Notes on 'Are Prisons Obsolete?', by Angela Davis
Generally seems hard to imagine abolition of prisons, accompanying structure of society âthat does not rely on the threat of sequestering people in dreadful places designed to separate them from their communities and familiesâ p. 10
Ruth Gilmore calls campaign of building prisons in California in 1980s-90s âa geographical solution to socio-economic problemsâ; Calif. built prisons on cheap land, promised economic development nearby that never happened p. 14-15
Important to fight for prison reforms, but work canât get stuck on only improving prisons when we can build options other than imprisoning people p. 20
During slavery, idea started that non-slaves could be punished by hard labor, but couldnât use forced labor as a threat of punishment to slaves, because that was already their situation. Other punishment was âneededâ for slaves who broke rules; Thomas Jefferson suggested banishing them to other countries p. 28
Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery, âexcept as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.â Black Codes still existed of which only black people could be guilty, such as vagrancy p. 28-29
After slavery, system began of renting groups of convicts as workers. Some argue convict leasing was more brutal than slavery. Slave owners had to invest their own money in slaves and their well-being to some extent, but had no investment in health of convicts. p. 32
Landowners were able to build resources of southern states after abolition of slavery by renting convict workers, without creating a paid working class; e.g. Georgia railroads were mostly built by convict labor p. 34
European colonialism included introducing prison systems p. 42
Imprisonment as punishment on its own (instead of imprisonment while awaiting punishment, usually corporal or capital punishment), became common alongside rise of capitalism and Enlightenment, was seen as more progressive than corporal punishment. It was at same time that punishment began being measured in time, i.e. sentencing convicts to serve certain amount of time, just as labor was first being measured in time and equated with money, i.e. commodities p. 44
Early US prisons aimed to rehabilitate prisoners as individuals, thought isolating individual prisoners would give them time to think about their crime and repent. Today this appears as supermax prisons; but supermaxes depend on solitary confinement, sensory deprivation, donât intend to rehabilitate, instead use solitary as punishment of its own. This punishment obviously doesnât rehabilitate p. 50-51
Mumia Abu-Jamal in Live From Death Row: âWhat societal interest is served by prisoners who remain illiterate? What social benefit is there in ignorance? How are people corrected while imprisoned if their education is outlawed?â p. 55
Pell Grants for prisoners were outlawed in 1994 crime bill, and writing and other education programs were defunded after p. 56
Prisoners at Greenhaven Prison helped start accredited four-year degree program at their prison linked with an outside college, but was ended by the prison after 22 years. Many demands of Attica prison uprising centered around rehabilitation and education programs. Today few education, journalism programs still exist in prisons p. 56-57
Womenâs prisons tried to turn women away from crime by teaching them domestic, feminine skills; these skills would be used by former prisoners to work as domestics p. 64
Women have historically been incarcerated in mental hospitals instead of prisons; women who commit crimes assumed to be âinsaneâ. Women in prisons still more likely to be given psychiatric drugs. p. 66
Womenâs prisons began being built in 1850s. Black and indigenous women were still sent to menâs prisons sometimes, and often segregated from white women within womenâs prisons. Black women were leased as convict labor alongside men. Womenâs prisons that taught domestic skills to feminize women were more likely to be used for white women (capable of femininity) p. 72
Women often were given longer sentences than men, to spend time âretrainingâ them, but also to keep them isolated during their childbearing years to keep them from reproducing p. 72
âBlack and Latino men experience a perilous continuity in the way they are treated in school, where they are discipline as potential criminals; in the streets, where they are subjected to racial profiling by the police; and in prison, where they are warehoused and deprived of virtually all of their rights. For women, the continuity of treatment from the free world to the universe of the prison is even more complicated, since they also confront forms of violence in prison that they have confronted in their homes and intimate relationshipsâ p. 79
Military industry passes its technology to police forces who then use those technologies to send people to prison. âBoth systems generate huge profits from processes of social destruction.â Prison industry and politicians who support it make money by denying money to social programs, using that money to imprison people, and then turning profit from prison labor. Many companies use prison labor to save money, are now supporting expansion of prison industry p. 88
Antiprison work needs to dig deeper than just prisons themselves, but analyze also who benefits from prison industry. Prison reform doesnât work because it still supports existence of prison, doesnât take down capitalism and prison industrial complex p. 100
âThe prison industrial complex is much more than the sum of all the jails and prisons in this country. It is a set of symbiotic relationships among correctional communities, transnational corporations, media conglomerates, guardsâ unions, and legislative and court agendas.â Prison abolition needs to end correlation between imprisonment and profit/industry growth, not be based on punishment p. 107
Prison abolition needs to analyze profit of prison industry, media representations of crime and criminals. âIf we insist that abolitionist alternativesâŚstrive to disarticulate crime and punishment, race and punishment, class and punishment, and gender and punishment, then our focus must not rest only on the prison system as an isolated institution but must also be directed at all the social relations that support the permanence of the prison.â 112
