Are Prisons Obsolete?

“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.”