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A review by phito
Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis
5.0
I'm not even going to pretend this is a review. This is more me working through what I found to be most insightful about this book.
I think Angela Davis does exceptional work drawing the line from chattel slavery to the U.S. prison system. There are so many clear examples of how incarceration was codified to replace slavery as an institution, and it's quite jarring to read. I was aware of profit motives for the PIC, but I can't remember seeing it broken down this explicitly.
She also breaks down the way gender structures the prison system, and the importance of not marginalizing what women deal with in the prison system. As with the section on slavery and civil rights, this section on gender demonstrates how our society criminalizes not adhering to "social norms."
And that's the main takeaway for me in this book: that oppressed peoples are overly represented in the prison system by design. This means that people are criminalized on the basis of race, gender, socioeconomic status, sexuality, disability, etc. Therefore, abolishing prisons and other carceral institutions can be viewed as a net positive, even without a new system of accountability in place for people that do harm. Prisons do harm to oppressed peoples, and ending that harm is justification enough.
I think Angela Davis does exceptional work drawing the line from chattel slavery to the U.S. prison system. There are so many clear examples of how incarceration was codified to replace slavery as an institution, and it's quite jarring to read. I was aware of profit motives for the PIC, but I can't remember seeing it broken down this explicitly.
She also breaks down the way gender structures the prison system, and the importance of not marginalizing what women deal with in the prison system. As with the section on slavery and civil rights, this section on gender demonstrates how our society criminalizes not adhering to "social norms."
And that's the main takeaway for me in this book: that oppressed peoples are overly represented in the prison system by design. This means that people are criminalized on the basis of race, gender, socioeconomic status, sexuality, disability, etc. Therefore, abolishing prisons and other carceral institutions can be viewed as a net positive, even without a new system of accountability in place for people that do harm. Prisons do harm to oppressed peoples, and ending that harm is justification enough.