Are Prisons Obsolete?

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!