Are Prisons Obsolete?

Angela Yvonne Davis is the author of Are Prisons Obsolete? as well as several other nonfiction publications, like Women, Race & Class and Freedom is a Constant Struggle. Davis’s lifelong work as a scholar and activist focuses on civil rights, gender equity, the end of racism, and prison abolition. Davis was (and is) a member of several radical political groups, including the Black Panther Party and the Communist Party’s all-Black Che-Lumumba Club. Davis, alongside others, created Critical Resistance, an antiprison activist group fighting for prison abolition through education and grassroots programs of resistance. Davis is a professor at various post-secondary institutions, where her staunch leftist politics have occasionally been the source of conflict.

Davis wrote Are Prisons Obsolete? in the wake of the War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism, when incarceration rates were staggering, and after having experienced prison life herself in the 1970s. Throughout the book, Davis references her time in prison, enhancing the veracity of her claims by sharing firsthand experiences of racist and sexist punishments. In Chapter 4, she adds herself to the list of women who have endured the invasive strip search, and in Chapter 5, she reveals how the legacy of convict labor affected her group of close childhood friends. Davis grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, living through two of the racist institutions that founded the modern prison system: segregation and lynching. Although she discusses racism against Latinos, Indigenous Americans, and Middle Eastern people, her focus—from personal experience and overwhelming statistics—is on anti-Black racism in the justice system and society at large. Davis’s Marxist politics are evident throughout the book, especially in her discussion of exploitative prison labor and the privatization of prisons.

In Davis’s acknowledgements, she states her indebtedness to a host of other theorists, as the book’s “ideas reflect various forms of collaboration over the last six years with activists, scholars, prisoners, and cultural workers” (7). Her use of the work of others is evident throughout the book, as she includes quotations from various sources to support her conclusions. The wide range of fields and sources of these quotations—from geographers to cultural critics to official governmental reports—help support her claims that the prison system influences more than just ideas of crime and punishment. Davis’s emphasis on education in her own activism shines through these excerpts, especially her focus on firsthand prison literature to tell stories of life inside. Davis personally knows some writers she quotes, like Assata Shakur in Chapter 4, which allows her to add extratextual details to her analyses.