Are Prisons Obsolete?

sa.jls:$13.95 CANADA£6.99 UK"In this extraordinary book. Ang la Davis challengesus to confront the human rights catastrophe In ourjails and prisons. As she so convincingly argues, thecontemporary U.S. practice of super-incarceration iscloser to new age slavery than to any recognizablesystem of 'criminal justice.'"-Mike Davis, author of Dead Cities and City of Quartz"In this brilliant, thoroughly researched book.Angela Davis swings a wrecking ball Into the racistand sexist underpinnings of the American prisonsystem. Her arguments are well wrought andrestrained, leveling an unflinching critique of howand why more than 2 million Americans arepresently behind bars, and the corporations whoprofit from their suffering. Davis explores the biasesthat criminalize communities of color, politicallydisenfranchising huge chunks of minority voters inthe process. Uncompromising in her vision, Daviscalls not merely for prison reform, but for nothingshort of 'new terrains of justice.' Another Invaluablework In the Open Media Series by one of America'slast truly fearless public intellectuals."-formor ConQresswoman Cynthia McKinneyISBN 1-58322-581-1"Tfill •• JK TRADE BY CONSORTIUM

ARE PRISONSOBSOLETE?AnCJela Y. DavisAn Open Media BookSEVEN STORIES PRESSNew York

© 2003 by Angela Y. DavisContentsOpen Media series editor, Greg Ruggiero.All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproiuced, stored ina retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, includ·ing mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording or otherwise, withoutthewritten permission of the publisher.In Canada: Publishers Group Canada, 250A Carlton Street, Toronto ,ONM5A211In the U.K.: Turnaround Publisher Services Ltd., Unit 3, OlympiaTrading Estate, Coburg Road, Wood Green, London N22 6TZIn Australia: Palgrave Macmillan, 627 Chapel Street, South Yarra,VIC 3141Cover design and photos: Greg RuggieroISBN·lO: 1·58322·581-1/ ISBN-I3: 978-1-58322-581-3Printed in Canada.9 8 7 6 5 4 3Acknowledgments . . . .. . . .. . ... .. . . .. . .. . .. .... . .7CHAPTER 1Introduction-Prison Reform or Prison Abolition? . . . . .. . 9CHAPTER 2Slavery, Civil Rights, and AbolitionistPerspectives Toward Prison . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . .. . 22CHAPTER 3Imprisonment and Reform . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . ... . .. .40CHAPTER 4How Gender Structures the Prison System . . . . . . . . . . . 60CHAPTERSThe Prison Industrial Complex .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84CHAPTER 6Abolitionist Alteruatives ... .. . . . . .. . . .. . . . . . . .. . 105Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .116Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . .. . . . . . . . . . . 1285

AcknowledgmentsI should not be listed as the sole author of this book, for itsideas reflect various forms of collaboration over the last sixyears with activists, scholars, prisoners, and cultural workerswho have tried to reveal and contest the impact of theprison industrial complex on the lives of people-within andoutside prisons-throughout the world. The organizingcommittee for the 1998 Berkeley conference, CriticalResistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex, includedBo (rita d. brown), Ellen Barry, Jennifer Beach, Rose Braz,Julie Browne, Cynthia Chandler, Kamari Clarke, LeslieDiBenedetto Skopek, Gita Drury, Rayne Galbraith, RuthieGilmore, Naneen Karraker, Terry Kupers, Rachel Lederman,Joyce Miller, Dorsey Nunn, Dylan Rodriguez, EliRosenblatt, Jane Segal, Cassandra Shaylor, Andrea Smith,Nancy Stoller, Julia Sudbury, Robin Templeton, and SuranThrift. In the long process of coordinating plans for this conference,which attracted over three thousand people, weworked through a number of the questions that I raise in thisbook. I thank the members of that committee, includingthose who used the conference as a foundation to build theorganization Critical Resistance. In :2000, I was a member ofa University of California Humanities Research InstituteResident Research Group and had the opportunity to partic-7

We thus think about imprisonment as a fate reserved forothers, a fate reserved for the "evildoers," to use a termrecently popularized by George W. Bush. Because of the persistentpower of racism, 1/ criminals" and II evildoers" are, inthe collective imagination, fantasized as people of color. Theprison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract siteinto which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of theresponsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting thosecommunities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionatenumbers. This is the ideological work that theprison performs-it relieves us of the responsibility of seriouslyengaging with the problems of our society, especiallythose produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.What, for example, do we miss if we try to think aboutprison expansion without addressing larger economic developments?We live in an era of migrating corporations. Inorder to escape organized labor in this country-and thushigher wages, benefits, and so on-corporations roam theworld in search of nations providing cheap labor pools. Thiscorporate migration thus leaves entire communities inshambles. Huge numbers of people lose jobs and prospectsfor future jobs. Because the economic base of these communitiesis destroyed, education and other surviving socialservices are profoundly affected. This process turns the men,women, and children who live in these damaged communitiesinto perfect candidates for prison.In the meantime, corporations associated with the punishmentindustry reap profits from the system that managesprisoners and acquire a clear stake in the continued growthof prison populations. Put simply, this is the era of the prisonindustrial complex. The prison has become a black hole intowhich the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited.Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social16 1 Angela Y. Daviswealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditionsthat lead people to prison. There are thus real and often quitecomplicated connections between the deindustrialization ofthe economy-a process that reached its peak during the1980s-and the rise of mass imprisonment, which also beganto spiral during the Reagan-Bush era. However, the demandfor more prisons was represented to the public in simplisticterms. More prisons were needed because there was morecrime. Yet many scholars have demonstrated that by thetime the prison construction boom began, official crime statisticswere already falling. Moreover, draconian drug lawswere being enacted, and "three-strikes" provisions were onthe agendas of many states.In order to understand the proliferation of prisons and therise of the prison industrial complex, it might be helpful tothink further about the reasons we so easily take prisons forgranted. In California, as we have seen, almost two-thirds ofexisting prisons were opened during the eighties andnineties. Why was there no great outcry? Why was theresuch an obvious level of comfort with the prospect of manynew prisons? A partial answer to this question has to dowith the way we consume media images of thc prison, evenas the realities of imprisonment are hidden from almost allwho have not had the misfortune of doing time. Culturalcritic Gina Dent has pointed out that our sense of familiaritywith the prison comes in part from representations ofprisons in film and other visual media.The history of visuality linked to the prison is alsoa main reinforcement of the institution of theprison as a naturalized part of our social landscape.The history of film has always been wedded to therepresentation of incarceration. Thomas Edison'sARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 117

first films (dating back to the 1901 reenactment presentedas newsreel, Execution of Czolgosz withPanorama of Auburn Prison) included footage ofthe darkest recesses of the prison. Thus, the prisonis wedded to our experience of visuality, creatingalso a sense of its permanence as an institution. Wealso have a constant flow of Hollywood prisonfilms, in fact a genreJlSome of the most well known prison films are: I Want toLive, Papillon, Cool Hand Luke, and Escape from Alcatraz.It also bears mentioning that television programming hasbecome increasingly saturated with images of prisons. Somerecent documentaries include the A&E series The BigHouse, which consists of programs on San Quentin,Alcatraz, Leavenworth, and Alderson Federal Reformatoryfor Women. The long-running HBO program Oz has managedto persuade many viewers that they know exactly whatgoes on in male maximum-security prisons.But even those who do not consciously decide to watch adocumentary or dramatic program on the topic of prisonsinevitably consume prison images, whether they choose toor not, by the simple fact of watching movies or TV. It is virtuallyimpossible to avoid consuming images of prison. In1997, I was myself quite astonished to find, when I interviewedwomen in three Cuban prisons, that most of themnarrated their prior awareness of prisons-that is, beforethey were actually incarcerated-as coming from the manyHollywood films they had seen. The prison is one of themost important features of our image environment. This hascaused us to take the existence of prisons for granted. Theprison has become a key ingredient of our common sense. Itis there, all around us. We do not question whether it should18 I Angela Y. Davisexist. It has become so much a part of our lives that itrequires a great feat of the imagination to envision lifebeyond the prison.This is not to dismiss the profound changes that haveoccurred in the way public conversations about the prisonare conducted. Ten years ago, even as the drive to expand theprison system reached its zenith, there were very few critiquesof this process available to the public. In factI mostpeople had no idea about the immensity of this expansion.This was the period during which internal changes-in partthrough the application of new technologies-led the U.S.prison system in a much more repressive direction. Whereasprevious classifications had been confined to low, medium,and maximum security, a new category was invented-thatof the super-maximum security prison, or the supermax.The turn toward increased repression in a prison system,distinguished from the beginning of its history by its repressiveregimes, caused some journalistsl public intellectualsland progressive agencies to oppose the growing reliance onprisons to solve social problems that are actually exacerbatedby mass incarceration.In 1990, the Washington-based Sentencing Project publisheda study of U.S. populations in prison and jail, and onparole and probation, which concluded that one in fourblack men between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine wereamong these numbers.12 Five years later, a second studyrevealed that this percentage had soared to almost one inthree (32.2 percent). Moreover, more than one in ten Latinomen in this same age range were in jail or prison, or on probationor parole. The second study also revealed that thegroup experiencing the greatest increase was black women,whose imprisonment increased by seventy -eight percent.13According to the Bureau of Tustice Statistics, African-ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 119

Americans as a whole now represent the majority of stateand federal prisoners, with a total of 803,400 blackinmates-118,600 more than the total number of whiteinmates.14 During the late 1990s major articles on prisonexpansion appeared in Newsweek, Harper's, Emerge, andAtlantic Monthly. Even Colin Powell raised the question ofthe rising number of black men in prison when he spoke atthe 2000 Republican National Convention, which declaredGeorge W. Bush its presidential candidate.Over the last few years the previous absence of criticalpositions on prison expansion in the political arena hasgiven way to proposals for prison reform. While public discoursehas become more flexible, the emphasis is almostinevitably on generating the changes that will produce a betterprison system. In other words, the increased flexibilitythat has allowed for critical discussion of the problems associatedwith the expansion of prisons also restricts this discussionto the question of prison reform.As important as some reforms may be-the eliminationof sexual abuse and medical neglect in women's prison, forexample-frameworks that rely exclusively on reforms helpto produce the stultifying idea that nothing lies beyond theprison. Debates about strategies of decarceration, whichshould be the focal point of our conversations on the prisoncrisis, tend to be marginalized when reform takes the centerstage. The most immediate question today is how to preventthe further expansion of prison populations and how to bringas many imprisoned women and men as possible back intowhat prisoners call lithe free world." How can we move todecriminalize drug use and the trade in sexual services?How can we take seriously strategies of restorative ratherthan exclusively punitive justice? Effective alternativesinvolve both transformation of the techniques for addressing20 I Angela Y. Davis"crime" and of the social and economic conditions thattrack so many children from poor communities, and espe­Cially communities of color, into the juvenile system andthen on to prison. The most difficult and urgent challengetoday is that of creatively exploring new terrains of justice,where the prison no longer serves as our major anchor.ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 121

Slavery,2Civil RiQhts, andAbolitionist Perspectives TowardPrisonif Advocates of incarceration .. . hoped that the penitentiarywould rehabilitate its inmates. Whereas philosophersperceived a ceaseless state of war between chattelslaves and their masters, criminologists hoped to negotiatea peace treaty of sorts within the prison walls. Yetherein lurked a paradox: if the penitentiary's internalregime resembled that of the plantation so closely that thetwo were often loosely equated, how could the prison possiblyfunction to rehabilitate criminals?"-Adam Jay Hirsch15The prison is not the only institution that has posed complexchallenges to the people who have lived with it and havebecome so inured to its presence that they could not conceiveof society without it. Within the history of the UnitedStates the system of slavery immediately comes to mind.Although as early as the American Revolution antislaveryadvocates promoted the elimination of African bondage, ittook almost a century to achieve the abolition of the "peculiarinstitution." White antislavery abolitionists such as JohnBrown and William Lloyd Garrison were represented in the22dominant media of the period as extremists and fanatics.When Frederick Douglass embarked on his career as an antislaveryorator, white people-even those who were passionateabolitionists-refused to believe that a black slave coulddisplay such intelligence. The belief in the permanence ofslavery was so widespread that even white abolitionistsfound it difficult to imagine black people as equals.It took a long and violent civil war in order to legally disestablishthe "peculiar institution. II Even though theThirteenth Amendment to the u.s. Constitution outlawedinvoluntary servitude, white supremacy continued to beembraced by vast numbers of people and became deeplyinscribed in new institutions. One of these post-slaveryinstitutions was lynching, which was widely accepted formany decades thereafter. Thanks to the work of figures suchas Ida B. Wells, an antilynching campaign was graduallylegitimized during the first half of the twentieth century.The NAACP, an organization that continues to conductlegal challenges against discrimination, evolved from theseefforts to abolish lynching.Segregation ruled the South until it was outlawed a centuryafter the abolition of slavery. Many people who livedunder Jim Crow could not envision a legal system defined byracial equality. When the governor of Alabama personallyattempted to prevent Arthurine Lucy from enrolling in theUniversity of Alabama, his stance represented the inabilityto imagine black and white people ever peaceably living andstudying together. "Segregation today, segregation tomorrow,segregation forever" are the most well known words ofthis politician, who was forced to repudiate them someyears later when segregation had proved far more vulnerablethan he could have imagined.Although government, corporations, and the dominantARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 123

me dia try to represent racism as an unfort un ate abe rration ofthe past that has been re le gate d to the graveyard of u.s. history,it continues to profoundly in flue nce co ntemporarystructures, attitudes, and be havio rs. Nevertheless, anyo newho wo uld dare to call fo r the reintro duct io n of slavery, theorganizat io n of lynch mobs, or the reestablishme nt of le galsegre gatio n wo uld be summarily dismissed. But it should beremembered that the an cestors of many of to day's mostardent libe rals co uld not have im agi ne d life wit ho ut slavery,life wit ho ut lynching, or life without se gregation. The 2001Wo rld Conference Against Racism , Racial Discrim in at io n,Xenophobia, and Re lated Intolerances he ld in Durban, SouthAfrica, div ulge d the immensity of the global task of elim inatingracism . The re may be many disagreements re garding whatco unts as racism and what are the most effective strategies toelim in ate it. Ho wever, espe cially wit h the do wnfal l of theap art heid re gime in South Africa, there is a global co nsensusthat racism should not de fine the fut ure of the planet.I have re ferre d to these historical ex amples of effo rts todism ant le racist inst itutions be cause they have co ns ide rablere levance to our dis cussion of prisons and prison abo lit io n. Itis true that slavery, lyn ching, and segregation acquire d sucha stalwart ideologi cal quality that many, if not most, co uldnot fo resee their de cline and co llapse. Slave ry, lyn ching, an dse gre gat ion are ce rt ainly compe llin g ex amples of so cial inst i­tutions that, like the prison, we re once co ns idered to be aseve rlasting as the sun. Yet, in the case of all three examples,we can point to movements that assumed the radical stanceof anno uncing the obsolescence of these institutions. It mayhe lp us gain perspective on the prison if we try to im agineho w stran ge and dis comforting the de bates about the obso ­lescence of slavery must have been to those who took the"pe culiar institution" fo r granted-an d espe cially to those24 1 Angela Y. Daviswho re aped dire ct benefits from this dre adful system of racistexploitation . And even though there was widespread resist ­ance among black slaves, there we re even some among themwho assumed that they and their progeny wo uld be alwayssubje cte d to the tyranny of slave ry.I have intro duce d three abo lit io n campaigns that we reeventually mo re or less successful to make the point thatso cial circumstances transform an d popular attit udes shift,in part in re spo nse to organize d so cial movements . But Ihave also evoked these historical campaigns be cause they alltargete d some expression of racism. U. S. chattel slavery wasa system of force d labor that re lie d on racist ide as and be liefsto justify the re le gation of people of African descent to thele gal st at us of property. Lynching was an extrale gal institutionthat surren de re d thousands of African-Ame rican livesto the violence of rut hless racist mobs. Un der segre gat io n,black people we re le gally de clare d se cond-class cit izens, fo rwhom voting, jo b, educat io n, an d ho us ing ri ghts we re drasticallycurt aile d, if they we re av ailable at all.What is the re lations hip between these historical expressionsof racism an d the ro le of the prison system today?Explo ring such co nnections may offe r us a diffe rent pe rspectiveon the current state of the punishme nt industry. If weare alre ady persuaded that racism should not be allowe d tode fine the planet's fut ure an d if we can success fully arguethat prisons are racist institutions, this may le ad us to takese rious ly the prospe ct of de claring prisons obso lete.Fo r the moment I am co ncentrat in g on the history ofantiblack racism in orde r to make the point that the priso nreveals co nge ale d fo rms of antiblack racism that ope rate inclandest ine ways. In other words , they are rarely re co gnizedas racist. But there are other racialize d histories that haveaffe cted the deve lopment of the U. S. punis hment system asARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 125

well-the histories of Latinos, Native Americans, andAsian-Americans. These racisms also congeal and combinein the prison. Because we are so accustomed to talking aboutrace in terms of black and white, we often fail to recognizeand contest expressions of racism that target people of colorwho are not black. Consider the mass arrests and detentionof people of Middle Eastern, South Asian, or Muslim heritagein the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks onthe Pentagon and World Trade Center.This leads us to two important questions: Are prisonsracist institutions? Is racism so deeply entrenched in theinstitution of the prison that it is not possible to eliminateone without eliminating the other? These are questions thatwe should keep in mind as we examine the historical linksbetween U.S. slavery and the early penitentiary system. Thepenitentiary as an institution that simultaneously punishedand rehabilitated its inhabitants was a new system of punishmentthat first made its appearance in the United Statesaround the time of the American Revolution. This new systemwas based on the replacement of capital and corporalpunishment by incarceration.Imprisonment itself was new neither to the United Statesnor to the world, but until the creation of this new institutioncalled the penitentiary, it served as a prelude to punishment.People who were to be subjected to some form of corporalpunishment were detained in prison until the executionof the punishment. With the penitentiary, incarcerationbecame the punishment itself. As is indicated in the designation"penitentiary," imprisonment was regarded as rehabilitativeand the penitentiary prison was devised to provideconvicts with the conditions for reflecting on their crimesand, through penitence, for reshaping their habits and eventheir souls. Although some antislavery advocates spoke out26 1 Angela Y. Davisagainst this new system of punishment during the revolutionaryperiod, the penitentiary was generally viewed as aprogressive reform, linked to the larger campaign for therights of citizens.In many ways, the penitentiary was a vast improvementover the many forms of capital and corporal punishmentinherited from the English. However, the contention thatprisoners would refashion themselves if only given theopportunity to reflect and labor in solitude and silence disregardedthe impact of authoritarian regimes of living andwork. Indeed, there were significant similarities betweenslavery and the penitentiary prison. Historian Adam JayHirsch has pointed out:One may perceive in the penitentiary many reflectionsof chattel slavery as it was practiced in theSouth. Both institutions subordinated their subjectsto the will of others. Like Southern slaves, prisoninmates followed a daily routine specified by theirsuperiors. Both institutions reduced their subjects todependence on others for the supply of basic humanservices such as food and shelter. Both isolated theirsubjects from the general population by confiningthem to a fixed habitat. And both frequently coercedtheir subjects to work, often for longer hours and forless compensation than free laborers.l6As Hirsch has observed, both institutions deployed similarforms of punishment, and prison regulations were, in fact,very similar to the Slave Codes-the laws that deprivedenslaved human beings of virtually all rights. Moreover, bothprisoners and slaves were considered to have pronouncedproclivities to crime. People sentenced to the penitentiary inARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 127

the North, white and black alike, were popularly representedas having a strong kinship to enslaved black people.17The ideologies governing slavery and those governingpunishment were profoundly linked during the earliestperiod of U.S. history. While free people could be legallysentenced to punishment by hard labor, such a sentencewould in no way change the conditions of existence alreadyexperienced by slaves. Thus, as Hirsch further reveals,Thomas Jefferson, who supported the sentencing of convictedpeople to hard labor on road and water projects, alsopointed out that he would exclude slaves from this sort ofpunishment. Since slaves alreadyhard labor, sentencingthem to penal labor would not mark a difference intheir condition. Jefferson suggested banishment to othercountries instead. isParticularly in the United race has always playeda central role in constructing presumptions of criminality.After the abolition of slavery, former slave states passednew legislation revising the Slave Codes in order to regulatethe behavior of free blacks in ways similar to those that hadexisted during slavery. The new Black Codes proscribed arange of actions-such as vagrancy, absence from work,breach of job contracts, the possession of firearms, andinsulting gestures or acts-that were criminalized onlywhen the person charged was black. With the passage of theThirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, slavery andinvoluntary servitude were putatively abolished. However,there was a significant exception. In the wording of theamendment, slavery and involuntary servitude were abolished"except as a punishment for crime, whereof the partyshall have been duly convicted. II According to the BlackCodes, there were crimes defined by state law for whichonly black people could be "duly convicted." Thus, former28 I Angela Y. Davisslaves, who had recently been extricated from a eonditionof hard labor for life, could be legally sentenced to penalservitude.In the immediate aftermath of slavery, the southern stateshastened to develop a criminal justice system that couldlegally restrict the possibilities of freedom for newly releasedslaves. Black people became the prime targets of a developingconvict lease system, referred to by many as a reincarnationof slavery. The Mississippi Black Codes, for example,declared vagrant /I anyone/who was guilty of theft, had runaway [from a job, apparently], was drunk, was wanton in conductor speech, had neglected job or family, handled moneycarelessly, and ... all other idle and disorderly persons."19Thus, vagrancy was coded as a black crime, one punishableby incarceration and forced labor, sometimes on the veryplantations that previously had thrived on slave labor.Mary Ellen Curtin's study of Alabama prisoners duringthe decades following emancipation discloses that before thefour hundred thousand black slaves in that state were setfree, ninety-nine percent of prisoners in Alabama's penitentiarieswere white. As a consequence of the shifts provokedby the institution of the Black Codes, within a short periodof time, the overwhelming majority of Alabama's convictswere black.2o She further observes:Although the vast majority of Alabama's antebellumwere white, the popular perceptionwas that the South's true criminals were its blackslaves. the 1870s the growing number ofblack prisoners in the South further buttressed thebelief that African Americans were inherentlycriminal and, in particular, prone to larceny.21ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? ! 29

In 1883, Frederick Douglass had already written aboutthe South's tendency to "impute crime to color."22 When aparticularly egregious crime was committed, he noted, notonly was guilt frequently assigned to a black person regardlessof the perpetrator's race, but white men sometimessought to escape punishment by disguising themselves asblack. Douglass would later recount one such incident thattook place in Granger County, Tennessee, in which a manwho appeared to be black was shot while committing a robbery.The wounded man, however, was discovered to be arespectable white citizen who had colored his face black.The above example from Douglass demonstrates howwhiteness, in the words of legal scholar Cheryl Harris, operatesas property.23 According to Harris, the fact that whiteidentity was possessed as property meant that rights, liberandself-identity were affirmed for white people, whilebeing denied to black people. The latter's only access towhiteness was through "passing." Douglass's commentsindicate how this property interest in whiteness was easilyreversed in schemes to deny black people their rights to dueprocess. Interestingly, cases similar to the one Douglass discussesabove emerged in the United States during the 1990s:in Boston, Charles Stuart murdered his pregnant wife andattempted to blame an anonymous black man, and inUnion, South Carolina, Susan Smith killed her children andclaimed they had been abducted by a black carjacker. Theracialization of crime-the tendency to "impute crime tocolor," to use Frederick Douglass's words-did not witheraway as the country became increasingly removed fromslavery. Proof that crime continues to be imputed to colorresides in the many evocations of "racial profiling" in ourtime. That it is possible to be targeted by the police for noother reason than the color of one's skin is not mere specu-30 I Angela Y. Davislation. Police departments in major urban areas have admittedthe existence of formal procedures designed to maximizethe numbers of African-Americans and Latinos arrestedevenin the absence of probable cause. In the aftermath ofthe September 11 attacks, vast numbers of people of MiddleEastern and South Asian heritage were arrested and detainedby the police agency known as Immigration andNaturalization Services (INS). The INS is the federal agencythat claims the largest number of armed agents, even morethan the FBJ.24During the post-slavery era, as black people were integratedinto southern penal systems--and as the penal systembecame a system of penal servitude-the punishmentsassociated with slavery became further incorporated intothe penal system. "Whipping," as Matthew Mancini hasobserved, "was the preeminent form of punishment underslaverYi and the lash, along with the chain, became the veryemblem of servitude for slaves and prisoners. "25 As indicatedabove, black people were imprisoned under the lawsassembled in the various Black Codes of the southern states,which, because they were rearticulations of the Slave Codes,tended to racialize penality and link it closely with previousregimes of slavery. The expansion of the convict lease systemand the county chain gang meant that the antebellumcriminal justice system, which focused far more intenselyon black people than on whites, defined southern criminaljustice largely as a means of controlling black labor.According to Mancini:Among the multifarious debilitating legacies ofslavery was the conviction that blacks could onlylabor in a certain way-the way experience hadshown them to have labored in the past: in gangs,ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 131

subjected to constant supervision, and under thediscipline of the lash. Since these were the requisitesof slavery, and since slaves were blacks,Southern whites almost universally concluded thatblacks could not work unless subjected to suchintense surveillance and discipline.26Scholars who have studied the convict lease system pointout that in many important respects, convict leasing was farworse than slavery, an insight that can be gleaned from titlessuch as One Dies, Get Another (by Mancini), Worse ThanSlavery (David Oshinsky's work on Parchman Prison),27 andTwice the Work of Free Labor (Alex Lichtenstein's examinationof the political economy of convict leasing).28 Slaveowners may have been concerned for the survival of individualslaves, who, after all, represented significant investments.Convicts, on the other hand, were leased not as individuals,but as a group, and they could be worked literally todeath without affecting the profitability of a convict crew.According to descriptions by contemporaries, the conditionsunder which leased convicts and county chain gangslived were far worse than those under which black peoplehad lived as slaves. The records of Mississippi plantations inthe Yazoo Delta during the late 1880s indicate thatthe prisoners ate and slept on bare ground, withoutblankets or mattresses, and often without clothes.They were punished for "slow hoeing" (ten lashes),"sorry planting" (five lashes), and "being light withcotton"(five lashes). Some who attempted toescape were whipped" till the blood ran down theirlegs"; others had a metal spur riveted to their feet.Convicts dropped from exhaustion, pneumonia,32 1 Angela Y. Davismalaria, frostbite, consumption, sunstroke, dysentery,gunshot wounds, and "shaclde poisoning" (theconstant rubbing of chains and leg irons againstbare £leshJ.29The appalling treatment to which convicts were subjectedunder the lease system recapitulated and further extendedthe regimes of slavery. If, as Adam Tay Hirsch contends,the early incarnations of the U.S. penitentiary in the Northtended to mirror the institution of slavery in many importantrespects, the post-Civil War evolution of the punishmentsystem was in very literal ways the continuation of aslave system, which was no longer legal in the "free" world.The population of convicts, whose racial composition wasdramatically transformed by the abolition of slavery, couldbe subjected to such intense exploitation and to such horrendousmodes of punishment precisely because they continuedto be perceived as slaves.Historian Mary Ann Curtin has observed that many scholarswho have acknowledged the deeply entrenched racism ofthe post-Civil War structures of punishment in the South havefailed to identify the extent to which racism colored commonsenseunderstandings of the circumstances surrounding thewholesale criminalization of black communities. Evenantiracist historians, she contends, do not go far enough inexamining the ways in which black people were made intocriminals. They point out-and this, she says, is indeed partiallytrue-that in the aftermath of emancipation, large numbersof black people were forced by their new social situationto steal in order to survive. It was the transformation of pettythievery into a felony that relegated substantial numbers ofblack people to the "involuntary servitude" legalized by theThirteenth Amendment. What Curtin suggests is that theseARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 133

charges of theft were frequently fabricated outright. They"also served as subterfuge for political revenge. After emancipationthe courtroom became an ideal place to exact racial retribution."3oIn this sense, the work of the criminal justice systemwas intimately related to the extralegal work of lynching.Alex Lichtenstein, whose study focuses on the role of theconvict lease system in forging a new labor force for theSouth, identifies the lease system, along with the new JimCrow laws, as the central institution in the development ofa racial state.New South capitalists in Georgia and elsewherewere able to use the state to recruit and discipline aconvict labor force, and thus were able to developtheir states' resources without creating a wage laborforce, and without undermining planters' control ofblack labor. In fact, quite the opposite: the penalsystem could be used as a powerful sanction againstrural blacks who challenged the racial order uponwhich agricultural labor control relied.31Lichtenstein discloses, for example, the extent to whichthe building of Georgia railroads during the nineteenth centuryrelied on black convict labor. He further reminds usthat as we drive down the most famous street in Atlanta­Peachtree Street-we ride on the backs of convicts: "[TJherenowned Peachtree Street and the rest of Atlanta's wellpavedroads and modern transportation infrastructure,which helped cement its place as the commercial hub of themodern South, were originally laid by convicts."32Lichtenstein's major argument is that the convict leasewas not an irrational regression; it was not primarily athrowback to precapitalist modes of production. Rather, it34 I Angela Y. Daviswas a most efficient and most rational deployment of raciststrategies to swiftly achieve industrialization in the South.In this sense, he argues, "convict labor was in many ways inthe vanguard of the region's first tentative, ambivalent, stepstoward modernity."33Those of us who have had the opportunity to visit nineteenth-centurymansions that were originally constructedon slave plantations are rarely content with an aestheticappraisal of these structures, no matter how beautiful theymay be. Sufficient visual imagery of toiling black slaves circulateenough in our environment for us to imagine the brutalitythat hides just beneath the surface of these wondrousmansions. We have learned how to recognize the role ofslave labor, as well as the racism it embodied. But black convictlabor remains a hidden dimension of our history. It isextremely unsettling to think of modern, industrializedurban areas as having been originally produced under theracist labor conditions of penal servitude that are oftendescribed by historians as even worse than slavery.I grew up in the city of Birmingham, Alabama. Because ofits mines-coal and iron ore-and its steel mills thatremained active until the deindustrialization process of the1980s, it was widely known as "the Pittsburgh of theSouth." The fathers of many of my friends worked in thesemines and mills. It is only recently that I have learned thatthe black miners and steelworkers I knew during my childhoodinherited their place in Birmingham's industrial developmentfrom black convicts forced to do this work under thelease system. As Curtin observes,Many ex-prisoners became miners because Alabamaused prison labor extensively in its coalmines. By1888 all of Alabama's able male prisoners were leasedARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? I 35

to two major mining companies: the Tennessee Coaland Iron Company (TCI) and Sloss Iron and SteelCompany. For a charge of up to $18.50 per month perman, these corporations "leased," or rented prisonlaborers and worked them in coalmines.34Learning about this little-acknowledged dimension ofblack and labor history has caused me to reevaluate my ownchildhood experiences.One of the many ruses racism achieves is the virtual erasureof historical contributions by people of color. Here wehave a penal system that was racist in many respects-discriminatoryarrests and sentences, conditions of work,modes of punishment-together with the racist erasure ofthe significant contributions made by black convicts as aresult of racist coercion. Just as it is difficult to imagine howmuch is owed to convicts relegated to penal servitude duringthe nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we find it difficulttoday to feel a connection with the prisoners who produce arising number of commodities that we take for granted in ourdaily lives. In the state of California, public colleges and universitiesare provided with furniture produced by prisoners,the vast majority of whom are Latino and black.There are aspects of our history that we need to interrogateand rethink, the recognition of which may help us toadopt more complicated, critical postures toward the presentand the future. I have focused on the work of a few scholarswhose work urges us to raise questions about the past,present, and future. Curtin, for example, is not simply contentwith offering us the possibility of reexamining the placeof mining and steelwork in the lives of black people inAlabama. She also uses her research to urge us to thinkabout the uncanny parallels between the convict lease sys-36 I Angela Y. Davistem in the nineteenth century and prison privatization inthe twenty-first.In the late nineteenth century, coal companieswished to keep their skilled prison laborers for aslong as they could, leading to denials of "shorttime. " Today, a slightly different economic incentivecan lead to similar consequences. CCA[Corrections Corporation of America] is paid perprisoner. If the supply dries up, or too many arereleased too early, their profits are affected . . .Longer prison terms mean greater profits, but thelarger point is that the profit motive promotes theexpansion of imprisonment.35The persistence of the prison as the main form of punishment,with its racist and sexist dimensions, has createdthis historical continuity between the nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-centuryconvict lease system and the privatizedprison business today. While the convict lease system waslegally abolished, its structures of exploitation havereemerged in the patterns of privatization, and, more generally,in the wide-ranging corporatization of punishment thathas produced a prison industrial complex. If the prison continuesto dominate the landscape of punishment throughoutthis century and into the next, what might await cominggenerations of impoverished African-Americans, Latinos,Native Americans, and Asian-Americans? Given the parallelsbetween the prison and slavery, a productive exercisemight consist in speculating about what the present mightlook like if slavery or its successor, the convict lease system,had not been abolished.To be sure, I am not suggesting that the abolition of slav-ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 137

ery and the lease system has produced an era of equality andjustice. On the contrary, racism surreptitiously definessocial and economic structures in ways that are difficult toidentify and thus are much more damaging. In some states,for example, more than one-third of black men have beenlabeled felons. In Alabama and Florida, once a felon, alwaysa felon, which entails the loss of status as a rights-bearingcitizen. One of the grave consequences of the powerful reachof the prison was the 2000 (sJelection of George W. Bush aspresident. If only the black men and women denied the rightto vote because of an actual or presumed felony record hadbeen allowed to cast their ballots, Bush would not be in theWhite House today. And perhaps we would not be dealingwith the awful costs of the War on Terrorism declared duringthe first year of his administration. If not for his election,the people of Iraq might not have suffered death, destruction,and environmental poisoning by u.s. military forces.As appalling as the current political situation may be,imagine what our lives might have become if we were stillgrappling with the institution of slavery-or the convictlease system or racial segregation. But we do not have tospeculate about living with the consequences of the prison.There is more than enough evidence in the lives of men andwomen who have been claimed by ever more repressiveinstitutions and who are denied access to their families,their communities, to educational opportunities, to productiveand creative work, to physical and mental recreation.And there is even more compelling evidence about the damagewrought by the expansion of the prison system in theschools located in poor communities of color that replicatethe structures and regimes of the prison. When childrenattend schools that place a greater value on discipline andsecurity than on knowledge and intellectual development,38 I Angela Y. Davisthey are attending prep schools for prison. If this is thepredicament we face today, what might the future hold if theprison system acquires an even greater presence in our society?In the nineteenth century, antislavery activists insistedthat as long as slavery continued, the future of democracywas bleak indeed. In the twenty-first century, antiprisonactivists insist that a fundamental requirement for the revitalizationof democracy is the long-overdue abolition of theprison system.ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 139

3Imprison ment andReform"One should recall that the movement for reforming theprisons, for controlling their functioning is not a recentphenomenon. It does not even seem to have originated ina recognition of failure. Prison 'reform' is virtually contemporarywith the prison itself: it constitutes, as it were,its programme."-Michel Foucault36It is ironic that the prison itself was a product of concertedefforts by reformers to create a better system of punishment.If the words "prison reform" so easily slip from our lips, it isbecause "prison" and "reform" have been inextricablylinked since the beginning of the use of imprisonment as themain means of punishing those who violate social norms.As I have already indicated, the origins of the prison areassociated with the American Revolution and therefore withthe resistance to the colonial power of England. Today thisseems ironic, but incarceration within a penitentiary wasassumed to be humane-at least far more humane than thecapital and corporal punishment inherited from England andother European countries. Foucault opens his study,Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, with aic description of a 1757 execution in Paris. The man whowas put to death was first forced to undergo a series of formidabletortures ordered by the court. Red-hot pincers were40used to burn away the flesh from his limbs, and molten lead,boiling oil, burning resin, and other substances were meltedtogether and poured onto the wounds. Finally, he was drawnand quartered, his body burned, and the ashes tossed intothe wind.37 Under English common law, a conviction forsodomy led to the punishment of being buried alive, andconvicted heretics also were burned alive. "The crime oftreason by a female was punished initially under the commonlaw by burning alive the defendant. However, in theyear 1790 this method was halted and the punishmentbecame strangulation and burning of the corpse."38European and American reformers set out to end macabrepenalties such as this, as well as other forms of corporal punishmentsuch as the stocks and pillories, whippings, brandings,and amputations. Prior to the appearance of punitiveincarceration, such punishment was designed to have itsmost profound effect not so much on the person punished ason the crowd of spectators. Punishment was, in essence,public spectacle. Reformers such as John Howard in Englandand Benjamin Rush in Pennsylvania argued that punishment-ifcarried out in isolation, behind the walls of theprison-would cease to be revenge and would actuallyreform those who had broken the law.It should also be pointed out that punishment has not beenwithout its gendered dimensions. Women were often punishedwithin the domestic domain, and instruments of torturewere sometimes imported by authorities into the household.In seventeenth-century Britain, women whose husbands identifiedthem as quarrelsome and unaccepting of male dominancewere punished by means of a gossip's bridle, orilbranks, " a headpiece with a chain attached and an iron bitthat was introduced into the woman's mouth.39 Although thebranking of women was often linked to a public parade, thisARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 141

contraption was sometimes hooked to a wall of the house,where the punished woman remained until her husbanddecided to release her. I mention these forms of punishmentinflicted on women because, like the punishment inflicted onslaves, they were rarely taken up by prison reformers.Other modes of punishment that predated the rise of theprison include banishment, forced labor in galleys, transportation,and appropriation of the accused's property. Thepunitive transportation of large numbers of people fromEngland, for example, facilitated the initial colonization ofAustralia. Transported English convicts also settled theNorth American colony of Georgia. During the early 1700s,one in eight transported convicts were women, and the workthey were forced to perform often consisted of prostitution.40Imprisonment was not employed as a principal mode ofpunishment until the eighteenth century in Europe and thenineteenth century in the United States. And Europeanprison systems were instituted in Asia and Africa as animportant component of colonial rule. In India, for example,the English prison system was introduced during the secondhalf of the eighteenth century, when jails were establishedin the regions of Calcutta and Madras. In Europe, the penitentiarymovement against capital and other corporal punishmentsreflected new intellectual tendencies associatedwith the Enlightenment, actIVIst interventions byProtestant reformers, and structural transformations associatedwith the rise of industrial capitalism. In Milan in 1764,Cesare Beccaria published his Essay on Crimes andPunishments,41 which was strongly influenced by notions ofequality advanced by the philosophes-especially Voltaire,Rousseau, and Montesquieu. Beccaria argued that punishmentshould never be a private matter, nor should it be arbitrarilyviolent; rather, it should be public, swift, and as42 I Angela Y. Davislenient as possible. He revealed the contradiction of whatwas then a distinctive feature of imprisonment-the factthat it was generally imposed prior to the defendant's guiltor innocence being decided.However, incarceration itself eventually became thepenalty, bringing about a distinction between imprisonmentas punishment and pretrial detention or detention until theinfliction of punishment. The process through whichimprisonment developed into the primary mode of stateinflictedpunishment was very much related to the rise ofcapitalism and to the appearance of a new set of ideologicalconditions. These new conditions reflected the rise of thebourgeoisie as the social class whose interests and aspirationsfurthered new scientific, philosophical, cultural, andpopular ideas. It is thus important to grasp the fact that theprison as we know it today did not make its appearance onthe historical stage as the superior form of punishment forall times. It was simply-though we should not underestimatethe complexity of this process-what made most senseat a particular moment in history. We should therefore questionwhether a system that was intimately related to a particularset of historical circumstances that prevailed duringthe eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can lay absoluteclaim on the twenty-first century.It may be important at this point in our examination toacknowledge the radical shift in the social perception of theindividual that appeared in the ideas of that era. With therise of the bourgeoisie, the individual came to be regarded asa bearer of formal rights and liberties. The notion of the individual'sinalienable rights and liberties was eventuallymemorialized in the French and American Revolution."Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite" from the French Revolutionand "We hold these truths to be self-evident: all men are cre-ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 143

ated equal ... /J from the American Revolution were new andradical ideas, even though they were not extended towomen, workers, Africans! and Indians. Before the acceptanceof the sanctity of individual rights, imprisonmentcould not have been understood as punishment. If the individualwas not perceived as possessing inalienable rights andliberties, then the alienation of those rights and liberties byremoval from society to a space tyrannically governed by thestate would not have made sense. Banishment beyond thegeographical limits of the town may have made sense, butnot the alteration of the individual's legal status throughimposition of a prison sentence.Moreover, the prison sentence, which is always computedin terms of time, is related to abstract quantification,evoking the rise of science and wh;;tt is often referred to asthe Age of Reason. We should keep in mind that this wasprecisely the historical period when the value of labor beganto be calculated in terms of time and therefore compensatedin another quantifiable way, by money. The computabilityof state punishment in terms ofmonths,years-resonates with the role of labor-time as the basis forcomputing the value of capitalist commodities. Marxist theoristsof punishment have noted that precisely the historicalperiod during which the commodity form arose is the eraduring which penitentiary sentences emerged as the primaryform of punishment.42Today, the growing social movement contesting thesupremacy of global capital is a movement that directly challengesthe rule of thehuman, animal, and plantpopulations, as well as its natural resources-by corporationsthat are primarily interested in the increased production andcirculation of ever more profitable commodities. This is achallenge to the supremacy of the commodity form, a rising44 I Angela Y. Davisresistance to the contemporary tendency to commodifyevery aspect of planetary existence. The question we mightconsider is whether this new resistance to capitalist globalizationshould also incorporate resistance to the prison.Thus far I have largely used gender-neutral language todescribe the historical development of the prison and itsreformers. But convicts punished by imprisonment in emergentpenitentiary systems were primarily male. This reflectedthe deeply gender-biased structure of legal, political, andeconomic rights. Since women were largely denied publicstatus as rights-bearing individuals, they could not be easilypunished by the deprivation of such rights through imprisonment.43This was especially true of married women, whohad no standing before the law. According to English commonlaw, marriage resulted in a state of "civil death," assymbolized by the wife's assumption of the husband's name.Consequently, she tended to be punished for revoltingagainst her domestic duties rather than for failure in her meagerpublic responsibilities. The relegation of white women todomestic economies prevented them from playing acant role in the emergent commodity realm. This was especiallytrue since wage labor was typically gendered as maleand racialized as white. It is not fortuitous that domestic corporalpunishment for women survived long after these modesof punishment had become obsolete for (white) men. Thepersistence of domestic violence painfully attests to thesehistorical modes of gendered punishment.Some scholars have argued that the word "penitentiary"may have been used first in connection with plans outlinedin England in 1758 to house "penitent prostitutes./I In 1777,John Howard, the leading Protestant proponent of penalreform in England, published The State of the Prisons,44 inwhich he conceptualized imprisonment as an occasion forARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? I 45

eligious self-reflection and self-reform. Between 1787 and1791, the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham publishedhis letters on a prison model he called the panopticon.45Bentham claimed that criminals could only internalize productivelabor habits if they were under constant surveillance.According to his panopticon model, prisoners were tobe housed in single cells on circular tiers, all facing a multilevelguard tower. By means of blinds and a complicated playof light and darkness, the prisoners-who would not seeeach other at all-would be unable to see the warden. Fromhis vantage point, on the other hand, the warden would beable to see all of the prisoners. However-and this was themost significant aspect of Bentham's mammoth panopticon-becauseeach individual prisoner would never be ableto determine where the warden's gaze was focused, eachprisoner would be compelled to act, that is, work, as if hewere being watched at all times.If we combine Howard's emphasis on disciplined selfreflectionwith Bentham's ideas regarding the technology ofinternalization designed to make surveillance and disciplinethe purview of the individual prisoner, we can begin to seehow such a conception of the prison had far-reaching implications.The conditions of possibility for this new form ofpunishment were strongly anchored in a historical era duringwhich the working class needed to be constituted as an armyof self-disciplined individuals capable of performing the requisiteindustrial labor for a developing capitalist system.John Howard's ideas were incorporated in thePenitentiary Act of 1799, which opened the way for themodern prison. While Jeremy Bentham's ideas influencedthe development of the first national English penitentiary,located in Millbank and opened in 1816, the first full-fledgedeffort to create a panopticon prison was in the United States.46 I Angela Y. DavisThe Western State Penitentiary in Pittsburgh, based on arevised architectural model of the panopticon, opened in1826. But the penitentiary had already made its appearancein the United States. Pennsylvania's Walnut Street Jailhoused the first state penitentiary in the United States,when a portion of the jail was converted in 1790 from adetention facility to an institution housing convicts whoseprison sentences simultaneously became punishment andoccasions for penitence and reform.Walnut Street's austere regime-total isolation in singlecells where prisoners lived, ate, worked, read the Bible (if,indeed, they were literate), and supposedly reflected andrepented-came to be known as the Pennsylvania system.This regime would constitute one of that era's two majormodels of imprisonment. Although the other model, developedin Auburn, New York, was viewed as a rival to thePennsylvania system, the philosophical basis of the twomodels did not differ substantively. The Pennsylvaniamodel, which eventually crystallized in the Eastern StatePenitentiary in Cherry Hill-the plans for which wereapproved in 1821-emphasized total isolation, silence, andsolitude, whereas the Auburn model called for solitary cellsbut labor in common. This mode of prison labor, which wascalled congregate, was supposed to unfold in total silence.Prisoners were allowed to be with each other as theyworked, but only under condition of silence. Because of itsmore efficient labor practices, Auburn eventually becamethe dominant model, both for the United States and Europe.Why would eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reformersbecome so invested in creating conditions of punishmentbased on solitary confinement? Today, aside from death,solitary confinement-next to torture, or as a form of torture-isconsidered the worst form of punishment imagina-ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 147

le. Then, however, it was assumed to have an emaneipatoryeffect. The body was placed in conditions of se;relatLOnand solitude in order to allow the soul to flourish. It is notaccidental that most of the reformers of that era were deeplyreligious and therefore saw the architecture andthe penitentiary as emulating the architecture and regimesof monastic life. Still, observers of the new penitentiary saw,early on, the real potential for insanity in solitary confinement.In an often-quoted passage of his American Notes,Charles Dickens prefaced a description of his 1842 visit toEastern Penitentiary with the observation that "the systemhere is rigid, strict, and hopeless solitary confinement. Ibelieve it, in its effects, to be cruel and wrong."In its intention I am well convinced that it is kind,humane, and meant for reformation; but I am persuadedthat those who devised this system of PrisonDiscipline, and those benevolent gentlemen whocarry it into execution, do not know what it is thatthey are doing. I believe that very few men are capableof estimating the immense amount of torture andagony that this dreadful punishment, prolonged foryears, inflicts upon the sufferers . . . I am only themore convinced that there is a depth of terribleendurance in it which none but the sufferers themselvescan fathom, and which no man has a right toinflict upon his fellow-ereature. I hold this slow anddaily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to beimmeasurably worse than any torture of the body . ..because its wounds are not upon the surface, and itextorts few cries that human ears can hear; thereforeI the more denounce it, as a secret punishment whichslumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.4648 I Angela Y. DavisofUnlike other Europeans such as Alexis de Tocquevilleand Gustave de Beaumont, who believed that such punishmentwould result in moral renewal and thus mold convictsinto better citizens,47 Dickens was of the opinion that"[t]hose who have undergone this punishment MUST passinto society again morally unhealthy and diseased. "48 Thisearly critique of the penitentiary and its regime of solitaryconfinement troubles the notion that imprisonment is themost suitable form of punishment for a democratic society.The current constmction and expansion of state and federalsuper-maximum security prisons, whose putative purposeis to address disciplinary problems within the penalsystem, draws upon the historical conception of the penitentiary,then considered the most progressive form of punishment.Today African-Americans and Latinos are vastlyoverrepresented in these supermax prisons and controlunits, the first of which emerged when federal correctionalauthorities to send prisoners housed throughout thesystem whom they deemed to be /I dangerous" to the federalprison in Marion, Illinois. In 1983! the entire prison was"locked down,'! which meant that prisoners were confinedto their cells twenty-three hours a day. This lockdownbecame permanent, thus furnishing the general model forthe control unit and supermax prison.49 Today, there areapproximately super-maximum security federal andstate prisons located in thirty-six states and many moresupermax units in virtually every state in the country.A description of supermaxes in a 1997 Human RightsWatch report sounds chillingly like Dickens's description ofEastern State Penitentiary. What is different, however, isthat all references to individual rehabilitation have disappeared.ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 149

Inmates in super-maximum security facilities areusually held in single cell lock-down, commonlyreferred to as solitary confinement ...[C]ongregateactivities with other prisoners are usually prohibited;other prisoners cannot even be seen from aninmate's cell; communication with other prisonersis prohibited or difficult (consisting, forofshouting from cell to cell); visiting and telephoneprivileges are limited.5oThe new generation of super-maximum security facilitiesalso rely on state-of-the-art technology for monitoring andcontrolling prisoner conduct and movement, utilizing, forexample, video monitors and remote· controlled electronicdoors. 51 "These prisons represent the application of sophisticated,modern technology dedicatedto the task ofsocial control, and they isolate, regulate and surveil moreeffectively than anything that has preceded them."52I have highlighted the similarities between the early U.S.penitentiary-with its aspirations toward individual rehabil·itation-and the repressive supermaxes of our era as areminder of the mutability of history. What was onceregarded as progressive and even revolutionary representstoday the marriage of technological superiority and politicalbackwardness. No one-not even the most ardent defendersof the supermax-would try to argue today that absolutesegregation, including sensory deprivation, is restorative andhealing. The prevailing justification for the supermax is thatthe horrors it creates are the perfect complement for the hor·rHying personalities deemed the worst of the worst by theprison system. In other words, there is no pretense thatrights are respected, there is no concern for the individual,there is no sense that men and women incarcerated in super-50 I Angela Y. Davismaxes deserve anything approaching respect and eomfort.According to a 1999 report issued by the National Instituteof Corrections,Generally, the overall constitutionality of these[supermax] programs remains unclear. As largernumbers of inmates with a greaterof char·acteristics, backgrounds, and behaviors are incar·cerated in these facilities, the likelihood of legalchallenge is increased. 53During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, absolutesolitude and strict regimentation of the prisoner's everyaction were viewed as strategies for transforming habits andethics. That is to say, the idea that imprisonment should bethe main form of punishment reflected a belief in the potentialof white mankind for progress, not only in science andindustry, but at the level of the individual member of societyas well. Prison reformers mirrored Enlightenmentassumptions of progress in every aspect of human-or to bemore precise, white Western-society. In his 1987 studyImagining theFiction and the Architecture ofMind inEngland, John Bender proposesthe very intriguing argument that the emergent literary genreof the novel furthered a discourse of progress and individualtransformation that encouraged attitudes toward punish·ment toThese attitudes, he suggests, heralded theconception and construction of penitentiary prisons duringthe latter part of the eighteenth century as a reform suited tothe capacities of those who were deemed human.Reformers who called for the imposition of penitentiaryarchitecture and regimes on the then existing structure of theprison aimed their critiques at the prisons that were primari·ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? ] 51

ly used for purposes of pretrial detention or as an alternativepunishment for those who were unable to pay fines exactedby the courts. John Howard, the most well known of thesereformers, was what you might today call a prison activist.Beginning in 1773, at the age of forty-seven, he initiated aseries of visits that took him "to every institution for thepoor in Europe . .. [a campaign] which cost him his fortuneand finally his life in a typhus war of the Russian army atCherson in 1791. "55 At the conclusion of his first trip abroad,he successfully ran for the office of sheriff in Bedfordshire. Assheriff he investigated the prisons under his own jurisdictionand later "set out to visit every prison in England and Walesto document the evils he had first observed at Bedford."56Bender argues that the novel helped facilitate these campaignsto transform the old prisons-which were filthy andin disarray, and which thrived on the bribery of the wardens-intowell-ordered rehabilitative penitentiaries. Heshows that novels such as Moll Flanders and RobinsonCrusoe emphasized "the power of confinement to reshapepersonality"57 and popularized some of the ideas that movedreformers to action. As Bender points out, the eighteenthcenturyreformers criticized the old prisons for their chaos,their lack of organization and classification, for the easy circulationof alcohol and prostitution they permitted, and forthe prevalence of contagion and disease.The reformers, primarily Protestant, among whomQuakers were especially dominant, couched their ideas inlarge part in religious frameworks. Though John Howardwas not himself a Quaker-he was an independentProtestant-nevertheless[h]e was drawn to Quaker asceticism and adoptedthe dress " of a plain Friend." His own brand of piety52 I Angela Y. Daviswas strongly reminiscent of the Quaker traditionsof silent prayer, "suffering" introspection, and faithin the illumining power of God's light. Quakers, fortheir part, were bound to be drawn to the idea ofimprisonment as a purgatory, as a forced withdrawalfrom the distractions of the senses into silent andsolitary confrontation with the self. Howard conceivedof a convict's process of reformation in termssimilar to the spiritual awakening of a believer at aQuaker meeting. 58However, according to Michael Ignatieff, Howard's contributionsdid not so much reside in the religiosity of hisreform efforts.The originality of Howard's indictment lies in its"scientific," not in its moral character. Elected aFellow of the Royal Society in 1756 and author ofseveral scientific papers on climatic variations inBedfordshire, Howard was one of the first philanthropiststo attempt a systematic statisticaldescription of a social problem. 59Likewise, Bender's analysis of the relationship betweenthe novel and the penitentiary emphasizes the extent towhich the philosophical underpinnings of the prisonreformer's campaigns echoed the materialism and utilitarianismof the English Enlightenment. The campaign toreform the prisons was a project to impose order, classification,cleanliness, good work habits, and self-consciousness.He argues that people detained within the old prisons werenot severely restricted-they sometimes even enjoyed thefreedom to move in and out of the prison. They were notARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? I 53

compelled to work and, depending on their own resources,could eat and drink as they wished. Even sex was sometimesavailable! as prostitutes were sometimes allowed temporaryentrance into the prisons. Howard and other reformerscalled for the imposition of rigid rules that would "enforcesolitude and penitence, cleanliness and work."60ilThe new penitentiaries," according to Bender, "supplantingboth the old prisons and houses of correction!explicitly reached toward . . . three goals: maintenance oforder within a largely urban labor force, salvation of thesoul, and rationalization of personality."61 He argues thatthis is precisely what was narratively accomplished by thenovel. It ordered and classified social life, it represented individualsas conscious of their surroundings and as self-awareand self-fashioning. Bender thus sees a kinship between twomajor developments of the eighteenth century-the rise ofthe novel in the cultural sphere and the rise of the penitentiaryin the socio-Iegal sphere. If the novel as a cultural formhelped to produce the penitentiary, then prison reformersmust have been influenced by the ideas generated by andthrough the eighteenth-century novel.Literature has continued to play a role in campaignsaround the prison. During the twentieth century, prison writing,in particular! has periodically experienced waves of popularity.The public recognition of prison writing in theUnited States has historically coincided with the influence ofsocial movements calling for prison reform and/or abolition.Robert Burns's I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chainand the 1932 Hollywood film upon which it wasbased, played a central role in the campaign to abolish thechain gang. During the 1970s, which were marked by intenseorganizing within, outside, and across prison walls, numerousworks authored by prisoners followed the 1970 publica-54 I Angela Y. Davistion of George Jackson's Soledad Brother63 and the anthologyI coedited with Bettina Aptheker, If They Come in theMorning.64 While many prison writers during that era haddiscovered the emancipatory potential of writing on theirown, relying either on the education they had received priorto their imprisonment or on their tenacious efforts at selfeducation,others pursued their writing as a direct result ofthe expansion of prison educational programs during that era.Mumia Abu-Jamal, who has challenged the contemporarydismantling of prison education programs, asks in Live fromDeath Row,What societal interest is served by prisoners whoremain illiterate? What social benefit is there inignorance? How are people corrected while imprisonedif their education is outlawed? Who profits(other than the prison establishment itself) fromstupid prisoners?65A practicing journalist before his arrest in 1982 on chargesof killing Philadelphia policeman Daniel Faulkner, Abu­Jamal has regularly produced articles on capital punishment,focusing especially on its racial and class disproportions. Hisideas have helped to link critiques of the death penalty withthe more general challenges to the expanding U.S. prison systemand are particularly helpful to activists who seek to associatedeath penalty abolitionism with prison abolitionism.His prison writings have been published in both popular andscholarly journals (such as The Nation and Yale Law Tournai)as well as in three collections, Live from Death Row, DeathBlossoms,66 and All Things Censored. 67Abu-Jamal and many other prison writers have stronglycriticized the prohibition of Pell Grants for prisoners, whichARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? I 55

was enacted in the 1994 crime bill,68 as indicative of thecontemporary pattern of dismantling educational programsbehind bars. As creative writing courses for prisoners weredefunded, virtually every literary journal publishing prisoners'writing eventually eollapsed. Of the scores of magazinesand newspapers produced behind walls, only the Angolite atLouisiana's Angola Prison and Prison Legal News atWashington State Prison remain. What this means is thatprecisely at a time of consolidating a significant writing culturebehind bars, repressive strategies are being deployed todissuade prisoners from educating themselves.If the publication of Malcolm X's autobiography marksa pivotal moment in the development of prison literatureand a moment of vast promise for prisoners who try tomake education a major dimension of their time behindbars,69 contemporary prison practices are systematicallydashing those hopes. In the 1950s, Malcolm's prison educationwas a dramatic example of prisoners' ability to turntheir incarceration into a transformative experience. Withno available means of organizing his quest for knowledge,he proceeded to read a dictionary, copying each word in hisown hand. By the time he could immerse himself in reading,he noted, "months passed without my even thinkingabout being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never hadbeen so truly free in my life."7o Then, aceording toMalcolm, prisoners who demonstrated an unusual interestin reading were assumed to have embarked upon a journeyof self-rehabilitation and were frequently allowed specialprivileges-such as checking out more than the maximumnumber of books. Even so, in order to pursue this self-education,Malcolm had to work against the prison regime-heoften read on his cell floor, long after lights-out, by theglow of the corridor light, talting care to return to bed each56 I Angela Y. Davishour for the two minutes during which the guard marchedpast his cell.The contemporary disestablishment of writing and otherprison educational programs is indicative of the official disregardtoday for rehabilitative strategies, particularly thosethat encourage individual prisoners to acquire autonomy ofthe mind. The documentary film The Last Graduationdescribes the role prisoners played in establishing a four-yearcollege program at New York's Greenhaven Prison and,twenty-two years later, the official decision to dismantle it.According to Eddie Ellis, who spent twenty-five years inprison and is currently a well-known leader of the antiprisonmovement, "As a result of Attica, college programs cameinto the prisons. II 71In the aftermath of the 1971 prisoner rebellion at Atticaand the government-sponsored massacre, public opinionbegan to favor prison reform. Forty-three Attica prisonersand eleven guards and civilians were killed by the NationalGuard, who had been ordered to retake the prison byGovernor Nelson Rockefeller. The leaders of the prisonrebellion had been very specific about their demands. Intheir "practical demands" they expressed concerns aboutdiet, improvement in the quality of guards, more realisticrehabilitation programs, and better education programs.They also wanted religious freedom, freedom to engage inpolitical activity, and an end to censorship-all of whichthey saw as indispensable to their educational needs. AsEddie Ellis observes in The Last Graduation,Prisoners very early recognized the fact that theyneeded to be better educated, that the more educationthey had, the better they would be able to dealwith themselves and their problems, the problemsARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? I 57

of the prisons and the problems of the communitiesfrom which most of them came.Lateef Islam, another former prisoner featured in thisdocumentary, said, "We held classes before thecame. We taught each other, and sometimes under penaltyof a beat-up."After the Attica Rebellion, more than five hundred prisonerswere transferred to Greenhaven, including some of theleaders who continued to press for educational programs. Asa direct result of their demands, Marist College, a New Yorkstate college near Greenhaven, began to offer college-levelcourses in 1973 and eventually established the infrastructurefor an on-site four-year college program. The programthrived for twenty-two years. Some of the many prisonerswho earned their degrees at Greenhaven pursued postgraduatestudies after their release. As the documentary powerfullydemonstrates, the program produced dedicated menwho left prison and offered their newly acquired knowledgeand skills to their communities on the outside.In 1994, consistent with the general pattern of creatingmore prisons and more repression within all prisons,Congress took up the question of withdrawing college fundingfor inmates. The congressional debate concluded with adecision to add an amendment to the 1994 crime bill thateliminated all Pell Grants for prisoners, thus effectivelydefunding all higher educational programs. After twentytwoyears, Marist College was compelled to terminate itsprogram at Greenhaven Prison. Thus, the documentaryrevolves around the very last graduation ceremony on JulyIS, 1995, and the poignant process of removing the booksthat, in many ways, symbolized the possibilities of freedom.Or, as one of the Marist professors said, "They see books as58 I Angela Y. Davisfull of gold." The prisoner who for many years had served asa clerk for the college sadly reflected, as books were beingmoved, that there was nothing left to do in prison-exceptperhaps bodybuilding. "But/' he asked, "what's the use ofbuilding your body if you can't build your mind?" Ironically,not long after educational programs were disestablished,weights and bodybuilding equipment were also removedfrom most U.S. prisons.ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? I 59

4How Gend er Stru ctures thePr ison Syste m"I have been told that I will never leave prison if I continueto fight the system. My answer is that one must bealive in order to leave prison, and our current standard ofmedical care is tantamount to a death sentence.Therefore, I have no choice but to continue ... Conditionswithin the institution continually reinvoke memories ofviolence and oppression, often with devastating results.Unlike other incarcerated women who have come forwardto reveal their impressions of prison, I do not feel 'safer'here because 'the abuse has stopped.' It has not stopped. Ithas shifted shape and paced itself differently, but it is asinsidious and pervasive in prison as ever it was in theworld I know outside these walls. What has ceased is myignorance of the facts concerning abuse-and my willingnessto tolerate it in silence."-Marcia Bunny72Over the last five years, the prison system has received farmore attention by the media than at any time since the periodfollowing the 1971 Attica Rebellion. However, with a fewimportant exceptions, women have been left out of the publicdiscussions about the expansion of the u.s. prison system.I am not suggesting that simply bringing women intothe existing conversations on jails and prisons will deepen60our analysis of state punishment and further the project ofprison abolition. Addressing issues that are specific towomen's prisons is of vital importance, but it is equallyimportant to shift the way we think about the prison systemas a whole. Certainly women's prison practices are gendered,but so, too, are men's prison practices. To assume that men'sinstitutions constitute the norm and women's institutionsare marginal is, in a sense, to participate in the very normalizationof prisons that an abolitionist approach seeks tocontest. Thus, the title of this chapter is not "Women andthe Prison System," but rather "How Gender Structures thePrison System." Moreover, scholars and activists who areinvolved in feminist projects should not consider the structureof state punishment as marginal to their work. Forwardlookingresearch and organizing strategies should recognizethat the deeply gendered character of punishment bothreflects and further entrenches the gendered structure of thelarger society.Women prisoners have produced a small but impressivebody of literature that has illuminated significant aspects ofthe organization of punishment that would have otherwiseremained unacknowledged. Assata Shakur's memoirs,73 forexample, reveal the dangerous intersections of racism, maledomination, and state strategies of political repression. In1977 she was convicted on charges of murder and assault inconnection with a 1973 incident that left one New Jerseystate trooper dead and another wounded. She and her companion,Zayd Shakur, who was killed during the shootout,were the targets of what we now name racial profiling andwere stopped by state troopers under the pretext of a brokentaillight. At the time Assata Shakur, known then as JoanneChesimard, was underground and had been anointed by thepolice and the media as the "Soul of the Black LiberationARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? I 61

Army." By her 1977 conviction, she either had been acquittedor had charges dismissed in six other cases-upon the basis ofwhich she had been declared a fugitive in the first place. Herattorney, Lennox Hinds, has pointed out that since it wasproven that Assata Shakur did not handle the gun with whichthe state troopers were shot, her mere presence in the automobile,against the backdrop of the media demonization towhich she was subjected, constituted the basis of her conviction.In the foreword to Shakur's autobiography Hinds writes:In the history of New Jersey, no woman pretrialdetainee or prisoner has ever been treated as shewas, continuously confined in a men's prison,under twenty-four-hour surveillance of her mostintimate functions, without intellectual sustenance,adequate medical attention, and exercise,and without the company of other women for allthe years she was in their custodyJ4There is no doubt that Assata Shakur's status as a blackpolitical prisoner accused of killing a state trooper causedher to be singled out by the authorities for unusually crueltreatment. However, her own account emphasizes theextent to which her individual experiences reflected those ofother imprisoned women, especially black and Puerto Ricanwomen. Her description of the strip search, which focuseson the internal examination of body cavities, is especiallyrevealing:Joan Bird and Afeni Shakur [members of the BlackPanther Party] had told me about it after they hadbeen bailed out in the Panther 21 trial. When theyhad told me, I was horrified.62 I Angela Y. Davis"You mean they really put their hands insideyou, to search you?" I had asked."Uh-huh," they answered. Every woman whohas ever been on the rock, or in the old house ofdetention, can tell you about it. The women call it"getting the or, more vulgarly, "getting Hnger-fucked.""What happens if you refuse?" I had asked Afeni."They lock you in the hole and they don't let youout until you consent to be searched internally."I thought about refusing, but I sure as hell didn'twant to be in the hole. I had had enough of solitary.The "internal search" was as humiliating and disgustingas it sounded. You sit on the edge of thistable and the nurse holds your legs open and sticksa finger in your vagina and moves it around. She hasa plastic glove on. Some of them try to put one fingerin your and another one up your rectumat the same time.75I have quoted this passage so extensively because itexposes an everyday routine in women's prisons that vergeson sexual assault as much as it is taken for granted. Havingbeen imprisoned in the Women's House of Detention towhich Joan Bird and Afeni Shakur refer, I can personallyaffirm the veracity of their claims. Over thirty years afterBird and Afeni Shakur were released and after I myself spentseveral months in the Women's House of Detention, thisissue of the strip search is still very much on the front burnerof women's prison activism. In 2001 Sisters Inside, anAustralian support organization for women prisoners,launched a national campaign against the strip search, theslogan of which was "Stop State Sexual Assault-" AssataARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 163

Shakur's autobiography provides an abundance of insightsabout the gendering of state punishment and reveals theextent to which women's prisons have held on to oppressivepatriarchal practices that are considered obsolete in the "freeworld./I She spent six years in several jails and prisons beforeescaping in 1979 and receiving political asylum by theRepublic of Cuba in 1984, where she lives today.Elizabeth Gurley Flynn wrote an earlier account of life ina women1s prison, The Alderson Story: My as a PoliticalPrisoner. 76 At the height of the McCarthy era, Flyml, a laboractivist and Communist leader, was convicted under theSmith Act and served two years in Alderson FederalReformatory for Women from 1955 to 1957. Following thedominant model for women's prisons during that period,Alderson's regimes were based on the assumption that"criminal/l women could be rehabilitated by assimilatingcorrect womanly behaviors-that is, by becoming experts indomesticity-especially cooking, cleaning, and sewing. Ofcourse, training designed to produce better wives and mothersamong middle-class white women effectively producedskilled domestic servants among black and poor women.Flynn's book provides vivid descriptions of these everydayregimes. Her autobiography is located in a tradition of prisonwriting by political prisoners that also includes women ofthis era. Contemporary writings by women political prisonerstoday include poems and short stories by Ericka Hugginsand Susan Rosenberg, analyses of the prison industrial complexby Linda Evans, and curricula for HIV/AIDS educationin women's prisons by Kathy Boudin and the members of theBedford Hills ACE collective}7Despite the availability of perceptive portrayals of life inwomen's prisons, it has been extremely difficult to persuadethe public-and even, on occasion, to persuade prison64 I Angela Y. Davisactivists who are primarily concerned with the plight ofmale prisoners-of the centrality of gender to an understandingof state punishment. Although men constitute thevast majority of prisoners in the world, important aspects ofthe operation of state punishment are missed if it is assumedthat women are marginal and thus undeserving of attention.The most frequent justification for the inattention towomen prisoners and to the particular issues surroundingwomen's imprisonment is the relatively small proportion ofwomen among incarcerated populations throughout theworld. In most countries, the percentage of women amongprison populations hovers around fiveHowever,the economic and political shifts of the 1980s-the globalizationof economic markets, the deindustrialization of theU.S. economy, the dismantling of such social service programsas Aid to Families of Dependent Children, and, ofcourse, the prison construction boom-produced a significantacceleration in the rate of women's imprisonment bothinside and outside the United States. In fact, women remaintoday the fastest-growing sector of the U.S. prison population.This recent rise in the rate of women's imprisonmentpoints directly to the economic context that produced theprison industrial complex and that has had a devastatingimpact on men and women alike.It is from this perspective of the contemporary expansionof prisons, both in the United States and throughout theworld, that we should examine some of the historical andideological aspects of state punishment imposed on women.Since the end of the eighteenth century, when, as we haveseen, imprisonment began to emerge as the dominant formof punishment, convicted women have been represented asessentially different from their male counterparts. It is truethat men who commit the kinds of transgressions that areARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 165

egarded as punishable by the state are labeled as socialdeviants. Nevertheless, masculine criminality has alwaysbeen deemed more "normal" than feminine criminality.There has always been a tendency to regard those womenwho have been publicly punished by the state for their misbehaviorsas significantly more aberrant and far more threateningto society than their numerous male counterparts.In seeking to understand this gendered difference in theperception of prisoners, it should be kept in mind that as theprison emerged and evolved as the major form of public punishment,women continued to be routinely subjected toforms of punishment that have not been acknowledged assuch. For example, women have been incarcerated in psychiatricinstitutions in greater proportions than in prisons.79Studies indicating that women have been even more likelyto end up in mental facilities than men suggest that whilejails and prisons have been dominant institutions for thecontrol of men, mental institutions have served a similarpurpose for women. That dcviant men have been constructedas criminal, while deviant women have been constructedas insane. Regimes that reflect this asslUnptioncontinue to inform the women's prison. Psychiatric drugscontinue to be distributed far more extensively to imprisonedwomen than to their male counterparts. A NativeAmerican woman incarcerated in the Women's CorrectionalCenter in Montana related herwith psychotropicdrugs to sociologist Luana Ross:Haldol is a drug theywho can't copewith lockup. It makes you feel dead, paralyzed. Andthen I started getting side effects from Haldol. Iwanted to fight anybody, any of the officers. I wasscreaming at them and telling them to get out of66 I Angela Y. Davismy face, so the doctor said, "We can't have that."And, they put me on Tranxene. I don't take pills; Inever had trouble sleeping until I got here. Now I'msupposed to see [the cOlUlselor] again because of mydreams. If you got a problem, they're not going totake care of it. They're going to put you on drugs sothey can control you.80Prior to the emergence of the penitentiary and thus of thenotion of punishment as "doing time, " the use of confinementto control beggars, thieves, and the insane did not necessarilydistinguish among these categories of deviancy. Atthis phase in the history of punishment-prior to theAmerican and French Revolutions-the classificationprocess through which criminality is differentiated frompoverty and mental illness had not yet developed. As the discourseon criminality and the corresponding institutions tocontrol it distinguished the IIcriminal" from the "insane/'the gendered distinction took hold and continued to structurepenal policies. Gendered as female, this category ofinsanity was highly sexualized. When we consider theimpact of class and racewe can say that for white andaffluent women, this equalization tends to serve as evidencefor emotional and mentalwomen, it has pointed to criminality.but for black and poorIt should also be kept in mind that until the abolition ofslavery, the vast majority of black women were subject toregimes of punishment that differed significantly from thoseexperienced by white women. As slaves, they were directlyand often brutally disciplined for conduct considered perfectlynormal in a context of freedom. Slave punishmentwas visibly gendered-special penalties, were, for example,reserved for pregnant women unable to reach the quotas thatARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? I 67

determined how long and how fast they should work. In theslave narrative of Moses Grandy, an especially brutal form ofwhipping is described in which the woman was required tolie on the ground with her stomach positioned in a hole,whose purpose was to safeguard the fetus (conceived asfuture slave labor). If we expand our definition of punishmentunder slavery, we can say that the coerced sexual relationsbetween slave and master constituted a penalty exactedon women, if only for the sale reason that they wereslaves. In other words, the deviance of the slave master wastransferred to the slave woman, whom he victimized.Likewise, sexual abuse by prison guards is translated intohypersexuality of women prisoners. The notion that female11 deviance" always has a sexual dimension persists in thecontemporary era, and this intersection of criminality andsexuality continues to be racialized. Thus, white womenlabeled as "criminals" are more closely associated withblackness than their "normal" counterparts.Prior to the emergence of the prison as the major form ofpublic punishment, it was taken for granted that violators ofthe law would be subjected to corporal and frequently capitalpenalties. What is not generally recognized is the connectionbetween state-inflicted corporal punishment and the physicalassaults on women in domestic spaces. This form of bodilydiscipline has continued to be routinely meted out towomen in the context of intimate relationships, but it israrely understood to be related to state punishment.Quaker reformers in the United States-especially thePhiladelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of PublicPrisons, founded in 1787-played a pivotal role in campaignsto substitute imprisonment for corporal punishment.Following in the tradition established by Elizabeth Fry inEngland, Quakers were also responsible for extended crusades68 I Angela Y. Davisto institute separate prisons for women. Given the practice ofincarcerating criminalized women in men's prisons, thedemand for separate women's prisons was viewed as quiteradical during this period. Fry formulated principles governprisonreform for women in her 1827 work, Observationsin Visiting, Superintendence and Government of FemalePrisoners, which were taken up in the United States bywomen such as Josephine Shaw Lowell and Abby HopperGibbons. In the 1870s, Lowell and Gibbons helped to lead thecampaign in New York for separate prisons for women.Prevailing attitudes toward women convicts differedfrom those toward men convicts, who were assumed to haveforfeited rights and liberties that womcn generally could notclaim even in the "free world./I Although some women werehoused in penitentiaries, the institution itself was genderedas male, for by and large no particular arrangements weremade to accommodate sentenced women.The women who served in penal institutionsbetween 1820 and 1870 were not subject to theprison reform experienced by male inmates.Officials employed isolation, silence, and hard laborto rehabilitate male prisoners. The lack of accommodationsfor female inmates made isolation andsilence impossible for them and productive laborwas not considered an important part of their routine.The neglect of female prisoners, however, wasrarely benevolent. Rather, a pattern of overcrowding,harsh treatment, and sexual abuse recurredthroughout prison histories. S1Male punishment was linked ideologically to penitenceand reform. The very forfeiture of rights and liberties impliedARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? I 69

that ''lith self-reflection, religious study, and work, male convictscould achieve redemption and could recover theserights and liberties. However,since women were notacknowledged as securely in possession of these rights, theywere not eligible to participate in this process of redemption.According to dominant views, women convicts wereirrevocably fallen women, with no possibility of salvation. Ifmale criminals were considered to be public individuals whohad simply violated the social contract, female criminalswere seen as having transgressed fundamental moral principlesof womanhood. Thewho, follOWing ElizabethFry, argued that women were capable of redemption, did notreally contest these ideological assumptions about women/splace. In other words, they did not question the very notionof "fallen women." Rather, they simply opposed the idea that"fallen women" could not be saved. They could be saved/ thereformers contended, and toward that end they advocatedseparate penal facilities and a specifically female approach topunishment. Their approach called for architectural modelsthat replaced cells with cottages and "rooms" in a way thatwas supposed to infuse domesticity into prison life. Thismodel facilitated a regime devised to reintegrate criminalizedwomen into the domestic life of wife and mother. They didnot/ however, acknowledge the class and race underpinningsof this regime. Training that was, on the surface, designed toproduce good wives and mothers in effect steered poorwomen (and especially black women) into "free worldlf jobsin domestic service. Instead of stay-at-home skilled wivesand mothers/ many women prisoners, uponwouldbecome maids, cooks, and washerwomen for more affluentwomen. A female custodial staff, the reformers also argued,would minimize thesexual temptations, which theybelieved were often at the root of female criminality.70 1 Angela Y. DavisWhen the reform movement calling for separate prisonsfor women emerged in England and the United States duringthe nineteenth century, Elizabeth Fry, Josephine Shaw, andother advocates argued against the established idea thatcriminal women were beyond the reach of moral rehabilitation.Like male conVicts, who presumably could be "corrected"by rigorous prison regimes, female convicts, theysuggested/ could also be molded into moral beings by differentlygendered imprisonment regimes. Architecturalchanges, domestic regimes, and an all-female custodial staffwere implemented in the reformatory program proposed byreformers,82 and eventually women's prisons became asstrongly anchored to the social landscape as men's prisons,but even more invisible. Their greater invisibility was asmuch a reflection of the way women / s domestic dutiesunder patriarchy were assumed to be normal, natural/ andeonsequently invisible as it was of the relatively small numbersof women incarcerated in these new institutions.TWenty-one years after the first English reformatory forwomen was established in London in 1853, the first U.S.reformatory for women was opened in Indiana. The aimwas totrain the prisoners in the "important" female roleof domesticity. Thus an important role of thereform movement in women's prisons was toencourage and ingrain "appropriate" gender roles,such as vocational training in cooking, sewing andcleaning. To accommodate these goals, the reformatorycottages were usually designed withkitchens, living rooms, and even some nurseries forprisoners with infants. 83ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 171

However, this feminized public punishment did not affectall women in the same way. When black and NativeAmerican women were imprisoned in reformatories, theyoften were segregated from white women. Moreover, theytended to be disproportionately sentenced to men's prisons.In the southern states in the aftermath of the Civil War,black women endured the cruelties of the convict lease systemunmitigated by the feminization of punishmentj neithertheir sentences nor the labor they were compelled to do werelessened by virtue of their gender. As the U.S. prison systemevolved during the twentieth century, feminized modes ofpunishment-the cottage system J domestic training, and soon-were designed ideologically to reform white women, relegatingwomen of color in large part to realms of public punishmentthat made no pretense of offering them femininity.MoreoverJ as Lucia Zedner has pointed outJ sentencingpractices for women within the reformatory system oftenrequired women of all racial backgrounds to do more timethan men for similar offenses. "This differential was justifiedon the basis that women were sent to reformatories notto be punished in proportion to the seriousness of theiroffense but to be reformed and retrained, a process that, itwas argued, required time."84 At the same time, Zednerpoints out, this tendency to send women to prison for longerterms than men was accelerated by the eugenics movement,"which sought to have'genetically inferior' womenremoved from social circulation for as many of their childbearingyears as possible." BSAt the beginning of the twenty-first century, women'sprisons have begun to look more like their male counterpartsJparticularly facilities constructed in the contemporaryera of the prison industrial complex. As corporate involvementin punishment expands in ways that would have been72 1 Angela Y. Davisunimaginable just two decades ago, the prison J s presumedgoal of rehabilitation has been thoroughly displaced by incapacitationas the major objective of imprisonment. As I havealready pointed out, now that the population of U.S. prisonsand jails has surpassed two million people, the rate ofincrease in the numbers of women prisoners has exceededthat of men. As criminologist Elliot Currie has pointed out,For most of the period after World War II, thefemale incarceration rate hovered at around 8 per100,OOOi it did not reach double digits until 1977.Today it is 51 per 100,000 . . . At the current ratesofthere will be more women in Americanprisons in the year 2010 than there were inmates ofboth sexes in 1970. When we combine the effects ofrace and gender, the nature of these shifts in theprison population is even clearer. The prison incarcerationrate for black women today exceeds thatfor white men as recently as 1980.86Luana Ross's study of Native American women incarceratedin the Women's Correctional Center in Montana arguesthat "prisons, as employed by the Euro-American system,operate to keep Native Americans in a colonial situation.1I87She points out that Native people are vastly overrepresentedin the country's federal and state prisons. In Montana, whereshe did her research, they constitute 6 percent of the generalpopulation, but 17.3 percent of the imprisoned population.Native women are even more disproportionately presentin Montana's prison system. constitute 25 percentof all women imprisoned by the state.B8Thirty years ago, around the time of the Attica uprisingand the murder of George Jackson at San Quentin J radicalARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 173

opposition to the prison system identified it as a principalsite of state violence and repression. In part as a reaction tothe invisibility of women prisoners in this movement and inpart as a consequence of the rising women's liberationmovement, specific campaigns developed in defense of therights of women prisoners. Many of these campaigns putforth-and continue to advance-radical critiques of staterepression and violence. Within the correctional community,however, feminism has been influenced largely by liberalconstructions of gender equality.In contrast to the nineteenth-century reform movement,which was grounded in an ideology of gender difference,late-twentieth-century "reforms" have relied on a "separatebut equal" model. This "separate but equal" approach oftenhas been applied uncritically, ironically resulting indemands for more repressive conditions in order to renderwomen's facilities " equal" to men's. A clear example of thiscan be discovered in a memoir, The Warden Wore Pink,written by a former warden of Huron Valley Women's Prisonin Michigan. During the 1980s, the author, Tekla Miller,advocated a change in policies within the Michigan correctionalsystem that would result in women prisoners beingtreated the same as men prisoners. With no trace of irony,she characterizes as "feminist" her own fight for "genderequality" between male and female prisoners and for equalitybetween male and female institutions of incarceration.One of these campaigns focuses on the unequal allocation ofweapons, which she sought to remedy:Arsenals in men's prisons are large rooms withshelves of shotguns, rifles, hand guns, ammunition,gas canisters, and riot equipment . . . Huron ValleyWomen's arsenal was a small, five feet by two feet74 1 Angela Y. Daviscloset that held two rifles, eight shotguns, two bullhorns,five handguns, four gas canisters, and twentysets of restraints.89It does not occur to her that a more productive version offeminism would also question the organization of state punishmentfor men as well and, in my opinion, would seriouslyconsider the proposition that the institution as a wholegenderedas it is-calls for the kind of critique that mightlead us to consider its abolition.Miller also describes the case of an attempted escape by awoman prisoner. The prisoner climbed over the razor ribbonbut was captured after she jumped to the ground on theother side. This escape attempt occasioned a debate aboutthe disparate treatment of men and women escapees.Miller's position was that guards should be instructed toshoot at women just as they were instructed to shoot atmen. She argued that parity for women and men prisonersshould consist in their equal right to be fired upon by guards.The outcome of the debate, Miller observed, was thatescaping women prisoners in medium or higher[security] prisons are treated the same way as men.A warning shot is fired. If the prisoner fails to haltand is over the fence, an officer is allowed to shootto injure. If the officer's life is in danger, the officercan shoot to kill.9oParadoxically, demands for parity with men's prisons,instead of creating greater educational, vocational, andhealth opportunities for women prisoners, often have led tomore repressive conditions for women. This is not only aconsequence of deploying liberal-that is, formalistic-ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 175

notions of equality, but of, more dangerous, allowing maleprisons to function as the punishment norm. Miller pointsout that she attempted to prevent a female prisoner, whomshe characterizes as a "murderer" serving a long term, fromparticipating in graduation ceremonies at the University ofMichigan because male murderers were not given such privileges.(Of course, she does not indicate the nature of thewoman's murder charges-whether, for instance, she wasconvicted of killing an abusive partner, as is the case for asubstantial number of women convicted of murder. )Although Miller did not succeed in preventing the inmatefrom participating in the commencement, in addition to hercap and gown, the prisoner was made to wear leg chains andhandcuffs during the ceremony.91 This is indeed a bizarreexample of feminist demands for equality within the prisonsystem.A widely publicized example of the use of repressive paraphernaliahistorically associated with the treatment of maleprisoners to create "equality" for female prisoners was the1996 decision by Alabama's prison commissioner to establishwomen's chain gangs. After Alabama became the firststate to reinstitute chain gangs in 1995, then StateCorrections Commissioner Ron Jones announced the followingyear that women would be shackled while they cutgrass, picked up trash, or worked a vegetable garden at JuliaTutwiler State Prison for Women. This attempt to institutechain gangs for women was in part a response to lawsuits bymale prisoners, who charged that male chain gains discriminatedagainst men by virtue of their gender.92 However,immediately after Jones's announcement, Governor FobJames, who obviously was pressured to prevent Alabamafrom acquiring the dubious distinction of being the onlyU.S. state to have equal- opportunity chain gangs, fired him.76 I Angela Y. DavisShortly after Alabama's embarrassing flirtation with thepossibility of chain gangs for women, Sheriff Joe Arpaio ofMaricopo County, Arizona-represented in the media as"the toughest sheriff in America"-held a press conferenceto announce that because he was "an equal opportunityincarcerator, " he was establishing the country's first femalechain gang.93 When the plan was implemented, newspapersthroughout the country carried a photograph of chainedwomen cleaning Phoenix's streets. Even though this mayhave been a publicity stunt designed to bolster the fame ofSheriff Arpaio, the fact that this women's chain gangemerged against the backdrop of a generalized increase inthe repression inflicted on women prisoners is certainlycause for alarm. Women's prisons throughout the countryincreasingly include sections known as security housingunits. The regimes of solitary confinement and sensory deprivationin the security housing unit (SHU) in these sectionswithin women's prisons are smaller versions of the rapidlyproliferating super-maximum security prisons. Since thepopulation of women in prison now consists of a majority ofwomen of color, the historical resonances of slavery, colonization,and genocide should not be missed in these imagesof women in chains and shackles.As the level of repression in women's prisons increases,and, paradoxically, as the influence of domestic prisonregimes recedes, sexual abuse-which, like domestic violence,is yet another dimension of the privatized punishmentof women-has become an institutionalized componentof punishment behind prison walls. Although guardon-prisonersexual abuse is not sanctioned as such, the widespreadleniency with which offending officers are treatedsuggests that for women, prison is a space in which thethreat of sexualized violence that looms in the larger socie-ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? I 77

ty is effectively sanctioned as a routine aspect of the landscapeof punishment behind prison walls.According to a 1996 Human Rights Watch report on thesexual abuse of women in U.S. prisons:Our findings indicate that being a woman prisonerin U.S. state prisons can be a terrifying experience.If you are sexually abused, you cannot escape fromyour abuser. Grievance or investigatory procedures,where they exist, are often ineffcctual, and correctionalemployees continue to engage in abusebecause they believe they will rarely be heldaccountable, administratively or criminally. Fewpeople outside the prison walls know what is goingon or care if they do know. Fewer still do anythingto address the problem.94The following excerpt from the summary of this report,entitled All Too Familiar: Sexual Abuse of Women in U. S.State Prisons, reveals the extent to which women's prisonenvironments are violently sexualized, thus recapitulatingthe familiar violence that characterizes many women's privatelives:We found that male correctional employees havevaginally, anally, and orally raped female prisonersand sexually assaulted and abused them. We foundthat in the course of committing such gross misconduct,male officers have not only used actual orthreatened physical force, but have also used theirnear total authority to provide or deny goods andprivileges to female prisoners to compel them tohave sex or, in other cases, to reward them for hav-78 I Angela Y. Davisdone so. In other cases, male officers have violatedtheir most basic professional duty andengaged in sexual contact with female prisonersabsent the use of threat of force or any materialexchange. In addition to engaging in sexual relationswith prisoners, male officers have usedmandatory pat-frisks or room searches to gropewomen's breasts, buttocks, and vaginal areas and toview them inappropriately while in a state ofundress in the housing or bathroom areas. Male correctionalofficers and staff have also engaged in regularverbal degradation and harassment of femaleprisoners, thus contributing to a custodial environmentin the state prisons for women that is oftenhighly sexualized and excessively hostile.95The violent sexualization of prison life within women'sinstitutions raises a number of issues that may help usdevelop further our critique of the prison system. Ideologiesof sexuality-and particularly the intersection of race andsexuality-have had a profound effect on the representationsof and treatment received by women of color both withinand outside prison. Of course, black and Latino men experiencea perilous continuity in the way they are treated inschool, where they are disciplined as potential criminals; inthe streets, where they are subjected to racial profiling bythe police; and in prison, where they are warehoused anddeprived of virtually all of their rights. For women, the continuityof treatment from the free world to the universe ofthe prison is even more complicated, since they also confrontforms of violence in prison that they have confrontedin their homes and intimate relationships.The criminalization of black and Latina women includesARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? I 79

persisting images of hypersexuality that serve to justify sexualassaults against them bath in and outside of prison. Suchimages were vividly rendered in a Nightline television seriesfilmed in November 1999 an location at California's ValleyState Prison for Women. Many of the women interviewed byTed Kappel complained that they received frequent andunnecessary pelvic examinations, including when they visitedthe doctor with such routine illnesses as colds. In anattempt to justify these examinations, the chief medical officerexplained that women prisoners had rare opportunitiesfor "male contact," and that they therefore welcomed thesesuperfluous gynecological exan1S. Although this officer waseventually removed from his position as a result of thesecomments, his reassignment did little to alter the pervasivevulnerability of imprisoned women to sexual abuse.Studies an female prisons throughout the world indicatethat sexual abuse is an abiding, though unacknowledged,form of punishment to which women, who have the misfortuneof being sent to prison, are subjected. This is oneaspect of life in prison that women can expect toencounter, either directly or indirectly, regardless of thewritten policies that govern the institution. In June 1998,Radhika Coomaraswamy, the United Nations Sp ecialRapporteur for Violence Against Women, visited federaland state prisons as well as Immigration andNaturalization detention facilities in New York,Connecticut, New Jersey, Minnesota, Georgia, andCalifornia. She was refused permission to visit women'sprisons in Michigan, where serious allegations of sexualahuse were pending. In the aftermath of her visits,Coomaraswamy announced that II sexual misconduct byprison staff is widespread in American women's prisons."96This clandestine institutionalization of sexual abuse vio-80 I Angela Y. Davislates one of the guiding principles of the United Nations'Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, aUN instrument first adopted in 1955 and used as a guidelineby many governments to achieve what is known as "goodprison practice." However, the U.S. government has donelittle to publicize these rules and it is probably the case thatmast correctional personnel have never heard of these UNstandards. According to the Standard Minimum Rules,Imprisonment and other measures which result incutting off an offender from the outside world areafflictive by the very fact of taking from the personthe right of self-determination hy depriving him ofhis liberty. Therefore the prison system shall not,except as incidental to justifiable segregation or themaintenance of discipline, aggravate the sufferinginherent in such a situation?7Sexual abuse is surreptitiously incorporated into one ofthe mast habitual aspects of women's imprisonment, thestrip search. As activists and prisoners themselves havepainted out, the state itself is directly implicated in this routinizationof sexual abuse, bath in permitting such conditionsthat render women vulnerable to explicit sexual coercioncarried aut by guards and other prison staff and byincorporating into routine policy such practices as the stripsearch and body cavity search.Australian lawyer/activist Amanda George has pointedout that[t]he acknowledgement that sexual assault doesoccur in institutions for people with intellectualdisabilities, prisons, psychiatric hospitals, youthARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? \81

training centres and police stations, usually centresaround the criminal acts of rape and sexual assaultby individuals employed in those institutions.These offences, though they are rarely reported, areclearly understood as being "crimes" for which theindividual and not the state is responsible. At thesame time as the state deplores "unlawful" sexualassaults by its employees, it actually uses sexualassault as a means of control.In Victoria, prison and police officers are vestedwith the power and responsibility to do acts which,if done outside of work hours, would be erimes ofsexual assault. If a person does not Ii consent" tobeing stripped naked by these officers, force canlawfully be used to do it . .. These legal strip searchesare, in the author's view, sexual assaults withinthe definition of indecent assault in the Crimes Act1958 (Vic) as amended in section 39.98At a November 2001 conference on women in prison heldby the Brisbane-based organization Sisters Inside, AmandaGeorge described an action performed before a national gatheringof correctional personnel working in women's prisons.Several women seized control of the stage and, some playingguards, others playing the roles of prisoners, dramatized astrip search. According to George, the gathering was sorepulsed by this enactment of a practice that occurs routinelyin women's prisons everywhere that many of the participantsfelt compelled to disassociate themselves fromsuch practices, insisting that this was not what they did.Some of the guards, George said, simply cried upon watchingrepresentations of their own actions outside the prisoncontext. What they must have realized is that "without the82 I Angela Y. Davisuniform, without the power of the state, [the strip search]would be sexual assault."99But why is an understanding of the pervasiveness of sexualabuse in women's prisons an important element of a radicalanalysis of the prison system, and especially of thoseforward-looking analyses that lead us in the direction of abolition?Because the call to abolish the prison as the dominantform of punishment cannot ignore the extent to whichthe institution of the prison has stockpiled ideas and practicesthat are hopefully approaching obsolescence in thelarger society, but that retain all their ghastly vitality behindprison walls. The destructive combination of racism andmisogyny, however much it has been challenged by socialmovements, scholarship, and art over the last three decades,retains all its awful consequences within women's prisons.The relatively uncontested presence of sexual abuse inwomen's prisons is one of many such examples. The increasingevidence of a U.S. prison industrial complex with globalresonances leads us to think about the extent to which themany corporations that have acquired an investment in theexpansion of the prison system are, like the state, directlyimplicated in an institution that perpetuates violenceagainst women.ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? I 83

5The Prison Ind ustrial Co mple x"For private business prison labor is like a pot of gold. Nostrikes. No union organizing. No health benefits, unemlJllJ'VHl"l,. insurance, or workers' compensation to pay. No""""5 ... "5'" barriers, as in foreign countries. New leviathanprisons arebuilt on thousands of eerie acres of factoriesinsidewalls. Prisoners do data entry forChevron, make telephone reservations for TWA, raisehogs, shovel manure, and make circuit boards, limousines,waterbeds, and lingerie for Victoria's Secret, all at afraction of the cost of 'free labor.' "-Linda Evans and Eve GoldberglOOThe exploitation of prison labor by private corporations isone aspect among an array of relationships linking corporations,government, correctional communities, and media.These relationships constitute what we now call a prisonindustrial complex. The term "prison industrial complex"was introduced by activists and scholars to contest prevailingbeliefs that increased levels of crime were the root causeof mounting prison populations. Instead, they argued, prisonconstruction and the attendant drive to fill these new structureswith human bodies have been driven by ideologies ofracism and the pursuit of profit. Social historian Mike Davisfirst used the term in relation to California's penal system,which, he observed, already had begun in the 1990s to rival84agribusiness and land development as a major economic andpolitical force. WITo understand the social meaning of the prison todaywithin the context of a developing prison industrial complexmeans that punishment has to be conceptually severed fromits seemingly indissoluble link with crime. How often do weencounter the phrase "crime and punishment"? To whatextent has the perpetual repetition of the phrase 1/ crime andpunishment" in literature, as titles of television shows, bothfictional and documentary, and in everyday conversationmade it extremely difficult to think about punishmentbeyond this connection? How have these portrayals locatedthe prison in a causal relation to crime as a natural, necessary,and permanent effect, thus inhibiting serious debatesabout the viability of the prison today?The notion of a prison industrial complex insists onunderstandings of the punishment process that take intoaccount economic and political structures and ideologies,rather than focusing myopically on individual criminal conductand efforts to "curb crime." The fact, for example, thatmany corporations with global markets now rely on prisonsas an important source of profit helps us to understand therapidity with which prisons began to proliferate precisely ata time when official studies indicated that the crime ratewas falling. The notion of a prison industrial complex alsoinsists that the racialization of prison populations-and thisis not only true of the United States, but of Europe, SouthAmerica, and Australia as well-is not an incidental feature.Thus,of the prison industrial complex undertakenby abolitionist activists and scholars are very much linkedto critiques of the global persistence of racism. Antiracistand other social justice movements are incomplete withattention to the politics of imprisonment. At the 2001ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? I 85

United Nations World Conference Against Racism held inDurban, South Africa, a few individuals active in abolitionistcampaigns in various countries attempted to bring thisconnection to the attention of the international community.They pointed out that the expanding system of prisonsthroughout the world both relies on and further promotesstructures of racism even though its proponents mayadamantly maintain that it is race-neutral.Some critics of the prison system have employed theterm "correctional industrial complex" and others "penalindustrial complex." These and the term I have chosen tounderscore, "prison industrial complex/' all clearly resonatewith the historical concept of a "military industrial com-I!whose usage dates back to the presidency of DwightEisenhower. It may seem ironic that a Republican presidentwas the first to underscore a growing and dangerous alliancebetween the military and corporate worlds, but it clearlyseemed right to antiwar activists and scholars during the eraof the Vietnam War. Today, some activists mistakenly arguethat the prison industrial complex is moving into the spacevacated by the military industrial complex. However, the socalledWar on Terrorism initiated by the Bush administrationin the aftermath of the 2002 attacks on the World TradeCenter has made it very clear that the links between themilitary, corporations, and government are growingstronger, not weaker.A more cogent way to define the relationship betweenthe military industrial complex and the prison industrialcomplex would be to call it symbiotic. These two complexesmutually support and promote each other and, in fact,often share technologies. During the early nineties, whendefense production was temporarily on the decline, this connectionbetween the military industry and the criminal jus-86 I Angela Y. Davistice/punishment industry was acknowledged in a 1994 WallStreet Journal article entitled "Making Crime Pay: The ColdWar of the '90s":Parts of the defense establishment are cashing in,too, sensing a logical new line of business to helpthem offset military cutbacks. WestinghouseElectric Corp., Minnesota Mining andManufacturing Co, GDE Systems (a division of theold General Dynamics) and Alliant TechsystemsInc., for instance, are pushing crime fighting equipmentand have created special divisions to retooltheir defense technology for America'sThe article describes a conference sponsored by theNational Institute of Justice, the research arm of the JusticeDepartment, entitled "Law Enforcement Technology in the21st Century. II The secretary of defense was a major presenterat this conference, which explored topics such as, liTherole of the defense industry, particularly for dual use andconversion."Hot topics: defense-industry technology that couldlower the level of violence involved in crime fighting.Sandia National Laboratories, for instance, isexperimenting with a dense foam that can besprayed at suspects, temporarily blinding and deafthemunder breathable bubbles. StingerCorporation is working on II smart guns/' whichwill fire only for the owner, and retractable spikedbarrier strips to unfurl in front of fleeing vehicles.Westinghouse is promoting the "smart car/ , inwhich minicomputers could be linked up with bigARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? I 87

mainframes at the police department ! allowing forspeedy booking of prisoners, as well as quickexchanges of information . . . 1 03But an analysis of the relationship between the militaryand prison industrial complex is not only concerned withthe transference of technologies from the military to thelaw enforcement industry. What may be even more importantto our discussion is the extent to which both shareimportant structural features. Both systems generate hugeprofits from processes of social destruction. Precisely thatwhich is advantageous to those corporations, elected officials,and government agents who have obvious stakes inthe expansion of these systems begetsand devastationfor poor and racially dominated communities in the UnitedStates and throughout the world. The transformation ofimprisoned bodies-and they are in their majority bodies ofcolor-into sources of profit who consume and also oftenproduce all kinds of commodities, devours public funds,which might otherwise be available for social programssuch as education, housing, childcare, recreation, and drugprograms.Punishment no longer constitutes a marginal area of thelarger economy. Corporations producing all kinds of goodsfrombuildings to electronic devices and hygiene productsandproviding all kinds of services-from meals to therapyand health care-are now directly involved in the punishmentbusiness. That is to say, companies that one wouldassume are far removed from the work of state punishmenthave developed major stakes in the perpetuation of a prisonsystem whose historical obsolescence is therefore that muchmore difficult to recognize. It was during the decade of the1980s that corporate ties to the punishment system became88 I Angela Y. Davismore extensive and entrenched than ever before. Butthroughout the history of the U.S. prison system, prisonershave always constituted a potential source of profit. Forexample, they have served as valuable subjects in medicalresearch, thus positioning the prison as a major linkbetween universities and corporations.During the post-World War II period, for example, medicalexperimentation on captive populations helped to hastenthe development of the pharmaceutical industry.According to Allen Hornblum,[T]he number of American medical research programsthat relied on prisoners as subjects rapidlyexpanded as zealous doctors and researchers, grantmakinguniversities, and a burgeoning pharmaceuticalindustry raced for greater market share.Society ! s marginal people were, as they had alwaysbeen, the grist for the medical-pharmaceutical mill,and prison inmates in particular would become theraw materials for postwar profit-making and academicadvancement.104Hornblum's book, Acres of Skin: Human Experiments atHolmesburg Prison, highlights the career of research dermatologistAlbert Kligman, who was a professor at theUniversity of Pennsylvania. Kligman, the IIFather of Retin­A," 105 conducted hundreds of experiments on the menhoused in Holmesburg Prison and, in the process, trainedmany researchers to use what were later recognized asunethical research methods.When Dr. Kligman entered the aging prison he wasawed by the potential it held for his research. InARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? I 89

1966, he recalled in a newspaper interview: If All Isaw before me were acres of skin. It was like afarmer seeing a fertile field for the first time." Thehundreds of inmates walking aimlessly before himrepresented a unique opportunity for unlimited andundisturbed medical research. He described it inthis interview as "an anthropoid eolony, mainlyhealthy" under perfect control conditions.106By the time the experimentation program was shut downin 1974 and new federal regulations prohibited the use ofprisoners as subjects for academic and corporate research,numerous cosmetics and skin creams had already been tested.Some of them had caused great harm to these subjectsand could not be marketed in their original form. Johnsonand Johnson, Ortho Pharmaceutical, and Dow Chemical areonly a few of the corporations that reaped great materialbenefits from these experiments.The potential impact of corporate involvement in punishmentcould have been glimpsed in the Kligman experimentsat Holmesburg Prison as early as the 1950s and 1960s.However, it was not until the 1980s and the increasing globalizationof capitalism that the massive surge of capital intothe punishment economy began. The deindustrializationprocesses that resulted in plant shutdowns throughout thecountry created a huge pool of vulnerable human beings, apool of people for whom no further jobs were available. Thisalso brought more people into contact with social services,such as AFDC lAid to Families with Dependent Children)and other welfare agencies. It is not accidental that "",'p lt".,.pas we have known it"-to use former President Clinton'swords-came under severe attack and was eventually disestablished.This was known as "welfare reform." At the same90 1 Angela Y. Davistime, we experienced the privatization and corporatizationof serviees that were previously run by government. Themost obvious example of this privatization proeess was thetransformation of government-run hospitals and healthservices into a gigantic complex of what are euphemisticallycalled health maintenance organizations. In this sense wemight also speak of a "medical industrial complex./l 107 Infact, there is a connection between one of the first privatehospital companies, Hospital Corporation of Americaknowntoday as HCA-and Corrections Corporation ofAmeriea Board members of HCA, which today hastwo hundred hospitals and seventy outpatient surgery centersin twenty-four states, England, and Switzerland helpedto start Correctional Corporations of America in 1983.In the context of an economy that was driven by anunprecedented pursuit of profit, no matter what tbe humancost, and the concomitant dismantling of the welfare state,poor people's abilities to survive became increasingly constrainedby the looming presence of the prison. The massiveprison-building project that began in the 1980s created themeans of concentrating and managing what the capitalistsystem had implicitly declared to be a human surplus. In themeantime, elected officials and the dominant media justifiedthe new draconian sentencing practices, sending more andmore people to prison in the frenzied drive to build more andmore prisons by arguing that this was the only way to makeour communities safe from murderers, rapists, and robbers.The media, especially television . . . have a vestedinterest in perpetuating the notion that crime is outof control. With new competition from cable networksand 24-hour news channels, TV news andprograms about crime . . . have proliferated madly.ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 191

According to the Center for Media and PublicAffairs, crime coverage was the number-one topicon the nightly news over the past decade. From1990 to 1998, homicide rates dropped by halfnationwide, but homicide stories on the threemajor networks rose almost fourfold.108During the same period when crime rates were declining,prison populations soared. According to a recent report bythe U.S. Department of Justice, at the end of the year 2001,there were 2, 100, 146 people incarcerated in the UnitedStates.109 The terms and numbers as they appear in this governmentreport require some preliminary discussion. I hesitateto make unmediated use of such statistical evidencebecause it can discourage the very critical thinking thatought to be elicited by an understanding of the prison industrialcomplex. It is precisely the abstraction of numbers thatplays such a central role in criminalizing those who experiencethe misfortune of imprisonment. There are many differentkinds of men and women in the prisons, jails, and INSand military detention centers, whose lives are erased by theBureau of Justice Statistics figures. The numbers recognizeno distinction between the woman who is imprisoned ondrug conspiracy and the man who is in prison for killing hiswife, a man who might actually end up spending less timebehind bars than the woman.With this observation in mind, the statistical breakdown isas follows: There were 1,324,465 people in "federal and stateprisons," 15,852 in "territorial prisons," 63 1,240 in "localjails," 8,761 in "Immigration and Naturalization Servicedetention facilities," 2,436 in "military facilities," 1,912 in"jails in Indian country," and 108,965 in "juvenile facilities."In the ten years between 1990 and 2000, 351 new places of92 I Angela Y. Davisconfinement were opened by states and more than 528,000beds were added, amounting to 1,320 state facilities, representingan eighty-one percent increase. Moreover, there arecurrently 84 federal facilities and 264 private facilities. 110The government reports, from which these figures aretaken,the extent to which incarceration ratesare slowing down. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reportentitled "Prisoners in 2001" introduces the study by indicatingthat lithe Nation's prison population grew 1.1 %,which was less than the average annual growth of 3.8%since yearend 1995. During 2001 the prison population roseat the lowest rate since 1972 and had the smallest absoluteincrease since 1979." 111 However small the increase, thesenumbers themselves would defy the imagination were theynot so neatly classified and rationally organized. To placethese figures in historical perspective, try to imagine howpeople in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries-andindeed for most of the twentieth century-who welcomedthe new, and then quite extraordinary, system of punishmentcalled the prison might have responded had theyknown that such a colossal number of lives would be eventuallyclaimed permanently by this institution. I havealready shared my own memories of a time three decadesago when the prison population was comprised of a tenth ofthe present numbers.The prison industrial complex is fueled by privatizationpatterns that, it will be recalled, have also drastically transformedhealth care, education, and other areas of our lives.Moreover, the prison privatization trends-both the increasingpresence of corporations in the prison economy and theestablishment of private prisons-are reminiscent of the historicalefforts to create a profitable punishment industrybased on the new supply of "free" black male laborers in theARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? I 93

aftermath of the Civil War. Stevendrawing fromthe work of Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie, argues:[ejompanies that service the criminalsystemneed sufficient quantities of raw materials toguarantee long-term growth ... In the criminal justicefield, the raw material isand industrywill do what is necessary to guarantee a steadysupply. For the supply of prisoners to grow, criminaljustice policies must ensure a sufficient number ofincarcerated Americans regardless of whethercrime is rising or the incarceration is necessary. 1l2In the post-Civil War era, emancipated black men andwomen comprised an enormous reservoir of labor at a timewhen planters-and industrialists-could no longer rely onslavery, as they had done in the past. This labor becameincreasingly available for use by private agents preciselythrough the convict lease system, discussed earlier, andrelated systems such as debt peonage. Recall that in theaftermath of slavery, the penal population drastically shifted,so that in the South it rapidly became disproportionatelyblack. This transition set the historical stage for the easyacceptance of disproportionately black prison populationstoday. According to 2002 Bureau of Justice Statistics,African-Americans as a whole now represent the majority ofcounty, state, and federal prisoners, with a total of 803,400black inmates-1 I8, 600 more than the total number ofwhite inmates. If we include Latinos, we must add another283,000 bodies of color.1l3As the rate of increase in the incarceration of black prisonerscontinues to rise, the racial composition of the incarceratedpopulation is approaching the proportion of black94 1 Angela Y. Davisprisoners to white during the era of the southern convictlease and county chain gang systems. Whether this humanraw material is used for purposes of labor or for the consumptionof commodities provided by a number ofcorporations directly implicated in the prison industrialcomplex, it is clear that black bodies are considered dispensablewithin the "free world" but as a major source of profitin the prison world.The privatization characteristic of convict has itscontemporary parallels, as companies such as CCA andWackenhut literally run prisons for profit. At the beginningof the twenty.first century, the numerous private prisoncompanies operating in the United States own and operatefacilities that hold 91,828 federal and state prisoners.114Texas and Oklahoma can claim the number of peoplein private prisons. But New Mexico imprisons forty-fourpercent of its prison population in private facilities, andstates such as Montana, Alaska, and Wyoming turned overmore than twenty-five percent of their prison population toprivate companies.lIS In arrangements reminiscent of theconvict lease system, federal, state, and county governmentspay private companies a fee for each inmate, which meansthat private companies have a stake in retaining prisoners aslong as possible, and intheir facilities filled.In the state of there are thirty-four governmentowned,privately run jails in which approximately 5,500 outof-stateprisoners are incarcerated. These facilities generateabout eighty million dollars annually for Texas.116 One dramaticexample involves Capital Corrections Resources, Inc.,which operates the Brazoria Detention Center, a governmentownedfacility located forty miles outside of Houston, Texas.Brazoria came to public attention in August 1997 when avideotape broadcast on national television showed prisonersARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 195

there being bitten by police dogs and viciously kicked in thegroin and stepped on by guards. The inmates, forced to crawlon the floor, also were being shocked with stun guns, whileguards-who referred to one black prisoner as "boy"-shouted,"Crawl faster!"1l7 In the aftermath of the release of thistape, the state of Missouri withdrew the 415 prisoners ithoused in the Brazoria Detention Center. Although few referenceswere made in the accompanying news reports to theindisputably racialized character of the guards' outrageousbehavior, in the section of the Brazoria videotape that wasshown on national television, black male prisoners were seento be the primary targets of the guards' attacks.The thirty-twa-minute Brazoria tape, represented by the jailauthorities as a training tape-allegedly showing correctionsofficers "what not to do "-was made in September 1996, aftera guard allegedly smelled marijuana in the jail. Important evidenceof the abuse that takes place behind the walls and gatesof private prisons, it came to light in connection with a lawsuitfiled by one of the prisoners who was bitten by a dog; hewas suing Brazoria County for a hundred thousand dollars indamage. The Brazoria jailors' actions---which, according toprisoners there, were far worse than depicted on the tape-areindicative not only of the ways in which many prisonersthroughout the country are treated, but of generalized attitudestoward people locked up in jails and prisons.According to an Associated Press news story, theMissouri inmates, once they had been transferred back totheir home state from Brazoria, told the Kansas City Star:[G]uards at the Brazoria County Detention Centerused cattle prods and other forms of intimidation towin respect and force prisoners to say, "I loveTexas." "What you saw on tape wasn't a fraction of96 I Angela Y. Daviswhat happened that day, " said inmate LouisWatkins, referring to the videotaped cellblock raidof September 18, 1996. "I've never seen anythinglike that in the movies." U8In 2000 there were twenty-six for-profit prison corporationsin the United States that operated approximately 150facilities in twenty-eight states. 119 The largest of these companies,CCA and Wackenhut, control 76.4 percent of the privateprison market globally. CCA is headquartered inNashville, Tennessee, and until 2001, its largest shareholderwas the multinational headquartered in Paris, SodexhoAlliance! which, through its U.S. subsidiary,SodexhoMarriott, provides catering services at nine hundred U.S.colleges and universities. The Prison Moratorium Project, anorganization promoting youth activism, led a protest campaignagainst Sodexho Marriott on campuses throughout thecountry. Among the campuses that dropped Sodexho wereSUNY Albany, Goucher College, and James MadisonUniversity. Students had staged sit-ins and organized rallieson more than fifty campuses before Sodexho divested itsholdings in CCA in fall 2001.120Though private prisons represent a fairly small proportionof prisons in the United States, the privatization modelis quickly becoming the primary mode of organizing punishmentin many other countries.121 These companies havetried to take advantage of the expanding population ofwomen prisoners, both in the United States and globally. In1996, the first private women's prison was established byCCA in Melbourne, Australia. The government of Victoria{/ adopted the U.S. model of privatization in which financing,design, construction, and ownership of the prison are awardedto one contractor and the government pays them back forARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? I 97

construction over twenty years. This means that it is virtuallyimpossible to remove the contractor because that contractorowns the prison. "122As a direct consequence of the campaign organized byprison activist groups in Melbourne, Victoria withdrew thecontract from CCA in 2001. However, a significant portion ofAustralia's prison system remains privatized. In the fall of2002, the government of Queensland renewed Wackenhut'scontract to run a 7l0-bed prison in Brisbane. The value of thefive-year contract is $66.5 million. In addition to the facilityin Brisbane, Wackenhut manages eleven other prisons inAustralia and New Zealand and furnishes health care servicesin eleven public prisons in the state of Victoria.l23 In thepress release announcing this contract renewal, Wackenhutdescribes its global business activities as follows:WCC, a world leader in the privatized correctionsindustry, has contracts/awards to manage 60 correctional/detentionfacilities in North America,Europe, Australia, South Africa and New Zealandwith a total of approximately 43,000 beds. WCCalso provides prisoner transportation services, electronicmonitoring for home detainees, correctionalhealth care and mental health services. WCC offersgovernment agencies a turnkey approach to thedevelopment of new correctional and mental healthinstitutions that includes design, construction,financing, and operations.l24But to understand the reach of the prison industrial complex,it is not enough to evoke the looming power of the privateprison business. By definition, those companies courtthe state within and outside the United States for the pur-98 1 Angela Y. Davispose of obtaining prison contracts, bringing punishment andprofit together in a menacing embrace. Still, this is only themost visible dimension of the prison industrial complex,and it should not lead us to the more comprehensivecorporatization that is a feature of contemporary punishment.As compared to earlier historical eras, the prisoneconomy is no longer a small, identifiable, and containableset of markets. Many corporations, whose names are highlyrecognizable by "free world" consumers, have discoverednew possibilities for expansion by selling their products tocorrectional facilities.In the 1990s, the variety of corporations makingmoney from prisons is truly dizzying, ranging fromDial Soap to Famous Amos cookies, from AT&T tohealth-care providers . . . In 1995 Dial Soap sold$100,000 worth of its product to the New York Cityjail system alone . . . When VitaPro Foods ofMontreal, Canada, contracted to supply inmates inthe state of Texas with its soy-based meat substitute,the contract was worth $34 million a year.l25Among the many businesses that advertise in the yellowpages on the corrections. com Web site are Archer DanielMidlands, Nestle Food Service, Ace Hardware, Polaroid,Hewlett-Packard, RJ Reynolds, and the communicationscompanies Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, and Ameritech. One conclusionto be drawn here is that even if private prison companieswere prohibited-an unlikely prospect, indeed-theprison industrial complex and its many strategies for profitwould remain relatively intact. Private prisons are directsources of profit for the companies that run them, but publicprisons have become so thoroughly saturated with theARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 199

profit-producing products and services of private corporationsthat the distinction is not as meaningful as one mightsuspect. Campaigns against privatization that represent publicprisons as an adequate alternative to private prisons canbe misleading. It is trne that a major reason for the profitabilityof private prisons consists in the nonunion laborthey employ, and this important distinction should be highlighted.Nevertheless, public prisons are now equally tied tothe corporate economy and constitute an ever-growingsource of capitalist profit.Extensive corporate investment in prisons has significantlyraised the stakes for antiprison work. It means thatserious antiprison activists must be willing to look muchfurther in their analyses and organizing strategies than theactual institution of the prison. Prison reform rhetoric,which has always undergirded dominant critiques of theprison system, will not work in this new situation. If reformapproaches have tended to bolster the permanence of theprison in the past, they certainly will not suffice to challengethe economic and political relationships that sustainthe prison today. This means that in the era of the prisonindustrial complex, activists must pose hard questionsabout the relationship between global capitalism and thespread of U.S.-style prisons throughout the world.The global prison economy is indisputably dominated bythe United States. This economy not only consists of theproducts, services, and ideas that are directly marketed toother governments, but it also exercises an enormous influenceover the development of the style of state punishmentthroughout the world. One dramatic example can be seen inthe opposition to Turkey's attempts to transform its prisons.In October 2000, prisoners in Turkey, many of whom areassociated with left political movements, began a /I death100 I Angela Y. Davisfast" as a way of dramatizing their opposition to the Turkishgovernment's decision to introduce !IF-Type," or U.S.-style,prisons. Compared to the traditional dormitory-style facilities,these new prisons consist of one- to three-person cells,which are opposed by the prisoners because of the regimes ofisolation they facilitate and because mistreatment and tortureare far more likely in isolation. In December 2000, thirtyprisoners were killed in clashes with security forces intwenty prisons.126 As of September 2002, more than fiftyprisoners have died of hunger, including two women,Gulnihal Yilmaz and Birsen Hosver, who were among themost recent prisoners to succumb to the death fast.!IF-Type" prisons in Turkey were inspired by the recentemergence of the super-maximum security-or supermaxprisonin the United States, which presumes to control otherwiseunmanageable prisoners by holding them in permanentsolitary confinement and by subjecting them to varyingdegrees of sensory deprivation. In its 2002 World Report,Human Rights Watch paid particular attention to the concernsraised bythe spread of ultra-modern "super-maximum"security prisons. Originally prevalent in the UnitedStates , .. the supermax model was increasingly followedin other countries. Prisoners confined insuch facilities spent an average of twenty-threehours a day in their cells, enduring extreme socialisolation, enforced idleness, and extraordinarilylimited recreational and educational opportunities.While prison authorities defended the use of supermaximumsecurity facilities by asserting that theyheld only the most dangerous, disruptive, or escapeproneinmates, few safeguards existed to preventARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 1101

other prisoners from being arbitrarily or discriminatorilytransferred to such facilities. In Australia, theinspector of custodial services found that some prisonerswere held indefinitely in special highsecurity units without knowing why or when theirisolation would end.127Among the many countries that have recently constructedsuper-maximum security prisons is South Africa.Construction was completed on the supermax prison inKokstad, KwaZulu-Natal in August 2000, but it was not officiallyopened until May 2002. Ironically, the reason given forthe delay was the competition for water between the prisonand a new low-cost housing development.l28 I am highlightingSouth Africa's embrace of the supermax because of theapparent ease with which this most repressive version of theU.S. prison has established itself in a country that has justrecently initiated the project of building a democratic, nonracist,and nonsexist society. South Africa was the first countryin the world to create constitutional assurances for gayrights, and it immediately abolished the death penalty afterthe dismantling of apartheid. Nevertheless, following theexample of the United States, the South African prison systemis expanding and becoming more oppressive. The U.S.priVate prison company Wackenhut has secured several contractswith the South African government and by constructingprivate prisons further legitimizes the trend toward privatization(which affects the availability of basic servicesfrom utilities to education) in the economy as a whole.South Africa's participation in the prison industrial complexconstitutes a major impediment to the creation of ademocratic society. In the United States, we have alreadyfelt the insidious and socially damaging effects of prison102 1 Angela Y. Davisexpansion. The dominant social expectation is that youngblack, Latino, Native American, and Southeast Asian menandincreasingly women as well-will move naturally fromthe free world into prison, where, it is assumed, they belong.Despite the important of antiracist social movementsover the last half century, racism hides from view withininstitutional structures, and its most reliable refuge is theprison system.The racist arrests of vast numbers of immigrants fromMiddle Eastern countries in the aftermath of the attacks onSeptember 11, 2001, and the subsequent withholding of informationabout the names of numbers of people held in INSdetention centers, some of which are owned and operated byprivate corporations, do not augur a democratic future. Theuncontested detention of increasing numbers of undocumentedimmigrants from the global South has been aided considerablyby the structures and ideologies associated with theprison industrial complex. We can hardly move in the directionof justice and equality in the twenty-first century if weare unwilling to recognize the enormous role played by thissystem in extending the power of racism and xenophobia.Radical opposition to the global prison industrial complexsees the antiprison movement as a vital means ofexpanding the terrain on which the quest for democracy willunfold. This movement is thus antiracist, anticapitalist,antisexist, and antihomophobic. It calls for the abolition ofthe prison as the dominant mode of punishment but at thesame time recognizes the need for genuine solidarity withthe millions of men, women, and children who are behindbars. A major challenge of this movement is to do the workthat will create more humane, habitable environments forpeople in prison without bolstering the permanence of theprison system. How, then, do we accomplish this balancingARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 1103

act of passionately attending to the needs of prisoners-callingfor less violent conditions, an end to state sexual assault,improved physical and mental health care, greater access todrug programs, better educational work opportunities,unionization of prison labor, more connections with familiesand communities, shorter or alternative sentencingandat the same time call for alternatives to sentencing altogether,no more prison construction, and abolitionist strategiesthat question the place of the prison in our future?6Abol itionist Alternat ives"Forget about reform; it's time to talk about abolishingjails and prisons in American society ... Still-abolition?Where do you put the prisoners? The 'criminals'? What'sthe alternative? First, having no alternative at all wouldcreate less crime than the present criminal training centersdo. Second, the only full alternative is building thekind of society that does not need prisons: A decent redistributionof power and income so as to put out the hiddenfire of burning envy that now flames up in crimes of property-bothburglary by the poor and embezzlement by theaffluent. And a decent sense of community that can support,reintegrate and truly rehabilitate those who suddenlybecome filled with fury or despair, and that can facethem not as objects-'criminals'-but as people who havecommitted illegal acts, as have almost all of us."-Arthur Waskow, Institute for Policy Studies129If jails and prisons are to be abolished, then what will replacethem? This is the puzzling question that often interruptsfurther consideration of the prospects for abolition. Whyshould it be so difficult to imagine alternatives to our currentsystem of incarceration? There are a number of reasonswhy we tend to balk at the idea that it may be possible toeventually create an entirely different-and perhaps moreegalitarian-system of justice. First of all, we think of the104 I Angela Y. Davis105

current system, with its exaggerated dependence on imprisonment,as an unconditional standard and thus have greatdifficulty envisioning any other way of dealing with themore than two million people who are currently being heldin the country's jails, prisons, youth facilities, and immigrationdetention centers. Ironically, even the anti-death penaltycampaign tends to rely on the assumption that life imprisonmentis the most rational alternative to capital punishment.As important as it may be to abolish the death penalty,we should be conscious of the way the contemporarycampaign against capital punishment has a propensity torecapitulate the very historical patterns that led to the emergenceof the prison as the dominant form of punishment.The death penalty has coexisted with the prison, thoughimprisonment was supposed to serve as an alternative tocorporal and capital punishment. This is a major dichotomy.A critical engagement with this dichotomy would involvetaking seriously the possibility of linking the goal of deathpenalty abolitionism with strategies for prison abolition.It is true that if we focus myopically on the existing system-andperhaps this is the problem that leads to theassumption that imprisonment is the only alternative todeath-it is very hard to imagine a structurally similar systemcapable of handling such a vast population of lawbreakers.If, however, we shift our attention from the prison, perceivedas an isolated institution, to the set of relationshipsthat comprise the prison industrial complex, it may be easierto think about alternatives. In other words, a more complicatedframework may yield more options than if we simplyattempt to discover a single substitute for the prison system.The first step, then, would be to let go of the desire todiscover one single alternative system of punishment thatwould occupy the same footprint as the prison system.106 1 Angela Y. DavisSince the 1980s, the prison system has become increasinglyensconced in the economic, political and ideologicallife of the United States and the transnational trafficking inU.s. commodities, culture, and ideas. Thus, the prisonindustrial complex is much more than the sum of all thejails and prisons in this country. It is a set of symbiotic relationshipsamong correctional communities, transnationalcorporations, media conglomerates, guards' unions, and legislativeand court agendas. If it is true that the contemporarymeaning of punishment is fashioned through these relationships,then the most effective abolitionist strategies willcontest these relationships and propose alternatives thatpull them apart. What, then, would it mean to imagine asystem in which punishment is not allowed to become thesource of corporate profit? How can we imagine a society inwhich race and class are not primary determinants of punishment?Or one in which punishment itself is no longer thecentral concern in the making of justice?An abolitionist approach that seeks to answer questionssuch as these would require us to imagine a constellation ofalternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimateaim of removing the prison from the social and ideologicallandscapes of our society. In other words, we would not belooking for prisonlike substitutes for the prison, such ashouse arrest safeguarded by electronic surveillancebracelets. Rather, positing decarceration as our overarchingstrategy, we would try to envision a continuum of alternativesto imprisonment-demilitarization of schools, revitalizationof education at all levels, a health system that providesfree physical and mental care to all, and a justice systembased on reparation and reconciliation rather than retributionand vengeance.The creation of new institutions that lay claim to theARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 1107

space now occupied by the prison can eventually start tocrowd out the prison so that it would inhabit increasinglysmaller areas of our social and psychic landscape. Schoolscan therefore be seen as the most powerful alternative to jailsand prisons. Unless the current structures of violence areeliminated from schools in impoverished comrmmities ofcolor-including the presence of armed security guards andpolice-and unless schools become places that encourage thejoy of learning, these schools will remain the major conduitsto prisons. The alternative would be to transform schoolsinto vehicles for decarceration. Within the health care system,it is important to emphasize the current scarcity ofinstitutions available to poor people who suffer severe mentaland emotional illnesses. There are currently more peoplewith mental and emotional disorders in jails and prisons thanin mental institutions. This call for new facilities designed toassist poor people should not be taken as an appeal to reinstitutethe old system of mental institutions, which wereandin many cases still are-as repressive as the prisons. It issimply to suggest that the racial and class disparities in careavailable to the affluent and the deprived need to be eradicated,thus creating another vehicle for decarceration.To reiterate, rather than try to imagine one single alternativeto the existing system of incarceration, we mightenvision an array of alternatives that will require radicaltransformations of many aspects of our society. Alternativesthat fail to address racism, male dominance, homophobia,class bias, and other structures of domination will not, inthe final analysis, lead to decarceration and will not advancethe goal of abolition.It is within this context that it makes sense to considerthe decriminalization of drug use as a significant componentof a larger strategy to simultaneously oppose structures of108 1 Angela Y. Davisracism within the criminal justice system and further theabolitionist agenda of decarceration. Thus, with respect tothe project of challenging the role played by the so-called Waron Drugs in bringing huge numbers of people of color into theprison system, proposals to decriminalize drug use should belinked to the development of a constellation of free, community-basedprograms accessible to all people who wish totackle their drug problems. This is not to suggest that all peoplewho use drugs-or that only people who use illicit'UgS-ntea such help. However, anyone, regardless of economicstatus, who wishes to conquer drug addiction shouldbe able to enter treatment programs.Such institutions are, indeed, available to affluent communities.The most well known program is the Betty Fordv .. ,,., which, according to its Web site, "accepts patientsdependent on alcohol and other mood altering chemicals.Treatment services are open to all men and women eighteenyears of age and older regardless of race, creed, sex, nationalorigin, religion or sources of payment for care."130 However,the cost for the first six days is $1,175 per day, and after that$525 per day)31 If a person requires thirty days of treatment,the cost would amount to $19,000, almost twice the annualsalary of a person working a minimum-wage job.Poor people deserve to have access to effective, voluntarydrug treatment programs. Like the Betty Ford program, theiroperation should not be under the auspices of the criminaljustice system. As at the Ford Center, family members alsoshould be permitted to participate. But unlike the Betty Fordprogram, they should be free of charge. For such programs tocount as "abolitionist alternatives," they would not belinked-unlike existing programs, to which individuals are"sentenced"-to imprisonment as a last resort.The campaign to decriminalize drug use-from manjua-ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 1109

na to heroin-is international in scope and has led countriessuch as the Netherlands to revise their laws, legalizing personaluse of such drugs as marijuana and hashish. TheNetherlands also has a history of legalized sex work, anotherarea in which there has been extensive campaigning fordecriminalization. In the cases of drugs and sex work,decriminalization would simply require repeal of all thoselaws thatindividuals who use drugs and who workin the sex industry. The decriminalization of alcohol useserves as a historical example. In both these cases, decriminalizationwould advance the abolitionist strategy ofdecarceration-that is, the consistent reduction in the numbersof people who are sent to prison-with the ultimate aimof dismantling the prison system as the dominant mode ofpunishment. A further challenge for abolitionists is to identifyother behaviors that might be appropriately decriminalizedas preliminary steps toward abolition.One obvious and very urgent aspect of the work ofdecriminalization is associated with the defense of immigrants'rights. The growing numbers of immigrants-especiallysince the attacks on September 11, 200 l-who areincarcerated in immigrant detention centers, as well as injails and prisons, can be halted by dismantling the processesthat punish people for their failure to enter this countrywithout documents. Current campaigns that call for thedecriminalization of undocumented immigrants are makingimportant contributions to the overall struggle against theprison industrial complex and are challenging the expansivereach of racism and male dominance. When women fromcountries in the southern region are imprisoned becausethey have entered this country to escape sexual violence,instead of being granted refugee status, this reinforces thegeneralized tendency to punish people who are persecuted in110 I Angela Y. Davistheir intimate lives as a direct consequence of pandemics ofviolence that continue to be legitimized by ideological andlegal structures.Within the United States, the "battered women's syndrome"legal defense reflects an attcmpt to argue that awoman who kills an abusive spouse should not be convictedof murder. This defense has been abundantly criticized,both by detractors and proponents of feminism; the formerdo not want to recognize the pervasiveness and dangers ofintimate violence against women and the latter challengethe idea that the legitimacy of this defense resides in theassertion that those who kill their batterers are not responsiblefor their actions. The point feminist movementsattempt to make-regardless of their specific positions onbattered women's syndrome-is that violence againstwomen is a pervasive and complicated social problem thatcannot be solved by imprisoning women who fight backagainst their abusers. Thus, a vast range of alternative strategiesof minimizing violence against women-within intimaterelationships and within relationships to the stateshouldbe the focus of our concern.The alternatives toward which I have gestured thus farandthis is only a small selection of examples, which canalso include job and living wage programs, alternatives tothe disestablished welfare program, commUnity-based recreation,and many more-are associated both directly andindirectly with the existing system of criminal justice. But,however mediated their relation might be to the current systemof jails and prisons, these alternatives are attempting toreverse the impact of the prison industrial complex on ourworld. As they contest racism and other networks of socialdomination, their implementation will certainly advancethe abolitionist agenda of decarceration.ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 1111

Creating agendas of decarceration and broadly casting thenet of alternatives helps us to do the ideological work ofpulling apart the conceptual link between crime and punishment.This more nuanced understanding of the social role ofthe punishment system requires us to give up our usual wayof thinking about punishment as an inevitable consequenceof crime. We would recognize that "punishment" does notfollow from "crime" in the neat and logical sequence offeredby discourses that insist on the justice of imprisonment, butrather punishment-primarily through imprisonment (andsometimes death)-is linked to the agendas of politicians, theprofit drive of corporations, and media representations ofcrime. Imprisonment is associated with the racialization ofthose most likely to be punished. It is associated with theirclass and, as we have seen, gender structures the punishmentsystem as well. If we insist that abolitionist alternativestrouble these relationships, that they strive to disarticulatecrime and punishment, race and punishment, class and punishment,and gender and punishment, then our focus mustnot rest only on the prison system as an isolated institutionbut must also be directed at all the social relations that supportthe permanence of the prison.An attempt to create a new conceptual terrain for imaginingalternatives to imprisonment involves the ideologicalwork of questioning why "criminals" have been constitutedas a class and, indeed, a class of human beings undeservingof the civil and human rights accorded to others. Radicalcriminologists have long pointed out that the category "lawbreakers"is far greater than the category of individuals whoare deemed criminals since, many point out, almost all of ushave broken the law at one time or another. Even PresidentBill Clinton admitted that he had smoked marijuana at onetime, insisting, though, that he did not inhale. However,112 1 Angela Y. Davisacknowledged disparities in the intensity of police surveillance-asindicated by the present-day currency of the term"racial profiling" which ought to cover far more territorythan "driving while black or brown" -account in part forracial and class-based disparities in arrest and imprisonmentrates. Thus, if we are willing to take seriously the consequencesof a racist and class-biased justice system, we willreach the conclusion that enormous numbers of people arein prison simply because they are, for example, black,Chicano, Vietnamese, Native American or poor, regardlessof their ethnic background. They are sent to prison, not somuch because of the crimes they may have indeed committed,but largely because their communities have been criminalized.Thus, programs for decriminalization will not onlyhave to address specific activities that have been criminalized-suchas drug use and sex work-but also criminalizedpopulations and communities.It is against the backdrop of these more broadly conceivedabolitionist alternatives that it makes sense to take up thequestion of radical transformations within the existing justicesystem. Thus, aside from minimizing, through variousstrategies, the kinds of behaviors that will bring people intocontact with the police and justice systems, there is the questionof how to treat those who assault the rights and bodiesof others. Many organizations and individuals both in theUnited States and other countries offer alternative modes ofmaking justice. In limited instances, some governments haveattempted to implement alternatives that range from conflictresolution to restorative or reparative justice. Such scholarsas Herman Bianchi have suggested that crime needs to bedefined in terms of tort and, instead of criminal law, shouldbe reparative law. In his words, "[The lawbreaker] is thus nolonger an evil-minded man or woman, but simply a debtor, aARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 1113

liable person whose human duty is to take responsibility forhis or her acts, and to assume the duty of repair."l32There is a growing body of literature on reshaping systemsof justice around strategies of reparation, rather thanretribution, as well as a growing body of experiential evidenceof the advantages of these approaches to justice and ofthe democratic possibilities they promise. Instead ofrehearsing the numerous debates that have emerged over thelast decades-including the most persistent question, "Whatwill happen to the murderers and rapists?"-I will concludewith a story of one of the most dramatic successes of theseexperiments in reconciliation. I refer to the case of AmyBiehl, the white Fulbright scholar from Newport Beach,California, who was killed by young South African men inGuguletu, a black township in Capetown, South Africa.In 1993, when South Africa was on the cusp of its transition,Amy Biehl was devoting a significant amount of hertime as a foreign student to the work of rebuilding SouthAfrica. Nelson Mandela had been freed in 1990, but had notyet been elected president. On August 25, Biehl was drivingseveral black friends to their home in Guguletu when acrowd shouting antiwhite slogans confronted her, and someof them stoned and stabbed her to death. Four of the menparticipating in the attack were convicted of her murder andsentenced to eighteen years in prison. In 1997, Linda andPeter Biehl-Amy's mother and father-decided to supportthe amnesty petition the men presented to the Truth andReconciliation Commission. The four apologized to theBiehls and were released in July 1998. Two of them-EasyNofemela and Ntobeko Peni-Iater met with the Biehls,who, despite much pressure to the contrary, agreed to seethem.133 According to Nofemela, he wanted to say moreabout his own sorrow for killing their daughter than what114 I Angela Y. Davishad been possible during Truth and Reconciliation hearings."I know you lost a person you love," he says he told themduring that meeting. "I want you to forgive me and take meas your child."l34The Biehls, who had established the Amy BiehlFoundation in the aftermath of their daughter's death, askedNofemela and Peni to work at the Guguletu branch of thefoundation. Nofemela became an instructor in an afterschoolsports program and Peni an administrator. In June2002, they accompanied Linda Biehl to New York, wherethey all spoke before the American Family TherapyAcademy on reconciliation and restorative justice. In aBoston Globe interview, Linda Biehl, when asked how shenow feels about the men who killed her daughter, said, "Ihave a lot of love for them." After Peter Biehl died in 2002,she bought two plots of land for them in memory of her husbandso that Nofemela and Peni can build their ownhomes.l35 A few days after the September 11 attacks, theBiehls had been asked to speak at a synagogue in their community.According to Peter Biehl, "We tried to explain thatsometimes it pays to shut up and listen to what other peoplehave to say, to ask: 'Why do these terrible things happen?'instead of simply reacting."136ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 1115

Res ourcesHUMAN RIGHTS WATCH PRISON PROJECT350 5th Avenue, 34th FloorNew York, NY 1011 8-3299Phone: (212) 290-4700Fax: (212) 736- 1300hrwnyc@hrw.orgwww.hrw.orgCRITICAL RESISTANCE: BEYOND THEPRISON-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEXwww.criticalresistance.orgNational Office:1904 Franklin Street, Suite 504Oakland, CA 94612Phone: (510) 444-0484Fax: (510) 444-2 177crnational@criticalresistance.orgNO RTHE AST REGIONAL OFFICE460 W. 128th StreetNew York, NY 10027Phone: (917) 493-9795Fax: (917) 493-9798crne@criticalresistance.orgSOUTHERN REGIONAL OFFICEP. O. Box 79 1213New Orleans, LA 70 179Phone: (504) 837-5348 or toll free (866) 579-0885crsouth@criticalresistance.orgINCITE! WOMEN OF COLOR AGAINST VIOLENCEP.O. Box 6861Minneapolis, MN 55406-0861Phone: (415) 553-3837incite-national@yahoo.comwww.incite-national.orgjJUSTICE NOW (JUSTICE NETWOR K ON WOMEN)1322 Webster Street, Suite 210Oakland, CA 94612Phone: (510) 839-7654Fax: (5 10) 839-7615cynthia@jnow.org, cassandra@jnow.orgwww.jnow.orgTHE NATIONAL CENTER ON INST IT UTIONSAND ALTERNATIVES (NCIA)3125 Mt. Vernon AvenueAlexandria, VA 22305Phone: (703 ) 684-0373Fax: (703) 549-4077imo@ncianet.orgwww.ncianet.orgjncia; www.sentencing.org116ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 1117

PRISON ACTMST RESOURCE CENTERP.O. Box 339Berkeley, CA 94701Phone: (510) 893-4648Fax: (510) 893-4607parc@prisonactivist.orgwww.prisonacti vist.orgNotesPRISON LEGAL NEWS2400 NW 80th Street, PMB #148Seattle, WA 98117Phone: (206) 78 1-6524www.prisonlegalnews.orgPRISON MORATORIUM PROJECT388 Atlantic Avenue, 3rd FloorBrooklyn, NY 11217Phone: (718) 260-8805Fax: (212) 727-8616pmp@nomoreprisons.orgwww.nomoreprisons.orgTHE SENTENCING PROJECT514-lOth Street NW #1000Washington, DC 20004Phone: (202) 628-0871Fax: (202) 628-1091www.sentencingproject.org23456789Katherine Stapp, "Prisons Double as Mental Wards," Asheville GlobalReport, no. 164 17-13 March 2002), www.agrnews.org. Stapp's articledescribes a study by Seena Fazel of Oxford University and John Danesh ofCambridge University published in the British medical journal Th eLancet. According to Stapp, the researchers concluded, "One in seveninmates suffers from a mental illness that could be a risk factor for suicide,says the study. This represents more than one million people inWestern countries. The study's authors ... surveyed data on the mentalhealth of 23,000 prisoners in 12 Western countries over a period of threedecades. They found that prisoners 'were several times more likely tohave psychosis and major depression, and about 10 times more likely tohave anti-social personality disorder, than the general population.'"Elliot Currie, Crime and Punishment in America INew York: Henry Holtand Company, 1998), 2l.Mike Davis, "Hell Factories in the Field: A Prison-Industrial Complex,"Th e Nation 260, no.7 120 February 1995).The information in this paragraph regarding the dates California prisonsopened was taken from the Web site of the California Department ofCorrections. www.cdc.state.ca.us/facility/faciLhtm.www.cdc.state.ca.us/facility/instvspw.htm.www.cdc.state.ca.us/facility/factsht.htm.www.cdc.state.ca.us/facility/instccwf.htm.Sandow Birk, Incarcerated: Visions of California in the Twenty-FirstCentury ISan Francisco: Last Gasp of San Francisco, 2001).Ruth Wilson Gilmore, "Globalisation and U.S. Prison Growth: FromMilitary Keynesianism to Post-Keynesian Militarism," Race and Class 40no. 2/3 10ctober 1998-March 1999): 174.118 I Angela Y. Davis119

10 Gilmore, 184.11 Girul Dent, "Stranger Inside and Out: Black Subjectivity in the Womenin-PrisonFilm," in Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in BlackPerformance and Black Popull1I Culture, edited by Harry Elam andKennel Jackson {Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming20(1':11.12 Marc Mauer, "Young Men and the Criminal Justice System: A GrowingNational Problem" (Washington, D.C.: The Sentencing Project, 1990).13 Marc Mauer and Tracy Huling, "Young Black Americans and theCriminal Justice System: Five Years Later" (Washington, D.C.: TheSentencing Project, 19951.14 Allen J. Beck, Jennifer C. Karberg, and Paige M. Harrison, "Prison and JailInmates at Midyear 2001," Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs,Apri1 2002, NCJ 191702), 12.25 Matthew J. Mancini, One Dies, Get Another: Convict LeaSing in theAmerican South .1866-1928 (Columbia, S.c.: South Carolina Press,26 Ibid.271996), 25.David Oshinsky, "Worse Than Slavery": Parchman Farm and the Ordealof Jim Crow Justice (New York: The Free Press, 1996).28 Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economyof Convict Labor in the New South (London, New York: Verso), 1996.29 Oshinsky, 45.30 Curtin, 44.31 Lichtenstein, 13.32 Ibid., xix.33 lbid.15Adam Jay Hirsh, The Rise of the Penitentiary: Prisons and Punishment inEl1Ily America (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 84.16 lbid., 71.17 Ibid., 73.18 lbid., 74-75.34 Curtin, 1.35 Curtin, 213-14.36 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (NewYork: Vintage Books, 1979), 234.37 lbid., 3.19 Milton Fierce, Slavery Revisited: Blacks and the Southern Convict LeaseSystem, 1865-1933 {New York: African Studies Research Center,Brooklyn College, City University of New York, 19941, 85-86.20 Mary Ann Curtin, Black Prisoners and Tbeir World, Alabama,1865-1900 (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia,2000), 6.21 Curtin, 42.22 Phillip S. Foner, ed. Th e Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass. Volume4: Reconstruction and After (New York International Publishers, 19551,379.23 Cheryl Harris, "Whiteness as Property," in Critical Race Theory, byKimherle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas.(New York: The New Press, 19951.24 On March 1, 2003, the INS was officially disestablished and its operationswere folded into the new Department of Homeland Security.38 Louis J. Palmer Jr., Tbe Death Penalty: An American Citizen's Guide toUnderstanding Federal and State Laws (Jefferson, N.C., and London:McFarland & Co, Inc. Publishers, 1998).39 Russell P. Dobash, R. Emerson Dobash, and Sue Gutteridge, The40Imprisonment of Women (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 19.John Hirst, "The Australian Experience: The Convict Colony, " In Th eOxfold History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in WesternSociety, edited by Norval Morris and David J. Rothman (New York,Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 244.41 Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1995).42 See Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, Punishment and SocialStructure (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), and DarioMelossi and Massimo Pavarini, The Prison and the Factory: Origills of tbePenitentiary System (Totowa, N.J: Barnes and Noble Books, 1981).43 Estelle B. Freedman, The.ir Sisters' Keepers: Women's Prison Reform illAmerica, 1830-1930 IAnn Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 10.120 1 Angela Y. DavisARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 1121

44 See discussion of John Howard's 1777 report, The State of the Prisons inEngland and Wales, in A Just Measure of Pain: The PenitentitlIy in theIndustrial Revolution, 1750-1850, by Michael Ignatieff (New York:Pantheon Books, 1978).45 Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon and Other Prison Writings (London andNew York: Verso, 1995).46 Charles Dickens, The Works of Charles Dickens, Vol. 27, AmericanNotes (New York: Peter Fenelon Collier and Son, 19001, 119-20.47 Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville, On the PenitentiarySystem in the United States and its Application in France (Carbondaleand Edwardsville: Southern illinois University Press), 1964 11833].48 Beaumont and Tocqueville, 13I.49 "Cold Storage: Super-Maximum Security Confinement in Indiana, " AHuman Rights Watch Report (New York: Human Rights Watch, October1997), 13.50 "Cold Storage, " 18-19.51 For an extended discussion of the Supermax, see Craig Haney and MonaLynch, "Regulating Prisons of the Future: A Psychological Analysis ofSupermax and Solitary confinement," New York University Review ofLaw and Social Change 23 (1997): 477-570.52 "Cold Storage, " 19.53 Chase Riveland, "Supermax Prisons: Overview and GeneralConsiderations." (Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Corrections,U.S. Department of Justice, January 1999), 4.54 Tohn Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture ofMind in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago and London: University ofChicago Press, 1987), 2.55 Ignatieff, 47.56 Ibid., 53.57 Bender, 1.58 19natieff, 58.59 Ibid., 52.60 Bender, 29.61 Ibid., 31.62 Robert Bums, I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chaingang (Savannah, Ga.:Beehive Press, 19941.63 George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson(Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill and Co., 1994).64 Bettina Aptheker and Angela Davis, eds. If They Come in the Morning:Voices of Resistance (New York: Third Press, 1971).65 Mumia Abu-Jamal, Live from Death Row (New York: Addison-WesleyPublishing Company, 1995), 65-67.66 Mumia Abu-Jamal, Death Blossoms (Farmington, Pa.: The PloughPublishing House, 1997).67 Mumia Abu-Jamal, All Things Censored (New York: Seven Storics Press,2000).68 Section 20411 of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of1994 prohibited the award of Pell Grants to fund prisoners' education. Itremains in effect today. See usinfo.state.gov/infousa/lawsJma;orlaws/h3355_en.htm.69 H. Bruce Franklin, ed. Prison Writing in Twentieth-Century America(New York: Penguin Books, 1998), 13.70 Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcohn X (As IbId to Alex Haley)(New York: Random House, 1965).71 Th e Last Graduation, directed by Barbara Zahm. IZahm Productions andDeep Dish TV, 1997).72 Marcia Bunney, "One Life in Prison: Perception, Reflection, andEmpowerment," in HtlIsh Punishment: International Experiences ofWomen's Imprisonment, edited by Sandy Cook and Susanne Davies(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999), 29-30.73 Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography IWestport, Conn.: LawrenceHill and Co., 1987).74 Ibid., x.75 Ibid., 83-84.76 Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, The Alderson Story: My Life as a PoliticalPrisoner INew York: International Publishers, 1972).77 ACE IMembers of AIDS Counseling and Education), Breaking the Walls78of Silence: AIDS and Women in a New York State Maximnm SecurityPrison INew York: Overlook Press, 1998).Vivien Stern, A Sin Against: the Future: Imprisonment in the World!Boston: Northeastern Press, 1998), 138.79 See Elaine Showalter, "Victorian Women and Insanity," in Madhouses,Mad-Doctors and Madmen: The Social History of Psychiatry in the122 1 Angela Y. DavisARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 1123

Victorian Era, edited by Andrew Scull (Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press), 198 1.80 Luana Ross, Inventing tbe Savage: The Social Construction at NativeAmerican Criminality. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 12l.81 Freedman, 15.82 See Freedman, chapters 3 and 4.83Joanne Belknap, Tbe Invisible Woman: Gender, Crime, and JusticeIBelmont, Calif.: Watsworth Publishing Company), 95.84 Lucia Zedner, "Wayward Sisters: The Prison for Women," in Tbe OxfordHistory of the Prison: Tbe Practice of Punishment in Western Society,edited by Norval Morris and David J. Rothman iNew York: OxfordUniversity Press), 318.85 lbid., 318.86 Currie, 14.87 Ross, 89.88 lbid., 90.89 Tekla Dennison Miller, Th e Warden Wore Pink (Brunswick, Me.: BiddlePublishing Company, 1996), 97-98.90 Ibid., 100.91 lbid., 12l.92 Philadelpbia Daily News, 26 April 1996.93 American Civil Liberties Union Freedom Network, 26 August 1996,aclu.orgfnews!w82696b.htmL94 All Too Familiar: Sexual Abuse of Women in U.S. State Prisons INewYork: Human Rights Watch, December 1996), l.95 Ibid., 2.96 www.oneword.org/ips2/aug98/03_56_003.97 Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (adopted by theFirst United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and theTreatment of Offenders, held at Geneva in 1955, and approved by theEconomic and Social Council by its resolution 663 C (XXIV) of 31 July1957 and 2076 (LXII) of 13 May 1977).98 Amanda George, "Strip Searches: Sexual Assault by the State,"www.aic.gov.au!publications!proceedings!20!george.pdf. 211-12.99 Amanda George made this comment in the video Strip Search. Producedby Sinmlering Video and Coalition Against Police Violence (date unavailable).100 Linda Evans and Eve Goldberg, "The Prison Industrial Complex and theGlobal Economy" [pamphlet) [Berkeley. Calif.: Prison Activist ResourceCenter, 1997).101 See note 3.102 Wall Street Journal, 12 May 1994.103 lbid.104 Allen M. Hornblum, Acres of Skin: Human Experiments at HolmesburgPrison INew York: Routledge, 1998), xvi.105 Hornblurn, 212.106 Hornblum, 37.107 See A.S. ReIman, "Thc New Medical Industrial Complex," New EnglandJournal of Medicine 30 (17) 123 October 1980): 963-70.108 Vince Beiser, "How We Got to Two Million: How Did the Land of the FreeBecome the World's Leading Jailer?" Debt to Society, MotherJones.comSpecial Report, 10 July 2001. Available at: v.'WW. motherjones.com!prisons/overview,html,6.109 Paige M. Harrison and Allen J. Beck, "Prisoners in 2001," Bureau ofJustice Statistics Bulletin (Washington, D.c.: U.S. Department of Justice,Office of Justice Programs, July 2002, NCJ 195189), l.110 Allen Beck and Paige M. Harrison., "Prisoners in 2000," Bureau of JusticeStatistics Bulletin (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Officeof Justice Programs, August 2001, NCJ 1888207), 1.111 Harrison and Beck, "Prisoners in 2001."112 Steve Danziger, The Real War on Grime: Report of the Na tional CriminalJustice Commission (New York: Perennial Publishers, 1996), 87.113 Allen J. Beck, Jennifer c. Karberg, and Paige M. Hartison. "Prison and JailInmates at Midyear 200 1," Bureau of Justice Statistics BulletiniWashington, D.c., U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs,April 2002, NCJ 191702), 12.114 Harrison and Beck, "Prisoners in 2001, n 7.115 Thid,116 Sue Anne Pressley, "Texas County Sued by Missouri Over Alleged Abuseof Inmates," Wasbington Post, 27 August 1997, A2.124 1 Angela Y. DavisARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 1125

117 Madeline Baro, "Video Prompts Prison Probe," Philadelphia Daily News,20 August 1997.118 "Beatings Worse Than Shown on Videotape, Missouri Inmates Say!' TheAssociated Press, 27 August 1997, 7:40 P.M. EDT.135 Ibid.136 Gavin On Venage, "Our Daughter's Killers Are Now Our Friends " TheStraits Times ISingapore), 2 December 2 2001.I119 Joel Dyer, The Perpetual Prion Machine: How America Profits fromCrime (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 2000).120 Abby ElIin, "A Food Fight Over Private Prisons," New York Times,Education Life, Sunday, 8 April 200 l.121 See Julia Sudbury, "Mules and Other Hybrids: Incarcerated Women andthe Limits of Diaspora, " Harvard TournaI of African American PublicPolicy, Fall 2002.122 Amanda George, "The New Prison Culture: Making Millions fromMisery, " in Sandy Cook and Susanne Davies, Harsh Punishment:International Experiences of Women's Imprisonment, by Sandy Cook andSusanne Davies (Boston: Northeastern Press, 1999), 190.123 Press release issued by Wackenbut, 23 August 2002.124 Ibid,125 Dyer, 14,126 See Amnesty International Press Release at www.geocities.com/turkish·hungerstrikc/amapriLhtrnl.127 www,hrw.org/wr2k2/prisons.html128 www.suntimes.co.za!20129 Arthur Waskow, resident, Institute for Policy Studies, Saturday Review, 8Tanuary 1972, quoted in Fay Honey Knopp, et aI., Instead of Prisons: AHandbook for Abolitionists ISyracuse, N.Y.: Prison Research EducationAction Project, 1976), 15-16.130 www.bettyfordcenter.org/programs/programs/index.html131 www.bettyfordcenter.org/programs/programs/prices.html132 Herman Bianchi, "Abolition: Assensus and Sanetuary," in Abolitionism:TowilId a Non·Repressive Approach to Crime, cds. Herman Bianchi andRene Swaaningen IAmsterdam: Free University Press, 1986), 117,133 Anthropologist Nancy Schepper·Hughes described this astonishing turnof events in a talk she delivered at UC Berkeley on September 24, 200 1,entided "Un· Doing: The Politics of the Impossible in the New SouthAfrica."134 Bella English, "Why Do They Forgive Us," Boston Globe, 23 April 2003.126 I Angela Y. DavisARE PRISONS OBSOLETE? 1127

About the AuthorANGELA YVONNE DAVIS is a professor of history of consciousnessat the University of California, Santa Cruz. Overthe last thirty years, she has been active in numerous organizationschallenging prison-related repression. Her advocacyon behalf of political prisoners led to three capital charges,sixteen months in jail awaiting trial, and a highly publicizedcampaign then acquittal in 1972. In 1973, the NationalCommittee to Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners,along with the Attica Brothers, the American IndianMovement and other organizations founded the NationalAlliance Against Racist and Political Repression, of whichshe remained co-chairperson for many years. In 1998, shewas one of the twenty-five organizers of the historic Berkeleyconference "Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison IndustrialComplex" and since that time has served as convener of aresearch group bearing the same name under the auspices ofthe University of California Humanities Research Institute.Angela is author of many books, including Blues Legaciesand Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma n Rainey, Bessie Smith,and Billie Holiday. Her new book, forthcoming fromRandom House, is Prisons and Democracy.\128