society that requires prisons. This starts by improving the material conditions of the impoverished (the people most likely to be imprisoned for committing crimes). Then we must demilitarize and revitalize our schooling system. We must provide universal basic services like Single-Payer Healthcare, free higher education, universal housing, public banking, and more. Doing this will drastically reduce the crime rate, and (in time) the prison population.
We must legalize marijuana and decriminalize both drug use & prostitution, providing drug treatment to those who need it instead of prison sentences. We don't treat alcoholics like we do drug addicts. That is another societal failure. We must abolish for-profit prisons, which have directly led to LESS FREEDOM by incentivizing corporations to get more people in jail.
We must strive for a more nuanced approach to criminal justice, with a spectrum of possible punishments. We must make sure whatever systems we have result in human beings LESS likely to commit crimes afterward. Every released prisoner who reoffends is a societal failure. Reducing recidivism rates must be priority number 1 in a restorative criminal justice system.
This book lights the fire to understand why our prison system is obsolete and lays a groundwork on how we can evolve beyond it. I've provided a short explanation of what needs to happen. This book was short and sparse on systemic improvements. I intend on finding more contemporary books that cover this subject in more detail.

I think this book is a very good introductory read on prison abolition. There wasn't any complicated jargon so it was pretty easy to follow along and it's fairly compact (you could read it in one sitting if you wanted to). I do wish however, that more time was spent talking about alternatives to the prison system. She only really explores decarceration in the last chapter and doesn't necessarily offer viable solutions. Still a really good read though.

In Are Prisons Obsolete? (published in 2003), activist and scholar Angela Davis discusses why it's so hard for so many to imagine a world without prisons. Though there are people who have studied police and prison abolition for decades, such concepts are unfamiliar to most of us. They seem idealistic, unrealistic. Something that could only work in a utopia, or more bluntly, something that could never work in reality. Many factors make prison what it is today, in this country. The average American's distance from and/or indifference to prison life. Disproportionate sentencing of people of color. Private prisons with incentive to maximize the number of inmates and the length of their sentences, to maintain a robust workforce. That is to say, any idea of rehabilitation and eventual reintegration into society is not only irrelevant, but directly opposed to prison privatization. All of the above and more combine to form an environment where exploitation and violence fester unchecked. In the worst cases, abuse is not only permitted but justified as another way to control and punish prisoners. The logic here is, “they deserve whatever they get, they're criminals.” It's easier to turn a blind eye to human rights abuses when you dehumanize those targeted.In an interesting chapter about gender, Davis talks about how women of color are cast as simultaneously hypersexual and unfeminine. She talks about how women's prison labor has historically focused on domesticity. For white women, this meant developing skills to be a homemaker to a future husband and children. But for women of color, this meant developing skills to cook and clean and childrear on behalf of affluent white women. She also discusses how women have been institutionalized in a different sense, in psychiatric wards, saying “deviant men have been con­structed as criminal, while deviant women have been con­structed as insane.” This last point is important to keep in mind as we have conversations about having social workers and psychiatrists step in where police do now.I will warn, if you are looking for a good place to start, this is not that. Try [b:The New Jim Crow 6792458 The New Jim Crow Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness Michelle Alexander https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328751532l/6792458.SX50.jpg 6996712] (available immediately from my library on hoopla), or Ava DuVernay's documentary 13th (available on Netflix and in-full on YouTube here). But for those interested, a free PDF of Are Prisons Obsolete is available here!

“We thus think about imprisonment as a fate reserved for others, a fate reserved for the ‘evildoers,' . . . Because of the per­sistent power of racism, ‘criminals' and ‘evildoers' are, in the collective imagination, fantasized as people of color. 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.”

This is exactly what I was hoping it would be: a cogent, comprehensive, readable overview of the modern prison abolition movement, including the current situation, historical context, an analysis of what's meant by “prison industrial complex”, and some discussion of what the alternatives might be.

I was hoping for a little more depth on the alternatives, since, as Davis points out, it's hard for us to envision a society without prisons. But this was a great primer.

Overall I think this book was great. I really liked how the author discussed the history of American prisons, and how they form the latest link in a chain that includes segregation and Jim Crow laws, the Black Codes of the South, and ultimately slavery. Her point about how people of power - white people - could not imagine a different system for dealing with crime/”crime” than what was in place during their lives, and how these systems did ultimately change, is useful to keep in mind when thinking about prisons and crime in America.

However, I have a major problem with this book.

The author never gives adequate answers to the question of what to do when someone commits a crime. Throughout the book she discusses how we as a society need to become less racist, less sexist, and less discriminatory against poor people, and that this will prevent crime. The final chapter is titled 'Abolitionist Alternatives', and where one imagines she will finally elaborate on true ideas for prison alternatives. But no - in fact she chastises the reader for thinking that there should be a punishment when a crime is committed. The author then goes on to rehash her opinions that better education and job opportunities will make prisons obsolete, and then offers the well-worn ideas that making drug and prostitution legal will also make prisons obsolete. What about those crimes that are truly crimes, like murder? She suggests that we enact some sort of reparative or restorative justice. Her example of this is of a murder in South Africa of a white American woman (an anti-apartheid activist) by a crowd of black South Africans. Her convicted murderers said they were sorry during the Peace and Reconciliation Commissions, and were eventually given cushy instructor/administrative jobs. That's all that happened when these people took away a person's life, and the author would like America to emulate this setup. I cannot agree with her because I think that we owe more to the victims and the victims' loved ones than a simple sorry.

So aside from my major problem with this book, I feel like this is an excellent read.