Davis, Angela Y — Are Prisons Obsolete

107 published claims from this book.

• Abolition requires a continuum of alternatives, not prisonlike substitutes
• Alabama’s prison population flipped from ninety-nine percent white to majority black after emancipation
• Alternatives failing to address structures of domination cannot achieve abolition
• Black Codes inverted Alabama’s prison population from white to black in years.
• Black convict labor that built modern cities remains a hidden dimension of history.
• Black convicts could be exploited because they were still perceived as slaves.
• California prison expansion responded to surpluses of capital, land, labor, and state capacity
• California’s prison boom absorbed surpluses of capital, land, and labor
• Capital flight into prisons followed deindustrialization and welfare dismantling in the 1980s.
• Corporate profit motives entrench a prison system that would otherwise be obsolete.
• Crime coverage rose sharply even as homicide rates fell by half.
• Criminality was still imputed to color a century and a half after Douglass.
• Death penalty and prison abolition are linked goals, not separate campaigns
• Declaring prisons obsolete follows from proving they are racist institutions
• Decriminalization of drugs and sex work advances abolitionist decarceration
• Defunding prison education collapsed almost all prisoner literary journals
• Deviant men are constructed as criminal while deviant women are constructed as insane.
• Drug decriminalization advances decarceration when paired with free treatment
• Early prisons held mostly men because women lacked rights to lose
• Even white abolitionists could not imagine black people as equals
• Feminized reform was reserved for white women; Black women got harsher unfeminized punishment.
• Formalistic equality with male prisons makes women’s prisons more repressive, not less.
• Free voluntary treatment outside criminal justice is the abolitionist standard
• Ignoring women prisoners makes the operation of state punishment partly illegible
• Immigrant detention extends the prison industrial complex’s racial and gendered reach
• Imprisoning women who resist abusers cannot solve intimate violence
• Imprisonment became the primary punishment because it suited capitalist bourgeois ideology, not superior merit.
• Imprisonment converts bodies of color into profit sources that drain public welfare funding
• Institutions once deemed inevitable became unthinkable through political struggle
• Jails and prisons now hold more mentally ill people than mental institutions
• Liberal gender equality can reduce to demanding equal right to be shot by guards.
• Male prisons functioning as the punishment norm drives women’s conditions toward greater repression.
• Mass incarceration functions as a management system for surplus labor.
• Mass incarceration under Reagan did not reduce crime but bred ever larger prison populations.
• Men’s prisons are gendered institutions, not the norm against which women’s prisons are judged
• Military and prison industrial complexes are symbiotic, sharing technologies
• Nearly one in three young black men were under correctional supervision by 1995
• Nineteenth-century women’s reformatories trained inmates in domesticity as proper femininity.
• Parents of a murdered student supported amnesty for their daughter’s killers
• People are imprisoned largely because their communities are criminalized, not for crimes
• Per-inmate fees give private prisons a structural incentive to keep people locked up
• Post-apartheid South Africa embraced the U.S. supermax prison model
• Post-slavery prisons reabsorbed emancipated black labor through the convict lease system
• Pre-prison punishment aimed at spectators as public spectacle, not at reforming the punished.
• Prison abolition has a long history but remains culturally unthinkable
• Prison disciplined workers for industrial capitalism
• Prison education once enabled transformative self-creation even against the regime
• Prison expansion correlates with falling crime, exposing profit and racism as drivers
• Prison expansion undermines democracy and normalizes incarceration for people of color
• Prison growth began when crime rates were already falling
• Prison imagery in media makes incarceration seem natural and permanent
• Prison is an ordinary life dimension in poor communities of color
• Prison is treated as an inevitable fact of life even in communities it oppresses
• Prison racism operates clandestinely and extends beyond black-white binaries
• Prison reform rhetoric reinforces the prison’s permanence.
• Prisoner demands directly produced successful college programs behind bars
• Prisons create the illusion that free people’s rights and liberties are secured by imprisonment.
• Prisons function as criminal training centers and a just society would not need them
• Prisons preserve racist and misogynist practices society has nominally abandoned
• Prisons proliferated while crime rates were falling due to corporate profit
• Prisons promised rural economic revival but delivered neither jobs nor revitalization
• Prisons stockpile obsolete ideas like racism and misogyny that society has rejected
• Private prisons profit by keeping inmates incarcerated as long as possible
• Private prisons require a steady supply of prisoners as raw material.
• Public prisons now function as profit sources nearly as much as private ones do
• Punishment follows politics, corporate profit, and media, not crime itself
• Punishment is so corporatized that mainstream companies now stake themselves in its perpetuation
• Punishment’s meaning is fashioned through institutional symbiotic relationships
• Punishments inflicted on women and slaves were systematically excluded from prison reformers’ agenda.
• Punitive transportation of convicts directly facilitated the colonization of Australia and Georgia.
• Reform rhetoric bolsters prison permanence and cannot meet corporate-era challenges
• Reform-centered frameworks marginalize decarceration strategies
• Rehabilitation has been displaced by incapacitation as prison’s goal
• Restorative justice can transform victim families into allies of their loved one’s killers
• Schools remain the major conduits to prisons without structural change
• Sexual abuse operates as an institutionalized, unsanctioned dimension of women’s punishment.
• Slavery, lynching, and segregation each institutionalized a distinct form of racism
• Solitary confinement was once seen as emancipatory, not torturous
• Statistical abstraction itself criminalizes prisoners by erasing their differences.
• Supermax confinement in practice catches arbitrarily designated prisoners, not only the most dangerous
• The 1994 crime bill deliberately destroyed higher education in prisons
• The Attica massacre was an official, ordered government action
• The convict lease system rationally accelerated Southern industrialization.
• The eighteenth-century novel helped produce the penitentiary
• The penitentiary made incarceration itself the punishment for the first time.
• The penitentiary mirrored chattel slavery in its structure and daily regime.
• The penitentiary was framed as a progressive reform of its era.
• The prison boom was a way to concentrate and manage a capitalist human surplus
• The prison disciplined convicts into an industrial labor force
• The prison industrial complex term contests crime as the root cause of imprisonment
• The prison system is racism’s most reliable institutional refuge.
• The prison was originally embraced as a humane replacement for capital and corporal punishment.
• The U.S. prison population grew tenfold in three decades, to two million.
• The U.S. supermax solitary-confinement model is spreading worldwide
• The United States dominates a global prison economy and punishment style
• Time-based prison sentences mirror the commodification of labor time
• Turkish prisoners death-fasted against U.S.-style cell isolation, and fifty died
• US prison population exploded tenfold while remaining majority people of color
• War on Terror strengthened rather than replaced the military industrial complex
• What was progressive in one era can become politically backward in another
• White supremacy survived slavery by re-inscribing itself in new institutions
• Whiteness operates as property that can be strategically claimed or disguised.
• Women are the fastest-growing sector of the US prison population
• Women face unacknowledged state punishment outside formal prison
• Women have been punished more through psychiatric institutions than prisons
• Women who are punished are seen as more aberrant and threatening than men
• Women’s imprisonment increasingly echoes slavery, colonization, and genocide.