Are Prisons Obsolete?
by Angela Y. Davis
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Book Summary Information
Author: Angela Y. DavisEdition: Paperback
Published: 2003-04
ISBN: 1583225811
Number of pages: 128
Publisher: Open Media
Book Reviews of Are Prisons Obsolete?
Book Review: Literature Working on the Prison System
Summary: 4 Stars
Angela Davis talks about many different points in her book Are Prisons Obsolete? She tries to convince the audience that the current U.S. prison system is not run adequately. Davis questions the United States system of justice and the prison system that currently houses over two million people throughout the nation. In her book, she argues that prisons do not solve crime and that over the past twenty years the prison boom has not lowered crime rates across the country, but has intensified criminal behavior. The injustices within the current prison system, including institutionalized racism, gender inequalities, and class segregation are thoroughly explored in this book. She also debates whether a prison reform would be enough or prison abolition is necessary. This book is a great piece of literature that exposes readers with little to no knowledge about prisons to some cruel realities.
The book offers an overview of the history of prisons. Davis takes as an example California, a state which "landscape has thoroughly been prisonized over the last twenty years" (Davis, 12). This overview is extremely important to underline Davis' point that prisons have become ineffective as rehabilitatory institutions. Although, theoretically, the main purpose of a prison is to rehabilitate criminals, economic factors as well as racist motives, quickly drove the prison system to emulate a new way of slavery. As Davis says: "segregation ruled in the south until it was outlawed a century after the abolition of slavery. Many people who lived under Jim Crow could not envision a legal system defined by racial equality" (Davis, 23). The need for cheap labor in the south incited the spur of legislations that promoted the incarceration of as many African Americans as possible after the civil war. These prisoners, then, were leased out resulting in productive yet cheap laborers. Davis touches base with racism and economic oppression issues in chapter two of her book.
As evidence to help us understand the causes by which prisons started to proliferate when official studies showed that crime rate was going down (Davis, 85), Professor Davis uses the fact that "many corporations with global markets, now rely on prisons as an important source of profit" (Davis, 85). All the data compiled in chapter five of Davis' book is important to explain how the prison system has embodied a prison industrial complex that manipulates inmates' labor in exchange for economic gain. She attributes the so-called "tough on crime" legislation to private prisons and other corporations' interests. Although chapter five is bombards the reader with communist idealism, a communist mentality is not necessary to understand Davis' conclusions.
Even though not enough facts and statistics are given in the book with regards to the problem with the system, the book offers two chapters full of first hand information gathered by Davis. Nevertheless, the book's emphasis is on proposing a prison abolition program that should go hand and hand with the prison reform movement (Davis, 9-10). She is the voice of many prison reformers who have been trying to end violence and sexual abuse in prisons, provide prisoners with education so that their civil rights are not stripped away, and most importantly, work for prisons to be part of the solution and not another cause of problem.
In her last chapter, Professor Davis proposes, not so concrete ideas to adopt a completely different system or correction. This is the book's weakest chapter since it is too rhetorical and lacks solid proposals. She implies that the amount of knowledge and work necessary to make a solid change is in fact not very achievable by saying: "An abolitionist approach that seeks to answer questions such as these would require us to imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions" (Davis107), referring to questions such as "how can we imagine a society in which punishment is not based on race and class?"(Davis107). Nonetheless her ideology and optimism opens many possibilities that could in fact be effective substitutes to incarceration.
It is for all these reasons that I recommend this book to everyone who is interested in knowing the hidden problems within the current U.S. prison system and the ongoing racial segregation issues. This book makes us think whether or not prisons are obsolete. Davis thinks they are.
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