ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? by Angela Y Davis (2003)
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ - Required reading for all! & a reread for me before I pick up Abolition Democracy in my journey to read all of Davis’s works. <3
“The prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers. This is the ideological work that the prison performs—it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.”
title: Are Prisons Obsolete?
author: Angela Davis
published: 2003
publisher: Seven Stories Press
genre/subgenre: nonfiction—sociopolitical history & activism
setting: prisons across the united states & the history of the penitentiary system in europe where it began
main themes/subjects: the prison industrial complex, history of prisons & penitential systems, the gendered nature of imprisonment & punishment, imprisonment as punishment as opposed to a landing pad for those to be tried & sentenced, prison labor as a nearly seamless continuation of chattel slavery, systemic racism (& misogyny) in the prison system, debunking the myth of “prison reform”, prison & the capitalist economy & how one does not exist without the other
representation: systemically disenfranchised populations including poor, women, & BIPOC folks
premise: “It is my hope that this book will encourage readers to question their own assumptions about the prison.” — Angela Davis
“…convicts punished by imprisonment in emergent penitentiary systems were primarily male… Since women were largely denied public status as rights-bearing individuals, they could not be easily punished by the deprivation of such rights through imprisonment. This was especially true of married women, who had no standing before the law. According to English common law, marriage resulted in a state of "civil death”… The persistence of domestic violence painfully attests to these historical modes of gendered punishment.”
my thoughts:
One of my reading goals for the year is to read all of the books by Angela Davis that are on my TBR (as part of my Black Classics 2025 reading goal which I realize I haven’t posted about yet but u kno how it is…), so I started with a reread of Are Prisons Obsolete? (because it is one of those books you can’t reread too many times) before segueing into Abolition Democracy, & then on to the rest of her books.
This book is calm and clear, thorough yet remarkably concise. Davis tackles all the main issues, critiques, arguments, & thoughts from abolitionists past & present on the subject of incarceration, modern conceptions of justice, the prison industrial complex, & abolition strategies in a mere 115 pages.
notable elements: I was particularly interested on this reread in the discussion around the gendered nature of the prison & how historically women were rarely punished or imprisoned by the state because the male figures in their domestic spaces were legally responsible for & empowered to enact their punishment. This is why the majority of women in early prisons were the unhoused, sex workers, or the “insane”—in fact, Davis points out that effectively the asylum was to women what the prison was to men.
i would recommend this book to everyone. This is definitely one of those required-reading-for-all books I’d say. this book is best read intentionally, one sentence at a time. It’s a short book so it’s worth absorbing every word because Davis was extremely intentional abut each one she chose.
“In the nineteenth century, antislavery activists insisted that as long as slavery continued, the future of democracy was bleak indeed. In the twenty-first century, anti-prison activists insist that a fundamental requirement for the revitalization of democracy is the long-overdue abolition of the prison system.”
final note: I listened to the audiobook (narrated by Davis) for this reread & absolutely recommend it.
CW // violence, torture, rape, sexual assault, & abuse in the prison system, racism, misogyny, slavery, classism
season: all season
music pairing: soothing water & bird sounds
further reading:
everything else by Angela Davis, including:
ABOLITION DEMOCRACY (2005)
IF THEY COME IN THE MORNING (1971)
WOMEN, RACE AND CLASS (1981)
WOMEN, CULTURE & POLITICS (1990)
ABOLITION. FEMINISM. NOW. (2022)
STAMPED FROM THE BEGINNING by Ibram X Kendi (2016) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
ASSATA: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY by Assata Shakur (1987) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
THEY CALLED ME A LIONESS by Ahed Tamimi (2022) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
SISTER OUTSIDER by Audre Lorde (1984) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
HOOD FEMINISM by Mikki Kendall (2020) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
PARABLE OF THE SOWER by Octavia E Butler (1993) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Click on the star ratings beside the titles I’ve read to read my reviews/thoughts about the book.
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“…rather than try to imagine one single alternative to the existing system of incarceration, we might envision an array of alternatives that will require radical transformations of many aspects of our society. Alternatives that fail to address racism, male dominance, homophobia, class bias, and other structures of domination will not, in the final analysis, lead to decarceration and will not advance the goal of abolition.”
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