Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y Davis, Chapter 2
Summary of Key Points
Prison is not the first racist institution that has been targeted for abolition. At various times in history, it seemed impossible to imagine life without chattel slavery, legal segregation, and widespread organization of lynch mobs. Yet all these were abolished.
The penitentiary system was itself a reform of earlier forms of capital and corporal punishment. It was seen as a progressive reform, and it was believed that criminals would repent their crimes if given the time to reflect on their behavior (basically adult time-out)
In order for imprisonment to be a punishment, it has to represent a material change in conditions. Because imprisonment shares so many similarities with slavery, (and because it doesn’t make economic sense to lock up an enslaved worker) it was incredibly rare for enslaved people to be imprisoned. According to Mary Ellen Curtin, 99% of prisoners in Alabama were white during slavery.
This changed dramatically, however, after the end of chattel slavery. Because slavery was legal as a punishment for crime, the South set about criminalizing all aspects of Black life under the Black Codes. Now prisoners were majority Black and formerly enslaved peoples.
In addition to criminalizing the behaviour of Black people, in many cases charges were simply fabricated. White people could and often did use the courtroom to exact revenge on formerly enslaved people.
As former slaves were integrated into the prison system, so too were the punishments formerly used to enforce slavery, e.g. lashing. The convict leasing system was developed, were convicts were rented out to plantations or other industries. This system was largely considered worse than slavery by contemporaries, as convicts were regularly worked to death.
Convict leasing kept control in the hands of the planter class and delayed the development of a paid working class in the South. Alex Lichtenstein calls it “a most efficient and most rational deployment of racist strategies to swiftly achieve industrialization in the South”.
Under both the convict leasing system and the current for-profit prison industrial complex, there is an incentive to lock up more people for longer sentences. It’s simply more profitable.
