Are Prisons Obsolete?

“The gravity of these numbers becomes even more apparent when we consider that the U.S. population in general is less than five percent of the world's total, whereas more than twenty percent of the world’s combined prison population can be claimed by the United States.”

Davis shares statistics that to her prove America’s overreliance on the prison system. Before this passage, Davis reveals that the US holds more than two million people in its prisons out of the world total of nine million. Davis uses these statistics to raise the question as to why so many people are in prisons when crime rates have not risen to an extent that demands such an explosion in incarceration.

“On the whole, people tend to take prisons for granted. It is difficult to imagine life without them. At the same time, there is a reluctance to face the realities hidden within them, a fear of thinking about what happens inside them.”

Despite prisons being so prominent in society, Davis sees a paradoxical reluctance to look behind the prison walls to uncover the truth of the institutions. A main theme of the text is prison’s simultaneous visibility and invisibility in the social landscape. Throughout the book, Davis exposes the backward and repressive practices within prisons.

“The prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers.”

Davis defines the ideological function of prison: Prisons hide their connections to racism, sexism, and classism behind doing a public service. Davis states that people are happy to disregard the issues of prisoners because the “free world” deems the prisoners’ communities—largely communities of color—“undesirables.” The racist ideology that Black people and minorities are inherently more criminal upholds this lack of interest in prison issues.

“Debates about strategies of decarceration, which should be the focal point of our conversations on the prison crisis, tend to be marginalized when reform takes the center stage.”

Decarceration is the program of reducing the number of people imprisoned as punishment for lawbreaking. Davis believes that decarceration should be the foremost goal of prison activists, but activists are often more concerned with superficially changing prison routines and infrastructure. For Davis, this kind of reform still normalizes the permanence of prisons.

“Although government, corporations, and the dominant media try to represent racism as an unfortunate aberration of the past that has been relegated to the graveyard of US history, it continues to profoundly influence contemporary structures, attitudes, and behaviors.”

One of the book’s central themes is the legacy of slavery in modern prison systems. Davis asserts that despite major institutions’ claims that the US isn’t racist, the prison system both literally and ideologically upholds racist ideals because it disproportionately affects people of color. By referencing government, corporations, and the media, Davis shows the far-reaching industries that benefit from incarceration as punishment.

“Slavery, lynching, and segregation are certainly compelling examples of social institutions that, like the prison, were once considered to be as everlasting as the sun. Yet, in the case of all three examples, we can point to movements that assumed the radical stance of announcing the obsolescence of these institutions.”

Davis connects the prison to other historically racist institutions—both legal and extralegal. Davis shows that, like these earlier programs of racism, the public perceives prisons as permanent and unchangeable. However, she argues that slavery, lynching, and segregation all crumbled because of abolitionist activism and that prisons may also become obsolete if activists are willing to fight for total abolition instead of just reform.

“As is indicated in the designation ‘penitentiary,’ imprisonment was regarded as a rehabilitative and the penitentiary prison was devised to provide convicts with the conditions for reflecting on their crimes and, through penitence, for reshaping their habits and even their souls.”

Davis illustrates that penitentiaries, with imprisonment as their main form of punishment, were originally meant to rehabilitate convicts. The “conditions” that allowed penitence included isolation and silent self-reflection. Davis goes on to conclude that the goal of modern penitentiaries is no longer reform but rather profit.

“Police departments in major urban areas have admitted the existence of formal procedures designed to maximize the numbers of African-Americans and Latinos arrested—even in the absence of probable cause.”

A main piece of evidence that Davis offers to prove the continuance of racism in prisons is racial profiling. This passage explains that police departments have authorized programs of racial profiling that bring people of color into contact with the prison system even when they haven’t committed crimes. Davis notes that entire communities have been so thoroughly criminalized that prison has become an expected part of life.

“We have learned how to recognize the role of slave labor, as well as the racism it embodied. But black convict labor remains a hidden dimension of our history.”

Connecting to the theme of legacies of slavery, Davis defines modern convict labor as the direct descendent of slave labor. She believes that convict labor is harder to identify in society because prisons so effectively hide their exploitation of prison laborers. Davis goes on to describe the various industries that benefited from convict labor, like mining, agriculture, and infrastructure.

“If the words ‘prison reform’ so easily slip from our lips, it is because ‘prison’ and ‘reform’ have been inextricably linked since the beginning of the use of imprisonment as the main means of punishing those who violate social norms.”

Davis notes that prison reform activism has existed for as long as prisons have. Certain groups in society—particularly religious and Enlightenment groups—originally proposed imprisonment as a reform of harsh corporal punishment. Davis cites these historical specifics as evidence that prisons are outdated because they belonged to a particular era rather than being a permanent solution for all time. Prisons therefore do not reflect humanitarian progress.

“Before the acceptance of the sanctity of individual rights, imprisonment could not have been understood as punishment. If the individual was not perceived as possessing inalienable rights and liberties, then the alienation of those rights and liberties by removal from society to a space tyrannically governed by the state would not have made sense.”

Penitentiaries rose to prominence during a historical period that began to see individual men—and not women—as owners of rights and liberties that could be stripped as a punishment for crimes. Before this understanding, corporal punishment, exile, and forced labor was the norm of justice. Davis infuses this description with her disdain for the structure of prisons, as evident in her use of “tyrannical”—an adjective that she repeatedly uses throughout the text.

“What was once regarded as progressive and even revolutionary represents today the marriage of technological superiority and political backwardness. No one—not even the most ardent defenders of the supermax—would try to argue today that absolute segregation, including sensory deprivation, is restorative and healing.”

For Davis, modern super-maximum-security prisons take the original structure of penitentiaries to the extreme without maintaining the original goal of rehabilitation. Supermax prisons use their programs of near-total isolation as outright punishment. Connecting to the theme of the prison system’s outdated and repressive regime, Davis sees the supermax’s use of advanced technology for such a program as completely out of touch with modern ideals and values.

“In their ‘practical demands’ they expressed concerns about diet, improvement in the quality of guards, more realistic rehabilitation programs, and better education programs. They also wanted religious freedom, freedom to engage in political activity, and an end to censorship—all of which they saw as indispensable to their educational needs.”

Davis cites the Attica prisoner’s rebellion of 1971 as a key event for the development of education programs for prisoners. Davis, and the prisoners themselves, identify access to non-censored education as the key to rehabilitation. When education grants were cut in the 1990s, Davis notes, prisons explicitly displayed their abandonment of rehabilitation goals.

“Following the dominant model for women’s prisons during that period, Alderson's regimes were based on the assumption that ‘criminal’ women could be rehabilitated by assimilating correct womanly behaviors—that is, by becoming experts in domesticity—especially cooking, cleaning, and sewing.”

Davis shares Alderson prison’s program of rehabilitation as an example of the gendered structure of imprisonment. Reform groups developed a program of domestic training that would integrate criminal women back into the proper gender structures in the free world. The patriarchal structure that underpins women’s imprisonment, Davis argues, further proves that prisons are outdated institutions.

“Studies indicating that women have been even more likely to end up in mental facilities than men suggest that while jails and prisons have been dominant institutions for the control of men, mental institutions have served a similar purpose for women. That is, deviant men have been constructed as criminal, while deviant women have been constructed as insane.”

Women prisoners, Davis observes, were viewed as breakers of more than just laws but of core moral values. Publicly disobedient women were historically sentenced to psychiatric hospitals because of the belief that only mental health conditions could push women to criminal behavior. The connection between women criminals and mental health persists, as evident in the disproportionate prescription of psychiatric drugs in women’s facilities.

“However, since women were not acknowledged as securely in possession of these rights, they were not eligible to participate in this process of redemption.”

Into the 20th century, the prison system did not consider women—and especially women of color—to have the same rights and liberties as their male counterparts. The prevailing belief was that penitentiaries couldn’t offer them the same opportunity for reform. Davis argues that this lack of rights left women open to corporal punishment in the home and prompted the development of women’s-only imprisonment regimes.

“Training that was, on the surface, designed to produce good wives and mothers in effect steered poor women (and especially black women) into the ‘free world’ jobs in domestic service. Instead of stay-at-home skilled wives and mothers, many women prisoners, upon release, would become maids, cooks, and washerwomen for more affluent women.”

The original goal of women-only prisons was to develop the prisoners’ domestic skills so the women could become wives and mothers in the “free world.” Davis notes that these programs worked to produce servants for upper-class society. Davis highlights how poor and Black women were more likely to be funneled into these roles of servitude after being released, highlighting the intersection of racism, classism, and sexism in the prison system.

“Paradoxically, demands for parity with men’s prisons, instead of creating greater educational, vocational, and health opportunities for women prisoners, often led to more repressive conditions for women.”

Prison reform for women’s institutions frequently hinges on models of equality with men’s prisons. Instead of improving conditions in both men’s and women’s prisons, activists often uncritically demand parity by making women’s prisons reflect the repressive conditions in men’s prisons. Davis believes that formulaic calls for equality only work to further normalize the conditions of men’s prisons.

“Studies on female prisons throughout the world indicate that sexual abuse is an abiding, though unacknowledged, form of punishment to which women, who have the misfortune of being sent to prison, are subjected. This is one aspect of life in prison that women can expect to encounter, either directly or indirectly, regardless of the written policies that govern the institution.”

Davis devotes much of Chapter 4 to examining gender-based punishment in women’s prisons, which usually occurs in the form of sexual abuse and assault. As the prison system often does not hold officers accountable for their abuse, Davis argues that the system essentially sanctions such practices. Later, Davis uses her own experience in prison to confirm that almost all women are subjected to some form of sexual violence behind bars.

“The notion of a prison industrial complex insists on understandings of the punishment process that take into account economic and political structures and ideologies, rather than focusing myopically on individual criminal conduct and efforts to ‘curb crime.’”

Davis identifies the modern prison system as a prison industrial complex because of its strong ties with corporate interests. This passage exposes how the prison industrial complex looks beyond inmates’ individual rehabilitation to focus on major economic and political opportunities that come from imprisonment as punishment. Imprisonment under such a system is therefore not an attempt to decrease crime rates but an opportunity for corporations to profit.

“The transformation of imprisoned bodies—and they are in their majority bodies of color—into sources of profit who consume and also often produce all kinds of commodities, devours public funds, which might otherwise be available for social programs such as education, housing, childcare, recreation, and drug programs.”

Prisoners under the prison industrial complex are both a mass of consumers and a mass of cheap labor and are incredibly lucrative for corporations and governments. Davis argues that money funnels into the system to expand imprisonment rates rather to implement social welfare programs that could help prevent crime. This passage illuminates the modern prison system’s abandonment of rehabilitation goals for corporate greed.

“In arrangements reminiscent of the convict lease system, federal, state, and country governments pay private companies a fee for each inmate, which means that private companies have a stake in retaining prisoners as long as possible, and in keeping their facilities filled.”

Although Davis acknowledges the abolition of the convict lease system—in which prisoners were lent out to industry owners for a low fee—she notes that modern private prisons reflect this antiquated program. Under the current program, corporations make their money by having a full house of prisoners for “as long as possible,” and Davis argues that they are therefore interested in keeping incarceration rates high. This passage connects to the theme of the corporatization of US prisons.

“The first step, then, would be to let go of the desire to discover one single alternative system of punishment that would occupy the same footprint as the prison system.”

Because the prison industry is so complex, Davis argues, any meaningful alternative cannot be an easy one-for-one switch of the entire system. In Chapter 6, Davis explains that abolitionists should critique the various far-reaching relationships that uphold the prison system, because only dismantling these relationships can take away the power of the prison as an institution. Antiprison activism, Davis asserts, must also question larger ideologies of racism, sexism, and classism in the “free world.”