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A review by acsaper
Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis
5.0
Almost a decade before Michele Alexander, Angela Davis asked "Are Prisons Obsolete?"
Not waiting for an answer, Professor Davis dives head first into an extraordinarily readable case for prison abolition, over prison reform. In a pocket-sized book that packs a wallop, she beings by concretizing the direct lineage between slavery, civil rights, and the modern incarceral apparatus. Then, turning her attention to the problems of reform, she also deconstructs arguments that try to separate gender from prison politics, as if they were not inextricably linked. So too does she expose the privatized prison system and how alternative systems are much better suited to accomplish the intended goals. That is, unless the goal is the perpetuation of a racial hierarchy through the social control of a socially constructed race.
This book is so pointed, so clear, so concise. . .it is a wonder to me that it has not drawn as much attention as other critics of the prison industrial complex. Though that in and of itself is an analysis probably worth of a book!
Definitely read.
Not waiting for an answer, Professor Davis dives head first into an extraordinarily readable case for prison abolition, over prison reform. In a pocket-sized book that packs a wallop, she beings by concretizing the direct lineage between slavery, civil rights, and the modern incarceral apparatus. Then, turning her attention to the problems of reform, she also deconstructs arguments that try to separate gender from prison politics, as if they were not inextricably linked. So too does she expose the privatized prison system and how alternative systems are much better suited to accomplish the intended goals. That is, unless the goal is the perpetuation of a racial hierarchy through the social control of a socially constructed race.
This book is so pointed, so clear, so concise. . .it is a wonder to me that it has not drawn as much attention as other critics of the prison industrial complex. Though that in and of itself is an analysis probably worth of a book!
Definitely read.