Are Prisons Obsolete?

With her characteristic brilliance, grace, and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has made the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of prisons. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was a sheer illusion. Similarly, the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived amid the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men and women). Few predicted its passing from the American penal landscape. Davis expertly argues that social movements transformed these social, political, and cultural institutions, rendering such practices untenable.

In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis argues that the time for prisons is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for "decarceration" and argues for the transformation of society as a whole.