A review by thevampiremars
Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis

fast-paced

3.0

I know I’m going against the grain by not giving this book a high rating, but I genuinely feel that Are Prisons Obsolete? fails to answer or properly consider its central question, and that the points it does raise are largely underdeveloped, misguided, and ultimately unconvincing. I say this as someone who already supports prison abolition, who picked up this book hoping to find well-articulated arguments and suggestions for alternatives to the prison system.

Sexual assault, labour exploitation, medical experimentation – these are all things that happen in prisons but they are not inherent to the prison system, no matter how prevalent they might be. If we were to eliminate one or all of these occurrences, the fundamental character of the prison would not change. These are arguments for prison reform and regulation, not abolition.

Likewise, the racism angle does nothing to challenge the prison system itself, only to argue that the wrong people are sent to prison. Also... maybe there is a direct lineage that can be traced from slavery to the modern prison system but it’s not made clear here; the comparison seems superficial, noting that black people are disproportionately represented in the prison population so therefore it’s akin to slavery. Yes, both systems are fundamentally racist, but pointing this out doesn’t convincingly prove they are the same system or two sides of the same coin. Black people are more likely to be deemed “criminal” and sent to prison than white people who commit the same offences, who might face lighter sentences or no punishment at all (this much is abundantly clear). That does not equate, however, to black people being sent to prison expressly to become slaves. It’s a weak argument. Or maybe I’m wildly misunderstanding it?

I did appreciate Davis’s notes on the gendering of punishment (“deviant men have been constructed as criminal, while deviant women have been constructed as insane.”) I thought that was a valuable addition to the conversation on prison abolition/reform which often focuses on the subjectivities of male inmates (or inmates generally, assumed to be male by default), and it’s always worthwhile to factor mental institutions into discussions on criminalisation and imprisonment.

What, then, would it mean to imagine a system in which punishment is not allowed to become the source of corporate profit? How can we imagine a society in which race and class are not primary determinants of punishment? Or one in which punishment itself is no longer the central concern in the making of justice?

Only in the last ten pages does Davis propose alternative approaches to justice, including an emphasis on “reparation rather than retribution”. She suggests decriminalising drug use and sex work, which is a good start. But it’s disappointing that such a small portion of the pagecount actually addresses the question of what might replace prisons, and it offers only a few vague ideas and anecdotes. This ought to have been the substance of the book.

This is hardly a prison abolitionist manifesto. A good primer, maybe, if you haven’t given much thought to prisons and what goes on inside them.