Book Review by Jack Danger
Are Prisons Obsolete? by Professor Angela Y. Davis (Seven Stories Press, September 2003)
Since 1980 the number of people in jails and prisons in the United States has quadrupled and here we are in 2003 with over 2 million of our brothers and sisters locked up. With the increasing criminalization [0] of behavior and race, the election year fear factor platform of being soft on crime coupled with unjust and illogical mandatory sentencing, this staggering number is guaranteed to continue to soar. And though the statistics on actual crimes committed reveal a downward trend, we do not see a parallel decrease in those incarcerated. It would seem that prisons will be on our landscapes forever. This inevitability is challenged and destroyed by Are Prisons Obsolete? (APO?)
In APO? Davis outlines the history of successful abolition movements, which eradicated institutions that people “ …had become so inured to that they could not have conceived of society without it.” Slavery, lynching and segregation were woven deep in the fabric of this country. There was profit to be made, there were lines to be toed, there were elections to be won, there was the cries and hues of fear fueled by ignorance and hatred. Those in power had a lot invested in keeping slavery, then lynching, then segregation in place. But the voices of resistance, the work of those who saw the sin, the injustice, the wrongness of these institutions (coalitions of churches, of workers, of academics, of liberals and of everyday folk) kept struggling and dying and working and moving, not to reform these institutions but to abolish them. And they did. And as Davis says, if these institutions could be abolished then why not prisons? It’s a strong and compelling example of imagining the unimaginable.
To move us to a place of understanding where we can even begin to think about living without prisons, Davis outlines the history of prisons and punishment. How things came to be can be an effective tool to begin to eliminate them.
Prisons are a relatively new form of punishment. Imprisonment was not the principal means of governmental punishment until the 18th century in Europe and the 19th century in the United States. Up until then prisons were simply a holding tank until you were executed. Executed, not in a quick and “painless” manner, but if you can visualize the execution of William Wallace in the movie “ Braveheart,” you get the idea – drawn, quartered, and tortured in the Pioneer Courthouse Square of years ago. Public atrocities like these were designed not only to punish the lawbreaker, but to send an effective public relations message to the rest of the citizens. See what could happen to you?
Our current prison system, archaic and inhumane as it may seem, is actually the result of what was deemed “progressive,” reform efforts. Men designed and defined and discussed and prayed about how to rehabilitate the errant. One of the more interesting and bizarre campaigns of reform revolved around the framework of (1) maintenance of order within a largely urban labor force, (2) salvation of the soul and (3) rationalization of personality. A framework that its supporters compared to the development of a novel.
Prison architecture also plays a significant role in how we treat those we lock up. It is not without bitter irony that Davis notes that the continuing construction of super-maximum security facilities which employ state of the art surveillance technology, keep prisoners in solitary lock down for 23 hours a day, and severely limit any kind of contract with other people was once considered progressive penal policy or, as Davis puts it even revolutionary. Keep prisoners in solitude and let them spend their time in prayerful reflection, which will lead to rehabilitation, was the historical underpinning for the solitary cell type of prison constructed in the 1800’s.
But today rehabilitation is not the concern, control is. To make prisons obsolete we must dismantle the racist, sexist, classist and imperialistic chest thumping policies and institutions which continue to fill our prisons with the poor, the addicted, the uneducated, the mentally ill, the immigrants, the women and the non-whites. We must build a society where everyone is valued and we must back up those words with strong community based schools, affordable health care, living wage jobs etc. We must also “…give up our usual way of thinking about punishment as an inevitable consequence of crime. Imprisonment is associated with the racialization of those more likely to be punished.”
To make prisons obsolete is not unimaginable and after reading this book you will see that it is an attainable goal. We will need to reshift our thinking and re-examine how we look at crime and punishment, and then decide that we can and will create a world where justice is restorative and compassionate and prisons are obsolete. Reading Are Prisons Obsolete? is a good start.